On the Divide: Reading Cather Against the Binary

Abstract:This essay argues that Willa Cather’s 1896 short story, “Tommy, the Unsentimental,” paradoxically complicates gender binaries by proliferating binary relations—between East and West, weak and strong, sentimental and unsentimental. In so doing, Cather creates a world in which almost everyone’s gender is non-binary to some extent. Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jay Prosser, Jack Halberstam, and Chris Coffman, I contend that Cather anticipates current debates in queer theory by showing how thinking about transgender subjects and sexuality together alters how we understand fundamental terms like “homosexuality.” Finally, I show where the text reaches its limit, unable to shed its rigid taxonomy of “kinds” of people. Instead, we would do well to promote a discourse of “unkindness,” in which changes in gender identity and presentation, like those in Cather’s own life, can be acknowledged.