Willa Cather

When she did so, she sought recognition as a woman of serious purpose.

Cather's selfdramatizing career and swelledlife beginningswhich today would cause raised eyebrows among only the closely straitlaced in the culturesuggest little of the character that Willa Cather now has as one of the more important American novelists of the twentieth century. Cather's fiction deals not merely with outrageous bohemians and differents on the fringe of society but with a whole spue of characters and personalities, virtually who above all seek integration with the American mainstream, others who by reason of their grand qualities create and live extraordinary lives.

The specific role that Cather's gender may exhaust compete in her development as a source and in the development of her fiction has been a subject of much hypercritical inquiry. Cather's growing reputation among critics since her death has been accompanied by a good deal of critical interest in her gender. pursuit to identify a fe priapic "voice" in her fiction, early(a) critics sought to explain her fiction in terms of the point that she was a career woman who lived the artist's life in the outset half of the twentieth century, what one would now call a "liberated woman." The earlier critics were loath to mention certain other aspects of Cather's personal life (suggested by the William Cather portion of it) that may adopt influenced her writing. More recent critics, less(prenominal) constrained by understanding or social delica

cies,have renowned with frankness that Cather was a lesbian who appears to have privately declare the nature of her sexuality but who never "came out," as the style goes. But finally, whatever may have influenced the fiction, it must converse for itself, and one thing that it says is that serious novels with universal themes can have women at the center of the action rather than, as in the case of so many novels written by Cather's male and female contemporaries, subsidiary to it.

Undoubtedly, Cather's position as a salver had the effect of liberating her from a conventional existence, but her fiction suggests she was up to(p) to appreciate the complexities of many ways of life. Her fiction is not controversially "liberationist" in tone, yet (unlike so many male writers of postgraduate reputation) she creates a number of women characters who are not merely the summit movers of narrative action but whose actions influence, for good or ill, the lives of others. If some of her women fulfill conventional social roles, it does not follow that Cather is engaged strictly by the positive or negative factors of those roles in society. She does not set out to "prove" anything; sociology matters far less to her than psychology. And thus it is that she invites the reader to explore with her the consequences and implications of actions that proceed from the roles, positive or negative, that all human beings assume from time to time. The results of the exploration stamp the insight into human behavior and feeling that is always at the heart of Cather's fiction.

Although a consistency of voice, technique, and circumstance can be discerned in Cather's fiction, she is an accomplished enough artist not to write the same story or of the same kind
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