Willa Cather and the Indian Heritage

Abstract

In my book-length study of Willa Cather I tried to demonstrate the unusual range and depth of this author's imagination by focusing on the archetypal dimensions of her fictions.' 0 Pioneers!, with its tableau of a new land and its heroic settlers, has the qualities of an epic; My Antonia, with its journey into the author's childhood memories, is a pastoral; The Professor's House, which tells an ugly story of human greed, is largely satiric; while My Mortal Enemy, a tale of self-damnation, Death Comes for the Archbishop, a narrative of saintly love and service, and Shadows on the Rock, a historical novel of penitence and suffering, form something like a mortal comedy, exploring the whole range of the moral imagination. Willa Cather is viewed in my study as primarily a romantic writer who, like Cooper, Hawthorne, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, gave powerful expression to the American dream of individual freedom and power, and to the artist's struggle to transcend the world through his art. But there is another dimension to Willa Cather's fiction, a strong undercurrent of thought and feeling which turns away from the romantic dreams of selfhood toward the richness and complexity of the perceptual world, and which views art not as the product of self-expression but as a process of sympathy for people, places, and events. Seen from this vantage point Willa Cather belongs with another group of American writers, with the less likely company of Melville, Whitman, Pound, and William Carlos Williams. A clue to this less familiar aspect of Willa Cather's art can be found in her interest in the Indians of the Southwest, for whose various cultures she had such a great affinity. She admired the Indians' communal way of life, their respect for the environment, and the organic forms of their dwellings and their arts. These are attitudes and practices which inform both