The Dangers of Femininity in Willa Cather's Fiction

Abstract

When she was twenty-one, Willa Cather wrote, “The mind that can follow a ‘mission’ is not an artistic one. An artist can know no other purpose than his art.… The feminine mind has a hankering for hobbies and missions.” From the outset of her writing career as a journalist, Cather was intensely conscious of what to her seemed a difficult anomaly: being a serious writer and being a woman. She believed that women were conditioned to think and write in a literal and “horribly subjective” fashion, so that their literary productions were “an infernal mess.” When she embarked on a full-time writing career at the age of thirty-nine, she insisted that to avoid a feminine mind, one must avoid a feminine way of life:One must have the power of refuse most of the rest of life … to be free, to work at [my] table — that is all in all. …. There are fates and fates but one cannot live them all. Some would call mine servitude but I call it liberation. Miss Jewett too, turned away from marriage.Cather's single-minded determination to succeed and her uncompromising way of life that would ensure success as a writer rather than a woman writer prompted her to reject her background in her first pieces of fiction. She lived in rural southern Nebraska for seven years, from the ages of ten to seventeen, and in some early short stories she portrayed small-town life on the Plains as narrow, spiritually crushing and dominated by terrible physical hardship.Jennifer Bailey is Lecturer in American Literature in the Department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD.