Willa Cather on Writing and Gender Expression
From everyone's favorite New York prairie lesbian...
To say that I’ve been a fan of Willa Cather’s writing for a while is an understatement.
I first read her 1918 novel, My Ántonia, in high school. At fifteen, I found the novel somewhat dull… at least, the first half of it. As I forged through it, though, I found that there was something about the story that I couldn’t shake. Between the lines and pages, I found myself reading the story of a young man and a young woman, neither of whom quite fit into their environment, and the people who shaped their childhoods.
As a queer kid in the Appalachian foothills, My Ántonia was the first novel I had read in which I saw myself. Not the daydream version of myself– the superhero figure on a grand adventure that I wanted to see myself in– but the real me. The scared kid who didn’t quite fit in and didn’t yet know how to navigate the world. Importantly, by the novel’s end, I saw a young man returning home and finding peace with his past, which was something I thought was not in the cards for me.
Within a few weeks, we had concluded our lessons on My Ántonia and moved on to the next book, but, emotionally, I hadn’t moved on.
Fast forward a few years, and I’m heading to college. I’ve decided (to the chagrin of my mother) to pursue a degree in English primarily because of My Ántonia, and my desire to better understand why that particular novel stuck with me so acutely. An extracurricular reader, I dove into Cather’s oeuvre– starting with her other “prairie novels” that preceded My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and The Song of the Lark.
By that point, I was hooked. Cather’s crystalline prose captivated me. Her writing is so simple, so direct, yet so disciplined. Every word and every sentence carries with it a kind of intentionality that is hard to replicate. I’ve tried. In my studies, one of the exercises we would do to learn more about how different authors’ writing styles functioned was to attempt to write several paragraphs in a manner that emulated the author.
Hemingway? Easy. Faulkner? Difficult but doable. Fitzgerald? No problem.
But Cather? Not. A. Chance.
I’m biased, but she wrote circles around her contemporaries.
Editor’s note: I should disclose that I am starting this draft from Red Cloud, Nebraska, the town Willa lived in as a child, as I attend the Cather Foundation’s Spring Conference. I am VERY biased to the point that I will venture into rural Nebraska to hang out with academics for the weekend just to tour her childhood home, purchase an excess of books about her work, and attend lectures.
As my love affair with Willa deepened, I ventured into her letters, essays, and critical works, as well as the study of her life as an author. There is so much that writers and artists can learn from Cather and her unique ability to paint living landscapes, sneak in sly jokes, and construct mythological narratives about the American identity1.
Cather wasn’t just a writer, though. She was something of an acolyte of the arts. She held artistic expression atop a pedestal, and consistently sought to elevate it. A lifelong fan of opera and theatre, there are multimodal influences across her work.
She also spent considerable time reflecting on the nature of art and its value in society. Throughout her novels, short stories, essays, and letters, Cather continually refined her artistic philosophy, which fueled her desire to create breathtaking works throughout her lifetime.
Willa Cather: On the Novel and the Purpose of Art
In Cather’s 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, she tells the story of Thea Kronborg. In the novel, Thea grows up in a small town in Colorado, but she has a love of singing that leads her away from home in pursuit of her art.
Part IV of the novel– “The Ancient People”– sees Thea in the area outside Flagstaff, Arizona, to rest and refocus. In one particularly striking scene, she is bathing in a pool of water in a canyon and as she emerges from the water, she’s overcome with a sense of recognition of the beauty of the land around her and a shard of broken pottery that she has found, and realizes the connection between art, life, and nature.
Cather writes,
One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until the water had quite dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.
Within this paragraph, we see Cather giving form to her burgeoning perspective as an artist in which art is a byproduct of the human desire to hold on to the fleeting, ever-changing nature of life.
And Cather held writing as an art in incredibly high regard. In several of her essays, she draws a sharp line between novels that are written purely to entertain and novels that aim to possess some artistic merit. By today’s standards, her stance likely would have been considered elitist. She quibbled with publishers over the tiniest details of how her books were presented. She vehemently resisted having her work printed as paperbacks rather than hardcovers. She was meticulous about every little detail.
