Willa Cather's Women

WILLA CATHER'S WOMEN Susan J. Rosowski* Willa Cather created a gallery of powerful women. It includes the indomitable pioneer Alexandra Bergson, the great artist Thea Kronborg , the Earth Mother Antonia Shimerda, the artful teacher of civilized standards Marian Forrester, the fiercely individual Myra Driscoll Henshawe. As critics have recognized, each functions as a type, an allegorical figure, of Cather's major themes, as Alexandra and Antonia are allegorical of the pioneer experience, Thea and Myra Henshawe of the artistic soul, and Mrs. Forrester of the corrupting power of materialism.1 Yet these critical categories have led readers from similarities among them. All are female, and Cather makes her character's sex central to the characterization of each. Aside from recent studies on sexuality in specific novels, however, the broader question of Cather's treatment of these characters as women has received little attention, as if her insistence that individuals deal with permanent values has diverted readers from the directness with which she treats the economic and social conditions that shape a woman's relationships to those values. Just as Cather's women embody themes concerning the pioneer, artist, and materialism, so they embody themes concerning female experience. The emotional pattern of two selves that runs through Cather's fiction is especially suited to writing about women's lives. There are two selves in each person, Cather suggests: a personal, worldly self expressed with family and friends, and an otherworldly, imaginative second self expressed in creative work. The ideal human condition, described in Cather's early novels, involves a synthesis of the two, with the outward-moving self rooted in the settled personal self. In society, however, a woman encounters contradictions between the human pattern of two selves and cultural myths that would limit her to only one of them. Cather's later novels present increasingly complex examinations of social roles assigned to women and of the implication of those roles for individuals caught in them. *Susan Rosowski, Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has published on Cather in Novel, Western American Literature, Prairie Schooner, Journal of Narrative Technique, Genre, and elsewhere. She is currently coediting Women and Western Literature and writing a book on Willa Cather's narrative art. 262Susan J. Rosowski In her early novels—O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia—Cather presents women who either live or move outside conventional society; their strengths are due in part to this fact. Of the three, O Pioneers! offers the purest example of Cather's myth of human greatness. It was, Cather later said, a book she wrote entirely for herself;2 in it, she abandoned the conventional setting and characterization of her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, and turned to Nebraska as her setting and to a woman, Alexandra, as her major character. Alexandra dominates the book. Assuming mythic dimensions, she is an Earth Mother, a corn goddess, and an epic heroine.3 But just as Alexandra represents ideal forms of being, so her development presents Cather's ideal growth of the two selves, first by extending her creative self with the land and then by extending her personal self with Carl. This development follows that traditionally associated with a man, who through his work "encounters change and progress" and "senses his extension through time and the universe" then later turns to personal stability, "a home, a fixed location, and an anchorage in the world."4 Early scenes of O Pioneers! establish Alexandra's independence by contradicting cultural restrictions imposed upon a female character. Alexandra dresses comfortably and practically in a man's long ulster;5 just as naturally, she assumes conventionally male attitudes, walking "rapidly and resolutely," fixing her gaze "intently on the distance" (p. 6) and "into the future" (p. 14), then "gathering her strength ... to grasp a situation which, no matter how painful, must be met and dealt with somehow" (p. 10). Throughout, Alexandra moves as a subject rather than an object, a distinction Cather drives home in one brief encounter. When a drummer admires the girl's hair, Alexandra "stabbed him with a glance of Amazonian fierceness," "mercilessly" crushing his "feeble flirtatious instincts" (p. 8). A...