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IN MEMORY OF MILDRED R. BENNETT
The question of whether Willa Cather's writings betray an underlying anti-Semitism is not new. James Schroeter developed the accusation at some length in the mid-1960s, and Bernard Baum and John H. Randall III had made it explicit somewhat earlier. They conclude that indeed Cather was anti-Semitic in that she slipped into dismissive stereotypes-a characteristic she shared with other early modernists, Schroeter adds-stereotypes of the "poolroom" variety that identify Jewishness with "commercial exploitation, secularization, and destruction of traditional values" (Schroeter 376-77). His list of the writers who casually label a character "the Jew" or picture the Jew as outsider and spoiler includes stellar members of Cather's generation (Anderson, Dreiser) and of the generation succeeding (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound).
However, Cather is an especially painful case, because she alone had dignified immigrant Swedes, Norwegians, and Bohemians in her fiction, making them, indeed, her heroes and heroines. Such a defiance of literary decorum appears now so mild as to be invisible, but at the time it was a daring position. Hence, for Schroeter, it is doubly disappointing to find that Cather's sympathetic imagination faltered when she confronted the most recent immigrants, the Polish and Russian Jews who arrived in this country in such numbers in the 1890s and early 1900s.
In the thirty-some years since Randall and Schroeter were writing, two
developments have necessitated another look at Cather's treatment of
Jews. First, the wheel of critical attention in general has taken a
decided turn. Attitudes toward race, class, and gender are not dismissed
as awkward blemishes but are perceived as deeply significant clues both
to dominating cultural thought patterns and to individual habits of
mind. Texts are combed to note what is mentioned only tangentially, or
what is not said at all. Such clues are nowhere more powerfully
operative than in signaling how a people in a culture thought about
those it blocked from full participation-the "others" who are kept
silent, left out, or domesticated. To cite a much-repeated example, Jane Austen can
be said to have legitimized West Indian colonialism when in Mansfield Park she makes a plantation the source
of Sir Thomas's wealth. A more pertinent example is Cather's implied
approval of Tom Outland's efforts to interest the Smithsonian in his
Anasazi artifacts, with no expressed regard for Indian ancestral rights,
thus legitimizing the gathering of Indian pottery into a museum as a
pious act of preservation. In sum, the new rigor in cultural criticism
asks us to be more alert concerning attitudes toward racial or other
minorities and to treat such attitudes more seriously.
While this scrutiny is largely directed at the ideologies prevalent at a past time, it also highlights the observational power and moral sensitivity of the author. Despite a prevailing assumption that the writer as person is never free from a cultural context, we continue, paradoxically, to seek textual evidence that the writer as writer is prescient, however waveringly or unconsciously, about matters that we, in a later time, regard as foundational.
Second, during the past thirty years, critical opinion about Cather has taken a dramatic turn, a 180-degree swing. In the sixties she was a minor writer-interesting, but limited by her backward-looking fixation on the pioneer past. This view was shared by Randall, Schroeter, Leon Edel, even E. K. Brown, Cather's first "official" biographer. Today, a wealth of criticism has shown her to be an artist of sophistication and subtlety, both of method and of theme. A corollary of this new view is a new interest in Cather herself. The hearty, plain-speaking Westerner, a product of Populist midwestern small towns, as Randall describes her, has receded, her place taken by a bookish, self-conscious artist; this new perspective prompts us to question how aware she was of the culture she inhabited. It is no longer sufficient to point out that she describes some Jews as physically ugly (which she does) or as commercially successful (which she also does); in narrative context such portaits may be subverting the very stereotype represented, as Chaucer explodes antifeminism through the Wife of Bath.
At the outset it should be clear that, as the phrase has it, many of Cather's best friends were Jews, beginning with the Wieners, a family of German Jews living in Red Cloud during Cather's girlhood who loaned the young Cather books. Later friends, to name only those who figured prominently in her life, were Jan Hambourg (about whom more later), Alfred and Blanche Knopf, and the Menuhin family, who so brightened her last years. These people, it must be noted, were all "good" Jews, figures of exceptional learning and talent. She may have distinguished them from other Jews as being "like us."
In this connection we should also note David Hochstein, the model for the
luminous David Gerhardt in One of Ours. Cather
met Hochstein, a young violinist and nephew of Emma Goldman, through the
Hambourgs in 1916. The following year he refused a deferment from
serving in World War I, which was open to him as a professional
musician, and was killed on active duty in 1918. When One of Ours was published in 1922, Cather gave a remarkable
interview about her memories of Hochstein (whom she recalls as having
met only three times). It is a detailed picture full of admiration for
his artistry, his good looks, his intelligence, his sense of honor
(Cather, "Fiction Recalls"). To read the interview is to know that
Cather transformed her feelings about Hochstein into her fictional David
Gerhardt. One then wonders why she gave that character a "neutral" name
and omitted any reference to Jewishness in the novel. One reason, no
doubt, is that to have done so would have introduced an element
extraneous to her theme, one that would have cluttered the novel. In
fact Cather almost certainly did not regard Hochstein as a Jew, at least
not in any essential way. She would have been more concerned with his
identity as a cosmopolitan, European-educated artist, with Jewishness
being a remote aspect of his background.
Still, questions keep nagging. Didn't Cather know about and deplore the anti-Semitism of the time? Did she want to avoid confronting it?
