Willa Cather and American Arts Communities

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English English, Department of 8-2004 At the Edge of the Circle: Willa Cather and American Arts Communities Andrew W. Jewell University of Nebraska - Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Jewell, Andrew W., "At the Edge of the Circle: Willa Cather and American Arts Communities" (2004). Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English. 15. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/15 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. AT THE EDGE OF THE CIRCLE: WILLA CATHER AND AMERICAN ARTS COMMUNITIES by Andrew W. Jewel1 A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Major: English Under the Supervision of Professor Susan J. Rosowski Lincoln, Nebraska August, 2004 DISSERTATION TITLE 1ather and Ameri.can Arts Communities Andrew W. Jewel 1 SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: Approved Date Susan J. Rosowski Typed Name f7 Signature Kenneth M. Price Typed Name Signature Susan Be1 asco Typed Name Typed Nnme -- Signature Typed Nnme Signature Typed Name GRADUATE COLLEGE AT THE EDGE OF THE CIRCLE: WILLA CATHER AND AMERICAN ARTS COMMUNITIES Andrew Wade Jewell, Ph.D. University of Nebraska, 2004 Adviser: Susan J. Rosowski During the pivotal years of Willa Cather's artistic development, she regularly engaged a variety of American arts communities that encouraged, challenged, and influenced her work and professional growth. Her interactions with these communities were an effort to locate a sustainable, meaningful relationship to her fellow artists. This dissertation explores her efforts by analyzing the character of the communities, chronicling Cather7sinvolvement within them, and interpreting the impact on Cather7s life and work. After the Introduction, the chapters are organized to follow Cather as she experimented with various communal forms and developed her own relationship to the literary scene. Chapter one explores Cather's relationship with Annie Adams Fields and the circle that gathered around Fields's Boston home. Fields, who was Cather7sideal of the literary hostess, demonstrated the power a community could have on an artist's work and engaged Cather's imagination as a representative of the American literary past. Chapter two investigates Cather's experience in Greenwich Village during the early twentieth century, a time when the neighborhood was popularly known as the home of political and artistic radicals. Cather's comments about the Village, particularly in her story "Coming, Aphrodite!," demonstrate her efforts to counter the Village's popular identity and define her own role within the community. In chapter three, I look at Cather's involvement in three formal artists' colonies: the Bread Loaf School of English, Mabel Dodge Luhan7scolony, and the MacDowell Colony. Her involvement with and eventual rejection of these colonies suggests Cather7sgrowing awareness of her own creative needs and worth as a legitimate artist. The final chapter details the most profound artistic relationships of Cather's life, the intimate circle of her friends and fellow writers. Examination of her professional exchanges with Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, and Edith Lewis reveals that Cather frequently relied on the encouragement and suggestions of these women while creating her work. Introduction: The Group Life In her essay "Katherine Mansfield," Willa Cather writes that in all families there exists a "double life": "the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another-secret and passionate and intense- which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends." "One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life," Cather continues, "that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them" (136). This dual impulse to both search for and escape human relationships echoes in Cather's long and complicated experiences with American arts communities. In her years as a professional writer, Cather entered into several distinct American arts communities and found in them a "tragic necessity." These communities, which Cather became a part of in various ways in the early twentieth century, offered her encouragement and support, assisted her as she molded her personal and professional identity, and influenced the development of her writing. She remained always at the edge of the circle, however, vacillating between "greedily seeking" the group and "pulling away" in order to define herself apart from them. The critical tradition in Cather studies, perhaps taking a cue from Cather's assertion that "underneath" the group life is "the real life," generally regards her participation in arts communities as tangential to her authentic creative experiences. Instead, critics have been more interested in exploring the nebulous world of Cather's "secret and passionate and intense" private life. Though these explorations have taken many forms, from traditional biographies which understand Cather's life as a series of personal gains and losses to critical readings that interpret Cather's fiction as veiled expressions of her innermost feelings of sexual desire and frustration, critics have rarely understood Cather aspart of anything. Instead, she has been investigated as a woman who, in her own words, was "escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and [her] own affections have woven about [her]" (Cather, "Katherine" 136). Contributing to this view of Cather as highly-independent are her late years, when, financially and personally secure as a major author, she grew less socially engaged and preferred a quiet life with her partner, Edith Lewis, and a select group of intimate friends. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, a long-time friend of Cather's, writes, in Willa Cather: A Memoir, that Cather withdrew "from vital participation into a mold of almost rigid quietness" (281). Edith Lewis, in her memoir Willa Cather Living, describes Cather's withdrawal from active social life as "self-preservation," arguing that Cather needed "solitude not only to work in, but to feel and think in" (136; 137). This withdrawal was also accompanied by enthusiastic efforts to protect her privacy and determine her legacy: she attempted to burn all of her private correspondence; she forbade the publication of surviving letters; she rehsed to allow her work to be adapted into other media, like theater or film; and she was reticent about certain issues that many critics have deep curiosities about, like her sexual orientation. These efforts have both tantalized critics searching for hidden private meanings and created considerable roadblocks for Cather scholars who, used to these inconveniences, now joke that Cather herself would greatly disapprove of the entire Cather-scholarship phenomenon.' Though Cather's life has been scrutinized considerably over the past several decades, there has been virtually no attention paid to a remarkable aspect of her career: her working life as a novelist was one of repeated engagement with the arts communities in the United States. Cather did call the inner life "the real life"; however, she also acknowledges the power and pervasiveness of human connections, the "net" of relationships that fill and demand much of one's life. My dissertation looks at the other side of Cather's double life: her "group life." Examination of her memberships in multiple communities suggests that Cather, consciously or not, subtly utilized communities to propel her personal and professional development. Cather's experiences with arts communities helped her negotiate the move from novice writer to acclaimed professional. Willa Cather was a part of the circle of Annie Adams Fields in Boston; the creative neighborhood of Greenwich Village, New York; Vermont's Bread Loaf School of English; the Mabel Dodge Luhan colony in Taos, New Mexico; and the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Additionally, Cather cultivated a small group of women writers who, through their friendship with Cather, provided her with a sustained intimate circle. Far from being radically independent, Cather made engagement with arts communities a hndamental part of her artistic and professional development. Nevertheless, Cather's engagement with these communities was complex and irregular; ' For example, before his lecture at the 2000 International Cather Seminar in Nebmska City, Nebraska. Joseph Urgo joked that the large poster of Cather smiling behind the podium made him uneasy as he was about to read his paper, as he was sure Cather was lauglung at him. characteristically, she responded to them on her own terms, embracing some, challenging others, and uniquely interpreting all. "Community," for my study, means localized, interdependent groups of people that formed around a unifying experience or interest and responded directly to one another.

Load more