The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 28 (2017)
Copyright © 2017 Michael Gorman. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

Rural Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Imperialism inWilla Cather’s One of Ours

Michael GORMAN*INTRODUCTION
Among Americans familiar with the novelist Willa Cather (1873–1947),
she is best remembered for her depictions of the Great Plains and thepioneers who settled that vast expanse of territory between the Mississippi
River and the Rocky Mountains in the nineteenth century. Accordingly, herwriting has been both celebrated and dismissed as local color. Even alaudatory biographical sketch from the Willa Cather Archive describes
Cather as bringing “American regions to life through her loving portrayalsof individuals within local cultures.”1 Yet it is a mistake to view her writing
in isolation from global concerns. Cather is a modern writer whose fiction,even when set in the past, addresses pressing international affairs such as
World War I (1914–18) and the events leading up to America’s delayed
entrance into that struggle.
Unlike Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, whose writing careers
were spawned by World War I, Willa Cather came to maturity as a writer inthe decades preceding it, at the crest of America’s colonial ambitions. She
began her career as a journalist in 1893—the same year that FrederickJackson Turner announced his “frontier thesis” and American plantationinterests illegally enlisted US Marines to depose the Hawaiian monarch,
Queen Liliuokalani. By the time Hawai’i was formally annexed as a US
*Associate Professor, Hiroshima City University

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MICHAEL GORMAN

protectorate in 1898, Cather was employed as telegraph editor for thePittsburgh Leader and was busily compressing world affairs into headlines,2a task that grew in scope and impact when the United States declared war on
Spain in April 1898. This journalistic apprenticeship left a mark on Cather’s
fiction. Her knowledge of affairs preceding World War I and her attempt toaddress their impact on American identity by returning to the period of theUnited States’ emergence as a world power distinguishes her from novelists
working to establish an international and cosmopolitan brand of modernism
strictly bound to European tradition and situated between the world wars.
Cather’s interest in America’s international involvements and her nation’s
cosmopolitan identity remained strong and manifested itself in her
depictions of the rural American West. One of Ours (1922), Cather’s Pulitzer
Prize–winning novel about World War I and its legacy, illustrates thistendency.3 Scholarship has largely focused on Cather’s representation of theGreat War in the final book of One of Ours, but the Nebraska chapters(books 1, 2, and 3) of the novel portray the key struggle: the battle for rural
America’s identity in a global age.
FROM THE GREAT PLAINS TO THE GREAT WAR
In the final year of the Great War Willa Cather published My Ántonia(1918).4 That conflict had been raging the entire time she wrote this novel
set on the Great Plains, yet nowhere is it explicitly mentioned in the text.
Even though events in the narrative are conspicuously confined to Nebraska
around the turn of the century, a preoccupation with America’s relation to
the rest of the world is reflected in the story. Through referencing figures
such as the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (ca.
1510–54) and by comparing Nebraskan corn yields to the wheat crop of
Russia, Cather invokes the long history of European conquest in the New
World and celebrates the global economic importance of the American West,hinting specifically at the pivotal role American agronomy played during thewar.5 Four years later, in her next prairie novel, One of Ours, Cather
addresses the Great War explicitly. In contrast to the triumphant tone of MyÁntonia, however, One of Ours strikes a solemn note. The first two-thirds ofthis novel portray events occurring before US troops reach the trenches in
Europe. In these chapters, Cather highlights the conflicted ethnic loyalties
preventing Americans from forming a unified interpretation of the war in
Europe. At the same time, she infuses these prewar episodes with a sense of
the cynicism and schism debilitating the United States in the war’s

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aftermath.
The conflicting allegiances to European powers are reflected in the nameCather gives the farming community in One of Ours. By calling this pioneer
settlement on the Great Plains “Frankfort,” Cather hints at the convoluted
history of Franco-German relations. Its pronunciation and spelling resemble
that of Frankfurt am Main, the German city on the fringe of the coal-rich
Saar Basin—a highly strategic zone during World War I but demilitarized, as
stipulated by the Treaty of Versailles (1919), at the time Cather was writing
One of Ours.6 “Frankfurt” literally denotes the spot where the Franks forded
the Main River in order to conquer the Gauls after the Romans pulled out ofGermania in the fifth century CE.
Cather was not content to simply appropriate the name of the historic
German city; she felt compelled to modify the spelling before dropping it on
her fictional map. The change in spelling from “furt” to “fort” is subtle but
significant. By switching a single vowel, she alters the meaning in Germanfrom “the crossing of the Franks” to “the fort/defense of the Franks,” aphrase particularly appropriate considering the precarious situation of thecontested territory along the border between France and Germany. Until
1871, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were governed by France. The
greater parts of both provinces were conceded to the German Empire after
the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, but this concession did not sit wellwith French citizens. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson make special note of
the French military response to its embarrassing defeat in the FrancoPrussian War: “In the years immediately following 1871 and in theaftermath of military disaster, French army planners had thought
defensively. They had constructed great fortresses on the border withGermany to fling back the invader.”7 After reluctantly ceding AlsaceLorraine to Germany in the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt, these defenses became
key elements in France’s strategy to reacquire the lost provinces, territorythat would change nationalities four times between 1870 and 1945. In thefirst summer of the Great War, the French initiated “Plan 17,” an ambitious
attempt to liberate “Alsace-Lorraine and advance to the Rhine,” but theGermans repulsed the invasion and inflicted over three hundred thousand
casualties on the French in the two-week campaign.8
A devoted student of French history, Cather was acutely aware of therepeated contests for this territory. By christening her fictional farming
community “Frankfort,” she alludes to one of the most recognizable andpainful symbols of the Franco-German conflict and projects the anguishassociated with it on the American heartland.9 Cather accentuates the tension

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in the story through characterization. The novel’s protagonists, Claude
Wheeler and his wife Enid Royce Wheeler, embody the conflicted domestic
and foreign policies of the United States during the Progressive Era.
Whereas Claude exemplifies a Eurocentric cultural allegiance formed
through ideological apparatuses, Enid epitomizes cultural imperialism
associated with American exploitation of Asian markets.
Cather weds Claude’s perspective to prewar idealism and links his
individual identity to an affinity for European culture and the past. His
desire to study medieval French history, his enlistment in the American
Expeditionary Forces, and his eventual deployment in France reflect his
sympathy for European civilization as well as the United States’ prewar selfconcept as a de facto European power obligated to help resolve the conflictin Europe. Claude has desires and dreams, but he lacks the guidance andexperience necessary to turn his vague ideas into concrete action. Hisromantic sensibilities, intellect, passions, and interests belong to a previous
age. Even his most insignificant actions are subtly compared to “the heroesof old.”10 Like heroes of the past, Claude is depicted sculpturally, frozen intime like a bronze statue: “fists clenched in an attitude of arrested action . . .
his tense figure copper-coloured in the oblique rays.”11
Enid, on the other hand, is anything but inert. To capture her essence
artistically, sculpture would have to be abandoned in favor of more dynamic
media such as the audio recording or moving picture technologies pioneeredby Thomas Edison in the late nineteenth century. Enid is the personificationof America’s geopolitical interests outside Europe. Militantly devoted toconverting others to her socioreligious views, she doggedly pursues her
intentions. Her missionary ambitions mirror America’s twentieth-century
program of cultural imperialism—its imposition of trade, culture, andreligion—in other parts of the globe (especially Asia and Latin America),
while her dedication to the temperance movement foreshadows the nation’s
obsession with domestic concerns after 1919.
Like Claude, Enid is dissatisfied with life in Frankfort and desires
something more. While he wishes to “be good for something,” she hopes to“be of use”—preferably outside Frankfort.12 Although their escapist
fantasies would seem to complement each other, their sympathies andultimate desires lie, quite literally, in opposite directions (and times): Enidescapes Frankfort to proselytize in China, and Claude, the would-be
medieval European historian, meets his fate in France with the American
Expeditionary Forces during the Great War.

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SEEKING REFUGE FROM THE PRESENTCather portrays Claude Wheeler as a technophobe distrustful of
mechanical contrivances and innovations. Among the men in his family, heis clearly an exception. His father, Nat Wheeler, is a successful farmer who
never questions purchasing “a new thrasher or a new automobile,”13 and hisolder brother, Bayliss, runs a successful farm implement business. Claude
particularly resents the appliances and equipment his younger brother,
Ralph, imposes on the Wheeler household. The gadgets Ralph expects will
improve the family’s quality of life have negligible impact, and most are
ultimately relegated to storage. All who venture into the Wheeler cellar are
confronted by the hidden record of Ralph’s purchases and the failed promiseof technology: “Mysterious objects stood about . . . in the grey twilight;
electric batteries, old bicycles and typewriters, a machine for making cement
fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a stereopticon with a broken lens. The mechanicaltoys Ralph could not operate successfully, as well as those he had got tiredof, were stored away here.”14 Claude has little of Ralph’s faith intechnology’s capacity to reduce labor and is disgusted by the profligacy thatthe cellar rubbish represents.
Claude’s chief complaint about the machinery his family purchases is not
its absurdity or superfluity but the cultural sacrifices his family makes in thepretense of successful farming. “Machines,” as he recognizes, “could not
make pleasure, whatever else they could do. They could not make agreeable
people, either. In so far as he could see, the latter were made by judicious
indulgence in almost everything he had been taught to shun.”15 Nat Wheeler
gladly spends money on expensive items for the house or farm, but, on therecommendation of Bayliss, he refuses to support Claude, who wishes toattend the state university.16 Secular culture, art, and cosmopolitanism haveno place in the Wheeler family. They have been supplanted by crassmaterialism and fundamentalist Christian values.
Considering the amount of property owned by the Wheeler patriarch, his
willingness to spend money on farm machinery, and an eldest son who runs
a farm implement business, it is significant that Cather never depicts Claude
operating any state-of-the-art farm equipment such as a tractor, the mostrecognizable of farm machines. In the second decade of the twentiethcentury, steam-driven tractors were rapidly being replaced by smaller
gasoline-powered models with multicylinder engines, such as the Twin City
model “25” (fig. 1).
In 1916, when the Pazandak tractor photograph was taken, more compact

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MICHAEL GORMAN

Figure 1. F. A. Pazandak. Breaking Sod with Plow and Twin City “25” Tractor.
Courtesy of the Institute for Regional Studies, Fred Hulstrand and F. A. Pazandak
Photograph Collections, North Dakota State University.