Although Cather's Jewish friends and acquaintances were for the most part
assimilated, secular Jews, her reading had given her at least some
knowledge of Jewish religion, ritual, history, food, dress-the aspects
of life that set a people apart. In nineteenth-century literature she
would have encountered a romanticized Jewish culture (Scott, George
Eliot). In the more realistic works of Israel Zangwill, whose novels
enjoyed a vogue in England and this country in the 18gos, she would have
found a graphic picture of the contemporary London ghetto, crowded with
refugees from throughout Europe. Cather attended a lecture by Zangwill
in Pittsburgh in 1898 and wrote a piece about the occasion for the
Nebraska Journal, from which it is clear that she
admired his work. Her naive (to our ears laughable) portrait of Zangwill, apparently
aimed at reporters who had ridiculed his accent and appearance, reveals
Cather's own distancing sense of strangeness: "Handsome he certainly is
not, but neither is he a freak. I was rather pleasurably surprised,
indeed, when this slender, pale gentleman stepped before us. His
physiognomy is typically Semitic; the bold nose, the pale, olive skin,
the full lips, the heavy dark eyes, the shaggy black hair, suggested not
only the Jew, but Oriental Jew" ("The Drama as a Fine Art" 491). She
then stresses "the atmosphere of scholarship" Zangwill conveyed and sees
in him "the dreamer of the ghetto" as well as the scholar, full of "the
idealism of his race." She ends by rhapsodizing, in the manner of the
young Cather, "The ghetto has always had its dreamers, and their dreams
have changed the course of history and founded empires" (492). Clearly
the romanticized views of Judaism she had found in her reading had left
a mark.
However, her aroused sympathies did not prevent Cather from creating a
character with conventional traits of the stereotyped Jew, a
money-conscious art dealer in a story she would write soon thereafter,
"The Marriage of Phaedra," set in the world of London society. The title
refers to a painting. An American, McMaster, who sees its worth, tries
to prevent a sale that will send the masterpiece out of England. Though
he plays only a minor role, the Austrian-born Lichtenstein is so
repulsive that his very admiration for the painting ("a chem, a chem!")
offends McMaster ("The more genuine the Jew's appreciation, the more he
[McMaster] resented it" [87]). One might possibly argue that Cather is
paying a backhanded compliment in making the art expert a Jew ("The Jews
always sense talent," Fred Ottenburg tells Thea (Song 344]), but Lichtenstein fits so easily into the poolroom kind
of anti-Semitism that he can only be evidence of slack writing.
A story written after Cather had been working some five years at McClure's shows that by 1911 she was fully aware
of anti-Semitism as a social and human problem. In the story anti-Semitism is
not only depicted, it is also touched on in exchanges among the
characters.
When "Behind the Singer Tower" is the subject of critical attention, it is generally regarded as Cather's single muckraking story. In form, it is a tale within a tale. Fred Hallet, a construction engineer, recounts the death of a young immigrant Italian laborer he once befriended, Caesarino, who was crushed when a worn cable snapped during the construction of the Mont Blanc, a luxurious New York hotel. The story takes place a few years later, just after the hotel has burned, leaving only a blackened hulk on the skyline. Hallet had warned the builder, Stanley Merryweather, about the cable's weakness. Hallet's story may appear a bit self-serving, since he is the hero of his tale (he sees that Merryweather fully compensates Caesarino's poor mother), but the muckraking theme, that the lives of humble workmen are being sacrificed to greed, appears paramount.
Recently, Joan Wylie Hall has directed attention away from Hallet and his tale to the carefully structured frame of the story. Intriguingly, she speculates that Cather had Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" in mind as she wrote. In both stories, a small group of men, including the unnamed narrator (in "Behind the Singer Tower" he is a newspaperman) listen to an account of greed and moral decay, and in both, the scene is a boat at night in the harbor of one of civilization's great cities. Hall also finds that, like "The Heart of Darkness," "Behind the Singer Tower" points to an idea behind the exploitation: "the New York Idea," the drive for speed and bigness; and in both stories "ideas that should advance civilization cause destruction instead" (85).
By concentrating on the story's frame, Hall has discerned a meaning beyond simply contemporary social criticism. She leaves unnoticed, however, the byplay between Hallet and one of his passengers, Zablowski, labeled early in the story as "a young Jewish doctor from the Rockefeller Institute." Two other of the five guests on Hallet's launch are named, but only casually (another newspaperman, Johnson, and a lawyer, Chambers); the fifth is nameless, referred to as a draftsman. Hallet has invited the group for a boat ride to help them recover from their rescue work during the fire, a major disaster that has taken the lives of many important people in business, art, and diplomacy. The narrator observes that previous fires "had occurred only in factory lofts, and the people who perished in them, fur workers and garment workers, were obscure for more reasons than one; most of them bore names unpronounceable to the American tongue" (45).
Zablowski's name certainly sets him apart from the "more American" "Johnson" or "Hallet," and the young doctor seems allied through his name to the garment-district workers who were usually the victims of fires in tall, crowded buildings.
The narrator introduces Zablowski by describing him as "a very handsome fellow, with sad, thoughtful eyes," and adds, "we were all fond of him, especially Hallet, who was always teasing him" (46). What follows in the story makes clear just what the narrator, and the others, regard as "teasing." Johnson begins it by calling attention to the pattern made by lights on the famous Singer Tower, prominent on the New York skyline: "a Jewy-looking thing. . . . exactly like the Jewish high priest in the old Bible dictionaries" (46). Zablowski mildly denies the "Semitic" resemblance and suggests instead that the "high-peaked turban" is Persian or "a Magi or a fire-worshipper" or possibly "a Buddha." The exchange is playful enough, but significantly Johnson saw something amusing in a Jewish form above Manhattan and seized the opportunity for an idle tease about Jewishness (he even says that the fellow who placed the lights "must have had a sense of humor"). Further, Zablowski's response shows that he detected the ridicule and reacted to it as such.
The exchange between Johnson and Zablowski is crucial to the story in
another way: through their banter the perspective is immensely enlarged
to include great sweeps of cultural-religious time. Further, a tension
is set up between the Singer Tower on the one hand (a brooding,
enigmatic presence, "watching over the city and the harbor like a
presiding Genius") and the Statue of Liberty
"holding her feeble taper in the gloom off to our left" (46).
