The Case of Willa Cather

TheCaseofWillaCather David Stineback Ibeginwith the complacent but completely sincere assertion that no major Americannovelist in the twentieth century has been as misunderstood and mistreatedby literary critics as Willa Cather. The mistreatment is personal aswellasprofessional; indeed, its single most pervasive quality is an unreasonableconflation of personal and professional judgments-that is, the confusion ofjudgments about her character with judgments about her art. She has become,quietly and relentlessly, a "case" 1 for some of the crudest amateur psychoanalysisto be found in American literary criticism. Moreover, such confusionof biography and criticism characterizes the work of her admirers aswellas her detractors. The result is a persistent invasion of her life in the nameofevaluation, as if the critics were retaliating for being put on trial byher.2 Perhaps they were. Cather's aversion to critics, particularly after their responseto One of Oursin 1922,iswell known. But the analysisof that aversion has come from the critics themselves: the familiar picture of Cather as nostalgically incapable of coping with contemporary American society became current as she withdrew from critics and made that withdrawal a matter of principle in essays like "The Novel Demeuble," "Escapism" and ''MissJewett."3 Yet when one ignores non-fictional statements like these and concentrates on the novels themselves, a different image of Cather emerges. Of all Cather's works of fiction up to and including Shadows on the Rock 0931), only six out of twelve are clearly concerned with the past. Beginning Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 15,Number 4, Winter 1984,385-395 386 David Stineback with A Lost Lady in 1923,she seldom deals with Nebraska in its immigrant settlement days. And when she did deal with those times, in earlier novels like OPioneersI (1913) and My Antonia (1918),she never technically pictured them as a period of peace and contentment. Her attempt to find something romantic in the financial development of the West in A Lost Lady seems intellectual and half-hearted. Indeed, by the time she writes her "historical" novels-Death Comesfor the Archbishop (1927)and Shadows on the Rockthe issue of her nostalgia is moot, since the past qua past never plays more than a minor role in her work; only certain isolated times in the past-as in the present-merit her interest. And even here Cather's interest is in the effect of those times on character, rather than in the political, economic or social structure of society. Finally, the works that follow Shadows on the Rock-Obscure Destinies (stories; 1932),Lucy Gayheart (1935),Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)and The Old Beauty and Others (stories; 1948)are not really historical fiction: their concentration on ordinary characters and their minimal documentary nature suggest, once more, a lack of interest in the past for its own sake. Though one is in the past in these works, one is not very conscious of the time frame of Rosicky' s, Mrs. Harris', Lucy's, Sapphira's and Lady Longstreet's stories. Nor, it should be said, do Cather's works of fiction, taken as a whole, concentrate on her home region. Only half of them deal with the western Nebrruka/ eastern Colorado area, and those are seldom complimentary towarc1the general culture of the Great Plains. The Troll Garden (stories; 1905),with itsimage of local Philistines, stands at one end; Lucy Gayheart, with its1\1tile relationship between Lucy and Harry Gordon, the town success, standsat the other. I am not suggesting that Cather was incapable of nostalgia or that shedid not see the past, in abstract terms, as a more personal, human time than the present. I am saying that Cather's nostalgia, when it occurs, is quite inter· mittent and often unconvincing. Her sense of the past compared to the present, moreover, is a familiar and rather standard posture that some of the very critics of Cather have associated, uncritically, with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.4 Even ifit were true that Cather was obsessivelyrepelled bythe mechanization of the twentieth century, that would hardly be a strange posture for a modern American writer to assume. Why then are critics so determined to classify Cather's fiction as nostalgic, particularly when the same charge...