Author's note: I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for support during work on this essay. I am indebted to Gillian Brown, Eric Cheyfitz, Andy Delbanco, and Lynn Wardley for helpful criticisms of a draft of this essay.

1. Cather, Willa, O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), pp. 15, 20.Google Scholar Cited hereafter in the body of the essay.

2. Fryer, Judith, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 249.Google Scholar

3. U.S. Congress, Report of the Public Lands Commission, House Executive Documents (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880), 46th Congress, 2nd session, vol. 22, Serial 1923, No. 46, pp. 445–46, 535, 584–87.Google Scholar

4. Cather, Willa, My Antonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), pp. 7–8.Google Scholar Cather told a Philadelphia newspaper in 1913: “I felt … as if we had come to the end of everything-it was a kind of erasure of personality” (Slote, Bernice, ed., The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893–96 [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966], p. 448).Google Scholar In her recent monumental biography of Cather's early life and career, Sharon O'Brien discusses this remark extensively (Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 63)Google Scholar, and in general charts Cather's career as a development from this anxiety over self-erasure to a confidence in authentic voice. My argument differs in seeing in Alexandra and Cather a desire for self-erasure as a form of empowerment.

5. “Preface” to Alexander's Bridge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), new ed., pp. v–ix.Google Scholar

6. The phrase “interior structure … of property” is adapted from Elaine Scarry, part of whose undertaking in the magesterial The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar is to make us “reacquainted with the interior structure of material objects” (p. 243).Google Scholar This essay will stress that to speak of property is to speak of generative relations rather than of things. Similarly, Scarry notes that “material objects” must be understood, not as static entities, but as reflective relations, “the locus of a reciprocal action” (p. 257)Google Scholar between producer and artifact.

7. Howells, William Dean, The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 14Google Scholar; Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Nature, in Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. McQuade, Donald (New York: Random/Modern Library, 1981), p. 22.Google Scholar

8. Ely, Richard T., Property and Contract in their Relations to the Distribution of Wealth (New York: Macmillan, 1914), vol. 1, p. 96.Google Scholar Cited hereafter in the body of the essay as Ely.

9. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, “Possession,” in The Formative Essays of Justice Holmes: The Making of an American Legal Philosopher, ed. and intro. Kellogg, Frederic Rogers (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood, 1984), p. 180.Google Scholar Cited hereafter as Formative Essays.

10. Bentham, Jeremy, Theory of Legislation, trans, from the French of Dumont, Etienne by Hildreth, Richard (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, & Co., 1840), p. 137.Google Scholar

11. Moreover, in a scene that partakes of both aristocratic and natural rights traditions, and indeed suggests their intermixture, her father had on his deathbed bequeathed Alexandra management of the farm. The scene legitimates the redistribution of patrimony by revising the Biblical episode it recalls, Jacob's usurpation of Esau's birthright. Alexandra is the oldest child, and her managerial skills merit responsibilities usually assumed by sons. I am indebted to Brook Thomas for suggesting the need to consider the importance of this scene.

12. Contemporary debate about the basis of rights often recasts the vocabulary of the debate I am rehearsing between legal/conventional and natural rights accounts of property. Leo Strauss contrasts natural rights justifications to historicist, institutional, or conventional accounts of rights (Natural Right and History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953]).Google Scholar D. M. Armstrong contrasts natural rights with what he calls “regularity theory,” a notion of rights based on Hume's notion of inferential causality (What is a Law of Nature? [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983]).Google Scholar Most writers on the problem employ the familiar term associated with Bentham, utilitarianism. Margaret MacDonald and H. L. A. Hart, for example, contrast (or in Hart's case, question the contrast of) utilitarian to natural justifications of rights. See MacDonald, , “Natural Rights,” in Theories of Rights, ed. Waldron, Jeremy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 21–40Google Scholar; and Hart, , “Are There Any Natural Rights?” in the same volume, pp. 77–90.Google Scholar For an overview of the specific issues in contemporary debate, see Waldron, Jeremy's “Introduction,” pp. 1–20.Google Scholar In the period I am studying, it seems that “utilitarianism” was not common in American debates, as it was in English; see Ritchie, D. G., Natural Rights (1894).Google Scholar

13. C. B. Macpherson writes that, common usage notwithstanding, a property right is “a claim [to the use or benefit of things] that will be enforced by society or the state, by custom or convention or law” (“Introduction: The Meaning of Property,” in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978], p. 3).Google Scholar In a 1913 essay, reprinted posthumously as the title chapter of his often-cited book, Wesley Hohfeld laments the ambiguity in usage of the term “property,” which typifies the general “looseness of our legal terminology.” “Sometimes it is employed to indicate [a] physical object,” rather than “to denote the legal interest (or aggregate of legal relations) appertaining to such physical object” (Fundamental Legal Concepts as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, and Other Legal Essays, ed. and intro. by Cook, Walter Wheeler [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919], p. 28).Google Scholar Hohfeld cites even some judicial holdings defining property as things (pp. 27–30).