Continuing the conversation, Hallet terms the tower a "great heathen
idol," suggesting the loss of "idealism" represented by the Statue of Liberty. This reference prompts Hallet
to tell the story of the pathetic Caesarino, with its strange
anti-Semitic slant.
The villain of Hallet's tale, an embodiment of the "New York idea," is the engineer Stanley Merryweather-reckless, callous about working conditions, untouched by conscience (he is even "pleasurably excited" by disaster [52]), and sure that money will cover any lapse in the rules. But what is striking is how Hallet accounts for Merryweather. Despite his name, Merryweather is half Jewish, and "racial characteristics," though "very much veiled in Stanley," underlie his villainy. Hallet pointedly "teases" Zablowski with this analysis. There was something in Merryweather's eyes, he says, "something that you would recognize, Zablowski" (47). Hallet's elaboration on racial characteristics is extensive and fulsome: he describes not just ruthless ambition but also social pushiness (he was "insultingly cordial"), vulgarity of dress and manner (as a student he would buy a "necktie of unusual weave and haunting color"; he married a "burgeoning Jewish beauty" and hung her with jewels until she "looked like the Song of Solomon done into motion pictures"); and Merryweather's servility, which made him swallow, toadlike, any rebuff ("he always crawled"). It is a venomous portrait.
Hallet ends his tale with the pious hope that something good will come from the death of Caesarino and others like him, out of all the "glare" and the "frenzy"-the "unborn Idea," he calls it ("There must be something wonderful coming" [53]).
For us, the irony of the story-that Hallet is blind to the "new idea" of
brotherhood and freedom that already exists, as represented by the Statue of Liberty-is obvious, and integral. Did
Cather see it? I am persuaded that she did, partly because Hallet's
callousness is so extreme but mostly because she pointedly ends her
story with a final "tease" of Zablowski on just the point of "them"
versus "us"; even Johnson, not notably sensitive, sees the paradox.
After listening to Hallet's hope for the "unborn Idea," Johnson
observes, "Well, anyhow . . . whatever it is, it will be ours," to which
Hallet replies, "Don't call anything ours, Johnson, while Zablowski is
around."
"Behind the Singer Tower" repays close attention. It is dense-indeed, overloaded-combining as it does an exposé of conditions in construction, a satire on the bland snobbery of native-born Americans, and a meditation on the slow forces of change that crumble one civilization after another, not only the forces of myth and religion, as suggested by the lights of the Singer Tower, but also the physical ones that dwarf the human will. The city itself that night seems to be "asserting its helplessness": The "towers of stone and steel" . . . appear to be "grouped confusedly together," the result of "an irregular parallelogram pressed between two hemispheres" (44). Cather is describing a world subject to the determinacies of nineteenth-century naturalism; only the feeble torch of the Idea, Liberty's torch, counters these forces, and the Idea is misunderstood by the very persons who give it homage.
In her portrait of the Nathanmeyers in The Song of the
Lark (1915), Cather merges a picture of conventional Jewish
wealth (enormous, built through retailing, spent on good living) with
her romantic sense of Judaism's long past. The Nathanmeyers are, as Fred
Ottenburg firmly tells Thea, "the finest kind of Jews" (343). Patrons of
the arts, "so rich and great that even Thea had heard of them" (342),
and clearly at home in Chicago society, they yet retain a Jewishness
that lends them a transcendent poise, as though life has no further
surprises for them. Mrs. Nathanmeyer, "a heavy, powerful old Jewess,"
has standards, Fred tells Thea, that "have nothing to do with Chicago. .
. . Her perceptions-or her grandmother's, which is the same thing-were
keen when all this was an Indian village" (344). Though they are not
significant figures in Thea's fate, the Nathanmeyers and their home make
a glowing interlude in Thea's drab Chicago winter, and we think well of
Fred for his admiration of them.
Jews who figure in stories Cather wrote shortly after The Song of the Lark-Miletus Poppas in "The Diamond Mine"
(1915) and Siegmund Stein in "Scandal" (1916)-are central to any
discussion of Cather's anti-Semitism. Like Lichtenstein, they appear
compounded of unpleasant traits (though they do not resemble each
other), but unlike Lichtenstein, they are not humorous walk-ons. To
confront these portraits is to confront the story in which each appears.
After finishing The Song of the Lark, Cather had
more to say about opera singers. What fascinated her was the difference
between performing artists, who must please and charm the public, and
artists such as herself-writers or painters-who work in private, or even
anonymously.
The story of Cressida Garnet, the singer in "The Diamond Mine," is structured around her four marriages, but the narrator, Carrie, a friend from childhood, also describes her career, which Cressida pursued with undaunted energy through disappointments in her personal life. Carrie notes, however, that Cressida's success was owing to the voice coaching she received in Germany from Poppas, who thereafter became her accompanist-omnipresent, to the annoyance of family and husbands. Carrie is aware that Poppas is essential to Cressida's career. While she has vocal talent and ambition, she lacks musical intelligence. Poppas supplies "intuitions, discrimination, imagination, a whole twilight world of intentions and shadowy beginnings which were dark to Cressida" (86). At the same time, Carrie finds Poppas, a Greek Jew, unsavory. There seems to be something demonic in his grayish skin, waxed moustache, and "alarming, deep-set eyes,-very close together . . . and always gleaming with something like defeated fury" (70). "He was a vulture of the vulture race, and he had the beak of one" (75).
Only at the end of the story does Carrie, looking back, see Poppas's full
worth. After Cressida's death on the Titanic,
Poppas has retired to the Middle East, his "sainte
Asie," for his health. From there he sends Carrie a letter that
ends with four lines of verse from the closing scene of Wagner's Das Rheingoid. In this scene the Rhine maidens
sing of the mysterious meaning of the gold: "Traulich und Treu / ist's
nur in der Tiefe" (Loyalty, or comfort, and truth are found only in the
depth). Finally, Carrie sees the totality of Poppas's devotion to
Cressida, to her art, to the whole of art, and she writes the story we
have read.
