SOURCE: Hall, Joan Wylie. “Treacherous Texts: The Perils of Allusion in Cather's Early Stories.” Colby Library Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1988): 142–50.

In the following essay, Hall underscores the difficulties for Cather in inheriting and drawing upon a predominantly male literary canon and the ways in which she addressed this problem through fiction.

Willa Cather's recent biographer, Sharon O'Brien, suggests that the “intrusive references to male writers” in “The Treasure of Far Island” display a female author's urge to place herself in a tradition from which she feels excluded.¹ Some of the same literary debts are apparent in “The Professor's Commencement,” another early Cather story that also appeared in New England Magazine in 1902.² While she does not exaggerate the dominance of such allusions, O'Brien does overlook their suitability to the main characters in these particular stories and to Cather's early exploration of the theme of the artist, a theme she develops extensively...