7. Cather's Capitalism

¹Willa Cather, “Escapism” (1936), in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1992), p. 972.

²Cather's principal antagonist was Granville Hicks, who in the 1933 English Journal published an essay charmingly entitled “The Case against Willa Cather.” It is reprinted in Willa Cather and Her Critics, James Schroeter, ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 139–47.

³Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, in Early Novels and Stories (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 148.

⁴Ibid., p. 165.

⁵Ibid., p. 151.

⁶Ibid., p. 172.

⁷Ibid., pp. 149, 166, 170–72, 220–21.

⁸Ibid., p. 149.

⁹Ibid., p. 172.

¹⁰Ibid., pp. 170–71.

¹¹Pace Demaree Peck (“‘Possession Granted by a Different Lease’: Alexandra Bergson's Imaginative Conquest of Cather's Nebraska,” Modern Fiction Studies 36 [Spring 1990]: 7), who believes that the brothers' “hard labor in the fields writes the actual history of western settlement.”

¹²O Pioneers!, p. 197.

¹³Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 3rd ed., rev. (1966; rpt. Chicago: Contemporary Books, n.d.), pp. 97, 289–90. David Kelley (private communication) has suggested that “relational” may be a better term than “subjective,” because it stresses the relationship between object and subject and does not imply that economic values are merely arbitrary or context-free—which Mises does not mean to suggest they are.

¹⁴O Pioneers!, p. 197.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 198.

¹⁶Merely to observe this, of course, is to invite the disapproval of literary critics (left, right, and center), for whom commodities and the consumption thereof are traditional objects of moral aversion. Walter Benn Michaels has commented: “As long as the best thing to do with consumer culture is renounce it, literary criticism will be happy” (The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], p. 15).

¹⁷Money, as Lord Roll puts it, “acts as a price index” and allows for the exchange of goods to which individuals attach different values (Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought, 5th ed., rev. [London: Faber and Faber, 1992], p. 357).

¹⁸Mises, Human Action, p. 121.

¹⁹O Pioneers!, p. 227.

²⁰Ibid., p. 219.

²¹Ibid.

²²Ibid., p. 220.

²³Ibid.

²⁴Ibid.

²⁵Ibid., pp. 221, 222

²⁶Ibid., p. 222.

²⁷Ibid., p. 221.

²⁸Ibid., p. 181. See also p. 149, on Alexandra's ability to learn “by the mistakes” of her neighbors.

²⁹William Jennings Bryan, speech to the Democratic National Convention (1896), in American Public Addresses: 1740–1952, A. Craig Baird, ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), p. 200.

³⁰O Pioneers!, p. 185.

³¹Ibid., p. 192. Cather got the last laugh on Bryan when, two decades after the free silver campaign, Sinclair Lewis turned up in Nebraska to inform its citizens that “Willa Cather is... incomparably greater than William Jennings Bryan.” And the Nebraskans had to listen. See James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), p. 319.

³²Ibid., p. 192.

³³Ibid.

³⁴Ibid.

³⁵Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, bk. 1, chap. 2.

³⁶O Pioneers!, p. 222.

³⁷Ibid., pp. 218–19.

³⁸Ibid., p. 222.

³⁹Ibid., p. 172.

⁴⁰Ibid., p. 180.

⁴¹Ibid., pp. 182, 183.

⁴²Ibid., p. 182. The young Willa Cather had seen in Bryan a representation of “the entire Middle West” in all its “magnitude [she does not say greatness] and monotony” (emphasis added)—Cather, “The Personal Side of William Jennings Bryan,” The Library (July 14, 1900), in The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893–1902, William M. Curtin, ed.(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 789.

⁴³O Pioneers!, p. 186.

⁴⁴Ibid., p. 187.

⁴⁵Ibid., p. 219.

⁴⁶Ibid., p. 221.

⁴⁷Peck, “‘Possession Granted by a Different Lease’” (p. 7) asserts that Cather gives Alexandra's property rights “priority” over her brothers'. She doesn't.

⁴⁸Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 2, 124–25, 261.

⁴⁹Woodress, Willa Cather, p. 208.

⁵⁰In Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), Guy Reynolds labors to bring forth a “progressive” Willa Cather and is greatly assisted by the author's “multiculturalism”—although he is annoyed by her supposedly “illogical” representation of Alexandra Bergson as both a capitalist and a nice person (pp. 16, 56).

⁵¹Willa Cather, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,” The Nation 117 (September 5, 1923), p. 238.

⁵²Ibid.

⁵³Willa Cather, A Lost Lady, in Later Novels (New York: Library of America, 1990), pp. 58–59.

⁵⁴Willa Cather, “The Sculptor's Funeral,” in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, pp. 508, 507.

⁵⁵Cather, “Nebraska,” p. 238.

⁵⁶Ibid. For Guy Reynolds—“Willa Cather as Progressive: Politics and the Writer,” The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather, Marilee Lindemann, ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 28—there is “a sense of laissez-faire capitalism” here; yet he believes that Cather's statements are significant chiefly as a “populist” or “progressive” attack on banks.

