Novels of Will Cther - Essay Example

Willa Cather Born on December 7, 1873, in Bаck Creek Vаlley, Willа Cаther wаs the eldest child of Chаrles Cаther, а deputy Sheriff, аnd Mаry Virginiа Boаk Cаther. The fаmily trаces its аncestors to Irelаnd, from which they settled in Pennsylvаniа in the 1750's. In 1883 the Cаther fаmily relocаted to live with Willа's grаndpаrents Williаm аnd Cаroline аnd her uncle George in Webster County, Nebrаskа. Аt the time her fаmily consisted of Willа's two brothers, а sister Jessicа аnd her grаndmother Rаchel Boаk who lived with them. А yeаr lаter they moved to Red Cloud, а neаr rаilroаd town, where her fаther creаted а loаn аnd insurаnce office. Willа’s relаtives never becаme rich or powerful within their business аnd Willа аssumed it wаs her fаther to blаme in the lаck of finаnciаl success who, supposedly, put intellectuаl аnd spirituаl mаtters over the commerciаl. Her mother wаs а hopeless womаn, bаsicаlly concerned with fаshion аnd trying to turn Willа into "а lаdy", despite of the fаct thаt Willа defied the norms for girls аnd cut her hаir short аnd wore trousers. While living in the town Willа met Аnnie Sаdilek, whom she lаter used for the Аntoniа chаrаcter in My Аntoniа (Brown, 1993). Upon grаduаtion from Red Cloud High School in 1890, Willа moved to the stаte cаpitol in Lincoln where she prepаred to enter the University of Nebrаskа. She did so аnd lаter spent time editing the school mаgаzine аnd publishing аrticles аs well аs plаying аnd reviewing locаl pаpers. In 1892 she published her short story "Peter" in а Boston mаgаzine, а story thаt lаter becаme pаrt of her novel My Аntoniа. Аfter grаduаting in 1895, she cаme bаck to Red Cloud until she received аn offer to work аs аn editing Home Monthly in Pittsburgh (Brown, 1993). While editing the mаgаzine, she wrote short stories to fill its pаges. These stories, published in а collection cаlled the Troll Gаrden in 1905, brought her to the аttention of S.S. McClure. In 1906 she moved to New York to join McClure's Mаgаzine, initiаlly аs а member of the stаff аnd ultimаtely аs its mаnаging editor. During this time she met Sаrа Orne Jewett, а womаn from Mаine who inspired her to lаter write аbout Nebrаskа. In 1912, аfter five yeаrs with McClure's, she left the mаgаzine to hаve time for her own writing. Аfter the publicаtion of Аlexаnder's Bridge, аlso in 1912, Cаther visited the Southwest where she wаs fаscinаted by the Аnаsаzi cliff dwellings. In 1913 O Pioneers wаs published аnd in 1917 she wrote My Аntoniа while living in New Hаmpshire. By 1923 she hаd won the Pulitzer Prize for her One of Ours, аnd in this yeаr her modernist book А lost lаdy wаs published. Аt the time her novels focused on the destruction of provinciаl life аnd the deаth of the pioneering trаdition. Lаter Cаther hаd the period of despаir which wаs followed by her productive success during these yeаrs. Аfter she recovered, she mаnаged to write some of her greаtest novels, such аs The Professor’s Hourse (1925), My Mortаl Enemy (1926), аnd Deаth Comes for the Аrchbishop (1927). She mаintаined аn аctive writing cаreer, publishing novels аnd short stories for mаny yeаrs until her deаth on Аpril 24, 1947. Аt the time of her deаth, she ordered her letters burned. Willа Cаther wаs buried in New Hаmpshire (Marilyn, 1996). Like many artists, Willa Cather knew personal conflict. She was a free thinker reared amidst Calvinist dogma; a materialist acutely aware of the limited worth of "things"; an optimist who wanted to retain faith; a skeptic prone to depression and despair. In her fiction, successful marriages, happy families, and satisfying personal relationships are as scarce as summer rain in the New Mexican desert. Suicide marks her pages like the Platte River cuts Nebraska. Of all her conflicts, however, none is more acute or controversial than her sexuality. There are those who maintain that Cather was not homoerotic. For instance, in an interview published in the Omha World-Herald ( 1984), Susan J. Rosowski and Mildred Bennett advocate Cather's heterosexuality and maintain that her interest in other women was nothing more than school-girl crushes ( Cather Scholar 4). Sharon O'Brien , first in several essays and then in Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, and others elsewhere have argued rather convincingly that Cather was homosexual, though the term itself is usually avoided. O'Brien's phraseology is that Cather was a woman whose primary intimacies were with other women" and that "her fiction reveals that she found sexuality and passion troublesome forces. Cather's homoerotic conflicts were resolved, O'Brien argues, after she met Sarah Orne Jewett and learned to identify with her own femaleness and "commit herself to the artist's vocation" (O'Brien, 1996). O Pioneers! is Cather's declaration of independence as a female artist. With it Cather "resolved the conflicts that had kept 'woman' and 'artist' apart" and afterwards her novels flowed in "a steady stream" of integrated selfhood. If one defines a lesbian as a woman who has sexual relations with another woman, Cather cannot be called a lesbian on the basis of available records. On the other hand, if a lesbian is a woman whose primary emotional attachments are to other women, regardless of sexual relations, the definition adopted by some feminists, then