Who Are You, Willa Cather?

Abstract The authors cast a retrospective eye over Cather’s terrain, trying to look at all the novels on one plane, so as to find the most essential preoccupations that make her work what it is. The chapter includes discussions of the complexities of memory, as well as Cather’s habitual instinct to find some sort of bedrock in ancient first civilizations. Her landscapes and her light shows place the human figure in a wider-than-human world that can be full of wonder, or danger, or escape, but always works to shift perspective. She celebrates the dignity of human work within this alien wider context, even though human intentions are so often waylaid by chance encounters and events. Part of that human work is the creation of the self in fiction as a person—not, Cather insists, as a mere character. The book ends with Cather’s decisions about where and how to end her novels and stories.