Cather Studies, Volume 10: Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century

by Cather Studies, Richard H. Millington (Editor), Anne L Kaufman (Editor)

Overview

Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century explores, with textual specificity and historical alertness, the question of how the cultures of the nineteenth century—the cultures that shaped Willa Cather’s childhood, animated her education, supplied her artistic models, generated her inordinate ambitions, and gave embodiment to many of her deeply held values—are addressed in her fiction.

 

In two related sets of essays, seven contributors track within Cather’s life or writing the particular cultural formations, emotions, and conflicts of value she absorbed from the atmosphere of her distinct historical moment; their ten colleagues offer a compelling set of case studies that articulate the manifold ways that Cather learned from, built upon, or resisted models provided by particular nineteenth-century writers, works, or artistic genres. Taken together with its Cather Studies predecessor, Willa Cather and Modern Cultures, this volume reveals Cather as explorer and interpreter, sufferer and master of the transition from a Victorian to a Modernist America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803277243
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	08/01/2015
Series:	Cather Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	440
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Anne L. Kaufman teaches mathematics at Milton Academy and is a visiting lecturer in English at Bridgewater State University. Her work has appeared in Western American Literature, Canadian Literature, Western Historical Quarterly, and elsewhere. Richard H. Millington is Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of English at Smith College. He is the author of essays on Cather’s modernism and of Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction, and he is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Norton Critical Edition of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.

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Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century

Cather Studies 10

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By Anne L. Kaufman, Richard H. Millington

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7724-3

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CHAPTER 1

Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality

Melissa J. Homestead

In late November of 1908 Sarah Orne Jewett wrote a much-quoted letter to Willa Cather, in which she responded to Cather's story "The Gull's Road," just published in the December 1908 issue of McClure's magazine:

[W]ith what deep happiness and recognition I have read the "McClure" story, — night before last I found it with surprise and delight. It made me feel very near to the writer's young and loving heart. You have drawn your two figures of the wife and her husband with unerring touches and wonderful tenderness for her. It makes me the more sure that you are far on your road toward a fine and long story of very high class. The lover is as well done as he could be when a woman writes in the man's character, — it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade. I think it is safer to write about him as you did about the others, and not try to be he! And you could almost have done it as yourself — a woman could love her in that same protecting way — a woman could even care enough to wish to take her away from such a life, by some means or other. But oh, how close — how tender — how true the feeling is! (Letters 246–47).

In Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present Lillian Faderman cites this letter and Jewett and Cather's friendship to illuminate a great divide in the history of lesbian sexuality between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Jewett's novel Deephaven and her short story "Martha's Lady" have romantic attachments between women at their center, and Jewett lived openly in a publicly acknowledged "Boston marriage" with Annie Adams Fields. In contrast, Faderman writes, "There is absolutely no suggestion of same-sex love in Cather's fiction. Perhaps," she further hypothesizes, Cather "felt the need to be more reticent about love between women ... because she bore a burden of guilt for what came to be labeled perversion" in the last decade of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth (201). Referring to Jewett's advice that Cather write from a woman's point of view about the love of a woman for another woman, Faderman suggests, "The letter must have made Cather blush — but Jewett probably would not have known what she was blushing about" (202).

Since the publication of Surpassing the Love of Men in 1981 and Sharon O'Brien's biography Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice in 1987, Cather's fiction has been subjected to scores of queer readings. These readings are, in many respects, premised on a very different understanding of gender, sexuality, and identity than Faderman and O'Brien deploy in their biographical identifications of Cather as a lesbian. Nevertheless, these queer readings rest upon a biographical foundation, and in particular upon an understanding of Cather as secretive, private, and afflicted with shame. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in an influential reading of The Professor's House that inspired many critics to produce their own queer readings of the novel, proclaims that its structure and its focus on bonds between men register "the shadows of the brutal suppressions by which a lesbian love did not in Willa Cather's time and culture become freely visible as itself" (69). Building on Sedgwick's reading, Christopher Nealon maintains that characters in Cather's fiction create "affect genealogies" "linking the lonely dreamers who populate her fiction within their privacy" ("Affect-Genealogy" 10); he links this fictional dynamic to Cather herself, "who also knew the pathos of secrecy" (11). In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History Heather Love places Cather's fiction in a tradition of other "dark, ambivalent texts [that] register their authors' painful negotiation of the coming of modern homosexuality" with their emphasis on "feelings such as nostalgia, regret, shame, despair, ressentiment, passivity, escapism, self-hatred, withdrawal, bitterness, defeatism, and loneliness. These feelings are," Love argues, "tied to the experience of social exclusion and the historical 'impossibility' of same-sex desire" (40).

