“The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor”

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O’Brien REVIEW

Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice takes us on a journey through the life experiences of Willa Cather and how they led eventually to the writing of her novel O Pioneers. It is a journey through her roots in Virginia, her experience of transplantation to the Nebraska frontier as a nine year old, her early education, her years at college at the University of Nebraska, her work as an editor of McClure’s magazine, and her apprenticeship in writing.

It becomes clear that it took Willa Cather many, many years to give up trying to fit into the pre-formatted roles that the menu of her early years gave her to choose from and to make her own (both as a woman and as a writer). Her ability to break ground as a non-conforming woman eventually, gave her the ability and fortitude to break new ground in her writing as well. People come into the world on a spectrum with respect to femininity and masculinity and though born a girl, Willa Cather identified with (and chose to be identified with) boys from the time she was a youngster. If her mother dressed her up for a picture in a frilly dress, she had the picture taken with a bow and arrow in her hands. O’Brien recounts the following anecdote to illustrate how Willa Cather defied her mother’s attempt to feminize her.

“An early memory, which became a story Cather recounted to Edith Lewis, records what must've been a typical skirmish between rebellious daughter and imperious mother. One day an elderly judge was visiting Willowshade [Cather’s family home in Virginia]. Adopting a courtly, paternalistic manner toward Willa, he began stroking her curls and talking to her in the playful platitudes one addressed to little girls. But Willa refused to employ the playful platitudes with which little girls were supposed to flatter Southern gentleman. Throwing away the script, the daughter horrified her mother, Edith Lewis recounts, by exclaiming, "I's a dang'ous nigger, I is!"

Cather later wrote in a review of George Elliot’s The Mill on the Floss in 1897:

“Haven't we all had pretty prim little cousins like Lucy Dean, whose hair curled naturally, and who were always neat when we were dirty, and mannerly when we were rude; who never tore their frocks nor dropped their fork at the table; whose China blue eyes grew wide with astonishment at our tomboyish proceedings? And haven't we all just ached to push these immaculate cherubs into the mud – just as Maggie did? And haven't we all felt bitterly that our mothers secretly suffered from our plain brown faces and stubby noses and wished we were pretty like other children?"

It is interesting that Cather’s favorite female authors had both taken the name George (George Sand and George Elliot). “The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor,” Cather wrote. From a young age, she identified with the boys in the stories that she read and generally despised the roles that she saw girls being assigned. She loved heroes and the heroic. At heart she had a romantic belief in the powers of the individual to change history and it seemed so rare that women got to play those parts in literature. By laying around waiting to be rescued, kissed, or married, female characters seemed to be falling woefully short of their potential. They were not actualizing their highest purpose. In Willa Cather’s My Antonia, you cannot miss the way that the narrator (Jim Burden) disparages most of the girls in Black Hawk, Kansas (Cather’s childhood home of Red Cloud) and later at University. It is only the “manly” girls (even if they are pretty) that summon Jim Burden’s interests:

“That was before the day of high-school athletics. Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis-court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the high-school girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one danced with them, their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing--not to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.”

It is only the undomesticated girls that Jim can find worthy of his interest. Cather does not imagine a boy like Jim Burden. She inhabits him. These are not Jim’s views. These are Willa Cather’s. According to O’Brien, Willa Cather changed her name to “William” in high school (after her ancestor William who had fought and died in the Civil War), cut her hair short, took male parts in plays, took up vivisection and science as her primary academic interest, and set out to be a doctor. In her most famous works, O Pioneers! and My Antonia, Cather focuses her attention on the Edenic state of childhood. For her, children like her were damaged when they were forced to “pick a side” and fill a role that society handed them to play. For people like her, there was no place in society that could fit her particular wiring. O’Brien writes,

“In her fiction, this Edenic state is lost when the hateful distinction between the sexes arrives and the adolescent must enter the fallen world of adult sex roles and repress the part of the self then assigned to the other gender. The Fall – her metaphor for the loss of childhood – is thus a decent from unity to fragmentation as well as from freedom to restriction.”

“Failing to question the culture's polarization of gender, "Billy Cather" could reject the female role she found limiting only by continuing to repudiate her sex. Her need to differentiate herself from the mass of ordinary females is evident in her college journalism, where she frequently expressed her contempt for women in tones ranging from amused dismissal to bitter condemnation.”

When she was forced to start becoming “a young lady” Cather opted not to even try. She must have known that though she could never succeed at being William Cather, she would be better at it than she would be at being Wilella (her real name). Consistently, just as Cather admired women (like Antonia Shemerda) who were strong, tough, a bit wild, and more capable of doing a man’s job then men were, she also could only find men admirable who inhabited the furthest reaches of masculinity. O’Brien relates how impressed the college-aged Cather was with the men who played football and with the testosterone drenched writing of Rudyard Kipling. When Kipling got married and moved to Vermont, Cather expressed a concern that marriage and civilization would “ruin” him. “She would rather have heard that he had taken to opium or strong drink or that he had married a half caste woman and was raising vermilion hades out in India.”

“Finding Kippling a soldier to be reckoned with on the literary battlefield, a writer more at home with mangy dogs than ruffled collars, Cather liked the worship of force she found his work,” O’Brien writes. “If the climate is not good for Mrs. Kipling then remember that you were married to your work long before you ever met her,” Cather wrote Kipling after his marriage and move to Vermont, “Alas! There were so many men who could have married Mrs. Kipling and there was only you who could write Soldiers Three.” O’Brien notes how Cather took to the burgeoning interest Americans were developing in the sport of football.

“Writing in the Hesperian [University of Nebraska newspaper] in 1893, Willa Cather made what might seem an unlikely connection for a woman writer between art and athletics. She compared Homeric epic and football, the bone-crushing sport which, as we have seen, she praised as a rousing cure for “foppishnes,” “chappieism,” and Eastern effeminacy.

After conceding that the sport was “brutal,” she went on to say:

"So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi; that is, they like appeal to the crude savage instincts of men. We have not outgrown all their old animal instincts yet, heaven grant we ever shall! The moment that, as a nation, we lose brute force, or an admiration for brute force, from that moment poetry and art are forever dead among us, and we will have nothing but grammar and mathematics left. The only way poetry can never reach one is through one's brute instincts. Charge of the Light Brigade, or How They Brought Good News to Aix, move us in exactly the same way that one of Mr. Shue’s runs or Mr. Yont's touchdowns do, only not half so intensely. A good football game is an epic.”

Ironically, it would be only in the writing of her novels many years later that she would come to understand how one might combine masculine and feminine into a moderated “third way”- Cather’s fictional pioneer women take on a manly task (civilizing a wild frontier) but they do so as women – and as women that men can (and should if they were smart) love as women. Indeed, the title for Cather’s novel, O Pioneers! comes from the poem Pioneers, Oh Pioneers! by Walt Whitman. The poem is a celebration of manly frontier machoism in many respects and Cather seems intent on taking over Walt Whitman’s role as the literary director of pioneer life and modifying his vision to include a greater role for the feminine. Read the entire poem HERE.

Here are just a few stanzas to give you the gist of just what a machismo-laden, militaristic, testosterone marinated work of conquering it is.

Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill'd,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call--hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army!--swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

What Cather has done in her novel O Pioneers! is demonstrate that the Whitmanish “manly” work of acquiring a continent can perhaps be done better by - can it be? - by women. Women who are more womanly because they are more manly. Cather’s women are better than “ideal women” because they have not eviscerated themselves of all that is within them that is manlike. Cather’s men are men because they have not accepted the notion that women must remove all that is masculine from themselves to be lovely and loved by men. Cather’s men are capable of feminine traits (they appreciate natural beauty for example. They read poetry. They dance.) At the end of My Antonia, the heroine has lost some of her teeth but none of her zest for taking on the challenge of life on the prairie.

