Cather Studies, Volume 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination

Introduction

Introduction S U S A N J . R O S O W S K I Read together, the essays in this volume introduce us to the greening of literary studies, a.k.a. ecological literary studies, ecocriticism, environmental literary studies—all terms for a field that is young, in flux, and determined to remain so. These essays also reintroduce us to a Cather we risk forgetting in recent decades’ focus first on gender, then on class and race. I’m referring to the Cather who is profoundly identified with the places that shaped her and that she wrote about. Place seems “poised to resume its place as a vital human concept ,” Glen Love observes as he anticipates the next one hundred years when literary scholars . . . will find themselves, along with other humanists and social scientists, engaged in important, ecologically based interdisciplinary work with the natural sciences . We will necessarily become more interdisciplinary because we live in an increasingly interconnected world, because we need all the intellectual resources we can muster to find a sustainable place within it, and because we will see more and more the relatedness of all of this to the work we do as teachers and scholars of literature. Love offers an interdisciplinary reading of The Professor’s House that is, “if not overtly scientific, at least leaning in that direction.” He calls for acknowledging archetypes (among other influences) in Cather’s art as representing “biology and the commonality of human nature.” Love argues for the role of science in literary criticism, not to replace interpretation but to reinvigorate it, in (for example) “reconsidering the interpretation of archetypes.” x susan j. rosowski “My own journey to ecocriticism transpired via a series of environmentally preoccupied conference papers on Willa Cather,” Cheryll Glotfelty recalls in “A Guided Tour of Ecocriticism, with Excursions to Catherland.” From those beginnings a decade and a half ago, Glotfelty comes full circle to reflect upon ecocriticism generally and upon ecocriticism of Cather specifically. An ecological critical method addresses “the interconnections between human culture and the material world, between the human and the nonhuman.” What is the right relation between human beings and nature? The question fundamental to today’s environmental movement is hardly new, as Joseph Urgo reminds us. After situating Cather within the conservationist debate of her time between utilitarians (who urged reserving land for profitable use) and preservationists (who sought to preserve natural resources for aesthetic, recreational, and spiritual reasons), Urgo argues that My Ántonia models a preservationist aesthetic in which landscape and memory are inextricably entangled. In “Biocentric, Homocentric, and Theocentric Environmentalism in O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Patrick K. Dooley explores Cather’s “divided alliance” in terms of a problematic position illustrated by Aldo Leopold’s essay, “The Land Ethic,” the classic statement of ecological ethics. And in “Willa Cather: The Plow and the Pen,” Joseph W. Meeker reads O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia as espousing an ethic of development rather than of the environment. For Meeker, Cather presents the natural world merely as setting for her characters and as raw material for her pen; furthermore, she “shows little knowledge or curiosity about the natural processes surrounding her characters” and is “disinterest[ed] in her ecological context.” Thomas J. Lyon reads Cather differently. “The dynamism of nature admits of only permeable borders; requires for its understanding a consciousness loose and free to move,” he writes in “Willa Cather, Learner.” “The learning state is one of intense empathy, involving transcendence of the usual self,” and when the full range of consciousness is awakened, our native sensitivity to relationship comes alive. This larger cog- xi Introduction nizance is inherently ecological, and lets us see and feel the environment in a participative, intimate way. Willa Cather is one of our greatest nature writers—without even being a nature writer—because she had this living sense of the biotic community. Her capacity to feel for places and for trees— for the cottonwoods being cut down by 1921’s modern Nebraska farmers, for example—came from the same well of consciousness as her novelist’s sympathy for character. . . . For Cather the instinctive standard of excellence in human endeavor, the reference, is nature. “Sometimes Cather lets us directly into her own creative, environmental imagination,” enacting ecological consciousness. In “The Comic Form of Cather’s Art...