The tone of "The Diamond Mine" is reportorial; in fact, events surrounding Cressida's fourth husband so closely follow events of the life and death of the singer Nordica that publishers feared libel action. The figure of Poppas, however, edges toward allegory; he is the artist's deepest level of self, essential but not decipherable.
Why did Cather choose a Jew as the image of the intuitive self? It is a
romantic-rather, Gothic-portrait. (It perhaps owes something to the
mesmerizing voice coach, Svengali, in the novel Trilby, which is mentioned in the story.) When Carrie sees Poppas
and others waiting at the White Star Line for news of Titanic survivors, she thinks he looks "old as Jewry"-ageless,
timeless. Poppas might be an Old Testament Jew, returning to the Holy
Land (his "sainte Asie"). By making him also
Greek, Cather may have been trying to suggest the twin roots of Western
art and aspiration. She had written, after listening to Zangwill, "The
Hebrews, indeed, felt the beauty of holiness, but the Greeks felt the
holiness of beauty" (492).
The dynamics of "The Diamond Mine," then, point away from any anti-Semitic meaning-again, in fact, as in "Behind the Singer Tower," what is highlighted is prejudice that blinds.
"Scandal" is often deplored, both generally for its failure to interest and specifically for its disturbing picture of the unrelievedly ugly Siegmund Stein. Cather's agent made fifteen attempts to sell it before succeeding, evidence enough that it lacks immediate reader appeal (Woodress 282).
Much shorter than "The Diamond Mine," "Scandal" focuses on the performing artist's need for publicity and on the threat this need poses for the real, or inner, self. With its concern for the effective image, so different from earned fame, or reputation, the story seems peculiarly pertinent to the 1990s.
Both setting and situation are claustrophobic: the soprano Kitty Ayrshire, recovering from tonsilitis, has been at home alone for six weeks. Though her apartment is lavish, with a view of Central Park West, being "confined like a Trappist" is telling on her nerves, and Kitty begs her doctor to allow her one visitor (154). That evening she and a shadowy friend, who bears the pretentious name of Pierce Tevis, exchange stories in which Kitty, or rather the public personage of Kitty, figures. These are the "events" of the story. As the two friends talk, the real woman recedes, her place taken by the other Kittys, the subject of popular imagination, rumor, gossip, legend, lies, myths (all terms used in the text).
The reader is early alerted to Kitty's ingrained habit of projecting a self. In the opening scene, she handles the doctor as an audience who must be charmed, "Even with him she rose to her part just a little" (156). For Tevis she puts on a "costume" of diaphanous white and rose and arranges the room, with its many plants and flowers, so that it "composed about her." Sitting at one end of the huge room, she appears "a beautiful little toy woman" (157).
One corner of this room, located "off stage," as it were, is very different. It houses a painting, a Paris interior picturing Kitty's friends from an earlier time, all of them distinguished-a composer, a sculptor, and women "at once plain and beautiful" (158). The attention the narrator gives this painting signals to the reader that Kitty had once had, or had been aware of, "the kind of beauty" possessed by "the rather sallow women of the Simon painting" (162). The painting hints at the interior self that has been eroded by the necessity, the habit, of self-publicizing. The place of the soft gray painting is being taken by Kitty's mocking bird in its gilded cage next to the artificially blooming white lilac tree.
Kitty tells Tevis that she worries that her fans will forget her, but Tevis reassures her, "There is an affinity between you and the popular imagination" (160), and the stories and gossip that she has always attracted are keeping her alive with her public. After talking about the most exotic of the myths-that Kitty has an eight-year-old son living in Saint Petersburg in the care of his father, Grand Duke Paul-Kitty asks how ugly gossip starts, and Tevis tells her of an elaborate masquerade staged some few years back by Siegmund Stein, a department store millionaire. Stein, who started as a poor immigrant garment cutter, has climbed through a series of guises into social prominence. At one time, finding it useful to appear a success with women, he picked a little coat model, Ruby, who superficially resembled Kitty, had the girl suitably coiffed and dressed, and then escorted her to operas and restaurants. His clientele from Sioux City and Council Bluffs was flattered to associate with a man known to associate with the famous singer, and besides, Tevis observes, "They want the old gaudy lies" (170).
Kitty responds with two stories of her own, the first a preface to the second. At the outbreak of the Balkan troubles threatening war, she had smuggled a young tenor onto an ocean liner at Naples by pretending to the inspector that the "ridiculous" boy was "indispensable to my happiness . . . that I couldn't live without Peppo" (172). Where a cash bribe would not work, this scandalous pose, one of the old gaudy lies, did.
Kitty's follow-up story brings in Stein. She tells of a recent evening at the Stein mansion, where she and Peppo presented a private concert to a large invited company. She now sees in the attentive care that Stein and his wife lavished on her, and in the rapt appreciation of the audience, their assumption that here was a dramatic encounter of wife and discarded mistress-another of the old gaudy lies. Even at the time, Kitty recalls, she had felt suffocated by the attention and had sent Peppo for a taxi and fled.
Kitty appears to put the seal on her victimization when she says, in the closing line of the story, "If the Steins want to adopt you into their family circle, they'll get you. . . . That's why I don't feel compassionate about your Ruby. She and I are in the same boat" (177). What Kitty doesn't see, and the reader does, is that Kitty is as much deceiver as deceived: the very practice of her art-her smile, her zest, her acting a part in the old gaudy lies-is eating away at the reserves of her being. She projects a persona for the inspector of the ocean liner just as she does on the concert stage or at the Steins.
