[For this
year’s installment of my annual VirginiaStudying
series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the many famous Americans who
have been born in the state. Add your Virginia highlights—people, places, or
otherwise—for a crowd-sourced weekend post for (Virginia) lovers!]
On why it
mattered when the famous author finally returned to Virginia.
Willa
Cather was born and spent her first nine years of life near
Winchester, Virginia, but she is far better known for writing about two
other American settings. The family moved to Nebraska in 1883 (when she was
nine), and the books that launched her literary career a few decades later were
her second through fourth published novels, the Nebraska trilogy of O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My
Ántonia (1918). As far as I can tell she never lived for any length of
time in the American Southwest, but she nonetheless wrote, in The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the
Archbishop (1927), two of the most prominent and important novels in
English about that complex
and compelling region. While Cather wrote seven other novels (including One of Ours, a Pulitzer-winning story
of World War I), those five remain her most famous and frequently read, and so
Cather has become closely and justifiably tied to the literary and communal
histories of both the Nebraska plain and the Southwestern canyons.
There are of course
numerous reasons why an author might hesitate to write about her childhood
home, but one factor in Cather’s unwillingness to write about Virginia for
almost her entire career might have been a reticence—or even
perhaps an inability—to write about African Americans. In My Ántonia, for example—a novel that
deals with nuance and grace with the ethnic heritages and communities of a number
of immigrant character and families—we find Blind
d’Arnault, an African American (or rather mulatto) pianist whom Cather
describes in baldly stereotypical and even animalistic terms. Yet in what would
be her last published novel, Sapphira
and the Slave Girl (1940), Cather both returned finally to the setting
of her childhood and linked that setting entirely to race: the body of the
novel is set in antebellum Virginia and features the story of a mulatto
enslaved woman (Nancy) who eventually escapes her jealous mistress (Sapphira)
on the Underground Railroad to Canada; and the epilogue, set twenty-five years
later in the postbellum South of Cather’s childhood, reveals the novel’s
narrator to be a stand-in for Cather herself, who has (per the novel at least)
heard stories of this slave and her escape throughout her young life.
I don’t want to
overstate the cultural importance of Cather’s 1940 historical novel. This was
the same year, after all, that saw the publication of Richard
Wright’s Native Son, a novel that
illustrates how far beyond the plantation
tradition (in which Cather’s novel at least partly, if certainly uneasily,
sits) African American and American literature had gone by this time. Yet at
the same time, 1940 America (or at least its popular culture) was dominated by
the film
adaptation of Gone with the Wind,
just as the prior few years had been dominated
by Margaret Mitchell’s novel. Mitchell famously wrote to another Southern
novelist, Thomas W. Dixon, that she was “practically raised on” his trilogy of racist
historical novels, and she very much continued that particular
Southern tradition in Gone. So it
seems to me to be no small thing that when Willa Cather finally wrote a novel
about her native Southern state, in the same era so influenced by Mitchell’s
story, she chose to create a Southern slaveowning female protagonist who is far
less attractive (in every sense) than Scarlett O’Hara, and again whom a young
female slave wins an important and heroic victory.
Next Virginian
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Virginians or Virginia connections you’d highlight?
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