Cather Studies, Volume 6: History, Memory, and War

The "Enid Problem": Dangerous Modernity in One of Ours

The ‘‘Enid Problem’’ Dangerous Modernity in One of Ours P E A R L J A M E S Woman, German woman or American woman, or every other sort of woman, in the last war, was something frightening. The very women who are most busy saving the bodies of men: . . . these women-doctors, these nurses, these educationalists, these public-spirited women, these female saviours: they are all, from the inside, sending out waves of destructive malevolence which eat out the inner life of a man, like a cancer. —D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature In the epigraph, D. H. Lawrence redraws the battle lines of World War I as a war between the sexes rather than a war between nations. He describes the war as an occasion upon which women exerted a ‘‘destructive malevolence’’ toward men, rather than as a conflict during which armies of men wounded and killed each other. In his account, the war’s most damaging wounds were (and still ‘‘are’’) inflicted by a monstrous New Woman.1 Lawrence’s misogyny comes as no surprise. But it is surprising that a similar misogyny also structures postwar writing produced by women writers such as Willa Cather. Cather herself was something of a New Woman, who had challenged professional and literary notions of women’s proper sphere. She had herself been an ‘‘educationalist,’’ had once had ambition of becoming a ‘‘womandoctor ,’’ and had, in print, advocated nursing as a profession for 92 93 The ‘‘Enid Problem’’ women (‘‘Nursing’’ 319–23). Her status as an independent and professional woman, famously discontented with traditional gender roles, makes her recourse to the same vituperative antifeminist logic that we hear from Lawrence curious.2 Yet, her war novel, One of Ours (1922), traces the damage suffered by its male protagonist to female monstrosity—a monstrosity symbolized, by Cather as by Lawrence, by female action and independence called up by the war effort. One of Ours narrates the experience of its protagonist, Claude Wheeler, who experiences a masculine crisis. Claude’s crisis is both vague and overdetermined, and it provides the precondition for a war experience that enables him to come into his own as a man. Rather than depicting the war as traumatic for men, Cather traces its modern wounds to women—particularly to Claude’s wife, Enid—and then jettisons them from the novel. Marilee Lindemann notes that both war and misogyny play a role in the recuperation of Claude’s masculinity (74). What has not been appreciated , though, is the relationship between the war, particularly its modernity, and Enid’s unnatural femininity. Cather characterizes Enid through a series of tropes that pervaded representations of women’s roles in the war: practicing home economy, nursing, and driving. Through these tropes, Enid comes to stand for a paradigmatic New Woman, whose bids for independence threaten men. Why do both Cather’s and Lawrence’s postwar writings express dismay, not at the violence done by men nor at women who stayed at home as if content to let men suffer but by ‘‘nurses,’’ ‘‘doctors,’’ ‘‘educationalists’’—women ‘‘saviours’’? One of Ours has invited perpetual controversy for its depiction of World War I. It won a Pulitzer Prize and was a commercial success, but its critical reception records the mixed feelings that the war inspired in Americans in 1922. The novel provided an occasion for a debate about the war, its representation, and its place in recent memory.3 Scholars have continued to disagree about the novel’s attitude toward the war.4 For many readers, then and now, Cather’s depiction of the war seems too romantic because it provides an opportunity for traditional and heroic masculine achievement. Before the war, Claude Wheeler is tormented 94 p e a rl ja m e s by vague desires: he wants a more ‘‘splendid’’ life (52). The war fulfills this desire by giving him a chance to act heroically. To many, Cather’s depiction of Claude’s ‘‘clean’’ wounds and glorious battlefield death sanitizes the horror of trench warfare (453). Yet, other critics note the ironic tone at the novel’s conclusion, in which Claude’s mother reflects on her son’s naïve illusions. I would argue that Cather’s direct representation of the war is actually rather well balanced. She incorporates evidence of the war’s destruction as well as its excitement. Claude...