“Whitman thus celebrates what Cather condemns,” writes O’Brien,

“the masculine urge to subdue and to violate: his land is to be tamed by pioneers brandishing the guns that Cather, like Ivar, would like to exclude from her territory. And so in her novel she offers another vision of the taming of the land, one erasing the polarities and hierarchies in the Whitman poem; male/female, culture/nature, subject/object.”

In many ways, Cather’s relocation to the prairie from Virginia saved her. In Virginia, it is not likely that she could have found the sort of women that she could see herself becoming. O’Brien insightfully comments that the Nebraska landscape was exactly what Cather’s young soul needed. It was a space yet to be defined. It was a place where a woman could rethink what it meant to be a woman. It was an unformed world where new templates could be forged. “Dorothy Canfield rightly observes,” says O’Brien,

“an imaginative and emotional response to the great shift from Virginia to Nebraska is at the heart of Cather's fiction. Not her rootedness in Nebraska, but her transplanting from one radically different landscape and community to another at a formative, impressionable age powerfully affected her writing.”

In Nebraska, Cather found “no protective mountain ridges, and few marks on the land.” In Nebraska, there was space to define the self rather than merely choose from a menu of provided options. Needless to say, the move to a place where nature ruled and humans had yet to civilize was scary. In a 1913 newspaper interview Cather described her response to this desolate landscape:

“I shall never forget my introduction to it. We drove out from Red Cloud to my grandfathers homestead one day in April. I was sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding onto the side of the wagon box to study myself – the roads were mostly faint trails over the bunch grass in those days. The land was open range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal is if we had come to the end of everything – it was a kind of erasure of personality.”

“I would not know how much a child's life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it, if I had not been jerked away from all these and thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron. I had heard my father say you had to show grit in a new country but I thought I should go under.”

“For the first week or two on the homestead I had that kind of contraction of the stomach which comes from homesickness.”

In Red Cloud, Nebraska, people were taken, almost like soldiers into boot camp, and broken down to nothing. And once their Virginia and Boston and Bohemian identities were erased (if they could survive that painful experience - some didn't), they began to rebuild themselves.

“Although he is erased, blotted out, Jim [Burden] confronts a land of possibility seemingly beyond man's jurisdiction where a new self can be fashioned from the material out of which countries – and selves – are made. .."

"The new country lay open before me," Jim exults. "I could choose my own way over the grass uplands."

“In Virginia the road from Winchester to Romney was clearly marked, as with the behaviors required of little girls; In Nebraska, where the signs of roads were faint, there was more possibility for choice.”

Fortunately for us, Cather soon began her life’s work, collecting and assimilating and articulating the voices of the men and women who created, through experimentation, a new definition of what it meant to be male, to be female, to be American, to be human. In her late thirties, Willa Cather discovered that she had a great treasure in her childhood memories of these pioneering families of Nebraska. “Virginia had its writers and historians,” writes O’Brien,

“but Nebraska was open land for the pen as well as the plow. Except for some of the people who lived in it, Edith Lewis writes, I think no one had ever found Nebraska beautiful until Willa Cather wrote about it.”

Cather set out to do what her mentor Sarah Orne Jewett had recommended that she do; Capture the people she knew. In her 1925 Preface to Jewett’s  The Country of the Pointed Furs, Cather praised Jewett’s ability to duplicate in prose the rhythms and idioms of colloquial American speech:

“She had not only the eye, she had the ear. From childhood she must've treasured up those pithy bits of local speech, of native idiom, which enrich and enliven her pages. The language her people speak to each other is a native tongue. No writer can invent it. It is made in the hard school of experience, and communities where language has been undisturbed long enough to take on color and character from the nature and experiences of the people. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech – it is a gift from heart to heart.

Clearly, this is what Cather herself would set out to do. Cather’s mission was to do what her literary hero Virgil had done, to “be the first to bring the Muse into her country.”

“primus ego in patrimony me umm ... De ducat Musas” ( "For I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.")

