Cather Among the Moderns

CATHER AMONG THE MODERNS

CATHER AMONG THE MODERNS

JANIS P. STOUT

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Cover image: Willa Cather in Pittsburgh, 1903; Philip and Helen Cather Southwick Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries

Cover design: David Nees

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stout, Janis P., author.

Title: Cather among the moderns / Janis P. Stout.

Description: Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018032193| ISBN 9780817320140 (cloth) | ISBN 9780817392536 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cather, Willa, 1873–1947—Criticism and interpretation. | Modernism (Literature)—United States.

Classification: LCC PS3505.A87 Z8615 2019 | DDC 810/.93278—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032193

For Loren, of course, and for our grandchildren

When the world began to change, the restlessness of women was the main cause of the development called Greenwich Village, which existed not only in New York but all over the country.

—Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (1939)

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Preface

ONE

Becoming Thoroughly Modern

TWO

Being Modern in Greenwich Village

THREE

Among Women

FOUR

The Great War and Modern Memories

FIVE

New York Moderns in New Mexico

SIX

Democratic Vistas

SEVEN

Among Critics

EIGHT

Race and The Terrible

NINE

Making It New

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

Figure   1. Willa Cather as a woman editor

Figure   2. Willa Cather with other Hesperian staff members

Figure   3. Radical spokesperson Rebecca Edelsohn being arrested in 1914

Figure   4. Bodies from the March 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire

Figure   5. Willa Cather with Isabelle McClung Hambourg

Figure   6. Willa Cather in 1920 doing research in France for One of Ours

Figure   7. Edith Lewis

Figure   8. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Figure   9. Willa Cather on Grand Manan Island in the late 1920s or early 1930s

Figure 10. Willa Cather with S. S. McClure, Theodore Dreiser, and Paul Robeson in 1944

Figure 11. Edith Lewis and Willa Cather on horseback in New Mexico in 1925

PREFACE

It has long been debated among literary historians whether Willa Cather should be considered a modernist. That is not, or not quite, the question I am asking here—for one reason, because it has been discussed so many times already, and for another, because, if I did, I would not be able to give an unqualified answer. I would have to say something like yes, but or yes, well, not exactly. I would have to concede traces of that difficulty in placing her that the respected critic David Daiches acknowledged as long ago as 1951 in his Critical Introduction to Cather. Yet a degree of ambiguity in her relation to modernism—a different matter, of course, from her relation to modernity—doesn’t strike me as a real problem, since that very ambiguity leads us to far more interesting considerations than a simple yes or no. The difficulty of answering the question is precisely why Cather’s relation to modernism remains worth discussing.

The question of what is or was modernism itself has been discussed even more than the question of Cather’s relation to it. There was a time when this larger question seemed to have been answered. Modernism was that difficult, experimental, brilliant kind of writing practiced by T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and maybe a handful of others. But, in fact, it would only seem to have been answered. Houston A. Baker Jr., at the start of his 1987 book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, likened the term to Keats’s cold pastoral in Ode on a Grecian Urn in that, while promising a wealth of meaning, it locks observers into a questioning indecision. In recent years the definitional waters have been not merely roiled but greatly widened, with a chorus of scholarly voices calling for an end to the overemphasis on a few normative figures, at the expense of letting anyone else into the game. As recently as January 2015, in an article in PMLA called Djuna Barnes and the Geriatric Avant-Garde—wonderful title—Scott Herring offered a useful summary of the key components of what has traditionally been referred to as high modernism as being innovation, experimentalism, novelty, and difficulty, only to call his own list into question by conceding that the indisputably modernist Barnes did not persist in exemplifying these components but in rehearsing and revising them (71). She did not, he concluded, stop writing, revising, or challenging her mediums (87)—or her readers’ expectations.

Certainly Willa Cather did not stop writing. Her last known letter mentions plans to write an essay for the purpose of challenging published accounts of a brief episode in her life some four-plus decades earlier. Nor does Cather seem to have stopped revising—a practice that Hannah Sullivan has recently named as a legacy of high modernism. Cather did so quietly, for the most part, but nevertheless persistently. And she persisted to the end of her publishing life and even beyond (the cryptic Before Breakfast was published posthumously) in challenging her medium as well as her readers.