and powerful tractors had become commonplace in the grain-growing areasof the Plains.17 Nevertheless, not a single tractor of any kind appears on the
Wheeler farm. The absence of this technology is suggestive. Cather based
the character of Claude on her cousin, Grosvenor (G. P.) Cather, who died in
France while serving with the American Expeditionary Forces during WorldWar I, and G. P. is known to have operated a tractor on his family farm
before going to war. In fact, the Nebraska State Historical Society possesses
a photograph of Cather’s cousin on a Reeves Steam traction engine, animage Janis Stout reproduces in Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World.18
Rather than depicting Claude commanding heavy machinery commonly
employed on farms across the Central Great Plains before the war, Cather
heightens her hero’s discomfort by having him perform farm labor manually
or by antiquated means. Among the heavy farming tasks Claude completes
on his father’s farm in the months before the Great War erupts, none involve
any power implements. He replaces fifty acres of corn with winter wheat,gathers corn by hand in the fall, shovels snow and builds a makeshift shelter
for rescued hogs after an early spring blizzard, and works with a “team ofmules and a heavy plough” in the summer.19
Shortly after Cather began working on the manuscript for One of Ours,
the American intellectual Henry Adams was posthumously awarded the

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67

1919 Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, The Education of Henry Adams. Cather
admired the brilliance and sarcastic wit of Adams, a polymath who taught
medieval history at Harvard until 1877, produced a respected multivolume
history of the United States, and published two novels. In The Education,
Adams famously confesses that “what he valued most was Motion, and thatwhat attracted his mind was Change.”20 Cather gives her protagonist
aspirations to study the subject once taught by Adams, but she fails toendow Claude with anything resembling Adams’s intellect, sophistication,
or desire to understand the changes taking place around him. The gulf
between Claude and Adams is best illustrated by their antithetical reactions
to the machine age. On encountering the forty-foot dynamos in the Galleryof Machines at the Paris Exposition of 1900, Adams immediately
ascertained the changes they would bring about for mankind: “To Adams the
dynamo became a symbol of infinity.”21 In science and engineering, Adams
recognized an emotive capacity to inspire humanity and change the courseof history—a force matched historically only by the power of the goddess
figure.22 The machinery confronting Claude in One of Ours, however,contains nothing of the dynamo’s imaginative allure for Henry Adams.
Claude shares none of the reverence for the machine age that Adams
expresses in The Education.
For Adams, the study of history is the study of change. He actively seeks
out transformational events, experiences, ideas, and texts in order tounderstand their significance. But Claude views the discipline of history too
reductively and statically. His desire to study European history at the state
university in Lincoln, Nebraska, must be examined with his escapist
tendencies in mind. Pursuing an education in European history is attractive
to him because he believes it will help distance him from his present
surroundings. With a focus on Europe, it diverts his attention from life in theAmerican Midwest; as a class offered at the state university, moreover, it isassociated with the secular rather than the rigid Baptist beliefs of his mother,
Evangeline Wheeler, and the Bible college where he was grudgingly
enrolled.
Claude finds life in rural Nebraska stifling, particularly because of theexalted role religion plays in his community and home: “He felt condemned,
but he did not want to renounce a world he as yet knew nothing of. He
would like to go into life with all his vigour, with all his faculties free. He
didn’t want to be like the young men who said in prayer-meeting that theyleaned on their Saviour. He hated their way of meekly accepting permitted
pleasures.”23 Claude expects that “something splendid” awaits beyond

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MICHAEL GORMAN

Nebraska.24 Yet there is a risk in adhering to such thought. By seeking“something splendid” abroad or in the past, Claude remains blind to “thelittle things” in his immediate sphere capable of enriching his life orteaching him a lesson.25
More problematic than Claude’s blindness to “the little things” is hiscomplacency, his refusal to take action to improve the sociocultural situationin Frankfort. He disagrees, for example, with the temperance movement his
wife and elder brother industriously promote, but he takes no steps to protest
their activities; he just “shrugged his shoulders” and dismisses the issue.26 In
failing to act, Claude yields power to the close-minded and intolerant
factions in his community. Indeed, William Butler Yeats’s lines from “The
Second Coming” (1920) apply as much to Frankfort, Nebraska, as to the
Irish poet’s own homeland: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst /Are full of passionate intensity.”27 There are people in Frankfort “who had
imagination and generous impulses, but they were all . . . inefficient
failures.”28 Claude proves no exception. Rather than working to improve thecultural climate of his hometown, he retreats into the past and refuses toconfront the parochialism he detests. Instead of standing up for the “liberalprinciples” he once avowed,29 or for tolerance in general, Claude seeks
refuge from the uncompromising Protestant faith and capitalist enterprise
practiced by his family.
For Claude, medieval French history represents both a sanctuary from thenarrow-mindedness of residents living on the American Plains and an
identity to fill the historical and cultural vacuum facing Anglo-Americans
living in the Midwest. Claude’s historical ignorance is actually part andparcel of conquest, produced and promoted by “the rhetorical strategy ofnegation.”30 As defined by David Spurr, negation is the process “by which
Western [European] writing conceives of the Other as absence, emptiness,nothingness, or death.”31 Negation works principally in two ways: it rejects“the ambiguous object for which language and experience provide noadequate framework for interpretation” and “acts as a kind of provisional
erasure, clearing a space for the expansion of the colonial imagination.”32
Although Spurr discusses negation in relation to overseas colonialism, thisrhetorical strategy has long been employed to legitimize westward
expansion, as three centuries of myths imagining precontact North America
as a vast untamed wilderness attest. In twentieth-century American literature
there may be no better example than the prairie landscape Cather describes
in her second novel, O Pioneers! (1913), as a place where the “record of theplow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric

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69

races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings ofglaciers, and not a record of human strivings.”33 By reducing the record of
Plains Indians to “feeble scratches,” Cather relegates Native Americans to asavage “prehistory” and actually diminishes American history, especially for
English speakers living west of the Mississippi, who have no records
preceding the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. For
Nebraskans like the Wheelers, who dismiss the impact indigenous people
have had on the Plains, history is exceedingly brief. In Claude’s case it
begins a generation earlier with his father, Nat Wheeler, who migrated west
from Maine:
He had come to this part of Nebraska when the Indians and buffalo
were still about, remembered the grasshopper year and the big cyclone,
had watched the farms emerge one by one from the great rolling page
where once only the wind wrote its story. He had encouraged new
settlers to take up homesteads, urged on courtships, lent young fellows
the money to marry on, seen families grow and prosper; until he felt alittle as if all this were his own enterprise.34
Despite being barely a generation removed from the “Indians and the
buffalo,” Claude has little knowledge of either. Because Eurocentric
American thought devalued the culture of the native inhabitants of North
America, the misunderstood contribution of the indigenous Americans was
negated—systematically erased from Nebraskan history—allowing Cather
reductively to describe the Plains as a blank “page where once only the wind
wrote its story.” Raised in a historical vacuum, Claude is compelled to study
about and identify with the lengthy history of Europe, which stands in stark
contrast to the seemingly “empty” history of the American Plains.
Somewhat paradoxically, Claude first feels a sense of vitality while
studying medieval European history. “Claude usually came out from theselectures with the feeling that the world was full of stimulating things, andthat one was fortunate to be alive. . . . His reading that autumn actually madethe future look brighter to him; seemed to promise him something.”35 To
him, history was far from a dead discipline.
To be fair to Claude, history was a relatively new subject of university
study in the early part of the twentieth century. According to Benedict
Anderson, the “first academic chairs” in history appeared “in 1810 at the
University of Berlin and in 1812 at Napoléon’s Sorbonne.”36 It is no
accident that history emerged as a distinct university discipline in Prussia

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and France, the two most aggressive nation-states in continental Europe atthe beginning of the nineteenth century. The emergence of the Teutonic andGallic empires necessitated ideological state apparatuses to validate newboundaries and offices, and the institutionalization of history departments in
French and German universities met the requirement. Nor is it coincidental
that one hundred years later Cather created a hero fascinated with a field so
thoroughly linked to the principal powers involved in World War I. In
addition to the long history of conflict between these powers, Germany andFrance have contributed much to North American culture, and Cather
wanted to draw on America’s divided loyalties to these civilizations.
LUMINOUS VISIONS
For a final project in European history, Claude’s professor “assigned him”
a report on Joan of Arc, a topic “he felt sure that Wheeler would notdismiss” lightly.37 He does not. Nevertheless, Claude fails to elucidate muchabout the life of Joan through research. Despite “conscientious study,” herealizes that he “knew very little more about the Maid of Orleans than when
he first heard of her from his mother.”38 Claude has trouble using history to
uncover Joan’s humanity. He cannot move beyond viewing her as a symbolof chivalry and sacrifice: “a picture, a word, a phrase” that “could renew
itself in every generation.”39
At the time Claude would have been conducting his research into Joan ofArc, she was not yet a saint. (She was canonized by Pope Benedict XV in
1920.) Having been declared beatified by Pope Pius X in 1909, however, she
was already venerated by millions of Roman Catholics. During World War I,
Joan of Arc inspired France and its allies in their war efforts. Claude
describes her as the “Maid of Orleans.” This sobriquet was bestowed on
Joan for her role in defending Orléans from the English in 1429. Joan
actually hailed from Domrémy, a village in the Lorraine region of France,and her birthplace is significant in the context of German-French relations
and military history.40 By the beginning of World War I, Lorraine had long
been contested terrain. In 1871, France ceded a portion of Lorraine(Domrémy-la-Pucelle was not included) to Germany as part of the Treaty ofFrankfurt ending the Franco-Prussian War. When Germany invaded Belgium
on 3 August 1914, much of Lorraine was German-held territory, which
France intended to reclaim.41
Cather closely allies Joan of Arc to Claude’s interpretation of andparticipation in the war. First mentioned in relation to his university history

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71

course a year before war breaks out in Europe, Joan is never far from histhoughts, nor would she have been far from any American’s thoughts after
1914. Her inspiring image was part of US propaganda efforts to instill
hostility toward the German and Austrian states, to which many Americans
in the summer of 1914 still felt cultural allegiances. Claude is no exception:“He had always been taught that the German people were pre-eminent in thevirtues Americans most admire. . . . The invasion of Belgium wascontradictory to the German character as he knew it in his friends andneighbours.”42 Defending Belgium, Luxembourg, and France from Germany
and Austria will mean killing Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Slavs, and otherconquered people forcibly conscripted into the armed forces of the German
and Austrian empires. This reality made American participation in the war
unpopular with many immigrant families.43
To combat the resistance to supporting the Allies in the conflict, theUnited States initiated a vigorous agenda to promote Gallic sympathies.
Joseph Urgo points out that the United States was forced to manufacture acase for war: “The war effort of the Wilson administration was not confined
to simple reactions to events in Europe, but included as well an impressive,
successful domestic campaign aimed at the American populace. The
German threat to France was as tangible as soldiers at the door, but theGerman threat to the United States was a matter of ideologicalconstruction.”44 Governmental agencies were even formed for this purpose.
To promote anti-German sentiment, the National Board for Historical
Service was established to educate Americans, especially students, about“German blame for the war.”45 Although Urgo does not discuss Joan of Arc,
her legend was a critical element of the American propaganda campaign.
Five hundred years after being burned at the stake at Rouen in Normandy,
Joan was resurrected in paint, print, drama, and song to inspire Americaninterest and sense of duty in the war to end all wars (fig. 2).
Cather’s allusions to Saint Joan—from Claude’s university report to his
stay in Rouen, the city where Joan was convicted of heresy and burned at
the stake—point to the transatlantic ubiquity of this sacred icon during
World War I. Steven Trout notes how the “heroic legend of Joan of Arc” wasmobilized in France during the war; her defiant form was reproduced“armored . . . on innumerable propaganda posters.”46 For centuries after her
execution during the Hundred Years’ War, Joan was a symbol of antagonism
between England and France, but by World War I the memory of “laPucelle” (the Maid) united the Allies in battle against the Central Powers.

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In the war’s terrible wake, Joan also comforted the Allies for theirtremendous troop loss, over 4.5 million dead.47 Trout recognizes her
importance in the pantheon of the “iconography of remembrance,” a term hedefines as “a pattern of images” used to memorialize World War I.48 Joan of
Arc numbered among the most pervasive of these cultural texts: “Joan of
Arc is an icon whose significance extends far beyond Claude’s individual
history and the parameters of Cather’s text. In fact, the Maid of Orleansplayed a significant role in the way that grieving Americans looked back on
the Great War, embodying both the spirit of France for which the doughboys
fought and in many cases sacrificed themselves.”49 While Trout focuses on
the role Joan’s image played in assuaging grief and commemorating loss inthe postwar period, she plays a prominent part in the Nebraska chapters of
One of Ours as a projection of Claude’s psyche and desires before he enlists.
By selecting Joan of Arc as the topic for Claude’s research, Cather
accentuates the romanticism and masochism of her protagonist.
The affinity Claude feels for Joan may derive from her rural isolation.
They were both children of the frontier though Joan’s homeland differedfrom Claude’s in a critical respect: its susceptibility to partisan violence. As

Figure 2. Apotheosis of Joan of Arc in The Stars and Stripes [Paris, France], (May9, 1919), 4. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, American Memory, The Stars andStripes: The American Soldiers’ Newspaper of World War I, 1918–1919.

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Jules Michelet, the most influential historian of France, explains, Domrémy
was a farming area whose “unfortunate inhabitants . . . belonged to no one,were supported by no one, were spared by no one. . . . They till the soil, thesoldiery take the harvest. Nowhere is the peasant more deeply concernedwith the affairs of the whole country; his immediate interests are at stake;the least repercussions of national conflicts are felt with shattering force.”50
Like the most celebrated daughter of France, Claude hails from a provincialarea, but unlike Joan’s blood-soaked native ground, Nebraska has no
immediate political or military importance in his lifetime aside from its
agricultural production.
Claude’s dissatisfaction with the tedium of Nebraska seems explicable inthe context of his fundamental difference from Joan of Arc: his profane anddirectionless existence. He takes Frankfort’s peaceful conditions for granted
and waits passively for something to happen—for some sort of sign like thedivine direction Joan received from her saints. Due to his passivity, Claude
can hardly be characterized as a fanatic, but his talk of “something splendid”
and his masochism (demonstrated repeatedly throughout the story) reflect
the superficial manifestations of martyrdom, if not the essence. Unlike
Henry Adams, who recognizes the Virgin figure as a powerful motivating
force, Claude can neither articulate his fascination with Joan nor grasp her
historical significance. In his impassioned ignorance, Claude conflates Joanof Arc and Enid. He envisions Joan, the defender of France, in a “luminous
cloud, like dust” and Enid, the crusader of Frankfort, in a “luminous
vagueness.”51 Claude remains obsessed with the idea of martyrdom, yet thesimilar light in which he views the genuinely holy Joan of Arc and the Holy
Roller, Enid Royce, suggests he cannot truly comprehend such sacrifice.
RURAL APPRENTICESHIP
Like Claude, Enid anxiously awaits a chance to leave Frankfort, but she
has nothing of his clumsiness, apathy, or suspicion of machines. She iscapable, efficient, and in control. In fact, Enid actually resembles thecontraptions Claude distrusts, and Cather subtly reinforces this mechanizedimage of Enid—particularly in relation to her Christian activism and herphysical relationship to Claude—throughout the novel.
Enid’s Christian evangelism seems rather mechanical and at odds withothers in her community. Her personal habits reinforce this impression. For
instance, she eschews eating meat and drinking alcohol.52 Throughvegetarianism, Cather links Enid to some of the more militant missionary

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practices of the early 1900s. Eric Reinders notes the growing popularity ofvegetarianism among missionaries: “In publications such as the Church
Missionary Gleaner, India’s Women and China’s Daughter, and populartravel literature, there were numerous reports of vegetarianism and its
religious implications. Occasional voices in missionary culture spoke out formeat-avoidance: one extreme of the temperance movement extended its
prohibition of alcohol to meat (and even sex).”53 Cather’s characterization ofEnid closely resembles the extreme practices of avoidance mentioned byReinders. By making Enid a vegetarian, Cather equates her with the Chinese
she hopes to convert, since strict adherents of Buddhism avoid eating flesh.
While Enid’s diet has the potential to minimize her distinction from thepeople she wishes to convert and make her more effective in her mission,
her practice lacks the sincerity and compassion to be truly successful.
Empathy plays no role in Enid’s campaign for temperance, and Cather gives
no indication that it will play a larger role in her endeavors in China.
Enid has trouble with human intimacy. Cather wryly notes that she
disapproves of “ardour of any kind.”54 Her marriage to Claude is no
exception. Although Enid feels no physical attraction to Claude, she is acapable homemaker who performs household chores systematically.
Enid liked to iron, and Claude had never before in his life worn somany clean shirts, or worn them with such satisfaction. She told him heneed not economize in working shirts: it was as easy to iron six as
three.
Although within a few months Enid’s car traveled more than two
thousand miles for the Prohibition cause, it could not be said that she
neglected her house for reform. Whether she neglected her husband
depended on one’s conception of what was his due.55
Enid’s efficient management of her home allowed her to drive about thecountryside to campaign for Prohibition. She is most recognizable to herneighbors by the car. For one neighbor, Leonard Dawson, Enid iscompletely fused to the mechanism she drives: she and her car are reduced
to a single “black object rolling along the highroad in the moonlight.”56
Enid’s mechanical nature is further underscored through her collaboration
with Claude’s grim brother Bayliss, the dyspeptic farm implement dealer.
Together, these two reformers lend their characteristic blandness to thecrusade against alcohol, which Bayliss “hated . . . less for the harm it did
than for the pleasure it gave.”57 Cather describes their cooperative efforts

