Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and the Politics of Modernist Classicism

Abstract

Almost all of Willa Cather’s writing involves inheritance: both the legal passing on of property and, more important, the transmission and replication across generations of traditions, of culture itself. As a result her protagonists look back to their own pasts or to history in general, anxiously framing two questions: Who are my legitimate ancestors, biological or metaphorical? And what is the nature of their bequest to me? This thematic insistence has two consequences in her great mid-career novels of the late 1910s and 1920s. First, since culture is always read as a relationship of signs, one prominent concern of Cather’s fiction is education, which literally allows the present to read and thus receive the past’s cryptic legacy. Second, her heroes often confront an apparent choice of familial or cultural origins, and in response construct or act out some version of what Freud called the ‘family romance’, the childhood fantasy in which real pasts and parents are repudiated in favor of a more glamorous symbolic lineage. Thus for example Tom Outland in The Professor’s House (1925) emotionally replaces his dead ‘mover people’ parents with the vanished Anasazi Indians; A Lost Lady’s Niel Herbert (1923) similarly chooses Captain and Marian Forester over a biological family marked by ‘failure and defeat’ (30); and Claude Wheeler of One of Ours (1922) rejects his stifling small-town past for the defense of an idealized France — and trades his Nebraska parents for the courtly, childless Jouberts.