Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 4, Fall 1984, pp. 231-37.
Abstract
So much has been written about Willa Cather and the influence of the classics and later European literature that one sometimes forgets the American literary climate in which she developed. It was a postromantic age of realism, epitomized by William Dean Howells's attempt to limit fiction to normal characters in commonplace situations, which would make of it, as Cather complained, a "sort of young lady's illusion preserver." But the new breed of "naturalists," Cather's contemporaries, were in revolt against Howells and his more accomplished contemporary, Henry James, and advocated a return to romance without the chivalric trappings of Walter Scott and Dumas pere. Frank Norris, the most outspoken of a group that included Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser, pleaded for a serious response in his pointedly anti-Howells, anti-James statement against so-called realistic portrayals of the commonplace ("the drama of a broken tea cup, the tragedy of a walk down the block"). Romance would stress the abnormal in characterization and plot, treating American social problems, the dwellings of the poor, the outcasts, and so on, and would not be restricted to the norm of experience. McTeague, the 1899 novel in which Norris tried to fulfill these social responsibilities, was praised by Cather as a "great book," a powerful depiction of "brute strength and brute passions," a "searching analysis of the degeneration of ... two souls"; she detected his method as Zola's, "perhaps the only truthful literary method of dealing with that part of society which environment and heredity hedge about like the walls of a prison."
One need only review Cather's early story "The Clemency of the Court" (1893) to recognize her penchant for all the trappings of our naturalistic school: the effects of environment, evolutionary theory (the association of beast and man, and the reduction of a human to a bestial level), and adventure punctuated with revolting details (the killing of the dog and the farmer, and the tale of a prisoner in Russia committing suicide by biting deep into his arm, tearing open the veins with his teeth, and bleeding to death). A story like "On the Divide" three years later (1896) is similarly within the revolutionary, anti-Howellsian conventions of the age; it depicts a Norwegian giant who carries off a screaming woman, drinks himself into demonic stupors, and performs suicidal rituals in an oppressively hot, treeless environment where "it causes no sensation ... when a Dane is found swinging to his own windmill tower, and most of the Poles, after they have become too careless and discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut their throats with." It is appropriate that Willa Cather wrote like this, knowing her independence of mind, her masculine bent, and her introduction to rather primitive conditions when she came to Nebraska a century ago at the age of nine. (One recalls the incident recorded by Mildred Bennett about Willa helping the local doctor during the amputation of a boy's leg.)
But her mature fiction reveals another side of Willa Cather. As William Curtin has noted, the fondness for romance she shared with the young naturalists "put her at odds with William Dean Howells." Yet she acknowledged his greatness, despite his mildness, and his ability to "make very common little men in sack coats" live, even if he could not create very great ones. She defended Henry James's as well as Howells's "theories as to the delicacy and decency of literature," and developed for James a reverence that might seem inconsistent with her admiration for the naturalists. The spell of James materialized after 1896, when, although she lamented his failure to address modern society, modern "degeneracy," and the new woman, she expressed admiration for the perfect control of his art, "as calm and as subtle as the music of Mozart." She had earlier distinguished James with Hawthorne and Poe as our only masters of pure prose, and in a 1913 interview in the Philadelphia Record she described James, Mark Twain, and Sarah Orne Jewett as her "favorite American writers."
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln