Efforts by feminist scholars to recover Willa Cather's literary reputation and to ensure her place in a male-dominated canon have caused some feminist critics to dismiss aspects of her personality too complex to fit into established categories of feminist literary criticism. In particular, feminist critics have not admitted the extent of Willa Cather's misogyny, even though it informs the male code of behavior that is the controlling consciousness of all her fiction.

In her 1987 biography of Cather, Sharon O'Brien explores Cather's difficulty in reconciling her gender with the male-dominated literary tradition she hoped to join. But O'Brien does not acknowledge the depth or significance of Cather's hostility toward women. She admits that Cather had misogynistic views: “her early college journalism … frequently expressed … contempt for women in tones ranging from amused dismissal to bitter condemnation” (122). However, O'Brien argues that Cather's misogyny disappeared as she matured and asserts that Cather experienced what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar term “the woman writer's anxiety of authorship” (83), that even though she denounced women writers, “Somewhere in her consciousness she knew that women could be strong and vibrant and creative storytellers” (125). As Cather matured, she eventually abandoned the male values she once associated with art, thereby reconciling the opposing roles of woman and artist. Thus, O'Brien insists, Cather was able to write novels that speak from a woman's experience. However, O'Brien's effort to make Cather “fit” into a female literary tradition not only distorts the central themes of her fiction but also diminishes Cather's complex and conflicted literary imagination.

For whatever reason, during her adolescence Willa Cather admired male behavior and even adopted male dress; her apparent identification with males is evident from her self-imposed nickname “Willy” or “Billy” that she used well into her college years at the University of Nebraska. Recent biographers have attempted to treat the psychological aspects of her William Cather period. For example, O'Brien analyzes Cather's feelings toward her mother in an attempt to explain her cross-dressing and short haircuts during her adolescent years. However, Cather's identification with the masculine goes beyond the starched shirtwaists, short haircuts, and sarcastic newspaper columns of her college years. Any discussion of Cather's strong identification with male values must include her alleged lesbianism, for although O'Brien warns that “we must be careful to distinguish her love for women, which endured, from her male identification, which did not” (140), a discussion of one inevitably leads to a discussion of the other. Indeed, Cather's lesbianism, which includes an assumption that she loved women, and her misogyny, which implies that she hated women, complicates the discussion of the male values that inform her fiction.

Cather's alleged lesbianism and the effect her sexual orientation had on her writing have been hotly debated for the past five years. Although early biographers of Cather do not directly address the question of her lesbianism, all acknowledge her deep emotional attachment to Isabelle McClung. Cather lived with Isabelle in the McClung family home in Pittsburgh for a number of years and, according to all her biographers, loved Isabelle very deeply. Cather herself said that all her books were written for Isabelle. Eventually, however, Cather left the pleasant domestic surroundings of the McClung home and accepted a job at McClure's magazine in New York City. There, Cather moved into an apartment with her friend Edith Lewis, whom she had met in Red Cloud a few years before. Cather and Lewis lived together until Willa Cather's death in April of 1947. Thus, like her contemporary, Gertrude Stein, Cather had a friend and helpmate with whom she shared her life for nearly four decades. Indeed, the Stein-Toklas, Cather-Lewis relationships are also similar in that they both “duplicated the imbalance apparent in many heterosexual unions” (Benstock 18). Evidence for this “imbalance” in the Cather-Lewis relationship is reflected in Sharon O'Brien's description of Cather's relationship with Edith Lewis:

Cather, however, did not create this sheltering home [5 Bank Street] alone. This was a shared space and it is possible that without Edith Lewis (or someone like her) Cather might not have been able to fashion such a nourishing and harmonious domestic environment. … In Elizabeth Sergeant's view Cather was unquestionably the dominant partner in the menage. … Lewis helped in many ways … by taking care of those messy, intruding details of daily life that we all wish someone else would handle for us … [she] served as a buffer between Cather and the outside world.

(355)

In fact, the comparison between Stein and Cather is apt in other ways as well. Like Gertrude Stein, Cather's male-identified values had a profound influence on her work. In her recent book, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940, Shari Benstock suggests that “the implications of Stein's alliance with the masculine are more complex and more extensive than have so far been suggested” (19). Again, Benstock's remarks are equally applicable to Cather, who, like Stein, “presents particular problems for feminist critics because, although an important woman in twentieth-century literature and culture, she remained absolutely uninterested in supporting the work of other women or even in acknowledging herself as one of them” (18).

This statement is too harsh to apply absolutely to Cather; in later years, she admired the work of Sarah Orne Jewett and wrote a Preface to Jewett's book The Country of the Pointed Firs. Even her well-known admiration for Jewett, however, was qualified. “She was a very uneven writer. A good portion of her work is not worth preserving” (Willa Cather in Person 66). Cather's acceptance or praise of women writers is rare. For the most part, again like her expatriate contemporary overseas, Cather “wanted a place among the men of [the writing] community, and she accepted the implicit patriarchal belief that women were isolated and domesticated precisely because they were weak and non-intellectual” (Benstock 15).

For proof that Cather's misoygny was not merely a transitory attitude confined to her college years and for evidence of the male aesthetic that informs her fiction, we need look no further than a 1898 short story, “The Way of the World.” Written when Cather was twenty-five years old and working as a writer for the Home Monthly magazine in Pittsburgh, the story is parabolic. Its subject matter is the relationship between male and female and reveals much about Cather's male-identified code.

The main character of the story, Speckle Burnham, is a good boy, the kind Cather most admired. He has a “wonderful executive ability” and “inventive genius” (Collected Short Fiction 396). He is “a prince in his own right and a ruler of men” (397). In addition, Speckle is kind and not prejudiced against females; however, his kind and trusting nature is his downfall. He is done in by a girl, his playmate, Mary Eliza. Cather contrasts Mary Eliza with Speckle in a negative way. Instead of employing creativity and executive abilities, as Speckle does, Mary Eliza uses “arts and wiles” to get what she wants. She seeks to gain admittance into Speckle's play-town, Speckleville, a collection of “half-a-dozen store boxes of large dimensions, placed evenly in a row against the side of the barn” (395). Inhabited by Speckle and a few of his close friends, the citizenry of Speckleville is exclusively male. Cather attributes Mary Eliza's desire to be part of Speckleville to her gender: “the instincts of her sex were strong in her, and that six male beings should dwell together in ease and happiness seemed to her an unnatural and a monstrous thing” (397).

The admission of a woman threatens this cloistered male world, and Speckle's friends try to warn him not to let Mary Eliza in. “She's a girl, and this ain't a girl's play” (398). Over their objections, Speckle admits Mary Eliza to Speckleville, and she immediately begins making trouble. Cather never explains Mary Eliza's actions as the result of wickedness or meanness. Her motivations and actions are always the result of her gender. She appeals “to every masculine instinct in the boys, beginning with their stomachs” and eventually undermines Speckle's authority because she “possessed certain talents which peculiarly fitted her to dwell and rule in a boy's town” (400). Clearly these “talents” are uniquely female in nature, and her talents bring “disaster and ruin upon the town of Speckleville” (401).

Even feminine characteristics that boys display receive censure in Cather's story and are equally disruptive to the peace and order of Speckleville. When a “New Boy” arrives on the scene, Cather describes him as “disgustingly effeminate” because he wears shoes and socks and, instead of paying for his purchases with straight pins, the accepted currency of Speckleville, he gives Mary Eliza real money that she accepts. Cather indicates that this exchange is a serious breech of the male code. “They [Speckle and his friends] began to wonder as to just what a girl's notion of the square thing was, a question that has sometimes vexed older heads” (401-402). Predictably, Mary Eliza eventually goes off with the New Boy to start their own town, leaving the boys alone again. But the game is ruined, although Speckle is reluctant to admit it.

“Well, now she's gone,” protested Speckle, “so why can't we go like we did before?’

No one attempted to answer. It was scarcely a wise question to ask.

