Willa Sibert Cather

Willa Cather

(1873-1947)

Elements of biography

Willa Sibert Cather was born on 7 December, 1873 in Back Creek Valley, Virginia. Her father was a farmer. The early years of young Willa's life left a memorable impression on her and formed the basis for many of her stories and characters. The Cathers traveled west across six states landing in Nebraska, Webster county, in 1883 to live at the paternal grandfather's farm at a time when many Swedish, French and Bohemian immigrant pioneers had moved to the area with dreams of homesteading. Willa became friend to many of the new Americans. There was harsh contrast between the green wooded hills of Virginia and the wide open prairies of Nebraska to the ten year old tomboy. After a few years the family moved to the village of Red Cloud where Charles Cather opened an insurance and real estate office.

Willa Cather entered the University of Nebraska in 1891 with her sights set on studying science, though a professor's submitting one of her papers, to the school newspaper the Nebraska State Journal, caused her to rethink her career plans. She began to write a column for it in dramatic criticism, and also acted in a number of school plays. A year after her graduation in 1895, her love of music and concerts led her to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and an offer to become editor of a Pittsburgh paper. She was telegraph editor of the Daily Leader, drama critic, and also submitted book reviews. Her journalistic career was now in full swing.

In 1900 Cather became an English high school teacher in Allegheny, Pittsburgh. The months off in the summer allowed her to travel to France in 1902 with Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a prominent local judge who had become her best supporter and lifelong friend. It was the first of a number of trips that cultivated the great love Cather had for France's culture and literature.

Cather earned a doctorate of letters from the University of Nebraska in 1917. During her lifetime she also earned honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of California, and from Columbia, Yale, and Princeton.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922). In 1933 she was awarded the Prix Femina Americaine "for distinguished literary accomplishments."

Willa Cather died on 24 April 1947 of cerebral hemorrhage at her Madison Avenue apartment in New York City and was buried in the Old Burying Ground of Jaffrey Centre, Cheshire County, New Hampshire, on a special hillside spot she had selected.

Willa Cather's published works

April Twilights - poems 1903 A Lost Lady - novel 1923

The Troll Garden - short stories 1905 The Professor's House - novel 1925

Alexander's Bridge - novel 1912 My Mortal Enemy - novel 1926

O Pioneers! - novel 1913 Death Comes for the Archbishop - novel 1927

The Song of the Lark - novel 1915 Shadows on the Rock - novel 1931

My Ð'ntonia - novel 1918 Obscure Destinies - short stories 1932

Youth and the Bright Medusa - short stories 1920 Lucy Gayheart - novel 1935

Not Under Forty - essays 1936

One of Ours - novel 1922 Sapphira and the Slave Girl - novel 1940

Critics on Willa Cather's writings

In his book "Willa Cather's Imagination", relying upon received definitions - C.S. Lewis on epic, Renato Poggioli on pastoral, Erich Auerbach on legend - David Stouck classifies Cather's work according to mode, form, and theme, all steeped in tradition. The modes are "archetypal imaginative patterns": epic, pastoral, and satire. The forms include the saint's legend, historical novel, "KÑŒnstlerroman", Dantean "comedy", and the three-part sonata by analogy. The theme is fundamental to all literature, Stouck says: the dichotomy between art and life.

Kim Wells, in her "Hired Girls and Country Doctors: Working Women in the Domestic Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather" refers to Ann Romines' work, „The Home Plot: Women, Writing & Domestic Ritual" who seeks to define a tradition of writing by women about home and hearth while analyzing the struggle of five women authors with their place in that tradition. The working women in the novels that have been defined as "domestic" fiction are in themselves pioneers. In a world where middle-class white women rarely worked outside the home, Jewett's Nan Prince finds fulfillment outside of marriage as a doctor and Willa Cather's Lena Lingard decidedly proclaims her intention to never marry - becoming instead an important and skillful businesswoman. The "working women" of domestic fiction take their place in the "man's world" of economic independence, just as the women writers of these novels are able to do through their writing. These non-domestic characters are important to study in order to find a merging point with the sometimes divisive "halves" of modern woman's quest for self-identity: housewife and professional woman.

Cather's My Ð'ntonia features some definite clashes between domestic and non-domestic worlds. Romines does admit that despite what some critics refer to as Cather's "mystical concern with pots and pans," (Trilling 12) she has an ambivalent attitude toward domestic life but she then glosses over that ambivalence, instead discussing the places where domesticity rules. Cather is at the same time both connected to and very distanced from domestic ritual. "Throughout her writing life, Cather was engaged with the problem of domestic ritual. That subject . . . was often troubling excess baggage for young Willa Cather. Yet it was baggage she could never entirely abandon, for it was essentially a part of herself" (Romines 133). One of Cather's early methods of dealing with domesticity is in running away from it. For Cather, the housework and lifestyle that she associated with a woman's work meant confinement, and a loss of originality, and she wove this feeling of loss into much of her fiction. Stories like "A Wagner Matinee", "The Sculptor's Funeral", even "Coming Aphrodite" feature struggles between the expectations of societal roles and the free exercise of the individual will.

Often, Cather used the fictional device of male