Willa Cather's My Antonia and Legal Thought in the Late Nineteenth Century

• Publication year: 2022
• Citation: Vol. 51

51 Creighton L. Rev. 119. WILLA CATHER'S MY ANTONIA AND LEGAL THOUGHT IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

WILLA CATHER'S MY ANTONIA AND LEGAL THOUGHT IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

PAULETTE C. MINITER(fn*)

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,- that is genius."*

I. INTRODUCTION................................... 119

II. CATHER AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIND.............................................. 123

A. RELEVANT THEMES OF LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY JURISPRUDENCE........................ 124

B. NINETEENTH-CENTURY THEMES IN CATHER'S NONFICTION..................................... 126

III. LEGAL INFLUENCES IN CATHER'S LIFE AND LITERATURE...................................... 130

IV. NINETEENTH-CENTURY JURISPRUDENCE IN MY ANTONIA...................................... 137

A. THE WESTERN EXPERIENCE....................... 138

1. The Struggle Between Nineteenth-Century and Modern Legal Thought.................. 138

2. Historical Legal Science and the Law of Progress..................................... 142

3. The Intersection with Natural Law........... 150

B. THE "UNIVERSAL AND TRUE"...................... 154

1. History as a Source of Moral Guidance....... 155

2. Discovery and Declaration of the Law ........ 158

V. CONCLUSION ..................................... 166

I. INTRODUCTION

In the 1918 novel My Antonia, Willa Cather offered an unusual portrait of the American experience. Cather's method was to present a central female character through the eyes of a male narrator. The narrator, Jim Burden, is a Harvard-educated lawyer in New York for "one of the great Western railways."(fn1) Antonia Shimerda is a friend from his childhood in Nebraska during the waning days of the frontier. Jim tells the story of how Antonia, the daughter of poor Bohemian homesteaders, survives the suicide of her father and the disgrace of being an unwed mother to build a life on the land and thus bear out the "pioneer ideal."(fn2) Despite their disparate social statuses and divergent life paths, Jim sees Antonia as the utmost symbol of "the country" and "conditions" of his youth.(fn3)

In Cather's words, Antonia "is the story."(fn4) Yet it is Jim's retrospective account of their friendship that forms the novel's content, making his perspective key to the novel's meaning. Indeed, much of the novel's fascination has long lived in Jim's deep, yet somewhat elusive, interest in Antonia's life. As one contemporary critic put it, "[t]he reader is puzzled to understand why she should mean so much to the boy Jim Burden."(fn5)

That Jim is a lawyer is a curious facet of his character and of My Antonia. However, its import is mostly unexamined by scholars and not directly explained by the text. At first glance, Jim's life as a lawyer seems peripheral because he does not discuss his legal work in any detail. Scholars who have, in passing, noted this facet of Jim's character argue that Jim's identity as a railroad corporation lawyer reflects his interest in exploiting the Western lands that he purportedly loves, suggesting either a defect in Cather's moral vision, or that Jim is an "unreliable" narrator.(fn6) In the latter view, Jim's interpretation of Antonia's life is too idealistic to be realistic. Cather, however, privately intimated that Jim's being a lawyer is meant to enhance his credibility by signifying his sophistication. This is apparently why we learn at the outset, in the novel's introductory chapter, that Jim is a lawyer. "[T]he introduction had to state the facts that the narrator of the story is a man of worldly experience," Cather wrote in a letter, "for only those who know the world can see the parish as it is."(fn7)

This Article interprets My Antonia through a jurisprudential lens in order to bring out and explain the central role that legal ideas and themes play throughout the novel. In particular, it argues that the narrative perspective of My Antonia depicts an approach to understanding the world that influenced legal thought in the late nineteenth century, which is when the novel's narrator studies law at Harvard, which significantly influenced that era's jurisprudence.(fn8) On this reading, My Antonia portrays a lawyer's endeavor to discern principles of natural law through historical study of the human experience, a method representative of what modern lawyers call "historical" jurisprudence or inductive "legal science."(fn9)

