Modernist by Association: Willa Cather’s New York / New Mexico Circle

Abstract

My title does not mean that Willa Cather was a modernist only by association. She can be, and has been, called a modernist for other, inherent reasons. She can also be, and has been, called a realist, a romantic, or even a proto-postmodernist. She is hard to classify. Cather used to be seen as a kind of belated Victorian, perhaps a transitional figure between romantic Victorianism and the true moderns, in much the same way as A. E. Housman, whose poetry she in fact greatly admired. In recent decades, however, Cather has most often been read as a modernist, albeit a modernist in her own distinctive way. Such reinterpretations (for example, Phyllis Rose’s “The Case of Willa Cather” and Jo Ann Middleton’s Willa Cather’s Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique) have usually been based on prose style and her fairly subtle but quite real experimentalism in narrative form. Other revisionist scholars have emphasized the content and context of Cather’s fiction, “specify[ing] the nature of her engagement with the definitive experiences and ideological movements of twentieth-century life.”3 Among these, we would think of Joseph R. Urgo and Guy Reynolds. Here, partly in hopes of demonstrating that Cather was one of those women “not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable” of whom Elsie Clews Parsons writes in the first of my epigraphs and partly as an argument that the usually so acute Elizabeth Sergeant was not entirely correct in believing that the “spirit of the age” did not “greatly affect” her, I propose to conceive of Cather as a modernist by examining her literary and intellectual affiliations among a particular group of modernist contemporaries, all but one of them women.4