A Pioneer’s Progress
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            Because her most famous works, such as My Ántonia and O Pioneers!, are stylistically “modern” à la F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it’s easy to forget that Cather (1873–1947) grew up in rural Virginia and in Nebraska in the late 19th century, when sex roles and social attitudes were both straight and narrow. Yet her views of women and men were both complex and visionary, challenging Victorian stereotypes about both sexes.

            Unsettling Cather is divided into four parts. The first deals with race, the second with sex and gender roles, the third with geopolitics, and the last with her often-dismissed novel Lucy Gayheart. Because the essays provide many clear examples of her writing, not having read the novels is not a barrier to understanding their points. They may, in fact, stimulate interest in reading or rereading her novels, as they did for me.

     The collection covers a wide range of Cather’s writing, including her four most famous novels—My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and One of Ours—along with lesser-known novels that deal with such controversial issues as race and disability. Four essays delve into her last novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which brings out themes from her early upbringing in Virginia, where slavery was still a recent memory. Some consider it a precursor to Black Liberation theology, while others believe that it never frees itself from an underlying racism.

            The essays on gender roles reveal that Cather wrote in a society that was on the cusp of change. Her female characters—from the hard-working Ántonia to the free-spirited Lena Lingard in My Ántonia, the indomitable matriarch Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!, or the independent, successful singer Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark, all coming into their own in small, provincial Midwestern towns—were fiercely driven to defy the Gilded Age view of women as subservient homemakers.

     These essays reveal that Cather herself made the same journey of self-discovery. Dressing early on in masculine garb, she fled Nebraska and eventually made her way to Greenwich Village, at that time a radical community of artists and revolutionaries. She lived close to Emma Goldman, the anarchist and free love advocate. Goldman’s view of marriage as a means by which the patriarchal system imprisoned women helped shape Cather’s scorn for marriage and her creation of female characters who openly defied the norms. Even seemingly conventional women who stayed on the farm, such as Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!, struggle to be independent while supporting their families. Other women, such as Thea Kronborg, follow a path similar to Cather’s, moving from a small town to a large city to foster their career.

            In Cather’s case, that meant moving from Red Cloud, Nebraska, to the capital city of Lincoln for college, before moving to Pittsburgh to work as a journalist and finally to New York City in 1906. The move from an agrarian world to the urban bustle, with all its angst and pleasures, was a distinctly American journey that Cather captured perfectly in her novels. This collection doesn’t explore Cather’s life as a lesbian, but it does show how her female characters defy expectations, developing their careers despite the barriers that women faced at this time.

            The crises faced by Cather’s characters seem remarkably similar to those of our own times. If all you know of her work is the novels you read in high school, these essays might motivate you to read the rest of her œuvre. Rereading her novels, I’m struck by how relevant they remain, and how women like Lena, Ántonia, Thea, Lucy, and Alexandra face many of the same struggles as do women today.