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The Stuff of our Forebears: Willa Cather's Southern Heritage by Joyce McDonald, Ph.D. University of Alabama Press |
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"McDonald Succeeds in establishing both the importance and the relevance of those formative years before the Nebraska experience that scholars have so emphasized for several decades. Since Cather herself insisted repeatedly that the early years of an author's life so greatly affected--indeed determined--the material, insight, and direction of one'swork, it is altogether fitting that McDonald has cogently and effectively focused attention on the pre-Nebraska years. The Stuff of Our Forebears is a readable, insightful addition to Cather scholarship." "In associating Cather with the past grandeur and defeat of the South and detecting in her fiction an undertone of historical irony, McDonald successfully places Cather in a larger world than the pioneering American one with which she has been identified." |
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A diverse and experimental writer who lived most of her life in New York City, Willa Cather is best known for her depiction of pioneer life on the Nebraska plains. Although scholars have begun to extricate Cather from the restrictive label of plains "regional" writer, surprisingly little has been written about the influence of Cather's early years in Virginia on her fiction. Joyce McDonald convincingly demonstrates that Cather's works yield a remarkable wealth of themes and literary modes connecting her to the South of her youth and to the Southern literary tradition. In 1883, at age nine, Willa Cather moved with her family from the lush Shenandoah Valley to the barren plains of Nebraska, a move that would profoundly affect her life and her work. Despite Cather's association with Nebraska, however, the novelist's Virginia childhood and the influence of her Southern family were deeply influential in shaping her literary imagination. McDonald shows evidence, for example, of Cather's Southern sensibility in the class consciousness and aesthetic values of her characters and in their sense of place and desire for historical continuity, a sensibility also evident in her narrative technique of weaving stories within stories and in her use of folklore. What most links Cather and her work to the South and to the Southern literary tradition, however, is her use of pastoral modes. In fact, the stages through which Cather's variations on the pastoral advance correspond to a paradigm unique to Southern literature. Evolving from the pastoral idealism of O Pioneers! and the alienation and disillusionment evident in books such as A Lost Lady and The Professor's House, Cather's later works finally reach historical reconciliation--an acceptance of her own historical past and a reclamation of her Southern ancestral roots. In her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Cather reconciles personal human experience with its historical context. Beginning with an examination of Cather's Virginia childhood and the Southern influences that continued to mold her during the Nebraska years, McDonald traces the effects of those influences in several of Cather's novels. The patterns that emerge are often surprising. They reveal not only Cather's strong ideological connection to the pastoral but also the political position implicit in her choice of that particular mode. Further analysis of Cather's work reveals her preoccupation with hierarchical constructs and with the use and abuse of power, along with her interest in order, control, and possession. The Willa Cather who emerges from the pages of The Stuff of Our Forebears is not the Cather who claimed to eschew politics but a far more political novelist than has heretofore been perceived.
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