TROUBLING BODIES in the FICTION of WILLA CATHER Sarah
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TROUBLING BODIES IN THE FICTION OF WILLA CATHER Sarah E. Clere A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2011 Approved By: Joseph M. Flora Connie C. Eble Minrose C. Gwin Fred C. Hobson Linda Wagner-Martin ABSTRACT Sarah E. Clere: Troubling Bodies in the Fiction of Willa Cather (Under the direction of Joseph M. Flora) “Troubling Bodies” examines Willa Cather’s use of the human body as a means of foregrounding a range of economic and social concerns. I argue that for Cather the body provides a vehicle through which she explores potentially volatile issues that both the restrictive cultural climate in which she wrote and her own aesthetic sensibilities made it difficult to pursue rhetorically. In locating these issues on and around characters’ mutable bodies, Cather subtly demonstrates a significant engagement with contemporary culture. At the same time, she avoids didactic and discursive rhetoric that might have cluttered her famously smooth prose and overt political stances that could have bound her fiction too closely to contemporary events, rendering it irrelevant and anachronistic to later audiences. Ultimately, Cather’s treatment of the body contributes substantially to her status as a modernist, allowing her to resist enclosure within such potentially limiting frameworks as regionalism or local color. Tracing this idea across an array of novels, I consider Cather’s treatment of bodies in The Song of the Lark , One of Ours , The Professor’s House , My Ántonia , and Sapphira and the Slave Girl . ii For Tom Horan, my constant collaborator and best friend iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My parents, Tom and Dee Clere, have helped and inspired me in more ways than I could possibly acknowledge here or anywhere else. I have been certain of their love and support over the course of my entire life, and the process of writing this dissertation was no exception. My brother, Bert Clere, has consistently made life so much more fun. I am thrilled to be able to share this achievement with my paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Shrader Clere. Her memories and stories made the past come alive to me as a child and informed my thinking as an adult. I know my maternal grandparents, Herbert Vaughan and Sarah Daniel Vaughan, and my paternal grandfather, Raymond Clere, would be proud of me. I think of them often. My advisor, Joe Flora, has guided me since I first stepped into his classroom my second year of graduate school. This dissertation is measurably better because of his unerring direction, and I am a significantly more able scholar and writer as a result of his instruction and example. Connie Eble has been a mentor throughout my career at UNC, and I am grateful for her friendship and her deft way with prose. At both the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I have been lucky enough to learn from an array of talented and generous professors, including Gwen Ashburn, Richard Chess, Michael Gillum, Philip Gura, Minrose Gwin, Fred Hobson, Trudier Harris, Alan Life, Sophie Mills, and Linda Wagner-Martin. At UNCA Merritt Moseley showed me the kind of teacher, scholar, and citizen I still hope one day to be. Thank you also to Guy Reynolds and the two anonymous readers for Cather Studies , whose suggestions greatly improved the first chapter. iv I am lucky enough to have a supportive group of friends who are smart, kind, and side- splittingly funny in equal parts. I am particularly grateful for the friendship of Amanda Lail and Lindsey Smith, both of whom have given me so much over the years. Saving the best for last, I thank my husband, Tom Horan. To be with you always, in whatever circumstances—well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Who Owns Willa Cather?…..……………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Vocation and Appropriation in The Song of the Lark ………………………………18 Chapter 2: One of Ours Part 1: “What Was the Matter with Him?”: Claude’s Struggle with Sexuality and Capitalism in One of Ours ……………………………………………………………………………………67 Part 2: Claude and War…………………………………………………………………………109 Chapter 3: “Tom Isn’t Very Real to Me Anymore”: Failures of Representation in The Professor’s House ……………………………………………………………………………....139 Chapter 4: Embodiments of Slavery in My Ántonia and Sapphira and the Slave Girl ………..173 Conclusion: Troubling Bodies, Troubling Structures…………………………………………223 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………...230 vi INTRODUCTION: WHO OWNS WILLA CATHER? Willa Cather’s childhood and young adulthood coincided with middle class Americans’ increasing documentation and display of their lives through the medium of photography. From her birth in 1873, a range of studio photographs depict Cather’s growth and development. She was fifteen in 1888 when George Eastman’s development of the Kodak camera