Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture
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Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture
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Overview
The first comparative study of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather in thirty years, this book combines biographical, historical, and literary analyses with a focus on place and aesthetics to reveal Wharton’s and Cather’s parallel experiences of dislocation, their relationship to each other as writers, and the profound similarities in their theories of fiction. Julie Olin-Ammentorp provides a new assessment of the affinities between Wharton and Cather by exploring the importance of literary and geographic place in their lives and works, including the role of New York City, the American West, France, and travel. In doing so she reveals the two authors’ shared concern about the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496216885 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 396 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
THE "LITERARY ARISTOCRAT" AND THE PLAINSPOKEN PIONEER
Unfortunately surface differences — as the word implies — are the ones that strike the eye first. ... We must dig down to the deep faiths and principles from which every race draws its enduring life to find how like in fundamental things are the two people whose destinies have been so widely different.
EDITH WHARTON, French Ways and Their Meaning
THE MEETING THAT NEVER TOOK PLACE
Edith Wharton and Willa Cather never met. But to anyone interested in these authors and their works, it is enticing to imagine how they might have gotten along had they met — perhaps as mature, successful novelists in the late 1920s or during Cather's 1930 trip to France, where Wharton had been living since 1907. It is entirely possible that the two women would not have hit it off. Wharton, who maintained energetic lifelong friendships with many people, is also known to have been stiffly formal, even cold, on occasion. Cather, although she had interviewed celebrity writers as a journalist and, during her career as an increasingly prominent author, had become friends with many important authors and musicians, was also a private person. Further, she may still have harbored vestiges of her youthful insecurities about being "provincial" — insecurities that meeting "Mrs. Wharton" might well have stirred.
A certain degree of underlying tension would have been particularly likely if they had met (as they probably would have) at one of Mrs. Wharton's two homes in France — the Pavillon Colombe, a villa located just north of Paris in the town of St. Brice-sous-Forêt, if it had been a summer meeting, or Sainte Claire le Château in Hyères, on the Mediterranean coast, if it were winter. Wharton might well have been her chillier self to the younger writer, whom she referred to, in her only known written comment on Cather, as "the lady with the blurry name," and whom she may have seen as a real-life version of one of her own characters, Undine Spragg, a parvenue from the West who invades New York. If this had been the case, Wharton might well have conveyed it through her manner, however subtly, and Cather might well have responded by becoming a bit defensive.
Yet by 1930 both were confident of their abilities, the authors of novels that had achieved popular success and critical acclaim; both had received honorary doctorates from Yale University, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for the novel, among many other honors. They shared many interests; perhaps most important among these were their love of literature and their devotion to the art of fiction. If the visit had gone well, they might have spent hours discussing ways to craft a character or shape a plot, topics on which, as we will see, their views were remarkably similar. So were their views on literary modernism: both disliked it. The theater, poetry, paintings, and music — all were arts that fascinated them both. There was much else they could have discussed, including their mutual friends and acquaintances Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zona Gale, a novelist little remembered today. Their shared love of France could have provided hours of discussion, as could their dislike of New York City. If they had been lucky enough to sit outside in one of Wharton's beautifully designed gardens, the conversation might easily have turned to their shared love for plants and flowers. Eventually they might have discussed their views of the state of American culture, which concerned them both deeply.
We will never know, of course, how this hypothetical teatime would have proceeded. It would doubtless have been a polite meeting, but the odds are good that it would have been neither a big success nor a dismal failure. One trait the two great writers shared was that both were fundamentally very private people. Especially in their later years, it could take some time to get beyond the persona each showed to the world, although those fortunate enough to see beyond that persona found a warm and enthusiastic personality. They might well have kept the encounter civil but short, and then said a formal goodbye. Afterward each would have returned to her own privacy: Wharton to her library and Cather to a good hotel nearby — both, in all likelihood, to enjoy a good dinner and then, in the evening, to write letters about the meeting to their friends.
THE ARISTOCRAT AND THE POPULIST
Popular perceptions, like history, seem to have conspired to keep the two authors apart. Despite the increasingly complex critical analyses of both authors in recent decades, they are often still seen in the terms in which influential early critics defined them. Wharton is still often seen as "our outstanding literary aristocrat," the New York chronicler of an East Coast American aristocracy, while Cather is frequently thought of as the Nebraska author of novels "redolent of the Western prairie" that "pulsate with the life of the people." These thumbnail portrayals function as shorthand for two of the most significant issues that have kept the works of these authors apart: not class and race, as has often been true in literary studies, but class and place — social class and geography, which are directly related to a broad swath of cultural issues and to wide, even semiconscious, myths about America and Americanness.
