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Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter the Witla Cather Society 326 N Copyright © 1992 by the Willa Cather Pioneer ISSN 0197-663X Memorial and Educational Foundation Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter The Witla Cather Society 326 N. Webster Street VOLUME XXXVI, No, 3 Red Cloud, Nebraska 68970 Fall, 1992 Literary Annual Telephone (402) 746-2653 Victorian Rules and Left Bank Rebellion: Inside This Issue Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein The Song of the Lark and James’s Patrick W. Shaw The Tragic Texas Tech University Muse ..... Elsa Nettels My Mortal Enemy as a Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein were near-exact contemporaries (Stein Ballad of 1874-1946, Cather 1873-1947), and thus were products of Victorian Exile .... Laura Winters America. As children they both migrated from east to west -- Stein from Eden Bower and Pennsylvania to California, Cather from Virginia to Nebraska. They came Foucault .. Holly Messitt from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds. They both desired careers Impressionism in Lucy in medicine, but became distinguished writers instead. And they both were Gayheart. Kevin Synnott homoerotic. Yet, despite such similarities, Cather perceived art, Victorian The Narrator in "Two society, and "aberrant" sexuality so differently from Stein that the contrast Friends" ... Mark Sherf invites speculation about Cather and the Left Bank community which 0 Pioneers! flourished in Paris for the first forty years of the twentieth century and which Adaptations . Cecilia Farr 1 Cather in Saudi Stein dominated. The topic on which I wish to focus, therefore, is the polar Arabia.. Asad AI-Ghalith extremes which Cather and Stein occupied on the continuum of personal response to Victorian orthodoxy. The personal and artistic conflicts which Cather and Stein experienced were hardly unique. Many (perhaps most) creative women of their generation suffered from the repressive and contradictory sexual mores of The Fifth the Victorian hegemony. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English cite Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, and others as examples of intelligent, active International women paralyzed "at the brink of adult life" (2) by "the ideology of a mascu- Seminar Red Cloud and Hastings, Nebraska 19-26 June, 1993 When the World Broke in Two: Cather’s Later ¯ " Writings CALL FOR PAPERS, es- pecially on seminar topic: inquiries to Susan Rosow- ski, Dept. of English, U. of Nebraska-Lincoln. SCHOLARSHIP HELP available for participating graduate students: inquir- ies to Pat Phillips, WCPM. Pablo Picasso’s Gertrude Stein (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Gertrude Stein) and Leon Bakst’s Willa Cather (Omaha Public Library) seem portraits of, respectively, confident rebellion and somewhat troubled conformity. 23 linist society, dressed up as objective truth" (4).2 While in Paris, even though, as she herself said, every time they may appear to be otherwise, these paralyzing she crossed the Missouri River when returning to Victorian attitudes were not the embedded command- Nebraska she was so confused she "could not decide ments of tradition, rustic superstitions, or old wives’s which was the real and which the fake ’me’" (WCiP tales. Neither were they the sustained manifestation of 37)? seventeenth-century Calvinism. They emanated instead The superficially satisfying argument that Cather did from urban industrialism under the aegis of science not understand Stein’s reasons for revolt and dis- and were formulated in medical texts, purity manuals, agreed with her unorthodox life style is flawed. Like and other influential communications from the morally Stein, who openly assumed and fulfilled the masculine empowered. Ehrenreich and English call the purveyors role in her "marriage" to Alice B. Toklas, Cather no of these attitudes "the new class of experts" who less openly but more quietly occupied that same "presented themselves as authorities" on the Woman dominant role in her long-term relationship with Edith Question (4); and the audience they addressed was Lewis, with whom she lived from 1908 until her death the educated middle class to which Cather and Stein in 1947. Among others, Leon Edel recognizes that belonged. Lewis was so subservient to Cather that she was The phenomenon of this new moral authority has "worshipful" (189). A more logical explanation of itself been the subject of several studies. Among the Cather’s refusal to associate with the Left Bank is that best is John and Robin Haller’s The Physician and by the late nineteenth-century the Victorian moralists Sexuality in Victorian America, a title which correctly had criminalized lesbianism and the type of relation- suggests that medical doctors of the Victorian era "held ship which Cather and Lewis shared, As Joanna Russ [themselves] responsible for the moral and spiritual, as notes, the "innocent rightness in feelings of love for well as the physical, health of the nation" (Hailer xi). and attraction to women" which an earlier generation One example will suffice to characterize physicians’ enjoyed was no longer possible (79), and Cather would attitudes toward women and sexuality. In 1893 (when not risk being considered "inverted" E a pejorative Cather was twenty and "on the brink of adult life") term Freud applied to homoeroticism (BW 554).4 physician James Weir, Jr., attacked the feminist Cather’s only manifest rebellion against Victorian movement "as an example of hermaphroditism" and sexual orthodoxy, therefore, was her well-documented predicted that "American feminists would degenerate period of adolescent cross-dressing. Coincidental with into either uninhibited libertines or an anomalous this minor revolt was her determination to become a phalanx of barrel-chested women" (Hailer 77). Females physician, a "man" of science. Both the overt expres- who made suffrage demands, sought entrance to tradi- sions of masculinity and the attempts to enter medicine tional male occupations, and participated in similar ended as Cather probably realized that women were radical behavior were, Weir concluded, victims of not welcomed into a fraternity of physicians whose "psycho-sexual aberrancy" (77). "scientific" studies had convinced them that "women’s Cather and Stein were two who survived the inferiority was clearly evident in almost every analysis damage caused by these self-proclaimed experts to of the brain" (Hailer 50) and who warned that "women forge their own distinct identities. Stein managed the whose activities had taken them beyond the bound- feat via an overt rebellion against the Gilded Cage of aries of polite society would inevitably degenerate into Victorian America and emerged as a woman who by rooftop mehitabels with voracious sexual appetites or sheer force of personality demanded that her radical depersonalized neuters sublimating their natural art and unorthodox sexuality be recognized and instincts for those of a neurotic drone" (84). accepted. Cather-- though not without scars E chose Given her devoted adolescent interest in medicine an overtly quiet conservative adherence to socially and her close relationship with Red Cloud physicians, acceptable and "scientifically" approved behavior. we can safely assume that Cather was informed of the More factors than their coincidental backgrounds latest medical pronouncements and took them serious- suggest that Cather should have emulated Stein’s ly. She knew, therefore, that continuing her masculine actions and affiliated with the Paris Left Bank commu- guise and persisting in a medical career would guaran- nity, "where life was economically, psychologically, and tee her being publicly identified as a sexual deviate politically easier" (Benstock 13). Cather was a life-long and would invite public censuring which she could not devotee of French culture; she took frequent trips to tolerate.5 Though the world of fiction-making was also France; the great love of her life, Isabelle McClung, male dominated and did not recruit women, it at least resided in Paris; and Cather visited Isabelle regularly. grudgingly admitted them, thus Cather could redirect More significantly, a commitment to the Left Bank life her energies to that profession.6 Accepting prescribed style could have ameliorated some of the psycho- concepts of normality and social roles, and unable to sexual conflicts which troubled Cather and which grew modify her sexual ethic radically enough to rebel more pronounced as she aged.3 Yet, Cather did not publicly against perceived scientific correctness, Cather visit Stein’s expatriate salon at 27 Rue des Fleurus or was unwilling to persist in overt nonconformity. Her make any known effort to participate in Left Bank life. antisocial "William" period was tolerated by a home- A significant question, then, remains. Why did Cather town that, like the authors of the purity manuals, did not break with Red Cloud when she could have stayed not want to cope with matters taboo and thus dis- 24 missed the cross-dressing as mere theatrical Emil Bergson of O Pioneers!, who are gunned down tomboyism. However, neither Red Cloud nor the for surrendering to their sexual passions; and Marian cosmopolitan centers of the northeast were willing to Forrester of A Lost Lady, who is exiled to Latin ignore such "aberrancy" once Cather reached her America and sexual/economic dependence upon a majority. Consequently, rather than extend her civil wealthy old man because of her adultery. Even disobedience into full-fledged combat with the Antonia Shimerda, whose personality the proper moral/somatic arbiters, Cather would suppress her Victorian Jim Burden misconstrues, deteriorates into sexuality as well as
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