ABSTRACT
Cather includes autobiographical elements-her old story-in most of her fiction, and provides an example of what Morgan observes of twentiethcentury women writers who wrote autobiographical fiction, namely that they “retain a sense of the self as plural…[and of] roles/identities as multiple” (8). In the process of trying to make sense of herself and her experiences through her art, Cather continually re-envisions herself, often putting seemingly mutually exclusive terms into simultaneous play. She is both Jim Burden, who moved from Virginia to Nebraska as a child, and Antonia, who wears men’s clothing; she is both Thea Kronborg, the successful artist, and Lucy Gayheart, the mediocre one who fails; she is both Godfrey St.Peter, the professional historian, and Lesley Ferguesson, the underage schoolteacher. Like the subjects of Gambrell’s study of women modernist insider/outsiders, Cather “refused ever to let a subject go” (184). Continually re-envisioning herself throughout her career, Cather showed an attitude towards identity which can only be described as modern. Her characters are multi-faceted and complex, and we never see a case in which “partial ancestry…[has] the power to become totally defining” (Sollors, Neither 249). Many of them, like their creator, have cosmopolitan aspects. In exploring and evaluating cosmopolitanism in Cather, I find it useful to think of the term’s adjectival and noun forms separately. For example, we can say that someone has a cosmopolitan outlook without arguing that he or she is a cosmopolitan. This distinction is important in part because of a tendency to conflate the
cosmopolite with metropolitan man.2 Certainly the “crucible of the [early twentiethcentury] metropolis” (R.Williams 46), to which many immigrants and intellectuals alike were drawn, played a key role in the emergence of a modernist sensibility. Even while discussing the importance of the metropolis, however, Williams warns of “the metropolitan interpretation of its own processes as universals…only in history but as it were above and beyond it” (R. Williams 47). Cather provides a good illustration of the need for such skepticism. In spite of a lifetime spent crossing the country and the Atlantic and years with a New York City address, she retained “her sense of being a Nebraskan rather than a New Yorker” (Lindemann, “Fear” 30). Further, Cather’s cosmopolitanism does not translate to the political liberalism which Michael Novak seems to assume in his contention that “the true liberal spirit is cosmopolitan rather than universalist. The connotations of these two words suggest the difference between a liberalism that expects, and desires, a certain homogenization and a liberalism that expects, and delights in, variety. Cosmopolitan liberalism is surely closer to the heart of the authentic liberal spirit” (39). Novak sees “cosmopolitan liberalism” as a single term, but Cather would not fit so neatly into such a paradigm. Cather disdained assimilationist calls for immigrants to forget their native tongues and traditions, and yet while she has been connected with cosmopolitanism by many sources, she is never considered a liberal. Thus, Nelson sees Cather as “a woman artist with a cosmopolitan outlook” but concludes that her status is fundamentally “ambiguous” (21), while Carlin characterizes her as “a cosmopolitan Midwesterner [and] a conservative Republican” (6) in the same breath. Cather’s representations of cosmopolitan characters show a similarly complicated and fluid positionality.
