Cather, Willa

From Philosopedia

Cather, Willa (1867—1947) Cather, a short story writer and novelist, is one of the great writers of the 20th century. She celebrated the strength of the frontier settlers in O Pioneers (1913) and My Antonia (1918). Her Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) is considered one of her best works. She is known as a master of the craft of fiction, as evidenced not only by her fiction but also by her On Writing (1949). While on the editorial staff of McClure’s Magazine in 1907 and 1908, Cather wrote a scathing work, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (republished 1992), which brought her much negative criticism. Like Samuel Clemens, who had called Eddy “queen of frauds and hypocrites,” Cather presents a negative view of Eddy’s life and writings. However, a Canadian newspaperwoman named Georgine Milmine originally was credited as having been the author. In fact, to her death Cather denied having written the book, either unwilling to be known as a comic writer or, as critics claim, was tacitly acknowledging that Milmine was biased and had supplied her with material for its sensational and commercial value. Critic Michael Warner (Voice, 17 Aug 93) wrote concerning the Eddy biography: “The heroine comes off with as much pathos, hilarity, and will as any character in Cather’s fiction. Each chapter shows Mrs. Eddy venturing into new realms of implausibility, a bombazine Cortez of the ridiculous. The suspense lies in wondering how much farther she can go, and she never fails to satisfy. This is the woman, after all, who had an adult-size cradle made to order so she could be rocked to sleep. She had her second husband (the exquisitely queer Mr. Eddy came third) cover a nearby bridge with sawdust to deaden the sound of neighbors’ footsteps. At night, she sent him out to kill discordant frogs. By the time Eddy was forty, she had raised nervous illness to an art form—and that was before she became its theorist. Like her principal rival in hysterical science, Sigmund Freud, Mary Baker Eddy did not begin the major part of her career until the age of fifty. Perhaps Cather felt reluctant to take credit for such a splendid character, who was still alive when the biography was published.” Puritan critics accused Cather of being a lesbian, citing how from the ages of fourteen to eighteen she so strongly identified as a male that she dressed in men’s clothing, got a crew cut, and called herself William Cather Jr. In 1895 in the Nebraska Journal, she condemned Oscar Wilde for his alleged homosexual acts. However, in 1895 she wrote a rhapsodic newspaper commentary on Sappho, whose lyre “responded only to a song of love.” Her critics, particularly religionists sensitive about her attacks on Mary Baker G. Eddy, disclosed that Cather in 1905 had left her lover, Isabelle McClung in Pittsburgh, later burning all their correspondence, and had moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, where she lived the rest of her life, for almost forty years, with Edith Lewis, another Nebraskan. One of her biographers, Sharon O’Brien, said that Lewis phoned her not to use the word “lesbian” in writing of Cather. “When I told her this wasn’t possible, she hung up,” wrote O’Brien, who then added that “Cather herself invited me to tea at her Bank Street [New York City] apartment. ‘I want you to know,’ she said, pouring me a cup, ‘that I am not gay.’ ‘What about the letters to Louise Pound?’ I asked. As soon as I spoke, the dream abruptly ended. I could not tell if I had silenced or convinced her.” O’Brien explained that while at Duke University, she had come across romantic love letters to Pound, her friend at the University of Nebraska, “in which Cather agreed that relationships like theirs were ‘unnatural.’ ” O’Brien’s work, Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians: Willa Cather (1994), took fifteen years to research and argues that if Cather were alive today she would not at all mind being outed, that flouting convention when she thought she was right was part of her character. Cather’s other critics were surprised that her work was so popular, that readers were buying plots about mule-riding priests in nineteenth-century New Mexico and about non-shocking romance. Clifton Fadiman as well as Lionel Trilling considered her as a person writing of the past and acting as if she was not of the present. Trilling observed that she lived in a world of Freudians but wrote in “defense of gentility.” The Catholic World commended her for high standards, aware that she was a nominal Episcopalian, for not stooping to “crude realism, Freudism, inchoate prose, shallow philosophy.” Her final years were spent tending a case of chronic tendinitis in her right hand. Awaking one day from an afternoon nap, she complained of a headache, then died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The Nation in an obituary described her as a minor novelist, one “remote from the talents and problems of the past two anxious decades.” Only in the 1990s did “William” Cather’s reputation increase, partly because of a new evaluation of her lesbianism and her feminism. (See entries for Christian Science and Louise Pound.) {Joan Acocella, “Cather and the Academy,” The New Yorker, 27 November 1995; CE; GL}