Craniometry, Race, and the Artist in Willa Cather

Willa Cather's description of Blind d'Arnault, the black pianoplaying prodigy in My Ántonia (1918), is shocking. “He had the Negro head,” Cather's narrator, Jim Burden, tells us, “almost no head at all; nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool” (139). This passage, like the entire Blind d'Arnault episode, has usually been ignored by critics, or, in a few more recent instances, confronted as evidence of Willa Cather's racism. Jim's phrase of “astounding insult and innocence,” Blanche Gelfant writes, “assures him that the black man should not frighten, being an incomplete creature, possessed … of instinct and rhythm but deprived of intellect” (120). Elizabeth Ammons cites this passage too, among others, as one of many offensive racist stereotypes in the description of d'Arnault (“African American Art,” 57). The description of d'Arnault is certainly full of racist stereotypes: d'Arnault, with what are termed his “animal desires” and “dark mind,” playing “barbarously and wonderfully” (My Ántonia, 142), is hardly accorded a fully human status by Jim, and nothing in the novel suggests any distance between Jim's racial attitudes and Cather's. I do want to argue, though, that Cather's views on race are considerably more complicated, as well as more central to her fiction, than critics have yet demonstrated. Attending to the preoccupation with skull shape in Cather's fiction gives us a way into this complexity.