‘Savage Blonde’: Willa Cather and the Making of an American Musician

Abstract

Willa Cather's fiction devotes extraordinary attention to music and musicians – more, perhaps, than any other American fiction writer. This article explores how Thea Kronborg, the diva-heroine of Song of the Lark, reflects emerging notions of American music at the turn of the 20th century, particularly those that rest on references to and transcriptions of African or Native American music. I argue that the development of Thea's musicality enacts a form of embodied transcription that both reveals and conceals the ‘folk’ musicality it claims to represent.