Vernon Parrington was the critic who in 1921 dubbed Wharton "our outstanding literary aristocrat," and although it may sound today like a compliment, the moniker was meant to dismiss her and her work as irrelevant, passé, and questionably American. In his review of her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, Parrington remarked, "With her ripe culture, her clear and clean intelligence, her classical spirit, her severe standards and austere ethics, Mrs. Wharton is our outstanding literary aristocrat." Yet his conclusion was that despite the novel's literary accomplishment, "it doesn't make the slightest difference whether one reads the book or not." Wharton's choice to depict the "little clan of first families" in New York, to "open [her] doors ... only to the smart set," and to live with "windows [that] open only to the east, to London, Paris, Rome" means that she has wasted her art on "insignificant material" and on "rich nobodies." Parrington concludes that "there is more hope for our literature in the honest crudities of the younger naturalists, than in her classic irony; they at least are trying to understand America as it is." As we will see in more detail in chapter 4, questions of literary subgenre — the tension between realism and naturalism — and inherent "Americanness" are imbricated with those of gender, class, and place (and, in this instance, with underlying attitudes toward age). Parrington's "younger naturalists" attempting to "understand America as it is" were obviously not writing about New York aristocrats looking eastward toward Europe. In remarks such as these, Parrington led the critics who, in the 1920s and 1930s, charged Wharton with being out of touch with her home country and with what mattered in a world changed by World War I.
Paradoxically, since Parrington wrote his review a century ago, his dismissive moniker for Wharton has come to epitomize her in ways that have also been seen as positive. "Our literary aristocrat" is not repellant but appealing to Americans, many of whom have become increasingly fascinated with the rich, famous, and quasi-aristocratic. Certainly part of the staying power of the idea of Wharton as "literary aristocrat" is that in many ways, the shoe fits. Wharton, who traced her ancestry back to the early Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam and a Revolutionary War general, belonged to "Old" New York. During her extended travels in Europe as a child and adolescent, she socialized with many people, including members of the French aristocracy, as she chronicled in "Life and I," a brief memoir never intended for publication. As an adult, she lived in France from 1907 until her death in 1937, keeping company not only with its literary and political elite but also with countesses and princesses. She is buried, as if in support of Parrington's argument, in the Cimitière des Gonards in Versailles, a mere mile from the gates of Louis XIV's opulent palace. The upper-class world in which she lived is also the one she recreates in many of her best-known fictions, including The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920). Yet the prevailing view of Wharton as an East Coast, Europe-bound aristocrat limits what readers perceive in her writing.
The perception of Willa Cather as a chronicler of prairie life functions in much the same way. While this perception is rooted in facts, thinking of Cather solely as an author who writes in a straightforward way about ordinary people in the Midwest and West elides the complexity and variety of her life and her writings. As with Wharton, much of our view of her has been shaped by influential early critics. Indeed, while Wharton was beginning to be challenged in the 1920s because she depicted New York "aristocracy," Cather was celebrated because she depicted "ordinary" people, characters who were perceived as very American (despite their clearly portrayed attachment, in many cases, to their European countries of origin). The prominent critic H. L. Mencken gave Cather a huge boost in his review of My Ántonia (1918), referring to it as "one of the best [novels] that any American has ever done, East or West, early or late." In his review of Alexander's Bridge, he had noted Wharton's influence favorably, but in his remarks on Ántonia, he praised her for breaking away from Wharton and finding her own voice and place. Another important critic, Randolph Bourne, reinforced the idea of Cather as quintessentially American in his review of My Ántonia: "Here at last is an American novel, redolent of the Western prairie." To be "American," for these reviewers, was to depict working- or middle-class individuals beyond the cities of the eastern seaboard — preferably out "West," a designation that was used broadly and flexibly. (Ironically, in the 1930s Cather would, like Wharton, be charged with being out of touch with the "real" America.) Cather certainly encouraged the perception of her as a western and therefore an American writer, emphasizing her experiences in Nebraska and the Southwest in interviews and writing her own promotional materials. The novels that made her famous, O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia, are both set in Nebraska, and part of their success was the fact that in them she depicted a kind of life that was perceived as uniquely American — and as the opposite of Wharton's project in The Age of Innocence.
Yet for Cather, as for Wharton, the reality of her life and her literary range is far more complex. Parrington, who dismissed Wharton as insufficiently American because her "windows ... open[ed] only ... to London, Paris, Rome," might have been surprised by a 1908 letter Cather wrote in which she declared that "Rome, London, and Paris, were serious matters" when she was in school: "They were the three principal cities in Nebraska, so to speak." While academic critics have, for the last three decades or more, steadily revealed aspects of this much more complicated Cather, the popular image of her has, like that of Wharton, remained static. Both authors and their works have been neatly pigeonholed along lines that are simultaneously geographic and social: Wharton as a chronicler of an East Coast Europeanized elite, Cather of the daily lives of western and midwestern immigrants and farmers.
Once we look into family background, we realize that even in terms of class associations, the portrayals of Wharton as aristocratic and Cather as middle class are limited at best. Certainly there are class differences between the two. If property ownership is an indication of class, it has to be acknowledged that at the time of Wharton's death, she owned two villas in France, while the only home Cather actually owned was a small cottage on Grand Manan Island off the coast of New Brunswick. Certainly as children, Edith Jones and Willa Cather were in different places on the socioeconomic scale. The Jones family belonged to the leisure class; Edith's father did not need to work in order to support the family. This does not mean that the family had the wealth associated with the millionaires of the Gilded Age, on whose vast expenditures Wharton would look with skepticism. But it does mean that in order to economize, the family traveled in Europe for several years so that her father could rent their homes in New York City and Newport at a profit. Cather's background was quite different. Born in Virginia, she was the eldest child of seven in a family that was decidedly middle class. Cather's father, who had some legal training, was a sheep farmer in Virginia; when the family moved to Nebraska, he farmed for eighteen months and then, relocating to Red Cloud, sold real estate and insurance and made farm loans. He seems to have had something of a challenge in providing for his growing family.