Modernism is a term that has more than once seemed settled and defined, only to be reconsidered. That remains true today. Though still thought of in stylistic ways or as a literary and artistic period in time, modernism is now being usefully retheorized in terms that go beyond nationality or language, beyond formerly clear time boundaries, and beyond the elite, difficult texts of high modernism to include popular culture. The liveliest field of modernist studies today is occupied by scholars advancing the concepts usually called cultural modernism, a way of thinking about modernism that offers a valuable framework for Cather studies in years to come.

Like the question of whether Cather is properly termed a modernist, the question of what modernism is or was is not my central interest here either. Both are relevant, and I will touch on both at various points if only to question the value of the questions themselves. As readers of twentieth-century American literature, we need to be talking about modernisms, plural, and not only the techniques that writers employed but also their reasons for doing so—their conceptions of the world, whether conscious or unconscious, how they responded to the changing world around them, and how they shared their interests with social and intellectual communities. As models for doing this last, for trying to conceive of modernism as a community or a culture, I think back to Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1986) and Daniel Joseph Singal’s Towards a Definition of American Modernism (1987).

Benstock and Singal (himself a key figure in the development of cultural modernism) indicate the kind of book I want this to be. My aim is a book about Willa Cather that, as Benstock says of her own, marks the intersections of life and art, the crossroads of memory and history, myth and biography (ix). Or to put it differently, my purpose is a book about Cather that positions her against a crowded backdrop of her contemporaries, many but not all of whom she knew personally, who shared modernity’s stage with her and were recognized as moderns and modernists. How, I ask, did they come to share the same stage, and how—a rather different question—do they share the same stage in the theater of our own viewing today?

In short, I propose to explore not only the ways in which Willa Cather’s writing participated in the literature and art of her time but also her lived intersection with the experiences that characterized modernity, broadly conceived, in the first half of the twentieth century in America. Some of the people, ideas, and works of literature or art that she encountered can readily be identified with what is usually called modernism; some cannot. Hence my title, which is not Cather Among the Modernists but Cather Among the Moderns. Its echo of Christine Stansell’s title for her book about Greenwich Village and the American avant-garde, American Moderns, is fully intentional.

I have tried hard to make this book both sound, in a scholarly sense, and readable. That goal is evident in my intermittent use of a narrative mode of opening up situations for consideration. It is evident, too, in my frequent use of a relatively informal, direct vocabulary. In trying to make the book readable, I have also tried hard not to clutter the text unnecessarily. References to The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (coedited by Andrew Jewell and myself) will consistently appear in parentheses as "Sel. Letters," with page numbers, as will identifications of quotations from Cather’s own novels, stories, and other works. Unless otherwise indicated, these will refer to the Scholarly Edition. Other notes appear primarily as endnotes and whenever possible are grouped. In writing about a subject such as this, one is always conscious that one is joining a conversation already in progress. I hope that my efforts to acknowledge what others in the conversation are saying are not so frequent as to become distracting. Within the notes themselves, authors’ names and short titles correspond readily to bibliography listings for fuller information.

✤

I particularly want to thank Richard Millington, who asked me in June 2015 whether I was planning a book about Cather in relation to other modernists, because he had noticed that I kept giving conference papers that placed her in such relationships. I had not even thought of doing such a thing, but my eyes (I can imagine) instantly lit up in the way one’s eyes do when an alluring new prospect is presented. In addition to Millington, many others in the community of Cather scholars have helped me over the years in more ways than I can begin to name here. On this present project, I am especially indebted to Andrew Jewell, who conferred with me on matters of fact, read chapter drafts, and gave me valuable suggestions. Andy alerted me, for example, to the autobiography of Walter Francis White, which places Cather at mixed-race parties in Harlem in the twenties. Thanks, too, to Ann Romines and Melissa Homestead, who are always ready to listen to my uncertainties, think them over, and share their expertise; to Robert Thacker and Richard Harris, who have encouraged me in my work for many years; and to Robert L. Patten, who suggested I have a look at Dickens’s prefaces. I appreciate the interest and work of Daniel Waterman at the University of Alabama Press and the press readers who provided such copious and useful suggestions. As always, I give special thanks to Carolina de Leon and her colleagues at Evans Library, Texas A&M University, without whom my scholarly and publishing life could not have continued after retirement. For assistance with photographs, thanks, too, to Josh Caster at the University of Nebraska, Love Library, Special Collections; Marty Vestecka Miller at the Nebraska State Historical Society; and Halle Mares at Ohio State University, Special Collections. Other debts are acknowledged in notes throughout the text.

In drawing on my own previously published works on Cather, I hope to bring them into more coherent relevance to the central question of Cather’s modernity addressed here. These earlier publications are listed in the bibliography. I thank the editors and presses who published them and by so doing have made it possible for me to continue and, I hope, refine and develop my ideas about this writer who has held my attention for so many years.

1

BECOMING THOROUGHLY MODERN

Miss Willa Cather, the editor of the Home Monthly, is . . . such a thoroughly up-to-date woman she certainly should be mentioned among the pioneers in woman’s advancement.

—Jeannette Barbour, 1897 interview in the Pittsburg Press

I have been running away from myself all my life (have you?) and have been happiest when I was running fastest.

—Willa Cather to Dorothy Canfield, June 22, 1933

When a twenty-two-year-old Willa Cather took a train from Red Cloud, Nebraska, to the big city of Pittsburgh in June 1896, she was enacting one of the major tropes of modernity: geographic mobility. In fact, she was enacting multiple tropes of modernity at once, not only mobility in itself but more specifically movement from rural to urban spaces and, for women, an increasing trend toward pursuit of a career rather than marriage as the shaping pattern for their lives. In leaving home and setting out east to begin a career in journalism, she was joining one of the most recognizable groups among moderns, the New Woman: single, white, well educated, intent on career achievement, unconventional.

Probably she didn’t realize how privileged she was, in comparison with most women. My addition of the racial marker white to the usual definition of the New Woman is a reminder that women’s surge into journalism and editorial work did not represent the work experience of women in general.¹ In the 1890s those young women who had high school or technical school educations but not college were going into office work as file clerks and copyists (Cather’s term for typists and stenographers when she wrote about this group decades later in her Office Wives stories). But the economic sectors in which most urban women worked around the turn of the century were manual factory labor and retail sales. These were women not of the middle class but of the white working classes. Black women usually cleaned houses, cooked, or took in washing. Cather had graduated from college. It was possible for her to have higher aspirations.

Her journey to Pittsburgh (spelled Pittsburg at that time) was not her first long train trip. As a child, she had been taken away from her home in Virginia to the western frontier state of Nebraska by way of that emblem of rapid movement and mechanical power inseparably linked to modernity. Her family had thereby joined the myth-making movement westward that is evident in American history at every stage but became a great surge after the Civil War. People from the South moved west in great numbers to escape the economic devastation wrought by the war all across the region. Charles and Mary Virginia Cather left their home in the Back Creek community of western Virginia, near the West Virginia line, in 1883, going to join relatives who had already made the move to Nebraska. Their oldest child, Willela or Willa (or Willie), was not yet ten years old. She hated leaving her home, and for her first year after the move she hated Nebraska. She was homesick. In 1896, then, in going by train to Pittsburgh to begin a new life, she was reversing the direction of her family’s migration.

We can see from the record of Cather’s later travels how deeply embedded this American pattern of life was in her life. She embodied American mobility.² And as we can readily see in both her fiction and her poetry, patterns of travel and mobility were deeply embedded in her imagination as well.