And finally, is she not like Stein-a stage manager, a master of effect
and image making? The devices practiced by Stein in his rise-reported by
Tevis in detail-dovetail with those Kitty uses: when Stein had been only
"a hideous underfed little whippersnapper," working the machines in
Rosenthal's garment factory, he was concerned about dress, associates,
recreations; he studied libraries and museums to learn about pictures
and porcelains and took lessons in the social graces; as he accumulated
wealth, he became a collector of art objects and of as-yet-unknown poets
and musicians (167). In the full meaning of the term, Stein is
self-made-he is the ever-changing sum of his public selves. Kitty seems
to have sensed this kinship to herself; she remembers that she felt
something "hideously forceful" about him (176). In Cather's lexicon, force has a special ring; it denotes essential,
though anarchic, vitality and power, the energy without which nothing,
least of all art, is accomplished. Perhaps that is why Kitty fled: she
sensed their similarity; she dimly realized that she had just played a
part in Stein's scene, not a part (the condescending opera star) in her
own.
Why did Cather choose a Jew to stand for the underside, as we might say, of building a career-the relentless effort, the conniving, the exploitation? True, it is Tevis who voices the full dislike that he, and others of his kind, feel for the upstarts pushing into the Fifth Avenue mansions "that used to belong to people of a very different sort" (171), and it is Tevis who describes Stein's physical ugliness ("tiny black eyes, with puffy lids and no lashes" [166]). Nevertheless, despite the obvious snobbery, we are meant to agree with Tevis's repugnance, the story suggests, so as to perceive that living by publicity is a danger to the integrity of the self: it is Stein who represents the danger to Kitty, not, as she thinks, the used-up Ruby.
Clearly Cather knew all about the stereotype of the social-climbing Jew-the stereotype of the drawing room and salon more than the poolroom. She needed an image to convey the dangers of human commodification, and she chose that cartoon figure. Did she know that she might risk offending her friends and associates who were Jews? She must have, but she took that risk.
A slight story Cather published in the Century
magazine in 1918, "Ardessa," suggests that at McClure's Cather had met, and sympathized with, Jews from the
working class, stenographers, office managers, and the like. The story
shows her awareness of the new immigrants from Eastern Europe and their
efforts at gaining a toehold in American culture. Centered on office
personalities in a magazine publishing house, the story describes an
old-fashioned, leisurely office style that is yielding to modern
business demands for efficiency. Ardessa Devine, the secretary who has
been with the firm from its founding, who comes in late and takes
vacations at will, exploits Becky Tietelbaum-"a thin, tense-faced Hebrew
girl"-by concealing Becky's stenographic abilities (106). When Ardessa's
boss, the hard-driving O'Mally, discovers this, he transfers Ardessa to
the business office. There she will have to work under handsome Rena
Kalski, another "slender young Hebrew," whose self-assured intelligence
has made her the office manager's chief assistant (109).
The tone of this little story is tolerant, amused at all the characters but clearly on the side of Becky and Rena. In defeating Ardessa, they, and particularly Rena, treat Ardessa with unexpected kindness.
Of particular interest is the narrator's description of Becky's family. Becky lives with eight brothers and sisters, her mother, and her father, Isaac, in three dark rooms behind Isaac's tailoring shop, hoping to move soon to a better flat upstairs. Isaac is ambitious for his daughter, who has finished a high-school commercial course, and tells her that she must "improve herself." After she is placed with Ardessa, Becky "fairly wore the dictionary out." Efforts at self-improvement and the "pushy" ambition that Pierce Tevis found offensive are here viewed admiringly though Becky is operating at a very different social level.
In the novels Cather wrote in the twenties, only one Jew appears, Louis
Marsellus, but his is a pivotal portrait in any discussion of Cather's
anti-Semitism, partly because the novel in which he figures, The Professor's House (1925), is one of Cather's
major works and partly because Marsellus has so frequently been cited as
evidence, from a biographical point of view, of Cather's deepest
feelings about Jews and about the marriage of her friend Isabelle
McClung. Schroeter and Leon Edel first proposed the notion that through
Marsellus, Cather was at last venting her resentment of Jan Hambourg,
who had married Isabelle some nine years before, in 1916, and this
interpretation has been widely accepted. (Anger at Hambourg has also
been seen, more plausibly, behind the portraits of Poppas and Stein,
since the stories in which they appear were written close to the time of
the event.) But the whole matter of Cather's feelings about Hambourg
should be regarded as conjectural. There can be no question that Cather
missed the McClung home in Pittsburgh as a refuge (the house was sold
after the death of Judge McClung in late 1915) and following that, the
loss of Isabelle to marriage. But what is striking is how open Cather
was about her feelings-she spoke about her sense of loss to friends and
wrote about it in letters. She also feared that the Hambourgs might
eventually live in France, which they did. Such honesty is the opposite
of seething anger. Elizabeth Sergeant, in her memoir, stresses Cather's
exuberance and physical joy in living in 1916; McClung's marriage cast a
shadow, but it was not devastating. Further, the sheer biographical
evidence of the continued friendship between Cather and the Hambourgs,
full of immediate sociability in New York (as shown in the Hochstein
interview) and then long visits in Toronto and later in France, should
be considered. The Professor's House is dedicated
to Hambourg ("To Jan, because he likes narrative"); it seems
inconceivable that this mark of esteem and trust (Hambourg's ability to
see into fiction) is only "a nasty joke," as Schroeter terms it
(369).
Disengaging Marsellus from serving as a mask for Cather's alleged hatred
of Hambourg does not, however, mean that his is not an anti-Semitic
portrait. It does mean he can be looked at in narrative context. It is
my view that Cather here deliberately explodes the stereotype, showing
that Marsellus's energy and zest for living (what the Professor, with
unconscious bias, calls the "florid" style) make him the true inheritor
of the Outland legend. However, since I have written elsewhere about The Professor's House, I will not repeat myself
(Wasserman, "Music of Time").
