Confirmation bias sometimes creates wonderful Procrustean distortions. One of the American literary mysteries, for some reason, has been the sexual orientation of Willa Cather, the exceptional American novelist. She made an effort to destroy her letters and, to many, that is smoke of a bigger fire. Here is a funny segment from a book by Joan Acocella analyzing a presumed insight to Cather revealed in her book "The Professor's House:"
In a 1989 essay Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, pioneer of “queer theory,” writes that “The Professor’s House” might seem, on the surface, “hererosexist,” but that its underlying rebellion against heterosexism can be discovered by deconstructing the last sentence of the book—specifically, one word in that sentence, “Berengaria,” the name of the ship on which the professor’s wife and daughter are sailing home for Europe. Here is Sedwick’s analysis of that word:
“Berengaria, ship of women: the {green} {aria}, the {eager}{brain}, the {bearing} and the {bairn}, the {raring}{engine}, the {bargain} {binge}, the {ban} and {bar}, the {garbage}, the {barrage} of {anger}, the {bare} {grin}, the {rage} to {err}, the {rare} {grab} for {being}, the {begin} and {rebegin} {again}.”
This list of anagrams, which must have taken a while to work out, supposedly reveals the maelstrom of lesbian energies churning beneath the surface of “The Professor’s House,” energies that Cather was venting when she gave the ship that strange name. Yes, Sedgwick says, the name has a historical meaning—Berengaria was the wife of Richard the Lion-Hearted—but otherwise it is a “nonsense word.” She apparently does not know that it was the name of a real ship, a famous Cunard ocean liner, on which Cather had returned from Europe immediately before starting work on “The Professor’s House”
And her not-so-funny conclusion, in an article in "The New Yorker:"
...this woman, because she was supposedly a lesbian and because, therefore, all her work was considered encoded, full of secrets, was made the sport of literary theorists. And while they were snuffling about in her presumed recesses, all the great things about her—her profundity, her stern tragic sense, her grand, unshowy musical prose (she may have had a better ear than any other American novelist)—all these were ignored.
In a 1989 essay Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, pioneer of “queer theory,” writes that “The Professor’s House” might seem, on the surface, “hererosexist,” but that its underlying rebellion against heterosexism can be discovered by deconstructing the last sentence of the book—specifically, one word in that sentence, “Berengaria,” the name of the ship on which the professor’s wife and daughter are sailing home for Europe. Here is Sedwick’s analysis of that word:
“Berengaria, ship of women: the {green} {aria}, the {eager}{brain}, the {bearing} and the {bairn}, the {raring}{engine}, the {bargain} {binge}, the {ban} and {bar}, the {garbage}, the {barrage} of {anger}, the {bare} {grin}, the {rage} to {err}, the {rare} {grab} for {being}, the {begin} and {rebegin} {again}.”
This list of anagrams, which must have taken a while to work out, supposedly reveals the maelstrom of lesbian energies churning beneath the surface of “The Professor’s House,” energies that Cather was venting when she gave the ship that strange name. Yes, Sedgwick says, the name has a historical meaning—Berengaria was the wife of Richard the Lion-Hearted—but otherwise it is a “nonsense word.” She apparently does not know that it was the name of a real ship, a famous Cunard ocean liner, on which Cather had returned from Europe immediately before starting work on “The Professor’s House”
And her not-so-funny conclusion, in an article in "The New Yorker:"
...this woman, because she was supposedly a lesbian and because, therefore, all her work was considered encoded, full of secrets, was made the sport of literary theorists. And while they were snuffling about in her presumed recesses, all the great things about her—her profundity, her stern tragic sense, her grand, unshowy musical prose (she may have had a better ear than any other American novelist)—all these were ignored.
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