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| Willa Cather |
| 維拉•凱瑟 |
| 圖片來源：http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~cather/catherpix.html |
| 主要文類：Novel |
| 資料提供者：Kate Liu/劉紀雯;Joseph Murphy/墨樵;Ray Schulte/蕭笛雷 |
| 關鍵字詞：Introduction to Literature 1998;American Literature |
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Willter Cather: An
Introduction
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Joseph C.
Murphy
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 Life and Works
Fictional Method and Style
Modernism
Cather and History
Willa Cather's America
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| Life and
Works |
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The following biographical
materials are available online at the Willa Cather Archive:
https://cather.unl.edu/
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| Fictional Method and
Style |
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Cather stated her credo of fiction
most forcefully in her essay ¡§The Novel Demeuble¡¨ (1922), meaning
¡§The Unfurnished Novel.¡¨ The title refers to her idea that the best
fiction does not merely ¡§catalogue¡¨ the furniture of life¡Xphysical
things, processes, and sensations¡Xbut selects such details carefully
to ¡§present [the] scene by suggestion rather than enumeration.¡¨ She
praises novelists like Hawthorne and Tolstoy whose settings ¡§seem to
exist not so much in the author's mind, as in the emotional penumbra of
the characters themselves.¡¨ Cather argues that, paradoxically, by
saying less, writers can say more. They can create a sense of something
beyond words: |
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Whatever is felt upon the page
without being specifically named there¡Xthat, one might say, is
created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the
overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the
emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high
quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself. |
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Cather invokes the bare stage of ancient Greek theatre
and the New Testament image of ¡§that house into which the glory of
Pentecost descended¡¨ as examples of the kind of suggestive simplicity
she favored in fiction. By ¡§not naming,¡¨ Cather was not rejecting
realism completely, but seeking a greater truthfulness to how life is
experienced, and to what is most durable in experience.
Cather's restrained method can be witnessed not only in
her choice of words but in her choice of narrative structures. She was
as exacting with plot as she was with language. She tended to reject
sensational storylines in favor of unconventional or indirect
presentations of experience. Her novel My Antonia (1916)
is, she said, ¡§just the other side of the rug, the pattern that is
supposed not to count in a story. In it there is no love affair, no
courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle for success. I
knew I'd ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern. I
just used it the way I thought absolutely true.¡¨ In Death
Comes for the Archbishop (1927) she strove to write
¡§something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of
composition¡¨¡X¡§not to use an incident for all there is in it¡Xbut to
touch and pass on.¡¨ In both My Antonia and A
Lost Lady (1923) she employs male characters as filters
through which to study her heroines. In The Professor's
House (1925), Cather inserts the first-person narrative of
a young man, who died years before in the Great War, in order to
illuminate the life of her title character. Her novels achieve unity
not through strong plotline but through the cumulative power of
incidents carefully selected and selectively viewed. Frequently,
sensational or violent events are reported indirectly, in passing.
Although less sensational than Faulkner's, Cather's novels often share
with his a strategy of weaving together shorter narratives into a total
structure.
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| Modernism |
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Cather is sometimes not named
alongside major modernists like Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, and
Hemingway¡Xpartly because she gets categorized as a Nebraska regional
writer, and partly because her fiction seems, on the surface, less
challenging, experimental, or disillusioned than we expect modernism to
be. But in fact, Cather was a contemporary of these writer and
developed a brand of modernism that was as sophisticated as theirs. The
American modernist poet Wallace Stevens once remarked of Cather: ¡§We
have nothing better than she is. She takes so much pain conceal her
sophistication that it is easy to miss her quality.¡¨ Other modernists
too, like Woolf, Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis, read and admired
Cather's work. Like them, she sublimated the trauma of modern
experience into new literary forms. Like them, she found her own way
amidst the various aesthetic options at the turn of the century:
realism, naturalism, symbolism, impressionism. She sought a deeper
account of experience than was typical of realism or naturalism, but
she valued the attention of those movements to common people and social
realities. Impressionism and symbolism (which she absorbed through
painting as well as literature) both influenced her fictional method
(impressionistic descriptions of landscapes and cityscapes; and her
knack for iconic symbols: the plough framed by the setting sun in My
Antonia, the strong swift man in Alexandra's dream in O
Pioneers! [1913], the mysterious ¡§stone lips¡¨ cave in Archbishop
); however, she rejected the brands of those movements
tending toward decadence or art for art's sake. Cather's work
demonstrates a number of qualities often identified with modernist
literature: |
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- experimenting with narrative structures,
temporal frameworks, narrative voices, and symbols;
- exploring inner consciousness as a major
theme;
- adapting the abstract methods of modern painting to
literature;
- embracing communities steeped in tradition and
history (both Western and "primitive" traditions) as a relief from the
upheavals and alienation of modernity.
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| Cather
and History |
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Willa Cather can properly be
considered a historical novelist. She did not write adventure-packed
historical romances in the vein of Sir Walter Scott or James Fenimore
Cooper; rather, she moderated her romantic vision with a critical,
realist edge and with experimental modernist techniques. Her use of
history can be divided into three types: |
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- Three of her novels meet the conventional definition
of historical fiction: they are fictional reconstructions of
historically remote times and places. Death Comes for the
Archbishop recreates the American Southwest of the
nineteenth century, and Shadows on the Rock (1931)
does much the same for seventeenth-century Quebec. Both are based
partly on historical documents and integrate actual historical figures
with fictional characters. In her final novel, Sapphira and
the Slave Girl (1940), Cather looks back to the pre-Civil
War slave culture of her native Virginia.
- Two other novels¡X The Song of the Lark (1915)
and The Professor's House (1925)¡Xincorporate
history through modern characters' encounters with the archeological
remnants of the cliff-dwelling Indians of the Southwest; moreover,
Cather's professor in the latter novel, Godfrey St. Peter, is a
historian of the Spanish exploration of the Americas.