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75

coldly as “business,”58 rhetorically linking Protestant activism to capitalist
enterprise.
People like Enid and Bayliss are no laughing matter. Despite being
dedicated to their causes, they lack the humanity and sincerity of venerated
Christian figures like Joan of Arc. Illiberal citizens represent the greatest
threat to the culture of provincial America, a threat Cather voiced in anarticle about Carry Nation, the militant temperance crusader from rural
Kansas: “There is no figure in society who can work more discomfort thanthe village Semiramis, whose prejudices are as violent as her information islimited, and who has an accepted outlet for her ferocious energy.”59 Though
Enid is more restrained than the hatchet-brandishing Carry Nation, she andBayliss provoke animosity and acrimony in Frankfort and drive a wedge
between Claude and his closest friend, the Bohemian immigrant Ernest
Havel. Both characters, in fact, make disparaging comments about Ernest. In
the second chapter of the novel, Claude drops by his elder brother’s store on
the day of a fair and asks if he had seen Ernest, to which Bayliss replies,“‘What would he be in here for? Better look for him in the saloon.’”60 The
comment about Ernest is inflammatory and unwarranted. “Nobody,” thenarrator admits, “could put meaner insinuations into a slow, dry remark than
Bayliss.”61 Enid also dislikes Ernest Havel because of his atheism and his
consumption of alcohol. She even confesses to Claude,’” I never . . . liked
Ernest Havel.’”62 Ernest solidifies Enid’s contempt by refusing to hangposters endorsing Prohibition on his barn “as an example to the Bohemians”
and informing her that he plans to vote against the Prohibition referendum.63
In the face of this rebuff, “Enid was quite spiteful.”64 Like Carry Nation,
Enid cannot tolerate people with differing opinions and lacks the charisma topersuade others to her views.
Together, Bayliss and Enid signify the lack of imagination, destructive
impulses, and intolerances of Protestant evangelism and its attempts tostultify the development of a rich and varied civilization like that which thehistorian Jules Michelet celebrated in France (or the one Cather remembers
from her Nebraskan childhood). Unfortunately, Claude’s elder brother andwife also represent the victorious faction. Success in their endeavors stifles
others. Bayliss’s implement business thrives (at the expense of small
farmers who must incur debt to purchase machinery or fail to compete with
their wealthier and better-equipped neighbors), and Enid plugs steadily awayat her projects to the chagrin of her husband and father. Bayliss and Enid are
wreaking cultural havoc in Frankfort. How much worse might it be if they
were to extend their withering influence overseas? Although Cather does not

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answer this question in the narrative, she gives readers pause to consider it.65
MISSION IN CHINA
As opposed to the indecision biting at Claude, Enid is instilled with asense of purpose. She knows exactly what she wants from the beginning,and she repeatedly informs Claude of her intentions before marrying him:“‘The only thing I really want to do is to go out to China and help Carrie inher work.’”66 Enid longs to join her elder sister, Carrie, as a missionary in
China, a dream pursued by a great many American women after 1900. From1890 to 1919, American missionary presence in China grew exponentially.
By 1919, there were over 3,300 American missionaries serving in China,
and over 60 percent of the Protestant missionaries were women.67
Enid’s alliance with her businessman brother-in-law Bayliss mirrors anactual historical phenomenon: the convergence of American missionaries,
American foreign policy, and American trade in China. Diana Preston notesthat American interest in China had always been economic:
America’s interest in China had, like Britain’s, remained primarily
commercial. She wanted trading opportunities rather than territory andby the late nineteenth century was better placed than ever to pursue
this. Her recent victory in the Spanish-American War had given her thePhilippines, an operating base a mere 400 miles or so off the coast of
China, while industrial production at home was increasing rapidly.
However, [Secretary of State] John Hay knew that this promisingmarket would be prejudiced if other foreign powers establishedmutually exclusive spheres of interest in China. Hay’s call for China’s
territorial integrity to be preserved and for commercial equality [“Open
Door policy” in 1899] was therefore prompted as much by economic
self-interest as by the political desire not to see China carved up as
Africa had so recently been by the Europeans.68
The Protestant missions formed a key part the United States’ strategy for
expanding economic influence in China without subjecting the republic tocriticism, as taking control of Cuba and the Philippines had after the
Spanish-American War. In the midst of the anti–imperialist debates, Chinese
missions were used covertly as alternatives to direct political and military
involvement, as Jane Hunter acknowledges: “When the costs of imperialism
became apparent, American leaders withdrew their support for political

