Modernist by Association: Willa Cather’s New York / New Mexico Circle

The new woman means the woman not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable.

Elsie Clews Parsons, Social Rule: A Study of the Will to Power¹

The spirit of the age . . . does not greatly affect Cather.

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Fire Under the Andes²

My title does not mean that Willa Cather was a modernist only by association. She can be, and has been, called a modernist for other, inherent reasons. She can also be, and has been, called a realist, a romantic, or even a proto-postmodernist. She is hard to classify.

Cather used to be seen as a kind of belated Victorian, perhaps a transitional figure between romantic Victorianism and the true moderns, in much the same way as A. E. Housman, whose poetry she in fact greatly admired. In recent decades, however, Cather has most often been read as a modernist, albeit a modernist in her own distinctive way. Such reinterpretations (for example, Phyllis Rose’s “The Case of Willa Cather” and Jo Ann Middleton’s Willa Cather’s Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique) have usually been based on prose style and her fairly subtle but quite real experimentalism in narrative form. Other revisionist scholars have emphasized the content and context of Cather’s fiction, “specify[ing] the nature of her engagement with the definitive experiences and ideological movements of twentieth-century life.”³ Among these, we would think of Joseph R. Urgo and Guy Reynolds. Here, partly in hopes of demonstrating that Cather was one of those women “not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable” of whom Elsie Clews Parsons writes in the first of my epigraphs and partly as an argument that the usually so acute Elizabeth Sergeant was not entirely correct in believing that the “spirit of the age” did not “greatly affect” her, I propose to conceive of Cather as a modernist by examining her literary and intellectual affiliations among a particular group of modernist contemporaries, all but one of them women.⁴

In doing so, I am following Daniel Joseph Singal’s examination of modernism as a culture, and one dramatically distinct from the culture of late Victorianism, in his 1987 essay “Towards a Definition of American Modernism” and also, citing Singal even in its title, Richard Millington’s “Willa Cather’s American Modernism,” particularly Millington’s pronouncement that “culture” refers to “the interconnected and particular ways distinct communities construct meanings.”⁵ The distinct community I deal with here, in relation to which I am situating Cather, is made up of Randolph Bourne, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and the strikingly counter-cultural sociologist and anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons. All four knew each other, all four are recognized as modernists, all four were first and foremost New Yorkers, and all except Bourne shared Cather’s ties with New Mexico in the early decades of the twentieth century.

To refer to Willa Cather as a New Yorker is to unsettle the prevailing image of her as a Nebraskan. She was in fact very much an embodiment of American mobility. Urgo has influentially read her in relation to “migration” and a “metaphysics of homelessness and human movement.”⁶ Reynolds’ reading of the “political intricacy” of her writing similarly emphasizes movement—that is, the disputed role of immigration in “American nationalism.”⁷ Born in Virginia in 1873, Cather was taken west at the age of nine but set her face back eastward after college, accepting an editorial job at a newly launched magazine in Pittsburgh. In 1901 she left the magazine and newspaper industry to become a high school teacher in Pittsburgh in the belief that classroom work would allow her more time for the writing of fiction. Five years later, however, she returned to editorial work, joining the fabulously successful McClure’s Magazine and moving to New York, where she abundantly demonstrated the “female independence and self-possession in the city” that Ann Romines identifies as an aspect of modernity.⁸ She would live in New York the rest of her life, though with significant intervals spent at other, quieter favorite places, including the Southwest.

In...