Care-focused Feminism, Care Ethics, and Feminine Artistry in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House

Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House dismantles feminine behaviors, as Cather ascribes new meaning to her marginalized female characters’ independent acts and depicts male characters being saved by women. Cather’s care and care ethics are based on human relations; they highlight empathy, responsibility, acceptance, and emotion-based practice. She accordingly shows sincere care and acts in the spirit of salvation for the characters’ surroundings, culture, and society through marginalized figures such as Augusta, Mother Eve, and Tom. These are examples of alternative caregivers who develop a connection-based relationship through their sincerity and attentiveness and cultural and social care. In their care, we observe a spirit of self-sacrifice and the possibility of a true bond between them and others and their communities. This article conveys Cather’s capacity for serving as a conduit for healing and solidarity and proves her visionary force of care practice.

Pueblo Utopias

The chapter expands upon the “Romance of Ruins” by considering the meaning of Native American ruins and the impact they have had on the idea of “American” culture. Early explorers like William Henry Jackson, Frederick Chapin, and Gustaf Nordenskiöld photographed the civilizations of the Anasazi, including the cliff dwellers, for the first time, igniting great interest among the general public. Their discoveries appeared in the popular press and were presented at World Expositions, while novelists like Willa Cather incorporated the meaning of the Mesa Verde in fiction (e.g., The Professor’s House). Cather’s utopian view of pueblo culture is echoed in the work of early twentieth-century photographers like Laura Gilpin, who found in the ancient ruins of the Southwest and Central America, symbols of ideal civilization. Meanwhile, architect Mary Colter created ersatz ruins in the Grand Canyon National Park that would serve as emblems of the lost civilization and as tourist attractions.

“Our Wonderful Adventures in the Southwest”

Willa Cather and Edith Lewis traveled together to the American Southwest in 1915, 1916, 1925, and 1926, and southwestern travel became their shared passion, an escape from the pressures of modern city life into a realm of adventure. In the Southwest, Cather also sought experiences and information necessary for her creative work, and she transformed experiences she shared with Lewis into fiction. They informed Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop. This chapter describes their experiences as tourists and as women playing at being western cowboys. The chapter also gives full treatment to Lewis’s role as Cather’s editorial collaborator, using The Professor’s House as an example.

No Forgiveness in Heaven, No Forgetting in Hell

Chapter 7 argues that the word which brings the “nasty, grim little tale” of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House to the surface is “sin” and that the hermeneutic that makes sense of the Professor’s love-driven crisis of will is German-American Catholic. The starting point of this revisionist reading is non-controversial; The Professor’s House frames one great homosocial, alternatively domestic, putatively anti-capitalist intergenerational romance (Tom Outland’s reminiscences of his cowpoke buddy, Roddy Blake) inside another (Professor St. Peter’s idealization and idolization of Tom Outland), both of which seem to be as pure of heart—and of fluid exchange—as the pristine air and water of Outland’s Blue Mesa. But the women of the novel, especially wife Lillian and the two daughters, would seem to have a different story to tell, regarding the Professor’s investments in Outland and Outland’s retreat with Roddy and what male-male romance has in it for women—a subtext of feminist perspective and women’s values that emerges, in remarkable clarity, as if by miracle, from the fractured yet relentless Catholic insinuations of the novel: a veritable catechism of silent revelations and muted insistences beginning, in fact, with the reclamation of the discourse and provenance of sin. It comes as a surprise, then, that a novel as sophisticated in sociological inquiry, sexual wisdom, and experimental form as The Professor’s House—one of the most academically revered, or at least attended to, novels in the current modernist canon—can and does have a moral—indeed, it tests for morality.

Epic Stone Butch

Through application of the contemporary term transmasculinity and the more historical stone butch, the author questions the critical tendency to perceive American writer Willa Cather only as lesbian while ignoring or undertheorizing a transgender longing at play in her fiction, short stories, and letters. While biographical evidence must not be approached as simply coterminous with literary production, as literature often exceeds or resists such alignments, Cather's letters in particular suggest a strong identification with her male fictional alliances. Analysis of her letters alongside two of her most treasured, and disparaged, novels, One of Ours (1922) and The Professor's House (1925), conveys Cather's wish for an idealized masculinity, both for herself and for Western culture, that would survive two coeval historical processes and events: the closing of the American frontier and the First World War. Through what the author calls a stone butch “armature,” she and her characters retained masculine dignity despite historical foreclosure of Cather's manly ideal, Winston Churchill's Great Man, who was for her the artistic and intellectual casualty of the period. Cather expressed the peculiar nostalgic longing present in stone butch, and in the explosion of new forms of transmasculinity in the present. This suggests that historical transgender styles don't disappear entirely, even as new categories emerge.

Coda

This conclusion uses a single scene from Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House to link sexuality, pain, and the articulation of queer history. It argues that former student Tom Outland, a figure of queer survival’s simultaneous potency and precarity, ultimately teaches Professor Godfrey St. Peter how, by letting go, to love a man and write history. Outland demonstrates how the suffering inherent in queer survival is also the engine of queer narrativity, the means by which queer knowledge and embodiment get articulated and transmitted across generations without the support of traditional kinship circuits and reproductive technologies.