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When it comes to depicting the relationship between nature and culture, there's a very strong tradition of 'quest plot' narratives in US-American literature. The most important characteristics of these adventure stories are heroic individualism, the search for spiritual truth and the wish to conquer the "virgin land". Usually, the hero has deeply ambivalent feelings towards both wilderness and civilization as well as towards women, which are constructed as agents of both realms. This structure excludes women from playing an active part as a story's heroine. My thesis traces alternative narratives written by white female US-American authors about women between nature and culture of the frontier regions. The introductory chapter sketches the history of the established dominant nature-culture-pattern and a general opening of the traditional US-American canon in favor of a more pluralistic range of topics, patterns and motifs during the last decades. Furthermore, the chapter discusses a group of academic studies that claim a so-called 'home plot' to be the organizing principle behind many novels by US-American women. It is seen as counter narrative to the male "primary myth" of the 'quest plot' with a tradition of its own. The 'home plot' is characterized by the female protagonists' decidedly positive relationship to the land and their creative integration of the natural and the cultural sphere. A critical discussion of this approach closes the chapter. The main part of the thesis consists of a close reading analysis of Willa Cather's "O Pioneers!" (1913), Ellen Glasgow's "Barren Ground" (1925), Edith Kelley's "Weeds" (1923) and Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" (1981). In very different ways, these novels negotiate the chances and limits of constructing female identities by integrating natural and cultural sphere. The analysis of those four novels shows that there are women-centered alternative plots far from the traditional US-American 'quest plot'. It becomes visible as well, though, that these are not ...
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