On Province and Empire in My Ántonia and One of Ours: Cather’s 1922 The Waste Land

Abstract

Willa Cather profoundly alters her attitude towards the American experiment, World War I, and the prospect of cultural pluralism in America between her 1918 My Ántonia and her 1922 One of Ours. In doing so, she addresses the issue of what kind of culture America should have: a monistic one such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson advocated or a pluralistic one. In My Ántonia, set during the period of Great Plains settlement but extending up into World War I, she presents an intact American cultural pluralism: non-English speaking European cultures continuing their positive practices absent the monarchic repression of Central European empires. Her ethnic settlements in the Great Plains practice pluralistic democracy without intervention from centralised authority, implicitly reflecting what could happen under an emerging European anti-monarchic ethos or in an America that allowed for many ways of life. In One of Ours, on the other hand, she savages the jingoism that possessed America during, and after World War I: a repression that makes the war disastrous for pluralistic democracy. The dream falters. Her wartime Nebraska becomes repressive for Germans, Czechs, and other divergent peoples. It practices conformity, a new materialism, and meaningless religion. Indeed, the death of her novel’s hero, Claude Wheeler, is not a sacrifice that enables democratic renewal but rather offers us a self-blinded hero who dies in glorious strife only as he sees it. He actually dies for a nation increasingly making itself unsafe for democracy in an army whose soldiers are massively disillusioned by the war. Thereafter, Cather writes little in a positive vein of Nebraska or the Great Plains and its various cultures but turns to earlier New World catalyst communities such as those of Quebec, the pueblos of the Southwest, and pioneer New Mexico.