“I always told you she'd spoil the town, Speckle, and now she's done it,” said Jimmy Templeton.

(403)

The inhabitants of Speckleville quarrel among themselves, and soon the “town vanished as many another western town has done since then” (404).

There is little doubt that Cather means this story to be amusing; that is evident from the frequent authorial asides to the reader: “Now, alas! It is time to introduce the tragic motif in this simple chronicle of Speckleville, to bring about the advent of the heavy villain into the comedy” (401). Cather employs mock heroic elements in the story to add to the humor. When the question of admitting a girl to the all-male population of Speckleville arises, Cather commiserates with Speckle: “Poor Speckle! He had never heard of that old mud-walled town in Latium that was also founded by a boy, and where so many good fellows dwelt together in jovial comradeship until they invited some ladies from the Sabine hills to a party, with such disastrous results.” (398). Again, at the end of the story Speckle sits alone “with his empty pails in his deserted town, as Caius Marius once sat among the ruins of Carthage” (404). When Mary Eliza leaves Speckleville to start a new town, she invites the Speckleville boys to “come over to our town and buy things, and we'll come over and buy things at yours” (402-403). The male code, however, has been profoundly violated: “The treachery, the infamy of her deception never seemed to have occurred to her. It was as though Coriolanus, when he deserted Rome for the camp of the Volscians, had asked the Conscript Fathers to call on him and bring their families!” (403).

Throughout, Cather employs classical allusions, comparing the story of Speckleville to the fall of Rome. Cather uses such allusions deliberately and with a humorous intent. But although her intent is humorous, a bitter undertone taints the subtext, which is misogynistic. For example, early in the story Speckle wonders about the limitations of the female imagination: “He was wondering whether Mary Eliza could meet the large demands on the imagination requisite to citizenship in Speckleville. He was not wholly certain as to the enduring qualities of feminine imagination, but he did not know exactly how to express his doubts, so he remained silent” (399). It might be argued that Cather's intention in this story is to protest stereotypical notions of women; unfortunately, she does not allow for this reading of the text. “For all boys will admit that there are some girls who would make the best boys in the world—if they were not girls” (401). Thus, girls do not simply act like girls—they are girls. That fact, according to Cather, damns them.

Cather objects, in this story and elsewhere, to the foolishness, treachery, and meddlesome nature of women that many male writers and critics of her time expressed. Mary Eliza's violation of the male code when she accepts the New Boy's money indicates Cather's internalization of the male values and attitudes that permeated late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century America.

Another short story written during this period also indicates her admiration for male attributes and disdain for female characteristics. In her story, “Tommy the Unsentimental,” Cather introduces Tommy Shirley, who possesses “a peculiarly unfeminine mind that could not escape meeting or acknowledging a logical conclusion” and whose “shrewd face … was so like a clever wholesome boy's” (475). Miss Jessica, the stereotypical female described by Cather as “a white, dainty languid bit of a thing, who used violet perfumes and carried a sunshade” (476), is unable to complete an arduous twenty-five mile bicycle trip to save her would-be lover, Jay Ellington Harper, from a run on his bank. However, Tommy, who “looked aggressively masculine and professional when she bent her shoulders and pumped” (478), completes the journey in time to save Jay. In a typical Cather story, the male or the masculine woman performs in an honorable, unselfish manner whereas the female or feminine man behaves in a cowardly, selfish manner. The theme of a woman's violation, misinterpretation, or simple failure to live up to an accepted male code dominates this early short story.

But nowhere is the code of male behavior more graphically represented than in Cather's 1905 short story, “Flavia and Her Artists,” the story of a woman's violation of the male code that is exemplified by one man, Arthur Hamilton, and articulated by a masculine woman, Jimmy Broadwood. An examination of Arthur Hamilton's character provides insight into the male code of behavior that is espoused in “Flavia and Her Artists.” As she does in “The Way of the World,” Cather demonstrates the admirable character of the male by contrasting him with the female character who violates the male code his character represents. Thus, Arthur Hamilton conducts his business and his life “with quiet perserverance, marked ability, and amazing industry” (153). He is a hero to Imogen and “had been the magician of her childhood” (149). Like many Cather heroes, Arthur is outwardly laconic; his finest qualities are not initially apparent, but outward appearances are not important to the male aesthetic: “Arthur Hamilton was born, and he spent his boyhood in the West Indies, and physically he had never lost the brand of the tropics. … [He was] a self-sufficient, rather ascetic man of thirty, indifferent in manner, wholly negative in all other personal charms” (153).

