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Cather sings the blues: The Tragic Art of O Pioneers!

Willa Cather gives us memorable characters and grand descriptions of the Nebraska prairies and the Southwest— vivid landscapes and the women and men residing in and travelling through them. We tend to think of Cather in this body of work as a writer of pastoral, in, for example, O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), and in parts of One of Ours (1922); as a chronicler of western settlement and frontier life in these novels and in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927); and as a celebrant of artists and visionaries, above all the opera singer Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark (1915) but also the engineer and bridge-builder Bartley Alexander in Alexander’s Bridge (1912) and the adventurer and inventor Tom Outland in The Professor’s House (1925). Knowing as we do from biographers that the primary loves of Cather’s life were women, we also may conceive of her as a gay writer whose same-sex friendships and heterosexual relationships in her fiction (“Paul’s Case,” for instance, 1905) intimate interests and affections that Cather could not, or would not, declare openly and that a century later we perceive, interpreting between the lines. All of this defines Cather, yet it limits her as well and keeps us from seeing and valuing her as one of America’s most eloquent tragic writers. She is a deep, discerning creator of tragic art, with a mastery of nuance and implication. Cather evokes and hints at much more than she says directly: and we lose a great deal, her beat and rhythm of meaning, if we move quickly across her pages. Cather is not what she