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Willa Cather's Voyage Perilous: A Case for One of Ours

Willa Cather’s One of Ours, despite its Pulitzer Prize, has been and continues to be one of her least understood works as readers consistently miss its complex expression of her romantic-modernist dialectic. One of her few novels that does not develop a major female character, One of Ours often puzzles readers by its unexpected treatment of a subject seen as a man’s world: war and its effect on society. While some women writers of this time wrote of the war from a disillusioned correspondent’s perspective, as Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant did, many others, like Dorothy Canfield, wrote with an overtly patriotic vision. Cather, however, did neither. Refusing to choose one perspective as definitive, she elucidates the perspectives of multiple types of participants and exhibits the decided influence of both Canfield and Sergeant on her own novel. Cather’s novel reveals the strong impact of both these women—two of her closest friends—even as its reception history reveals that the women themselves each understood only parts of the novel. Willa Cather did not live to see her story of romantic Claude read as a dialectic between romanticism and modernism. In 1896, well before she launched her literary career, she expressed the difficulty of writing to be understood properly: “To keep an idea living intact [. . .] to keep it so all the way from the brain to the hand and transfer it on paper a living thing [. . .] that is the voyage