Cather Studies, Volume 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination

The Comic Form of Willa Cather's Art

The Comic Form of Willa Cather’s Art An Ecocritical Reading S U S A N J . R O S O W S K I Applied to literary studies, ecology’s principle of interconnection might be that reading a book in isolation is akin to reading a single chapter from a novel. It is a principle especially true for Willa Cather, who exhibited a lifelong attempt to see things whole, who understood wholeness to involve the fundamental biological pattern shared by all living things, and who recognized in the great dramatic form of comedy the artistic expression of that life rhythm. Indeed, Cather’s genius lay in giving voice to what philosopher Susanne K. Langer calls “the pure sense of life [which] is the underlying feeling of comedy” (327). The purpose of this essay is to trace the ways in which she did so. To begin we might remember that ecology shaped Cather’s conception of the world as surely as the Bible did her sense of language. Within her family the young Willa had the model of a favorite aunt, Frances Smith Cather, an accomplished amateur botanist who with her husband emigrated from Virginia to Nebraska a decade before Willa’s own family did so. Coming into her own as a student at the University of Nebraska, Cather witnessed the creation of the science of ecology, which arose not (as writers today often assume) from the transcendental naturalism of Emerson and Thoreau, argues historian Ronald C. Tobey, but rather from the struggle of grassland ecologists in Nebraska “to understand and to preserve one of the great biological regions of the world” (2). At the core of that struggle were the scientists centering around Charles Bessey along with his students 103 104 susan j. rosowski and Cather’s classmates—Roscoe Pound, Frederic Clements, and Edith Schwartz Clements. In fundamental ways Cather shared their experience of having been “raised on the frontier and [having ] entered botany just as the successive booms of settlement were breaking upon the virgin soil,” of looking to the prairies as “the heart, the enduring strength of the American continent,” and of struggling to preserve the region (Tobey 2). From this effort the grasslands ecologists “created the science of ecology . . . in the United States” (Tobey 2–3) and Willa Cather created a body of work reflecting an ecological aesthetics. That shared experience is evident in Cather’s early fiction, where descriptions of nature that she knew firsthand are among the features that most clearly anticipate her mature art. In “On the Divide” (1896), for example, she described the effect of weather on crops in precise scientific detail: when “scorching dusty winds . . . blow up over the bluffs from Kansas,” they dry up the sap in the corn leaves and “the yellow scorch creeps down over the tender inside leaves about the ear” (495). And in “The Treasure of Far Island” (1902) she describes the ongoing life of a sandbar, with all the changes that come with alterations in the weather: “In the middle of the island, which is always above water except in flood time, grow thousands of yellow-green creek willows and cottonwood seedlings, brilliantly green, even when the hottest winds blow, by reason of the surrounding moisture” (265). Such moments are spots of place akin to Wordsworth’s spots of time. By their very authenticity, however, such scenes often seem irrelevant to their stories’ plots about famous playwrights and failed immigrants. Critical convention has it that Cather was searching for her subject during these years: East or West, London or Red Cloud, artists or farmers? Seeking she was, but for something far deeper than mere subject matter; she needed to find what feeling she wanted to express in her art, and then to find the form for that feeling.1 Cather’s search culminated in Alexander’s Bridge (1912) and O Pioneers! (1913), the books she joined in the essay she titled “My First Novels [There Were Two].” Together they explore attitudes toward nature in the alternative forms of 105 The Comic Form of Willa Cather’s Art consciousness that lie behind the great dramatic forms of tragedy and comedy. Cather wrote Alexander’s Bridge as a case study in feeling and form. She constructed her plot along a transparently familiar tragic pattern: it focuses exclusively upon an exceptional individual (the bridge-building engineer Bartley Alexander) who suffers greatly from a flaw...