“Kings in exile”: Children’s Literature in Willa Cather’s Early Fiction

Abstract

Most university teachers of My Ántonia have probably had to justify their choice of including Cather on the curriculum in the face of students’ complaints that “this is children’s literature”—not the sort of high literature they expected to delve into when undertaking a degree in English studies. How then can we account for the fact that the same novel is regarded as one of the great American classics? What is it that allows us to classify certain books as children’s literature and others among the acknowledged classics of “serious” or great literature? This essay focuses on some of Cather’s early stories to show how she deconstructs the opposition between high and low, between serious literature and supposedly minor forms of artistic expression. While “The Princess Baladina: Her Adventure” has long been dismissed and forgotten as a mere children’s tale without much literary value, we shall see that its deeper concerns reverberate across much of Cather’s fiction. We shall then focus on a key scene (the apparition of the moon) that recurs throughout much of Cather’s fiction and retrace the development of Cather’s aesthetic by comparing “The Treasure of Far Island” (1902)—a story in which Cather articulates the tension between the child’s gaze and the adult’s gaze through an excessive use of literary allusions—with “The Enchanted Bluff” (1909) and My Ántonia (1918)—a novel that consequently stands out as the outcome of a long artistic process that allowed Cather to become a master in the art of simplifying and coordinating.