University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Humanities Conference, Nov. 2003
New Title
Fanny Fern’s novel Ruth Hall
(1855) tells the story of a widowed mother of two, who, in order to save
herself and her children from the depths of poverty, becomes a highly
successful newspaper columnist under the non
de plume of “Floy.” Toward the end
of the novel, after Floy has become a critical and popular success, a publisher
describes Floy as “elastic, strong, brave, loving…fiery, yet soft” and ends
with the punctuated conclusion that she is “a bundle of contradictions!”
(180). Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis)
knew well how a woman writer like Floy could be labeled as much since Ruth Hall was
largely based by Fanny
Fern’s own career in the literary marketplace.
For professional women writers of the nineteenth century, personal and
public identity manifested itself into “a bundle of contradictions” since women
like Fern (and others such as E.D.E.N. Southworth, Frances E.W. Harper, and
Lydia Maria Childe, to name a few) often commanded high prices for their work
and regularly produced bestselling books, but many times, as in this case with
Ruth Hall, these women had to rest their literary ambitions on the welfare of
her children or through the morals of True Womanhood. For all their success, these women commanded
almost no lasting critical respect.
Twentieth century women writers
also met with such contradictions and writers such as Edith Wharton and Willa
Cather had to carefully craft their public personas in an order to thwart
nineteenth-century stereotypes that women “authoresses” were merely second-rate
artists. Further, the growth of
celebrity culture added to an increased interest in the private lives of
writers, and, as Barbara Hochman notes, “many publications catered to the
reading publics wish to ‘know’ authors by providing new modes of access to
them” (27). The ways in which Wharton
and Cather responded to those cultural pressures varies greatly from those writers
of the previous century, and indeed, a study of Wharton’s and Cather’s public
and private personas showcases the power of both class and region in building a
literary project at the turn of the century.
As women writers in a field still dominated by male critics and writers,
Wharton and Cather had to negotiate their own “bundle of contradictions” as
they worked out their public and private identities as women novelists. In this chapter, I will explore how Wharton
and Cather constructed their public/private personas in terms of self-fashioning
themselves as professional and regional writers.
As a woman of the upper class,
Edith Wharton, like most women of her class, was certainly not raised to be a
writer—and most certainly not a professional writer. “In the eyes of our
provincial society,” Wharton recounts in her autobiography A Backward Glance,
“authorship was sill regarded as something between a black art and a form of
manual labour,” (69). Wharton further
frames herself in her autobiography as child who was an “omnivorous reader,”
and who followed the “many prohibitions” in reading material her mother
“imposed” on her (65). For this, Wharton
says that she grew up reading only the “essentials,” which translates into a
long list of classic male writers and, critically, only a few women: Mrs. Heman
and Mrs. Browning (66), Mrs. Beecher Stowe (“who was so ‘common’ yet so
successful) (68), and the Brontës (“who shrank in agony from being suspected of
successful novel writing”) (69). Wharton notes that she was “forbidden” to read
the “lesser novelists of the day,” what can only be interpreted as a subtle
hint to contemporary women novelists of her day who were producing much of the
best-selling fiction. Finishing her
chapter, “Little Girl,” Wharton reflects on her “dream of a literary career,”
that “faded into unreality” because “I had never even seen [a writer] in the
flesh!” (76).
Indeed, when Wharton, critics, and other writers frame public images
of Wharton in magazines and journals, she is framed around a masculine
tradition of writing rather than a feminine tradition. As mentioned above, Wharton rarely cited
women writers besides women such as Jane Austin, and she never cites
contemporary novelists at all, besides at rare intervals to showcase her own
mastery over “second rate” sentimentalists.
Early critics, too, constructed Wharton as a different kind of woman
writer, she was “misleading,” as one critic wrote in The Nation (Oct. 30, 1913: 404).
In this case, that amounts to a combination of Wharton’s “breeding” and
her “gentlemanlike” style. While touting
her writing as such, The Nation
reviewer says that she is nevertheless “strongly feminine” made interesting
through its “hint of contradiction” (404).
