Cather Studies, Volume 7: Willa Cather as Cultural Icon

Cather, Freudianism, and Freud

212 Cather, Freudianism, and Freud J O H N N . S W I F T This essay does not argue for or particularly examine Willa Cather’s cultural iconicity. It grew from my personal conviction of the immense significance of Cather’s writing, and from my old but unexamined habit of linking her mentally with another writer—Freud—whose status is indeed unquestioned. I wanted here simply to bring together more or less systematically two of the great figures in my own “family romance,” two strong voices that have echoed in my thinking for more than twenty years. To many readers (and certainly to Cather herself) they seem an unlikely pair. Yet they have much in common: children of the provinces who came to see themselves as speaking for high culture itself; professional late bloomers who served long, arduous apprenticeships; in their personal lives aloof, in what Freud called “splendid isolation”; meticulous self-fashioners; lovers of classical antiquity and things archaeological, and of European literature from Virgil through Shakespeare to Anatole France. Each described the collapse of his or her world and lived on past it, sometimes bitter but not defeated, into wise or cynical age. Each was until the end an unrepentant iconoclast: Freud’s Virgilian epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900—“Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo,” which I translate loosely as “If I can’t move heaven, then I’ll raise hell”—has always struck me as somehow appropriate to Cather, young or old. When I first read Cather in 1981, as I will describe below, I immediately and without much thought placed her in my own very small canon of literary icons, and it was hard for me to 213 Cather, Freudianism, and Freud understand why she was even then still for critics often a minor, regional figure. In what follows, reassured by the compelling arguments of others in this volume, I simply take her iconicity —her inexhaustible cultural suggestiveness—for granted, as I take Freud’s. T H E V I L L A G E F R E U D I A N S It is easy to follow the threads of relationship between Willa Cather and Sigmund Freud: there are almost none. I believe that Freud’s name appears exactly once in Cather’s published and unpublished writings, in a famous 1936 counterattack on young literary critics incapable of appreciating Sarah Orne Jewett’s prose: “Imagine a young man, or woman, born in New York City, educated at a New York university, violently inoculated with Freud, hurried into journalism, knowing no more about New England country people (or country folk anywhere) than he has caught from motor trips or observed from summer hotels: what is there for him in The Country of the Pointed Firs?” (Not Under Forty 92–93). In a subsequent letter to Zoë Akins she identified her targets as nyu graduates with foreign-sounding names publishing essays about sex-starved New England lady authors (Woodress 474; Stout, Calendar 206). I do not know the specific writers who incensed Cather, but they sound like practitioners of criticism-as-diagnosis, an approach pretty common in the enthusiastic youth of literary psychoanalysis, and one encouraged by Freud himself, who saw art (like most behavior) mainly as sublimated expression of the artist’s frustrated sexual desires. Beyond this public outburst (more noted now for its nativism —the young critic is of “German, Jewish, Scandinavian” descent—than for its critique of psychoanalysis) we hear little, even off the record, about Cather’s awareness of the strong currents of “Freudianism” that surged in American intellectual culture in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant describes a 1921 dismissal of Freud’s work as one instance of Cather’s growing rigidity and conservatism: “She 214 jo h n n . sw i f t was truly skeptical about the post-war world. Take this Viennese Freud: why was everybody reading him? Tolstoy knew as much about psychology—with no isms attached—as any fiction writer needed. I didn’t agree. Freud was here: I had to try to read him, because I lived in today’s world. But Willa . . . looked backward with regret” (173–74). Sergeant also tells a strange story of the late 1920s (probably the spring of 1929), of a depressed Willa Cather toying with entering Jungian analysis to address “the enigma of life and death” that hovered...