For the Seventeenth International Willa Cather Seminar, held in June 2019, we invited Cather scholars and readers to join us for six days at Shenandoah University, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the lush and complex site of Willa Cather’s birth and first nine years. Here, as an observant daughter of a privileged white family, Cather first encountered differences and dislocations that remained lively, productive, and sometimes deeply troubling sites of tension and energy throughout her writing life, extending to and beyond her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, set in her family’s Virginia.

Seminar participants visited many places that were important to young Willa’s family—and to other Virginians, both Black and white—as they experienced the persistent powers of enslavement, the French and Indian War (one of Cather’s best-known ancestors was a prominent local “Indian fighter” in the eighteenth century), the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction era. They also visited the still-new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington dc to learn more about how institutionalized enslavement had shaped the world into which Cather was born.

Of course the sixty-five papers presented at this seminar, as well as the conversations they sparked, were not rooted solely in Virginia. They covered the whole expanse of Cather’s life and work. We hoped that this seminar would unsettle some of our prevailing assumptions about Cather’s work and a life that moved from Virginia to Nebraska to Pittsburgh to New York City to New Mexico and farther west, and to Grand Manan Island. Experiences of difference and dislocation, which began for Cather early in her Virginia childhood, continued until her death in 1947 and her New Hampshire burial. We were especially eager to hear from new voices with new perspectives on Cather and the conference theme as we came together in a beautiful Virginia summer week, when the state was observing the four hundredth anniversary of enslavement, begun in the new Virginia colony in 1619, as well as the annual celebration of Emancipation known as Juneteenth.

Seminar participants did not disappoint us. The thirteen essays in this volume of the Cather Studies series are a rich sampling of the fresh and provocative scholarship shared in Virginia in 2019. We welcomed both familiar and new voices, and they introduced us to a variety of compelling ways of seeing and situating Cather’s texts—ways that both unsettle and advance Cather scholarship. We have organized the volume in loose groups or clusters of essays that examine a common text or theme. We begin with four essays on Sapphira and the Slave Girl that, in different ways, build upon the project begun in Toni Morrison’s influential reading, in Playing in the Dark, of how race shapes and misshapes the novel. Sarah Clere examines material culture in Sapphira and finds that, although that discourse is often oriented toward white characters in positions of power, considering the “historical context and function of objects and household spaces fractures the dominance of the narrative’s white perspective and provides insight into the lives of its Black characters.” Clere argues that “objects in Sapphira and the Slave Girl frequently undermine the idea of a static identity determined by race and social class, pointing instead to the possibility of adaptation and ultimately self-fashioning.” Barry Hudek explores biblical allusions in the novel, including some that Cather excised from the typescript, which serves as evidence of the author’s awareness of a justice-oriented mode of reading the Bible that would later be termed Black liberation theology. Although Cather rewrote a clearly subversive scene in which the dying Jezebel asks Henry Colbert to read her the story of the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt, Hudek sees in numerous remaining biblical allusions and in references to songs and hymns a thread of resistance to the imperialist order that produced and justified slavery. Sapphira and the Slave Girl contains, Hudek concludes, “clear moments of identification with and, potentially, celebration of Black liberation theology.”

Tracyann Williams’s reading of Sapphira attends not to resistance but to the persistence in the United States of “the unresolved disease of racism and slavery.” Williams sees the novel as “a major work, precisely because it is difficult and uncomfortable.” Cather’s story of the dropsical Sapphira’s obsession with the mixed-race young slave woman “offers a window into the American collective cultural and political psyche and the fraught relationship that exists between the races. Much in the way the miller takes in brown wheat and produces white flour, I argue that Cather is refining away the confusion of changing political dynamics, restoring a world in which a mistress with limited mobility can oppress those around her, denying citizenship and agency to those perceived as Other.” Speaking of wheat and flour, Steven Shively concludes our Sapphira cluster with a chapter that uses the folk song “Weevily Wheat,” which explicitly appears in My Ántonia and is more cryptically embedded in Sapphira, to affirm that traces of Cather’s roots in the South are not confined to the single novel she set in Virginia. Drawing widely on music and cultural history, Shively explores the “racial mobility” of “Weevily Wheat,” which had connections to the Scots-Irish people of Britain (from whom Cather was descended) and ties to nineteenth-century Black entertainments (e.g., play-parties) as well as to the coded language enslaved people used to convey messages of resistance and protest. Whatever Cather’s intentions in engaging with the song in both My Ántonia and Sapphira, Shively sees it as “a rich example of the ways Cather mixed experience, memory, and her broad cultural life to create art. The song is present as a Black American cultural artifact that adds significant meaning to the novel and to the ways American culture ignores, conceals, and reveals race.”

