ABSTRACT
Recent critics have begun to investigate the complex, and often disturbing, racial terrain of Willa Cather’s (1873-1947) writing. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison examines Cather’s novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) and claims that the “problem” with the novel, and the reason it so often has been dismissed by literary critics, lies in “trying to come to terms critically and artistically with the novel’s concerns: the power and license of a white slave mistress over her female slaves” (18). While Morrison laments the lack of critical examination of race in Cather’s work-claiming that “the urgency and anxiety in Willa Cather’s rendering of black characters are liable to be missed entirely; no mention is made of the problem that race causes in the technique and the credibility of her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl” (14)— Minrose Gwin has indeed noted a “problem” in Sapphira, brought on by inconsisten cies in characterization and narrative technique. According to Gwin, “The troublesome aspect of Sapphira is that as it suggests the mixed nature of human motivation and conduct, it also implies that… slavery usually had no grave and irrevocable psychological effects upon the enslaved” (138).
