SOURCE: “Women and the Father: Psychosexual Ambiguity in Death Comes for the Archbishop,” in American Imago, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 61-76.

In the following essay, Shaw relates Cather's own sexual and gender crisis to her portrayal of the female characters in Death Comes for the Archbishop.

How do we explain three quietly iconoclastic women in a narrative which James Woodress calls “a modern saint's life” (406) depicting an archbishop whom John J. Murphy extols as one who “combines rather than divides the world and the home and is, at once, father, uncle, husbandman, cook, builder, scholar and teacher, artist and historian” (54)? More apropos, perhaps, why must we explain the women at all? We need to explain them first because Willa Cather placed them in her narrative landscape of Death Comes for the Archbishop and because they are as intriguing as mesas on the horizon. Further, we need to explain...