Becoming Willa Cather: Creation and Career by Daryl W. Palmer, and: Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout (review)

The year 2019 was a remarkably rich one for book-length scholarship focused on contextualizing the work of Willa Cather. Under review here are books by Janis Stout and Daryl Palmer, but at the outset, I would note that the year also saw an interesting comparative study by Julia Olin-Ammentorp entitled Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and the Place of Culture (Univ. of Nebraska Press), which considers Wharton and Cather’s sense of geographical dislocation and attitudes about travel.

Stout and Palmer’s books, however, focus entirely on situating Cather intellectually in a very specific time and place, with Stout examining Cather amid the American modernists and Palmer tracing the influence of Nebraska culture on the development of her aesthetic.

Considering Cather’s earliest writings (including journalistic writing and the early short stories and poetry), Palmer’s book argues that from her childhood, she was “actively becoming Willa Cather, continually creating herself” within and in response to the “laboratory” of the young state of Nebraska. He claims, for instance, that the creation of Sandy Point, the “town” Cather and her playmates created out of packing crates and imagination, was her early experimentation in town-building during which she learned about community roles and conflicts, especially as influenced by western territorial imagination that offered models for an expansive imagination and the power of reinventing oneself. Palmer is among the first to consider to such extent the newspaper culture of Red Cloud, and he cites Cather’s brief stint writing for a newspaper that her father acquired and how reading the Red Cloud papers taught her about narrative juxtaposition (for instance, the way in which the Red Cloud Chief placed a story about a lynching next to a story about a ladies’ cooking club banquet). The papers also gave Cather a keen sense of Red Cloud’s social life, which revealed to Cather “a pattern of inclusion and exclusion.” Throughout, Palmer uses the metaphor of a palimpsest to explain Cather’s creativity; he writes that in a palimpsest “otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other.” For Cather, that meant erasing or disguising original experience, “knowing full well that what came first will shimmer through the final creation.” Although I worry that sometimes Palmer overuses his metaphor, overall, I credit him for writing a thought-provoking book that considers a number of experiences and influences in Cather’s early life that have been previously overlooked.

Janis Stout has long been considered a distinguished scholar within Cather studies, having established herself with books that include a literary biography, an edited volume on Cather and material culture, and the co-edited volume of Cather’s letters. Like those books, in Cather Among the Moderns Stout offers both groundbreaking biographical and critical work as she contextualizes Cather within the intellectual movement of American modernism. Cather’s modernism has been previously taken up by others, of course, beginning with Jo Ann Middleton’s 1991 volume Willa Cather’s Modernism and continuing most recently with two edited volumes, Willa Cather and Modern Cultures and Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux (in the Cather Studies series, volumes 9 and 11, 2011 and 2017, respectively). However, Stout’s current volume is an in-depth examination of the nuances, complexities, and contradictions of the modernist impulse, and her overview chapter, “Becoming Thoroughly Modern,” is a good primer on the development and characteristics of modernism that any American literary scholar could find useful. In the succeeding eight chapters, she positions Cather’s attitudes among the Modernist thinkers on topics that include geographic mobility, urbanization, technological innovation, consumer capitalism, racial equality, issues of gender and sexuality, bohemianism, fragmentation of identity, cultural pluralism, and artistic experimentation. Along the way, she grapples with issues that have vexed Cather scholars, including her...