Cather Studies 13: Willa Cather's Pittsburgh

Abstract

Joining the prestigious Cather Studies series, Willa Cather's Pittsburgh provides valuable information and insights on what is probably the least known period in the author's life and career, her years in Pittsburgh from 1896 to 1906. Editors Tim Bintrim, James Jaap, and Kimberly Vanderlaan brought particular expertise to bear on the subject, and the result is a highly useful and thought-provoking collection.Ann Romines’ prologue, “Becoming ‘Miss Cather from Pittsburgh,” opens with the question “What happened to Willa Cather in Pittsburgh?” Her answer incorporates several related strands: a “constant note” of homesickness, the satisfactions of personal freedom and a career, and persistent pondering of “what it means to be caught between two homes.” The well-positioned first essay, Daryl W. Palmer's “Bicycles and Freedom in Red Cloud and Pittsburgh: Willa Cather's Early Transformations of Place and Gender in ‘Tommy, the Unsentimental,’” follows smoothly from this tone-setting prologue.Veteran readers may at first wonder why Cather's bicycling and “Tommy the Unsentimental” need further comment. If so, Palmer's excellent background information on the bicycle as social phenomenon and its connection with Pittsburgh will be a pleasant surprise, as will his strong, nuanced reading of the story itself, which he sees being centered on female independence. Less persuasive is a secondary argument that Cather saw parallels between Red Cloud and Pittsburgh.Three strong threads running through the volume are the industrial nature of the Pittsburgh Cather experienced; a widening disparity of social classes; and Cather's network of friends and acquaintances whose presence is felt in her work. We also see her as a teacher, a student of languages, and a translator. Diane Prenatt's “Willa Cather as Translator: The Pittsburgh ‘French Soirées’” goes beyond the literal meaning of the word to argue effectively that “translation functions as a narrative strategy, as a plot device, and as enduring evidence of the deep meaning Willa Cather found in a language, a literature, and a culture not her own.”Inevitably, in a book of assorted essays some will be more impressive than others. Perhaps inevitably, readers will differ on which are which. For me, the two brightest stars here are Joseph C. Murphy's “Venetian Window: Pittsburgh Glass and Modernist Community in ‘Double Birthday’” and Charmion Gustke's “Big Steel and Class Consciousness in ‘Paul's Case.’” Murphy's essay is a model of how research and interpretation can work together. I am particularly struck by his astute demonstration that the “central Venetian window” in this under-appreciated story “serves as an entryway to Cather's depiction of modernist consciousness and community” and that remembrance of the house and its window “becomes a metonym” for the irrecoverable pre-war world. Gustke provides an equally impressive essay on “the dynamics of wealth and social mobility” and a fresh reading of ironies arising from clashes between the two in a frequently appreciated story. I particularly applaud Gustke's use of Cather's 1901 article “The Real Homestead” (the Homestead of the violent labor strike in 1892) to demonstrate her awareness of Pittsburgh's “inequitable distribution of wealth” and the effects of brutal working conditions.A pair of essays on Cather's writings about Chinese immigrants by Michael Gorman and Tim Bintrim are mutually reinforcing. In “The Boxer Rebellion, Pittsburgh's Missionary Crisis, and ‘The Conversion of Sum Loo,’” Bintrim argues that Cather developed an “opposition to Christian missionaries proselytizing the Chinese . . . during her teen years.” Firmly linking this idea to the Pittsburgh years, he sees it as being “not a revolt against Christianity but against Western imperialism.” Gorman in “Where Pagodas Rise on Every Hill: Romance as Resistance in ‘A Son of the Celestial,’” concedes that the early story's “racialized portraits and preposterous diction” are “abhorrent” but sees it as an important “anticipation” of “later—and more accomplished—works” and evidence that she resisted the “anti-Chinese politics common in the American West” (and in the nation as a whole, as demonstrated by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, referred to in the story). Ian Haney Lépez's White by Law (1996) can provide valuable background on the xenophobia Gorman emphasizes.Unfortunately, some of the essays in Willa Cather's Pittsburgh are only scantily linked to the title subject, notably John Murphy's epilogue. Implausible “stretches” in readings detract from some pieces, among them the late Angela Conrad's “Cather's Pittsburgh and the Alchemy of Social Class.” Conrad does, however, valuably pull together the volume's thread of social class. It may seem trivial to point out that lapses of copyediting crop up here and there. These do, after all, affect the reading experience. Strong scholarship such as that prevailingly exhibited here deserves the most scrupulous presentation.