ERIC EJ1128114: Hybridity in Willa Cather's "Death Comes for the Archbishop" and "Shadows on the Rock"

by: ERIC

Publication date: 2015-02

Topics: ERIC Archive, Novels, Foreign Policy, Christianity, Interpersonal Relationship, Intercultural Communication, Indigenous Populations, Clergy, Nuns, Catholics, Foreign Countries, Fard, Maryam Heydari|Pirnajmuddin, Hossein

Collection: ericarchive; additional_collections

Language: English

Willa Cather wrote "Death Comes for the Archbishop" and "Shadows on the Rock" based on the missionary life of Europeans in Quebec and New Mexico. In both novels she depicts a different type of colonizer-colonized relationship. The colonizers arrive with their stereotypical views about the natives to purportedly civilize them. But later, through their interaction with the natives, their superior, patronizing attitude gradually changes, so that, the boundary between the colonizer and the colonized becomes blurred. Contrary to their presuppositions about natives and also the long-established colonial attitude, the missionaries in these two novels treat the natives sympathetically and in some cases equally. Using Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity, this essay attempts to analyze these two novels in terms of the depiction of cultural relation/interaction.