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

"Squeezed into an Unnatural Shape": Bayliss Wheeler and the Element of Control in One of Ours

‘‘Squeezed into an Unnatural Shape’’ Bayliss Wheeler and the Element of Control in One of Ours C E L I A M . K I N G S B U R Y In his1987 biography Willa Cather: A Literary Life, James Woodress compares One of Ours to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Thematically and structurally, according to Woodress, the works, conceived on opposite sides of the Atlantic, address the question of social disintegration; in his words, both works open ‘‘with a panorama of society’s failures, followed by views of personal failure . . . and [end] with a promise of spiritual rebirth’’ (329). Woodress’s assertion that the novel deals with social and personal failure is a virtual given. Claude Wheeler cannot negotiate the spiritual void he finds in the materialistic world of his brothers, Ralph and Bayliss , and therein lies much of the conflict that sends Claude to war. But Woodress’s suggestion that the novel demonstrates ‘‘a promise of spiritual rebirth’’ plays down the cynicism, ironically that of the religious Evangeline Wheeler, that closes the novel in a place far from The Waste Land’s optimistic cultural and spiritual synthesis. Nothing about Lovely Creek changes as a result of Claude’s sacri- fice. While the enemy abroad is ultimately defeated, the enemy at home survives with a vengeance. One of Ours was a difficult novel for Cather to write.1 She suffered through several periods of illness as well as the psychological trauma of revisiting the life and death of her cousin G. P. Cather, who served as her model for Claude Wheeler. Cather also renewed her friendship with Dorothy Canfield Fisher during the composition of the novel because Cather needed Canfield Fisher’s exper129 130 c e l i a m. k i ng sb u ry tise to complete the sections of the novel set in France. Cather and Canfield Fisher had traveled together to France in1902, and at the time, Cather had been painfully aware of her own provincialism and envied Canfield Fisher’s sophistication.When Claude Wheeler arrives in France, he is equally aware of his shortcomings and becomes , in fact, resentful. Janis P. Stout argues that these sections of the novel, and Cather’s reliance on Canfield Fisher’s help in developing them, reveal Claude’s sense of insufficiency as well as Cather’s own. According to Stout, Cather’s reliance on Canfield Fisher ‘‘demonstrates how central, in Cather’s conception of the novel, was Claude’s sense of cultural deprivation’’ (49). Like Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, One of Ours is a novel of the home front, a largely corrupt home front from which escape is desirable. If the novel seems in places to glorify war, to see war as a noble endeavor that finally gives purpose to Claude Wheeler’s life, it does so with a sense of bitterness and betrayal and with a strong sense of irony. Claude Wheeler never loses sight of the spiritually blighted world that produced him. Frankfort, Nebraska, stands for all that is wrong with American culture—its materialism and its religious fanaticism. Steven Trout calls Frankfort ‘‘a place of cultural conformity , big business, and the emergence of everything associated with the appropriately constrictive term ‘Bible belt’’’ (‘‘Iconography ’’ 195). Trout’s association of big business with the rural Frankfort rings truer than we might imagine. Cather produces in the figure of Claude’s brother Bayliss a far more sinister model of American acquisitiveness and coercion than the image of Frankfort alone can achieve. In the early decades of the twentieth century as science and technology triumphed, the entrepreneurs who made their fortunes researching and manufacturing the new products to fuel American consumerism became important figures in the public eye. Two in particular, Henry Ford and John Harvey Kellogg, promoted their products with a religious zeal, and in doing so, dramatically changed American culture. Both men were evangelical in their approach to business; like Bayliss Wheeler, both believed they knew what was best for American consumers. Business, religion, science , and technology all were to work together to create utopian 131 ‘‘Squeezed into an Unnatural Shape’’ worlds where everyone drove a basic black Model-T Ford and ‘‘learned to live on nuts and toasted cereals’’ as Enid Royce and her mother do (103). The worlds Ford...