14. Most recently Roberto Mangabeira Unger has observed, in order to criticize and redefine, the way both classical liberals and radicals have identified rights in general “with a particular style of entitlement, … consolidated property right” (False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, Part I of Politics, a Work in Constructive Social Theory [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987], p. 509).Google Scholar

15. Lindsay, A. D., “The Principle of Private Property,” in Property, Its Duties and Rights: Historically, Philosophically, and Religiously Regarded, ed. Gore, Charles, Bishop Of Oxford (London: Macmillan, 1915), new ed., pp. 68–69.Google Scholar Lindsay writes that such essentialism reduces society to “a system of mechanical and external alliances.”

16. Holmes, , The Common Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), p. 173Google Scholar; Formative Essays, p. 181Google Scholar; The Rev. Rashdall, Hastings, “The Philosophical Theory of Property,” in Property, Its Duties and Rights, p. 44.Google Scholar Hohfeld's attempt to clarify the “correlative” nature of rights and duties—against the idealism of even the influential Pollock and Maitland treatise on the History of English Law (1905)—is frequently cited in contemporary debates (Fundamental Legal Concepts, pp. 35–64).Google Scholar

17. Holmes, , Common Law, p. 164Google Scholar; Formative Essays, p. 180.Google Scholar See Macpherson, 's The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).Google Scholar Numerous authors noted the anachronistic quality of the myth of property as an absolute extension of the ego. What they called “the regime of individual property” was giving way to corporate and collective capital and property (Ely, vol. 1, p. 269). The personality theory of property, wrote Henry Scott Holland, evolved during the transition to a mercantile economy. After custom settled, “the corporate [popular] imagination” retained “the vague impression of a law of nature … within and behind all particular laws” arising from the essential nature of personhood (“Property and Personality,” in Property, Its Duties and Rights, p. 172Google Scholar; cf. Macpherson, , “The Meaning of Property,” pp. 2, 10).Google Scholar This idealism, Holland writes, passed into “the structure of human thought,” propelling policy and rhetoric, although no longer appropriate to conditions. No wonder, as Ely writes, “people at the present time are puzzled concerning property” (vol. 1, p. 237).Google Scholar Veblen offers a compatible account in The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Scribner's, 1904, chs. 6, 8–9).Google Scholar Richard Schlatter describes the enduring popularity of natural rights assumptions in America even as they were coming under attack by English Utilitarians and the German Historical School (Private Property: The History of an Idea [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1951], ch. 9).Google Scholar More specifically, Hart describes Americans' rejection of Bentham's offers (@ 1817–30) to help write legal codes despite their appreciation of the force and influence of his arguments (Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory [New York: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1982], pp. 73–78).Google Scholar

18. Holland, , “Property and Personality,” in Property, Its Duties and Rights, p. 173.Google Scholar Attempts to disentangle from positive law some generative principle of law, whether or not it is called natural law, continue today. See note 12, above. See also: Bloch, Ernst, Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. Schmidt, Dennis J. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Dworkin, Ronald, “Rights as Trumps,” in Theories of RightsGoogle Scholar, ed. Waldron, , pp. 153–67.Google Scholar Every author alludes to the empirical and experiential commingling of founding principles of law with positive law. Dworkin's massive and growing ouevre represents probably the contemporary scene's most substantial attempt to establish logically a foundation of rights antecedent to determinate forms of law. See Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), esp. chs. 1, 6–7, 12–13.Google Scholar

19. Ely comments caustically on the circularity of justifications of property rights in various state constitutions: “The extracts from these Constitutions are in themselves a commentary on the [personality] theory [of property],” which is simply “dogmatism in disguise.” “No reason is given, but the statement is set up as its own reason. We cannot discover any natural rights existing prior to Constitutions among men” (vol. 2, p. 534).

20. “Codes, and the Arrangement of the Law,” Formative Essays, p. 88.Google Scholar The sense that rights are inferences suggests the importance of Hume's notion of inferential causality to the conventionalist insight. Schlatter contends that Bentham added little to Hume's contribution to the definition of property (Private Property: The History of an Idea, p. 245).Google Scholar See, for example, “Of Justice and Injustice,” in A Treatise of Human Nature (London: Oxford University Press, 1978).Google Scholar As did Bentham, Holmes, and Hohfeld, Unger defines rights as a set of stable “expectations,” which are the “indispensable expression” of the constitutional and institutional forms comprising the social matrix (False Necessity, pp. 508–09).Google Scholar

21. In an essay entitled (and appropriating the title of Kafka's story) “Before the Law,” Derrida has analyzed the relation of diffèrance (difference and belatedness) positive law has to universal law. Positive law seeks “its provenance” in universal law. But universal law remains in itself illegible and inaccessible because it “exceeds all boundaries.” The very readability of “singular” law empha sizes the remoteness, and finally the authority, of universal law (“Devant La Loi,” trans. Ronnell, Avital, in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance, ed. Udof, A. [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], pp. 134, 137)Google Scholar.

