Willa Cather, Gender, and Sexuality

Join me for the final video in my eight-night celebration of the life and works of Willa Cather. Today I'll talk about how three different nonfiction authors have written about Cather's gender and sexuality.
Books discussed:
The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis by Melissa Holmstead
Willa Cather: Queering America by Marilee Lindemann
Long Road from Red Cloud: Life Lessons from Willa Cather by Betty Jean Steinshouer.
My Willa Cather playlist: • Willa Cather
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[@art.and.lit.matters]

Hi Hannah, Your whole Cather series is so beautifully nuanced, immensely informed, sensitive and lots of fun. Today's presentation really raises things to a new level in the care you take with your with the biographies that have sought to deepen the understanding of Cather. I like how careful your analysis is leaving room for the complexity of meaning so critical to art and life. "The inexplicable presence of the thing not named" is such a beautiful description of what great art does.Take away that phantasmagoric substratum of what is suggested and hinted at and grows in the reader of any great novel and you might as well read a summary of the work instead. The internalization of that substratum in the mind of the reader is a huge part of what makes reading truly magical. That the the "thing not named" refers to a specific thing in the life of a writer can be a nod to the mysteries of gender and sexuality but it is so much more than that.
I think of Pascal saying "the heart has reasons that reason can never know." A careful reader of Cather in any decade didn't need a biographer to tell them Cather was a woman who deeply, knew truth in art, was never just working the surface, and most crucially here had an intersex consciousness and muse and sensitivity that is almost universal in works of the highest creative brilliance. Shakespeare had it, and Melville, and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather.
I think people who truly love art and literature have understood something of an intersexual and and even bisexual consciousness in the producers of art even when public writing about the subject tended to flatten the world. When a biographer latches onto a detail that. even in the most round-about way. supports a claim of biological intersex caution has to prevail. So does a bit of self scrutiny on the part of the biographer asking honestly how much of the claim is getting fuzzy with data because they want it to be true. And why would someone want it to be true. Precisely because we all intimate somewhere the truth of the intersex creative core and want a sort of objective validation of what be termed the hermaphroditic muse.
In my own life I spent years thinking a key to George Eliot's astonishing work was that she was a hermaphrodite. Looking back I think what really was at play is I wanted to give physical validation to my sense of her vast intersex creative consciousness and so latched on the strange event of her late in life husband John Cross jumping out the window into a river on their wedding night as his horror at seeing something upon her disrobing he didn't expect and didn't want to be there. I was probably wrong and definitely silly not in the idea but in my quickness to see it as a probable fact.
The use of only a couple pages to discuss the importance of a life long intimate and bonded relationship that was clearly also a creative partnership in the earlier biography seems like such a howling omission to a reader today but an older generation was used to it and would do a lot of filling in the blanks. Richard Ellmann, in the first 1959 edition of his great biography of James Joyce does not tell nearly everything he knew at the time about the beautifully quirky erotics between Joyce and Nora. It took a temporary loosening of cultural prudery to enable Ellmann to publish them in the second edition of the selected letters and give them their due in the second edition of the biography. Part of the impulse of letter burning in the end isn't a hiding of secrets so much as an aesthetic decision of wanting to be known by one's art where the "secrets" are already there in force. Anyone who has plunged into Joyce's Finnegan's wake sees the same interests expressed in the letters and an incredibly eloquent indirect voicing "of the thing not named." The indirect was for lots of reasons but one is simply that one is reluctant to directly voice things that society at the time would deem as aberrant and perverse. The smugness of censors usually hints at a mind incapable of the subtlety and self awareness necessary to really cherish that subterranean layer or Finnegans Wake and most of Cather would be on more censors ban lists.
With societies changes James Joyce's early letters to Nora feel not as much perverse but rather tender, fiercely erotic and beautiful human in the most profound of ways. Had Willa Cather not burned her own letters II suspect many of them would be among the most beautiful love letters ever. We'll never know but in my mind they almost exist, unabashedly lesbian but also with an erotics and even sense of gender that completely exceeds ordinary characterizations.
I absolutely loved the way you describe how the nuance of words like gay or queer can take on a range of quite distinct meanings depending on context even within a single letter is just so brilliantly clear. and outstanding teaching.
I'll tone it down with the long responses but I felt strangely moved by your video this morning and felt much closer to Cather which is the best thing of all and for which I am deeply appreciative.. Beautifully done.

[@scallydandlingaboutthebook2711]

This was a great way to round off the week.

[@kevinrussell1144]

VERY well done, Hannah. Your conclusion that we just don't know and that Cather prized her privacy too much to spell out the plain facts seems solid. This old, West Coast vegetable greatly enjoyed all your Cather videos. Fruit, root-crop vegetable, nut, or somewhere in between, the soil of genius produced a remarkable talent.

[@nikkivenable73]

She's my favorite female author. ❤

[@davidnovakreadspoetry]

Looking forward to literary modernism. 👍 This has been a pleasant in-depth series of discussions, some of which I cut short, because I hope to be doing some Pioneering fairly soon, if not before the year’s out then first thing next. (When I read Wharton one thing led to another. 🤪)

[@angelacraw2907]

Thank you for such an interesting video. I will have a go at the professors house soon. I read Oh Antonia a few years ago and was hoping to get to another.

[@andeeheartsbooks7447]

I love Cather even more after this video. I had no idea about any biographical info (or forgot if it was covered in lit class). I need to read more of her books!

[@HannahsBooks]

Thank you so much! She’s such a fascinating author.

[@actual-spinster]

would you say reading the only wonderful things would mostly work better if you've read a substantial amount of cather's work? this was great as usual!! i love how thoughtful u are :)

[@HannahsBooks]

Thank you so much-and my apologies for the late response. I would say that the book is a great follow-up if you have already read a standard biography of Catherine-like maybe Hermione Lee or even the short little one just published-not because you will need the background per se but just to appreciate what this book is adding to the dialogue. But it could work on its on, too, I think.

[@DebMcDonald]

Hannah, you have outdone yourself with this series on Cather. I appreciate your historian’s insight into literature because I am easily swept up in the emotional moments of the story and don’t step back to reflect and analyse often. I realise this took a lot time to organise, but I hope you will find time to do this again before bookukah next year. Thank you.

[@BookishTexan]

I haven’t gotten to all the videos in your series, but I plan to. This one and the others I have seen are great. Thank you HannH.

[@angelacraw2907]

Thank you for such an interesting video. I will have a go at the professors house soon. I read my Antonia a few years ago and was hoping to get to another.

[@HannahsBooks]

Do let me know what you think if you try The Professor’s House! It was my favorite of the Cather’s I read in December.

[@angelacraw2907]

@@HannahsBooks Yes I read it and I liked it better than My Antonia. This is mainly because of the frame narrative and the intriging layers relating to wealth versus virtue, male sexuality, midlife crisis plus much more. It had the amazing writing on nature and landscape that I loved in the other book too. I will be reading more of her books soon I'm sure.

[@readandre-read]

Hi Hannah! I'm running behind on this Cather series but it's terrific. I'll be watching the rest for sure. I love your careful readings and discussion here of the biographical information.

[@robinrobertson8332]

Thank you for this series. It was most enjoyable. Hope the rest of the year is good for you. See ❤

[@onetrickpony381]

such a great video and series! thank you

[@melissamybubbles6139]

This was an interesting discussion. Thank you.

[@AnnNovella]

This sound much like jealousy of the relationship

[@audreyh7892]

I always wondered if part of the reason her narrators rended to be men was so they would be taken more seriously instead of just womens fiction