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"Only the feeling matters": Willa Cather's sexual aesthetics
Abstract
While critics have long attempted to explain the motives behind Willa Cather's silences and determine the source of her reticence, affinities between Cather's aesthetics and a homosexual sensibility raise new questions about her art. Did Cather's subject determine her style, or did her preferred method find its appropriate material? Put another way, is homosexuality Cather's strategy or is it her subject, or a fusion of the two? Given her eroticized poetics, the application of a sexual paradigm to explore such questions seems promising. Although Cather eschewed depicting "physical sensations," sexuality suffuses her work to the extent that her reticence becomes less a disavowal of physiology than a discrete challenge of sexual norms; placing homosexuality in a reader's mind further inscribes that challenge by calling into question ideas about gender, power, culture, and identity. Gay parallels become clearer when such connections are made. Silenced by a prohibitive culture, the phenomenon of homosexuality helped Cather develop a sensitivity to human variation and a literary style to accommodate it. The range of male friendship and masculine desire in Cather's fiction demonstrates this gift of sympathy and registers its sincerity. But while Cather's wide play of feelings opened to her the imaginative possibilities of human differences, homosexuality does more than humanize her fiction; it transmutes that humanity into art. I would argue further that while the subject of homosexuality enables Cather to refine her characteristically subtle and elusive style, it becomes, in effect, the objective correlative of her art, dramatizing the diversity of human nature as it simultaneously deepens the mystery of her texts. The subject of homosexuality hovers above Cather's narratives and insistently lingers behind their veiled essence. She hints at it as early as "The Tale of the White Pyramid" (1892), incorporates it into the design of The Troll Garden (1905), and increasingly realizes its technical and thematic potential in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918). By the male-centered novels of the 1920s, One of Ours (1922), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Cather's sexual aesthetics provocatively evoke her highest literary ideals.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
Anders, John Piland, ""Only the feeling matters": Willa Cather's sexual aesthetics" (1993). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9333955.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9333955