My Mortal Enemy (1925) is Willa Cather’s only book-length work narrated by a woman and one of her most derided. Told by Nellie Birdseye, it is about the relationship between the narrator and Myra Henshawe. Nellie’s narration begins when she is 15 and Myra is 45. Nellie has grown up on stories of Myra’s dramatic elopement with Oswald Henshawe and her consequent disinheritance from her uncle’s fortune. Signaling how entrenched romantic narratives are, Nellie remarks that she had known about Myra and her “runaway marriage” since she could “remember anything at all” (3).
However, when Nellie finally meets Myra she is decidedly too old to be the heroine of a fairy tale, a fact which Myra is well aware. I read My Mortal Enemy as a critique of the romance narrative. Nellie’s disappointment with the real couple she encounters form the basis of the novel. Readers react strongly to Nellie’s innocence – and in turn dislike Myra. Similarly, critics have called her selfish, unlikable, and bitter. I will comment on the ways such descriptions of powerful women past their youth abound in our culture (as they did about Cather herself) and how this plays out when teaching the novel. Myra’s interest in Nellie, I argue, stems from a desire to teach her the constrictiveness of romantic narratives. And, more importantly, to have Nellie write the narrative Myra wants. I also explore the ways age and aging inform the perspective of the two women. Most pointedly, I argue that while My Mortal Enemy becomes the narrative Myra would have written (a deconstruction of the romance), it fails to offer a new narrative for Nellie, creating an ambivalent ending. Yet in its critique of women, age and the prescriptiveness of romantic love, it is a novel that deserves a much wider readership.
About the presenterAthena Devlin
Athena Devlin is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at St. Francis College in Brooklyn NY. She also directs the American Studies Minor at the college. Her primary area of interest is gender studies.