Lincoln — The reputations of two remarkable Nebraska writers are in decline, according to sources that surprisingly seem to welcome it.
First, a group of Vermont librarians has removed the name of Dorothy Canfield Fisher from an annual book award on grounds that she may have had connections to the eugenics movement. The evidence is totally unconvincing. As to the book in which she is said to show eugenics sympathies — Bonfire — it is, if anything, a refutation of eugenics: a main character of low birth exceeds all expectations. No matter. The award has been renamed.
Now comes an unexpected swipe at Canfield Fisher's friend and renowned contemporary, Willa Cather, from a PBS News Hour report about a sculptor who is creating Cather's likeness for placement in the U.S. Capitol. In an otherwise laudatory segment about Cather, viewers (about 2.7 million nightly) are suddenly told:
"[I]n recent decades, critics have pointed out shortcomings in how she represented race."
"She was a woman of her time. And she didn't represent Native American life well. She did not represent African American life well or frequently."This is news to some of us who have read her novels and found them filled with respectful depictions of Native Americans, especially her novels set in the American southwest. She was in awe of indigenous cultures and saw them as inspirations in Death Comes for the Archbishop and other works. In Song of the Lark, Mexicans living in Colorado befriend and develop Thea Kronberg's musical talents. In her final published novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Cather devotes years of work to strip away all sentimentality for the institution of slavery. Because she was a descendant of slaveowners herself, in her final chapter Cather inserts her real-life self as a five year old Virginian, so no one misses the point that slavery, for her, was not only an abomination but deeply personal.
To me, Cather was decidedly not a "woman of her time." In her time, notable novelists were avoiding these subjects entirely, or writing of them stereotypically.
To be sure, a search for Cather critics turns up a few who find fault in her works on these topics, with reasonable foundation. But they temper their words carefully so as not to put Cather into a category with bigots or racists, lest today's critics themselves, writing fashionably about race and ethnicity, someday be labeled "of their time."
Would that PBS News Hour were as judicious with their millions of viewers.