The mid-1890s were a time of continued uprootedness and mobility. In addition to the surge of migration from the South after the Civil War, European immigrants—those who did not stay to swell the populations of East Coast cities—poured into the Great Plains. They, as well as migrating Americans, had often been drawn by railway publicity flyers. When they arrived they either filed for 160 acres under the Homestead Act of 1862 (later revised to allow larger grants in areas not hospitable to farming) or purchased land at bargain rates from the railways, which had received it as an incentive for building, or both. Cather had known many of these immigrant people during her early years in Nebraska, including Czechs (or Bohemians), Scandinavians (mostly Norwegians and Danes), Germans, and French-Canadians. But in the 1890s an economic depression struck, comparable only to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thousands of homesteads were abandoned as people went broke and made their way back east or simply became vagrants. Cather would later take note of this eastward flight from the frontier in her 1913 novel O Pioneers!, in which Alexandra buys up such failed properties and becomes a great landowner.

In the last years of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, immigration from Europe continued, but the areas of origin shifted away from northern and western Europe toward southern and eastern Europe and Russia; many of these new immigrants were Jews.³ The numbers would remain high until a restrictive quota system was enacted by Congress in 1924.⁴ Cather’s move to Pittsburgh in 1896, then, was made during a period of rapid urbanization driven both by migration within the country, as settlers gave up and came back east, and by immigration from abroad. It is thought that the number of Americans living in cities increased from 10 million to over 50 million between 1870 and 1920. The characteristic site of modernity became urban and industrial.⁵

When Cather redirected her life away from small-town Nebraska to urban and industrial Pittsburgh, by means of a long train trip with a stopover in the very epitome of modern rail travel and transfer, Chicago, she was joining both of these patterns of modernity, migration and urbanization. Picking up on what was apparently a current phrase, she quickly named Pittsburgh, in a letter to college friend Mariel Gere, City of Dreadful Dirt (Sel. Letters, 33).⁶

Like most American migrants (and immigrants) both then and later, Cather had left home for reasons not merely of personal fulfillment (though that was a powerful motive for her) but of economic opportunity. In the 1900s, the pattern of movement would increasingly shift toward individual mobility as opposed to family or group migration. In a sense, by launching out in 1896 she was anticipating a coming trend. Of course, when multiplied by thousands, such seemingly individual relocations also become large cultural patterns. Relocation for purposes of employment or career advancement—that is, for reasons of opportunity—would become so widespread as the twentieth century went on as to constitute another kind of mass migration, though not unidirectional. By taking people away from sustaining family structures, this pattern of movement entailed the dislocation and alienation that has also often been seen as characteristic of modernity. The northward exodus of African Americans out of the South during World War I (a social epic depicted in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, an astonishing set of sixty stark paintings with text) would be one of the largest-scale forms this pattern would take.⁷ By midcentury, mobility for reasons of personal economic advancement would for the middle class often take the form of corporate transfers. Cather was participating in an early version of this kind of quasi-individual but socially widespread mobility when she made her train trip from Red Cloud to Pittsburgh in 1896, and she too would sometimes feel herself stranded without recourse to a readily available family structure.

Bernice Slote, one of the first scholars to work on Cather, and in particular on her early journalism, asked in 1966 whether Cather was already modern at the time she took the train for Pittsburgh.⁸ I believe the best answer is that she had begun the process of becoming modern. But Slote went on to provide two answers to her own question, both of which reflect her emphasis on aesthetic principles over social patterns. First, she said, Cather was ‘up-to-date’ in matters of general information on the arts and especially in theatre matters. This would prove advantageous to the young aspiring journalist as she found her way through what was in fact a deeply depressed employment market in the aftermath of the Panic of 1893. Second, Slote located Cather’s literary leanings at the moment of her departure as being somewhere between Shelley and D. H. Lawrence.⁹ It is this thread of indeterminacy, this transitional position, that particularly interests me in Slote’s answer to the question of whether Cather was already modern.

