Willa Cather’s Imagination by David Stouck, and: Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American and Canadian Western Literature ed. by Dick Harrison

Abstract

Tausky has set her writing career admirably in its context: the writer her­ self remains enigmatic. Perhaps we shall never get further than his summary of her temperament and its effect on her work : “But I cannot feel that Sara Jeannette Duncan really understood the drift towards a modem conscious­ ness. In some, though not all, respects, she embodied it. But she was too divided in her loyalties to be able to present it effectively in her work.” Certainly Thomas Tausky has achieved a fine piece of work with the mate­ rials available to him; I will keep hoping that someday another biographer will happen upon the kind of treasure-trove that opened up the story of Annie Howells and Achille Fréchette to James Doyle. Clara th o m a s / York University David Stouck, Willa Gather’s Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975). viii, 253. $9.50 Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American and Canadian Western Literature, ed. Dick Harrison (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1979). 174. $10.00 A woman of extraordinary energy, Willa Cather wrote twelve novels, numer­ ous short stories, and critical essays. This creative power continued almost to the end of her life, although there may be signs of fatigue in some of her later works such as Shadows on the Rock, Lucy Gayheart, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Even in The Professor’s House, published in 1925, the reader perceives the wearied disenchantment with the fruits of success and with the materialism of the modem world. The woman and the writer often seem indistinguishable for Cather scholars, and some of the best criticism has been biographical in focus.1 Cather often seems the embodiment of the myth of the frontier; in her fiction and in her life she illustrates Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of the relationship between individualism and westward mobility. David Stouck’s perceptive readings of Cather’s fiction are not con­ cerned with biography or American history but they indicate the multiple ways in which she views the heroic pioneer imagination. Is the writer driven by the fear of failure and the sense of inevitable defeat? What does “the west” mean to a writer who lived in an era of cultural change? What is the relationship between east and west, either as places which can be located on a map of North America, or as states of mind that are irrevocably opposed? David Stouck’s critical study, Willa Cather’s Imagination, and Crossing Frontiers, which records the topics discussed at the April 1978 Banff con­ 108 ference on American and Canadian western literature, attempt to answer these questions. David Stouck does not deal overtly with Cather’s cultural background or with her assimilation of the Populist mentality (for such an approach to Cather, the reader must refer back to John Randall’s The Landscape and the Looking Glass), but his readings of the novels bring out the full range and value of Cather’s writing. Most critics regard Cather’s vision as deep but not broad; Stouck, on the other hand, effectively demonstrates that the scope of her writing embraces a dual vision: east and west, disillusionment and optimism, despair and reconciliation. The prairie novels emerge as only one aspect of a vision that takes in a much broader concern for the theme of art versus life. Unlike many other commentators, Stouck does not find fault with Cather for retreating from the problems of an industrial culture; he finds little evidence of a destructive nostalgia for the past, and instead of pointing out her weaknesses as a writer, he reveals her hidden strengths. Moreover, he indicates the way in which Cather attempts to reconcile the contradictions which she perceives in American life. It seems to me that Cather’s fiction thus explores the territory which Howard Lamar’s essay “The Unsettling of the American West: The Mobility of Defeat” in Cross­ ing Frontiers explains from the historian’s perspective. Lamar is concerned that the heroic efforts of those who succeeded in settling the west should be lost in the contemporary flight from the farm to the city: “urbanization is wiping out the accomplishments and culture of those who did...