at her request, and she passed away in her Manhattan home in 1947.
In the pantheon of ‘Great American Writers’
Despite the growing reluctance in the 1930s to take Cather’s writing seriously, critics today have once again embraced her. She is credited with shifting the roots of early American writing from the New England of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the transcendentalists, and opening it up to the wild plains of the Midwest. Yet her writing differs from traditional ‘frontier literature’ in the sense that she engages with the land itself, the Native Americans who lived there and the immigrant experience. Therefore, her works never quite fit into the ‘manifest destiny’ ideal of American literature, despite many of them being set amongst the frontier towns that drove the ideal of American expansion. Her writing would go on to bear a great influence on later authors such as Cormac McCarthy, and his novel Blood Meridien, and continues to engage literary critics today.
My Ántonia
Cather published her most recognizable work, My Ántonia, in 1918, as a conclusion to her ‘Prairie Trilogy’, which included O, Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. Many elements of Cather’s life made their way into My Ántonia: her early encounters with the Nebraskan landscape and frontier life; the American immigrant experience; and the rich interior life of her heroines’ later years in life. Although her narrator, Jim Burden, feels a keen nostalgia for his childhood spent in the countryside with his friend, it is in the tender descriptions of Ántonia as an adult that we see Cather’s true strength as a novelist. Cather’s focus on the middle-aged woman, and the reluctance to have the story driven solely by romantic relationships – as exemplified by Ántonia, but also appearing repeatedly throughout her oeuvre – is completely unique, not only among her American contemporaries, but among her fellow novelists of the Western tradition. It is no wonder that Virginia Woolf admired Cather’s work, and that generations of readers have continued to return to My Ántonia.
Sources
Parrish, T. (2012). Introduction. In T. Parrish (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. Xvii-Xxxiv).
Lindemann, M. (2005). Introduction. In M. Lindemann (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 1-16).
Goldman, A. (2005). Rereading My Ántonia. In M. Lindemann (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 159-174).
Reynolds, G. (2005). Willa Cather as progressive. In M. Lindemann (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 19-34). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden—Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West. He and I are old friends—we grew up together in the same Nebraska town—and we had much to say to each other. While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.
Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends, I do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks together. That is one reason why we do not often meet. Another is that I do not like his wife.
When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage. Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished man. Her marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp comment at the time. It was said she had been brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland Whitney, and that she married this unknown man from the West out of bravado. She was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something unexpected. She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing during a garment-makers’ strike, etc. I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm. Her husband’s quiet tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth while to play the patroness to a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas and mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives her own life. For some reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden.
As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his naturally romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it often made him seem very funny when he was a boy, has been one of the strongest elements in his success. He loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development. He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable things in mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an idea can once get Jim Burden’s attention, can manage to accompany him when he goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons, then the money which means action is usually forthcoming. Jim is still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams. Though he is over forty now, he meets new people and new enterprises with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood friends remember him. He never seems to me to grow older. His fresh color and sandy hair and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man, and his sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful as it is Western and American.
During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood. To speak her name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one’s brain. I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart time enough to enjoy that friendship. His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her.
‘I can’t see,’ he said impetuously, ‘why you have never written anything about Ántonia.’
I told him I had always felt that other people—he himself, for one knew her much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with him; I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Ántonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her.
He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took hold of him. ‘Maybe I will, maybe I will!’ he declared. He stared out of the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about myself. It’s through myself that I knew and felt her, and I’ve had no practice in any other form of presentation.’
I