Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp

Abstract

Reviewed by: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp Lingfeng Nie Julie Olin-Ammentorp. Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture. U of Nebraska P, 2019. iix + 386 pp. Edith Wharton and Willa Cather have traditionally been separated and contrasted, with the former labeled an “eastern aristocrat” and the latter a “western democrat” (31). Critics and scholars generally assume that their vast biographical differences, such as social class and geographical location, lead to an unbridgeable gap between their literary creations, including their characters, settings, and themes. Nevertheless, beneath the surface of the split, or even rivalry, between Wharton and Cather lie deep similarities and continuities, as Julie Olin-Ammentorp argues in her fascinating new book, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture. Adopting the tool of place, specifically the typology of physical, cultural, and psychological places developed by anthropologists Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Olin-Ammentorp’s monograph attempts to illustrate how the lives and works of Wharton and Cather intersect and interact. Olin-Ammentorp splits her study into two parts, which are further divided into six thematic chapters. Part 1, “Contexts and Intersections,” [End Page 602] consists of two chapters and is an exploration of the two novelists’ affinities, ranging from their “lives, interests, and careers” to “their understanding of literature and their experience of place” (17). After drawing a general picture of their common ground, in part 2, “The Place of Culture,” Olin-Ammentorp devotes three chapters to a more nuanced and detailed analysis of specific places, such as New York City, the American West, and France, together with their cultural connotations, to further delve into the two authors’ commonalities, in spite of their differences. Wharton and Cather held contrary views of New York City due to their distinct formative experiences. However, their lives in New York intersected, and their works associated with the city, such as Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth and A Son at the Front and Cather’s stories, “Paul’s Case” and “Coming, Aphrodite!” suggest their parallel fear of US culture’s privileging of money over beauty and materialism over art. They harbored differing attitudes toward the West as well—Wharton was more cynical, while Cather was more positive. Accordingly, the two presented opposite Wests in their works: Wharton’s West was vague and uncultivated; Cather’s, specific and energetic. Nevertheless, according to Olin-Ammentorp, they shared an admiration of Western vitality and faced similar challenges related to gender when describing the West, as it was supposedly a metaphor of masculinity and power and thus not a domain for women writers. Although the two authors had different personal experiences with France, their admiration of French culture—its integration of “business, practicality, and energy . . . beauty and art” (206)—resonated, and both Wharton and Cather considered it an example for the US to emulate, particularly materialistic New York and the vigorous West. Shifting the focus away from specific places, the last chapter first attends to Wharton’s and Cather’s experiences with traveling and settlement, and their corresponding and paradoxical sentiments of having a “love of travel” (264) and a “fear of rootlessness or homelessness,” which are both evident in their works. Then, the chapter circles back to an imagination of a hypothetical meeting between the two fiction writers, as pointed out in chapter 1. By presenting Wharton and Cather’s profound connections and proximities, both biographical and literary, this study deconstructs our common understanding of vast distance between the two great novelists and destabilizes the factitious divisions between them—Eastern and Western, aristocratic and populist, and French and American—demonstrating the constructedness of their identity and the interconnectedness of national literatures. In this sense, Olin-Ammentorp obliquely answers the questions about American [End Page 603] literature put forward at the very beginning of the book: “What, after all, makes an American author American, and in what sense are Wharton and Cather, different as they are perceived to be, both American? Is the part of the country we think of as the ‘West’ somehow more ‘American’ than the region we think of as the ‘East’? What are the deep connections between American and other...