22. Adapting the work of C. B. Macpherson to Hawthorne's understanding of romance, Walter Benn Michaels has concisely stated for literary critics the problem of private property: “Property, to be property, must be alienable” (“Romance and Real Estate,” in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], p. 112).Google Scholar I take this insight as a starting point appropriate to Cather's laterealist, early-modernist aesthetics, to the problem of homesteading, and to the debate over property that subtends the two subjects. Emphasizing that property is not possessions but enforceable claims to the benefits of resources, my argument extends Michaels' point to consider the definitive alienability of rights. Rights seem more inalienable, more intrinsic to us than the possessions we happen to own, but in fact arise in the same representational or artifactual structure as property.

23. Scarry, , The Body in Pain, pp. 244–51Google Scholar; Marx, Karl, Early Writings, trans, and ed., Bottomore, T. B. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), p. 147.Google Scholar

24. In the Psychology, James wonders about what feels most intimate to us, even “our bodies themselves”: “are they simply ours, or are they us?” The cognitive “I” knows the self as “my historic Me, a collection of objective facts,” “powers, possessions, and public functions, sensibilities, duties, and purposes (The Principles of Psychology [1890; rpt. New York: Dover, 1950], vol. 1, pp. 291, 322).Google Scholar Identity, he wrote in the Briefer Course, is an activity of appropriation of these material and corporeal properties: “I” is “‘that to which’ all the concrete determinations of the Me belong and are known. … [t]hat something [a mental state] which at every moment goes out and knowingly appropriates the Me of the past” (Psychology: Briefer Course [1892; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984], p. 180).Google Scholar It is not accidental, I think, that in this period when, in America especially, property was imagined according to natural rights principles, James should formulate cognition of self as a problem of belonging. See note no. 68, below.

25. Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 2nd sess., Appendix, p. 36Google Scholar, Sen. McClernand of II., 7-10-1846. Cited hereafter as Globe. Tilling the soil was a “necessity” innate in “the law of [human] nature” (Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., p. 1449Google Scholar, Rep. Johnson of Tenn., 7-25-1850), without which the soil, God's gift to man, would have no value (Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 180, Rep. Dawson of Pa., 2-16-1854). Throughout this section, specific references to debates or publications of the period are cited. I am generally indebted to studies of the history of public-land policy by Gates, Paul W., History of Public Land Law Development (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968)Google Scholar; Hibbard, Benjamin, A History of the Public Land Policies (New York: Macmillan, 1924)Google Scholar; and Robbins, Roy M., whose Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776–1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942)Google Scholar probably remains the standard work on the subject. I relied on contemporary treatises on homesteading by Copp, Henry Norris, Public Land Laws (Washington: General Land Office, 1875; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Terry, Benjamin, The Homestead Law Agitation (Freiburg: N. P., 1892)Google Scholar; and Thompson, Seymour P., A Treatise on Homestead and Exemption Laws (San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney, 1886).Google Scholar For brief accounts of major events and issues, see Friedman, Lawrence, who capsulizes the development and problems of public-land law in A History of American Law (New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1985) 2nd ed.Google Scholar; and Eric Foner, who provides an excellent and concise account of political developments leading to the Homestead Act in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

26. Gates, , History of Public Land Law, p. 422.Google Scholar See generally Gates, 's seminal “The Homestead Law in an Incongruous Land System,” The American Historical Review 41 (07 1936): 652–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; rpt. in The Public Lands: Studies in the History of the Public Domain, ed. Carstensen, Vernon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), pp. 315–48.Google Scholar

27. Gates, , History of Public Land Law, pp. 396–99Google Scholar; “Incongruous Land System,” pp. 323–24.Google Scholar Gates writes: “The American Emigrant Company, which had bought the swamplands of a number of Iowa counties, summed up under the caption ‘Better than a Free Homestead’ all the disadvantages of free land: ‘Under the homestead law the settler must, in order to get a good location, go far out into the wild and unsettled districts, and for many years be deprived of school privileges, churches, mills, bridges, and in fact of all the advantages of society.’ Landlookers were told by the Burlington and Missouri Railroad in 1878: ‘You can judge for your self whether it is not better to purchase land at four or five dollars per acre, on ten years' credit, and six percent interest, that is good land and near a railroad, and will quickly advance to 25 dollars per acre, rather than go upon the far western or southern plains and homestead land upon which you are never certain of half a crop, and which will never advance in value’” (History of Public Land Law, pp. 397).Google Scholar

