SOURCE: Harris, Jeane. “Aspects of Athene in Willa Cather's Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 2 (spring 1991): 177–82.

In the following essay, Harris discusses the stories in which Cather featured images of the Greek goddess Athene in an attempt to create female characters who embodied the ideals of her own masculine aesthetic.

Willa Cather's conflicted or ambiguous attitudes about gender and sex roles are the result of the collision of her adopted male aesthetic and her gender. Seeking to mitigate the conflicts created between these two disparate forces, Cather experimented with various techniques that have been widely discussed, e.g., the use of a male narrator. But Cather's ambivalence regarding gender is also reflected in her early short stories by the creation of strong, “manly” female characters. Drawing on her considerable knowledge of Greek mythology, Cather chose the imposing figure of the goddess Athene to embody the paradoxical qualities...