⁵⁷Ibid.

⁵⁸Mises, Human Action, p. 95.

⁵⁹Roll, A History of Economic Thought, pp. 361, 341. See also Mises, Human Action, pp. 119–27. Roll usefully reviews the nineteenth-century work that preceded that of the “trinity.” The term “marginal utility” was first introduced by Friedrich von Wieser in 1884 (Roll, p. 369).

⁶⁰Cather, “Sculptor's Funeral,” p. 509.

⁶¹O Pioneers!, p. 168.

⁶²Literary theorist Fredric Jameson (The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981], pp. 249–50) points in this direction when he observes that the problem of economic valuation became an issue in capitalist society as it had not in earlier societies. He mentions “the new subjectivity of individualism” involved in people's ability to choose among various activities and professions: “the realm of values becomes problematical.” But holding, as he does, to the labor theory of value, he associates this phenomenon with the discovery of “equivalent labor-power” and the “commodification of all labor,” by which I suppose he means the discovery (perhaps not exactly new to the nineteenth century) that money can buy virtually any kind of “labor.” He thus misses several things that are hard to miss if you aren't trying to operate with the labor theory of value. Among them is the fact that economic choice and valuation may become quite interesting in a period in which some kinds of “labor” (e.g., innovation, investment, and other canny uses of the brain) are routinely found to produce more valuable “commodities” (i.e., things that people are willing to buy) than more traditional kinds of “labor” could ever produce. In other words, when Alexandra is free to choose how she wants to “labor,” she is able to make a lot more money than Lou and Oscar, and this is very “problematical” for them.

⁶³It is never encountered in works of literary interpretation and theory, and it is often missing in works of history. William Cronon's admirable book about the economic development of Chicago, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), explains in fascinating detail the ways in which capitalist innovation and investment developed gargantuan new sources of value. But Cronon maintains that all of this exemplifies in some way the labor theory of value, simply because human work and “social relationships” were involved. He then qualifies the labor theory, but only to insist on the “value” that supposedly came to the Chicago markets “directly” from nature, ultimately from the “stored sunshine” that is the life of plants and “the wealth of nature” (pp. 149–50). Cronon doesn't ask himself about the “value” of all those units of sunshine that are stored but never used or wanted, or about the sunshine that was stored on this earth for millions of years before, in Cather's words, “a human face was set toward it with love and yearning” (p. 170, see below). He is imagining the world as an historian or ecologist, but not as an economist.

⁶⁴Cather, “Personal Side of William Jennings Bryan,” p. 783.

⁶⁵Harry Scherman, The Promises Men Live By: A New Approach to Economics (New York: Random House, 1938), pp. xii–xiii.

⁶⁶Woodress, Willa Cather, p. 445, suggests that “Two Friends” is “the unique exhibit in the canon of Cather's fiction in which politics provides plot”—a statement that needs to be qualified, especially in view of the political choices that appear in crucial episodes of O Pioneers! and other works; e.g., One of Ours (1922), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940).

⁶⁷Willa Cather, “Two Friends” (1932) in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, p. 686.

⁶⁸Ibid., pp. 687, 686.

⁶⁹Ibid., pp. 686–87.

⁷⁰Ibid., p. 684.

⁷¹Robert W. Cherny, “Willa Cather and the Populists,” Great Plains Quarterly 3 (Fall 1983): 206–18, a very valuable contribution, shows how important the great populist movements were to Cather's neighbors, and outlines her unfavorable reaction to them early and late in her career.

⁷²Hicks, “The Case against Willa Cather,” p. 146.

⁷³Ibid.

⁷⁴Mises, Human Action, p. 97.

⁷⁵Willa Cather, “On the Art of Fiction” (1920), in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, p. 939.

⁷⁶Sharon O'Brien, in Cather, Early Novels and Stories, p. 1310.

⁷⁷Cather, “On the Art of Fiction,” pp. 939–40.

⁷⁸Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy, in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, p.538.

⁷⁹Ibid., p. 577.

⁸⁰Ibid.

⁸¹Woodress, Willa Cather, p. 384.

⁸²Ibid. In correspondence that passed much later, she added a complication by discussing the problem in terms of Myra's view of Oswald: Myra came to feel he was the enemy because she had originally admired him too much (ibid., pp. 384–85).

⁸³Ibid., p. 388, quoting Louis Kronenberger, New York Times Book Review (October 24, 1926), p. 2.

⁸⁴Ibid., p. 386.

⁸⁵My Mortal Enemy, pp. 567–68.

⁸⁶Woodress, Willa Cather, p. 385.

⁸⁷Willa Cather, Nebraska State Journal (February 11, 1894), in The World and the Parish, p. 50.

⁸⁸Woodress, Willa Cather, pp. 451–52.

⁸⁹Ibid., p. 304.

⁹⁰Ibid., p. 305.