Arthur is an unpretentious business man; he is wealthy enough to support his wife's prodigious demands for material belongings because of his business acumen, which she, of course, fails to appreciate and indeed of which she is ashamed. “The fact that her husband's name was annually painted upon some ten thousand threshing machines, in reality contributed very little to her happiness” (153). According to Cather's code, action, not words, are important. Women, who are only impressed by outward appearances, merely reveal their insensitivity to the male code by their preoccupation with superficial manifestations of taste. Unlike men they need public recognition for their beauty and taste. Men, on the other hand, even though they may have rough exteriors, are devoted to a code that considers outward appearance less important than quality of character. Women, however, are incapable of adhering to the male code of behavior. Flavia Hamilton is such a woman, and Cather describes her in less than generous terms.

Her face was the sort that does not show wear. Its blond tints were as fresh and enduring as enamel,—and quite as hard. Its usual expression was one of tense, often strained, animation which compressed her lips nervously. … A perfect scream of animation, Miss Broadwood called it. … At least this was the impression Imogen got from that note in Flavia which was so manifestly false.

(157)

The language Cather uses to describe Flavia Hamilton is clearly negative. She is hard, artificial, concerned only with material possessions—all the negative qualities Cather despises in women. Because she has no understanding of art, she surrounds herself with artists, who, sensing her total lack of understanding, secretly despise and mock her. Her very presence in the story is an affront to the male aesthetic that is embodied by her husband, Arthur Hamilton.

Arthur's adherence to the masculine code of silence or taciturnity prevents him from articulating the principles he embodies and by which he lives. Therefore Cather must employ another character to espouse the code for him. Like Tommy Shirley in “Tommy the Unsentimental,” Jimmy Broadwood is the masculine woman in “Flavia and Her Artists” who articulates the male aesthetic that governs the consciousness of the story.

As in many Cather stories, a woman's goodness and attractiveness are in direct proportion to her masculinity, and every reference to Jemima “Jimmy” Broadwood is accompanied by a description of her masculinity. “She always reminds me of a nice, clean, pink-and-white boy who has just had his cold bath” (150). “She wore her thick brown hair short and parted at the side; and rather than hinting at freakishness, this seemed admirably in keeping with her fresh, boyish countenance” (153). “She wore a white rosebud in the lapel of her coat, and decidedly she seemed more than ever like a nice, clean boy on his holiday” (162).

Clearly, Jimmy Broadwood is a character Cather admires, and although the story is told from Imogen Willard's point of view, her opinions and perceptions of the other characters are determined by what Jimmy Broadwood thinks. The omniscient narrator refers repeatedly to Jimmy's opinions throughout the narrative. For example, the narrator provides the following description of the Hamiltons' house:

Flavia's house was the mirror of her exultation; it was a temple to the gods of Victory, a sort of triumphal arch. … The “House of Song,” as Miss Broadwood had called it, was the outcome of Flavia's more exalted strategies. There was a smoking-room, which one entered through the library behind the staircase. On the second floor there was the same general arrangement; a square hall, and, opening from it, the guest chambers or, as Miss Broadwood termed them, the cages.

(151)

Flavia has a penchant for inviting well-known artists to stay at her house. She collects and displays them. Her absurdity stems from the fact that she is blind to their contempt of her and her hospitality, a hospitality which is offered at the expense of her husband's and children's comfort and well-being. Jimmy Broadwood explains the results of Flavia's foolishness to Imogen:

Chaos has already begun in the servants' quarters. There are six different languages spoken there now. You see, it's all on an entirely false basis. Flavia hasn't the slightest notion of what these people are really like, their good and their bad escape her. They, on the other hand, can't imagine what she is driving at. Now, Arthur is worse off than either faction; he is not in the fairy story in that he sees these people exactly as they are, but he is utterly unable to see Flavia as they see her. There you have the situation … all that Flavia's artists have done or ever will do means exactly as much to her as a symphony means to an oyster.