allowed men and women without any knowledge of photography to begin taking pictures. Of the numerous extant photographs of Willa Cather as a young person, a number show her dressing in a manner that appears markedly masculine. This alleged cross-dressing has elicited a substantial degree of critical interest over the past twenty-five years. Such masculine dress, while it was no doubt somewhat anomalous for Red Cloud, Nebraska, in the 1880s, reflected larger sartorial trends. Sociologist Diana Crane discusses the prevalence of what she terms an “alternative style” of women’s clothing in the second part of the nineteenth century and its neglect by historians of fashion: “This style incorporated items from men’s clothing, such as ties, men’s hats, suit jackets, waistcoats and men’s shirts, sometimes singly, sometimes in combination with one another, but always associated with items of fashionable female clothing” (101). It is this “alternative style” of dress that Willa Cather dons. Looking closely at photographs of Cather reveals feminine details amid the overt masculine signifiers. 1 As a young teen she was photographed in her uncle’s Confederate Army cap; however, her jacket has the elaborate frog closures and puffed sleeves typical of a woman’s jacket of the period. In a later, often-reproduced portrait from her time at the University of Nebraska, Cather poses with her college friend, the future linguist Louise Pound. Both women, according to Cynthia Griffin Wolff, are “stylishly turned out as ‘male impersonator’—Eton Boy (Pound) and Dandy (Cather)” (213). Pound wears a cap and Cather wears a homburg, and each wears a jacket with a soft tie, but the jackets again have puffed sleeves and are obviously feminine in design. Elaine Showalter has remarked that “Cather’s daring, in her disguise as the short-haired, suspender-wearing ‘Billy,’ and the tolerance and respect of her classmates were extraordinary” (285). Crane, however, registers the surprising “lack of social ostracism” surrounding the “alternative style” of dress Cather sports, asserting, “It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly in the 1920s, that the suit jacket worn by women acquired lesbian connotations” (106). In a related vein, Julie Abraham has noted the significant number of lesbian cross-dressing narratives from the 1920s, the period in which the construction of modern lesbian identity began, and through which lens Cather is often viewed (184 n .96). In the nineteenth century, however, masculine dress for women had a different context and implication. Following the theme of the photograph of Cather and Pound, Wolff places Cather’s clothing choices within the context of the cross-dressing often done by late-Victorian actresses and male impersonators. Wolff intriguingly asserts that far from being a rebellion against maternal identification and authority as Cather’s biographers have suggested, Cather’s 1 Only in photographs of theatrical performances in which she played a male role does Cather appear garbed in actual men’s clothing. In these photographs she wears a boys’ or men’s suit with trousers and without the fashionable puffed sleeves. 2 self-presentation could have been a playful collaborative effort on the part of mother and daughter: “Cather and her mother loved the professional theater. thus when Willa Cather decided to present herself to the public as ‘William Cather M.D.’ both mother and daughter would have known that this presentation echoed the most recent, the most impudent, and most tantalizing and daring theatrical vogue” (204). The admixture of feminine details in Cather’s clothing also matched the attire of vaudeville cross-dressers, who were never intended to fool their audiences completely. In British writer Sarah Waters’s 1998 novel about late-Victorian male impersonators, Tipping the Velvet , when a character dons her first suit as preparation for her stage role as a young swell, her landlady thinks the guise is “too real”: “She looks like a boy. Which I know she is supposed to—but, if you follow me, she looks like a real boy. Her face and figure and her bearing on her feet. And that ain’t quite the idea now, is it” (118). The “idea” is not a totalizing embrace of masculinity, but a convincing performance that still allows the original gender to be acknowledged. We have no way of knowing whether or not Cather’s contemporaries read her own performance of masculinity as “too real” and became, at certain moments, uncomfortable. My aim in this discussion of Cather’s dress is not to downplay its masculine elements or deny its transgressive aspects, but to illustrate how it did fit—just barely—within the parameters of acceptable dress and behavior in the late nineteenth century. Although Cather’s embrace of the “alternative style” fit into period fashion paradigms, she vigorously performed masculinity in other ways, cutting her hair extremely short and signing her name William Cather M.D.