Lost Ladies: (Dis)locating Willa Cather as Feminist Recovery Work

Abstract

Lost Ladies:(Dis)locating Willa Cather as Feminist Recovery Work Anna Creadick Peacocks are inspiring . . . but they sure don't stop to consider they might be standing in your way. —Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983, p. 59) For so long, and justifiably, the project of Legacy in general and the Profiles feature in particular has been a commitment to bringing women writers in. As we teach and write about women writers today, are there some who ought to be left out? Are there some women writers who, like Flannery O'Connor, to whom Walker is referring in the epigraph above, might even be "standing in [the] way"? In this essay I take up the case of Willa Cather in service of what might seem a counterintuitive question: Could the sidelining of some women writers ever be part of feminist recovery work? Where and why must we include or exclude a writer like Cather? And why, or at what cost, has she received what could be seen as an excess of scholarly attention? leaving cather out I recently decided to resuscitate an American women writers course long on the books at the small liberal arts college where I teach. After some agonizing about the book list, I decided to leave Cather out. That difficult choice led me to this essay.1 Cather's centrality to the American literary canon is as unquestionable as her critical status is formidable. Over twenty years ago, Phyllis Frus and Stanley Corkin charted a "climactic phase" of Cather scholarship, noting with satisfaction that "[a]t last count there were 860 online citations for [Cather] in the [End Page 102] MLA bibliography" (206). In the two decades since, that number has nearly tripled. The MLA International Bibliography currently lists more scholarship on Cather than on Edith Wharton or Kate Chopin, more than on Alice Walker or Zora Neale Hurston, more than on Tillie Olsen or Flannery O'Connor. Today, Cather trails only Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison as the most-studied American woman author.2 One explanation for the endless fascination with Cather as a subject comes from Deborah Carlin, who notes, "Whether viewed as an American icon, a woman writer, a lesbian, a cosmopolitan Midwesterner, a conservative Republican, a scathing journalist, an antimodernist, or an embittered elegiast, Cather remains an anomaly in American literature and her fiction is peculiarly hard to place" (6).3 These same qualities that make Cather so hard for scholars to "place" also make her so easy to place in the classroom. I could, and do, teach Cather in my Modern American Literature class and in my Sexuality and American Literature class. But in my American Women Writers course, I balked. Why? To manage the enormity of the course subject, I chose an organizing theme: "Feminist Recovery Work." We would read the women writers we might never have read at all if not for the labor of feminist critics who rescued those writers from obscurity, or at least from the margins. So I assigned Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska. We read Gloria Anzaldúa, Mitsuye Yamada, and Grace Metalious. The course opened with Harriet Jacobs's 1861 slave narrative and closed with Janet Mock's 2014 memoir of trans womanhood, which enacts a different kind of recovery work while also regularly name-checking many authors already on the syllabus. But I kept Cather out. That decision had to do with three forces often at play in American women's writing: misogyny, canonicity, and feminism. misogynist (mis)readings Flashback, 2005: I was a new visiting assistant professor, teaching an American literature survey, when one especially enthusiastic student asked if he could come to office hours "just to talk more about the reading." I remember so clearly how he knocked on the doorjamb, stepped in, sat down in the late autumn light, looked up at me, and said, "I usually hate female writers—but I really love this book." After working to control my shock, I smiled weakly, took a breath, and in my mind began to compose a Cather paper. The book? Cather's 1923 novel A Lost Lady. A Lost Lady offers excellent terrain for...