Redefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather

"Success is never so interesting as struggle," Willa Cather wrote in 1932, but the idea of success apparently "interested" Willa Cather a good deal during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it did many of her contemporaries. Redefining the American Dream examines Cather's interest throughout her life in the version(s) of success that pervaded American culture and that were (and often still are) identified as the American Dream. Sally Peltier Harvey studies the forces in America that shaped Cather's attitudes about success as Cather was growing up and the forces that reshaped her attitudes during the years that Cather wrote her novels, causing her to reassess the relationship between material success, personal fulfillment, individual autonomy, and commitment to community. Harvey traces Cather's shifting views and her struggle to redefine the American Dream rather than abandon it, as many of her contemporaries did. Cather's efforts in this regard involved a repeated confrontation with the concepts of individualism and community. Cather in her novels moves away from the traditional pairing of self-fulfillment and material success, so common in nineteenth-century thought - a pairing that valorized individualism and viewed competition as a natural law. Cather seems to work toward a redefinition of success that sees a fulfilled self grounded in community, though still struggling to balance community's demands and the individual's needs. What begins for Cather as a troubled ambivalence about the success ethic in America becomes in her later novels an acceptance - even a celebration - of the tension between individual and community that underlies the struggle toward success.