While discussing Cather’s life in class, we have touched upon two areas that have particularly grabbed my interest: her relationships with gender and sexuality. With these to aspects still under much discussion in our modern present, I cannot help but take Cather’s subtle yet radical past into consideration while considering her characterization throughout the novel. Often, scholars and students attempt to view and understand My Antonia through an LGTBQ+ lens, which truthfully feels like a bit of stretch based on my own research and the content of the novel. That being said, it feels important to align our understanding of Cather’s views and practice of sexuality with those on gender, especially considering how closely the two are linked. Many of Cather’s central characters – especially the youth in books one and two – fluctuate between the expected norms and roles that accord to either gender.
It is understood that Cather experienced deep, lengthy relationships with other women during her time. The University of Illinois identifies Cather as living in a period where “the tension between same-sex desire and growing awareness of the building momentum of homophobia” is evident in Cather’s work (see Paul’s Story, in which main character Paul commits suicide due to depression partially caused by alienation based on his homosexual preferences). While difficult to do more than theorize Cather’s sexuality, there is evidence of her long, intensely personal relationships (and infatuations) with women in her life: in college, she had a “girl crush” (a very common occurrence in Cather’s time, as The New Yorker writer Joan Acocella notes) on classmate Louise Pound, a “12-year relationship” with high school classmate Isabelle McClung (who is largely considered the love of Cather’s life), and Edith Lewis, who Cather was close with for 40 years as a “companion and housemate” (University of Illinois). Louise and Isabelle seemed particularly intimate for Cather; the University of Illinois notes that Isabelle’s “later marriage devastated Cather,” while Acocella points to Louise and Cather’s relationship as revealed through her personal letters that many scholars cite as the “smoking gun” proof of Cather’s supposed homosexuality. As paraphrased by Cather biographer Sharon O’Brien, Cather wrote to Louise on June 15th, 1892 that it was “so unfair that feminine friendship should be unnatural” while agreeing with another classmate that this was true. However, New York Times writer Tom Perrotta points out that though Cather is “a favorite subject of queer theorists interested in the way an author’s sexuality gets repressed,” readers who comb through Cather’s recently published letters will find little to indicate her own preferences; Cather never intended her letters to see the light of day, and even her most intimate writings hint towards discretion and concealment – some letters ask their recipients to “just put them in the furnace” (New York Times), while her letters’ content only hints towards her sexuality, such as an account in 1893 where Cather describes “driving a certain fair maid over the country with one hand” only to later mention that “as for me – I drive with one hand all night in my sleep” (New York Times). While there are these indicative “smoking guns,” none are truly proof that Cather was homosexual nor is it enough evidence to read her works – particularly My Antonia – through that lens.
What is more clearly documented is Cather’s relationship with gender. As Tom Perrotta puts it, many readers read Cather’s letters hoping to see how her sexuality was “repressed,” but also to identify the ways in which those repressions were “revealed in his or her fiction. This is a concept which I think particularly applies to My Antonia; rather than see her repression, we see a celebration of the way she slips between gender norms. Willa Cather (real name Wilella) was often nicknamed “Willa” and “Willie” by friends and family, as was common in Southern pronunciation of names ending in -a, according to Publisher’s Weekly. Though Cather stuck to more traditional femininity in both name and behavior in her later adult life, as a child she remained fairly fluid; she would don the name William (and, when she became interested in science, wrote her name as “William Cather, M.D.,” a position decidedly male during her lifetime) and signed her early college papers as “William Cather, Jr.,” as CliffNotes reports in their biography on Cather.
Author and Cather biographer Phyllis Rose also describes how Cather “dressed as a boy, cut her hair like a man’s and called herself William” not only in her adolescence, but all the way up until she was halfway through her studies at the University of Nebraska. Her passion for science ran deep before writing; she aspired to be a doctor, and “scandaliz[ed] her conservative hometown with her unfeminine enthusiasms” (Rose, New York Times). Rose also points to Cather’s tendency as a novelist to adapt a male point of view, a note which is particularly striking considering her earlier behavior as an adolescent.
Regardless of whether we will ever be able to truly understand Cather’s interior life, the things we do know seem to bleed into her work. In My Antonia, central characters Jim and Antonia seem to exist within the opposite gender’s norms; as children, Jim is often how with his grandmother, decidedly not performing in the tasks which Otto and Jake perform as the “male workers” to keep up their land, while Antonia is forced into labor after her father’s suicide only to find herself greatly enjoying the work of men. Other minor characters demonstrate Cather’s fondness for breaking norms and stereotypes; Frances Harling, for example, is described as a “dark” girl from working and visiting multiple farms and fields. She is much like her father, and knows everything about local farms and homesteads, businesses, and finances while retaining a cool, levelheadedness expected of men during this period. On the other hand, Charley Harling is described as receiving whatever he wants from his father, and even though the items are decidedly male in quality (such as guns), this spoiling is generally characteristic of a father and his daughter. Charley is also described as emotional and flighty, and can never quite decide what to do with things, which are other characteristics we might traditionally align with the female gender. Regardless, it seems clear that Cather’s world of breaking apart from traditional gender bleeds heavily into My Antonia and her writing, and is one example of how her unique life shapes her powerful works.
I really like how you position this debate (some would call it a modern obsession) over Cather’s sexuality. We long to read our evolving norms related to sexuality back onto a period where we understand how constrained (by law and culture) sexual identity could be. It’s interesting, then, to note that where we seek to hunt for repression as we search for that proverbial smoking gun, we tend to come up empty handed. What, exactly, are we looking for? Proof of a same-sex sexual encounter to cement our sense of her as a queer author? We should instead look to those moments where she is genuine and unguarded in how she lived her own life with female companions, which also mirrors how bold her views on gender could be both in her early life and in her fiction. “Many of Cather’s central characters – especially the youth in books one and two – fluctuate between the expected norms and roles that accord to either gender,” you write. You mention many of these instances, but there’s also the young Sally, who cropped her hair short and took on the mannerisms of a boy. Then there is the altering of gender norms not in terms of outer dress but inner determination, as when Lena refuses to Mary, and forms a strong bond with Tiny (another unmarried woman, and an adventurer) out west. San Francisco, perhaps, it the true frontier! All of these elements in the novel seem as you say, “a celebration of the way she slips between gender norms.” This, of course, suggests a similar flexibility around ideas of sexuality, and we can appreciate her engagement with these issues without having to definitively “figure” Cather out.
In your post, I appreciate the wide-ranging use of links and images–well done! Though I often prefer that NovelWorlds posts stick a bit closer with just a single source (thus offering some depth), you cover a lot of interesting ground here, and it’s all aptly related.