Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Gender, melancholy, and the whiteness of impersonal form in The Great Gatsby
- 2 Redeeming violence in The Sun Also Rises: phallic embodiment, primitive ritual, fetishistic melancholia
- 3 Versions of traumatic melancholia: the burden of white man's history in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!
- 4 The Professor's House: primitivist melancholy and the gender of utopian forms
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
4 - The Professor's House: primitivist melancholy and the gender of utopian forms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Gender, melancholy, and the whiteness of impersonal form in The Great Gatsby
- 2 Redeeming violence in The Sun Also Rises: phallic embodiment, primitive ritual, fetishistic melancholia
- 3 Versions of traumatic melancholia: the burden of white man's history in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!
- 4 The Professor's House: primitivist melancholy and the gender of utopian forms
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Willa Cather might seem an anomalous figure to include in a book on modernism and masculinity. This is so, first and most obviously, because she was a woman. What can it mean to approach her work as a response to transformations in the meanings of manhood at the turn of the twentieth century rather, say, than the meanings of womanhood? Can she have been so male-identified that the waning of a certain model of manhood provoked a tortured textual grief-work like that of her male contemporaries? To answer “yes” to this second question is to stress even more than I have till now the fantasmatic character of gender, the way it is formed through identifications that can take unruly, non-normative directions. My assumption in what follows is that this is what happened in Cather's case; her psychic formation included a constitutive and unusually intense identification with the masculine that had profound consequences for her work. This identification explains but is not reducible to the well-known adolescent period during which she dressed in men's clothing, cropped her hair, and signed her name “William.” It was not, that is, as even some of her most astute critics have argued, a phase that Cather outgrew to become a “real” (female-identified) woman, but rather a constitutive component of her identity, ambivalently embraced but more or less lasting, that continued throughout her life to trouble the female-solidaristic and feminist elements of her work.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism , pp. 137 - 177Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011