Against the American Grain: Willa Cather’s History Troubles

During a brief scene in Willa Cather’s 1922 novel One of Ours, her ardent young protagonist, Claude Wheeler, asks a neighboring miller for permission to marry his daughter. Mr. Royce would like to warn Claude away from the marriage and so spare him the disappointment of his own domestic life, yet the elder man cannot shape his past into meaningful words: “He found himself absolutely unable to touch upon the vast body of experience he wished to communicate to Claude. It lay in his chest like a physical misery, and the desire to speak struggled there.”¹ Musing in silence, Mr. Royce widens the gap across which words fail to convey experience: “The dead might as well try to speak to the living,” he thinks, “as the old to the young” (One 1059). This painful inability to draw the past into the present indicates a predicament that is shared by many of Cather’s characters, but falls outside the usual lines of thinking about her novels. Debate about whether Cather’s fictional treatment of history either constructs or contests idealistic visions of the past has directed readings of her work primarily along these two tracks. Lost to this binary view of Cather’s engagement with history, I want to suggest, is a serious consideration of her rendering of the past as a vast, untouchable “body of experience” that is no less significant because it cannot be fully rendered.

Cather’s first critics compiled a “case against” her by citing nostalgic sentiments in her fiction as evidence of her antimodernity, the product of “her unwillingness to face the harshness of our world.”² Some readers, most prominently Alfred Kazin and Walter Benn Michaels, developed the perception of this retreat into Cather’s broader practice of “nativism”—the use of historical subjects to reclaim or invent an American origin—that they saw as definitive of US literary modernism.³ Recent critics continue to find that Cather fails the historical subjects that her fiction invokes, whether these readers further parse the mechanisms of Cather’s nativism or reveal her more complex historicism. For instance, Sarah Wilson’s compelling argument for the discovery of Cather’s “historicist critique of nostalgia” in the “fractured” form of The Professor’s House (1925) concludes with the charge that this design nevertheless prohibits a sustained practice of inquiry.⁴ For Wilson, Cather ultimately stops short of a viable approach to historical subjects—in that novel to Native Americans most troublingly—by sealing them off from view; Cather’s structure can only leave her “bound, and vexed, by having ‘covenanted’ with ‘the dead.’”⁵ I intend to make a case for Cather as a writer attuned to and deeply invested in the consequences of writing history, but also make clear a fundamental reluctance to recuperate the past in her books. Cather wrote against history to the extent that she recognized the destructive force of possessive conquest in efforts to achieve historical mastery. Yet her novels also include injunctions to face up to the claims that past lives and events make upon the living.

Seeing both sides of this equation—Cather’s rigorous dismantling of bids for historical possession alongside her charge to deal with history through other means—develops a more nuanced picture of Cather’s ideas about history and explains why Cather’s treatments of historical subjects and methods have long served to advance radically opposed critical perspectives. Further, this consideration of Cather’s historical methods draws important aspects of her fiction—in particular, her disturbing, often graphic depictions of corpses and ghosts—from the margins of her novels toward the center of a larger historical project. Cather’s complex figuration of the demands of the dead places her work in line with historical theorists who seek new ways to “consult the past,” as Walter Benjamin advised, without overtaking it.⁶ In a broader sense, developing this correspondence also supports a reassessment of modernist writers as invested in representational strategies that approach, rather than evade, the historiographic dilemmas posed or exposed by the First (and Second) World War.⁷ My goal in this...