Willa Cather and the New Woman’s “Un-Sentimental Sort of Success”

Chapter 1 discusses a paradigmatic New Woman narrative, Willa Cather’s 1915 The Song of the Lark, in which Cather ostensibly reclaims sentiment for the New Woman, only to place her female opera singer in sentimental relation to art, not domesticity. The chapter analyzes the Künstlerroman’s unorthodox marriage plot as it stages the conflicts of New Woman sexuality. The chapter further explores Cather’s use of a New Woman artist to reconfigure the role of emotion in the aesthetic encounter, and links this representational paradigm to both the nascent neurophysiological concept of empathy and the modernist ideal articulated by T. S. Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility. Reiterating stereotypes of traditional sentimental reading as uncritical, overemotional, and unsophisticated, Lark develops and endorses a self-conscious and discerning alternative.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather, via Edith Wharton

In The Beautiful and Damned several intertextual references to Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country occur: this essay explores those regarding the New Woman, the flapper. Harshly criticised by the two women writers, she is more nuanced in Fitzgerald’s second novel.