ABSTRACT
Yet Cather and her protagonists inhabit space and inherit the legacy of Madwoman in distinct ways. While Gilbert and Gubar characterize nineteenth-century female authors as trapped by the architecture of a male society, and domestic literary space as uniformly confi ning and obstructing, Willa Cather’s life vanquishes this line of thinking, but her work does not. Through her continuous departures the author not only escaped confi nement, but also chose it in some instances, thereby complicating facile subversion of what came before. In addition, she does not present the same freedom in her fi ction. As many of her texts refl ect the evolution of Cather’s relationship with the space of artistic production, one can look to the disjunctions between the author and her protagonists to map the degree of freedom in the twentieth-century female literary voice. This chapter reads Willa Cather’s life and several of her works through the critical paradigm of The Madwoman in the Attic. I propose that as an early twentieth-century female author, Cather’s autobiography inherits and ultimately subverts the legacy Gilbert and Gubar establish for nineteenth-century female authors. Her fi ctional representatives, however, speak to the madness of confi nement and the domestication of discontent that Gilbert and Gubar expound. If Cather’s literary surrogates are sane, they depart from Gilbert and Gubar’s model in important ways. And if Cather escaped the “architecture of an
overwhelmingly male-dominated society” (xi), “A Death in the Desert” (1905), The Song of the Lark (1915), and The Professor’s House (1925) contain fundamental tenets of Madwoman’s premise: tropes of confi nement and escape, asocial surrogates, and threatening landscapes as metaphors for psychological and physical unease.