28. Hibbard, , History of the Public Land Policies, p. 386.Google Scholar

29. Copp, , Public Land Laws, p. 28.Google Scholar One registry agent said he doubted “if the trees standing on any timber-culture entry west of the hundredth meridian would retard a zephyr” (Robbins, , Our Landed Heritage, pp. 248–49).Google Scholar

30. Report of the Public Lands Commission, House Ex. Doc. (1880), pp. 98, 586Google Scholar (see note 3, above); Copp, , The American Settler's Guide: A Popular Exposition of the Public Land System of the United States of America (Washington: published by the editor, 1885), 9th ed., p. 57.Google Scholar It is necessary to note that Copp's next listing is “Intentions are not the equivalent of actual residence and improvement.” The conflict between this and the ruling preceding it are intended by Copp, I think, not to be cautionary but to serve as models of interpretive possibility. In another guide, William E. Preston advises settlers and soldiers how to use preempting and homesteading to bolster each other, and that only alternate six months' residency was necessary to prove up (The Soldier's, Settler's and Inventors' Guide, Containing the Pre-emption and Homestead Laws of the United States, in Force 1872 [Cleveland: published by the author, 1872], pp. 19–21).Google Scholar

31. Friedman, , A History of American Law, p. 418.Google Scholar One contemporaneous treatise writer registered his “disgust” that the “confused and almost inexplicable system, indicative of differing intentions, theories, and designs, on the part of the lawmakers,” made a “conflict of judicial construction and interpretation” inevitable and “a systematic treatise” nearly impossible to compile (Thompson, , Treatise on Homestead and Exemption Laws, p. vi).Google Scholar

32. Friedman himself has written that the “complex and contradictory” quality of the Homestead policy testifies to “the multiplicity of interests that had a voice in enactment and administration” (p. 419).Google Scholar

33. The popular mythology of homesteading often informs even academic analysis, most recently Richard Slotkin's argument that “the original intent” of the Homestead program embodied in a simple and unitary way “the vision of a ‘fee-simple empire,’” and that the actual operation of the program transgressed this vision (The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialism [New York: Atheneum, 1985], p. 285).Google Scholar At least with respect to the spectrum of debates about homesteading, my argument, following Smith, Henry Nash's in Virgin LandGoogle Scholar, suggests that it is a mistake to imagine the fee-simple vision as simple in the first place.

34. Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 184, Rep. Dawson of Pa., 2-14-1854; Globe, 29th Cong., 2nd sess., Appendix, p. 39, Sen. McClernand of II., 7-10-1846; Gales & Seaton's Register of Debates, 19th Cong., 1st sess., p. 732, Sen. Benton of Mo., 5-16-1826. Galusha Grow, probably the most radical land reform advocate in Congress, who denied that the government owned or even was trustee of the land, began a long discussion of Roman land policy this way: “The first step in the decline of empires is the neglect of their agricultural interest, and with its decay crumbles national power” (Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 242, 2-21-1854).Google Scholar It is important to keep in mind that land grant principles were inherited from English Crown policies for colonizing the new world (Terry, , The Homestead Law Agitation, p. 10).Google Scholar

35. Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 1089, Sen. Cass of Mi., 7-18-1854; Ibid., p. 241, Rep. Grow of Pa., 2-21-1854. Rep. Sapp of Ohio remarked: “The laboring man, without land or property, does not feel much interest in the welfare and prosperity” of the nation (Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, pp. 178–79, 2-16-1854). The tendency of cultivators to identify with their property is explicit, as were the three general premises of the movement, in speeches of Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, land reform's first Congressional voice (See: Register of Debates, 19th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 722–33Google Scholar, 5-16-1826).

36. Globe, 29th Cong., 1st sess., p. 1059, Rep. Bowlin of Mo., 7-9-1846.

37. See speeches by Andrew Johnson in the Congressional Globe: 31st Cong., 1st sess., p. 1450, 7-25-1850; 31st Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 250, 7-25-1850; 32nd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 529, 4-29-1852; 36th Cong., 1st sess., p. 1654, 4-11-1860. See also: 32nd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 437, Rep. Hall of Mo., 4-20-1852; 33rd Cong., 1st sess., pp. 180–81, 185, Sen. Dawson of Pa., 2-14-1854 (Dawson brought this session's Homestead Bill to the floor from Committee); 29th Cong., 1st sess., p. 1060, Rep. Bowlin of Mo., 7-9-1846.

38. Globe, 32rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 574, Rep. Cleveland of Ct., 4-1-1852; Globe, 29th Cong., 1st sess., p. 1059, Rep. Bowlin of Mo., 7-9-1846.

