Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1998, pp. 82-83.
Abstract
If we think of America simply as a land of migration and settlement, we are missing the broader picture, the one Joseph Urgo draws so clearly. Urgo analyzes more than a westward movement of settlers, concentrating instead on the concepts of the movement of ideas and cultures between a variety of old worlds and . new, and making the point that Willa Cather "is a comprehensive resource for the demarcation of an empire of migration in U.S. culture." As he explains, his interest in Cather's work lies in "the aesthetics of migration." Willa Cather certainly knew migration, from her move to Nebraska from Virginia as a child to her continuous travel as an adult.
Focusing on her novels, Urgo shows how Cather's representation of American culture is based on the perpetration of movement and impermanence-physically, intellectually, and temporally. Drawing from O Pioneers! through Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Urgo analyzes Cather's use of migration and her awareness that life continually brings us to crossroads. Some of these conclusions would seem selfevident- certainly the Shimerda family, Claude Wheeler, Father Latour, and Euclide Auclair come to mind. While Cather establishes the act of physical migration with these characters, she also develops the sense of cultural migration-how ideas pass between characters, leaving influence on the culture around them. Urgo's approach to interpreting Cather in this way keeps the reader asking what place and home and history really meant to these characters.
The strength of Urgo's work is not only the depth of his explication of Cather's use of migration in her novels, moving far beyond a simple literary context, but the extent to which he establishes cultural context, citing sources as varied as Salman Rushdie and Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz. Urgo allows those of us who think that we know a bit about Cather to re-think her treatment of movement, home, and culture in her novels.
Chapter one opens with this Cather quote: "I keep my own suitcases under the bed." Debunking the myth of an American homeland, Urgo accurately concludes that Cather has encapsulated not only a statement of personal migration, but also that of our transitory culture.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln