Willa Cather

All world-class writers possess at least one work that could be considered a literary masterpiece. DeMaupassant wrote Boule de Suif, Ball of Fat, Tolstoy authored War and Peace as well as the novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Hardy gave us Jude the Obscure and so on. Willa Cather had many such showpieces, most noticeably her novel, My Antonia, and the equally compelling short story, Neighbor Rosicky. 

Born in 1873 Willa Cather - unquestionably one of America’s greatest literary writers - was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I. Interestingly, when it was initially published Earnest Hemingway offered a scathing review of One of Ours, suggesting the author knew absolutely nothing about the realities of the battlefield. Despite his damning commentary, many soldiers returning from the war praised the work suggesting that Willa Cather understood the horrors and implicit ironies of trench warfare far better than most contemporary writers.

In the psychedelic sixties many American feminists were damning Willa Cather to hell, suggesting that her books be burned or banned from public libraries because of the ending to her most famous work, My Antonia, where the self-reliant heroine eventually marries and raises a family of her own. Hard-core feminists felt that Ms Cather had sold out to the male chauvinist (i.e.misogynistic) male-dominated society that valued ‘bare foot and pregnant’ over female entrepreneurship and financial independence. 

These college-educated women failed to acknowledge Willa Cather’s vivid depiction of bright-eyed ever-resourceful frontier women brimming over with common decency, intestinal fortitude and personal ingenuity. A perfect example of what I just mentioned emerges three quarters of the way through the novel, where Ms Cather introduces a new character, a young Scandinavian girl who has just arrived in the Mid West to work on her parents’ farm. The girl, a gifted seamstress, eventually moves to California where she opens her own millinery boutique - an inspiring precursor to the Horatio Alger story, if ever there was one.

One additional example of Willa Cather's misconstrued feminism lies in the following passage that comes in the final pages of her epic novel, where the male narrator notes:

“I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered -

about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women 

who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose 

inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia 

had not lost the fire of life.”

This quote embodies one of the most poignant scenes in the book, where an increasingly maternal Antonia in her twilight years feels a total fulfillment. No matter that she’s missing a handful of teeth or teeters about on spindly legs. She loves her family, farm, chickens and cows. Life is good! Try explaining that to a character disorder feminist with high blood pressure, tendency to work too late and drink too much.

My Antonia is a literary masterpiece, but the much shorter Neighbor Rosicky is equally impressive. Neighbour Rosicky tells the story of a 65-year-old Czech farmer, Anton Rosicky, who now resides in Nebraska with his wife and six children. The story begins with Anton at his doctor’s office, where he learns that he has a bad heart. The doctor informs him that he can no longer continue to work the fields, and should stick to less strenuous chores about the home and barn. The Rosicky family's kindness is reflected in the narrator’s recollection of the hospitality shown in their home after delivering a neighbor's baby. He reflects on gossip he's heard about the Rosickys, that their farm never turns a significant profit as do some of the nearby farms. But rather than feel sorry for them, he respects the Rosickys for valuing relationship over money.

Cather admired Henry James's use of language and characterization and while she enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot, the Brontës, and Jane Austen—she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.  One contemporary exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor. Jewett advised Cather to use female narrators in her fiction, to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was dedicated to Jewett), and to write fiction that explicitly represented romantic attraction between women. Cather was also influenced by the work of Katherine Mansfield, praising in an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak out onto the shadowy realm of personal relationships.

What follows is a handful of Willa Cather quotes.

“Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” ― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.” ― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.” ― Willa Cather , The Song of the Lark

We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.         Willa Cather

“I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.” ― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.

There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. Willa Cather, “My Ántonia”, p.15, 

When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open. Willa Cather (2009). “O Pioneers!”, p.224, 

“The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.” Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”

“The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.” ―Death Comes for the Archbishop

“Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.” ― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.” ― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. ” ― Willa Cather

“Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.” My Ántonia

“There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” ― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air. or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.” ― Willa Cather, My Antonia

“But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.” ― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” ― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!