39. Globe, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 439, Rep. Hall of Mo., 4-20-1852.

40. Robbins, , Our Landed Heritage, pp. 96–116, 152–59.Google Scholar

41. Globe, 29th Cong., 1st sess., p. 777, Rep. Thompson of Miss., 7-9-1846.

42. See, e.g., Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 1106, Sen. Dawson of Pa., 7-20-1854. Not until conditions improved in 1846 did many take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the law.

43. Globe, 29th Cong., 1st sess., p. 473, Rep. McConnell of Al., 3-9-1846; see also: United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, The Homestead Law: A Brief Sketch in United States History (Washington, 1962), p. 14.Google Scholar

44. Globe, 29th Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 780, Rep. Thompson of Miss., 7-9-1846.

45. Grow, Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 242, 2-21-1854.

46. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 951, 7-25-1850; Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 182, Rep. Dawson of Pa., 2-14-1854. By similar reasoning, Grow answered, unchallenged but to my mind unpersuasively, the charge that after five years settlers would be free to speculate in land by mortgaging their homestead. A possibility, Grow admitted, but “The man who has kept his quarter section five years, and has surrounded it with the comforts of the fireside, and has connected with it all the associations of home, is not likely to leave it unless it be for the purpose of bettering his condition in some far distant location. … But even if the settler does sell, it would be to some one who wanted to cultivate the land, and that would secure its continued settlement and cultivation …” (Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 243, 2-21-1854).

47. Note the conclusions to the two novels. Holmes: “And so with the moonlight and starlight falling upon the old homestead, and the sunlight of love falling upon thehearts of its inmates, we bid them adieu” (p. 114). In Micheaux, the protagonist asks his wife if she had loved her former fiance, and she indicates its impossibility by exclaiming the man's name. “Something dark passed before him-terrible years when he had suffered much. She was speaking again. ‘You know I never loved any one in the world but you’” (p. 533).

48. Homesteading opportunities were not extended to Indians until the 1880s. Ironically, the eligibility of Indians for homesteading, included as a mechanism for citizenship in the Dawes Act of 1887 (stipulating that Indian homesteads were to be inalienable for twenty-five years), accelerated the dissolution of the communal organization of the Indian tribes by opening Indian lands to sale and settlement (Robbins, , Our Landed Heritage, p. 283).Google Scholar

49. Terry, , The Homestead Law Agitation, p. 6Google Scholar; Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., p. 1090, Sen. Weller of Ca., 7-18-1854; Robbins, , Our Landed Heritage, p. 177Google Scholar; Hough, Emerson, The Passing of the Frontier: A Chronicle of the Old West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), p. 85.Google Scholar

50. See: Republican Association of Washington, “Lands for the Landless” (Washington: Congressional Republican Executive Committee, 1859).Google Scholar

51. Johnson, , Globe, 31st Cong., 2nd sess., p. 313, 1–23–1851Google Scholar; Evans, George Henry, The Radical, in Continuation of the Working Man's Advocate, Devoted to the Abolition of the Land Monopoly, and Other Democratic Reforms, 1841–43 (N.P.), p.8.Google Scholar

52. Young, Mary E., “Congress Looks West: Liberal Ideology and Public Land Policy in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Frontier in American Development-Essays in Honor of Paul Wallace Gates, ed. Ellis, David M. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 106Google Scholar. See, for example: Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, pp. 181–82, 1088, 1090, 1106Google Scholar; 32nd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, pp. 434, 436; 29th Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 778.

53. Richardson, James D., ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1897), vol. 5, pp. 611–14.Google Scholar

54. Most proponents of homesteading either denied the unfairness of eleemosynary policy, which would stimulate productivity nationally, or extolled the duty of the state toward its poor. This latter argument was challenged as a faulty interpretation of natural law and the Declaration of Independence. See, e.g., Senate floor debate: Globe, 36th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 1629–31, 4–10–1860.Google Scholar

55. Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 182, 2–14–1854.Google Scholar

56. See, e.g., Globe, 36th Cong., 1st sess., p. 1555Google Scholar, Johnson, , 4–5–1860Google Scholar; p. 1653, Johnson, , 4–11–1860Google Scholar; 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 182, Rep. Dawson of Pa., 2–14–1854; p. 1050, Sen. Cass of Mi., 7–18–1854; 31st Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 951, Johnson, , 7–25–1850Google Scholar; Evans, , The Radical, pp. 5, 59.Google Scholar

