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Life and Times

‘The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.’ These words close a famous passage from My Ántonia, in which two characters see a plough on the field as the sun sets behind it. The plough casts a long shadow, leading them to momentarily believe it is a person, only to realize it’s a simple farming tool. Within this image is contained the essence of Willa Cather’s writing – her quintessential rural landscapes, the nod to her classicist influences such as Virgil, the clean, incisive language, the imagery of empire-building in America and the sense of ultimately being dwarfed, like the plough, by the awesome power of the natural world. Her ability to build layers of meaning into her stories has made her one of the classic American authors, whose shadow grows ever longer over the canon of American literature.

Early years

Willa Cather was born in 1873, on a small farm in rural Virginia. Although she is most often associated with the wide, open plains of the frontier, her roots were firmly in the antebellum South where she lived until she was nine years old. In 1882, fleeing from an outbreak of tuberculosis in Virginia, Cather’s family moved to Nebraska, where her father first tried his hand at farming, then eventually moved the family to the frontier town of Red Cloud to open an insurance office. At the time, Nebraska was made up of mostly unsettled land, and at first the wild and open landscape awed and frightened the young Cather. We see this experience mirrored in the characters of her novels, such as Jim Burden in My Ántonia, who describes his first encounter with the great expanse of Nebraska as ‘feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction’. Despite this early reticence, Cather grew to love her home in Nebraska, where she received her early education from local shop-owners and other adults in her small town, many of them immigrants from a variety of backgrounds who provided the basis for her expansive worldview.

‘New Woman’ – education and success

Despite a childhood determination to become a physician, Cather eventually took up writing during her studies at the University of Nebraska. This was one of the first universities to admit female students, and so Cather was among the first generation of women to go to college in America. She was an active participant in university life, editing the student newspaper, The Hesperian, and writing continuously. After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in English in 1894, she continued her career as a journalist, writing for various publications in Pittsburgh and supplementing her income with teaching. Only after a decade of establishing herself as a journalist did she begin to steer her work towards creative writing, publishing a short story collection called The Troll Garden in 1905. By 1912, the former southern farmgirl was living in New York City and working as an editor at the prestigious magazine, McClure’s. In 1912, she also published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge. Despite the slow start to her creative writing career, she went on to publish a total of four novels within that decade. She showed no signs of slowing down, going on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel, One of Ours. She continued writing well into the 1930s, by which time, however, the critical focus had shifted, and her novels were viewed in a less favorable light by her contemporaries, who often commented on her subject matter, which they considered too sentimental and lacking in contemporary relevance. Although she continued writing even into the 1940s, her final works in progress were destroyed at her request, and she passed away in her Manhattan home in 1947.

In the pantheon of ‘Great American Writers’

Despite the growing reluctance in the 1930s to take Cather’s writing seriously, critics today have once again embraced her. She is credited with shifting the roots of early American writing from the New England of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the transcendentalists, and opening it up to the wild plains of the Midwest. Yet her writing differs from traditional ‘frontier literature’ in the sense that she engages with the land itself, the Native Americans who lived there and the immigrant experience. Therefore, her works never quite fit into the ‘manifest destiny’ ideal of American literature, despite many of them being set amongst the frontier towns that drove the ideal of American expansion. Her writing would go on to bear a great influence on later authors such as Cormac McCarthy, and his novel Blood Meridien, and continues to engage literary critics today.

My Ántonia

Cather published her most recognizable work, My Ántonia, in 1918, as a conclusion to her ‘Prairie Trilogy’, which included O, Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. Many elements of Cather’s life made their way into My Ántonia: her early encounters with the Nebraskan landscape and frontier life; the American immigrant experience; and the rich interior life of her heroines’ later years in life. Although her narrator, Jim Burden, feels a keen nostalgia for his childhood spent in the countryside with his friend, it is in the tender descriptions of Ántonia as an adult that we see Cather’s true strength as a novelist. Cather’s focus on the middle-aged woman, and the reluctance to have the story driven solely by romantic relationships – as exemplified by Ántonia, but also appearing repeatedly throughout her oeuvre – is completely unique, not only among her American contemporaries, but among her fellow novelists of the Western tradition. It is no wonder that Virginia Woolf admired Cather’s work, and that generations of readers have continued to return to My Ántonia.

Sources

Parrish, T. (2012). Introduction. In T. Parrish (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. Xvii-Xxxiv).

Lindemann, M. (2005). Introduction. In M. Lindemann (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 1-16).

Goldman, A. (2005). Rereading My Ántonia. In M. Lindemann (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 159-174).

Reynolds, G. (2005). Willa Cather as progressive. In M. Lindemann (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 19-34). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.