Synopses & Reviews
Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled thetraditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported awholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelationsabout her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stoutpresents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artisticand cultural tensions of her day.
A product of theSouth--she was born in Virginia--Cather went west with her family at an early age, aparticipant in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny. Known for her celebrations ofimmigrants on the prairie, she in fact shared many of the ethnic suspicions of hercontemporaries. Loved by a popular audience for her pieties of family and religion, she was in her youth a freethinker who resisted traditional patterns for women'slives, cutting her hair like a boy's and dressing in men's clothing. Seen by criticssince the 1930s as a practitioner of an escapist formalism, she was, in Stout'sview, profoundly ambivalent about most of the important questions she faced. Catherstructured her writing to control her uncertainty and project a serenity she did notin fact feel.
Cather has at times been viewed as awriter preoccupied with the past whose literary project had little to do with theintellectual currents of her time. On the contrary, Stout argues, Cather was a fullparticipant in the doubts and conflicts of twentieth-century modernity. Only inrecoil from her distress at these conflicts did she turn to overt celebrations ofthe past and construct a retiring, crotchetypersona.
The Cather that emerges from Stout'streatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T. S. Eliot, though moreresponsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements.Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previousbiographers have allowed. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World presents a womanand an artist who fully exemplifies the ambivalence, the foreboding, and above allthe complexity that we associate with the twentieth-century mind.