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The Dangers of Femininity in Willa Cather's Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
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When she was twenty-one, Willa Cather wrote, “The mind that can follow a ‘mission’ is not an artistic one. An artist can know no other purpose than his art.… The feminine mind has a hankering for hobbies and missions.” From the outset of her writing career as a journalist, Cather was intensely conscious of what to her seemed a difficult anomaly: being a serious writer and being a woman. She believed that women were conditioned to think and write in a literal and “horribly subjective” fashion, so that their literary productions were “an infernal mess.” When she embarked on a full-time writing career at the age of thirty-nine, she insisted that to avoid a feminine mind, one must avoid a feminine way of life:
One must have the power of refuse most of the rest of life … to be free, to work at [my] table — that is all in all. …. There are fates and fates but one cannot live them all. Some would call mine servitude but I call it liberation. Miss Jewett too, turned away from marriage.
Cather's single-minded determination to succeed and her uncompromising way of life that would ensure success as a writer rather than a woman writer prompted her to reject her background in her first pieces of fiction. She lived in rural southern Nebraska for seven years, from the ages of ten to seventeen, and in some early short stories she portrayed small-town life on the Plains as narrow, spiritually crushing and dominated by terrible physical hardship.
Jennifer Bailey is Lecturer in American Literature in the Department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982
References
1 Slote, Bernice, ed., The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements 1893–1896 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 406Google Scholar.
2 The Kingdom of Art, pp. 408, 409.
3 Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley, Willa Cather A Memoir (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1953), pp. 115–16Google Scholar. Cather became a great friend of Sarah Orne Jewett, shortly before Jewett's death in 1909.
4 For example, “Lou, the Prophet,” first published in The Hesperian, 22 (14 10 1892)Google Scholar, and “Peter,” first published in The Mahogany Tree (31 05 1892)Google Scholar.
5 For example, “A Death in the Desert,” first published in Scribners Magazine, 33 (01 1903)Google Scholar, “A Wagner Matinee,” first published in Everybody's Magazine, 10 (02 1904)Google Scholar, and “The Sculptor's Funeral” first published in McClure's, 24 (01 1905)Google Scholar. All the stories listed above are included in Cather, Willa, Collected Short Fiction 1892–1912 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965)Google Scholar.
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8 Quoted in Jeffrey, J. R., Frontier Women: the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1880 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), p. 151Google Scholar.
9 Quoted in Fellman, Michael, “Julia Louisa Lovejoy Goes West,” Western Humanities Review, 31 (Summer 1977), 230Google Scholar.
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11 Roberts, Elizabeth Madox, The Time of Man (New York: Viking Press, 1926)Google Scholar. This ecstatic release, occasioned by an open, uncultivated or vast landscape, is also found not only in the fiction of Roberts and Cather, but also in Jewett, Sarah Orne's The Country of the Pointed Firs (New York: New American Library, 1979)Google Scholar: “there above the circle of pointed firs we could look down over all the island, and could see the ocean that circled this and a hundred other bits of island-ground, the mainland shore and all the far horizons. It gave a sudden sense of space, for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in — that sense of liberty in space and time which great prospects always give” (p. 81). There is a similar affirmation in Smedley, Agnes, Daughter of Earth (London: Virago, 1977)Google Scholar, when Marie Rogers describes her affinity with the Arizona Desert.
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17 Maxwell Geismar, “Willa Cather: Lady in the Wilderness,” repr. in Willa Cather and Her Critics, p. 193.
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19 Cather, Willa, A Lost Lady (London: Virago, 1980), p. 104Google Scholar. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in the text.
20 Cather, Willa, The Professor's House (London: Virago, 1981), p. 85Google Scholar. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in the text.
21 The notion of a home as a house that merges with its surroundings, so that the distinction between inner and outer space is minimized, is to be found in Jewett's novel The Country of the Pointed Firs and in The Great Meadow (New York: Viking Press, 1930) by Roberts, Elizabeth MadoxGoogle Scholar. Diony Hall, the protagonist of Roberts' novel, is among the first pioneer settlers into Kentucky and learns to accept the wisdom of Daniel Boone: “‘You always felt at home in the world,’ Diony said. ‘You felt at home with what way the sun rises and how it stands overhead at noon, at home with the ways rivers run and the ways hills are. It's a gift you have, to be natured that way’” (p. 186). The exclusively male prerogative to have “‘Elbow room’” (loc. cit.) is finally transferred to Diony. This is the definition of home, rather than the log cabin, whose domestic insularity is made all the more vulnerable by its defensive exclusion of the wilderness.
22 Randall, John H. III, The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather's Search for Value (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960), p. 180Google Scholar. See also J. W. Krutch, “The Lady as Artist,” Alfred Kazin, “Willa Cather,” and Henry Steele Commager, "Willa Cather, all repr. in Schroeter, ed.
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24 Kolodny, Annette, “A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts,” New Literary History, II (1980), p. 452Google Scholar.