- Much of Cather's fiction is historical insofar as her
characters are preoccupied with history. Numerous characters survey
their personal histories to make sense of their present lives. For
Cather, childhood is the reservoir of the self, the site of what Jim
Burden in My Antonia calls ¡§those early
accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever
be.¡¨ Other characters survey cultural history, within and beyond their
own lifespans, as a touchstone for personal experience. This recourse
to history is frequently intensified by a character's exile status.
Archbishop Latour, for example, looks to his early days in France, and
to the history of Catholicism in the Old and New worlds, to gain
perspective on his ministry in New Mexico. Likewise, Alexandra Bergson
and Antonia Shimerda gauge their American progress against their
European memories. Many of Cather's characters are exiles trying to
transplant their memories of an older culture into a newer American
field. This is the classic American immigrant story. It is a story of
both loss and gain: the vastness of the landscape and the diversity of
the American population are consolations for the constraints these
immigrants left behind. In contrast to Faulkner's characters, who are
sometimes overburdened with history¡Xtheir families having lived in the
same place for some generations¡XCather's emigres struggle to keep hold
of history.
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| Willa
Cather's America |
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Cather's fiction and life ranged
across the American continent to an extraordinary degree. Born in the
Southern state of Virginia, in 1873, Cather moved with her family to
the open Midwestern tableland of Nebraska at age 10. This uprooting was
the central event of her childhood and, indeed, of her life. It defined
her abiding fictional concern with exile: the adventure of new
frontiers, and the attendant longing for what is left behind. She later
recalled this childhood displacement in an interview: ¡§I was little
and homesick and lonely.... So the country and I had it out together
and by the end of the first autumn the shaggy grass country had gripped
me with a passion that I have never been able to shake. It has been the
happiness and curse of my life.¡¨ Cather's experience became that of
her narrator Jim Burden in My Antonia, and his
response to the Nebraska landscape captures something of Cather's
ambivalence: ¡§There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but
the material out of which countries are made.¡¨ To participate in the
making of a new country was for Cather, as it was for her character
Jim, a heroic and stirring project. And to do so alongside fellow
migrants and immigrants from the East Coast, France, Germany,
Scandanavia, Bohemia, and Russia gave the experience a richer cultural
dimension. If these refugees from the East and Europe made prairie life
tolerable for Cather, they also reminded her of older, more
sophisticated civilizations against which American pioneering appeared,
at its worst, crass and materialistic. This tension between the ideals
and realities of the American frontier occupies a number of Cather
novels, including O Pioneers!, The
Song of the Lark, My Antonia, One
of Ours (1922), and A Lost Lady. The
town of Red Cloud, Nebraska, where her family eventually settled, was
the prototype of the small frontier towns she repeatedly depicted in
fiction.
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Farmland
in Webster County , Nebraska , outside Red Cloud. Photograph by Joseph
C. Murphy
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| The home of
Annie and John Pavelka, Cather's prototypes for Antonia and Cusak in My
Antonia and the Rosickys in "Neighbour Rosicky." Photograph
by Joseph C. Murphy |
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Cather never lost her yearning for older civilizations, and she
increasingly heeded their call. After graduating from the University of
Nebraska, she worked as a magazine editor and high school teacher in
the teeming industrial city of Pittsburgh, from 1896 to 1906, before
joining McClure's magazine in New York. The
vital arts culture that flowered alongside capitalism in American
cities, especially Pittsburgh, New York, and Chicago, is one of
Cather's concerns in ¡§Paul's Case¡¨ and The Song of the
Lark. Cather made a home in New York for the rest of her
life. While she enjoyed the benefits of America 's cultural metropolis,
she also used it as a base from which to explore places that meant more
to her. Cather had first visited Europe in 1902, and she returned there
repeatedly, with an increasing focus on France in the 1930s.
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Mesa Verde, Colorado, around
1915.
Source: http://libtextcenter.unl.edu/cather/gallery/index.html
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She first visited the American Southwest ( Colorado, Utah, New Mexico,
and Arizona ) in 1912, and immediately recognized there an historical
depth she found lacking in much of North America. Here European
colonial and missionary contacts dated back to the 1500s, and the
Anasazi Indians had built fine stone cities into cliff walls in
pre-Colombian times. In The Song of the Lark and
The Professors House, Cather's characters
seek imaginative connections with these ancient Indians and with the
Europeans who first explored the region. Death Comes for the
Archbishop, focusing on two French Catholic missionaries in
New Mexico, recreates the mesh of French, Spanish, Mexican, Indian, and
Anglo cultures in the Southwest during the second half of the
nineteenth century. In 1928 Cather visited Quebec City ( Canada ),
which inspired her next novel, Shadows on the Rock,
set in Quebec in the 1600s.
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Chateau Frontenac, Quebec
City, 1928.
Source: http://libtextcenter.unl.edu/cather/gallery/index.html
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New Mexico and Quebec had a similar appeal for Cather: they were
predominantly Catholic cultures with rich histories dating back
hundreds of years. She found in them an alternative to American Puritan
history, centered in New England and originating in England. Her
alternative American history originated in France and Spain, and was
ultimately oriented toward Rome. By opening up this history Cather
brought cultural and geographical complexity to the American novel. She
demonstrated the continuity of the United States with the historically
Indian and French territory to the Northeast and historically Indian
and Spanish territory to the Southwest.
Cather's final work adds to the geographical complexity
of her accomplishment. Her last completed novel, Sapphira
and the Slave Girl, is set in antebellum Virginia, some
decades before she was born in that state. At the time of her death in
1947 she was working on another historical narrative, Hard
Punishments, set in 1340 in Avignon, France.
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