Willa Cather and Others (review)

Best known as a scholar of gender and sexuality in early modern British literature, Jonathan Goldberg, author of Queering the Renaissance, turns his attention to early-twentieth-century American literature and its cultural context in his newest monograph, Willa Cather and Others. Primarily aimed at literary scholars, this book locates Cather's better-known novels—O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, The Song of the Lark, and The Professor's House—in a rich cultural cartography that includes not only her lesser-known fiction and journalism but a broad range of cultural phenomena: diva worship among early-twentieth-century lesbian opera buffs, homoeroticism and homophobia in the cultural constructions of World War I shell shock, early-twentieth-century travel writing, and documentary photography of Native Americans in the 1930s.

Taking as his starting point Cather's own seemingly oxymoronic aesthetic principle that the quest of an author is not representation but the evocation of what she calls "the thing not named," Goldberg unpacks this term and extends it to explicate multiple texts and contexts. Critic Sharon O'Brien first linked "the thing not named," with its echoes of "the love that dare not speak its name," to Cather's homosexuality, but Goldberg takes Cather's principle further. He linksCather's expressed desire to point to, to evoke, to dream "the thing not named" inextricably to her sexuality but refuses a one-to-one equation that would simply substitute "lesbian desire" for "the thing not named" as the coded secret of all Cather's texts.Instead, he steers his reader on a much less direct route from textual surface to textual depth and from life to art, illustrating, for example, how Cather used seemingly heteronormative plot lines to represent deeply homoerotic desires, or how she engaged almost obsessively in various novels with male-male homoerotic dynamics as a mode of "not naming" (but certainly queering) such "things" as authorial identification and readerly desire.

The notion of "the thing not named" is most compelling when Goldberg uses it to extend and expand insights found in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. He brings these insights on disjunctures between identification and identity to bear on the processes of readership, authorship, and narration in Cather's work. For instance, in the first chapter, "Other Names," Goldberg examines a series of what he calls "signature effects," points where authorial presence and desire are inserted into the narrative. Using these "signature effects" to map the progress of Cather's pursuit of "the thing not named" in several of her novels, he traces the author's identification and disidentification with various characters and shows how she aligned her own voice/persona with male narrators or focalizing characters. Here Goldberg departs from such lesbian-feminist readings as O'Brien's that regard Cather's authorial identification with male characters to be failures, closetings of lesbian desire at the textual level. For instance, O'Brien sees Cather's repudiation of her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, and her "rewriting" of that novel in O Pioneers! as tied to the gender of her protagonists: Alexander's Bridge fails, O'Brien believes, because Cather utilized a male protagonist as a point of identification through which desire is mobilized, whereas O Pioneers! succeeds because Cather turned Alexander into Alexandra, thereby creating a seamless identification between author/narrator and protagonist that does not cross the boundary of gender identity. Goldberg, on the other hand, offers a much more compelling reading, arguing that Cather employed cross-gender identification (and disidentification) as a way to evoke, not disavow, queer desire. For example, he argues that Cather used naming to align her authorial voice with the malevolent character who seduces the heroine of My Ántonia when she gave this character a name that obviously echoes her own, "Wick Cutter." At the same time, in this "signature effect," Goldberg points out, the castration allusions in this name suggest...