O Pioneer?

"The Prosaic Willa Cather" by James Seaton, in The American Scholar (Winter 1998), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009.

Once put down by modernists as an outdated expression of Victorian genteel culture, the fiction of Willa Cather (1873–1947) is now enjoying a revival. Her chief champions are feminist literary critics, who have been busily reinterpreting her work in terms of her identity as a woman and (putatively) a lesbian.

Though the feminist approach at least has people reading Cather again, it is unlikely, argues Seaton, an English professor at Michigan State University, to long sustain her reputation as the major writer and cultural critic that she is. For Cather’s status to be secure, he maintains, "the search for the origins of her opinions must give way to a renewed attempt to understand the significance of the view of the world achieved when those opinions become transmuted into novels, short stories, and essays." Whereas feminists look, for instance, to Cather’s supposed lesbianism to explain why romantic love between men and women in her fiction leads to disillusion and death, while friendship nourishes and protects, Seaton sees something else at work, something linked to "her affirmation of organized religion and ordinary family life."

O Pioneers! (1913), a Cather novel set in the Nebraska prairie of the late 19th century, may seem to lend itself to a political reading. Emil Bergson and Marie Tovesky Shabata become lovers, only to be shot a few hours later by her husband, when he finds them asleep together under a white mulberry tree. Yet Seaton says that it is not simply heterosexual attraction that led the lovers astray but an unbridled "spirituality that defies human nature." She, according to the novel, was in search of "perfect love," and he, of "rapture... without sin."

"In contrast to such romantic spirituality," writes Seaton, stands organized religion, which, throughout Cather’s fiction, figures "as a rock anchoring the changing aspirations and hopes of individuals to a larger order."

Whether in the 19th-century Southwest of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) or in the 17th-century Quebec of Shadows on the Rock (1931), Seaton says, Cather is not trying to satisfy an appetite for the exotic. Instead, the glimpses the novels offer of the religion or the art of a past culture bring home "the continuing importance of everyday life, of the meaningfulness of the constant daily efforts to concentrate upon and order an otherwise chaotic existence." Art and religion in Cather’s fiction emerge from daily life "as continuations and deepenings of everyday routine."

In Cather’s art, Seaton concludes, one can make out "the hidden connections between grand moral principles and seemingly trivial choices, between everyday life and high art." And, in the end, the high art includes Cather’s own.