When we look at their family backgrounds more carefully, however, the picture becomes more complex. In her memoir, A Backward Glance, Wharton noted that her mother "always said that old New York was composed of Dutch and British middle-class families, and that only four or five could show a pedigree leading back to the aristocracy of their ancestral country"; she confirmed that "my own ancestry, as far as I know, was purely middle-class." Yet Wharton traced her ancestry back to General Ebenezer Stevens, an officer in the Revolutionary War, and to the Dutch colonial settlers of New Amsterdam. In an American context, tracing one's ancestry to important precedents before the Revolutionary War constitutes its own form of aristocracy, as Wharton well knew; even the protest that her family was not truly aristocratic conveys a note of aristocratic authority. But Cather could make similar claims. Cather's parents were "fourth-generation Virginians," with her paternal grandmother tracing her roots to Jeremiah Smith, who had arrived in Virginia in 1730 and been "deeded land on Back Creek in 1762 by Lord Fairfax." (The Fairfax family is mentioned in Wharton's memoir as well; unlike her own middle-class family, she notes, the Fairfaxes had "a pedigree leading back to the aristocracy of their ancestral country.") Wharton's great-grandfather was a general in the Revolutionary War; Cather's ancestor Jasper Cather also fought in that war. One fact suggests that the common understanding of the social class of these two authors should be, if anything, the reverse. As an adult, Cather learned that an early ancestor from Wales "had fought for Charles I"; in recognition of his services, Charles II had given land in Ireland to his descendants. She also learned that British heraldry includes a Cather coat of arms. Strictly speaking — using the standards of Wharton's mother, that aristocracy was a matter of heredity — it turns out that it is not Wharton but Cather who is "our literary aristocrat."
Nevertheless, broad cultural references continue to reiterate the perception of Wharton as sophisticated eastern aristocrat and Cather as western democrat. A travel writer's 2017 article strikes a note often heard, praising Cather's 1902 sketches of England and France for the Nebraska State Journal partly by denigrating Wharton: "She was not blue-blooded Edith Wharton, who had grown up in the first-class section of European trains, with servants unpacking her trunks. Willa Cather was of the American prairie." A 2015 Edward Sorel cartoon in Vanity Fair, accompanying a review of Harold Bloom's book The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (from which Wharton and Cather are both excluded), offers a brilliant visual equivalent (fig. 1). Wharton is depicted as bejeweled and elegantly dressed in decidedly nineteenth-century style, peering up indignantly through her lorgnette at a God-sized Bloom, while Cather, a head shorter, hovers behind Wharton in the middy blouse she wore in the well-known Edward Steichen portrait. Sorel's portrayals are successful precisely because they reiterate the usual views of both authors, with Wharton looking very much the aristocrat and Cather decidedly middle class; the cartoon also suggests their overall status in American culture, with Cather somewhat obscured behind the larger, more prominent Wharton.
Other references reiterate these associations of class and place, including the authors' surviving homes and even their graves. The Mount, the estate built by Wharton and her husband Teddy in Lenox, Massachusetts, and the place most visibly associated with Wharton and her work, was called "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond" by Henry James. In 2012 it was used for a Vogue magazine photo shoot featuring fashions based on clothing Wharton wore and described in her work; it received additional publicity when it was visited by Julian Fellowes, the creator of the BBC'S popular Downton Abbey, who credits Wharton as an inspiration. While The Mount is associated with high fashion and high incomes, the house most associated with Cather, known as the Cather Childhood Home, is determinedly midwestern and middle class. A modest structure of a story and a half (its upper level unfinished, as it was in Cather's day), the Childhood Home is located in Red Cloud, Nebraska, commonly thought of as Cather's hometown. (Red Cloud is also the home of the Willa Cather Foundation and the National Willa Cather Center, further solidifying its connection with Cather.) The emblem of "Catherland," as the area around Red Cloud has been nicknamed, is the plough, a reference not only to local agriculture but also to a famous passage in My Ántonia in which the central characters see a plough on the horizon magnified by the rays of the setting sun. Wharton is buried in a cemetery in Versailles, France; Willa Cather is buried in Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire, in a quiet, wooded cemetery from which Mount Monadnock can be seen. Even in the marketplace "Wharton" connotes upscale, European-inflected products, "Cather" the middle-class and American. For its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2010, French cosmetics manufacturer Lancôme named a particular shade of "peachy pink" lipstick "Rose Edith" in Wharton's honor; Cather's fiction has inspired an American beer, Dogfish Head's "My Antonia" pilsner.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture"
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