In consideration of these portrayals, a problem arises regarding how to interpret these flawed characters in relation to Cather’s supposed respect for Czech immigrants and their culture. in Porter 17).1 One particularly bold newspaper writer even went so far as to suggest that Annie Pavelka – the prototype for Ántonia Shimerda in My Ántonia – was someone with whom Cather was “more than half in love,” indicating that Cather may have found Bohemians and their culture more than merely “interesting” (Rowse).ĭespite Cather’s proclaimed interest in Bohemian culture, though, Cather’s literary representations of the immigrants she claimed to love often fall short of adulation, and into the realm of blatant stereotyping – especially with regard to the beloved Bohemian characters in My Ántonia, who are frequently portrayed as animalistic, infantile, and rash. She had a pony and spent her time riding about the country and getting acquainted with the neighbors, whose foreign speech and customs she found intensely interesting” (Cather qtd. Cather herself played no small role in perpetuating the image of herself as a proponent for immigrants, writing in an anonymously-published 1926 biography that “Willa Cather did not go to school. As news writers of Cather’s time noted, the inclusion of Bohemian characters in Cather’s published work was uncommon for her era: “The Russians or the Norwegians might have selected such a woman and such a struggle for the subject of a story, but there are few Americans who would have ventured to do so” (Peattie). Many of Cather’s novels and short stories feature immigrants and their struggle for self-actualization in a foreign climate, and Bohemian immigrants are not excluded from these literary portraits. Willa Cather has been hailed, for decades, as an advocate for Bohemian culture.

I’ll admit that I found K.E.’s hypothesis absurd when they first proposed it, but I think they have marshalled some very compelling evidence for their ground-breaking thesis. tackles one of the most accepted pillars of Cather criticism: that Cather was a great champion of Czech culture in her work. situates themself clearly within existing discourse and reveals surprising gaps in previous readings of Cather. Daft '19Įach year I teach the senior seminar, I challenge students to make an original contribution to Cather criticism, not merely parroting what other scholars have said, but staking out their own territory: remedying inaccurate or partial representations of Cather’s fiction in earlier scholarship and offering a substantially new reading of one or two of her novels or stories. The Bohemian Problem: A Sociological and Literary Examination of Willa Cather’s Fraught Relationship with Czech Culture By K.E.

The Bohemian Girl by Willa Cather