⁹¹Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), pp. 557, 514. This edition contains Cather's revisions to the 1915 text, which is the one reprinted in the Library of America edition of Early Novels and Stories (see above, note 3). No revisions significantly affect the passages quoted in this essay.

⁹²Mises, Human Action, p. 97.

⁹³The Song of the Lark, pp. 559, 557.

⁹⁴Cather, quoted in Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir, p. 63.

⁹⁵The Song of the Lark, p. 515.

⁹⁶Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 1. Acocella's book is a lively and judicious assessment of Cather's achievement and of other critics' attempts to come to terms with it.

⁹⁷The Song of the Lark, p. 578.

⁹⁸Ibid., p. 571.

⁹⁹Ibid., p. 554.

¹⁰⁰Ibid., p. 408.

¹⁰¹Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), in Not Under Forty (1936), in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, pp. 837, 834–35.

¹⁰²The Song of the Lark, p. 380.

¹⁰³Willa Cather, “Neighbour Rosicky” (1930), in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, pp. 71, 15, 24–25.

¹⁰⁴Woodress, Willa Cather, p. 438.

¹⁰⁵As stressed by Cherny (“Willa Cather,” pp. 213–15), who traces Cather's development of the theme through the various situations in which the novel's characters, though influenced or constrained by circumstances, are shown to retain their power of choice.

¹⁰⁶Cather, My ántonia, in Early Novels and Stories, p. 712. In her 1926 shortening of the introduction (pp. 1332–34), Cather took out the specifically leftist sympathies of the wife, perhaps because they had dated, but she kept the “romantic disposition which... has been one of the strongest elements in [Jim's] success.”

¹⁰⁷Ibid., pp. 888, 896, 878, 931–32.

¹⁰⁸Ibid., p. 933.

¹⁰⁹Ibid., p. 920.

¹¹⁰Ibid., p. 933.

¹¹¹Susan Rosowski, “Willa Cather's Women,” Studies in American Fiction (Autumn 1981): 265–68; and Woodress, Willa Cather (p. 300) make observations similar to this.

¹¹²Woodress, Willa Cather, pp. 296–97.

¹¹³My ántonia, p. 918.

¹¹⁴Ibid., p. 926.

¹¹⁵Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir, pp. 261, 143.

¹¹⁶Willa Cather, One of Ours, in Early Novels and Stories, p. 1239; Song of the Lark, p. 99.

¹¹⁷A Lost Lady, pp. 57–58.

¹¹⁸Ibid., p. 58.

¹¹⁹O Pioneers!, p. 192.

¹²⁰Ibid., pp. 209, 270.

¹²¹Ibid., p. 267.

¹²²Ibid., p. 210.

¹²³Ibid., p. 207. Sally Peltier Harvey, who operates with customary literary-critical stereotypes of the great contest between individualism and “community,” imagines the mature Willa Cather vexing herself with questions like, “[W]as there a place in modern... America for an individualism nurtured by and responsive to community, or did self-aggrandizement necessarily entail ignoring others' needs?” (Redefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather [London: Associated University Presses, 1995], p. 92). It's hard to picture Cather wrinkling her brow over such questions, at any stage of her career. Her answer to the first question is always Yes; to the second, No. Cather has been called a believer in the survival of the fittest, because of what she says about the virtue of people who can “weather the storm” (Cherny, “Willa Cather,” pp. 213, 215). But she is hardly the stereotypical Social Darwinist. She characteristically associates individualism with social benefits and collectivism with social detriments, and she sees no paradox in that.

¹²⁴Alexander Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” lines 175–78.

¹²⁵O Pioneers!, p. 270.

¹²⁶Ibid.

¹²⁷Cather, “The Novel Démeublé,” p. 837.

¹²⁸Mises, Human Action, pp. 235–36.

¹²⁹The Song of the Lark, p. 557.

¹³⁰O Pioneers!, p. 250.

¹³¹Ibid., p. 288.

¹³²Ibid., p. 289.

¹³³Ibid.

¹³⁴Ibid., p. 196.

¹³⁵Ibid., p. 170.

¹³⁶Even in sensitive discussions of “dialectical” relationships between nature and Alexandra's creativity, the balance can be lost, as I think it is in Susan J. Rosowski's emphasis on Alexandra's learning of nature's “laws” (“Willa Cather's Ecology of Place,” Western American Literature 30 [Spring 1995]: 44). Warren Motley helps to right the balance by emphasizing the role of Alexandra's “sharp business sense”—although he believes that its successful exercise leaves her “psychologically deadened” (“The Unfinished Self: Willa Cather's O Pioneers! and the Psychic Cost of a Woman's Success,” Women's Studies 12 [1986]: 149–65). Peck, “‘Possession Granted by a Different Lease’” (pp. 5–22) goes to extremes in an opposite direction when she discusses Alexandra's spiritual possession of the landscape (a good thing to discuss) while ignoring her real estate speculations.

¹³⁷O Pioneers!, p. 290.