Willa Cather: Forsaken Love for Art's Sake (Part 1)
We hide ourselves and
find ourselves in frames of artistic vision.
Saturated by thoughts and emotions, personal history and social demands,
we seek a viewfinder through which to make sense of ourselves in the
world. This paper, Forsaken Love for
Art’s Sake, shows how Willa Cather and myself make sense of our worlds through
the lens of our respective works of art.
In
the novels of Willa Cather, the distinction of loving and being in love is
portrayed like a firefly tucked inside the blackened sky. The luminescence of
the female abdomen signals perspective mates of her readiness to reproduce. However, in the stillness and dimming of her
light, it is as if she does not even exist; we cannot see or hear her. So it is with Cather’s depictions of those who
do love-- the silence and purgatory of
restrained ardor in which Cather suspends those is only relieved by
evocative landscapes or unstoppable artistic geysers and quests. Love’s fulfillment never seems to fully
realize itself for Cather or her characters, yet somehow, neither she nor we
seem worse for it. The substitution and reward
of an aesthetic life honestly serves her cause.
Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and
raised in the frontier milieu of the late 1800’s. The eldest of seven children, her family’s relocation to a farmstead in Nebraska
when Cather was nine years old unearthed impressions, which fed her later
novels. One of Cather’s joys was riding
her father’s pony to the outlying homesteads owned by immigrants from Bohemia,
Sweden, and Holland. Cather took great
interest in these Old World visits and later reflected, “I have never found any
intellectual excitement any more intense than I used to feel when I spent a
morning with one of those old women at her baking or butter making.” The, homesteading endeavor failed, so the
family moved to the town of Red Cloud with its new opera house and educated
European neighbors. This opened doors
for Cather intellectually, and provided her access to scholarly literature and
languages.
These formative years and
Cather’s subsequent studies at University of Nebraska fed her knowledge of not
only the land, but also the spirit of survival required to exist in such virgin
environments. She based the town of Moonstone
in The Song of the Lark on her
hometown, Red Cloud, and modeled her
protagonist Antonia, in My Antonia, after
her childhood friend Annie Pavelka. Morris
Dickstein comments, in “A Mirror in the Roadway:
Literature and the Real World,” “[Cather’s] heroines were all
immigrants, but Cather herself had grown up among [them]… many of their
experiences were also her experiences” (Dickstein 60).
So, after a decade of
post-graduate teaching and copywriting, Cather’s success in the historical
fiction genre materialized when her mentor Sarah Orne Jewitt, urged Cather to quit
her editorial job at McClure’s Magazine to dedicate herself fully to her
writing. In a 1908 letter, Jewitt tells
Cather, “You must find your own quiet center of life and write from that…to
write and work from this level we must
live it… “recapture
[...] early memories and to make style subordinate to a truthful presentation”
(Smith 482). Cather had already published a poetry and
short story collections but Jewitt’s sage advice changed Cather’s course.
Throughout her life, Cather
lived in the netherworld between acceptable societal standards and her own
private passions. As a teenager she was
a “maverick…the growing-up process…included a crew-cut, tomboy period and her
early ambition to become a medical doctor… dissecting frogs and toads,” much to
the chagrin of the townspeople (Gerber 26).
While attending the University of Nebraska, though, she was offered a
steady column as a theater critic for the Nebraska
State Journal and there, honed her knowledge and formed opinions on the
arts. In this role, Cather, whose
androgynous appearance placed her in a spotlight all her own, had finally found
refuge for her unique sense of belonging; and
that became sealed inside the art of her pen.
Commenting on Cather’s genius in composing
heavily-thicketed rows behind which she shielded her identity issues, critic Harold Bloom venerates
her “exquisitely subtle rendering[s]” as “…she studies the nostalgias of lost
or unfulfillable love...transform[ing] experiential loss into aesthetic gain”
(Bloom 631). It is this vessel of aesthetic gain which
holds Willa Cather’s most precious gifts.
This was, of course, evidenced when Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in
1923 for her WWI novel, One of Ours. For over a decade prior, she had been writing
steadily, living in New York City, and had cohabitated with two women: Isabelle
McClung, from 1901-06; and Edith Lewis, since 1908, who became her lifetime
companion and literary executor.
As a tacit lesbian, the true
trajectory of Cather’s life was marked by her dedication to her writing,
foregoing a family life and starkly contrasting her upbringing. Recapturing
the essential nature of that childhood, though, through her characters’ lives
became Cather’s self-styled motherhood.
