Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout, and: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout, and: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp Catherine Morley CATHER AMONG THE MODERNS, by Janis P. Stout. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. 280 pp. $44.95 hardback; $44.95 ebook. EDITH WHARTON, WILLA CATHER, AND THE PLACE OF CULTURE, by Julie Olin-Ammentorp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 396 pp. $60.00 hardback; $60.00 ebook. Janis Stout’s Cather Among the Moderns and Julie Olin-Ammentorp’s Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture each offers a considerable contribution to Willa Cather studies and indeed to Edith Wharton studies in the case of the latter. Both books demonstrate exemplary scholarship in their blending of close literary analysis with historical and biographical insights. Stout and Olin-Ammentorp break new ground in the critical conceptualization of Cather in particular. Interestingly, both books approach their subjects as being deeply attuned to the cultures they occupied and deeply cognizant of the sociopolitical debates that they are often perceived as overlooking in favor of narratives of either ordinary midwesterners or New York upper-class elites. As well as this sense of the writers as culturally and politically engaged, both Stout and Olin-Ammentorp offer portraits of the writers as carefully attentive to the craft and form of writing itself. Cather, in particular, is presented by Stout as a modernist in a similar vein to Virginia Woolf in terms of her attention to formal gaps and elisions (rather wonderfully described by Stout as “vacuoles”), the shape of her texts, and her compulsive revision of them, as well as her deviation from standard generic expectations and parameters as closely aligned to the modernist project of “making it new” (p. 197). [End Page 171] Stout’s study looks to position Cather amongst her contemporaries, contemplating that which makes Cather modern and ultimately that which makes her a modernist writer. Beginning with her early life, Stout looks at the writer’s geographical mobility, which propelled her from Virginia to Nebraska as a child, through to her later journey to Pittsburgh where she embarked upon making a thoroughly modern life, and through the development of her career as a journalist, her immersion in the artistic and cultural life the city afforded, her trips to the Carnegie Institute Art Galleries and Chicago’s Art Institute, and her journeys to England and Europe. Stout astutely links Cather’s mobility to two of the most important aspects of American modernity—migration and immigration—noting that Cather’s travels, while driven by individual choice, set her within a wider sociocultural phenomenon that engendered many of the features that critics and writers now consider to be modern and indeed modernist. Such features include the alienation, dislocation, nervousness, and fragmentation associated with urbanization, with the urban environment most typical of modern and modernist writing. Stout makes the case that these facts of Cather’s early life, as well as the family’s rather disharmonious political leanings, made for a writer who had already begun the process of becoming modern before she had even left Red Cloud, Nebraska for Pittsburgh. Indeed, the key word for Stout in terms of approaching the questions of Cather’s modernity is “transitional,” a writer in motion between states, between worlds, and between identities. Stout makes a compelling case for viewing Cather as transitional in her gender experimentalism and her performance of gendered identities as observed especially during her time at the University of Lincoln, Nebraska, a thread that is picked up in the book’s third chapter, “Among Women.” Rather than viewing Cather’s hairstyle and her choice of clothing as an attempt to masquerade as a man, Stout invites the reader to consider Cather as playing with different versions of femininity. Certainly, Cather is interested in a femininity without the fashionable frills and fuss of her contemporaries but, as Stout observes through careful examination of archival photographs, her dress choices were sophisticated and often observable in the more urbane New Woman styles that she would go on to adopt upon her relocation to the bigger city. This biographical observation of Cather’s transitional femininity—her rejection of categorical...