A Code of Her Own: Attitudes Toward Women in Willa Cather's Short Fiction

Abstract

Efforts by feminist scholars to recover Willa Cather’s literary reputation and to ensure her place in a male-dominated canon have caused some feminist critics to dismiss aspects of her personality too complex to fit into established categories of feminist literary criticism. In particular, feminist critics have not admitted the extent of Willa Cather’s misogyny, even though it informs the male code of behavior that is the controlling consciousness of all her fiction. In her 1987 biography of Cather, Sharon O’Brien explores Cather’s difficulty in reconciling her gender with the male-dominated literary tradition she hoped to join. But O’Brien does not acknowledge the depth or significance of Cather’s hostility toward women. She admits that Cather had misogynistic views: “her early college journalism . . . frequently expressed . . . contempt for women in tones ranging from amused dismissal to bitter condemnation” (122). However, O’Brien argues that Cather’s misogyny disappeared as she matured and asserts that Cather experienced what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar term “the woman writer’s anxiety of authorship” (83), that even though she denounced women writers, “Somewhere in her consciousness she knew that women could be strong and vibrant and creative storytellers” (125). As Cather matured, she eventually abandoned the male values she once associated with art, thereby reconciling the opposing roles of woman and artist. Thus, O’Brien insists, Cather was able to write novels that speak from a woman’s experience. However, O’Brien’s effort to make Cather “fit” into a female literary tradition not only distorts the central themes of her fiction but also diminishes Cather’s complex and conflicted literary imagination. For whatever reason, during her adolescence Willa Cather admired male behavior and even adopted male dress; her apparent identifica-