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chapter 3 PLURALISM IN THE IMMIGRANT PRAIRIE Willa Cather’s Civilized Primitives  Having discovered “the world of ideas” through the classics, Willa Cather’s Jim Burden contemplates a passage from The Georgics in the third book of My Ántonia : “‘Primus ego in patriam mecum . . . deducam Musas’; for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.” Burden tells us that his mentor earlier had clarified the meaning of patria for Virgil, as being not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse . . . not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little “country”; to his father ’s fields, “sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops.” () It is not difficult to recognize the parallels between the Virgilian invocation and authorial ambitions at hand. As Blanche Gelfant has pointed out, writing about nineteenth-century European “pioneers” and the prairie, Willa Cather was a literary “pioneer” herself (). In an essay she called “My First Novels (There Were Two),” Cather wrote, “Nebraska is distinctly déclassé as a literary background; its very name throws the delicately attuned critic into a clammy shiver of embarrassment .” She then summarized the establishment feeling: “a New York critic voiced a very general opinion when he said: ‘I simply don’t care a damn what happens in Nebraska, no matter who writes about it’” (“My First” ). Cather was unique in casting not only the scorned region but also the denigrated immigrant subjects in a light previously unavailable. She wrote in the same essay, “O Pioneers! was not only about Nebraska farmers; the farmers were Swedes! At that time, , the Swede had never appeared on the printed page in this country except in broadly humorous sketches; and the humour was based on two peculiarities : his physical strength, and his inability to pronounce the letter ‘j’” (“My First” ). Susan Rosowski has observed that Cather “was the first to give immigrants heroic status” () by placing them center stage during one of the most important events in the history of the United States: the continental expansion of the American empire into “the West.” Although both immigration and the experience of the West continue to inform the U.S. national imaginary, these two components were seldom aligned in narrative. Particularly distinctive was Cather’s favorable representations of various groups of non-Anglo immigrants , who, at the xenophobic time of her writing of the early novels, were held in low esteem and were not part of dominant national identity discourses. Frederick Jackson Turner, whose assessment of the Western experience influenced generations, disliked Cather’s novels because of their sympathy for unassimilating “non-English stocks” (Handley ). Preoccupied with the question of national , ethnic, and literary origins and inheritance, Cather mobilized her own ideas about the beginnings of settlers, American patrias, and “non-English stocks” through, as I explain, the contradictory discourses of primitivism and civilization as well as enclosure and translocality. On the one hand, like Cahan’s localism, writing the region allows Cather to provide more complex and favorable depictions of immigrants than her readers would have found elsewhere during the xenophobic time of war. On the other hand, she encloses, as does Cahan, the possibility of a larger critique of immigration, territory, and empire; her pluralist inclusion and valorization of off-white Northern and Eastern European immigrants exclude the casualties of empire, Native American communities, as well as the other, subaltern subjects who were part of the expansion project. Reading for spatial containment reveals the deployment of (successful) immigration as foundational to national identity to cover over the “wounds” (see chapters  and ) inflicted on those who were summarily excluded from this narrative . Because enclosure in Cather’s works is a generative rather than confining experience of place for her heroic immigrants (unlike for others), the importance of civilizational thinking to the twin processes of immigration and expansion, separating the civilized from the uncivilized through spatial and other means, is laid bare. In this chapter, I show that Willa Cather deploys a poetics and politics of enclosure in which place—as frontier, region (“the West”), land, and landscape— and the ideal immigrant subject are represented in terms of boundaries and containment . The translocal diasporic sensibilities of exile and nostalgia for the homeland exceed the enclosure, only to be reframed...

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