Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  The women (‘O you mothers and you wives!’) are following along behind with the pack-horses. Figuratively speaking, they are the earth itself, either as a maiden lying ready for productive defloration (‘we the virgin soil upheaving’) or as ‘the eloquent dumb great mother’ in another of Whitman’s pioneering poems, ‘A Song of the Rolling Earth’. Or else they give inspiration as the Muse/flag, at once heavenly and martial:

  Raise the mighty mother mistress,

  Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,

  (bend your heads all,)

  Raise the fang’d and warlike mistress, stern, impassive,

  weapon’d mistress

  Pioneers! O pioneers!5

  In the later literature of immigrant heroes – Frank Norris’s The Octopus, or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Ole Rölvaag’s Norwegian epic trilogy, or William Carlos Williams’s novel of immigrants in New York, White Mule – the female characters are always dependent and subsidiary. Tough though they had to be, in life as in literature, the struggle for the frontier is essentially a male story,6 with the land as a woman (or a female troll, in Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth) who must be penetrated and fertilized.7

  The activity of the pioneers, and the voice of their poet, is rendered in muscular, strenuous language:

  The great poem of the West. It’s that which I want to write. Oh, to put it all into hexameters; strike the great iron note; sing the vast, terrible song; the song of the People…Ah, to get back to that first clear-eyed view of things, to see as Homer saw, as Beowulf saw, as the Nibelungen poets saw. The life is here, the same as then; the Poem is here; my West is here; the primeval, epic life is here…It is the man who is lacking, the poet.8

  —

  Norris’s virile, ambitious language intends to master the ‘vast, terrible’ material of formless American space: the task requires the poet to be ‘the man’. This male conquest of space is seen by Charles Olson (writing brilliantly on Melville, in 1947, the year Cather died) as the essential drive of American writing:

  I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America….It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story [Parkman’s]: exploration….

  Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive. As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted. They are the alternatives….

  Space has a stubborn way of sticking to Americans, penetrating all the way in, accompanying them. It is the exterior fact….We must go over space, or we wither.9

  All the great writing of nineteenth-century America could be read, in Olson’s terms, as different ways of mastering space. Melville’s Ahab tries to blast through it, crash through the wall of impenetrable whiteness. Cooper’s pioneers, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, adventure into it; Hawthorne’s puritans enclose themselves in rigid self-protective communities; Poe buries himself under it, in what D.H. Lawrence calls his ‘horrible underground passages of the human soul’.10 The American Romantics, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, try to live in harmony with it, to expand the ‘self’ to be commensurate with the space, and feel, in Emerson’s hopeful words, ‘the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me’.11 A lone woman writer, Emily Dickinson, made a project, unread in her own time, for mastering space by creating a new geography of the imagination. ‘My business is circumference’,12 she wrote, constructing a poetry that encompasses a vast ‘circumference’ in a tightly contained form.

  In all these writings there is a tension between romantic identity with, and fearful opposition to, the imagined ‘continent’ of undiscovered space, a tension acutely emphasized by the traumatic carving up, in the Civil War, of the actual continent. (And in all these white male writers there is an assumption that American space is there to be colonized, in spite of its aboriginal occupants.) By the turn of the century, infinite space was getting distinctly constricted. The pioneering ideal was turning itself into a nostalgic retrospect for a lost Eden, as in Scott Fitzgerald’s lament, at the end of The Great Gatsby, for the ‘fresh, green breast of the new world’ as it might once have looked to the explorer, holding his breath, ‘face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder’,13 or Robert Frost’s later chauvinistic, retrospective sentiments for ‘the gift outright’, of the ‘unstoried’ female land: ‘The land was ours before we were the land’s.’14

  The historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential 1893 essay on the closing of the American frontier celebrated the creation of the American democratic character (strong, energetic, practical, exuberant) through the conquest of the wilderness, and struck an ominous note on the ending of this ‘Edenic myth’: ‘And now, four centuries from the discovery of America…the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.’15 A less idealized version of the American conquest of space would be constructed in the 1920s by D.H. Lawrence and William Carlos Williams, both of whom saw the history of the New World as one of fatal aggression and repression, producing a morbid split in the American psyche.16 Alien though these interpretations are from Turner’s celebration of the democratic character, the idea of a split or fracture is common to both.

