Cather Studies, Volume 7: Willa Cather as Cultural Icon

Cather’s Shadows: Solid Rock and Sacred Canopy

174 Cather’s Shadows Solid Rock and Sacred Canopy J O H N J . M U R P H Y Willa Cather seemed to have little interest in developing herself into a popular icon beyond encouraging the early image of a girl on a pony riding over vast prairies on her way to buttermaking and story-telling immigrant homemakers, and the later one of the natural artist who produced O Pioneers! (1913) without “writ[ing] at all” (Carroll interview, Bohlke 21) and has Jim Burden declare in My Ántonia (1918) that he “didn’t arrange or rearrange,” just “simply wrote down” what he recalled without awareness of “form” (xiii). As the Benéts affirm in their 1940 interview, “she does not go in for personal appearances, speechmaking , banqueting, public autographing, and the like” (Bohlke 136), activities that make popular icons of people who want to become such icons. But the prefatory note in Not Under Forty (1936), that she had ceased to identify with the contemporary world and numbered herself among “the backward” (v), suggests that we consider the kind of icon Cather indeed became, intentionally or not, for those dismayed that a major writer would identify with “the backward,” and for those who view her as their champion for so doing. Perhaps because of patriotism, lack of self-confidence, or fear that a favorite image of Cather as an icon of confident midwestern grandeur (a kind of literary Bess Truman) might topple like the Saddam Hussein bronze in Baghdad, scant attention is given to Cather’s argument with Americanization. At Laura Bush’s celebration of Cather and some others at the White House in 175 Cather’s Shadows September 2002, many well-known Cather literary passages were conspicuous for their absence among the celebratory ones that made us feel good about America. I remembered Jim Laird’s condemnation of Sand City in “The Sculptor’s Funeral” (1905) as “a dung heap” (Collected Stories 203) and “place of hatred and bitter waters” (210); Jim Burden’s condemnation of Black Hawk as a collection of “flimsy shelters” full of “jealousy and envy and unhappiness,” a place under the “tyranny” of gossip in which life is “made up of evasions and negations” and “every natural appetite . . . bridled by caution” (212); and Niel Herbert’s lament in A Lost Lady (1923) about the passing of the Old West from greathearted dreamers to “shrewd young men, trained to petty economies,” who “had never dared anything, never risked anything ” (102), as well as the narrator’s impetuous comment that Niel “was in a fever of impatience to be gone . . . forever, and was making the final break with everything that had been dear to him in his boyhood” (160). Most of all, I remembered Claude Wheeler’s reflection in France in One of Ours (1922) that he had “no chance for the kind of life he wanted at home [in Nebraska], where people were always buying and selling, building and pulling down. He had begun to believe that the Americans were a people of shallow emotions” (328). The insistence of such complaints, in spite of the obvious imperfections of the characters who make them, suggests that they probably were Cather’s as well, a suggestion confirmed in “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,” the 1923 article Cather wrote for The Nation. In it she laments the “Americanization” that has “done away with” (237) much of European culture and stamped out the use of other languages through English-only programs; she also condemns the indifference and even closedmindedness of New England and southern settlers toward their Bohemian and Scandinavian neighbors. After presenting a picture of productive fields, new farmhouses with bathrooms, clean and well-kept towns, and “crowds of happy looking children, well nourished,” on their way to school, Cather turns to “the other side of the medal, stamped with the ugly crest of materialism .” An overabundance of prosperity, movies, and gaudy fiction has generated “the frenzy to be showy; farmer boys who wish to 176 jo h n j. m u r p h y be spenders before they are earners, girls who try to look like the heroines of the cinema screen; a coming generation which tries to cheat its aesthetic sense by buying things instead of making anything .” Then she zeroes in on the University of Nebraska, fearing that her alma mater “may become a gigantic...