To write "like a woman": transformations of identity in the work of Willa Cather

Willa Cather's early life resembles one of the histories in Jonathan Katz's Gay American History. Her cross-dressing, invention of a male pseudonym, and details of behavior, together with her love for two women in her adulthood, Isabelle McClung and Edith Lewis, make it clear that Cather was a lesbian. Defensive about One of Ours, Cather nonetheless wrote much of her fiction in a male persona--A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, "Tom Outland's Story," Death Comes to the Archbishop, O Pioneers!, My Antonia, and One of Ours, as well as numerous short stories. Much of the fictional material in these works is curiously inconsistent with the male persona, but instead resembles lesbian experiences: the inaccessibility (to the narrator) of women who are nonetheless accessible to other men, absolute heartbreak at the untouchability of the women rather than anger or guilt or the search for sexual release elsewhere, and the women's intimacy with the men involved, as in One of Ours or O Pioneers!, without any suggestion of sexual involvement or explicit sexual history. Lesbian isolation, in adolescence at any rate, produces such situations; Carson McCullers's and some of May Sarton's work are cases in point. Speaking in masquerade, Cather is capable of describing lesbian experience with a fullness and unconsciousness which is now impossible. Innocence gave way to guilty self-consciousness, and that to politically conscious rebellion. The gain is in honesty, but Cather's record of lesbian experience, under whatever disguise, is nonetheless irreplaceable.