Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout Richard Millington Janis P. Stout, Cather Among the Moderns. U of Alabama P, 2019. ix + 265 pp. In Cather Among the Moderns, Janis Stout sets out to answer a question that has exercised scholars for decades: how should we see Cather in relation to the group of writers, all her contemporaries, whom we call modernists? Briefly put, Stout answers this question by expanding the kind of attentiveness that we bring to it. She does so by focusing not simply on the expressive strategies that may or may not have affiliated Cather with her innovation-seeking contemporaries but also on the contexts—the communities, the friendships, the antipathies, the affinities—through which Cather encountered the cultural transformations of the earlier twentieth century. In a sense, then, the most important word in Stout's title is among, and the book's prevailing spirit is exploratory, as Stout interrogates the relation between the early twentieth-century worlds in which Cather found herself and the writing that she produced. In taking this contextual approach, Stout joins a scholarly tradition, memorably codified by Daniel Joseph Singal, that she calls "cultural modernism" (xii)—one that thinks of modernism not as a set of artistic practices (though such practices may well be revealing and significant) but as a distinctive historical culture, the successor to the American Victorian culture that preceded it. In doing so, she is less interested in rendering a verdict on Cather as modernist—though she will supply one—than in setting in motion an inquiry that gives us a newly vivid, intellectually compelling sense of Cather's life and work and delivers a welcome jolt of energy and expansiveness to biographical thinking within Cather studies. Once she has established this intellectual orientation, Stout launches her biographical narrative by identifying and unpacking a moment of inception: the 1896 train journey that brought Cather [End Page 386] from Red Cloud, Nebraska to Pittsburgh, where she took up a post at the Home Monthly. Stout begins, this is to say, not with the writing but with the context—with the ingredients, both cultural and personal, that affiliated Cather to the transition from a Victorian America to a modernist one: mobility, urbanization, and the unmooring of the coordinates of identity, especially for young white middle-class women who had access to careers within an expanding consumer economy. Cather's story starts with a young person becoming modern by navigating modernity. In the chapters that follow, a pattern emerges. As in the opening chapter, they start with context, and the organization of Stout's account, though inflected by chronology, is fundamentally locational. In each chapter, Stout places Cather in American modernity's definitive terroirs: Cather is shown inhabiting the Greenwich Village of the 1910s, encountering the gender-role-redefining world of early twentieth-century female friendships, and absorbing the dismantling of hierarchical conceptions of race in the wake of Franz Boas's new anthropology, to take a few examples. In each of these chapters, the contextual work leads to a consideration of the complex relationship between particular contexts and the shaping of Cather's fiction. Thus, chapter 2's evocation of the talkative, experimental culture of Greenwich Village generates a discussion of the emphatic urbanity of "Coming, Aphrodite" and other early stories. Chapter 3's recovery of the world of female friendships that Cather and Edith Lewis together inhabited informs a survey of the strong women who populate Cather's fiction. In chapter 4, an account of the Great War's emergence as a topos of modernist sensibility yields a rich discussion of the reputation-shaping dissonances between One of Ours and the prevailing, mostly male treatments of the war and its attendant disillusionment. Chapter 5, discussed more fully below, hears the echoes of the Taos-based counterculture presided over by Mabel Dodge Luhan in Cather's Southwestern fiction. In "Democratic Vistas," chapter 6, Stout explores the interplay between democratic and elitist elements in Cather's relation to her readers and her conception of artistic authenticity, as Cather advocates for her own novelistic innovation against the dismissals of a critical establishment oblivious to her originality. Perhaps the book's...