“More than Anything Else, I Like My Closets”: Willa Cather’s Melancholic Erotics in The Professor’s House

This article explores Willa Cather’s erotic investment in melancholic seclusion. Her 1925 novel The Professor’s House has been interpreted as an exemplary work showcasing the author’s ambivalence about her closeted homoeroticism. Rather than seeing Cather’s evasiveness about her own and her characters’ sexuality as an indication of a backward sexual politics, however, I argue that it constitutes a refusal to participate in a bifurcated discourse of modern sexuality. The novel’s representation of the protagonist’s profound attachment to the quasi-closet that is his den disrupts an object-choice-based sexual binary by suggesting an erotics of the closet. When read in light of Sigmund Freud’s and Julia Kristeva’s ideas about melancholia, the professor’s closet becomes not a symbol of repression, but a locus of a self-sufficient erotic economy of narcissism, whereby melancholic identification makes it possible for the subject to merge with a lost object.