Throughout her career, she seems to wrestle with the purpose of art. In some of her earlier letters and essays, she rejects mass market novels as futile and largely a waste of time. In these letters, she she upholds “artistic” novels as those that do something new. One of her most well-known essays, “The Novel Démeublé,” the very pointedly states,
In any discussion of the novel, one must make it clear whether one is talking about the novel as a form of amusement, or as a form of art; since they serve very different purposes and in very different ways. […] The novel manufactured to entertain great multitudes of people must be considered exactly like a cheap soap or a cheap perfume, or cheap furniture. Fine quality is a distinct disadvantage in articles made for great numbers of people who do not want quality but quantity, who do not want a thing that "wears," but who want change,—a succession of new things that are quickly threadbare and can be lightly thrown away. […] Amusement is one thing; enjoyment of art is another.
She then goes on to distinguish that the type of writer behind each type of novel is vastly different, with writers who create for art having a distinct characteristic in which they can distinguish what is meaningful and what needs to be reflected within fiction. In contrast, writers who serve a mass audience simply observe and recount the world before them without the critical eye of distinguishing what is deserving of capture.
Cather penned “The Novel Démeublé” in 1922, but it wasn’t her first time wrestling with the question of the function of art and the artist. Her 1920 short story, “Coming, Aphrodite!,” for example, follows the story of a man named Don Hedger, a young avant-garde painter who lives in a shabby apartment in Washington Square, New York City.
Hedger is curmudgeonly. He’s set in his ways. Like Cather, he desires to create art that he deems meaningful and culturally important.
But then a new neighbor moves in. The beautiful Eden Bowers, a singer, enters the apartment next door and almost right away she casts a long shadow over Hedger’s life. She is depicted as a free spirit. Like the goddess whose name lends itself to the story’s title, Eden Bowers is the embodiment of passion and desire, and is depicted equally in terms of beauty and vulgerness, especially as her behavior is concerned. Hedger is completely awestruck by his neighbor, including one rather infamous scene where he is watching her through a hole in the wall and “Hedger's fingers curved as if he were holding a crayon” in a scene so beautifully euphemistic, you can almost miss that it’s describing self-pleasure.
As Hedger and Bowers grow closer to each other, their ideological divide becomes clear. Bowers wants to entertain. She wants to be on stage singing for the masses, and she doesn’t understand how Hedger wouldn’t want the same for his paintings. She pleads with him to consider creating work like that of Burton Ives, a fictional, commercially successful painter. Hedger is deeply offended that she would want him to lower himself and his artistry to the level of a painter like Ives, who he views as something of a lucky simpleton who does work that “any painter in New York” could do.
It’s considered bad criticism to assume that the events of a story are drawn directly from an author’s life (the biographical phallacy, it’s called), but writers write what they know, and the rift between Hedger and Bowers could be seen as Cather wrestling with her own ideas about art and making a living as an artist.
By the end of “Coming, Aphrodite!” both Bowers and Hedger are successes by their own definitions and in their own fields. Bowers headlines shows across Europe (ooh la la), and Hedger is featured in major exhibitions as his work finds an audience with which it resonates and is understood. The two weren’t able to make it as lovers, but they were able to make it as artists, almost as if Cather is suggesting that both avenues of art are viable, albeit irreconcilable.
Part of Cather’s resistance to mass market novels came from her experience publishing her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge. After it was published, she began to distance herself from it. She reflected in essays and letters that Alexander’s Bridge encapsulated what was en vogue at the time, not what she found interesting. Her next novel, O Pioneers, on the other hand, told a story that decidedly wasn’t en vogue. It was provincial and utilized elements of the prior generation’s regionalist literature, set in quiet midwestern prairies. It didn’t feature the upper class, big cities, or political intrigue. And yet, it spoke deeply to a generation of readers who found themselves on the cusp of a changing culture, who craved a simpler American myth to believe in, and who were captivated by Cather’s crystal clear prose, powerful women, and gripping storytelling.
O Pioneers solidified itself as a work of art, and her subsequent novels carried on its tradition.
In the end, Cather’s work and her desire to be seen as a serious artist rather than someone with mass market appeal are far less important to her than her desire to create.
She wrote in a letter to her childhood friend, Muriel Gere, while living in Pittsburgh, “There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; that’s my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be.”