The prairie novels, O, Pioneers!
(1913), Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918), threw us back to
Cather’s roots; re-raising herself in these childhood settings through her
adult eyes. True to form, Cather female
protagonists break tradition with the conventional representation of women as
docile and subservient to men.
Cather’s women are
independent and cognizant of something larger than themselves, and they reach
into that opening with hopeful
trust.
As Thea Kronborg studies
piano with Professor Harsanyi in Song of
the Lark, she simultaneously loses and find herself in the music: She’s writes, “There were hours… of great exaltation; when she was at
her best and became a part of what she was doing and ceased to exist in any other sense” (Cather 163).
As
well, Alexandra Bergson realizes,
in O Pioneers!, how she is part of
the land she’s lived in, reflecting:
“She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The
chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest
music… Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring. (Cather
42) “
This sensation of possibility and discovery is
precisely the purpose for Cather’s connecting the human spirit to the
land. Land is a metaphor for life
itself: its fulfillments and its
disappointments. More complex are the
human relationships with an agenda of expansion upon that land, so that, in this context, Cather’s relationships ARE the
seeds planted and harvests sowed:
the rains, snows, and broken plows.
In
her most popular work, My Antonia,
the interplay between Jim and Antonia is a decades-long loving relationship
based on strong eros never expressed.
As a pubescent boy, Jim confesses how he feels emasculated by Antonia:
“Much as I liked Antonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took with
me. She was four years older than I…but
I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her protecting manner” (Cather
30). The next scene involves Jim
slaying a rattlesnake about to spring on him.
In full view of Antonia, he “ran up and drove
at his head with [the] spade, struck [it] fairly across the neck” (Cather 31),
which not only kills the snake but symbolically, as a phallus, kills Jim’s
sexual countenance in exchange for Antonia’s awe. She exclaims, “You
is just like big mans,” as Jim is left pondering the limp snake (Cather
32).
The
relinquishing of sexuality in exchange for something more lasting (or precious)
repeats itself in subsequent novels. In Phyllis Robinson’s biography of
Cather, she writes, “She paid a price for her art…Her longtime companionship
with Edith Lewis “was undoubtedly a marriage in every sense. But Willa was too conscious of her ties to
home…to live openly with Edith” (Robinson 208). Cather wrote in her compilation,
On Writing, something of an
explanation: “One realizes that human relationships are the
tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory.” Whether
mourning or mocking love, here, Cather’s feelings are clear.
If Jim is reflective
Cather’s private renouncement of her sexuality, Antonia, who after the suicide
of her father, adopts a more mannish role, transforms from a pretty, vivacious
youth to a commanding farm manager; thus, reminiscent of Cather’s college years
when she “attracted attention because of
her mannish dress…short hair and…[artificial] deep masculine voice” (Robinson
41). These gender a-typical behaviors
made Cather’s personal world political, a feminist marker.
Throughout her novels, though,
Cather employs sense of place as a
central motif, and, ultimately, it is this aspect of her prose, not her
feminist qualifications, which are at the heart of her inclusion in the
literary canon, according to Bloom, “fully the peer of Theodore Dreiser, Ernest
Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald” (Bloom 631). However well-defined this sense of place appears in scenic landscapes, the inner sense of place Cather creates through artistically-promising and
-fulfilling dreamscapes holds an even deeper sacredness for us to understand
the inherent bond Cather draws between art and life. One of her most famous quotes comes from a
scene in Song of the Lark, after Thea’s brilliant performance of Sieglinde: “Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the
sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the
artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is” (Cather 421). The value of expressing pain and vulnerability
can only be justified if it can also be used to enlighten. This is the job of artists - to reframe pain
so it can be understood. Cather says in The Art
of Fiction, “Art…should simplify” (Cather ii).
Cather
understood the courage and commitment required of an artist from the age of 17.
Her first published essay included the following declaration: “[Jehovah] says,
‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’
Art, science and letters cry, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods at all’”
(Robinson 44). This is a defining
statement for young Cather who, three years later, repeated the devout
sentiment, writing: “An author’s only safe course is to cling to the skirts of
her art, forsaking all others, and keep unto her (my emphasis) as long as they two shall live” (Stirling
101). The suggestion of
matrimonial-like devotion and religious piety to her writing is not lost here.
Some of us, like Cather, hold up fictional
screens and some of let the hard truth speak for itself.
(part 2 will be posted tomorrow)
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