Cather Studies, Volume 11: Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux
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Cather Studies, Volume 11: Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux
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Overview
Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux examines Willa Cather's position in time, in aesthetics, and in the world. Born a Victorian in 1873, Cather made herself a modernist through the poems, stories, and novels she wrote and published into the twentieth century. Beginning with a prologue locating Cather's position, this volume of Cather Studies offers three sets of related essays.
The first section takes up Cather's beginnings with her late nineteenth-century cultural influences. The second section explores a range of discernible direct connections with contemporary artists (Howard Pyle, Frederic Remington, and Ernest Blumenschein) and others who figured in the making of her texts. The third section focuses on The Song of the Lark, a novel that confirms Cather's shift westward and elaborates her emergent modernism. An epilogue by the editors of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather addresses how the recent availability of these letters has transformed Cather studies. Altogether, these essays detail Cather's shaping of the world of the early twentieth century and later into a singular modernism born of both inherited and newer cultural traditions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803296992 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Series: | Cather Studies |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Ann Moseley is the William L. Mayo Professor and professor emerita of literature and languages at Texas A&M University–Commerce. John J. Murphy is professor emeritus at Brigham Young University. Robert Thacker is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Compatibility of Art and Religion for Willa Cather
From the Beginning
Steven B. Shively
The touchstone for this essay is Godfrey St. Peter's statement to his students in The Professor's House (1925) that "Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had" (69). The Professor asserts that art and religion are compatible, that they are — or at least have the potential to be — equal and complementary forces for finding meaning in life. Many readers and critics believe this linking of religion and art expresses not only Godfrey St. Peter's thinking but also that of Willa Cather, who said almost the same thing without the filter of fiction in a 1936 letter published in Commonweal: "Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin" ("Escapism" 27). Moreover, this position is commonly assumed to represent a shift in Cather's thinking and writing away from a view of religion as mostly antagonistic to art, a view represented in her pre-1925 fictional portrayals of the crazed Free Gospel preacher Asa Skinner in "Eric Hermannson's Soul," the insipidly pious Brother Weldon in One of Ours, the petty rivalry between Methodists and Baptists in The Song of the Lark, the art-killing Baptists of My Ántonia, the boring and conformist Cumberland Presbyterians so loathed by Paul in "Paul's Case"; a full list would be long indeed. Cather's "new" view, many believe, came to its fullest expression with the publication of her most overtly religious books, Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock. This critical position also draws support from the 1922 confirmation service in which she joined the Episcopal Church, often seen as a reaction to modernism and its accompanying societal and cultural shifts and to various physical and family challenges; presumably she turned to religion for comfort and meaning as part of a broad retreat into the past and its traditions.
I do not seek to debunk completely such a view of Cather — of course she changed and responded to life, and these responses are reflected in her fiction. I will argue here, however, that Cather worked out much of the tension between religion and art long before the 1920s. Her early writing, primarily journalism, reveals that during the 1890s she had already discovered the power of both religion and art, and concluded that they could, in fact, be compatible. Cather never banished aesthetically rich religion from the kingdom of art; rather, it held a privileged seat from the start. Some religion was simply ugly, and indeed Cather had no patience for it and did not hesitate to expose it. But for the discriminating Willa Cather this distinction was true of all forms of expression by which humans sought entry into the kingdom of art: good poetry, music, paintings, architecture, and books were welcomed, while those that were base and distasteful were turned away.
I preface my analysis of religion in Cather's early journalism with the comment that I am not particularly concerned with matters of belief in traditional doctrinal or theological ways. Belief is a prickly thing (that is true of political beliefs as well as religious beliefs) for which public practices and statements offer only limited evidence. We know very little of Cather's private conversations about religion, and our knowledge of her practices is incomplete. We know that she was born into a practicing Baptist family, had a deep familiarity with the Bible, later joined the Episcopal Church, and attended — at least occasionally — religious services of various denominations. For many years she gave money to Grace Episcopal Church in Red Cloud, and at times she gave (and received) books and other items with religious meaning to family and friends. She read books that would commonly be labeled religious, and she counted ordained ministers among her friends. Such matters are important, but they tell us little about her specific beliefs. We know, for example, that she requested an Episcopal burial rite, but we do not know what she believed about life after death. I find no evidence that Cather experienced religious angst, that she had — or ever sought — a conversion experience, that she struggled significantly with religious principles. She does not seem to have cared much about notions of a Trinitarian God or apostolic succession or transubstantiation. When she writes of the Nicene Creed, as she did to her niece Helen on Easter Sunday 1940, it is to express admiration for its "beautiful prose" and "majesty," not for its statements of belief (Letters 582). Despite the title of her short story "Eric Hermannson's Soul," she seems more interested in saving Eric's art than in saving his soul. Certainly there is much evidence that she believed in transcendence, forgiveness, selfless servanthood, the beauty of creation, miracles, redemption, and the warmth of a faith community. Such ideas are often religious, but they can also be broadly spiritual, even broadly human. To Cather, Orpheus, Nature, Truth — and more — could be divine.