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77

expansion and used mission organizations as a partial strategy to retain theexhilaration of empire without paying its bills or taking on its corrupting
responsibilities.”69 Although they were unsuccessful in gaining large
numbers of converts to their faith, Christian missions in China were
promoted by the US government as a strategy to gain entrance into themarkets.
The timing of Enid’s departure for China is critical historically. Enid
leaves in the years between the Boxer Rebellion of 1900—an event that had
fascinated Cather as a journalist—and the conclusion of the Great War(1919).70 As Paul Cohen explains, the Boxer Rebellion was depicted andperceived by Americans and Europeans as a conflict between forces ofsuperstition and enlightenment.71 Accounts of this cultural conflict in thenewspapers and in personal correspondence, such as the letters Eva Price, a
Christian missionary serving in China, wrote to her family and community,
would have convinced American Christians of the need to spread theGospel.72 The letters Enid receives from her sister Carrie (and shares withher community) convince her of just such a need.73
After the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, Western missionaries
regained much of what they lost at the hands of the Boxers, and antiWestern sentiment gradually subsided. But their improved status did not lastlong. The influence of the Christian missionaries in China was dealt a
serious blow by the Treaty of Versailles, which awarded Shantung Province
in northern China to Japan for its part in eliminating German influence in the
Pacific and Asia during World War I.74 The increased Japanese presence innorthern China adversely affected the Christian missions that were forced tovacate under pressure from the Japanese now controlling the territory.75
Consequently, it would have been fruitless for Enid to leave for China muchlater than she did.
Though she is not a sympathetic character, Enid is a compelling figure inwhom Cather’s fascination with international events and a revulsion forProtestant zealotry and commercialism converge. For better or for worse,
Enid represents what R. Laurence Moore termed the twentieth-century“religious triumphalism” of the United States.76 Moore recognizes that theUnited States “became the major missionary power of the world faster thanit achieved clear dominance in any other area” and that “reasons quickly
developed to link the twentieth-century work of Protestant missionarygroups with general programs to Americanize the world.”77 In Nebraska,
Enid is rather easily equated with her religious beliefs and social practices.
In China, she will become the representative of a wide range of implicit

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American values. The “thing not named” (a term Cather used in her essay“The Novel Démeublé” to describe a desired suggestiveness) as it relates to
Enid is cultural imperialism.78 When she sails for China to spread theGospel, she is also charged with economic, political, and social conversion.
CONCLUSION
Cather published One of Ours in September 1922. Several years later, inthe preface to Not under Forty, she claimed the “world broke in two in 1922
or thereabouts.”79 This pronouncement has intrigued Cather specialists for
decades. As the year that also witnessed the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1922 is typically considered thezenith of literary modernism. So how can scholars interpret Cather’sstatement other than as a disparagement of the “new poetry” or the “modern
novel”? To what else might she have been alluding?
The answer to this question may be found in Cather’s correspondence. In
a letter to a long-time friend, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Cather describes her
reasons for writing One of Ours and the impact its composition had on her.80
As noted earlier, she based this novel on the life and experiences of her
cousin, G. P. Cather, who died while fighting in France during World War I.
Cather describes feeling a strong connection to her cousin: “With this boy I
was all mixed up by accident of birth. Some of me was buried with him inFrance, and some of him was left alive in me.”81 This work was anemotional exercise for Cather. It took her three years to complete andexacted a physical and psychological toll. On finishing this tribute to her
kinsman, she confesses to feeling broken: “Well, he’s given me three lovely,
tormented years. He has been in my blood so long that it seems to me I’ll
never be quite myself again.”82 After completing this project into which she
had put so much of herself, Cather feels diminished.
One of Ours is also the literary embodiment of Cather’s declaration in1936 that the “world broke in two.” It is concerned with the political andcultural fracturing of American identity in the years following World War I.
As such it also serves as an epitaph for America’s political identification
with Europe and the Jeffersonian ideals of the yeoman farmer, on which theUnited States was founded. In earlier novels, such as O Pioneers! and MyÁntonia, Cather depicted the rural Plains as an environment benefitting
culturally from the infusion of European immigrants and rivaling thecosmopolitanism of urban settings of cities like New York City. In One ofOurs, however, America’s rural cosmopolitanism is threatened by crass

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79

economic motives, conspicuous consumption, and religious intolerance. The
single-minded pursuits of Bayliss and Enid alienate residents in the ruralcommunity and mimic the myopic isolationist stance the United States
Congress adopted in the postwar period by refusing to ratify the Treaty of
Versailles and support the establishment of the League of Nations.
NOTESThis article is the result of research supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science, Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Kakenhi) number 16K02501.
1
Amy Ahearn, “Longer Biographical Sketch” (Willa Cather Archive), accessed 2 July
2016, http://cather.unl.edu/life.longbio.html#rn1m. The Willa Cather Archive is a scholarly
website devoted to Cather studies run by the University of Nebraska.
2James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1987), 130–31.
3Willa Cather, One of Ours (1922; repr., New York: Vintage, 1991).
4
Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
5
For a discussion of how Cather traces the shift from continental expansion to overseas
colonialism in her fiction, see Michael Gorman, “Jim Burden and ‘the White Man’s Burden’:My Ántonia and Empire,” Cather Studies 6 (2006): 28–57.
6
For a detailed discussion of the agreements affecting the territories in the Rhineland andSaar Basin, see Michael Howard, The First World War (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002).
7
Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The First World War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Books, 1999), 39.
8
Ibid., 47–48.
9
In One of Ours, Cather alludes to French history beginning with the Merovingian kings,
the descendants of the Frankish chieftain, Clovis I, who initiated the unification of France.
For more detail about Cather’s interest in French history see Guy Reynolds, Willa Cather inContext: Progress, Race, Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 47, 178n3; Elizabeth
Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (1953; repr., New York: J. B. Lippincott
Company, 1953), 88.
10Cather, One of Ours, 131.
11
Ibid., 100.
12
Ibid., 119, 110.
13
Ibid., 9, 11.
14
Ibid., 19.
15
Ibid., 38.
16
Ibid., 23–24.
17
The New York Public Library American History Desk Reference (1997; repr., New York:
Hyperion, 2003), 266. According to this source, the “first gasoline engine tractor makes its
appearance in South Dakota” in 1892.
18
Janis P. Stout, Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (Charlottesville: University Pressof Virginia, 2000), 169.
19
Cather, One of Ours, 66, 67, 83, 115.
20
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918; repr., New York: Modern Library,1996), 231.
21
Ibid., 380.

