SOURCE: Harris, Jeane. “A Code of Her Own: Attitudes Toward Women in Willa Cather's Short Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 36, no. 1 (spring 1990): 81–9.

In the following essay, Harris addresses Cather's conflicted notions about gender and the ways she expressed this ambivalence in her stories.

Efforts by feminist scholars to recover Willa Cather's literary reputation and to ensure her place in a male-dominated canon have caused some feminist critics to dismiss aspects of her personality too complex to fit into established categories of feminist literary criticism. In particular, feminist critics have not admitted the extent of Willa Cather's misogyny, even though it informs the male code of behavior that is the controlling consciousness of all her fiction.

In her 1987 biography of Cather, Sharon O'Brien explores Cather's difficulty in reconciling her gender with the male-dominated literary tradition she hoped to join. But O'Brien does not acknowledge the depth or significance of Cather's...