Starting from Rome: Literary Rivalry, Dorothy Canfield, and Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop

“I’d love to talk to you about being a roughneck in France—which you never were! . . . because you grew up in a college atmosphere, and because your father and mother were intellectual people.”

—Cather, Letter to Dorothy Canfield, May 8, 1922¹

One of the major recurrent themes in the voluminous scholarship about Willa Cather is the role in her life and career played by other women writers. Sharon O’Brien’s influential 1987 biography, for instance, emphasizes Sarah Orne Jewett’s importance in helping Cather find a voice that would draw on her female identity. David Porter has viewed Cather’s career as having been shaped by a polarity between her devotion to Jewett and her very different interest in a second female precursor, Mary Baker Eddy. Cather’s housemate Edith Lewis, long neglected or belittled by such Catherians as biographer James Woodress, is now seen—largely as a result of the research of Melissa Homestead—not only as a personal bastion of security in her role as life partner but as an editor and collaborator in Cather’s work in pre-publication stages. Friendships with Mabel Dodge Luhan, the journalist and biographer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, the playwright and screenwriter Zoë Akins, the playwright and novelist Zona Gale, and the prickly novelist and autobiographer Mary Austin have also being explored, and novelist and social activist Dorothy Canfield Fisher (whose name I will show here as Canfield, as she signed her novels) is recognized as a major figure in Cather’s life, with whom she shared discussions of their work.²

Female literary affiliation has been a major theme in feminist scholarship in general since the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Such studies typically employ a language of sisterhood, conveying, in Diana Wallace’s words,”an ideal of equal, supportive, female friendship.”³ Elaine Showalter, for example, wrote of British women novelists with deeply shared and deeply empowering interests in “socially informed exploration of the daily lives and values of women,” entailing a “confrontation with male society.”⁴ But recognition of rivalry among women writers also has a history of many decades. It has been, Wallace insists, an “equally central theme” as sisterhood, with which it can “co-exist in the same relationship.”⁵ Indeed, even while defining a shared women’s tradition in literature, Showalter insisted in 1977 that nineteenth-century women novelists “could not evade rivalry” with those who had been accorded primacy in their art, such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot.⁶ Elizabeth Ammons argued in 1992 that it was especially in the early twentieth century, as women writers became “determined to be artists,” that they also often became “rivals, threats to each other.”⁷ Harold Bloom’s 1973 model of an “anxiety of influence” motivating distancing maneuvers among “strong” male poets has not often been invoked by scholars of women’s literature, but was revised by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in 1988 into a model of “anxiety of authorship” or “ambivalent affiliation.”⁸

Accordingly, in studies of Cather’s friendship with other women writers it is their mutual encouragement that is usually emphasized. In my own previous work on the connection between Cather and Canfield, I have similarly pursued evidence of mutual reading, echoing, and encouragement. Here, however, I will explore not so much their long and undeniably warm friendship or the well-known “rift” that occurred in it for a period of over a decade—admirably explicated by Mark Madigan in his groundbreaking essay “Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield: Rift, Reconciliation, and One of Ours”—as an element of rivalry that began long before the rift and continued long after it was resolved.⁹ Using primarily biographical evidence, I will seek to trace the effects of that rivalry on a text where Canfield’s influence has not previously been seen: the 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop.

London and Paris, by Way of Lincoln and Pittsburgh

When Willa Cather made her first trip to Europe, in 1902, with her beloved friend Isabelle McClung, a young Dorothy Canfield...