Willa Cather: Short Stories Literary Elements

Literary short stories

America in the first half of the 20th century, predominantly the prairie states of the Midwest with a special focus on Nebraska, however several of her most famous stories take her far outside these regional confines to big cities like Pittsburgh and Boston.

Cather is very precise in choosing the narrative perspective of her stories. For instance, the title character of “Paul’s Case” is far too unreliable to trust with telling his story and so the perspective is a well-defined third-person observer. On the other hand, the “A Wagner Matinee” derives much of its power and substance from the very subjective viewpoint afforded by its first-person point of view.

For the most part, the tone of Cather’s stories are dominated by an almost clinical detachment which supports the underlying mood of laconic fatalism. Cather is one of the most precise stylists in American literature and so both tone and mood vary to fit each individual story as required, but even her first-person narratives are marked by attempts to impose logical control over emotional events.

Protagonists: With the notable exception of Paul in “Paul’s Case” and a few other scattered examples, the protagonists of Cather’s stories tend to be women. Antagonist: considering all those women, one might expect the antagonists to be mostly men, but in almost every single case the villains of a Cather story are abstractions: conformity, ennui, economic deprivation, and crushed dreams being foremost.

One does not read Cather for scenes of high action. The conflicts are generally internalized and usually revolve around the disconnect between what one character desires of their life and what that life actually is.

The most famous climax in Cather’s canon stands out in part because it is situated in such stark opposition to her usual preference for understated, non-confrontational, anticlimaxes. Paul (Paul’s Case) throws himself to his instant—if temporarily painful—death in front of an oncoming train.

It has been suggested that the title character of Cather’s story published in 1900, “A Singer’s Romance” foreshadows the appearance of Cressida Garnet sixteen years later in the story “The Diamond Mind.”

The surprising revelation driven by the title of “Tommy, the Unsentimental” arrives early and in an understated fashion typical of Cather’s style: “Needless to say, Tommy was not a boy”

Working within the more sophisticated spectrum of literary non-genre short fiction, it perhaps does not even need to be said that Cather’s work overflows with the typical sort of allusions to mythology, the Bible, and opera. Much more subtle—and more authentically representative of the attributes of allusion—are the references throughout Cather’s body of work to the radical economic theories of Thorstein Veblen, the man who created the concept of conspicuous consumption and predicted the leisure economy of the 21st century back in the 19th century.

It is a testament to the sheer breadth of Cather’s skill that one of her most effective uses of imagery is that which permeates throughout the story “The Fear That Walks by Noonday” which takes as its subject perhaps the least likely topic imaginable for the writer of My Antonia: football. “In a general scramble for the ball he caught it in his arms and ran. He held the ball tight against his breast until he could feel his heart knocking against the hard skin; he was conscious of nothing but the wind whistling in his ears and the ground flying under his feet, and the fact that he had ninety yards to run. Both teams followed him as fast as they could, but Horton was running for his honor, and his feet scarcely touched the earth.”

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Metonymy is used in the title of one of Cather’s most famous early stories, “The Clemency of the Court” in which “Court” stands for the entire judicial system. Everything in the story moves incessantly toward the final line which also engages metonymy as an exclamation point: “And so it was that this great mother, the State, took this willful, restless child of her's and put him to sleep in her bosom.”

Some critics have identified the title character of “Paul’s Case” as the personification of the poseur; the affected aesthete who is doomed to tragedy because of a fundamental failure to understand the deeper implications art as containing deeper meaning beyond its superficial “art for art’s sake” surface appeal.