American Woman: Willa Cather

When it comes to my favourite authors, it could be said that I get slightly obsessed.

When the writer is dead the supply of their books is, obviously, finite and so when it comes to my beloved Rumer Godden and Daphne DuMaurier, their bodies of work adorn my bookshelf like expensive boxes of chocolates that provoke a continual yearning - a yearning only to be indulged a little at a time.

But with those authors still inhabiting this mortal plane, Isabel Allende, Joanne Harris, Rose Tremain, Barbara Kingsolver, I tend to go for full immersion – book after book after book, biography, press, gossip … and now I can even top it off with Wiki, Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

But when a few months ago I rediscovered Willa Cather (1873 -1947), I decided to kick the habit. She was an author I had touched on briefly at university and her work whet my appetite, but the years that I had yet to reread her turned into decades, until a member of my reading group suggested My Antonia as our next book.

One of the advantages of ploughing through Cather’s canon is that her novels are short. But there are plenty to get my teeth into, and fortunately my Brighton’s Jubilee Library has an impressive collection. I quickly followed up My Antonia with A Lost Lady.

So what does Cather write about that gets me so excited?

Nebraska! American pioneers at the end of the 19^th century!

Er … ho hum, not exactly wizards, or vampires or zombies, is it?

If anyone came up to me and said, “Hey – do you want to read a book about Nebraskan farmers?” Well, my answer would probably be the same as yours.

But stay with me.

A maxim that Cather aspired to was ‘Primus ego in patrium mecum deducam Musas’ - for I shall be the first to bring the muse into my country.  Cather’s lyrical muses conjure a vivid rendering of the wondrous, yet savage, environment of the newly opened West of America, a landlocked world far from many readers’ experience.

She was in love with the nature of Nebraska, its swathes of dancing grasses, gnarly old trees, untouched marshy meadows. Her lyrical descriptions are breathtaking. This seems to have prompted some critics to bridle at what seems to them a kind of naïve sentimentalism for an idealised past. Particularly in the 30s when America’s farming pioneers found themselves starving in the self-made dustbowl as stocks and shares tumbled in the cities, elegies to the ache of America’s agricultural heartland, such as Grapes of Wrath, seemed to render Cather’s more delicate, less epic tales all the more unpopular.

Like Zora Neale Hurston’s treatment by her peers during the Harlem Renaissance, the desire for more hard-core – ‘male’ – narrative made the more ‘feminine’ celebration of family relationships, local culture and environment seem trivial.

Yet, Cather was far from idealistic. She was cynical and certainly didn’t turn a blind eye to the many hardships suffered and sacrifices made by 19^th Century American pioneers. Her stories portray gritty, courageous and ambitious women, and her books refuse to judge the morals of their heroines, examining the motives and morality of those characters who dare to do so.

At this time in America migrant mothers sacrificed their own small comfort of remaining in their homelands and often their own health and well being to sow the seeds for their daughters’ liberation. Daughters who then had the right and the access to education and opportunities that propelled them into a life that must have seemed worlds apart from the freezing dugout shack where they had been born.

And Cather herself was no shrinking violet. In an era where every woman wore her hair long, she sheared off her locks to spare herself and her ailing mother the trouble of washing, brushing, braiding and dressing it. (I’ll bet she had better things to do than mess with her hair). And she chose to keep it short until she reached college.

As a girl she indulged in the kind of ‘all about you’ quiz that girls still do today. Favourite colour, favourite writer … and what trait did Willa Cather foresee as being most desirable in a husband? “Lamblike meekness”! What quality did she most despise in women? “Lack of grit”!

Do you fancy reading her stuff now?

Unfortunately, even a century later, there are still those in the world who regard the things women have to say as trivial, as if having invisible gonads seems to nullify the validity of the female voice.  And while women in countries like the UK can take for granted a culture of equal regard, there are plenty of places not so very far away, where that is simply not so.

As contemporary arguments about gender swirl into a vertigo of vicious circles about whether sexual precociousness is sexual degradation, the fundamental issue has to be that a woman should have choices about her body – how she chooses to dress and adorn herself, how and whether she wishes to reproduce.  The seeds of these choices were sown by the women who made the sacrifices to earn them in the first place, and for American women they can look to Willa Cather and her ilk for that.

Almost a century ago in her novel My Antonia, Cather created a character, Lena, who makes an extraordinary transformation - from a barefoot cowherd to a finely dressed seamstress making clothes for the cream of society. Speaking of marriage, she says: “Men are all right for friends but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones ... I prefer to be foolish when I like it and be accountable to nobody.” And, the narrator reflects, Lena “ … remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.”

Cather, who chose never to marry, also writes critically of marriage via her protagonist, Jim Burden: “This was a fine life certainly, but it wasn’t the kind of life he had wanted to live. I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two.”

So can a woman of 2013 really turn the pages of Fifty Shades or listen to Blurred Lines without blushing - not with embarrassment at the clumsy sexual titillation - but the fact that women’s sexual domination is still celebrated and fetishized by mainstream culture. 

Are we still so afraid of the battle we face to be taken seriously, so horrified to be identified as ‘feminist’ that we retreat to infantilism? Are we really happy buying into such a value system with its double standards?

'You know you want it. Good girl.'

Let’s not dance to that tune.