57. Kolodny, Annette, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. xiii, 178–226 passimGoogle Scholar. See: Hampsten, Elizabeth, Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880–1910 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Schlissel, Lillian, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken, 1982)Google Scholar; and Stratton, Joanna, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1981)Google Scholar. Emphasizing women's “receptivity” rather than the 19th Century's characterization of women as passive, Sharon O'Brien locates Cather, especially in her professional and personal relationship to Jewett, in “a less competitive paradigm” than male appropriativeness toward nature and Bloomian anxiety about antecedents and rivals (Willa Cather, pp. 364–65)Google Scholar; the gift-giving of female and folk traditions (p. 347) better fosters a “communal ideal” (p. 383). Drawing a connection between Alexandra's love of the land and Cather's lesbianism, Judith Fryer “would suggest that loving the land, as Willa Cather who loved women did, is for women a different experience from the dominance and mastery suggested by critics like Richard Slotkin” (Felicitous Space, p. 376, note 56).Google Scholar

58. This advertisement appeared in a national magazine during the Dakotas rush between 1909–13 (MacDonald, Marie, After Barbed Wire: A Pictorial History of the Homestead Rush in the Northern Great Plains, 1900–1919 [Glendive, Montana: Frontier Gateway Museum, 1963], p. 33)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the New Woman in professional and academic arenas, see Rosenberg, Rosalind, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), ch. 3.Google Scholar

59. Stewart, Elinore Pruitt, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1913; rpt. Boston: Houghton Miffiin, 1982), pp. 196, 215–16Google Scholar. I will refer to the author as Pruitt because that is how she signs her letters, even though she marries Mr. Stewart about one-third of the way through the book.

60. Sanford, Mollie Dorsey, Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857–1866, ed. Danker, Donald F. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), p. 32Google Scholar; Tillson, Christiana Holmes, A Woman's Story of Pioneer Illinois, ed. Quaife, Milo Milton (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1919), pp. 41–42)Google Scholar; Shaw, Luella, True History of Some of the Pioneers of Colorado (Hotchkiss, Co.: W. S. Coburn, John Patterson, and A. K. Shaw, 1909), pp. 266, iiiGoogle Scholar; Royce, Sarah, A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California, ed. Gabriel, Ralph Henry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), pp. 140, 144.Google Scholar

61. Stewart, , Letters of a Woman Homesteader, p. 134Google Scholar; Farseth, Pauline and Blegen, Theodore C., trans, and eds., Frontier Mother: The Letters ofGro Svendsen (Northfield, Minn.: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1950), pp. 44, 42Google Scholar. Special holdings by the Department of the Interior and the attorney general were necessary to determine that widows and single women who spent up to six months of the year working as housekeepers retained rights to their homestead claims, if procedural conditions were met. For the case of an unmarried Bohemian girl who periodically “worked out for others,” see Copp, , Public Land Laws, p. 234.Google Scholar

62. Hampsten, , Read This Only to Yourself, p. 34.Google Scholar

63. Various commentators have discussed the middle-class origins of antebellum women's reform, a heterogeneous alliance of promoters of enlightenment ideals and advocates of moral reform. See Rossi, Alice S., The Feminist Papers, From Adams to de Beauvoir (New York: Bantam, 1973), pp. 244–50, 265–74Google Scholar; and Jo, Mari and Buhle, Paul, “Introduction: Woman Suffrage and American Reform,” in The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from the Classic Work of Stanton, Anthony, Gage, and Harper, eds. Buhle, and Buhle, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 6–10Google Scholar. This text will be cited hereafter as Woman Suffrage. The postbellum women's movement saw heterogeneity often deteriorate into discord (Buhle, and Buhle, , pp. 18–33)Google Scholar, but the logic of natural rights continued to inform much of its language, especially that of its best-remembered advocates.

64. Stanton, , “Address to the New York legislature, 1860,” in Schneir, Miriam, ed., Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 118Google Scholar; Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Women and Economics, ed. Degler, Carl (New York: Harper, 1966), pp. 67, 333.Google Scholar

65. See the discussion of rights in “On the Jewish Question,” Early Writings, pp. 21–28Google Scholar. For Marx, property is both the means and result of “alienated labour, alienated life, estranged man” (p. 131). The structure of property is “incorporate[d]… in the very essence of man,” who is known and constituted as “a phenomenon of being external to oneself” (p. 148). “The supersession of private property” (p. 160) would also be “The supersession of self-estrangement” (p. 152), and would mean man's “return to himself” (p. 155). Scarry calls Marx's goal that of “restoring the referent” (The Body in Pain, p. 273)Google Scholar, returning disembodied labor to its source. See note 70, below.

