Willa Cather's Early Journalism: Gender, Performance, and the "Manly Battle Yarn"

JANIS P. STOUT Willa Cather's Early Journalism: Gender, Performance, and the "Manly Battle Yarn" riLLA cather's biographer James Woodress states that when Cather entered the University ofNebraska in 1890 she was "still refusing to act and dress like a girl." He illustrates this refusal to act the prescribed part with an anecdote drawn from the recollections offellow students. As the students awaited their instructor's arrival on the first day of the term, the door opened, and a head with short hair and a straw hat appeared. A masculine voice inquired if this were the beginning Greek class, and when someone said it was, the body attached to the head and hat opened the door wider and came in. The masculine head and voice were attached to a girl's body and skirts. The entire class laughed, but Cather, apparently unperturbed , took her seat. (69) It is a scene that would play well on stage: audience members sit expectantly , gendered clues (of costume and voice) shape their expectations, and comic reversal occurs, all the more effective because the performer retains (or seems to retain) her aplomb. Moreover, Woodress writes the scene in theatrical terms, all props and appearances, and his language implies that he participates in the audience's amusement. The young Cather is defined in affectionately comic terms as an adolescent awkwardly jumbling up pieces that don't fit together: skirts with masculine voice, girl's body with boyish (short) hair and hat. But the confidence Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 3, Autumn 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 52Janis P. Stowt with which the biographer chuckles at his subject implies his foreknowledge of a happy ending in which gender decorum will be restored and the confused adolescent will achieve maturity—that is, will learn to act and dress, as well as write, like a woman. If Cather began her college years as a rebel in masculinized clothes, as several commonly reproduced photographs seem to show (a mode of self-presentation sometimes described as cross-dressing), she ended them still a rebel, but in less conspicuous ways, not having to do with dress. Photographs made in her senior year, showing her in a puff-sleeved ball gown or an opera cape and hat, convey an indisputably feminine persona . What had happened to her masquerade of masculinity? The simplest answer, and an accurate one, is that the mother of her friend Mariel Gere had intervened. As Mildred Bennett writes, Mrs. Gere saw that she was wearing a "self-imposed disguise" and "persuaded" her to let her hair grow longer and to dress in a more feminine style (216), and also, Cather would later recall, to try to improve her spelling (Letter to Mariel Gere, April 24, 1912, Nebraska). But that answer is in fact far too simple. Not only does its emphasis on costume (like Woodress ' in the anecdote of the classroom) imply that she was covering up a real self who could be found merely by changing clothes, but it gives the spotlight to a minor character rather than the star. Moreover, it is hard to believe that anyone could have persuaded the strongminded Cather to adopt a persona she did not want. A better answer, I believe, comes from the fact that fot two years Cather had been writing theater reviews for the Nebraska State Journal. As she gained worldly experience and moved into the role of professional journalist, she seems to have realized that she could gain a reception among people who could advance her career, and thereby achieve her goals more readily, if she did not elicit hostility at the outset over how she dressed or cut her hair. More importantly, from her intensive observation of performers and performances she seems to have begun to recognize how gender was projected, if not constructed, and to realize that she, too, could be a performer, an actor—and not just on stage, in community theatricals. From the beginning of her junior year, Cather spent inordinate amounts of time in the theater and among actresses. She observed and commented on performances of all sorts of female roles, from ingenues to sirens to...