The Imaginative Claims of the Artist in Willa Cather's Fiction

Book excerpt: In this, her first book, scholar Demaree C. Peck assigns Willa Cather her rightful place in our literary history. Challenging the assumption that women writers must draw their inspiration from a lineage of female predecessors, Peck portrays Willa Cather as a woman who self-consciously set out to write within a male literary tradition that she identified as Emersonian. Peck explores the psychological underpinnings of Cather's aesthetics to show that her theory of stylistic economy and simplicity was motivated by a desire to reorganize the elements of the artistic stage exclusively around her own romantic ego - that "inexplicable presence of the thing not named". Although Cather's protagonists appear in various disguises, clad as pioneers, lawyers, or priests, they are all incarnations of the artist who appropriates people and places as parts of consciousness. Cather's imaginative claimants seek to assimilate the world as a reflection of the self, in the way that their prototype, Emerson's poet-landlord, enjoys a figurative ownership of the landscape in reward for his integrating vision. The novels offer a series of ingenious masquerades beneath whose plots lurk variations of a single story impelled by the artist's quest to take imaginative possession of the world in order to recover the dominion of her soul. Unlike critics who have discussed Cather's novels as a series of discrete experiments, Peck charts the pursuit for imaginative possession as a continuous theme, thereby suggesting a coherence for Cather's art and career as a whole. Offering original interpretations of eight of Cather's novels in the light of previously undiscussed letters and other biographical materials, Peckexplores the relation between Cather's life and art to suggest that she created her central characters as surrogates whose imaginative accumulations could compensate her for various dispossessing experiences in her own life. Cather's novels operate according to the psychological laws of wish fulfillment. While Cather's romanticism has its historical origin in American transcendentalism, its psychological origin derives from the mythic domain of childhood. Cather's "kingdom of art" sanctions the dream projected upon childhood of an original omnipotence that could cheat fate and remain unsoiled by experience. Her novels enact a fantasy of return to primal wholeness. Peck suggests that the novels serve a restorative function not only for their author, but for Cather's readers as well. Cather's fiction is significant, Peck argues, because it performs an important psychological work for its audience.