“Few of our neighbors were Americans,” Cather said in an interview about her literary work and its source in pioneer women’s kitchens,

“ – most of them were Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and Bohemians. I grew fond of some of these immigrants – particularly the old women who used to tell me of their own country. I used to think them underrated, and wanted to explain them to their neighbors. Their stories used to go round and round and my head at night. This was, with me, the initial impulse. I didn't know any writing people. I had an enthusiasm for a kind of country and a kind of people, rather than ambition.”

Later, Cather would called this power 'memory,' as when she told Elizabeth Sargent that her creative life began “when she ceased to admire and began to remember.” O’Brien emphasizes that Cather really only became a great writer when she stopped trying to write and started allowing her life and her memories to use her to write.

“Cather uses the word 'home' several times to describe her discovery, and return to, her own material. The material with which Cather felt at home was not only childhood memories of Nebraska, however, but any experience – whether real or imagined – that marked her deeply.”

All stories that we write because we are pretending to be someone else when we write are, what Cather would call “external stories.” And though they may sell well (indeed they usually outsell their original counterparts in their own place and time), they do not last. “There is a time in a writers development when his life line and the line of his personal endeavor meet,” Cather wrote in the Preface to her story, Alexander’s Bridge in 1922.

“This may come early or late, but after it occurs his work is never quite the same. After he has once or twice done a story that formed itself, inevitably, in his mind, he will not often turn back to the building of external stories again.”

“The young writer must have his affair with external material he covets; must imitate and strive to follow the masters he most admires, until he finds he is starving for reality and cannot make this go any longer. Then he learns that it is not the adventure he sought, but the adventure that sought him, which has made the enduring mark upon him.”

Cather’s characters are not simply pioneers because they chose to move to a frontier. Her characters are pioneers because when they arrived there, they forsake much of what they had been told it meant to be human and opted to forge their own unique identities. The more they did so, the more Willa Cather celebrates them. And the more, I think, she would celebrate us today were we to do the same.

Questions for Comment: Do you think you would have to move away from your present life to become a more authentic self? How have you responded to the cultural forces that have told you what you need to be to be a man or woman? Do you think that there are “original people” anywhere in America any more? Or have we all been mass produced by the media we consume?

Comments

[Ghedin]

This is a great essay. Thanks for writing. The Cather quote quote about Homer and Tolstoy was interesting. In her day, "animal instinct" and "savage" were generally seen as masculine and the feminine would be the "civilizing" and passion controlling side. If femininity meant being the force of the genteel against the savage, no wonder there were so many rules and expectations for women. It was all about the boundaries. Cather wanted to define herself as a new mixture of masculine and feminine. Good idea, and clearly easier to implement as a pioneer in a place of less defined boundaries and rules yet to be written. But what I love about Cather is that I think she may have started to ask some really good questions. Not only how do we redefine womanhood with a combo of masculine and feminine attributes, But "hey, let's challenge the labeling of these attributes!" Put "woman as civilizing force" on hold. What is the animal instinct/primitive savegeness of womanhood?
Savage grace. Passionate community. Elemental compassion. It's fun to think about. Society has started to give up trying to codify femininity. That's great as long as we can make femininity more than the things that civilize the masculine.
I don't need to leave my life to find it...I need to build where I'm at. With what I am.
Mass media has no idea how to define masculinity or femininity. All we get now are stylized archetypes and catchy memes. I guess it's a good time to be original. Or to try if that moves you. I'm not an original. It's more interesting to me to try to connect with the essential me in the context of my relationships and my community.

[Philip Crossman]

"Cather wanted to define herself as a new mixture of masculine and feminine. Good idea, and clearly easier to implement as a pioneer in a place of less defined boundaries and rules yet to be written."

I find that I don't have time to develop "my feminine side" without loosing some of the masculine traits that I am "supposed to have." Someday, I swear to myself, I am going to learn more about cars, plumbing, and the stock market but I can't seem to give up reading romance novels to do it. Grin.

Thanks for sharing that "essential you" R.