Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 4, Fall 1984, pp. 211-12.
Abstract
The essays in this volume were originally presented in June 1983 at the second national seminar on Willa Cather, "Willa Cather Today." For nearly a week, 125 people gathered in Hastings and Red Cloud, Nebraska, some coming from nearby homes and some traveling from twenty-eight other states, India, China, and Sweden. In doing so, participants had in substance one of the most basic ideas in Cather's writing, that place and movement are complementary. In coming to Webster County, participants affirmed the importance of not only place in Cather's writing but also the journeys that connect lives. In 1981, the theme of the first national seminar on Cather was "Willa Cather and Nebraska"; in 1983, we focused on the complementary aspect of that theme-the various paths that Cather's writing suggests.
Cather was fond of quoting Michelet, "The end is nothing, the road is all." "In fact," she wrote in an essay on Thomas Mann, "the road and the end are literally one." The road and the end-the journey and its destination-come together in Cather's life and writing. Cather is as firmly identified with Red Cloud, Nebraska, as Faulkner is with Oxford, Mississippi, yet her life was filled with movement: as a child she moved with her family to Red Cloud, which she later left to move to Lincoln, Pittsburgh, and New York. While maintaining an apartment in New York, she engaged in travel that was almost migratory: in the summer to Red Cloud and Grand Manan; in the autumn to Jaffrey, New Hampshire. As she had explored Red cloud when she was young, so her characters explore Moonstone, Black Hawk, Sweet Water, and Haverford, their walking lending purpose to a scene and color to an individual. Older characters take broader journeys, their travels enabling connections of the Old World and the New, East and West, past and present.
Mona Pers discusses the journey of Cather's books to Sweden, where their fortunes have been affected by an even more complex set of factors than in America: to the influence of publishing houses and politics is added that of translations. Pers notes that Cather's reputation has grown slowly but steadily; she then interprets that slowness by a general tendency among Swedes to overlook American literature and by a pre-World War I orientation by Swedish intellectuals toward Germany. At the same time, other factors contributed to the growth of Cather's reputation: graceful translations appeared (Signe Undset, sister of Sigred Undset, translated three of Cather's novels), and readers responded to Cather's authenticity in treating the Swedish immigrant personality.
Next Susan J. Rosowski takes a journey of the mind to antebellum Virginia to discuss Sapphira and the Slave Girl as a Gothic novel in which Cather focuses on the dark possibilities that run as an undercurrent through her earlier writing. Rosowski suggests that this last novel, often dismissed as escapist, may be the most directly political of Cather's writing and demonstrates that through it we may more fully recognize the Gothicism of the Nebraska fiction.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln