Looking back on 30 years of portraying Willa Cather on the Chautauqua circuit, I tried to let her be herself, as shown through years and years of research. UNL Professor Sue Rosowski once told me she had figured out that I approached Cather from the inside out, while most "academics" approached her from the outside in. That was a big responsibility.
Sometimes I was tempted to make Cather be more temperate in her less-than-feminist statements about women's suffrage or certain female novelists. Other times I wished she could be more forthcoming about her marriage-less state. Now that her long-verboten letters are easily searched, I understand that she was an even more complex person than she seemed at the time. Her flip answers to the question of why she never married (one favorite was to quote Louisa May Alcott: "I'd rather paddle my own canoe") and her seemingly misogynist statements about the suitability of women for authorship and/or full citizenship, taken in the context of her early confusion about gender, can lend itself to lively debates about who she really was and what she really thought.
As she famously wrote of Thea Kronborg, in The Song of the Lark, "There's no sag in me." Thea knew who she was, presumably, from day one. She didn't fit the mold of a marriageable young female any more than Cather did. Thea's own father knew she was "not the marrying kind . . . too peppery and too fond of having her own way."
Fred Ottenberg, the man in the book who comes closest to winning Thea's hand, is also realistic about her, recognizing that she's "distinctly not the marrying kind . . . equipped to be an artist, and to be nothing else; already directed, concentrated, formed as to mental habit," and that "Marriage would be an incident, and not an end with her."
Fred was right about that. As Thea expressed it, "Who marries who is a small matter, after all." How could Willa Cather have created such a woman, in fiction, if she did not herself have a wholly original view of marriage? For Cather, traditional marriage was an impossibility. This she knew, from an early age. But just as Thea did, she liked the thought of having "somebody human to make a report to once in a while."
She greatly minded not being able to have children, and doted on her nieces and nephews and the Menuhin cherubs - Yehudi and his sisters, Hephzibah and Yaltah - as if they were her own. But Cather's parenting instincts were as much fatherly as motherly. She seemed a perfect balance of feminine and masculine, once she understood who it was she had to be. She could enjoy the silk stockings her brother sent as a Christmas present, even as she knew she lacked the physical requirements to be a "real" female. Like Thea, she knew "we don't get fairy tales in this world," and so she set out to be her most well-balanced, androgynous self.
Maslow called it self-actualization. I call it being whole.
Sometimes I was tempted to make Cather be more temperate in her less-than-feminist statements about women's suffrage or certain female novelists. Other times I wished she could be more forthcoming about her marriage-less state. Now that her long-verboten letters are easily searched, I understand that she was an even more complex person than she seemed at the time. Her flip answers to the question of why she never married (one favorite was to quote Louisa May Alcott: "I'd rather paddle my own canoe") and her seemingly misogynist statements about the suitability of women for authorship and/or full citizenship, taken in the context of her early confusion about gender, can lend itself to lively debates about who she really was and what she really thought.
As she famously wrote of Thea Kronborg, in The Song of the Lark, "There's no sag in me." Thea knew who she was, presumably, from day one. She didn't fit the mold of a marriageable young female any more than Cather did. Thea's own father knew she was "not the marrying kind . . . too peppery and too fond of having her own way."
Fred Ottenberg, the man in the book who comes closest to winning Thea's hand, is also realistic about her, recognizing that she's "distinctly not the marrying kind . . . equipped to be an artist, and to be nothing else; already directed, concentrated, formed as to mental habit," and that "Marriage would be an incident, and not an end with her."
Fred was right about that. As Thea expressed it, "Who marries who is a small matter, after all." How could Willa Cather have created such a woman, in fiction, if she did not herself have a wholly original view of marriage? For Cather, traditional marriage was an impossibility. This she knew, from an early age. But just as Thea did, she liked the thought of having "somebody human to make a report to once in a while."
She greatly minded not being able to have children, and doted on her nieces and nephews and the Menuhin cherubs - Yehudi and his sisters, Hephzibah and Yaltah - as if they were her own. But Cather's parenting instincts were as much fatherly as motherly. She seemed a perfect balance of feminine and masculine, once she understood who it was she had to be. She could enjoy the silk stockings her brother sent as a Christmas present, even as she knew she lacked the physical requirements to be a "real" female. Like Thea, she knew "we don't get fairy tales in this world," and so she set out to be her most well-balanced, androgynous self.
Maslow called it self-actualization. I call it being whole.
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