Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T17:20:48.937Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Craniometry, Race, and the Artist in Willa Cather

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Susan Meyer
Get access

Extract

Willa Cather's description of Blind d'Arnault, the black pianoplaying prodigy in My Ántonia (1918), is shocking. “He had the Negro head,” Cather's narrator, Jim Burden, tells us, “almost no head at all; nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool” (139). This passage, like the entire Blind d'Arnault episode, has usually been ignored by critics, or, in a few more recent instances, confronted as evidence of Willa Cather's racism. Jim's phrase of “astounding insult and innocence,” Blanche Gelfant writes, “assures him that the black man should not frighten, being an incomplete creature, possessed … of instinct and rhythm but deprived of intellect” (120). Elizabeth Ammons cites this passage too, among others, as one of many offensive racist stereotypes in the description of d'Arnault (“African American Art,” 57). The description of d'Arnault is certainly full of racist stereotypes: d'Arnault, with what are termed his “animal desires” and “dark mind,” playing “barbarously and wonderfully” (My Ántonia, 142), is hardly accorded a fully human status by Jim, and nothing in the novel suggests any distance between Jim's racial attitudes and Cather's. I do want to argue, though, that Cather's views on race are considerably more complicated, as well as more central to her fiction, than critics have yet demonstrated. Attending to the preoccupation with skull shape in Cather's fiction gives us a way into this complexity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 27 , October 2002 , pp. 341 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Ammons, Elizabeth. “Cather and the New Canon: ‘The Old Beauty’ and the Issue of Empire.” Cather Studies 3 (1996): 256–66.Google Scholar
Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ammons, Elizabeth. “My Ántonia and African American Art.” New Essays on My Ántonia. Ed. O'Brien, Sharon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 57–83.Google Scholar
Boas, Franz. “Letter to Professor J. W. Jenks, Dec. 31, 1909.” A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911. Ed. Stocking, George W. JrChicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974: 212–14.Google Scholar
Boas, Franz. From Papers on Interracial Problems Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress Held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911. Ed. Spiller, Gustav. Boston: Ginn, 1912. Reprinted in Franz Boas, A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911. Ed. George W. Stocking Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Camacho, Roseanne V. “Whites Playing in the Dark: Southern Conversation in Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl.” Willa Cather's Southern Connections. Ed. Romines, Ann. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000: 65–74.Google Scholar
Camper, Petrus. Dissertation sur les variétés naturelles qui caractérisent la physiognomic des hommes des divers climats et des differents ages. Trans. Jansen, Henri J.. Paris, 1792.Google Scholar
Carlin, Deborah. Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. 1927; rept. New York: Random House, 1990.Google Scholar
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. 1918; rept. New York: Vintage, 1994.Google Scholar
Cather, Willa. One of Ours. 1922; rept. New York: Random House, 1991.Google Scholar
Cather, Willa. The Professor's House. 1925; rept. New York: Random House, 1990.Google Scholar
Cather, Willa. Sapphira and the Slave Girl. 1940; rept. New York: Random House, 1975.Google Scholar
Cather, Willa. The Song of the Lark. 1915; rept. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.Google Scholar
Cather, Willa. Youth and the Bright Medusa. New York: Knopf, 1920.Google Scholar
Fischer, Mike. “Pastoralism and Its Discontents: Willa Cather and the Burden of Imperialism.” Mosaic 23 (1990): 31–44.Google Scholar
Freeman, R. Austin. “The Anthropologist at Large.” McClure's Magazine 35 (1910): 57–67.Google Scholar
Gelfant, Blanche H. “The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in ‘My Ántonia.’” Willa Cather: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Bloom, Harold. New York: Chelsea House, 1985: 103–121.Google Scholar
Gregor-Dellin, Martin, and Mack, Dietrich, eds. Cosima Wagner's Diaries. Trans. Skelton, Geoffrey. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977.Google Scholar
Hallgarth, Susan A. “The Woman Who Would Be Artist in The Song of the Lark and Lucy Gayheart.” Willa Cather: Family, Community, and History. Ed. Murphy, John J.. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Humanities Publications Center, 1990: 169–73.Google Scholar
Hendrick, Burton J. “The Skulls of Our Immigrants.” McClure's Magazine 35 (1910): 36–50.Google Scholar
Kramer, Lawrence. “The Waters of Prometheus: Nationalism and Sexuality in Wagner's Ring.” The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference. Ed. Dellamora, Richard and Fischlin, Daniel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Larsen, Lance. “Cather's Controversial Portrayal of Martinez.” Willa Cather: Family, Community, and History. Ed. Murphy, John J.. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Humanities Publications, 1990: 275–80.Google Scholar
Mares, E. A. “Padre Martinez, Defender of the People.” New Mexico Magazine 63 (1985): 57–60.Google Scholar
Marcus, Lisa. “‘The Pull of Race and Blood and Kindred’: Willa Cather's Southern Inheritance.” Willa Cather's Southern Connections. Ed. Romines, Ann. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000: 98–119.Google Scholar
Merrick, Sara Newcomb. “John and Simon Newcomb, the Story of a Father and Son.” McClure's Magazine 35 (1910): 677–687.Google Scholar
Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Murphy, John J.My Antonia: The Road Home. Boston: Twayne, 1989.Google Scholar
O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Peck, Demaree C.The Imaginative Claims of the Artist in Willa Cather's Fiction: “Possession Granted by a Different Lease”. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Rather, L. J.Reading Wagner: A Study in the History of Ideas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Guy. Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire. New York: St. Martin's, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romines, Ann. “The Hermit's Parish: Jeanne Le Ber and Cather's Legacy from Jewett.” Cather Studies 1 (1990): 147–58.Google Scholar
Rose, Paul Lawrence. Wagner: Race and Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Russett, Cynthia Eagle. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Schwind, Jean. “Fine and Folk Art in The Song of the Lark: Cather's Pictorial Sources.” Cather Studies 1 (1990): 89–101.Google Scholar
Stanton, William. The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America 1815–59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.Google Scholar
Stout, Janis P.Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.Google Scholar
Urgo, Joseph. Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.Google Scholar
Urgo, Joseph. Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion. Trans. Stewart, Spencer. Commentaries by Barry Millington, Elizabeth Magee, Roger Hollinrake, and Warren Darcy. Slovenia: Thames and Hudson, 1993.Google Scholar
Wald, Gayle. “Race, Labor, and Domesticity in Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl.” Willa Cather's Southern Connections. Ed. Romines, Ann. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000: 90–95.Google Scholar
Wasserman, Loretta. “Cather's Semitism.” Cather Studies 2 (1993): 1–22.Google Scholar
Weiner, Marc. Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Westling, Louise H.The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “Time and Memory in Sapphira and the Slave Girl: Sex, Abuse, and Art.” Cather Studies 3 (1996): 212–37.Google Scholar
Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Yaeger, Patricia. “White Dirt: The Surreal Racial Landscapes of Willa Cather's South.” Willa Cather's Southern Connections. Ed. Romines, Ann. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. 138–155.Google Scholar
Yoshikawa, Mako. “‘A Kind of Family Feeling About Nancy’: Race and the Hidden Threat of Incest in Sapphira and the Slave Girl.” Willa Cather's Southern Connections. Ed. Romines, Ann. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. 75–82.Google Scholar
Zhu, Li, and Bintrim, Tim. “The Chinese Connection: Cather and Pittsburgh's Chinatown.” Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter and Review 42 (1998): 1–5.Google Scholar