Canonical Relations: Willa Cather, America, and The Professor's House

"Willa Cather is a very small critical backwater."

"There is no Willa Cather 'industry.'¹

The first of these observations, both made by James Schroeter in his introduction to the "Recent Views" section of Willa Cather and her Critics, published in 1967, could still pass as majority opinion. Those critics who do work on Cather routinely lament their own, and Cather's, continued exclusion from the main currents of American literature as measured by canon-forming syllabi, anthologies, or magisterial pronouncements of American literary greatness. However, there now is a Willa Cather industry. This is evidenced on the one hand by the fact that, great or not, Cather is in a continual condition of reappropriation at the hands of readers of various persuasions, and on the other by the luxuriant growth of "Catherland," the real and imaginary location centered around Red Cloud, Nebraska, where devoted Catherites go to immerse themselves in theme park versions of the immigrant pioneer dream.

That there is now no contradiction between industrial levels of critical engagement and continued marginal literary status is one marker of a shift in the critical environment since the time of Schroeter's writing. The explosion of debate over canon formation since the 1970s may not have moved the usual suspects from the canonical center, but it has enabled any number of additional value claims. Cather's place in the literary landscape continues to be contested, and it is the significance of that contest and its meaning for the canon debate as a whole that I want to address here through a reading of The Professor's House.

First, though, it will be helpful to recall how the changing fortunes of Cather's reputation have reflected and often paralleled the shifting politics of American literary study. Cather's reputation arrived in the backwater where Schroeter finds her in the 1960s only after several periods of critical celebration and dismissal. Her early championing by Mencken as a "fresh" voice articulating the unsung, real American experience of immigrant life on the prairie was quickly superseded by critiques of her formal and temperamental antimodernity, most notoriously in Granville Hicks's "The Case Against Willa Cather."² Although the politically engaged, proscriptive criticism of the 1930s Left is often presented as anomalous, antithetical to the essential trajectory of American critical history, Hicks's "case" is largely reiterated in later commentary on Cather. Hicks's "refusal to examine life as it is" is picked up by Lionel Trilling's "disgust with life," Alfred Kazin's "turn[ing] her back on that [modern] world," Leon Edel's "refusal to move with her era," and John Randall's comprehensively damning "an outlook on life so distorted and falsified as to be practically worthless as an interpretation of human experience."³

Since the 1920s there has also been a consistent alternative reading of Cather's literary worth, one that sees her work as exemplary of art's claim to evocation of universal values; this view emerges, for example, in a recent analysis of The Professor's House as "an inquiry into the nature of civilization, of man's impulse to civilize and create. The book holds in imaginative and mournful equipoise both the nobility of the civilizing instinct and the certainty of its frustration."⁴

The opening up (or splintering) of the American canon that began in the 1970s produced rereadings of Cather that both sought to revise her reputation, repositioning her as a feminist voice and as a lesbian writer, and to relocate her canonically alongside the male modernists who were now seen to have unjustly overshadowed her linguistic originality.⁵ Cather's appropriation for lesbian feminist purposes, in particular, did not go unchallenged: the attempt to rescue her work as impersonal art has indeed been reinvigorated by this onslaught, and the emergence of queer readings in the 1990s has been accompanied by similar defenses of her life and work.⁶

In some ways, then, the history of Cather's reputation can be read as typical: many American women writers were accorded a new prominence, and new relevance, by feminist critics of the...