Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures

Introduction

ix Introduction M E L I S S A J . H O M E S T E A D A N D G U Y J . R E Y N O L D S To some, linking Willa Cather to “the modern” or more narrowly to literary modernism still seems an eccentric proposition . As Richard Millington has pointed out, “one will look in vain for Cather’s name in the index of most accounts, whether new or old, of the nature and history of Anglo-American modernism ” (52). Perhaps she fails to feature in these accounts because in her public pronouncements and certain recurring motifs in her fiction, she appeared to turn her back on modernity. Cather was skeptical about many aspects of the culture that took shape around her in the early decades of the twentieth century, in that most modern place, the United States of America. Born in rural Virginia during the decade following the Civil War, Cather felt herself to be part of a vanished world. She was already in her twenties when the generation of canonical American modernist novelists (F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway) was born, and late-Victorian culture formed her childhood world. By the time the modernist moment had decisively crystallized in the 1920s and 1930s, Cather was issuing jeremiads condemning aspects of modern life she felt to be cheap or “gaudy.” In her essay “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle” (1923) she attacked movies, consumerism, and education policy (including the changes at her alma mater, the University of Nebraska , that, in her eyes, made it a “trade” school). Cather’s title x melissa j. homestead and guy j. reynolds for her notorious collection of literary-cultural essays, Not Under Forty (1936), conveyed her sense that those younger than that age would not understand her cultural positions, prejudices, and beliefs. As Millington observes, one strain of Cather scholarship has argued for her status as a modernist artist by focusing on her “affinities with the aesthetic ideals of particular modern artists” (52), and particularly her experiments with form and narrative technique. For example, is The Professor’s House (1925), with its embedded narrative in the voice of Tom Outland, “modernist ”? However, Cather, even at her most formally experimental, is still far removed from the main currents of modernist fiction. Unlike Gertrude Stein or James Joyce, she never wrote prose that radically challenged received ideas of conventional syntax; her sentences remained clean and classical, lapidary in their simple effectiveness. Her narrative structures, though more complex and experimental than many critics have acknowledged, never equaled the avant-garde complexity we associate with Faulkner. Furthermore, the themes and subject matter that define modernist storytelling are either absent or only marginally present in Cather’s work. The urban cultures of Chicago and New York certainly feature in some of her fiction, but the city is not the cynosure of her literary imagination, as it is in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. His novel points to another thematic dimension where Cather is idiosyncratic: she does not share modernism ’s fascination with new technologies of the early twentieth century. The Great Gatsby, with its cars and movies and phones, best exemplifies the way American fiction of the 1920s registered the massive shift in the sheer “stuff” of everyday life. In contrast, Cather’s fiction—much of it set in the late nineteenth century or earlier—can seem fetishistically wedded to imagined worlds where such technology was either absent or remained the object of suspicion. Millington advocates a different approach to Cather’s engagements with modernity—a historicist, cultural studies one xi Introduction in which scholars are “interested less in the formal qualities of Cather’s fiction than in the relation between the content of that fiction and the context of her society and culture” and “work to specify the nature of her engagement with the definitive experiences and ideological movements of twentieth-century life— migration and immigration, nostalgia, Progressivism, the emergence of a fully fledged culture of consumption, and so on” (52). The essays in this collection extend this contextual approach, adding more “experiences and ideological movements” for understanding Cather’s engagements with what this volume terms “modern cultures.” Our contributors write about the role of railways in Cather’s work, her understanding of art history, music, and performance, her response to the opening up of the American Southwest to...