Digital Commons Network^™

Willa Cather As Equivocal Icon, Guy J. Reynolds

Guy J Reynolds

All icons are ultimately equivocal: you can’t think of an icon without thinking about iconoclasm. Iconicity is a function of place. Cather turned the creation of icons, and the sceptical deconstruction of icons, into a form of narrative quest that could animate a whole fiction. After Cather’s death, her coterie, Midwesterners who had come East, were faced with what to make of an iconic heartlands figure who had moved to this re¬gion. Cather’s status as Midwestern icon became, after her death, a subject of struggle among E.K Brown, his widow Peggy Brown, Dorothy Canfield, Edith Lewis, Alfred Knopf, Leon Edel, …