An Ecological Interpretation of Consumer Culture in Willa Cather's The Professor's House

摘要

The Professor's House presents the readers pictures with striking consumer culture characteristics. With abundant goods of sign values, conspicuous consumption, swelling-desire-stimulating power and the individuals 'efforts to construct their identi?ties through consumption as dominant features, consumer culture exerts negative and even devastating effects on the characters in the novel. Theories of ecocriticism shed new lights on the interpretation of consumerism reflected in the novel, especially on ana?lyzing how the consumer culture makes the characters suffer from split personality, alienation from nature, society, and even from themselves and their spiritual ecology.