Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
In her introduction to Isolation and Masquerade Frances Kaye immediately establishes her disagreement with Sharon O'Brien's views of Willa Cather as they appear in O'Brien's 1987 work, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. O'Brien's 1995 book was written for the Chelsea House young adult Gay Men and Lesbians series, but though this work, unlike the 1987 book, takes the writer into her last days, O'Brien's perspective on Cather's accomplishments is essentially no different from what she has already revealed; so, we can be certain that Kaye's disagreements would also apply to O'Brien's more recent efforts. Two more different views of a single subject are unimaginable. Kaye explains that her purpose in writing Isolation and Masquerade was to pin down what she has always found "discomforting-and finally profoundly distasteful" in Willa Cather's writing: what Kaye characterizes as Cather's "sense that the concerns of ordinary women, heterosexual or homosexual, are not valid and do not deserve to be voiced" (p. 188). Kaye wishes to demonstrate that Cather saw herself as separate from other women, both in terms of her lesbianism and her role as an artist. Her self-isolation was unfortunate for Cather herself, Kaye believes, because it involved psychic costs; but even worse, its results, as manifested in her work, are dangerous for readers. Kaye complains that Cather asks the female reader to identify with Alexandra and repudiate heterosexual passion; to identify with Thea and repudiate the concerns of other women. Even lesbian readers can be led astray by Cather, Kaye believes, when they are asked to identify with Jim Burden and stand by helplessly as a loved woman is lost to a heterosexist society. Hence, all women readers are forced to pay "psychic and social costs" (p. 187) if they are seduced by Cather's work.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:1 (Winter 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.