Content area
Full Text
Behind "Reflections on Willa Cather": Katherine Anne Porter and the Dilemmas of Literary Sisterhood
On September 25, 1949, two years after the death of Willa Cather, the New York Times Book Review published a warmly appreciative review by Katherine Anne Porter of the posthumous volume Willa Cather on Writing. Entitled "The Calm, Pure Art of Willa Cather," that review was perhaps the most unqualified in its praise of any review Porter ever wrote. When she subsequently expanded it into a full essay, however, its title became the more neutral "Reflections on Willa Cather" and its straightforward celebration of this literary elder sister, one of the preeminent novelists of her time, had modulated into a complex rhetoric in which overt praise is undercut by traces of disguised belittlement. Between the two, and in the gaps between text and subtext in the essay, yawns a gulf of ambiguity. One thing is clear: that the role of literary younger sister was not a comfortable one for Porter.
Feminist scholarship in the past three decades has abundantly demonstrated the powerful continuities that link women writers into what has been called a literature of their own. Often that tradition is described in sororal or matrilineal terms that imply a harmonious mutuality distinctly unlike the Freudian anxiety between literary fathers and sons famously theorized by Harold Bloom.(1) Women writers are seen as forming, instead, a harmonious family of attentive and mutually supportive speakers and hearers. In the case of Porter's attentive awareness of Cather, however, sisterhood entails rivalry. Sensing (as various of her letters to such other literary sisters as Josephine Herbst and Kay Boyle indicate) that the limited space for women available in a predominantly masculine world of letters enforced a rivalrous competition for place, she seems to have found the figure of Cather a daunting one. In the late 1940s, when she was writing her review of Willa Cather on Writing and then revising it into one of her most substantial literary essays, Porter was recognized as a modernist virtuoso of the short story, a "writer's writer" in short forms. The commercially dominant genre of the novel, however, still, despite prolonged efforts, eluded her. Cather, on the other hand, enjoyed her greatest success in the novel. Like Porter, she...