66. Evans consistently held “that the land should not be a matter of traffic, gift, or will… that the land is not property, and, therefore, should not be transferable like the products of man's labor.” Skidmore generally agreed, but a rift developed between the two men in 1829 after Skidmore installed in the platform of the New York Working Men a resolution that upon entering society “man gives up to others his original right of soil” (The Radical, vol. 2, pp. 7–9)Google Scholar. See: Skidmore, Thomas, The Right of Man to Property! (1829; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.).Google Scholar

67. See Derrida, , “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7 (Autumn 1980): 63–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cohen, , “History and Genre,” New Literary History 17 (Winter 1986): 204–06CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In another context, turn-of-the-century debates about money and art (and finally the nature of minds), Walter Benn Michaels has importantly delineated a related but far more elaborate structure of representation, which he calls the logic of naturalism. The structure of mimesis “epitomiz[es] the distinction between what we are made of and what we are” (The Gold Standard, p. 171Google Scholar; see note 22, above). To summarize briefly a very complex argument: phenomena (nature, objects, minds, persons) appear to be themselves by being not themselves, more specifically by appearing to be imitations of themselves (pp. 154–61, 169–74).

68. In exemplifying the structural alienation of identity, property evokes the Lacanian sense that the subject is known and indeed emerges as loss: “nothing contains everything,” and the difference between everything and any local situation is “the gap that constitutes the subject. The subject emerges with and as the introduction of a loss in reality.” Lacanian subjectivity resembles the structure of property: in both, expenditure (in labor or cognition) is never redeemed in identical terms. As loss is potential in owning, failed redemption is the risk that defines experience. It is worth noting, however, that the fact that property signifies what we are not and what is sacrificed does not mean that the self or cognition is necessarily inadequate. Rather, Lacan writes, “by status reality is as full as possible” (“Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatsoever,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. Macksey, Richard and Donatio, Eugenio [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972], p. 193).Google Scholar

William James's understanding of consciousness illuminates Lacan's position, I think. (See note 24, above.) One can only know “I” as an “historic Me,” as a collection of past properties and mental states. There is always a nonidentity between “I” and properties known, and between the present and previous “I's.” Yet, James writes, “That something which at every moment goes out and knowingly appropriates that Me of the past, and discards the non-me as foreign, is it not a permanent abiding principle of spiritual activity identical with itself wherever found?” Our “I” consists of a continuity in the feeling of warmth and intimacy. In James's terms, Lacanian cognition of self as different from itself is the very condition of a “functional” identity, even, since it may readily suffice, an “essential” identity (Briefer Course, p. 180).Google Scholar

69. I adapt this point from Ely's analysis of natural rights notions of the individual. See: Ely, , vol. 1, pp. 66, 106, 142.Google Scholar

70. This conflation and circularity infects the arguments of even authors criticizing the personality theory of property and urging what was called the “social theory of property.” Authors like Rev. Washington Gladden, leader of the Social Gospel School of Economics, his ally Richard Ely, and the contributors to Property, Its Duties and Rights define private property as a stewardship “established and maintained for social purposes” (Ely, , vol. 1, p. 165)Google Scholar. This definition has the virtue, for its proponents, of recognizing that the “right over one's person” and property is “limited,” not “absolute” (pp. 175–76), “a relative and dependent” stewardship of resources divinely supplied (Gore, Charles, “Introduction,” Property, Its Duties and Rights, p. xi)Google Scholar. A similar notion had been urged at an 1829 meeting of Mechanics in New York, a group that would evolve into The Working Men, led by Evans, George and Skidmore, Thomas: “all men hold their property by the consent of the great mass of the community, and by no other title”Google Scholar (Evans, , The Radical, p. 3)Google Scholar. Like The Working Men, later authors offered the social theory of property as reducing if not resolving the conflict between individual and state potential in a social contract view of society. But it has this effect necessarily only by extending the identification between self and property to an identification between the individual and the state; the social theory of property elevates rather than eliminates the elisions of natural rights logic.

Marx's goal to supersede private property also imagines the “resolution” of the “contradiction” in property, a metaphor in his work too for the structure of cognition and self, and thus imagines an elision between the poles of self and selfrepresentation. The return of man “to himself” that would effectively end politics, withering away the state, is a fantasy of the end of representation. Scarry calls Marx's goal of recuperating alienated labor that of “restoring the referent” (see note 65, above). Perhaps more radically, it seeks the end of referentiality, of the difference between self and its identifying productions. This would not constitute the liberation of subjects into consciousness, as Marx claims, but the end of the conditions of consciousness. In the Jamesian or Lacanian senses (see note 68, above)-both, it seems to me, conventionalist rather than natural rights logics the structural difference of self from itself is the condition of knowledge and possibility as well as of limitation.

