Threats of Correspondence: The Letters of Edith Wharton, Zona Gale, and Willa Cather

THREATS OF CORRESPONDENCE: THE LETTERS OF EDITH WHARTON, ZONA GALE, AND WILLA CATHER Deborah Williams lona College In 1922, Edith Wharton's good friend and long-time correspondent Sara Norton died, leaving behind a Wharton who felt lonely and out ofplace in the post-war world, despite her recent Pulitzer Prize and the record earnings ofher books. To some degree, ofcourse, Wharton had felt out of place her entire life, but in letters to Sara Norton, she had been able to find a faithful and literate friend, who praised her successes and was discreet about her failures. Although Norton never achieved the literary success that her more famous friend did, she did send her writing to Wharton, and Wharton was both encouraging and complimentary about it, which is somewhat surprising, given that Wharton is rarely thought of as a mentor, particularly not for other women writers.1 What Susan Goodman has recently called Wharton's "inner circle" was formed primarily of men; the women with whom Wharton was close were not, generally speaking, "literary." It has long been the view, in fact, that Wharton deliberately kept herselfseparate from other women, particularly other women writers. She did not want to be connected to them in reviews or in the public eye. She attempted to distance herself from contemporary feminist debate and from women who might be considered her literary peers: Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, H. D., Zora Neale Hurston. Wharton's detachment is curiously similarto Cather's, who also held herselfseparate from other writing women. Cather's intimate women friends were not writers; her women friends who wrote were either not as successful as Cather or were not among her intimates. Both Wharton and Cather wanted to be seen as individuals in the literary landscape rather than as members ofagroup ofwomen writers, a labelthat in theireyes collapsed aesthetic differences under the essentializing rubric of gender. They did notjoin the various communities ofwomen writers forming around them, communities that ranged from the avant-garde modernist salons of Paris to the radical feminist group in New York known as Heterodoxy to the women journalists and editors in New York and Paris.2 Wharton and Cather's shared aloofness from the literary world around them, particularly the world of other women writers, is more 212Deborah Williams complicated than a simple desire to be seen separately from their female peers, however. Even as they make distinctions between themselves and others, there is a competing desire to make connections with those women writers who might understand their dilemma: caught between the literary marketplace's rigid definition of"literary woman" on the one hand and, on the other, the desire to create an authorial self impervious to such marketplace considerations. Their ambivalence pervades the letters each wrote to Zona Gale, the writer who replaced Sara Norton in Wharton's correspondence and who wanted Cather to come live and work in her father's house. It is one of the ironies of literary history that Wharton and Cather remained unaffiliated with one another and yet chose the same woman writer with whom to initiate and maintain a long correspondence. Both Wharton and Cather sought out Gale's friendship and commentary, but they also kept her at arm's length, not fully committing themselves to what Wharton called, in her first letter to Gale, the "community of spirit" that existed between like-minded writers. Reading the correspondence between these writers allows us to understand why it was so difficult for Wharton and Cather actually to join that community of spirit; we see enacted within the pages of their letters a personal version of the larger and more public negotiations that allowed them to re-define the role ofthe American woman writer. Although Gale is not well-known to readers today, in the twenties and thirties she was a well-respected, highly successful novelist and playwright who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 (the first awarded to a woman dramatist) for her stage adaptation of her novel Miss Lulu Bett. She was also widely known as an outspoken feminist and pacifist ; gave speeches on behalf of Robert La Follette, the Progressive candidate for President; lobbied for educational reforms and for...