Love also suggests that "critics have tended to overstate the absolute nature of [the] historical break" between Cather and Jewett (92). She bridges this gap by reconfiguring Jewett, focusing on the failures of friendship and community in Jewett's fiction and on the lonely spinster as central to her lesbian aesthetic. I propose to bridge the gap by another route, by reconfiguring Cather through a return to and revision of biography. Many queer readings of Cather's fiction are based, either explicitly or implicitly, on Sharon O'Brien's recovery of Cather's experiences of gender and sexuality in the late 1880s in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and in the early 1890s in Lincoln, Nebraska. Love, for example, vaguely telegraphs this biographical ground for interpretation when she characterizes Cather as "associated ... with the anxieties of sexual definition at the turn of the century in her taking of a male persona, in her excoriation of [Oscar] Wilde after his trial, and in her at times virulent misogyny" (Feeling Backward 92). Cather's "male persona" did not long survive her move from Red Cloud to Lincoln to attend the University of Nebraska, and her "virulent misogyny" and "excoriation" of Wilde in the wake of his trial for homosexuality are found in her journalism of the 1890s. While resting on this foundation of early biography, queer readings often (although not exclusively) focus on Cather's later fiction; following Sedgwick's powerful example, they most often focus on The Professor's House, producing ever more refined readings of the dynamics of desire and identification in Cather's novel featuring what Sedgwick calls a "gorgeous homosocial romance of two men" at its center (68). Queer readings also often incorporate into their analytical frame Cather's melancholic, backward-looking essays "148 Charles Street" and "Miss Jewett" as published in Not Under Forty (1936).

O'Brien's biography follows Cather only until 1915, but queer readings of Cather's fiction leave behind its culmination, in which O'Brien argues that Cather's encounters with Fields and Jewett in 1908 gave Cather evidence "that love and work might coexist, a hopeful sign to Cather who was developing her relationship with Edith Lewis at this time" (342). In this essay, then, I reread and reframe evidence contemporaneous with Cather's encounters with Jewett to disrupt notions of Cather's "now-notorious sexual privacy" (as Scott Herring refers to it in yet another reading of the Professor's House ["Catherian Friendship" 68]) that undergird queer readings of her fiction. Cather's supposed efforts to recall and destroy her letters to protect her privacy have become a commonplace of Cather biography and criticism, including queer readings. In Willa Cather: Queering America, for example, Marilee Lindemann characterizes Cather in her late life as targeting her letters in a "search-and-destroy mission" because "she sought frantically to protect her privacy and her public (asexual) image" (5). It is beyond the scope of this essay to provide broader evidence overturning claims about Cather-as-letter-burner. However, by closely examining the Cather-Jewett correspondence and considering how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary historians have come to know it, I complicate commonly held assumptions about Cather's desire to hide or destroy evidence of her same- sex attachments.

As I demonstrate, Cather did not (contra Faderman) "blush" when she received Jewett's letter of advice. She did not follow Jewett's advice by writing fiction that represented romantic love between women (nor, for that matter, did she immediately follow Jewett's advice to leave McClure's magazine to devote herself to writing fiction full time, waiting three years to do so). However, this aesthetic choice is not evidence of how Cather lived her life, either in 1908 or in the subsequent thirty-nine years (shared, notably, with Edith Lewis). The remainder of this essay seeks to recover the visibility of Lewis and Cather's partnership for those thirty-nine years, first focusing most intensively on three sets of evidence from its beginning in 1908 — Jewett's letters to Cather, Cather's letters to Jewett, and Cather's Christmas present to Edith Lewis — and then surveying the evidence preserved in letters from subsequent years.

First, why is it that Jewett's letters to Cather from 1908 are so widely quoted (the other widely quoted one being about why Cather should leave McClure's)? Because they were published in 1911 in The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, edited by Annie Fields. Notably, this publication occurred not just during Cather's lifetime but before even the publication of her first novel. Jewett's will, signed in 1897 and probated in the fall of 1909, gave Mary Rice Jewett (her sister) and Fields joint authority over her "unprinted papers and unpublished manuscripts," further specifying that she gave them sole authority over publication of manuscript materials, including "any of my letters whoever [sic] hands may be ... they being well aware of what would please me in this regard or what I should dislike" (Jewett, "Excerpts"). As Jewett's will assumes and common sense dictates, Fields could only publish letters from Jewett to persons other than Fields herself if those persons granted Fields access to them. Cather herself could not have published the Jewett letters in her possession without permission from Jewett's literary estate: the copyright in an unpublished letter resides in the author or in the author's heirs or assigns, not in the recipient. Conversely, however, Fields could not publish them without Cather's cooperation and consent.

The three letters from Jewett to Cather published in Life and Letters were clearly not the only ones Cather had in her possession. Many times in her critical writings and in interviews Cather refers to advice from Jewett contained in letters, including in the famous opening of her preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, later revised and published as "Miss Jewett" in Not Under Forty: "In reading over a package of letters from Sarah Orne Jewett, I find this observation: 'The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down on paper — whether little or great, it belongs to Literature'" (ix). These oft-quoted words of wisdom do not appear, however, in any of the three letters to Cather published in 1911.