71. Gill, Thomas, “Landlordism in America,” North American Review 142 (01 1886): 62Google Scholar. See: Gill, ibid., pp. 52–67; Desmond, A. J., “America's Land Question,” 142 (02 1886): 153–58Google Scholar; George, Henry, “More About American Landlordism,” 142 (04 1886): 387–401Google Scholar. Desmond submits that soon “the words of the song ‘Uncle Sam has land enough to give us all a farm,’ will suggest nothing but a sorrowful reminiscence” (158). These authors were disputing the claims of Thomas Donaldson, “The Public Lands of the United States,” 133 (August 1881): 204–13; Strong, Horace, “American Landlordism, I” 142 (03 1886): 246–53Google Scholar; King, David Bennett, “American Landlordism, II” 142 (03 1886): 254–57Google Scholar; and Martin, John A., “The Progress of Kansas” 142 (04 1886); 348–55Google Scholar. These authors exhorted failing farmers to “thrift” (King). Donaldson, author of one of the most influential treatises on the public domain, charged that the “worst monopolists” were settlers who managed to acquire extra quarter sections (p. 205). Attacking donation policy as socialist and disruptive of “law and order,” Strong urged in rhetoric familiar to us today that “The people, left to themselves, under the guidance of economic law, will settle in the best way all economic problems. All the government has to do is keep the peace” (p. 253).

72. 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, p. 185, 2–14–1854.

73. I am thankful to Eric Jager for discussion of this point.

74. This leaves the particulars of proprietorship and liberty subject, of course, to political contingencies.

75. James, Henry, The Spoils of Poynton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 162–63.Google Scholar

76. I note the overlap between Cather and James here not just because I believe it is textually appropriate. Cather criticism has often noted, as Cather often noted, her early apprenticeship to James's style, from which Cather felt she had to graduate in order to establish her own identity as a writer. Recently, most powerfully in the work of O'Brien, this graduation is seen to have feminist implications. I do not deny the feminist point, nor that, as Cather believed, ceasing to imitate James strengthened her writing. Nevertheless, I am suggesting, though she ceased aspiring to his style, Cather's account of the structure of individual authority was similar to that of James.

77. In thinking Cather means literally that no new stories can be written, I agree with Fryer, (Felicitous Space, pp. 259–60)Google Scholar. In contrast, O'Brien argues that Cather “was telling a new story in American women's writing” (Willa Cather, p. 428)Google Scholar. This characterization of the narrative may be true, but we should distinguish its thematic or formal novelty from Cather's conviction that no truly new stories are possible.

78. Letter to Austin, Mary, 11–9–1927Google Scholar, Mary Austin Collection, Huntington Library; Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (New York: Knopf, 1962), p. 12Google Scholar. Cited hereafter as OW. In her letter to Mary Austin, Cather suggested that the novel form was impossible. I draw my concluding account of the logic of Cather's aesthetics from her remarks about writing. I do not mean to suggest that all Cather's novels follow this sensibility. Critics have often remarked the preindustrial impulse of her work, a trait that could be characterized as nostalgia for an Edenic moment before exchange. Sometimes this is the case. My Antonia, Song of the Lark, or A Lost Lady, for example, either imagine a harmony between human production and the land or repudiate a culture that impedes such harmony. But like O Pioneers!, I would argue, The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, or Shadows on the Rock, for example, exhibit Cather's fascination with dispossession. At least portions of each do concern preindustrial experience. But the effect of these episodes is to examine not how securely we might own limited quantities of possessions, but how delicate is the chore of surrendering them. I am grateful to Amy Kaplan for suggesting the need to attend to the question of Cather's nostalgic settings.

79. Sanford, , The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford, p. xiiGoogle Scholar; Tillson, , A Woman's Story of Pioneer Illinois, p. 3.Google Scholar

80. Lewis, Edith, Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record (New York: Knopf, 1953), p. 106.Google Scholar

81. Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 14Google Scholar. Cather's destruction of her letters and the prohibitions of her will have raised various questions. Was she trying to protect her friends, her privacy, her lesbianism, from public consumption? By my account of Cather's concerns, the emphasis on privacy, especially as a key to her corpus, is misplaced. Following Stewart's general suggestion, one might compare her gesture to Henry Adams's conception of his Education as “my last Will and Testament” (letter to Gaskell, Charles, The Education of Henry Adams [Boston: Riverside/Houghton Mifflin, 1973], p. 508)Google Scholar. He advised Henry James “to take your own life in the same way in order to prevent biographers from taking it in theirs” (p. 513)–commemorate your cessation in order to stake out the field first. In destroying her letters, Cather bounded the field of public inquiry.

Most theatrically, Cather's actions obstruct inquiry into her sexual practices and personal relationships. Critics have noted her refusal to identify herself as a lesbian writer, even as a lesbian. I think we should take her determination seriously: to emphasize lesbianism would emphasize gender, specificity of identity, and finally the identification of self with physiological features or personal properties. Albeit it is ineluctably proprietary, her notion of self departed from this liberal notion of self-proprietorship, the possession of intrinsic and private characteristics anterior to the conditions of their assignability.