As Andrea Gabor explains, in the post-Civil War period: America overcame its democratic ambivalence to public sculptureIn the aftermath of the war, scores of towns and cities throughout the North, enjoying the fruits of victory and prosperity, rushed to erect sculptures that would commemorate their local heroes (Gabor 1997, 100). This urge was a predominant one in Cather's time. The urge to memorialise the departed is a universal one, transcending time and place. Defying mortal times, a graveyard is an attempt to preserve memory, an attempt to idealize the essence of a deceased individual by the survivors. In fact, the graveyard is a constant presence in her corpus even when it is not explicitly named. The graveyard is used by Cather both literally and metaphorically to describe the landscape and the characters she presents in her oeuvre. As a result, the graveyard, the most concrete emblem of death, becomes the most expressive motif in the American writer's narratives. The shadow of death looms large over the fictional universe of Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather1 (1873-1947).
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