Actress, Scholar Performs:

Mark your calendar! Sunday, December 12th at 2:00 PM at the Columbus Public Library, Betty Jean Steinshouer, actress and Cather scholar, will be performing her one-woman show on Willa Cather.

This Columbus Library Foundation-sponsored event will be one of the Library’s contributions to the statewide “One Book, One State: Nebraska Reads “My Antonia”. Across the state during March and April, 2005, people will be encouraged to read “My Antonia” by Willa Cather.

The public---especially high school students--- are encouraged to attend this Cather re-enactment. The actress will be dressing the part to portray Willa Cather. In character, she will discuss her early years in Red Cloud, her friendship with Anna Pavelka, (her model for Antonia) and the writing of this famous book about Nebraska pioneers.

As many of you may know, Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873 in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, the eldest child of Charles and Mary Cather, both descendants of established Virginian families. Her childhood was reportedly happy and well-ordered, and is remembered in her novel “Sapphira and the Slave Girl”. In 1883, the Cathers moved to Webster County, Nebraska, joining members of the family who settled there earlier. This crucial move, dislocating and dramatic, introduced Cather to the landscape and to the ways of life she would memorialize in her famous prairie novels, “O Pioneers!”, “My Antonia”, and “A Lost Lady”, as well as in parts of “The Song of the Lark”.

In the small town of Red Cloud, Cather was a notably energetic, intelligent, and outspoken child, while, as her novels show, the town often seemed to her repressive. “I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything,” she told an interviewer many years later. “It was a kind of erasure of personality.”

In Lincoln, Nebraska, where she attended the university, she began her journalistic career, writing numerous reviews for the local newspapers. There, too, she published her earliest stories, formulated her idealistic and romantic ideals about art, and nurtured her literary ambitions. Those ambitions had to wait for their fulfillment while she earned a living in Pittsburgh as journalist and teacher, and then in New York as an editor for “McClure’s Magazine”. With the publication of “O Pioneers!” in 1913, Cather became the dedicated writer of her own dreams. In time she achieved recognition for her prairie novels and for her rare and unique works such as “The Professor’s House”, “Death Comes for the Archbishop”, and “Shadows on the Rock”. She led an ordered life, writing stories, novels, and critical essays, traveling regularly, and maintaining valued friendships, among them with neighbors from her childhood, as well as famous writers and musicians. She was honored for her writings, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for “One of Ours”, a novel about a soldier in World War I. She died at her New York home on August 24, 1947.

Perhaps the most popular of Cather’s novels, “My Antonia” is at once the intimate portrait of an American heroine, an elegy for a vanished frontier, and the story of an unconsummated love affair. What is it that makes Antonia a genuinely heroic figure? Partly, it is her ability to emerge undiminished and unembittered from circumstances no less bleak than the ones that killed her father, to improvise happiness in the same way she once improvised stories.

Although “My Antonia” is mournful in its tone----and has been used in high school curricula to convey a conservative view of the American past----it is also notable for its striking realism about gender and culture. Not only does this novel have a female protagonist who prevails in spite of male betrayal and abuse (and two secondary female characters that prosper without ever marrying), it also portrays the early frontier as a multicultural quilt in which Bohemians, Swedes, Austrians, and a blind African American retain their ethnic identities without dissolving in the American melting pot.

The virtues that Cather associates with her heroine---strength, resilience, and unselfconscious nobility at a decisive moment in our nation’s past---have either become obsolete or have receded into our collective unconscious. However, reading “My Antonia” reawakens our memory of them: “She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true…she still had that something which fires the imagination, could stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.” [p. 258]

Please join Columbus Public Library and its Foundation on Sunday, December 12, 2004 at 2:00 PM. Betty Jean Steinshouer is an accomplished actress and a top-notch scholar on Willa Cather. If you’ve always yearned to converse with one of Nebraska’s most accomplished authors, here’s your chance!

For more information, visit www.vintagebooks.com or www.penguinputnam.com and www.willacather.org/onebook.htm