Cather Studies 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures ed. by Melissa J. Homestead and Guy J. Reynolds (review)

Cather Studies 9 continues the pattern followed by the University of Nebraska Press in recent years of using the biennial series to showcase the theme of the corresponding international seminar sponsored by the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Willa Cather Foundation. The thirteen essays in this collection resonate with the rich papers and discussions which were part of the 12th International Willa Cather Seminar, “Cather, Chicago, and Modernism,” held in Chicago in June 2009.

Willa Cather famously wrote in the prefatory note to her 1936 essay collection Not under Forty that the book “is for the backward, and by one of their number.” Melissa Homestead and Guy Reynolds, editors of Cather Studies 9, do not seek to debunk Cather’s claim, acknowledging that she was not a traditional modernist. The essays they selected for this volume present Cather smack in the middle of cultural transitions (from late-Victorian to modern eras) and cultural struggles (between modernists and anti-modernists). Fortunately, Cather and her writing do not get lost in the cultural debates; this book demonstrates that she remained a vibrant, innovative, and thoughtful writer, not only an observer to cultural change but a participant in a world that was shifting in ways she did not always value.

Despite the strong presence of Chicago in this volume, there is much for scholars of the American West. Cather harkens to the time when Chicago was not only a bustling marketplace for agricultural products of the West but also a dual gateway—the starting point for many of those seeking land, work, and fortune in the West as well as the transportation hub for those who, like Cather, travelled from west to east. Even those essays not directly apropos of traditional notions of the West are relevant because they illustrate the ways the West hung over Cather’s eastern interactions; Amber Harris Leichner’s “Cather’s ‘Office Wives’ Stories and Modern Women’s Work,” for example, demonstrates that Cather’s New Woman persona remained a western woman.

Homestead and Reynolds have grouped the essays into “two distinct clusters” (xi): those which focus on Cather’s relationship to place and those which focus on her interactions with visual arts and music. This editorial plan brings some order to what might otherwise appear to be a hodgepodge, but it also tends to diminish the diversity of topics represented. Mark Facknitz’s essay on trains and technological change, Richard Harris’s discussion of Chicago novelist Henry Blake Fuller as an intellectual predecessor for Cather, and Matthew Lavin’s analysis of the literary marketplace and Cather’s relationship with her agent Paul Reynolds are among the essays that resist editorially imposed boundaries of geographic or cultural place and the arts. A more accurate description is the editors’ claim that “the writers in this volume create a layered, multivalent sense of what ‘modern cultures’ might mean” (xix). Modernism, Cather’s writing, and her persona are all conflicted and complex topics, and this collection of essays offers valuable forays into the mix.

Cather Studies 9 explores Cather in conversation with writers as diverse as Zane Grey, Sarah Orne Jewett, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It incorporates unexpected texts such as The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1914) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) into Cather’s engagement with modernism. Topics ranging from violence to jazz to tourism enrich our understanding of Cather’s works. Despite such surprises, some aspects of modernism get unexpectedly short shrift, most notably Cather as an internationalist and her relationship to world cultures (only Joyce Kessler’s study of Cather’s short story “The Profile” is explicitly international).

Thankfully, neither the editors nor the contributors make much effort to force Cather or modernism into small boxes. In discussing his own purpose, Lavin offers a good summary of the entire volume: “I am less concerned with Cather’s...