Willa Cather and the criticism of politics

In 1996, Elizabeth Ammons confidently asserted that “the new canon in American literature - the one . . . that it is imperative to think about Willa Cather within - is multiculturalism.” Undoubtedly, multiculturalism - including feminist, queer, and ethnic studies - has brought an enormous vitality to Cather criticism. Yet the composite of Cather constructed by such approaches - queer opera diva, rugged cowgirl, and Greenwich Village cosmopolitan - has barely dented the image of Cather that persists in the public imagination. When Laura Bush recently proclaimed, after hosting a literary salon celebrating the writing of Cather, Edna Ferber, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, that “there is nothing political about American literature,” it was clear that the Cather she had invited to the White House was safely apolitical, the author of slightly more grown-up, highbrow versions of Little House on the Prairie. The First Lady's appropriation of a bland, antiseptic Cather follows close on the heels of Joan Acocella's reactionary crusade to cleanse Cather criticism of ideology - recuperating Cather from an academic trend towards what Acocella terms “spun-from-nothing hypotheses” about race, sex, and politics.