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Ibid., 388–89.
Ibid., 43. Claude’s desire to experience the world before renouncing it reflects advice
Sarah Orne Jewett shared with Cather: “A knowledge of the world was needed in order tounderstand the parish.” See L. Brent Bohlke, ed., Willa Cather in Person (1986; repr.,
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 40.
24
Cather, One of Ours, 46.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid., 186.
27
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Bedford Introduction to Literature,
5th ed., ed. Michael Meyer (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 1133–34, lines 7–8.
28
Cather, One of Ours, 129.
29
Ibid., 186.
30
David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing,and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
31
Ibid., 92.
32
Ibid., 92–93.
33
Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 11.
34
Cather, One of Ours, 7–8.
35
Ibid., 33.
36
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (1983; repr., London: Verso, 1991), 194.
37
Cather, One of Ours, 53.
38
Ibid., 53.
39
Ibid., 54.
40
Domrémy is now called Domrémy-la-Pucelle (Domrémy of the Maid) in honor of St.
Joan.
41
By 1911, France had already started devising military plans to retake Alsace-Lorraine. See
Prior and Wilson, First World War, 39.
42
Cather, One of Ours, 136–37.
43
Historian H. W. Brands discusses how the issue of heritage complicated most decisions inregards to World War I. See Woodrow Wilson (New York: Times Books, 2003), 52–53.
44
Joseph R. Urgo, Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1995), 152.
45
Ibid., 153.
46
Steven Trout, Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 167.
47
Howard, First World War, 146.
48
Trout, Memorial Fictions, 41.
49
Ibid., 49–50.
50
Jules Michelet, Joan of Arc, trans. Albert Guérard (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1957), 7.
51
Cather, One of Ours, 54, 120.
52
For a noted Francophile and epicure like Cather labeling someone a vegetarian and ateetotaler is equivalent to defining her as a cultural philistine. Edith Lewis describes Cather’sfondness for wine and how even during Prohibition they continued to enjoy fine Frenchwines while summering on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, Canada. See Edith
Lewis, Willa Cather Living (New York: Knopf, 1953), 193.
53
Eric Reinders, Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine
Chinese Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 153–54.
54
Cather, One of Ours, 172.
22
23

RURAL COSMOPOLITANISM AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM IN WILLA CATHER’S ONE OF OURS81

Ibid., 172–73.
Ibid., 169.
57
Ibid., 173.
58
Ibid.
59
Willa Cather, “Small Town Life,” in The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles
and Reviews, 1893–1902, vol. 2, ed. William Curtin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1970), 849–52.
60
Cather, One of Ours, 10.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid, 106.
63
Ibid., 168.
64
Ibid.
65
For a more positive interpretation of Enid’s character, see Pearl James, The New Death:
American Modernism and World War I (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013),
59. James offers a convincing alternative to my reading.
66
Cather, One of Ours, 105.
67
Jane Hunter, “China: Women Missionaries and Cultural Conquest,” in Imperial Surge:
The United States Abroad, the 1890s–Early 1900s, ed. Thomas G. Paterson and Stephen G.
Rabe (Lexington, KY: Heath, 1992), 189–204. 189–90.
68
Diana Preston, The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China’s War on Foreigners
That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900, (1999; repr., New York: Berkeley, 2000), 14.
69
Hunter, “China,” 192.
70
Cather was fascinated with China and the Far East in general. In her early career as ajournalist, she interviewed Lee Chin, a successful Chinese merchant living in Pittsburgh.
Cather unsuccessfully tried to secure comment from him about the Boxers—he referred her tothe Chinese diplomat, Wu T’ing-fang. See “The Chinese Minister,” in Curtin, World andParish, vol. 2, 803–6.
71
Paul Cohen, China Unbound: Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past (New York:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 105.
72
Eva Jane Price, China Journal 1889–1900: An American Missionary Family during theBoxer Rebellion (New York: Scribner’s, 1989).
73
Cather, One of Ours, 109–10.
74
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2001; repr., New
York: Random House, 2002), 476.
75
Reinders, Borrowed Gods, 31.
76
R. Laurence Moore, “American Religion as Cultural Imperialism,” in The American
Century in Europe, ed. R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2003), 151–70. 153.
77
Ibid., 153.
78
Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé,” Not under Forty (1936; repr., Lincoln: Universityof Nebraska Press, 1988), 43–51. 50.
79
Willa Cather, prefatory note, Not under Forty, v.
80
Willa Cather, Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 22 March 1922, in The Selected Lettersof Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013), 311–13.
81
Ibid., 312.
82
Ibid.
55
56