Willa Cather

The following passages are adapted from critical essays on the American Cather (1873–1947).

Passage A When Cather gave examples of high quality in fiction, she invariably cited Russian writers Ivan Turgenev or Leo Tolstoy or both. Indeed, Edmund Wilson noted in 1922 that Cather followed the manner of Turgenev, not depicting her characters’ emotions directly but telling us how they behave and letting their “inner to avoid overloading the work with unnecessary detail, concentrating instead on what is characteristic and typical.

Here we have an impressionistic aesthetic that anticipates Cather’s: what Turgenev referred to as secret knowledge Cather called “the thing not named.” In one essay she writes that “whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created.” For both writers, there is the absolute importance all the elements of narrative for these writers is the establishment of a prevailing mood.

Passage B In a famous 1927 letter, Cather writes of her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, “Many [reviewers] assert vehemently that it is not a novel. Myself, I prefer to call it a narrative.” Cather’s preference anticipated an important reformulation of the criticism of fiction: the body of literary theory, called which takes as its object “narrative” rather than the “novel,” seems exactly appropriate to Cather’s work.

Indeed, her severest critics have always questioned precisely her capabilities as a novelist. Morton Zabel argued that “[Cather’s] themes...could readily fail to find the structure and substance that might have given them life or redeemed them from the tenuity of a sketch”; Leon Edel called one of her novels “two inconclusive fragments.” “non-novelistic” structures indirectly articulate the essential and conflicting forces of desire at work throughout Cather’s fiction.