Between Registers: Coming In and Out Through Musical Performance in Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark

For some of us, it might be that the most intense and important way we express or enact identity through the circulation of physical pleasure is in musical activity, and that our “sexual identity” might be “musician” more than it is “lesbian,” “gay,” or “straight.”

Suzanne Cusick (“On a Lesbian Relationship with Music” 70)

On November 27, 1897, Willa Cather’s opinion of Jules-Émile-Frédéric Massenet’s Hérodiade appeared in the Courier. Cather wrote,

     [The Hérodiade is] full of that ever present sensuous spirituality of his, like Rossetti’s verses, hinting of the warfare between the flesh and the spirit and giving the victory quite frankly and joyously to the flesh, as Massenet always does, but full of vague, delicious yearning. (The World and Parish 520)

While Cather’s phrases, “ever present,” “of his,” and “as Massenet always does,” betray the writer’s condescension toward Massenet and Rossetti for their acquiescence to the pull of sexuality (the same reasons for which she overtly condemned Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, and Kate Chopin ¹ ), the unobtrusive “but” reveals the author’s attraction to a liminal state of unfulfilled and undefined desire, “of vague, delicious yearning.” Cather’s success as an outspoken journalist in a male-dominated profession and her decision to live rather openly, though ambiguously, with her lesbian lovers—first, Isabelle McClung and then Edith Lewis—reveal that Cather was able to keep societal focus on her writing and off of her sexuality. Her renunciation of the provocative pose she had adopted as an undergraduate cross-dresser and cross-namer (she often signed herself “William” or more ambivalently “Will”) was the first step in her public and literary detachment from clearly defined gender roles.

     Indeed, Cather has gained attention recently from performance and queer theorists who have shown “gender” to be a mutable boundary in her fiction. Certainly it is complex. Her lesbianism challenged and yet accorded nicely with societal pressure to be outwardly both an “unsexual” Victorian woman and a successful “masculine” artist. Cather’s early prose reveals that she did internalize the Victorian “cult of manhood,” ² reviling “effeminate” men and “feminine” women’s writing, and yet she loved women both in her fiction and in her private life.

     Many have read hypocrisy in Cather’s condemnation of Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality, yet Cather also denounced heterosexual passion and marriage. ³ She deplored Chopin’sThe Awakening as “trite and sordid” and went on to write,

     These people [female characters like Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary] really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist upon making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists. (The World and Parish 697–98)

Ultimately, art is a more satisfying and faithful lover than romance. Cather’s argument with Kate Chopin, whose other works she respects, is that the strength of Edna’s passion is “unnatural” and cheapens Chopin’s artistry as a writer. Cather’s censure of Wilde, though addressing a homosexual man, is substantively identical: “he took the tapers from the altar for festival lights and brandished them in the wild melee of a carnival night,” and she sadly laments “the chaos and confusion of wasted life and wasted talent.” Wilde’s “sin,” she claims, is “[ir]reverence for his own gift” by offhandedly writing his “insincere” plays (The Kingdom of Art 392). What Cather condemns more than “gay” or “straight” sex is the unintellectual abandon to physical passion and life which is always destructive to the...