The chapters in our second cluster use sex and/or gender to frame fresh discussions of Cather’s literary influences and cultural engagements in the first decade of her career as a novelist. Hannah Wells revisits the question of Walt Whitman’s influence not only on O Pioneers! but on Cather’s fiction more broadly. Wells looks at the divergent ideals of the pioneer articulated in Whitman’s poetry and Cather’s prose to ground “an ecofeminist reading that explores the negotiation of a right relationship with the land through the intersection of femininity and pioneerism within Whitman’s and Cather’s schemata of American western expansion.” Molly Metherd examines Cather’s rendering of a “female national hero” in The Song of the Lark’s Thea Kronborg as a reimagining of the American body politic. Metherd explains that “the nation [Cather] imagines into being is not the nation of nativists in the early twentieth century, that is, singular, monolingual, white. Instead, Cather imagines a nation made up of many cultures. Thea is deeply influenced by her experiences in diverse communities in the United States, and the novel situates the aesthetic spirit of these communities as central to both the development of her artistic genius and to the national character. The work reimagines not only the national hero as woman but also a national consciousness as cosmopolitan.” In the final essay of this cluster, Geneva M. Gano puts Cather in conversation with anarchist Emma Goldman and places Lena Lingard at the center of My Ántonia to ground the claim that the novel offers “Cather’s most affirming portrait of free sexual pleasure and desire.” Such a reorientation demonstrates that “despite its explicitly nostalgic tone and androcentric perspective, the novel conveys a recognizably radical feminist argument ... for a woman’s right to control her own body and direct her own economic future.” That argument aligns Cather to a surprising degree with the more overt sexual radicalism of Goldman’s advocacy of free love. Gano concludes, “Cather shows us that Lena’s refusal of marriage and childbearing (though, crucially, not love and pleasure) has enabled her alone to emerge unscathed from a brutal frontier capitalism that relentlessly extracts a physical, intellectual, and emotional toll on the young, poor, immigrant women upon whose labor it depends.”

Cather’s engagements with particular regions as geopolitical, sociolinguistic, and literary sites are the throughline in our third cluster of contributions, which offer fresh comparisons and probing questions into Cather’s contexts and shaping environments. Lisbeth Strimple Fuisz, in “Mapping and (Re)mapping the Nebraska Landscape in the Works of Willa Cather and Francis La Flesche,” puts O Pioneers! and My Ántonia in dialogue with La Flesche’s memoir The Middle Five: Indian Boys at School to consider how the two writers’ “representations of place respond to the imperatives of settler colonialism.” Drawing on the insights of critical geography, literary, and Indigenous studies, Fuisz finds that Cather’s novels “reproduce dominant settler colonial spatial relationships, thereby participating in the naturalization of those forms,” while “La Flesche’s portrait of the Omaha Nation in The Middle Five, in contrast, unsettles depictions of Nebraska as settler space by establishing spatial imaginaries that pre-date and coexist alongside settler spaces.” The comparative strategy has significant interpretive value, as Fuisz explains in her conclusion: “Reading Cather, a settler writer, in the context of an Indigenous contemporary like La Flesche denaturalizes her depictions of the landscape, revealing some assumptions about geography and belonging” that are otherwise difficult to see.

For Sallie Ketcham and Andrew P. Wu, Nebraska is a rich repository of experiences that resonated in Cather’s life and writing long after she left the state a year after graduating from college. In “Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz: The Muse and the Story Catcher in the Capital City,” Ketcham examines the lasting influence the city of Lincoln had on Cather and on Sandoz, who was born a generation later, in 1896. The chapter is a study of parallels and contrasts, as Ketcham explores how “two iconic Nebraska writers pursued higher education, encountered resistance, navigated the town’s matriarchal ‘blackball’ caste system, and began to mold memory, the raw material of their art.” She argues that those formative years in Lincoln and at the University of Nebraska “helped determine the trajectory of their careers, launching Cather toward national and international prominence while consigning Sandoz to regional writer status.” Her conclusion makes the case for placing the two writers in conversation: “To read the works of Cather and Sandoz side by side, especially My Ántonia and Old Jules, two books that draw on such similar material, is to engage in a tale of two conflicting and conflicted Nebraskas. Each informs and explicates the other. Together, they provide human dimension and historical context for Cather’s and Sandoz’s pivotal years as young, evolving writers, for the Lincoln of their past, and for their strangely parallel yet nonintersecting worlds.” In “‘Blue Sky, Blue Eyes’: Unsettling Multilingualism in My Ántonia,” Wu focuses on the sociolinguistic environment Cather experienced during the period when her closest neighbors included immigrants from a variety of European countries. My Ántonia is at the center of his analysis, but Wu notes that “Cather had a keen ear for language diversity and wove it into her fiction in numerous ways” throughout her career. Indeed, the prominence and frequency of moments of multilingualism help situate Cather within the cultural politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Wu asserts: “Cather implicitly advocates for a cosmopolitan, multicultural America in which multilingualism is commonplace—not a society in which everything becomes ‘Americanized.’”