Even constructed in a space between masculine and feminine writing,
Wharton is nevertheless a “nervous, cultivated American woman,” whose writing
is limited as “an extremely clever performer” (404).
Wharton’s first major publication was The Decoration of Houses,
which she co-authored with Codman. With
it, Wharton set up what would be a major aspect of her public identity, her
expertise on high forms of cultural knowledge.
Part Martha Stewart part historian, Wharton continued to publish works
such as Italian Villas and Their Gardens
(1904), one year before she would find critical and best-selling success with The House of Mirth. Find House of Mirth
discussions??? Advertising???
Further, Wharton’s continued success came from her publicly touted
friendship with Henry James. While
critics were quick to see Wharton’s literary connections to James even before
she became close friends with him, Wharton’s career was largely mapped out as a
Jamesian protégé.
When it came time for Cather to
publicize her new novel, O Pioneers!
in 1912, she had to work out critical issues of marketing both her authorial
self and the book to an increasingly
sophisticated American book-buying public. After Cather’s self-proclaimed
failure with her first novel, Alexander’s
Bridge, the success and marketing of her new, and potentially risky,
Nebraska novel would be critical for her career. Cather’s years as an editor at
McClure’s magazine made her “more
sharply aware,” as Janis Stout puts it, “of both literary fashion and the ways
in which fiction got itself published” (89).
With this in mind, Cather’s marketing of her first Nebraska novel
(including the important necessity of writing her authorial self into the
marketing) set a tone that would largely characterize her public reputation
(and her later celebrity status). She may have been asking whether her success
with the new novel would allow her to continue writing, especially with S.S.
McClure’s earlier warning that she could not pull off a successful professional
writing career. In this paper I will
explore Cather’s early newspaper interviews in which she positions her
authorial self as a regional writer, arguing specifically that through these
interviews she modernizes and complicates former literary understandings of
regional writing in general and western regionalism in particular.
One of the most notable aspects of
Cather’s early interviews is the way she consistently refers to Sarah Orne
Jewett as her literary mentor. While
Sharon O’Brien and Marilee Lindemann have made much of the Jewett-Cather
relationship, both concentrate on Cather’s preface to a collection of Jewett’s
work. Cather’s use of Jewett’s name and
literary reputation in this preface was, arguably, different than her use of
Jewett’s name some twelve years earlier.
By 1925 Cather was sure of her literary powers—in fact, she was at the
height of her creative output, producing One
of Ours, for which she won the Pulitzer prize, A Lost Lady, The Professor’s
House, and would soon begin her masterpiece, Death Comes For the Archbishop.
If we move back in time to 1912 and in the immediate years following,
Cather’s future lay uncertain, and her use of Jewett’s name and literary
reputation introduced Cather’s own name in connection to a respectable American
literary tradition of New England regionalism.
Cather met Jewett through Annie Fields in 1908 in Boston while
Cather was researching a series of articles on Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of
Christian Science, for McClure’s
magazine (Stout 98). As one of the most
well-known and respected “local color” writers of the late nineteenth century,
Jewett was one of many successful women writers (Freeman, Cooke, etc.) who
commanded the public’s attention and filled the pages of magazines. By the turn of the century, however, the
success of these local colorists diminished; as Donna M. Campbell explains, the
rise of male naturalist writers such as Dreiser, Crane, and Norris were a part
of “a backlash against what was
perceived as feminine domination of audience and literature alike” (47). While
Cather did not like many of these local color writers (most of whom were
women), she did admire Jewett’s work
(O’Brien 335). During their brief
relationship before Jewett’s death in 1909, Jewett urged Cather to abandon her
attempts at writing Jamesian fiction and rely on her own life experience for
subject matter. While Cather ignored
Jewett’s advice and wrote Alexandar’s
Bridge, she did begin to write about her memories of Nebraska in O Pioneers! Cather’s interviews during this period closely
mirror those Jewett gave years earlier in which Jewett discusses her technique
of writing from her early life experiences and her deep connection to the New
England landscape. In one circa 1900
interview, Jewett tells of following her physician father about “silently, like
an undemanding little dog,” to various patients “whom he used to visit in
lonely inland farms or on the sea-coast in York and Wells” collecting,
unconsciously, all of the details of “the country interiors.” “Now,” Jewett said in her interview, “as I
write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again the wise things
he said and the sights he made me see” (Famous
Authors 47). Throughout Jewett’s
discussions of her writing, she underscores the lived experience of the places
and memories that inspired her fiction in order to show the “authentic” experience
behind her fiction.
