The American Archetype of Rural Queerness Redefined / Zee Francis. Lit Hub February 28, 2020

Toward the beginning of Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia, Cather’s recently-orphaned narrator, Jim Burden, describes his first impression of the Nebraska prairie. En route to his grandparents’ homestead, he tells us,

There seemed to be nothing to see. . . . There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. . . . I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction.

The language here is mythic, conjuring a place where old rules are discarded and new conceptions of the world and the self can be formed. Though in a material sense this land has never actually existed “outside man’s jurisdiction” (whatever the era’s Manifest Destiny rhetoric may have claimed), the sparseness of the physical environment nevertheless suggests a realm spacious enough for the existential work of crafting an identity to take place.
Cather herself knew both the landscapes of the Great Plains and the act of identity-making well. Like Jim, she moved to Nebraska from Virginia at about age ten—though she was accompanied by her still-living parents. After a brief stint as a farmer her father moved the family to the nearby town of Red Cloud (fictionalized in the novel as Black Hawk), where, like Jim, the young Willa set to work befriending and learning about her neighbors, including a Jewish couple who allowed her the use of their extensive library. Like Jim she attended college in Lincoln, and then set off—like him—for New York.
Though separated by a state and a century, I recognize a good deal of myself in Cather and her novel, too. I grew up in rural Missouri, in a small town at the edge of the Ozarks. Like Cather I was raised Baptist, and like her I developed twin passions for both the written word and the beauty of barren and inhospitable landscapes. We both went to a state college, and then drifted to a larger city after graduation.
Maybe most significantly, we’re joined by what today would be called our “queerness”—though of course that’s a vague and disputed term at best, and not the one Cather would have used. I am a bisexual man (with some reservations about the “man” part of that designation). It is widely speculated that Cather was a lesbian, or otherwise LGBTQ-adjacent; in college Cather was photographed wearing masculine clothes and a short men’s hairstyle, and for a time she (that’s the pronoun Cather used throughout her life, so I’ll use it too) took on the nickname “William.” She never married but maintained a series of close relationships with women throughout her adult life, and she lived for 39 years with the editor Edith Lewis, with whom she is also buried. While it’s true that the author never confirmed her sexuality in any known writings, that’s a fact that is as inconclusive as it is unsurprising given the period in which she lived and her own somewhat contradictory streak of social and religious conservatism. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-american-archetype-of-rural-queerness-redefined/