“Regionalism” and “modernism” have often been viewed as antagonistic modes produced by markedly different sensibilities, but that is not how they operate in Jace Gatzemeyer’s reading of Death Comes for the Archbishop. In “Regionalism Démeublé: Reflective Nostalgia in Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Gatzemeyer brings both formalist and historicist concerns to bear on the question of whether Cather was a regionalist or a modernist. The answer, he suggests, is both. Gatzemeyer argues that, in Archbishop, “Cather had developed a ‘modernist regionalism’ grounded in a kind of nostalgic longing that would elicit not disengagement with modernity in favor of a prelapsarian place and time but rather a critical awareness of modernity’s potentials and pitfalls. Far from the regressive, reactionary nostalgia identified by her critics in the 1930s, the nostalgia evoked by Cather in this novel was a more decidedly ‘modern nostalgia.’” This reflective nostalgia “for the imagined past of a particular regional space” is used “to evoke—without moralizing upon—the shortcomings of modernity and to suggest a better way forward.”

Our collection ends with a pair of chapters that challenge a critical consensus that has coalesced against Cather’s novel of 1935, Lucy Gayheart. Joshua Doležal’s “The Neuroscience of Epiphany in Lucy Gayheart” is a nuanced rereading of a late and often devalued Cather novel. It uses neuroscientific study of cognitive impasses and sudden insights to ground an argument that Lucy’s development is not muddled or failed, as has often been claimed, but that it is instead a recursive movement that ultimately leads to genuine epiphany and “existential triumph” in the character’s recognition that “Life itself” is “the sweetheart.” For Doležal, Lucy’s accidental drowning shortly after she has this realization does not undermine the integrity or value of her epiphany. Elizabeth Wells, in “Unsettling Accompaniment: Disability as Critique of Aesthetic Power in Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart,” agrees with Doležal that the shift from the triumphant Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark to Lucy is not necessarily pessimistic, arguing that it may merely indicate Cather’s “perspectival shift away from artistic formation and toward artistic production and accompaniment.” Wells draws on disability theory, particularly the concept of “narrative prosthesis,” which Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell have described as art’s unappreciative reliance upon abnormal bodies, since “authors often need disability, as they rely on it to create meaning, [but] they also demand that it be removed in order to cleanse the narrative; having performed the service of artistic prosthesis, characters with disabilities are then let go.” The framework obviously applies to the role of the singer Clement Sebastian’s accompanist James Mockford, but Wells also uses it to explore the relationship between Henry Gordon and Lucy Gayheart, arguing that Lucy serves as a kind of prosthesis to Harry. Through her, he can experience the pleasures of “trifling things,” like art and nature, without sullying his upstanding reputation. Once he marries, however, Lucy can no longer play that role for Harry and so he pushes her away, and his rejection is partly responsible for her drowning. Wells’s reading of Lucy’s death accords with Doležal’s. She doesn’t see it as a sign of the character’s weakness or an undermining of her epiphany either. She sees it as a critique of “an aesthetic that consumes its accompanists.”

Our seminar program included, for the first time, several Black Americans who now live in Willa Cather’s birthplace. One of those voices was that of Barbara Davis, a singer who is a minister at a historic Black church in Winchester, Virginia. More than a year after the seminar, she told us that reading Sapphira and the Slave Girl for the first time and sitting in on seminar sessions has given her a “fresh perspective” and helped her to “better understand who Willa Cather is. Her legacy can help us to understand the experience of living an entitled life that is entwined with a history of slavery, such as her memories of being a young girl waiting for ‘our Nancy’ to come ‘home.’ The seminar gave me hope. Faith in God’s people to always seek the truth” (24).

We share Barbara Davis’s insight, and hope, in this troubled time of our national and global life, that the truths our authors pursue in this volume—as Willa Cather did in her fiction—will also bring hope to you.

We can’t end this introduction without offering sincere thanks to our contributors for their perseverance and patience in working to complete this volume through the massive disruptions and stresses of a global pandemic. We also appreciate the generosity of colleagues who took the time to review essays and the support of the Willa Cather Foundation, the University of Nebraska Press, and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. We owe special thanks to John Jacobs of Shenandoah University, host institution for the seminar, for all he did to assure a smooth and rewarding conference and cultural experience.