(164)

The “situation,” as Jimmy puts it, worsens when one of Flavia's artists, M. Roux, who has already insulted Flavia at her own dinner table, leaves the house and writes a scathingly accurate portrait of her in a newspaper. Jimmy is gleeful that at last Flavia will see herself as others see her, but Arthur, adhering to the chivalrous male code of behavior, burns the newspaper before Flavia can read it. Ignorant of what has happened, Flavia praises M. Roux at dinner in front of her other artists, who mock her by agreeing with her opinion of him. In a deliberate, obviously prepared speech, Arthur denounces M. Roux in front of his wife and their dinner guests. Shamed by Arthur's speech, the artists begin to pack up and leave. Imogen's description of Arthur's act of love and defense of his wife's honor exemplifies the male code. “He bared his back to the tormentor, signed himself over to punishment in that speech he made at dinner, which everyone understands but Flavia” (171). Flavia, of course, in her stupidity and arrogance, blames her husband for what has happened and denounces his behavior to Imogen.

You can't realize, knowing Arthur as you do, his entire lack of any aesthetic sense whatever. He is absolutely nil, stone deaf and stark blind, on that side. He doesn't mean to be brutal, it is just the brutality of utter ignorance. … I have spent my life apologizing for him and struggling to conceal it but in spite of me, he wounds them; his very attitude even in silence offends them. Heavens! do I not know, is it not perpetually and forever wounding me?

(165)

Imogen, having internalized many of the male values her society espouses, defends Arthur's character on the basis of his gender. “I think you mistake his attitude … that is, I fancy he is more appreciative than he seems. A man can't be very demonstrative about those things—not if he is a real man” (169, 170). Imogen's attempt to explain to Flavia the male code of silence is completely unsuccessful. Flavia's total egocentricity and unforgivable ignorance is thus brutally exposed by Cather's use of dramatic irony. Flavia, of course, is the one who has no aesthetic sense whatever; she is the one who is ignorant and whose ignorance of the male code of behavior, here exemplified by Arthur Hamilton's essential honesty and chivalric defense of his wife's honor, is unforgivable. Imogen's appraisal of his behavior and character are clearly Cather's.

How Cather experienced and came to terms with her lesbianism and the effect her identification with a masculine ethic had on her fiction are not easily determined. Her sentiments regarding men and women are puzzling. But, as an examination of three of her short stories has shown, Cather's identification with masculine values and ideals and her misogyny is not confined to her early adolescence or to her newspaper columns where she voices every male prejudice imaginable.

Shari Benstock argues about Gertrude Stein that “It is important to situate Stein among women writers of this [the expatriate Paris] community even though she would argue against such an alignment” (19). Benstock's remarks are equally relevant to Willa Cather. Cather probably did not consider herself part of a female literary tradition; she would undoubtedly have been insulted by such a notion. Thus, although it is important to examine Cather's relationship to other women writers, feminist critics cannot make room for Willa Cather in the feminist literary tradition by dismissing her misogyny as a youthful misstep. Such an approach oversimplifies the complex, troubling nature of her genius. Clearly, complicated forces were at work inside her psyche. Struggling with the growing awareness of her sexual nature and wishing desperately to be accepted by the male literary establishment, she denigrated women artists in her early newspaper writing and fiction simply because, again like Gertrude Stein, she perceived no other way to claim a place for herself in a writing community dominated by men. Although many of Cather's attitudes about women are confusing, one thing is abundantly clear: Willa Cather does not sit comfortably among other American women writers in a female literary tradition.

Works Cited

Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.

Cather, Willa. Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction: 1892-1912. Ed. Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965.

———. Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speechs, and Letters. Ed. Brent L. Bohlke. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.