In 1913, while promoting her new novel, O Pioneers!, Cather began to invoke Jewett’s name and discuss
Jewett’s effect on her own writing. In fact, Cather dedicates the novel to
Jewett “in whose beautiful and delicate work there is the perfection that
endures.” In one interview, after
calling Mark Twain, Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett the “great ones” when
asked to name her favorite American writers, Cather relates finding a Jewett letter
“among some of her papers in South Berwick after her death.” Cather then goes on to quote a line from
Jewett’s letter: “Ah, it is things like that, which haunt the mind for years,
and at last write themselves down, that belong, whether little or great, to
literature.” In her interview, Cather
points to Jewett’s honesty, “that earnest endeavor to tell truly the thing that
haunts the mind,” that she most values
about her work. In showing Jewett’s
literary influence on her own writing, Cather later states in the same
interview that with O Pioneers! she
“tried to tell the story of the people as truthfully and simply as if I were
telling it to her by word of mouth” (Bohlke )
Cather’s use of Jewett’s name and literary heritage becomes a common
strategy for the emerging writer in her interviews throughout the teens. In a 1919 interview for the Chicago Daily News, Cather quotes Jewett
as telling her to “Write it as it is, don’t try to make it like this or that.
You cant’ do it in anybo[d]y’s else[s] way—you will have to make it your
own. If the way happens to be new, don’t
let that frighten you. Don’t’ try to
write the kind of stories that this or that magazine wants—write the truth and
let them take it or leave it” (Bohlke 18). In naming Jewett throughout her
interviews, Cather claims a link to Jewett’s legacy of regionalism. Yet, as a western writer, Cather’s claim to a
New England tradition suggests a complexity and depth to her construction. That
one of the most well-known and respected New England writers like Jewett could
become friends with and influence a new writer from the Nebraska plains upsets
easy notions of what defines “regional.”
Building her name on Jewett’s literary legacy instead of other notable
popular western writers like Owen Wister, Frank Norris, or Stephen Crane, she bypasses
the male western literary tradition for her own sense of regional/literary
identity.
In addition to mentioning Jewett’s influence in her early
interviews, Cather constructs her authorial self by developing a picture of her
Nebraska childhood throughout these interviews.
She often over-simplifies her childhood to interviewers, reducing her
experience to what L. Brent Bohlke has noted as a “romantic vision” of her life
that often featured her “riding recklessly across the Nebraska plains” on
ponies to the extant that “it would seem that even Cather herself began to
believe” these stories (xxii). Another way to interpret Cather’s “romantic
vision” is through Scott McCloud’s term amplification
through simplification, in which complex qualities are simplified to their
most basic, one-dimensional shape. The
simplified state, McCloud argues through the example of a photographic face
simplified into a happy face, allows for readers to absorb themselves into the
story, or, in the case of the happy face, the generalized shape of the face
allows the viewer to imagine the face in any number of ways, and hence it’s
possible meanings become amplified (McCloud ). So, then, in a similar way,
Cather’s mythic rendition of her Nebraska childhood allows readers the space to
imaginatively invent Cather. While her
generalizations about immigrant women, pony rides, and other experiences with
her natural surroundings gave readers a much different conception of the West
than dime-store westerns, her stories also have a bareness that allows readers
to imaginatively engage in her Nebraska childhood experiences. Cather’s repetition of this story, as Bohlke
notes, further amplifies her story, reinforcing her Nebraska ties and her
self-construction as a western writer (xxii).
That is, Cather’s authority to write about the west lie in her childhood
experiences.
