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Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World by Janis P. Stout

2002; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.2002.0035

1948-7142

Rosanna West Walker,

American Literature and Humor Studies

392 WAL 36.4 W inter 2002 Quit fingering my debris. . . . No more of your stiff justice, your rigid peasant cleanliness, you poker of cobwebs, destroyer of the nests of honest wasps. You’re a ragged bird’s nest lashed to a branch, a poor impression of a bouquet. I’d sooner lick up what sullies the linoleum each day than listen to your faint, scraping accusations. (54) In some oddly quiet, civilized way— as if suggested over tea and cucumber sandwiches— Gerstler consistently advocates in some of her finest poems wild­ ness over such domesticity, advising, for instance, from the perspective of a woman happily married to a bear in “The Bear-Boy of Lithuania”: Girls, take my advice, marry an anim al.. .. Pick one who likes to tus­ sle, who clowns around the kitchen, juggles hot baked potatoes, gnaws playfully on the comer of your apron. Not one mocked by his lumbering instincts, or who’s forever wrestling with himself, tainted with shame, itchy with chagrin, but a good-tempered beast who plunges in greedily, grinning, and roaring. . . . Excuse me, please. His bellow summons me. (4) In sum, Gerstler’s book is a lovely collection: fresh in its perspective, gentle and comic while devastatingly astute and unflinching. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. By Janis P. Stout. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. 381 pages, $35.95. Reviewed by Rosanna West Walker University of Oregon, Eugene Reading Janis P. Stout’s cultural biography of Willa Cather after reflecting about other biographical treatments of this hard-to-pin-down author is a refreshing experience. Cather is still the enigmatic, ambivalent, contradictory writer we have always known, but if you have not joined the ranks of those who declare her work thoroughly modernist, you can get on the bandwagon now. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World is a biography with such a thesis. Stout proves that the sentimental diehards who persist in thinking of Cather as a woman who was somehow separate from her times— an author who wrote with a sort of nostalgic look backward— are wrong. In fact, Stout presents a compelling case that Cather’s work is central to the movement so confusingly termed “modernism” (which itself could be described as enigmatic, ambiva­ lent, and contradictory, all of the adjectives with which I have just described Cather). The portrayal of Cather throughout this work is that of an author who “structured” her writing to “control her uncertainty and project a seren­ ity that she did not feel”; this view is one reason Stout places her squarely in the “intellectual sea change” called modernism (xi). Many critics have not viewed Willa Cather as a modernist. Yet, increasingly, scholars (Susan Rosowski, B O O K R E V IE W S 393 Marilyn Arnold, Phyllis Rose, Jo Ann Middleton, and Glen Love, to name a few) are saying that aspects of Cather’s work fall under the rubric of mod­ ernism, an idea that Janis P. Stout takes up with force. Willa Cather’s writing is highly autobiographical. This is one thing upon which everyone seems to agree; Stout treats this idea in depth while engaging all of the central concerns of Cather studies. She takes readers on a chrono­ logical tour of the events that shaped Cather’s thinking during the writing of each work. Through an examination of primary documents, letters, interviews, and conversations, we gain insight into Cather’s growing angst at the forces shaping her world as Stout tackles some of the seeming inconsistencies that have provided much fodder for critics in the past. Rather than taking the stereotypical view that Cather was a writer of serenity who turned to America’s past in nostalgic escape, Stout shows her to be a writer of conflict whose nos­ talgia for simpler times disguises a complex engagement with the present. Stout’s book could be titled “Willa Cather’s Ambivalence” and not be far from the mark. This ambivalence is at the heart of every story Cather wrote and is one of the factors that enable us to see Cather’s works as fully modernist. For example, Thea, in The Song of the Lark, finds...