  Cather’s fiction is obsessed with this idea of fracture, both in the secret lives of her characters and in her public sense of American history. The popular, obvious side of her writing, her memorializing of the pioneers and immigrants of the Western states and her disenchantment with the America of the ‘closed frontier’, is very much of its time, and is strongly in sympathy with Turner’s thesis. She wrote an essay in 1923 called ‘Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle’, which restates that thesis in the context of her home state:

  In Nebraska, as in so many other States, we must face the fact that the splendid story of the pioneers is finished, and that no new story worthy to take its place has yet begun. The generation that subdued the wild land and broke up the virgin prairie is passing, but it is still there, a group of rugged figures in the background which inspire respect, compel admiration. With these old men and women the attainment of material prosperity was a moral victory, because it was wrung from hard conditions, was the result of a struggle that tested character. They can look out over those broad stretches of fertility and say: ‘We made this, with our backs and hands’. The sons, the generation now in middle life, were reared amid hardships, and it is perhaps natural that they should be very much interested in material comforts, in buying whatever is expensive and ugly. Their fathers came into a wilderness and had to make everything, had to be as ingenious as shipwrecked sailors. The generation now in the driver’s seat hates to make anything, wants to live and die in an automobile, scudding past those acres where the old men used to follow the long corn-rows up and down. They want to buy everything readymade: clothes, food, education, music, pleasure. Will the third generation – the full-blooded, joyous one just coming over the hill – will it be fooled? Will it believe that to live easily is to live happily?17

  The closing of the frontier, with all that that implied in terms of urbanization, political change and foreign policy, naturally involved the American writers. What was to become of the imaginative mastering of space? Coinciding with Turner’s thesis, a literary battle was raging between American writers arguing for an epic national literature, robust, virile and democratic (like those mythical frontier pioneers), and more Europeanized novelists such as William Dean Howells and Henry James, intent on social and psychological exactitude. Terms like ‘romance’ and ‘realism’, ‘naturalism’ and ‘veritism’, were hurled around, notably by Frank Norris:

  Romance – I take it – is the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type of normal life. Realism is the kind of fiction that confines itself to the type of normal life. According to this definition, then, Romance may even treat of the sordid, the unlovely – as for instance, the novels of M. Zola….Also, Realism…need not be in the remotes
t sense or degree offensive, but on the other hand respectable as a church and proper as a deacon – as, for instance, the novels of Mr Howells….Let Realism do the entertaining with its meticulous presentation of teacups, rag carpets, wall paper and haircloth sofas, stopping with these, going no deeper than it sees, choosing the ordinary, the untroubled, the commonplace.

  But to Romance belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man.18

  Cather drew the line at Zola, but she too liked the idea of a fiction that would ‘plumb’ and ‘range’ and be unconfined, and when she reviewed Norris’s McTeague admiringly in 1900, she praised him in his own terms:

  He is big and warm and sometimes brutal, and the strength of the soil comes up to him with very little loss in the transmission. His art strikes deep down into the roots of life and the foundations of Things as They Are – not as we tell each other they are at the tea-table.19

  Cather would not begin to write her own novels for some years after that review – my first chapters describe her long ‘apprenticeship’ – and when she did, they were not at all like Frank Norris’s, or those of any of the male writers from whom she learned so much. She made her own version of the never-concluded struggle in the American imagination between romance and realism, space and confinement, pioneering energy and elegiac memorializing.

  Her appropriation of a male tradition – an appropriation which had everything to do with her sexual alienation from conventional femininity – made her work unique. Virginia Woolf’s well-known ideal of an artist with an androgynous, ‘man-womanly’ mind, in A Room of One’s Own (contemporaneous with Cather’s great novels of the 1920s), finds its best illustration, in an American context, in Willa Cather’s writing.

  —

  Cather’s ‘cross-dressing’, in her life as in her writing, was a complicated matter.20 She outgrew her (now notorious) youthful phase of calling herself ‘William Cather Jr’, dressing as a boy, and having passionate erotic crushes on other girls, and on actresses and opera singers, and created for herself a well-controlled, increasingly ‘private’ life as an independent professional woman, not explicitly or even admittedly homosexual, but emotionally defined by her deep feeling for one woman and her lasting companionship with another. Her own self-concealments made for a euphemistic tone in the early books on Cather. E.K. Brown, Cather’s first biographer, spoke of her ‘warm friendship’21 with Isabelle McClung; the shorter, earlier version of Woodress’s biography said that ‘she was married to her art’;22 and as late as the 1970s and ’80s critics were still referring obliquely to Cather and McClung’s ‘special relationship’ or ‘close friendship’.23 An unpublished letter from Virginia Faulkner (who, with Bernice Slote, was the pioneering Cather scholar in Nebraska) to one of Cather’s nieces shows a vigorous rearguard action being fought against lesbian interpretations of Cather’s life and work.24

  Such inexplicit approaches now feel squeamish. On the other hand, appropriations of Cather as a lesbian-feminist feel anomalous, as here:

  Thirty years after her death,…at a public hearing on gay rights, a speaker would cite Willa Cather as one of the homosexuals whose presence in New York had enriched the city’s cultural and intellectual life.25

  Cather looks uncomfortable under this banner. She did not call herself a lesbian,26 would not have thought of herself as such, wrote disapprovingly of Oscar Wilde’s ‘infamy’27 even when she was enthusiastic for 1890s decadence, obscured her sexual feelings in her fictions, and may not have had sexual relationships with the women she loved. Nor did she have the slightest interest in political support among women, or in what Adrienne Rich, in extending the definition of the word lesbian, calls ‘the bonding against male tyranny’.28

