Modernism in "A Lost Lady" vs "Passing"

The essence of a person lingers in one's memory even long after that person has gone away. In the two modernist novels, A Lost Lady and Passing, the authors were both concerned with that indispensable property that characterizes a person rather than their reality. Larsen and Cather tell the story of women who existed in literature primarily as an incorporeal being. By using the non-traditional topics that classify realist literature, each author builds a woman's essence around the issues of sexuality, race, gender and class. I feel that Willa Cather uses this approach to realism best to carry out the notion of "essence" in her novel. Skaggs paints out that Cather said while creating Marian Forrester in A Lost Lady she "didn't want to make a character study, but just a portrait like a thin miniature painted on ivory. A character study of Mrs. Forrester would have been very, very different." (Skaggs, pg. 45)
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