In Cather's late work, after 1930, Jewish characters appear only twice, in the Rosens of "Old Mrs. Harris" and as the stout, dark man who assaults Gabrielle Longstreet in "The Old Beauty." This unnamed figure, whose national or ethnic origin is never given, is an interesting measure of the strength of the Jewish stereotype in our consciousness in that the briefest of descriptions, in addition to physique and coloring, have been sufficient to cause readers to sense anti-Semitism behind his lineaments: "He is an immigrant who has made a lot of money. He did not belong" (56). Here is not the place for a full discussion of this story, perplexing because the allegorical substructure is so close to the surface that realistic characterization scarcely applies.
The Rosens, modeled on the Wieners, who were kind to Cather in her youth, are important figures in "Old Mrs. Harris." Rather as David Gerhardt points Claude Wheeler toward a richer, expanded life (though it is too late for Claude), the Rosens, with their books, their quiet home, their reverence for great authors, point young Vickie to education as an end in itself, "If you want it without any purpose at all, you will not be disappointed," Mr. Rosen tells her (158).
There is nothing of the poolroom stereotype about the Rosens, who appear thoroughly at home in Skyline, Colorado, where Mr. Rosen, not ambitious for a great financial success (unlike his urban relatives), has a dry-goods store. Semitism, in the sense of a people apart, is not an issue in this story. The Rosens belong to no church but contribute to the support of all.
Simpler and more likable people than the Nathenmeyers, the Rosens are linked only subtly to the ancient Jewish wisdom that Cather liked to invoke: through a quiet simile, brief, but epic in suggestion, Cather touches lightly on the deep past of Judaism. Mr. Rosen, she says, "carried a country of his own in his mind, and was able to unfold it like a tent in any wilderness" (121). Momentarily we see the small-town merchant silhouetted against the desert violets of his remote Hebrew heritage. To contrast Mr. Rosen with Lichtenstein, the first Jew to appear in her fiction, is to see how surely Cather advanced in fineness of execution and also in delicacy of feeling.
It is unlikely that we can glean significant new insights about endemic
anti-Semitism in the first decades of the century from Cather's
fictional Jews, many and varied though they are. Possibly the sheer
intensity of hatred on the part of cultural leaders (Fred Hallet, Pierce
Tevis) is revealing. Though there is nothing here to equal the brutal,
mindless tormenting of Robert Cohn (The Sun Also
Rises), there is a surreal physicality in the way Hallet describes
Merryweather and Tevis describes Stein, and in Kitty's sense of
suffocation by Stein's guests, that brings home to us the visceral
impact of this particular prejudice. An interesting dynamic also
appears. Hallet's case against Merryweather is climaxed by his outrage
at Merryweather's sufferance ("When you had him, he always crawled"
[47]), and Johnson is annoyed at Zablowski's patience with Hallet's
teasing ("Why don't you ever hit back?" [54]).
The comparison to Cohn's persecutors is again apt-they become
increasingly maddened by his endurance of abuse. It is significant, I
think, that in The Professor's House Cather again
dramatizes this forebearance (Marsellus excuses his anti-Semitic
brother-in-law, Scott, who has secretly blackballed Marsellus's
admission to a club), but this time patient forgiveness (Christian, we
might say) is admired. The Professor says, "Louie, you are magnanimous
and magnificent!" (170).
Of more particular interest is whether Cather should continue to be seen as harboring an anti-Semitic streak. Those commentators who base their answer on the incidence of "positive role models" in her fiction must say yes. The moral absolutists, too, who find any expressed consciousness of otherness evidence of racism or elitism, will find many instances of distancing, if only in the epithets Jew, Jewess, Hebrew. The rest of us must read and ponder. We can at least agree that Cather was aware of Jews as a presence in American life and, more than any other writer of her time, chose to register that presence in fiction. Zablowski, the Nathenmeyers, Poppas, Stein, Becky Tietelbaum, Marsellus, the Rosens-just to list these figures, vivid and memorable-must be convincing. She witnessed, and put in her fiction, the anti-Semitic prejudices of the dominant culture. In her way, she combatted this bias, but hers was not the direct way of the social protest novel and, clearly, she did not make it an overriding concern. She put the needs of the work first.
We can say of Cather as a writer, as Henry James said of Hawthorne, that she "is perpetually looking for images which shall place themselves in picturesque correspondence with the spiritual facts with which [she] is concerned." I think Poppas and Stein, and possibly the dark man of "The Old Beauty," were created for reasons of "picturesque correspondence," never mind that they may also have confirmed pervasive prejudices. At the same time, one of the "spiritual facts" dearest to Cather was the worth of art and learning, and the Nathanmeyers and the Rosens can be numbered among the many images by which she sought to dramatize her faith.
When the tenor Raymond d'Esquerré steps before his largely female
audiences in Willa Cather's short story "The Garden Lodge" from Perhaps it was the still heat of the summer night, perhaps it was the
heavy odours from the garden that came in through the open windows;
but as she played there grew and grew the feeling that he was there,
beside her, standing in his accustomed place. In the duet at the end
of the first act she heard him clearly: "The Troll Garden (1905), unexpected things
happen:
"Stout matrons became slender girls again; worn spinsters felt their
cheeks flush with the tenderness of their lost youth" (53). D'Esquerré's
retinue consists of a host of women, from "sisters of charity and
overworked shop-girls" to "Amazons who dwelt afar from men in the stony
fastnesses of apartment houses," seeking not erotic fulfillment with him
but romance "as various as the hues of phantasy" (53). It is as if
d'Esquerré, whose marital status is never hinted at in Cather's story,
flees from the world of theaters filled with romance-hungry women when
he accepts the invitation of the cool-headed Caroline Noble, who offers
him the use of her garden lodge and acts as his rehearsal pianist.
