Cather, Willa - K. P. Stich (essay date 1994)

K. P. Stich (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: Stich, K. P. “Woman as Enemy: Willa Cather's ‘The Marriage of Phaedra.’” In Modern Language Studies 24, no. 2 (spring 1994): 38–47.

[In the following essay, Stich views “The Marriage of Phaedra” as Cather's interpretation of the Greek Amazon myth.]

To the classical Greeks, Amazons were enemies because of their threat to patriarchal rule (Tyrrell, duBois); they had to be conquered in battle or, at times, through marriage. To Willa Cather, the Amazon archetype seems to evoke a comparable response in the creative minds of men, especially artists, whose sympathy with the so-called feminine does not at all preclude their exploitation of women. The Amazon archetype, I would argue here, is a variant of the anima archetype. As such, its disregard or abuse helps account for the anima's likely turning into one's “fatal” enemy in the alchemy of creativity as much as in the alchemy of...

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