The Professor's "Women": Gendered Silence and Self-Revelation in Cather's The Professor's House

Abstract

This paper discusses how the themes of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House and her ban on publishing her private letters affect our future readings of her work. By utilizing close analysis of the text and evidence from Cather’s life, I show how the novel relates to gender narration and the way women tell their own stories. In the novel, Professor St. Peter adopts two dress forms as his “women,” as Tom Outland does with Mother Eve. The dress forms and Mother Eve have no way to share their own stories, causing the male characters to create stories about the figures. This juxtaposes the unique privilege of self-revelation that Cather gives to Outland in “Tom Outland’s Story.” Cather identified herself with Outland through her desire to manage the revelation of her personal life; however, her reticence led to unwarranted speculation about her character. A similarity can be drawn between this aspect of Cather’s image and the feminine figures in The Professor’s House, as the “women” all become what the people around them need them to be. Reading Cather’s novel from this perspective transforms it into a cautionary tale about the consequences of allowing gendered biases to impact our speculation about a figure’s life.