We see this thread of indeterminacy running all through Cather’s relation to both modernity itself and modern literature. We see it especially in her choice of gender roles and her ways of performing those roles, and we see it, too, as she matured, in her writing about women’s lives. One of the most modern aspects of Willa Cather was her questioning of traditional ways of being female and her envisioning of alternatives. She joined the great modern surge of urbanization at a time when women’s lives and their modes of self-presentation were in transformation.

Modern, Modernity, and Modernism

I will frequently be using throughout the chapters that follow the related words modern, modernity, and modernism or modernist. It may be well, then, to pause here to think about them and clarify their meaning.

Modern is of course the commonest of the four, used as a descriptor for a person, thing, or idea that is recent or up-to-date, or to refer to someone or something that fits well within a context of recentness or innovativeness or seems to represent the new or up-to-date. Modern is generally a clear and unproblematic term. It generally carries a neutral connotation, with no value judgment attached—as when we refer to modern science as distinct from ideas about the natural world formulated before the development of laboratories, sophisticated equipment, and the working-out of scientific methodology. But if it is used as a term of value, it usually carries a positive connotation. We may complain of specific features or tendencies of modern times, but to deplore a person or thing simply for being modern would be to label ourselves retrograde. Placing Cather among the moderns, then, simply means assessing her position among those of her contemporaries whose taste and style represented their time. It implies a belief that she belongs in such company. That is, most simply, what I am doing here: positioning her within or against the context of a broad backdrop of her contemporaries.

Modernity may be no more than the noun for the adjective modern, but it is more specifically a term of history, a period designation. Sometimes used inclusively for the entire postmedieval world, primarily in Europe, it more commonly designates the twentieth century, perhaps extending back into the latter decades of the nineteenth. This latter sense is how I use it here. Modernity also serves as an indication of the predominant conditions of life and thought during this period: the rapidly increasing technological innovation of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the increasing prevalence of consumer capitalism and of at least nominally democratic institutions, the emergence of women into something approaching equality with men, the definitive establishment of urbanism as the condition of life for the vast majority of people in so-called developed countries, and in America the continuance of racial conflict and injustice despite major gains toward equality. In more philosophical terms, it designates a time when in Daniel Joseph Singal’s words, the Victorians’ bedrock assumptions including a belief in a predictable universe yielded to the premise of an unpredictable universe where nothing is ever stable and knowledge is partial and transient at best.¹⁰ According to Singal’s analysis, these are the primary indicators and underlying structures of modernity. In more directly anthropological terms, it refers to the cultural concepts underlying the new anthropology in the early twentieth century. Cather was demonstrably interested in this line of thinking, which entailed a reluctance to think of cultures sequentially or in hierarchy and an emphasis on a culture’s wholeness, in which individual elements generate meaning in the context of that whole.¹¹

Modernism differs from either of the preceding in that it is a term of art, and a particularly elusive one. In traditional literary usage, it has referred to the vastly transformative movement in art and literature that emerged in or around the early years of the twentieth century, which reflected the conditions of modernity in complex and disputed ways. Defined in that way, it has mainly designated the movement in literature identified with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and a few others whose names make up a very exclusive list. As a kind of byword, it also refers to a conscious and intentional effort to belong to such a movement—a kind of self-consciousness in being innovative. And in this sense too it applies to Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Stein—the early high modernists.

Never so neutral or self-evident a term as either modern or modernity, modernism carries a large and sometimes cumbersome baggage of associated meanings. As it first became established, it was usually directed toward the styles and techniques of these certain few innovative writers, and it can still profitably be used in that way when discussing writers or artists whose status has seemed, for some reason, unclear. But that use readily leant itself, in the days of the New Criticism, to becoming a measuring stick for literature in general. (See, for example, Cleanth Brooks’s venerated The Well-Wrought Urn, 1947.) This is in part a function of chronology. Esteem for modernism was institutionalized along with the establishment of English as an academic discipline; it was stitched into its very fabric as the discipline established its professional credibility.¹² With the professionalization of literary study came a high valuation of complexity, ambiguity, and difficulty.