Caroline has rejected the romanticism that spoiled her childhood and is
confident of her ability to withstand the magnetic pull of the great
tenor. Their rehearsals of Wagner's Die
Walküre are remarkable because of their efficiency and
dedication and not because of any threatened physical intimacy between
the two. Yet as Caroline plays through Wagner's score during a nocturnal
visit to the garden lodge after d'Esquerré's departure, she conjures a
difference image of the absent tenor:
Thou art
the Spring for which I sighed in Winter's cold embraces"
[Cather's italics]. Once as he sang it, he had put his arm about
her, his one hand under her heart, while with the other he took her
right from the keyboard, holding her as he always held Sieglinde
when he drew her toward the window. She had been wonderfully the
mistress of herself at the time; neither repellent nor acquiescent.
She remembered that she had rather exulted, then, in her
self-control-which he had seemed to take for granted, though there
was perhaps the whisper of a question from the hand under her heart.
"Thou art the Spring for which I sighed in
Winter's cold embraces." Caroline lifted her hands quickly
from the keyboard, and she bowed her head in them, sobbing.
(54-55)
Caroline's deep appreciation of the power of music sets her apart from the absurd Flavia Hamilton of "Flavia and Her Artists" and other characters throughout Cather's early fiction who, according to Jeane Harris, exemplify "the foolishness, treachery, and meddlesome nature of women" (85). Harris in fact detects a strong note of misogyny in many of the early stories, an element that necessarily complicates discussions of Cather's sexuality (89). Caroline Noble, however, is another matter. Even though her surrender to the rush of emotions expressed in her piano playing and her final submission to a well-ordered life with her stockbroker husband smack strongly of the melodramatic, her breakdown and the music that triggers it are actually more complex than most critical treatments of the story have allowed.
Cather's choice of music seems hardly accidental, for she maintained a
lifelong interest in the operas of Wagner, and she would return to the
music of "Fred, can't you be serious? A thousand things may happen between
this and Friday to put me out. Something will happen. If that part
were sung well, as well as it ought to be, it would be one of the
most beautiful things in the world. That's why it never is sung
right, and never will be." She clenched her hands and opened them
despairingly, looking out of the open window. "It's inaccessibly
beautiful!" she brought out sharply. (453)Die Walküre in her fiction,
most notably in The Song of the Lark (1915).
While preparing for her first Sieglinde, Thea Kronborg angrily stops
Fred Ottenburg as he is playing on the piano the same passage from Die Walküre that had brought about
Caroline's emotional collapse:
On the surface, Cather's two treatments of Sieglinde's portion of the
love duet share a great deal. Both performances are interrupted by a
realization that the music is somehow "too beautiful" to be played with
anything but the greatest concentration, and in both settings the music
carries a heavy emotional weight because it speaks of the past struggles
of Caroline and Thea to come to terms with their personal lives and
professional careers. There is, however, an inconsistency in Cather's
employment of the Wagnerian quotation. Sieglinde's words, "Du bist der
Lenz, / nach dem ich verlangte / in frostigen Winters Frist" ("You are
the Spring / that Spring I have yearned for / in frost and in winter's
ice"), from
Act I, scene iii, of Die Walküre are
suggested by Fred Ottenburg's playing of the music that accompanies
them, and Thea is quite properly reminded of the artistic challenge that
the passage signifies. But why, during her storm-tossed night in the
garden lodge, should Caroline hear the tenor d'Esquerré sing words meant
for the soprano ("She heard him clearly: "Thou art the
Spring for which I sighed in Winter's cold embraces")? Is
Cather misremembering her Wagner and confusing Sieglinde's words with
Siegmund's?
Or is Caroline's hearing playing tricks on her, inverting the roles of
the love duet and, in following Cather's lead, "italicizing" words whose
context does not require it, thus adding to the phantasmagoria of her
dream? And
what is significant about this confusion of voices in developing the
reputation of d'Esquerré as the intensely virile bringer of dreams?
Caroline's experience is not an example of an unusual Catherian lapse of
memory about opera; rather, it is actually evidence of one of several
strange reversals of gender in "The Garden Lodge." From Caroline's
father, Auguste, to d'Esquerré to Caroline herself, characters in this
story deviate from the gender roles assigned to them, almost as if to
emphasize a susceptibility to unthinkable temptations, temptations that
if carried to their logical conclusion would subvert a well-ordered
domestic existence. Thus Auguste nearly bankrupts his household by
pursuing impossibly romantic goals, only to be rescued by the
hard-headed Caroline, who abandons a promising musical career to become
the family's breadwinner. D'Esquerré shines in performance, but offstage
he cannot shake the trappings of the Wagnerian world where he earns his
living; in his dealings with Caroline, he seems doomed to play not the
part of heroic Parsifal but of Kundry, a weary woman imprisoned in the
"barren sands" (55) of Klingsor's garden with the other sexually
frustrated characters of Wagner's Parsifal. Like
a male Kundry, d'Esquerré tempts Caroline to embrace a life of sensual
excess-but not, it seems, with d'Esquerré as her male partner. Perhaps
Cather suggests Caroline's willingness to commit the "sins with no name"
that entice forest children into the troll garden of Charles Kingsley's
parable quoted on the title page of her volume of stories, a description
that Cather may have associated with homosexuality. We know, for example, that
Cather was already aware of the dangers of flouting the conventions
governing relationships between women. Sharon O'Brien has examined
Cather's relationships with women such as Louise Pound and concludes
from Cather's letters to Pound that she was well aware of "the effects
that the public categorization of female friendship as lesbian, deviant,
and unnatural had on her private experience" (Emerging
Voice 133). Similarly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has noted the
interdependence of gender and sexuality in Cather's "Paul's Case," a
companion story to "The Garden Lodge" in The Troll
Garden, suggesting that Cather's realization of her own sexual
identity as a lesbian provides a clue to her sympathetic treatment of
the sexually ambivalent Paul, despite her earlier participation in "the
public auto-da-fé" surrounding Oscar Wilde's trial ("Across Gender"
63).