After 1911 Cather was asked more than once to grant access to additional Jewett letters in her possession. In 1927, when a young F. O. Matthiessen wrote her asking for information and letters for his planned biocritical study of Jewett, she told him to contact Mary Jewett, Theodore Jewett Eastman (Sarah and Mary's nephew), and Houghton Mifflin editor Ferris Greenslet for information. She further advised, "Such of my letters from Miss Jewett as I would care to make public are already printed in Mrs. Fields' collection of Miss Jewett's letters." In 1941, when Carl J. Weber, librarian at Colby College, wrote an aging Cather to ask her to deposit her Jewett letters at Colby, Cather conceded that she might, in the future, "feel the time has come for depositing Miss Jewett's letters" in a library and that she would, at that time, "consider [Colby's] friendly offer of hospitality." She also made it clear that she had more letters than were included in Fields's edited volume and explained how the three came to be published: "Miss Jewett's letters written to me, are the very personal letters of a dear friend and have great value for me. The only letters which I thought had any special interest for the public, I allowed Mrs. James T. Fields to use in her volume of Miss Jewett's letters, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1911. I allowed her to use these letters because she convinced me that they offered very good advice to all young writers."

There is no epistolary trail from 1909, 1910, or 1911, substantiating her account here of negotiations with Fields over which letters she would allow to be published. However, Cather made yearly week-long visits to Fields in Boston, including a visit in spring 1911, just as Fields was completing her preparation of the volume, and the transaction could have easily taken place in person.

After The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett appeared, Annie Fields seems to have returned most of the letters to their owners (i.e., their original recipients), and many, including the three to Cather, cannot, as of the writing of this essay, be located in manuscript. Furthermore, scholars comparing those that are extant in libraries in manuscript (many of them Jewett's letters to Fields) with the print volume have discovered that Fields exercised a heavy editorial hand, omitting portions of many letters. Indeed, much has been made of M. A. DeWolfe Howe's advice to Fields that she eliminate from Jewett's letters to her many of their nicknames for one another because "all sorts of people" might "read[] them wrong" (Howe 84). Fields followed his advice.8 It is thus entirely possible, even likely, that Fields (of her own accord or at Cather's suggestion) edited out portions of Jewett's letters to Cather. Notably, because Jewett's manuscript letters to Cather are currently not known to exist, scholars today have access to them only as print artifacts produced in 1911. Although Lillian Faderman imagines Jewett and Cather on opposite sides of a great divide in 1908, three years later, in 1911, neither Cather nor Fields found anything to blush about in Jewett's three letters to Cather. Instead they collaborated in making them public.

Cather's side of this correspondence from 1908 — and the fact that it exists more than a century later — is equally illuminating. Cather's letters are not entirely about her struggles to balance magazine work with fiction writing. Instead one of them also comments on the beginning of her domestic partnership with Edith Lewis. In a long letter dated 24 October 1908 Cather expresses pleasure that Fields and Jewett were enjoying a novel by their friend Mrs. Humphry Ward in serialization in McClure's; consoles them for the loss of Charles Eliot Norton (a retired Harvard professor and father of their friend Sara Norton); praises a package sent by Jewett containing a volume of Annie Fields's poetry, The Singing Shepherd (1895); describes the positive response to the publication of Jewett's poem "The Gloucester Mother" in McClure's; alerts Jewett to the imminent publication of "The Gull's Road" in McClure's; and sends her a manuscript of an unpublished story declined by McClure's and Scribner's (most likely "The Enchanted Bluff"). Right in the middle of this densely packed letter Cather describes the success of her new living arrangements with Lewis, shifting intricately back and forth between their shared domestic and professional lives (Lewis was also on the editorial staff of McClure's in 1908).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century by Anne L. Kaufman, Richard H. Millington. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations,
Introduction Anne L. Kaufman and Richard H. Millington,
Part 1. Contexts,
1. Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality Melissa J. Homestead,
2. Cather's Readers, Traditionalism, and Modern America Charles Johanningsmeier,
3. Time Out of Place: Modernity and the Rise of Environmentalism in Willa Cather's O Pioneers! Leila C. Nadir,
4. Contamination, Modernity, Health, and Art in Edith Wharton and Willa Cather Susan Meyer,
5. From Sentimentality to Sex: The Circus Motif in Willa Cather's Writing Steven B. Shively,
6. Daughter of a War Lost, Won, and Evaded: Cather and the Ambiguities of the Civil War Janis Stout,
7. A [Slave] Girl's Life in Virginia before the War: Willa Cather and Antebellum Nostalgia John Jacobs,
Part 2. Precursors and Influences,
8. Cather's Jewett: Relationship, Influence, and Representation Deborah Carlin,
9. Willa Cather and the Example of Henry James Elsa Nettels,
10. Kindred Spirits: Willa Cather and Henry James John J. Murphy,
11. The Rise of Godfrey St. Peter: Cather's Modernism and the Howellsian Pretext Joseph C. Murphy,
12. Echoes of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage in Willa Cather's One of Ours Ann Moseley,
13. Thackeray's Henry Esmond and The Virginians: Literary Prototypes for My Mortal Enemy Richard C. Harris,
14. "One Knows It Too Well to Know It Well": Willa Cather, A. E. Housman, and A Shropshire Lad Robert Thacker,
15. Following the Lieder: Cather, Schubert, and Lucy Gayheart David Porter,
16. Pompeii and the House of the Tragic Poet in A Lost Lady Matthew Hokom,
17. Making It New: O Pioneers! as Modernist Bildungsroman Sarah Stoeckl,
Contributors,
Index,