Willa Cather Today

From 1947, the year Willa Cather died, until today, Cather studies have expanded from a Nebraska cottage craft to an international industry. During this time the number of publications about her life and work has become formidable. Recently I made an assault on the ever taller mountain of Cather material, and although I have not reached the peak, I have spent considerable time slogging up some treacherous slopes. What I present here is a bundle of my own biases, selective in nature, without any pretense of comprehensiveness. I would like first to take a brief look at three works on Cather which, though they may at first glance appear to be striking out on new paths, actually lead (in my view) to dead ends. They are perhaps a representative selection in that one essay may, in a loose sense, be considered feminist, another sociological, and the third psychoanalytical. The first of these is Blanche H. Gelfant\u27s The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Àntonia. This essay, which appeared in the journal American Literature in March 1971, may be seen in part as a product of its tumultuous times. On the opening page, the author says that she is going to challenge Jim Burden\u27s vision of the past and adds, I believe we have reason to do so, particularly now, when we are making many reversals in our thinking. With those times now behind us, and some of those reversals not so firmly established, I wonder how well Gelfant\u27s totally new reading holds up. The author begins by proposing to expose Jim Burden as a disingenuous and self-deluded narrator and adds, Once we redefine his role, My Àntonia begins to resonate to new and rather shocking meanings which implicate us all. We may lose our chief affIrmative novel, only to find one far more exciting-complex, subtle, aberrant. This is the first of many of the essay\u27s misleading assertions: the author is not performing a salvaging of a novel through reinterpretation, as suggested, but rather attempts a savaging-a slash-and-burn operation that, if successful, would destroy Cather\u27s My Àntonia and most of her other work