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INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscripthas been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affectreproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sectionswith small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back ofthe book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI .. A Bell & Howell mtorrnauon Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. MI48106-1346 USA 313!761-47oo 800:521-0600 Getting Back to Their Texts: A Reconsideration of the Attitudes of Willa Cather and Hamlin Garland Toward Pioneer Li fe on the Midwestern Agricultural Frontier A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHJLOSOPHY IN ENGLISH AUGUST 1995 By Neil Gustafson Dissertation Committee: Mark K. Wilson, Chair LaRene Despain Joseph Maltby .Jo nat.h a n Ho r s e Richard L. Rapson UMI Number: 9604154 Copyright 1995 by Gustafson, Neil All rights reserved. OMI Microform 9604154 Copyright 1995, by OMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 11, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 .. iii © Copyright 1995 by Neil Gustafson All Rights Reserved iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank John Ahouse of the Doheny L{brary at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles for his assistance in working with their Hamlin Garland collection. I also thank the several staff members at Love Library at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who helped me access materials from their collection of Willa Cather materials. I am grateful to Susan Rosowski of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for her help in deciphering Cather's handwriting in two letters she wrote to Garland, which are located in the Garland collection at USC-Doheny. I am indebted to Kathleen Gustafson for having played the roles of sounding board and copy editor. My greatest debt, however, is that which lowe my chair, Mark K. Wilson, whose persistent encouragement and patience buoyed me as I wrote. I express my sincere gratitude, also, to Joseph Maltby for straigtening out at least two chapters and for helping me to envision the entire paper, to LaRene Despain for helping me better organize Chapters V and VI, to Richard L. Rapson for approving my history chapter, and to Jonathan Morse for occasionally asking, at the right times, "so what?" Part of Chapter VI of this dissertation appears, in slightly altered form, in the August 1995 edition of Western American Literature. • v Abstract Hamlin Garland and Willa Cather, pioneers themselv~~, recorded the life of the Midwestern pioneer farmers throughout their lengthy writing careers. Each has come to represent, in the general critical view, a particular attitude toward that life: Garland is thought to have hated his farm experience and has become known as the debunker of the myth of the rural idyll; Cather, who strove to escape the desolation of the Nebraska prairie, has become famed as the singer of paeans to life on the prairie. This study challenges those generalized views on several bases. It suggests that each maintained a life-long attachment to rural roots and that each wrote about farm life on the frontier in a largely realistic vein, portraying it as a "hard pastoral" existence, somewhat after Carl Van Doren's phrase. Critics often underestimate the impact on Cather and Garland of growing up in the political, economic, and social turmoil of the late nineteenth century which led farmers to organize politically. Also not adequately considered is the importance of several natural disasters which exacerbated the plight of the Midwestern farmer. In addition, many critics and biographers have misunderstood the early lives of Garland and Cather--perhaps out of unfamiliarity with the realities of life on a farm or in a • small town--and have incorrectly characterized their vi childhoods as stained by educational, social, and cultural impoverishment. Another cause of misunderstanding about Garland's and Cather's attitudes toward pioneer farm life stems from basing opinions on limited samplings of their works. This evaluation, of most of Garland's farm writings and all of Cather's, illustrates that each passed through various stages of development in recording that life and that each wrote both positively and negatively about the agricultural pioneer experience throughou~ their care~rs. Garland' is not the vilifier of farm life; Cather is not its blind champion. Together, the two writers have given us a realistic picture of both the hardships and the pleasures of pioneer life on the Midwestern agricultural frontier. vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements . i v Abstract .. • v List of Abbreviations . ... ix Chapter I: Introduction. 1 Chapter II: Turmoil on the Prairie in the Late Nineteenth Century . 15 Part 1: Three Decades of Progress · . 18 Part 2: Thirty Years of Poverty . 23 Part 3: Farmers in Revolt ... · . 31 Chapter III: Biographical Parallels. · . 51 Part 1: Early Safe Havens ... 52 Part 2: Life on the Middle Border and the Divide. 68 Part 3: The Myth of Social, Cultural, and Intellectual Impoverishment . 75 Part 4: Finding Literary Careers. 87 Chapter IV: Generalized Critical Interpretations of the Midwestern Writings of Garland and Cather. 102 Part 1: General Critical Opinions of Garland's Midwestern Fiction ... .. 103 Part 2: General Critical Opinions of Cather's Midwestern Fiction ... .. 112 Chapter V: The Stages of Garland's Prairie Representations. 124 Part 1: Early Local Color and Realism. 126 viii Part 2: The Reform Impulse in Garland's 1888-1891 Short Stories. • . ••.. 140 Part 3: The 1892 Novels of Reform. 178 Part 4: Balance in Rose of Dutcher's Coolly and Boy Life on the Prairie. ......... 188 Chapter VI: The Stages of Cather's Prairie Representations . · 219 Part 1: Early Naturalistic Stories . · 224 Part 2: The Struggle Between East and West . · 236 Part 3: The Prairie Novels: Hardship and Triumph, and Deteriorating Values . .... 261 Part 4: Final Statements: Stay on the Land . 299 Chapter VII: Conclusion . 319 Works Cited. ..... .. ... ....... 330 ix List of Abbreviations Cather Works KOA The Kingdom of Art MA My Antonia OP o Pioneers! WP The World and the Parish Garland Works M-TR Main-Travelled Roads PF Prairie Folks RM Roadside Meetings 8MB A Son of the Middle Border we Wayside Courtships Others EV Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, O'Brien wwe The World of Willa Cather, Bennett 1 Chapter I: Introduction Hamlin Garland and Willa Cather both spent the last half of their childhoods on prairie homesteads and in the small towns near them. Garland, born in 1860, moved to the edge of the agricultural frontier in Iowa in 1870 (Hill 13); Cather, who was born thirteen years later than Garland, arrived in 1883 at her grandparents' Nebraska farm, which they had homesteaded some six years earlier (Robinson 14). Both Garland and Cather wrote extensively about this life on the prairie and in small country towns during the period in American history when the West was being opened to the farmer. In 1893, ten years after Cather arrived on the prairie, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper to the American Historical Association which was meeting during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago as part of the World's Fair (Simonson 1). His paper, The Significance of the Frontier in America, begins with the announcement that the great American frontier is gone. Though others had said it before, which he acknoT ledges, his paper has corne to represent the requiem for the passing of the frontier. Only thirty years after the enactment of the Homestead Act in 1862, the free land had disappeared; in fact, only pockets of unsettled land had remained even in 1880, according to a .. U.S. Census report that Turner cites (Turner 27). 2 Turner's main point in presenting his speech, however, was not to announce the closing of the frontier; rather, his presentation posits a theory which ignited a heated controversy over how historians would view--and try to explain--the entire history of our country. Turner says: "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development" (271. It is not within the scope of this paper to recount the long-standing debate that ensued over the merit of Turner's hypothesis.' But it can be stated, whether Turner was right or not, that it was in fact that free land which enticed Garland's father (in 1870) and Cather's uncle George (1873) and her Cather grandparents (1877)--whom her parents were to follow (1883)--to the agricultural frontier. By the time Turner presented his paper in Chicago, both Hamlin Garland and Willa Cather had already left their frontier homes.

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