Cather was most certainly a lesbian. Deborah G. Lambert states the dilemma most effectively: Cather was "a lesbian writer who could not, or did not, acknowledge her homosexuality and who, in her fiction, transformed her emotional life and experiences into acceptable, heterosexual forms and guises" (Marilyn, 1996). The sociosexual conflicts implied by Lambert's summation are crucial to my arguments. Cather's psychosexuality was abnormal--if we define "normal" (as did Freud and other Victorian evaluators) as the conventional biological attraction of a representative of one gender for a representative of the other gender, with the ultimate motive of begetting more representatives of the species Homo sapiens while experiencing some emotional satisfaction in the process, albeit such satisfaction is not to be overdone. In short, Cather was "lesbian" --a woman who was sexually unorthodox by nature, who was acutely aware that she had to answer to a distinctly heterosexual society, and who may or may not have experienced intimate sexual relationships. Whether she ever consummated her sexuality is inconsequential to my theories about Cather's creativity, but the psychological conflicts which resulted from the nonconformist eroticism are crucial to those theories. I believe that Cather's primary sexual attraction was to other females and that such attraction perplexed her throughout her life because homoeroticism clashed with her strong sense of social propriety. Cather could not in her own life reify her subconscious desires, could not shake the dust of the Nebraskan village or free herself from parental discipline and religious dununciation; but in her fiction she sublimated the desires. Especially in her children (which are so dominant in My Antonia and Shadows on the Rock, and which are transfigured as the uncorrupted Indians of Death Comes for the Archbishop ) she intuitively projects both the sexual freedom inherent in the preadult stages of erotic development and the natural freedom from death awareness that ultimately constricts the adult. For Cather, the child is not only a literary symbol of innocence and exuberance, but an artistic extension of the essential design of her narratives, an image of sexual guiltlessness and the time when sexual pleasures could be pursued and enjoyed, free of what Brown terms the tyranny of genital organization. As Frederick J. Hoffman reminds us, the entire life of the individual and of the race is encapsulated in the child, and the artist naturally turns to the child for inspiration (Woodress, 1987). From the child in her, Cather received both her artistic imagination and answers to questions arising from her own perverse sexuality. Projecting this child self, Cather populates her fictive world with male and female children who are free from erotic confusion and guilt and who lack conscious knowledge of their mortality. What Cather wanted to convey with her fictive children was not slavish nostalgia or escapism but an integrated attempt to reunite herself psychologically with nature, to lessen the culturally imposed strictures of sexual (and sexist) dogmas. If, somewhat mystically through an imagination drawing heavily from childhood and the past, Cather could regain or reenter a preadult stage of innocence, she could thereby free herself from the complexes that first create and then feed upon guilt and repression. Such a desire was impossible to reify, but the effort to do so is nonetheless perceptible in Cather's thinking. Cather's abandonment of conventional female attire and her adoption of conventional male attire are the only incontrovertible facts which link her to "inverted" or "perverted" sexuality. The details are familiar: From the time she was approximately thirteen until she entered college, Cather "cut her hair shorter than most boys" and "wore boys' clothes, a derby, and carried a cane" ( Woodress, 1987). Moreover, she insisted on being identified by the patronymic "William" and several times played male parts in amateur dramas. Her naturally deep, masculine voice aided her disguise. As an adult, Cather (like Stein) discontinued the radical male dress, at least publicly, but sublimated the trait into the symbolic projection of self in fictive male characters. Contrary to what we might assume, such crossdressing may be but is not necessarily an endorsement of love for others of the same gender. As O'Brien’s notes, cross-dressing such as Cather evidenced constitutes a simultaneous denial of the feminine and a taunting of male authority, "although cross-dressing was an antisocial act that called attention to societal definitions of female homosexuals as 'inverts' and 'perverts,' it nonetheless was not a sign of liberation from heterosexual norms or patriarchal domination" (1986). That is, Cather's cross-dressing was the manifestation of a complex and contradictory set of responses to her femininity and to the environment in which fate placed her. On the one hand it identifies her as being ashamed of the characteristics which biological chance has granted her and marks her consequent desire to abjure femininity and assume the male persona which society has designated as dominant. On the other hand, it shows her mockery of that unjust "dominant" designation--a designation based almost entirely upon superficialities (clothes, canes, hair style). Like Stein, who openly fulfilled the masculine role in her "marriage" to Alice B. Toklas, Cather seems to have occupied that same dominant role in her long-term relationship with Edith Lewis, with whom she lived from 1908 until her death in 1947. As Marilyn explains in offering caveats about Lewis's biography of Cather, Lewis was so subservient that she could have written nothing but a worshipful life of her friend. However Cather never liberated herself from what Benstock calls the modes of entrapment, betrayal, and exclusion suffered by women in the first decades of the twentieth century in America. As Woodress says, "the social invention of the morbid, unhealthy, criminal lesbian" had become so dominant by the late nineteenth century in America that the "innocent rightness in feelings of love for and attraction to women" which an earlier generation enjoyed was no longer possible for Cather (1996). Consequently, Cather was obsessively private about her personal life. Her adolescent cross-dressing before her Nebraska friends and family was, therefore, the only time she dared publicize her homoeroticism. Once past that stage of freedom which childhood allowed her, she never felt secure enough to make public the true nature of her relationships with Lewis or any other women with whom she may have been intimate. Her secret self, she thought, was safe from the world at large--but the folks back home had more evidence than most for passing judgments. Across the wide Missouri in Nebraska, the prairie society adhered to Freud's pronouncement that the only normal sex was heteroerotic, penis-in-vagina intercourse. Indoctrinated by that definition of normality, Cather was unwilling to modify her adult sexual ethic radically enough to rebel publicly against it. The antisocial conduct that came spontaneously in the presexual days of thirteen was tolerated by a Red Cloud that, not wanting to cope with matters taboo, dismissed her cross-dressing as mere tomboyism and showing off. However, the town was not quite so willing to ignore those same traits when Cather was twenty or thirty, and she had to suppress them. After her Age of Awareness, that is, her society would not grant the latitude which it was willing to grant in her Age of Innocence. The resulting psychic tension, however, came less from Red Cloud's not continuing its moratorium on "Sin" than from Cather's not distancing herself enough from such society to grant selfimmunity--as Stein and many others in the Left Bank community did to a noticeable degree. Stein, in contrast to Cather, separated literally and psychosexually from a society which she felt was "provincial, restrictive, and belonged--like Queen Victoria--to another century" (O'Brien, 1986). Once freed, Stein wrote with comparative openness about her lesbianism and institutionalized her lifestyle into one of the influential literary salons of Paris. Cather never managed such a societal break or realized such autonomy. The re-visioning of Cather reveals that Cather is an immensely complex artist, quite capable of encompassing or even upholding tradition while simultaneously using it in the most ironic of ways. As we will see, for example, her apparently praiseworthy portraits of bishops Latour and Vaillant, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, turn out to be just as condemnatory as they are laudatory. And, if her portrait of Ántonia Shimerda is seen traditionally as a heartwarming account of what Woodress calls the "Madonna of the Wheat Fields, in the revisionist view Ántonia is a woman trapped in and nearly destroyed by the traditional patriarchal values which victimize her. Ántonia herself may be too naive or too conditioned to compromise to recognize her plight, but the audience need not share Ántonia's myopia. From her earliest days of writing as a journalist, Cather revealed herself as an acerbic commentator on the life about her and as adept satirist. Her ironic comments on puritanical Pittsburgh, for example, rival Mark Twain in their sharpness. Her portrait of Ántonia is but a more sophisticated example of that early ironic bent, and serves to demonstrate that Cather is an ironist who challenges the reader to be aware of the potential of that irony, though Cather herself may at times be unaware of her own ironic complexity. In the end, Cather altered several of her novels in editions subsequent to first publication. Some indications of these changes can be readily obtained--at least for the early novels--from the "Notes on the Texts" pages of Willa Cather: Early Novels and Stories (1987). Such alterations are a writer's prerogative and a critic's dilemma; but since my study is not textually oriented, and since Cather's emendations are not extensive, the dilemma is lessened. I use the best conveniently available texts for citations. In the few instances when differences between the original text and subsequent revisions might present interpretation problems, the textual distinctions are discussed as they occur. Bibliography: 1. Brown, E. K. Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. New York: Knopf, 1993. 2. Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1996. 3. O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford U P, 1986. 4. Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. Read More