Willa Cather's "pioneer" novels and (not new, not old) historical reading

Frus is associate director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Writing Center at the University of Michigan and author of The Polit and Poets of Journalistic Narrative, 1994. Corkin is associate professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and author of Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States: Cinema, Literature, and Culture, 1996

In a generally admiring review of Paradise, Toni Morrison's 1998 novel set in an allblack town in Oklahoma and ranging from 1976 back through the Civil Rights and postWorld War II periods to Reconstruction, Brent Staples pays tribute to Morrison's complex and beautiful writing and her critique of the utopian ideal. But he also complains that Morrison has made the novel's characters and their stories ambiguous and mythical "by avoiding literal references to history and even physical descriptions that might fix characters in time and space" (1994). Describing Morrison's decision to rely on magic realism and myth rather than to evoke with historical specificity "the black Western settlements that sprang up during Reconstruction, or the so-called 'exodusters' who left the South to seek their fortunes on the frontier," Staples expresses his desire "to see her talents turned to a cultural history of the eras and places she treats so compellingly"(1998). Indicating to the reader how to read for the referent, rather than on the allegorical plane on which Morrison seems to be working, Staples says that the town started by the freedmen's descendents, Ruby, Oklahoma, was "almost certainly based" on "a very real town called Langston, Okla., settled by Negroes in 1890 and named for the black educator and Reconstruction congressman, John M. Langston" (1998).

When we, as critics, wrote similarly about Cather's 1915 novel, My Anto nia, regretting that she takes pains to evoke a specific place-the Nebraska of her childhood-in a realistic way, but then elevates her setting to myth by eliding the actual conditions of farm life on the Plains in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, we were taken to task for expressing the wish that the material history of her plains novels were more accessible to the reader (Frus and Corkin 1996). Stanley Fish, the respondent to our paper at the 1993 Alabama Symposium, lectured us, saying that Cather "intended" to write a novel, not a history, and our treating her as a deficient historian was inappropriate, a sign of the failure of literary studies to keep within its disciplinary boundaries, which he was at the time policing (Raymond 1996, 16465). Our response was to note that disciplinarity too often limits exploration of knowledge and that interdisciplinary moves are inevitable in humanities and social sciences fields that have been transformed by social construction theory, structuralism, and poststructuralism-to the point where most humanists view knowledge as partial and historical knowledge as the concern of all who inquire, rather than the purview of a particular group of academic historians doing empirical history (See Corkin 1996, 176). Obviously we were not asking Cather to be a historian, but calling for teachers and students to work harder at recovering what she leaves out or is vague about: the history of the times in which she wrote, the period in which the novel is set, and the relation of both to our own times.

No wonder Staples touched a chord in us with his lament that "the historical events that inspired [Paradise] remain submerged and inaccessible" (1998). Morrison had proved she could teach Americans about other episodes in our history, not painlessly, surely, for Beloved and Jazz-the previous novels in this trilogy-are searing in their treatment of the effects of slavery and the Great Migration on African-Americans. But, like Morrison's earlier novels Song of Solomon and Sula, they also demonstrate the extent to which the historical experience of African-Americans is bound up with national culture, even identity, and essential to any American's adequate accounting of our past. Besides, at a time when literary studies in general has taken a turn toward history, why wouldn't teachers and critics as well as literary historians pay attention to the history in novels and look to those with latent historical reference as well as explicit historical and documentary narratives to study in classrooms and write about in journals and monographs? And why wouldn't a reviewer express regret that a novel chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club and thus destined to have hundreds of thousands readers does not make it easy for them to learn about an important part of U.S. history? In the interest of showing the advantages of reading many novels with significant historical reference as though they were historical novels, we offer a reading of four of Cather's so-called "pioneer" novels-O Pioneers! (1913), My Antonia (1918), A Lost Lady (1923), and The Professor's House (1925). Although we draw on recent historicist readings of these novels and acknowledge their authors in the notes, we do not intend this as a guide to revisionist readings; rather we focus on our materialist historical approach in order to show the potential effects of such a perspective.2 As things stand, a teacher or critic is likely to adopt one of the normative frameworks of Cather readings: especially realism or modernism, the dominant literary historical categories determining eligibility for the canon (see Middleton 1990). Pastoral is another common set of framing conventions-that is to say, the mythic or essentialized version of frontier (see Stouck 1975). Romantic and classical readings are also popular (Rosowski 1986, 1989). In our view, all these are versions of cultural myths that have come to stand for historical truth. These novels have also been cited as examples of the "chastening" of American prose style in the second and third decades of the century (see Love 1980; Stouck 1975; and Stouck and Giltrow 1992). To accept this description is to acquiesce to Cather's terms for her own reception, for this is the period in which she developed a deliberately understated or "unfurnished" style, as she called it in "The Novel 'Demeuble."' Like Hemingway, she emphasizes the "importance of the thing not said" and concocts a deceptively transparent style that seems to be objective (see Frus 1994, ch. 2). Rather than accepting the terms on which she asks to be read, we look at rather than through the medium of her particular style in order to work against the transparency of these novels, and we put back in some of the "furniture" she took out. By this method we believe we can show that what is left out of each of these novels is the historical circumstances that would severely undercut the novels' affecting, but finally facile, vision of American life at the end of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century.