From the cradle, the Judeo-Christian heritage — and its presence in daily life — was part of Willa Cather's experience. In the 1930s, Cather recalled the religious legacy of her youth in a commentary on Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, and she noted the expression of that inheritance through language:
The Bible countries along the Mediterranean shore were very familiar to most of us in our childhood. Whether we were born in New Hampshire or Virginia or California, Palestine lay behind us. We took it in unconsciously and unthinkingly perhaps, but we could not escape it. It was all about us, in the pictures on the walls, in the songs we sang in Sunday school, in the "opening exercises" at day school, in the talk of the old people, wherever we lived. And it was in our language — fixedly, indelibly. The effect of the King James translation of the Bible upon English prose has been repeated down through the generations, leaving its mark on the minds of all children who had any but the most sluggish emotional nature. (Not Under Forty 101–2)
Cather's allusion to her childhood confirms that traditional religion was always a prominent part of her life and writing, beginning with her earliest public and professional pieces, which reveal how she used and understood the language of religion. Perhaps this religious heritage is why she spent little time in faith-searching. Bernice Slote notes that religious books, specifically the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, are a "constant, insistent, pervasive" presence in Cather's writing, but that in her early journalism "[s]he did not need to contrive the [religious] metaphor and its extension, nor (at this time, at least) did she think to examine it logically, to correct roughnesses and omissions and even contradictions. This was simply the way one talked" (35). What Cather did with this heritage is remarkable. As this paper will demonstrate, in a few short years in the 1890s she rapidly moved from a crude and exaggerated use of religious phrases that amounted to little more than mimicking cultural traditions to a sophisticated application of religious vocabulary, metaphor, and symbol. In integrating religion into her aesthetic credo, she made the inherited tradition new and claimed it for herself — and for art. She at times questioned, abandoned, and rejected religious dogma and zealotry, but she never let go of a commitment that religion could serve art and art could serve religion.
In an 1890 column on high school happenings for the Red Cloud Republican (she was sixteen years old), Cather reported on the vivisection of a dog by the zoology class, raising the dog's status from stray to soldier in "the immortal army of the martyrs" ("High School" 2). This claim of martyrdom for the dog suggests a puckish awareness of the rhetorical possibilities of religious words, but there is no suggestion in the article that the idea of martyrdom and the communion of saints had any significant meaning for her. Cather's religious rhetoric also appears in a gossipy letter written in 1889 to Mrs. Louise Stowell, a family friend who had recently moved away from Red Cloud. Cather refers to the students of a local piano instructor as "disciples" who "burn strange fire apon the alter of the Gods in these dgenerite days" (Letters 9–10, original spelling retained). Commenting on the possibility of a trip to Omaha to hear pianist Anton Rubinstein, she casts herself as "a pilgrim [going] to worship in a far country." In these juvenile writings Cather demonstrates a playful acceptance of her religious inheritance and that the Bible left its mark, fixed indelibly in her language. Neither her language nor her ideas, however, are yet linked to art. Cather is practicing, observing, and imitating, but there are few signs that she is discriminating between the artistic and the profane.
One of the earliest signs of a more mature approach to religious language — and, eventually, religion more broadly — is the high school commencement speech she gave in June 1890, which was also printed in the Red Cloud Chief under the title "Superstition vs. Investigation." True to her habit, Cather uses religiously tinged words: "exodus," "pilgrimage," "worship," "reverence," and more. Here, however, she complicates the matter by going beyond word choices to using religious references for clarification and meaning; for example, she follows the word "superstition" with the appositive "the stern Pharoah [sic] of his former bondage," thus emphasizing the cruelty of superstition and adroitly capturing its prison-like effect on people while also establishing it as the thing that held back the heroic Moses ("Superstition" 141). In an allusion to the Garden of Eden, she demonstrates a broad, symbolic interpretation of the fruit of the tree of knowledge rather than the narrow, literal understanding we might expect from a nineteenth-century Baptist: "It is the most sacred right of man to investigate; we paid dearly for it in Eden; we have been shedding our heart's blood for it ever since. It is ours; we have bought it with a price" (142). In her speech Cather collapses distinctions between science and religion by blending powerful allusions to the Bible with equally strong references to atoms, the discovery of the circulation of blood, and Newtonian theories about matter. While the speech has science as its foundation, signs of artistic understanding and advocacy come through in Cather's acknowledgment of the enticement of "prob[ing] into the mysteries of the unknowable" and in her presentation of "fact and fancy" as equals (143). In addition, she recognizes that the imagination is even more powerful than science: "Microscopic eyes have followed matter to the molecule and fallen blinded. Imagination has gone a step farther and grasped the atom" (143). The commencement speech reveals a young woman strengthening her understanding of the capacity of religion to be an evocative force in people's minds, stronger even than the scientific method she celebrates. She also shows an ability to stretch religion without losing it: "There is another book of God than that of the scriptural revelation, a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery" (142). At the same time, she holds no tolerance for religion that blindly relies on superstition, seeks to limit imagination, or takes a dull, limiting view of creation. Now, Cather is ready to strengthen further her artistic credo at the University of Nebraska.