In turn, My Antonia emerges as a literary work that is "worth analyzing in relation to the concerns of lawyers, judges, and law professors" for at least two reasons.(fn10) First, it provides a potential source of background knowledge for lawyers who seek to gain, in Richard Posner's words, "empathetic awareness" of that period's jurisprudence.(fn11) That is, My Antonia can help enrich readers' understanding of the ideas that engaged American legal thinkers of the time, as well as of the human context that possibly shaped their ideas.(fn12) Secondly, the novel's legal themes have potential to provoke thought and insights about enduring jurisprudential questions.

This Article proceeds in four parts. Part II discusses Willa Cather's connection to relevant nineteenth-century ideas. Part III sketches possible legal influences in Cather's life and literature, including her father (who studied law), Louis Brandeis (with whom she was friends), and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (who expressed strong admiration for My Antonia).

Part IV describes how My Antonia portrays strands of nineteenth-century thinking commonly associated with that era's jurisprudence. One can see three important jurisprudential themes from that period in the novel: first, the effort to look to history for moral guidance; second, the focus on particular cases as empirical material from which to work out legal principles; and third, the identification of classical liberalism with "principles of progress discovered by human experience."(fn13) In this light, Antonia's story as told by Jim, which he aptly keeps in a "legal portfolio," becomes akin to the main case that Jim relies on for evidence of truths that he claims to extract from history, similar to how natural lawyers have often viewed case law as evidence of general eternal principles.(fn14) The point is to connect My Antonia with the intellectual culture in which American legal thought of the era unfolded, thereby illuminating the novel's bearing on what Holmes called "[t]he remoter and more general aspects of the law . . . which give it universal interest."(fn15)

To conclude, this Article offers final reflections on the role of law in My Antonia and how the novel depicts law as one of those "permanent aspects of the human condition" that are the perennial focus of great literature.(fn16)

II. CATHER AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIND

Willa Cather was born into a modest Virginia farming family in 1873 and eventually became one of the twentieth century's leading literary figures.(fn17) Before devoting herself to fiction, she wrote journalism, taught Latin and English to high school students, and was an editor for several years at the New York "muckraking" magazine, Mc-Clure's. Although Cather lived most of her adult life in New York, she spent her youth in the West. In the early 1880s, her parents left the Shenandoah Valley to take up homesteading in Nebraska. Cather's family socialized in prominent Republican circles there,(fn18) and her early journalism sometimes bore flavors of that upbringing.(fn19)

But as a novelist Cather was not especially political, believing that artists were unlikely to be useful in solving social problems.(fn20) One noted foray into politics came in 1921, when she gave speeches in Nebraska criticizing "legislation that restricts personal liberty," including state laws that regulated the wrestling matches of "farm boys" and that criminalized the teaching of foreign languages to children who had not yet finished the eighth grade.(fn21) Cather said "[a]rt can find no place in such an atmosphere as these laws create," for "art must have freedom."(fn22) Such laws, Cather said, "put the state on a plane between despotism and personal liberty."(fn23) For this Article's purposes, Cather's intellectual life is relevant insofar as it reflects her engagement with ideas that circulated among educated Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A. RELEVANT THEMES OF LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY JURISPRUDENCE

Cather came of age in the late nineteenth century, but her literary career spanned well into the 1940s, making it possible to identify her with the intellectual culture of both the frontier era that she wrote about and the modern period in which she wrote.(fn24) Here, it is necessary to show only that Cather's thinking reflects fluency with ideas that influenced American jurisprudence in the late nineteenth century, when the narrator of My Antonia attends Harvard Law School.

The precise content of late nineteenth-century jurisprudence is a subject of scholarly debate, but several prominent themes are particularly relevant here. As a general matter, late nineteenth-century jurisprudence is often associated with historical analysis of the law. At the time, scholars in various disciplines turned to history for explanations, viewing society as best understood retrospectively.(fn25) Legal historians described nations and...