Willa Cather and Others, and: Willa Cather: Queering America (review)

Since Sharon O'Brien officially outed Willa Cather in her 1987 biography, Cather has been queered by a wide range of critics and theorists. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw Cather's reincarnation as the darling of feminists and queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler, who were drawn to Cather's youthful penchant for cross-dressing and the "gorgeous homosocial romances" she penned in her fiction (Sedgwick). But this queering has not been without contestation, witness Joan Acocella's reactionary Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2000), which attempted to yank Cather back to the prim prairie of Acocella's conservative imagination (with resounding applause from the likes of the National Review). This tug of war over Willa Cather—prairie spinster or queer diva—has proven quite invigorating for Cather scholarship, as if the culture wars themselves could be fought in the terrain of her fiction and biography.

If we follow Acocella's sorting of Cather critics into roughly two camps—one for art, the other for sex—then both Lindemann and Goldberg are firmly implanted in the sex camp, though for different reasons. For many critics wishing to "sex" Cather's texts, an infamous reflection in her 1922 essay "The Novel Demeublé" on "the thing not named" becomes the dominant metaphor unlocking Cather's closet. Cather writes:

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself." (cited in Goldberg, ix)

Goldberg, following O'Brien (whose biography of Cather turns on uncovering this "inexplicable presence"), is drawn to Cather precisely because of "the inexplicable presence of the thing not named," and he attentively mines Cather's texts for "unspeakable thoughts unspoken" (importing Toni Morrison's famous lines about race as the absent presence of American literature). Lindemann resists the critical combing of Cather's texts "for signs of how sexuality is translated into textuality, for evidence of lesbianism masked" (9); rather, she is interested in the thing named—queerness. Thus, the two books turn on very different axes. As Lindemann explains, "[t]he recognition that Willa Cather was a lesbian is important," but she emphatically resists "turning critical inquiry into a detective's search for the lesbian in the text" (77).

Lindemann's elegant, "happily perverse analysis" (30) of Cather is launched by a fascinating epistolary journey into Cather's correspondence with folklorist and first female MLA President Louise Pound, who, according to Lindemann, Cather had "met and fallen in love with at the University of Nebraska in 1891" (17). Lindemann artfully navigates the citation prohibitions of the Cather estate in her probing discussion of a series of letters Cather wrote to Pound between 1892 and 1897 that explicitly refer to their relationship as "queer." The queerness that Lindemann finds explicitly articulated in these letters is elaborated in Cather's fiction, where, Lindemann argues, "the ‘queer' may on the one hand be a utopian agent of challenge and change" and "on the other hand [may] be a source of profound menace—contagion, threat, disorder—that must be expelled from the body politic" (141). In witty, often dazzling, readings of texts from Alexander's Bridge (1912) to Cather's disturbing final novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), Lindemann skillfully plots Willa Cather's "queering [of] America."

Drawn to Cather through queer theory and through Cather's "numinous leitmotif" of "the thing not named," Jonathan Goldberg, noted Renaissance-scholar-turned-Cather-critic...