No Way to Treat a Lady. - Review - book review

National Review, March 20, 2000 by Terry Teachout

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, by Joan Acocella (Nebraska, 128 pp., $20)

In 1920, H. L. Mencken called Willa Cather "a woman who, after a long apprenticeship, has got herself into the front rank of American novelists." As usual, the Great Mentioner of American letters was right on the money. But her cool chronicles of prairie life and its discontents contained no Joycean word-juggling, no torrid sex scenes, no class consciousness-none of the ingredients, in short, that literary intellectuals of the '30s deemed indispensable. So a new generation of tastemakers dropped Cather down the memory hole, leaving her to middle- aged, middlebrow critics and the common readers who never swerved in their loyalty to the author of My antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop. It said everything about her that she won the Pulitzer Prize and made the cover of Time magazine: one moist kiss of death for each cheek.

The mills of trendiness grind ceaselessly, and in the age of feminist criticism Willa Cather became a potentially hot property once again. But getting her back into the classroom wasn't quite as simple as it looked. For in addition to being a woman, she was also a New Deal- hating Republican, a fellow traveler of Roman Catholicism, a firm believer in the gospel of art for art's sake, and a testy anti-feminist who dismissed most lady poets as wet-eyed half-wits and most lady novelists as simply incompetent: "Has any woman ever really had the art instinct, the art necessity? Is it not with them a substitute, a transferred enthusiasm, an escape valve for what has sought or is seeking another channel?"

How, then, to detoxify her politically incorrect life and work and render them fit for consumption by delicate undergraduates? The answer turned out to be breathtakingly simple. In 1984, Sharon O'Brien published an essay in an obscure academic journal announcing that Cather was a "self-identified" lesbian and that her homosexuality was the "emotional source of her fiction." Presto change-o: Today, virtually all Cather criticism takes these assertions for granted. The woman whom Granville Hicks had dismissed in proper Marxist fashion as being unequal to "the harshness of our world" is now a major novelist- or, to be exact, a major lesbian novelist, every bit as good as Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker, and maybe even Radclyffe Hall. There was only one catch: O'Brien made it all up.

One of the most unlikely things about the tale of how Willa Cather became a lesbian is that it was first told in The New Yorker (yes, The New Yorker!) by a dance critic. Joan Acocella is also a literary scholar by avocation, and by means unknown and unimaginable to me, she not only persuaded Tina Brown to print her expose in 1995, but has now contrived to have an expanded version published by a reputable academic house. This devastatingly concise book isn't going to win its fearless author any prizes-she marches through the ranks of Cather scholars the way Sherman marched through Georgia-but anyone who has had it up to here with political correctness should buy a copy of Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism and get ready to cheer, long and loudly.

According to Acocella, Cather probably was romantically attracted to women. But there is no documentary evidence that she ever did anything about it, and scarcely more proof to be culled from her novels. Indeed, that was the very point of her work: She sought to be the kind of novelist who writes not about "who marries whom, or at least who goes to bed with whom," but about the full panoply of human interests, of which love is but a single aspect. (Acocella herself has a special interest in artists who seek to break through what she calls "the boundary of the sex plot," a theme she also explores in her fine 1993 biography of the choreographer Mark Morris.)Human interests, mind you, not female ones: Cather felt equally competent to write about men, and did so no less memorably. But Sharon O'Brien, by her own admission, was determined to turn her idol into a single-issue cultural politician, thereby "rewriting one of the silencing stories of my own life, my domination by women who tried to erase me without ever seeing who I was." (How very '80s: biography as therapy.) So, Acocella says, O'Brien cooked the books, falsely paraphrasing an unpublished Cather letter so as to suggest that its author was confessing to "unnatural" feelings for a female friend. O'Brien made this "evidence" the centerpiece of the scholarly article that she later parlayed into a book-length "psychosexual study" that established her as the queen of Cather studies.

Since then, Willa Cather's lesbianism, such as it was or wasn't, has become the grain of sand around which a thousand costume pearls of critical theory have accreted: "In a 1986 essay," writes Acocella, "Judith Fetterley accused Jane Rule of anti-homosexual bias for describing My antonia as a serene book-in other words, for refusing to acknowledge its latent lesbian agony. 'Homophobia can go no further,' Fetterley declared." But Acocella, though she has assembled quite a nifty little chamber of critical horrors, is not your ordinary outrage- collecting cultural conservative. In fact, she is not a conservative at all, but an old-fashioned, determinedly non-radical feminist who insists that the proper goal of art is to describe life in all its proliferating, ideology-transcending complexity: