Jealousy in Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940): Nancy and Henry's Relationship

This study investigates the sources of jealousy in Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), focusing especially on Sapphira and Nancy's characters, who appear to present a traditional and stereotyped view of women's image in the southern American community during the 1930s and 1940s. In its purest form, Sapphira's envy stems from a desperate desire to have a genuine conventional family filled with love and stability. Sapphira hopes to get family privileges that will allow her to immerse herself more fully in the comfortable environment of family life, free of interruptions, aggravation, and threats. Aside from the themes of race and racism that drive the novel's action, the current research seeks to define and investigate the topic of jealousy and its relationship to social stability and domestic life as shown in Cather's work solely via social, cultural, and psychological lenses.