Antimodern strategies: Ambivalence, accommodation, and protest in Willa Cather's

Abstract

In this project I argue that Willa Cather's earliest collection of stories, The Troll Garden (1905), demonstrates the antimodern ethos of the American fin de siecle period as characterized by both progressive rhetoric and resistance to modernity. This work also responds to social and economic issues examined by Cather's contemporaries Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and Thorstein Veblen in his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) as well as by Walter Benjamin early in the 20th century. I argue, using historian T. J. Jackson Lears' notion of antimodernism as both "protest" and "accommodation" to modernity, that Cather figures the celebrity artist and the dandy as representations in an attempt to come to terms with her own contradictory impulses. Cather's early work confronts issues which include American individualism, consumerism, class, and aesthetic consumption in addition to gender. In addition I argue that her antimodern aesthetic is a "sensational" aesthetic, based upon Paterian and Fordian impressionism as expressed by T. E. Hulme, which is itself both a form of protest of and accommodation to the pressures of modernity upon the artist in bourgeois, modern America. Cather's early literary practices situate her within a particularly American Aestheticism traceable through European and American influences from other antimodernists such as Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Candace Wheeler, and Oscar Wilde. Cather's ambivalence towards modernity as portrayed in her aesthetic is compatible with Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of art as "answerability" and the necessity of an "excess of seeing" in confronting the complexity of this period---characterized by high finance capitalism, competition for cultural capital, and the resultant competing, simultaneous rhetorics of fears for the republic and progressive belief.