Yet even while Cather builds herself as a Nebraskan, her interviews
also dislocate her from Nebraska. In the
Webster County Argus, for example, an
anonymous writer notes,
Naturally we were especially pleased when last Friday Miss Willa
Cather, whose address is New York City, but who is at home in Red Cloud, New
York, London, Paris or any other city on earth in which she happens to be,
called at this office for that reason.
Miss Cather is enjoying a several weeks’ visit with her parents… (Oct.
29th, 1921; Bohlke 26)
What is especially
noteworthy in these newspaper interviews with Cather is her ability to occupy a
multitude of authorial identities: a transplanted Virginian, an urban New York
writer, an international traveler, and a Nebraskan. While Cather’s focus on her
childhood in Nebraska may have served to underscore her authenticity as a
western writer, much in Jewett’s tradition, it also served to obfuscate the
other half of her life in the east, her New York life—an urban life very much
unlike that of her Nebraska novels. Yet, as these interviews show, readers were
made well aware of her New York address.
Unlike Jewett, who said in one interview that, “I was born here . . .
and I hope to die here” (Famous Authors 46),
Cather constructs herself in such a way that she does not tie herself to living
in Nebraska even as she claims that identity.
This complex stance on her Nebraska/urban identity is taken up in a
1921 interview, in which Cather states that she “will have it distinctly
understood that she is not an eastern, western, northern or southern writer,
but first and foremost a Nebraskan.” The
article explains that,
When questioned as to why she
considered herself a Nebraskan after so many years abroad and in the east, she
replied, “Because my father and mother sill live in Nebraska. They have lived
here for 30 odd years, and because I came to Nebraska when I was 8 and lived
her until I finished college at 19, and the years from 8 to 15 are the
formative period of a writer’s life, when he unconsciously gathers basic
material. (Omaha Bee 29 Oct. 1921;
Bohke 31).
While western
writing has a history of transplanted writers, making their careers writing
about their non-native west (Owen Wister, for example), Cather was from the
West and she made her living writing about the West from the East. To construct a sense of authenticity, she
underscores her family ties to the state.
As she claims in one interview, “my grandparents were among the real pioneers” (emphasis added; Philadelphia Record 10 Aug. 1913; Bohlke
11). In yet another interview, Cather,
while in France, claims that “she is skeptical about remaining there, for as
she recalled Paris last autumn, when the leaves were turning yellow on the
cottonwoods along the boulevards, she said she would sit by the Seine and feel
weepy and homesick for the Republican valley” (Omaha Bee Oct. 29 1921). The
play Cather makes between the cultural cache of “taking up an apartment in
Paris,” and her “homesickness” for Red Cloud, reveals how she could map out a
complex range of geographies for herself.
She is able to live the life of a successful writer, traveling to exotic
locations to relax, but in connecting the Seine to the Republican valley, she
shows how she remains loyal to her Nebraska roots.
Even in early Cather novels we can
chart a geographical pull away from Nebraska.
While working on O Pioneers!, for
example, Cather’s trip to the Southwest had a deep impact on her sense of
place. David Stouck has noted that there is a “uncommon degree” of
autobiography in Cather’s fiction, and so, not surprisingly, in Cather’s next
novel, The Song of the Lark, Thea’s
most powerful awakening moment does not occur in Nebraska, but rather in
Panther Canyon. In the Introduction to My Antonia, we are told that Jim Burden,
again like Cather herself, is a displaced Nebraskan living in New York but
still retains “those big Western dreams” that make for a “quiet drama . . . in
one’s brain” (xi). Even as she tried to
construct herself as a Nebraskan in her interviews, the displaced characters we
find in her novels reflect her own complex relationship to Nebraska, her urban
lifestyle, and her sense of place.
Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have recently argued that that a
complex relationship to place has been the norm, rather than the exception, for
women’s regional writing. They say that,
These writers both in their
fictions and in their own biographies frequently move back and forth between
urban and rural/”regional” places; while cosmopolitan attitudes might assume
clear barriers between the modernizing life of the cities and the presumptively
pre-modern world of the regions, for the writers themselves and in their
regionalist texts, these barriers become permeable and transitive. (5)
Certainly
for Cather, while she skirted around her New York life in interviews, her
readers gained a sense of this “permeable and transitive” space as they
followed Cather throughout many geographies.
