Book Review -One of Ours by Willa Cather
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MFS Modernistic Fiction Studies 47.iv (2001) 1037-1038
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Book Review
Willa Cather:
The Writer and Her Globe
Americas
Janis P. Stout. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2000. eighteen + 381 pp.
In the last 2 decades, scholarship has illuminated the versatility of Willa Cather's biography and work, its capacity for supporting widely variant, sometimes antonymous, critical responses and interpretations. Cather was complicated enough to present with convincing self-assurance all the faces that differing camps among her readers accept wanted (or suspected, or sometimes feared): simultaneously prairie regionalist and urbane Francophile, emancipated woman and misogynist, freethinking Bohemian and conservative Republican, celebrant of immigrant experience and narrow nativist.
In Willa Cather: The Author and Her World, Janis P. Stout adopts this central quality of self-contradicting multiplicity as the exploratory instrument with which to address Cather'southward life and major fictions. "I see Cather," she begins, "every bit a securely conflicted writer who fits comfortably into no box, a person of profound ambivalence [. . .] who therefore structured her writing in such ways as to control her uncertainty." She acknowledges that a "conflicted Cather" is by no ways new to criticism and is non an approach to literary form as defensive symptom. Every bit she notes, Hermione Lee and Merrill Skaggs have written volume-length treatments of the internal divisions manifest in Cather's fiction. Sharon O'Brien established symptomatic reading equally a dominant style of Cather criticism in 1987's Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. Stout'south project is to sustain a symptomatic reading of Cather's typical ambivalence across her entire career, and to refer information technology not only to biography (whose layered depth she ably invokes through an exceptional knowledge of Cather's unpublished messages), but as well to the historical determinants and conditions of American literary modernism.
Stout explores the well-known wink points of Cather criticism in the last twenty-five years: cross-dressing, lesbianism, misogyny, crude racism, complicity in late imperialism. Her tactics are generally condiment, non reductive, expanding cultural contexts rather than taking sides on questions of the "existent" Willa Cather. Thus, for instance, she refers Cather's youthful mannish rebellion of the belatedly 1880s and early 1890s not only to "emerging lesbianism" merely too to "the markings past which the New Woman was and then being defined, available to her in the national magazines that [End Folio 1037] her family purchased and kept." Such circumspection is unarguably off-white-minded, and the extensive contextualizing that produces it provides a useful corrective to more idiosyncratic, selective readings. On the other manus, Stout'south calmly reasonable analysis tin can be even-handed to the point of bathos, as it is occasionally in her discussion of Cather's inconsistent anti-Semitism, which concludes fatalistically that for Cather "the earth was too circuitous to yield easy answers"--surely an evasive easy respond itself to the artistic and psychological puzzle of Cather's powerful, simple prejudices and loyalties.
On the whole, though, Stout's care and honesty pay off, and The Author and Her World is a valuably comprehensive piece of work. Stout writes most excitingly when she tracks her own deeply felt interests, equally in her intermittent but coherently illuminating analysis of Cather's persistent occlusions and misreadings of Native Americans, weaving through the novels from O Pioneers! to Death Comes for the Archbishop. This thread is itself an of import contribution to Cather scholarship, discovering in some unsuspected places a dandy American cultural anxiety and its repression. And the strength of Stout's reading lies in her personal alliance hither with a dissenting vocalization in Willa Cather, a nearly silenced voice that plant intolerable the unjust discourse of nation and race that her other, louder voices however vigorously deployed.
John Due north. Swift
Occidental College
...
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Source: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/21652
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