During her college years in Lincoln — 1890 to 1895 — Cather became increasingly aware of the power of religious expression as she began to work with her religious inheritance, gradually personalizing the ideas and traditions behind the rhetoric. After getting beyond the wordplay, she found in religious tradition something deeply sympathetic with her attitudes about art, and she set about the task of articulating that sympathy. Undoubtedly, the intellectual excitement of the university, the availability of diverse religious experiences, an increasing affinity for romanticism, and the usual process of maturation all combined to stimulate her to an examination of religion and how it fit her emerging creed of art.
At least two of Cather's early college essays survive; both were written for class in 1891 and then published in the Nebraska State Journal. They reveal that already she was finding her vocation. In the first of them, an essay on Thomas Carlyle, Cather still sometimes wrote in an overblown style — years later, in 1927, she wrote to Will Owen Jones, her old managing editor at the Journal, remembering this essay with its "very florid" style, "full of high-flown figures of speech" (Letters 391). The essay is memorable, however, not for its style but because it reveals that Cather had found in Carlyle her own sort of hero, someone whose life and ideas were compatible with her emerging beliefs, someone who had wrestled, as she was wrestling, with the tensions between art and religion. She praised "the strength of his great heart," his "love and sympathy for humanity," and his "soul sincere as truth itself." This essay, about a man she saw as a kindred spirit, gave her a forum for working through some of those tensions, for exploring how religion gets translated into the life of an artist.
Cather learned from Carlyle that it is possible to hold a passionate reverence for creation yet remain free of the narrowness that she often saw accompany religion. Noting a difference between reverence and creeds, she celebrates Carlyle as a model for freeing the divinity of creation from the strictures of religious creeds: "Carlyle's was one of the most intensely reverent natures of which there is any knowledge. He saw the divine in everything. His every act was a form of worship, yet ... [h]e was too passionately, too intensely religious to confine himself to any one creed" (Kingdom 423). In this essay Cather acknowledges Christianity while inserting it into a larger tradition of sacredness, including references to Valhalla, Buddha, the trees worshipped by Druids, and the pious Anchorites of ancient Thebes. Religion does not have to be a tool of public opinion misused by journalists and politicians. Cather praises Carlyle because "[h]e never strove to please a pampered public" while she condemns "the desperate efforts of modern writers" to respond to the "variation[s] of public taste" (424). Struggling to reconcile the conflict between the fundamentalism she observed in daily life and the sacredness she found in literary and artistic traditions, Cather perceived in Carlyle an indication that religion can be integrated with art.
Sacrifices (the word "sacrifice" shares linguistic origins with "sacred") also come with the artistic life, and in the Carlyle essay Cather uses the context of religion to discuss them: "Art of every kind is an exacting master, more so even than Jehovah. He says only, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' Art, science and letters cry, 'Thou shalt have no other gods at all.' They accept only human sacrifices" (423). Cather articulates the cost to Carlyle of serving his art: an unhappy marriage, poor health, lonely solitude, and battles with his publishers. This essay shows that she was increasingly turning to religion, not as an expression of her Baptist traditions, not because of any sympathy with the culture of evangelism, and certainly not as some sure path to happiness, but as a way of working out her ideas about art. When Cather writes that "[Carlyle] saw the divine in everything," the phrase is more than a sweeping generality, because she has communicated her emerging belief that divinity is manifested in the artistic life and her awareness of the accompanying joys and sorrows.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Introduction: Willa Cather at the Modernist CruxAnn Moseley, John J. Murphy, and Robert ThackerPrologue: Gifts from the Museum: Catherian Epiphanies in Context
John J. MurphyPart 1. Beginnings 1. The Compatibility of Art and Religion for Willa Cather: From the Beginning
Steven B. Shively2. Thea in Wonderland: Willa Cather’s Revision of the Alice Novels and the Gender Codes of the Western Frontier
Michelle E. Moore3. Ántonia and Hiawatha: Spectacles of the Nation
Joseph C. MurphyPart 2. Presences 4. Willa Cather, Howard Pyle, and “The Precious Message of Romance”
Richard C. Harris5. “Then a Great Man in American Art”: Willa Cather’s Frederic Remington
Robert Thacker6. Willa Cather, Ernest L. Blumenschein, and "The Painting of Tomorrow"
James A. Jaap7. From The Song of the Lark to Lucy Gayheart, and Die Walküre to Die Winterreise
David Porter8. The Trafficking of Mrs. Forrester: Prostitution and Willa Cather's A Lost Lady
Charmion Gustke9. The Outlandish Hands of Fred Demmler: Pittsburgh Prototypes in The Professor’s House
Timothy W. Bintrim10. Translating the Southwest: The 1940 French Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop
Mark J. MadiganPart 3. Articulation: The Song of the Lark 11. Elements of Modernism in The Song of the Lark
Ann Moseley12. “The Earliest Sources of Gladness”: Reading the Deep Map of Cather’s Southwest
Diane Prenatt13. Re(con)ceiving Experience: Cognitive Science and Creativity in The Song of the Lark
Joshua Doležal14. Women and Vessels in The Song of the Lark and Shadows on the Rock
Angela ConradEpilogue: The Difference That Letters Make: A Meditation on The Selected Letters of Willa Cather
Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout
Contributors Index