  None of this means, of course, that we are not allowed to describe her, now, as a lesbian writer. If we can’t say anything about writers which they would not have said about themselves, then there is no use in writing about them. But it is important not to collapse Cather’s imaginative life into a simple matter of repression, nor to condescend to her for her lack of ‘openness’. This mistake seems to me to be made in the description of Cather by one feminist American critic as

  a lesbian who could not, or did not, acknowledge her homosexuality and who, in her fiction, transformed her emotional life and experience into acceptable, heterosexual forms and guises.29

  and by another, arguing that

  Cather may have adopted her characteristic male persona in order to express safely her emotional and erotic feelings for other women.30

  These approaches display the disadvantages of openness. To account for Cather’s fiction by reading it as an encoding of covert, even guilty, sexuality, is, I think, patronizing and narrow. It assumes that the work is written only in order to express homosexual feeling in disguise; it makes her out to be a coward (which was certainly not one of her failings); and it assumes that ‘openness’ would have been preferable. If the argument is that ‘Cather never dealt adequately with her homosexuality in her fiction’, that My Ántonia is ‘a betrayal of female independence and female sexuality’, and that The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop retreat into ‘a world dominated by patriarchy’,31 then Cather is diminished by being enlisted to a cause. She was a writer who worked, at her best, through indirection, suppression, and suggestion, and through a refusal to be enlisted.

  That refusal to be co-opted marked, from early on, her attitude to other women writers. Not unlike George Eliot (whom Cather greatly admired), beginning her career as a novelist under a male pseudonym with a castigation of false and trashy versions of femininity in ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’,32 Cather too defined herself as a writer against the standards of female writing:

  I have not much faith in women in fiction. They have a sort of sex consciousness that is abominable. They are so limited to one string and they lie so about that. They are so few, the ones who really did anything worth while; there were the great Georges, George Eliot and George Sand, and they were anything but women, and there was Miss Brontë who kept her sentimentality under control, and there was Jane Austen who certainly had more common sense than any of them and was in some respects the greatest of them all. Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.33

  One of her most ferocious attacks, also written in her twenties, was on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Cather detested it for the ‘Emma Bovaryisme’ of its heroine, the emotional, dissatisfied Edna Pontellier; her critique of Edna and of women like her sounds like Lawrence’s attacks on neurotic modern American women ‘battening on love’:34

  With them everything begins with fancy, and passions rise in the brain rather than in the blood, the poor, neglected, limited one-sided brain that might do so much better things than badgering itself into frantic endeavours to love….They have driven the blood until it will drive no further, they have played their nerves up to the point where any relaxation short of absolute annihilation is impossible….And in the end, the nerves get even.35

  These rejections of the ‘feminine’ in Cather’s early critical writings are part of her dedication to classical, heroic forms of narrative with hard clear lines, strong stories and epic simplicity. The project to take over a male tradition of writing meant, at this stage, that she also had to appropriate the dominant male critique of female weakness and emotionalism. It is revealing that one of the few poems by women writers Cather admired was Christina Rossetti’s extraordinary ‘Goblin Market’,36 a preference which suggests her sense of alarm at setting out to steal the ‘goblin fruits’ of male art, and, at the same time, her need to remain sexually chaste – even repressed – in order to become an artist. In her essay on the poem, Ca
ther quotes its most startlingly erotic verse. The strong sister Lizzie, who has refused to eat the goblin fruits and has had them smeared all over her, returns to the weak sister Laura, who is pining away for the fruit, and says:

  Never mind my bruises

  Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices

  Squeezed from goblin fruit for you,

  Goblin pulp and goblin dew,

  Eat me, drink me, love me,

  Laura, make much of me.

  The sister eats, is poisoned, bitterly regrets her addiction, swoons, and wakes up saved and recovered. Cather gives this a stern puritanical reading (which sounds like her attack on Oscar Wilde): ‘Never has the purchase of pleasure, its loss in its own taking, the loathsomeness of our own folly in those we love, been put more quaintly and directly.’ She goes on to pity Rossetti for the weakness of her gift (‘the divine fire was not given to her lavishly…there was…only a spark which wasted the body and burnt out the soul’) and to ask ‘whether women have any place in poetry at all’.

  Ten years later, she would preface her first volume of stories, The Troll Garden, several of them about aspiring artists, with a quotation from ‘Goblin Market’:

  We must not look at Goblin men

  We must not buy their fruits:

  Who knows upon what soil they fed

  Their hungry thirsty roots?

  These fruits seem for Cather to be artistic fruits, the arcane property of the male world, at once frightening and desirable to the woman writer. But the powerful unexamined sexual dread in Rossetti’s poem also suggests the connection between Cather’s sexuality and her writing. If she was to steal the goblin fruits she would have to have more than a spark of the divine fire, would need to be strong – possibly through a refusal of the sexual knowledge proffered by the goblin men to the two sisters.