GLR May-June 2025

The Last Days

The last days was a cathedral. Choirs with hymnals and candlelit vigils guarded the hushed and sacred aisle on Sunday mornings. Just a glimpse at the congregation,

all robed in faith and kneeling in prayer, made people want to confess the truth about themselves to anyone who’d listen, but no one spoke.

The last days was serene. The last days echoed hymns like benedictions, and we loved the stained glass haven, even though it humbled us or maybe because it humbled us: children peeking through pews long before the sermon, drivers stopping by the street just for a moment of peace, preachers who’d stand at the pulpit and promise that if they ever lost their way, they’d find it all here.

These essays reveal that Cather herself made the same journey of self-discovery. Dressing early on in masculine garb, she fled Nebraska and eventually made her way to Greenwich Village, at that time a radical community of artists and revolutionaries. She lived close to Emma Goldman, the anarchist and free love ad vocate. Goldman’s view of marriage as a means by which the patriarchal system imprisoned women helped shape Cather’s scorn for marriage and her creation of female characters who Willa Cather, ca. 1921. Courtesy George Eastman House.

D IEM O KOYE

openly defied the norms. Even seemingly conventional women who stayed on the farm, such as Alexandra Bergson in OPio neers! , struggle to be independent while supporting their fami lies. Other women, such as Thea Kronborg, follow a path similar to Cather’s, moving from a small town to a large city to foster their career. In Cather’s case, that meant moving from Red Cloud, Ne braska, to the capital city of Lincoln for college, before moving to Pittsburgh to work as a journalist and finally to New York City in 1906. The move from an agrarian world to the urban bustle, with all its angst and pleasures, was a distinctly American jour ney that Cather captured perfectly in her novels. This collection doesn’t explore Cather’s life as a lesbian, but it does show how her female characters defy expectations, developing their careers despite the barriers that women faced at this time. The crises faced by Cather’s characters seem remarkably similar to those of our own times. If all you know of her work is the novels you read in high school, these essays might motivate you to read the rest of her œuvre. Rereading her novels, I’m struck by how relevant they remain, and how women like Lena, Ántonia, Thea, Lucy, and Alexandra face many of the same struggles as do women today. &BOOKLOVERS READERS ATTENTION Tim’s Used Books 242 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA timsusedfilms@gmail.com | 508-487-0005 | Open year-round. Are TIM’S USED BOOKS of Provincetown has been traveling throughout the Northeast since 1991, buying book collections, large and small. Scholarly, gay interest, the arts—all genres. Immediate payment and removal.

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