Willa Cather: Family, Community and History ed. by John J. Murphy (review)

deconstructionists—may take note and reread, rethink, and reappraise John Steinbeck’s prose. SUSAN SHILLINGLAW SanJose State University Reviews 247 Willa Gather: Family, Community and History. Edited byJohn J. Murphy. (Provo: Brigham Young University Humanities Publications Center, 1990. 324 pages, $7.95.) The thirty-two essays in this volume initially were presented at Brigham Young University’s Willa Cather Symposium. Taking their cue from a sympo­ sium sponsor, BYU’s Center for Family and Community History, many of the essayists focus on family in Cather’s biography and fiction. This focus elicits considerable commentary upon an apparent dichotomy in Cather: her positive valuation of both family and individuality, of both community connection and escape. Repeatedly, essayists reveal their desire to pin Cather down on one side of this dichotomy. Thus, Patricia Lee Yongue (“At Home and at War in One of Ours”) determines that for Cather, the “center of the spirit ofhuman living”is in the home, whereas Susan Hallgarth (“The Woman Who Would Be Artist mThe SongoftheLarkand Lucy Gayheart”) insists that this spirit requires an escape from home. As if to rebut Hallgarth,J. Gerard Dollar (“Community and Connected­ ness in A Lost Lady”) argues that this novel portrays familial connection more affirmatively than it portrays forces pulling against connection. Other essays acknowledge the complexity of Cather’s representations of family and escape throughout the course of her career. In “Willa Cather’s Chosen Family: Fictional Formations and Transformations,”SusanJ. Rosowski surveys such representations, refusing to “fix” Cather’s families into any one form. Also richly illuminating is Blanche Gelfant’s ‘“What Was It . . . ?’ The Secret of Family Accord in One ofOurs.”Unlike Yongue, who reads the novel as presenting families and females in positive opposition to male destructiveness, Gelfant asserts that a family accord based on “shared delusions”itself becomes destructive. Gelfant’s essay is one of the few in this volume to display an awareness of implications of post-structuralist theory for our interpretations of Cather’s life and work. The majority of essays provide traditionally sound close readings. While some allowance is made for personal accounts (“My Great-Grandmother in Cather’s Pages”by Sue Hart), for contextualizations (“Nebraska, 1883-1925: Cather’s Version and History’s” by Robert W. Cherny) and for biographical recuperations (“Cather’s Controversial Portrayal of Martinez” by Lance Larsen), the volume as a whole does not push forward the frontiers of Cather 248 WesternAmerican Literature criticism. Willa Gather: Family, Community and History is solid, informative, and tame; it’s time for something wilder. MADONNE MINER University ofWyoming Willa Cather:A Study ofthe ShortFiction. By Loretta Wasserman. Twayne’s Studies in Short Fiction Series, No. 19. (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. 178 pages, $18.95.) Willa Cather’s ties to classical and romantic literary traditions are every­ where evident in her work, but critics have just recently proposed that she be studied as a modernist. Within the past year,Jo Ann Middleton has examined the mid-career novels in Willa Cather’s Modernism: A Study ofStyle and Technique, and Tom Quirk has recreated a philosophical context in Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens. Now Loretta Wasserman provides new insights into Cather’s short stories. Although only “Paul’s Case” and “Neighbour Rosicky” are widely read, Wasserman argues that many other works—particularly “Coming, Aphrodite!,” “Uncle Valentine,” “Old Mrs. Har­ ris,”and “The Old Beauty”—reward analysis. The three-part format of the Twayne series limits extensive critiques, but Wasserman skillfully investigates Cather’s three collections (The Troll Garden, Youth and the Bright Medusa, and Obscure Destinies), the posthumousThe Old Beauty and Others, and uncollected stories aswell, without sounding perfunctory. “Part 2: The Writer”illuminates Cather’s career from 1903 to 1925 with seven commentaries by Cather herself, her friend Edith Lewis, and interviewers and reporters. “Part 3: The Critics”reprints five samples of recent criticism, includ­ ing excerpts from significant book-length studies by Susan Rosowski and Marilyn Arnold. But the firstand mostvaluable part of the book isWasserman’s own analysis of Cather’s modernism. Cather’s belief that a story begins with “a personal explosional experience”resemblesJamesJoyce’s “epiphanic moment,” central to the modernist short...