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 Emily Orlando Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture. By Julie Olin-Ammentorp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. x + 386 pp. $60 cloth. Despite their status as major fixtures in the American literary canon, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) and Willa Cather (1873–1947) are rarely examined together. The last book-length study of the two appeared thirty years ago. As [End Page 185] Julie Olin-Ammentorp elucidates in her smart, eloquently written new book, the writers have been kept apart because they have been wrongly perceived as different. In one corner we find Edith the aristocratic chronicler of New York (a label overlooking her investment in other genres and demographics); in another sits Willa “the plainspoken pioneer” scribe of the Midwest (25). Olin-Ammentorp’s study accounts for what is lost by simplistically reading the writers as disparate and emphasizes the importance of place and the relationship between place and culture in their work. In so doing, the book illuminates the many meaningful ways the writers intersect. Indeed, as Olin-Ammentorp so ably teaches us, Cather, not Wharton, is the one who lived in New York for four decades, yet Wharton is remembered as the New Yorker. While Cather, in turn, has been mythologized as the prairie writer of Nebraska, “both authors lived for a relatively brief period in the places with which they are most associated” (10). This highly engaging new book examines fiction, life writings, and theories of art by the two Pulitzer Prize–winning honorary Yale degree recipients. Olin-Ammentorp reveals how they offer a similar criticism of dominant American culture as obsessed with money-making for its own sake and ill-equipped to appreciate anything beyond pure profit. Both writers emerge as exceedingly private Francophiles as deeply invested in culture and aesthetics as they were distrustful of modernism (26). They loved travel, gardens, and their homes and moved in the same circles. They shared influences like Henry James, Walter Pater, and the French naturalists and even a biographer. In the book’s rich, interdisciplinary context, we see Wharton and Cather anew. Olin-Ammentorp is ideally suited to this task. Her study brings together biographical and historical analysis with impeccable close reading, emphasizing place and aesthetics to document the writers’ surprisingly shared experience of dislocation, their connections to each other as writers, and the compelling links between their theories of fiction and their unacknowledged investment in the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States. The book “uses ‘culture’ to refer both to the ‘high’ culture Wharton and Cather valued and to ‘the ways distinct communities construct meanings’” (15). As Olin-Ammentorp explains: “Given Wharton’s and Cather’s concern with ‘the place of culture’ in American society, I chose to use that phrase in my title. But ‘the culture of place,’ the ways in which national or regional communities establish values, underlies ‘the place of culture’ and is equally a concern” (15). Laying the foundation for her study, Olin-Ammentorp draws on the critic Merrill McGuire Skaggs’s observation that “books talk to each other,” which in turn calls to mind Virginia Woolf ’s sense that books continue each other (2). Olin-Ammentorp certainly shows Wharton and Cather—whom the former once referred to as “the lady with the blurry name” (26)—to be engaged in a career-long conversation that has gone largely unrecognized. She identifies [End Page 186] this, for instance, in the first chapter’s discussion of the ways Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome mattered to Cather. In chapter 2, the book examines both writers’ quest to enter what they called “the Land of Letters” (Wharton) and “the kingdom of art” (Cather) (70). The third chapter, which begins the book’s section on the place of culture, examines New York City in Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Cather’s “Paul’s Case.” Chapter 4 considers the American West in such works as Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive and Cather’s The Song of the Lark. Chapter...