And in later letters, she conveyed that writing was the one activity that deeply interested her:
The only reason I write is because it interests me more than any other activity I've ever found. I like riding, going to operas and concerts, travel in the west; but on the whole writing interests me more than anything else. If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die. I make it an adventure every day. I get more entertainment from it than any I could buy, except the privilege of hearing a few great musicians and singers. To listen to them interests me as much as a good morning's work.
William Cather, MD | Cather’s Queer Identity and Challenges to the Gender Binary
Cather’s inclusion in this newsletter during Pride Month is no coincidence, either.
While I don’t know that Cather ever used the term lesbian to describe herself, the Birkenstock fits. The Subaru key turns. The KD Lang ticket is sold. The U-Haul is rented. The softball game is scheduled.
I could continue, but I don’t want my love of lesbians and their stereotypical jokes to dip into disrespectful territory.
Born Wilella Sibert Cather in 1873, Cather spent much of her childhood pushing back against gender norms and expectations. Up to about the age of fifteen, she had ambitions of being a surgeon, a role typically held by men at that time, and styled herself in men’s clothes, used masculine pronouns, and referred to herself as “William Cather, MD.”
Some modern critics and scholars speculate that Cather may have identified as non-binary or gender non-conforming in today’s vernacular if it had been available to her. However, as Willa wrote explicitly about being a woman later in her life, and we can only speculate that she may have been non-binary, I will continue to refer to her as a woman and use she/her pronouns to describe her.
Regardless of where she may have fallen on the spectrum of gender identity, one thing we know for certain about Cather is that she maintained relationships with several women over the course of her life, notably including Louise Pound, an American folklorist and poet, and Edith Lewis, a magazine editor.
While Cather wasn’t an out-and-proud lesbian by modern standards, she was fairly forthcoming about her sexuality with those in her close circle. One of my favorite Cather quotes comes from a letter to her childhood friend Ellen Gere, sister of Muriel Gere who I’ve previously mentioned, in which Cather describes her life in Pittsburgh while working for Home Monthly, a women’s magazine. In the letter, she talks about a performer she’s become friends with who has captivated her attention, she writes, “And right near it is the Casino theatre and my old friend Pauline Hall plays there all next week. I foresee alas, that I will not go to the library on matinee afternoons but will slip across to the Casino to look upon Pauline's glorious anatomy once again. The old Nick is in me Neddy, its no use talking.”
And right near it is the Casino theatre and my old friend Pauline Hall plays there all next week. I foresee alas, that I will not go to the library on matinee afternoons but will slip across to the Casino to look upon Pauline's glorious anatomy once again. The old Nick is in me Neddy, its no use talking.
Willa Cather to Ellen B. Gere, [June 29, 1896]
She’s essentially saying that her friends or the religious family she’s living with in Pittsburgh may think the devil (old Nick) is possessing her, but she doesn’t care– she’s going to spend her time lusting over Pauline Hall while she can rather than spending her time in the library.
What I find so fascinating about Cather and how her sexuality plays out in her work has to do with the female characters she creates. Figures like Ántonia (from My Ántonia) and Alexandra Bergson (from O Pioneers!) buck feminine expectations, and are often contrasted against women who fit more traditional gender roles without being pitted against them. They work the land, they wear trousers, they do “men’s work” on their respective farms and take on provider and protector roles for their families. By embodying the pioneer spirit, they can embody their womanhood while also transcending traditional gender expectations simultaneously.
Like the women of her fiction, Cather didn’t let traditional gender roles define or limit her. During her time as a writer for Home Monthly, Cather penned an article under the pen name Helen DeLay in which she stated, “The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. ”
It should be noted that, despite my admiration for Cather as an author, she remains a product of her time, and the American identity she constructs is fraught with complications. While she often uplifts ethnically diverse narratives, challenges gender inequality, and frequently champions immigrants, her work, unfortunately, usually skews very white and erases indigenous narratives. In the early 20th century, there was a cultural push to view the American Midwest and West as being largely devoid of indigenous peoples (due to the preceding years of colonialism and genocide against native peoples that our country didn’t and still doesn’t want to acknowledge). Her work often echoes this, with indigenous people being portrayed as “of the past” and a venerable society that was “no longer around,” rather than the truth of indigenous people being subjected to forced relocation and other atrocities.