Such terms may not seem to apply to Willa Cather. At the surface level, her works are relatively transparent; they have a limpid quality that she in fact worked hard to achieve. But they are difficult in a different way. At the deeper level of what the seemingly simple surface means, they are often elusive. Such a text as Eliot’s Waste Land or Four Quartets or Joyce’s Ulysses announces its difficulty, and thus its modernity, at once. Cather’s My Mortal Enemy or Before Breakfast makes easy reading until we reread and reflect. Brokenness of surface, reflecting an assumption of brokenness in meaning, is equally imperative in traditionally understood (which is not to say misunderstood) modernism. In visual art we can see this in Cézanne or the Cubists, where surfaces are broken into aspects implying different perspectives, which can be made into ordinary wholeness only in the mind of the viewer; in literature we see it in abrupt discontinuities and in puzzles of perspective, such as Benjy’s narrative at the start of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Cather’s work, on the other hand, is seemingly smooth, flowing, and welcoming—until we notice gaps of time, irruptions of sudden violence, narrators’ questionable judgments, and dark implications. Modernism might also mean calling attention to the surfaces of works, their status as artifice; it implied an awareness of art as art. Hence René Magritte’s noted (and amusing) painting This Is Not a Pipe. (Indeed it isn’t; it is a painting.) Cather’s work seems wholly referential to the world outside, a kind of stylized realism, until we notice her attention to structures and the ways in which she draws the reader’s attention to structure.

Although discussions of modernism, traditionally defined, led to many fine examples of close reading of texts, theorists of modernism today are deeply engaged in challenging the exclusivity of this customary definition in favor of developing the more broadly embracing idea of a cultural modernism—cultural, that is, in the anthropological sense of culture developed in the early twentieth century. Innovation, for example (we think of Ezra Pound’s injunction to make it new), remains one of the hallmarks of modernism, but not mere stylistic innovation; rather, conceptual innovation, radical changes in world view that emerged historically in opposition to Victorian cultural assumptions, a turn from received truths to the making of meaning.¹³ For Cather, this turn would come to mean, after a long internship both in Pittsburgh and in New York, giv[ing] up her ambition to inherit the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel and turn[ing] definitely towards a class of materials that would have been invisible to . . . James and Wharton.¹⁴ The work of theorists of cultural modernism has entailed a further rejection to modernism’s exclusionary opposition between high art and daily life, or between high art and popular culture. Modernism’s equally exclusionary barrier between the civilized (read, white) world and savagery or blackness, despite its fascination with African images, has also been recognized in recent theoretical and historical work.¹⁵

Cather’s place among the modernists, whether as traditionally defined or as defined by the cultural theorists, has been much discussed but by no means entirely settled. Her own ambivalences and the ambiguities encountered in studying her works well illustrate the struggles over periodization that have come in recent years, challenging the idea of a clear distinction between the Victorian era, with its characteristic values and worldview, and modernity or modernism, conceived as a rejection and repudiation of those.¹⁶ We will touch on her position in relation to this group intermittently throughout the book and take up the question directly in the final chapter. In doing so, we will be participating in the broadening of what modernism means and in lengthening the roster of just who modernists are. Aside from this more specific question of Cather’s modernism, though, we will be looking, throughout, at her modernity.

Willa, William, or Willie

The young college graduate who boarded the train from Red Cloud to Pittsburgh in June 1896 had come through a long period of trying to define her gender identity and to find ways of presenting that identity. Her adolescent struggle with these issues, continuing into her college years, has been so often reviewed that I will take only a relatively brief glance at it here, important as it is. But we must give it at least that glance before moving on to think about her modernity, the ways in which she did or did not fit in among the moderns around her both as a young career woman and as a writer about modern women.

Gender and sexuality are sites of contention when Cather is discussed. The young Cather has at times been described as a cross-dresser and, if I may coin such a term, a cross-namer.¹⁷ Between the ages of eleven (when her family moved into Red Cloud from their farm or ranch a few miles outside of town) and sixteen (when she went to the University of Nebraska for a year of prep work before entering the university proper), she engaged in a kind of adolescent exploration of the available range of ways to be a girl or woman. The extent to which this may have been a strategy for defying her genteel and ladylike mother is unclear. It is quite clear, however, that she was interrogating gender, trying to find ways of being female that were unlike her mother’s ways. Some scholars have argued that she was beginning to realize and express her adult lesbian identity. Clearly, she was resisting frilly girlhood. But I am less convinced that, as one critic has written, during her adolescence and college years she dressed like a man, cut her hair short, and even called herself Willie.¹⁸ Even: as if that represented some extreme of self-masculinization. In fact, her family had called her Willie from infancy. This entire matter relates to our understanding of Cather among the moderns in that it shows her navigating one of the central aspects of modernity, the reconception of women’s roles and images and indeed women’s essential nature.

Arguments that Cather was identifying as a boy in Red Cloud and when she went to college are based largely on the pictorial record of her self-presentation in these early years. But I believe such arguments are a misreading of the photographs. As for having her hair cut like a boy’s, we can’t be so certain as scholars such as James Woodress have seemed to be in labeling these photographs as showing just that. We have no way of knowing whether she had insisted on having her hair cut so short against family opposition or whether her mother also wanted it short, perhaps for ease of care, or if some other factor was at work. For example, her favorite aunt, Frances Smith Cather (Aunt Franc), seems to have had shingled hair. Cynthia Griffin Wolff has offered evidence of a local outbreak of head lice, which would have been more easily managed in short hair than in long. In any event, it is hard to imagine that as a youngster she could have paid to have studio portraits made on her own, without her parents’ cooperation, and if her appearance as we see her in these images had offended them we can scarcely believe they would have it recorded in studio photographs.¹⁹

As for dressing like a man or boy, we need to remember that what looks that way to present-day eyes may not have been so then. For example, a hat shown in a photograph that Woodress singles out does appear masculine but was in fact a style being worn by even very femininely dressed young women.²⁰ In several of the frequently reprinted images that are claimed as evidence of her dressing like a man or boy, details such as the narrow shoulders and puffed sleeve caps of her jackets were beyond question styles for women.²¹ Rather than presenting herself as a boy or man, I believe she was adopting a middle way, taking up tailored and relatively masculine-looking styles that were actually fashionable for young women at the time, leaving her gender identification ambiguous.²²

Another of the photographs made during her early college years has been said to show her dressed in military garb.²³ True, she is wearing what has usually been identified as a Confederate cap, though it may have been a cap used by the university ROTC. Here, too, she wears a jacket with narrow shoulders and puffed sleeve caps that, along with its shapely fit at the waist and its elaborately embroidered frog closures, indicate it was intended for women. As I read these photographs, none of them shows that she was trying to dress like a man, though she may well have been aiming at a blurring of distinctions, an escape from being defined. If so, her rejection of categorical definition and her construction of self through performance and costume can well be seen as facets of the making of meaning itself that Richard Millington sees as the central subject-matter of her fiction and a central aspect of modernism.²⁴

Cather’s preferred activities as a teenager in Red Cloud are also sometimes mentioned as evidence of a male-gendered persona. It does seem to be true that in these respects she presented herself differently from most girls. In addition to learning Latin and Greek (masculine by custom, though not necessarily so) she took an avowed interest in amateur taxidermy and, so she claimed, vivisection. She also liked to accompany a local doctor on his rounds and may sometimes have assisted in surgical procedures, though Wolff conjectures that bragging about these various hobbies may have been more important to her than engaging in the activities itself.²⁵ Probably it was from her brief interest in accompanying the doctor that she took up, for a while, the practice of signing herself Dr. William Cather or William Cather, MD. During these same years, however, she also enjoyed picnics and gossiping, especially about young couples who spooned (possibly indicating distaste but possibly merely interest). After college, she once prepared a wedding breakfast for a cousin and boasted about her success, as she also boasted many years later, after a visit home, that she had taken over the kitchen and mastered the art of pastry. By then she had long been a career woman, but she did not disdain occasional bouts