While this paper is not looking at
how Cather’s readers and critics were responding to her literary
self-fashioning, two key literary figures of this time period stand out in
their response to Cather’s relationship to place. F. Scott Fitzergerald remarked in the 1919
volume of The Men Who Make Our Novels,
that, “the writer, if he has any aspirations toward art, should try to convey
the feel of his scenes, places and peoples directly—as Conrad does, as a few
Americans (notably Willa Cather) are already trying to do” (167). That Fitzgerald positions Cather in the same
breath as Conrad suggests that he saw her not as a mere “regional” writer, but
as a serious writer using place to develop American fiction. Further, Sinclair
Lewis told an Omaha audience in 1921 that,
Willa Sibert Cather is greater than
General Pershing; she is incomparably greater than William Jennings Bryan. She
is Nebraska’s foremost citizen because through her stories she has made the
outside world know Nebraska as no one else has done. (Omaha World Herald 10 April, 1921)
That these
prominent and popular writers of the time saw Cather as a successful model of a
modern writer connecting herself not only to place, but to a tradition of great
literature, shows that her early self-fashioning was, in many ways, successful.
Certainly both writers were trying to do the same, and as Fitzgerald’s comment
suggests, Cather was leading the way toward a new American literary tradition.
While Cather’s construction of her authorial
self as western writer in the time period between O Pioneers! and My Antonia
was largely successful, she faced increasing problems as some critics railed
against her portrayal of World War I France in One of Ours. Hemingway’s
famous reaction to the novel, that Cather lifted her war scenes from Birth of a Nation and “Catherized” it,
suggests that while Cather could write seriously about the Nebraska landscape,
she transgressed her boundaries when writing about war (Woodress 333). Cather’s
successful self-construction as a Nebraska writer ultimately limited her
ability to move her subject matter and authorial self into new directions. Her identity as a Nebraskan feminized her in
connection to the land, and to take up a masculine space—as Hemingway’s remark
powerfully shows—was to transgress upon male writing. As the politics of the literary landscape
shifted in the 1920s, the context and success of Cather’s authorial identity
created problems for her. Yet he
controversy surrounding her Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours opened her up to a much broader audience and
consequently, her subsequent novel, A
Lost Lady, was a critical and popular success. So, while Cather was, in some ways, limited
by her Nebraska childhood identity and subject matter, it did not hinder her
finding a broad readership and later, taking dramatic risks with Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock. While I think that Cather tried to build a
complexity into her regional identity by trying to create a more complex,
kaleidoscopic view of regionalism, her image ultimately became simplified by
her readers and critics as a Nebraska writer.
For Cather, her own literary self-fashioning was much like her
relationship to the land itself, as she said of Nebraska in one early
interview, it was “the happiness and the curse of my life.”
Works Cited
Baldman, Charles C. The Men Who Make Our Novels.
NY: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1924.
Campbell, Donna M. Resisting Regionalism: Gender and
Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915. Athens: Ohio UP, 1997.
Bohlke, L. Brent, ed. Willa Cather in Person:
Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1986.
Cather, Willa. My
Antonia. Lincoln, U Nebraska P, 1994.
---.The Song of the Lark. Lincoln, U Nebraska P,
1972.
---. Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and
Letters. L. Brent Bohlke ed. Lincoln, U Nebraska P, 1986.
Gordon, George [Crittenton, Charles Baldwin]. The Men
Who Make Our Novels. NY: Moffat, Yard & Co., 1919.
Fetterly, Judith and Marjorie Pryse. Writing Out of
Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Culture. Urbana: U Chicago P, 2003.
Harkinks, E.F. Famous Authors (Women). Boston:
L.C. Page, 1901.
Lindemann, Marilee. Willa Cather: Queering America.
NY: Columbia UP, 1999.
O”Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
Stout, Janis. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World.
Charlottesville: U Virginina P, 2000.
Woodress, James. Willa
Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln, U Nebraska P, 1987.
?Omaha World Herald Article in Archives
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