Seen in the light of such critics, Cather's "The Garden Lodge" portrays
the ways in which the boundary between gender and sexuality can be
blurred or subverted by fictional characters so as to achieve an honest
expression of the "inaccessibly beautiful" that simultaneously drives
and defeats them. Such a subversion of the commonplace is crucial to the
thematic structure of In the rendering of Caroline's bitter, anxious mood one can feel not
only Willa Cather's personal sense of the value for one's life of
devotion to art, but no less, and for the first time in her writing,
a sense that sustained labor, when forced upon one by ambition and
determination and directed toward a nonartistic goal, threatens the
very core of personality. (117)The Troll Garden and also
to an understanding of the importance Cather placed on artistic
endeavor, even if, as Susan Rosowski has shown, Cather's stories of this
period lack the conviction necessary to pursue this subversion to its
conclusion (29). Still, there are hints that Cather was aware of the
power of her material, for even though Caroline ultimately forsakes the
world of illusions for the safety of married life, she clearly loses
something valuable in the process. According to E. K. Brown:
In Cather's story, Wagner's seductive music is yoked to the goblin men of Christina Rossetti's astonishing poem "Goblin Market," quoted with Kingsley's parable at the beginning of the volume, and with interesting results. The ensuing struggle between marriage, romantic dissipation, and sexual experimentation "threatens the very core of personality" and ends in Cather's acceptance of her role as the dutiful stockbroker's wife, despite d'Esquerré's powerful attractions-attractions that have less to do with his alluring masculinity than with his ability to transpose feminine desires into another voice, to sing to Caroline with a woman's voice, as it were, Sieglinde's half of the duet and to weave for her a feminine "ecstasy of fancy" to which she nearly succumbs.
Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (1862) provides not only a unifying
device for the Troll Garden stories but also a
kind of narrative model for "The Garden Lodge." Laura's first taste of
the goblin men's fruits entices her back night after night in search of
their seductive flavors; she begins to languish and grow old until her
sister Lizzie brings her the nectar the goblins have smeared on her
face. The nectar has a poisonous effect on Laura, who falls into a deep
sleep. The following morning, "Laura awoke as from a dream, / Laughed in
the innocent old way" (51); she then regains her youth and resumes her
former life, eventually marrying and producing children who are
themselves warned of the dangers of the "haunted glen." The parallels
with Cather's story are obvious: Caroline hosts the tenor d'Esquerré and
drinks deeply of their exalted moments in rehearsal together; she visits
the garden lodge every day after d'Esquerré departs, and finally, after
a tormented, storm-clouded night of playing Wagner, Caroline sleeps for
awhile and sorts out the meaning of d'Esquerré's visit. Finally she
creeps back at dawn to meet her husband, Howard, at the breakfast table,
announcing that she has abandoned her romantically inspired doubts about
demolishing the guest house. Rising from the table, Caroline and Howard
laugh over her return to a safe, ordered existence after a brief moment
of uncertainty.
On a first reading, Cather's story seems to imply that Caroline's longing
for the male artistic world represented by d'Esquerré is the source of
her discontent (O'Brien, Emerging Voice 274). Yet
this "male longing" appears to be more complex than a mere desire for
admission to the sacred precincts of the performing arts dominated by
men and somewhat more problematic than a search for erotic fulfillment
with a man who offers what her husband lacks. Hermione Lee has noted the
"chivalrous mode" suggested by d'Esquerré's name (75), thus implying a
courtly grace hardly compatible with a flaming sexual passion. Caroline
realizes that her own fear of d'Esquerré is aroused by "the quiet, tired
reserve, the dullness, even, that kept him company" (53), rather than,
say, the powerful sexual attraction that Frank Ellinger has for Marian
Forrester in A Lost Lady. Moreover, the curious
gender portrayals in "Goblin Market"-the fact that the only men in the
poem are goblins who appear in various animal shapes, from cats to
wombats, and who coo like doves-also color our reading of events in the
Noble household. Significantly, Caroline's father, Auguste, her brother
Heinrich, even d'Esquerré himself resemble goblinlike apparitions that
haunt Caroline from afar. Not only are Rossetti's men grotesques and
therefore unfit for commerce with Lizzie and Laura; Rossetti's poem is
in fact remarkable for its unusually vivid suggestion of an incestuous
lesbian sexuality. Lines such as those addressed by Lizzie to Laura
("Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
/ Goblin pulp and goblin dew. / Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make
much of me") (46-47) can still raise the eyebrows of modern readers
accustomed to more frank depictions of sexuality than were common in
Rossetti's time. Like Lizzie and Laura, Caroline shuns the world of men
except insofar as men can provide safety and security. Although Caroline
and Howard share an easy manner with each other, Cather provides shrewd
glimpses of the couple's routine existence that give the impression that
the Nobles' marriage does not seethe with erotic passion. We know, for
example, that Howard is sixteen years older than Caroline, that they
sleep in separate rooms, that they seem to enjoy traveling separately,
and most importantly that they are divided by Caroline's continual
refusal to give in to the romantic sentimentality that Howard longs to
find in her.
Caroline's periodic visits to the garden lodge and her tumultuous night at the piano can best be understood not as a confrontation between Howard Noble and his rival d'Esquerré but as the pursuit of a vision of rapture and excitement that is lacking in both men. Just as Cather's frequent use of juxtaposition in her later fiction has been cited by Merrill Skaggs as a means of defining characters through "contrasting opposite types . . . by pulling [a] straight line between the two opposite points into a triangle" (18), in "The Garden Lodge" Cather's "triangulation" of Caroline's character may involve the addition of an unnamed but distinctly lesbian sexuality to emphasize the romanticism missing from Caroline's well-ordered life. Interestingly, this "sin with no name" is suggested both by d'Esquerré's withdrawn masculinity and by the Amazons in his entourage, who together form a vivid chamber of horrors for Caroline.
If Rossetti's poem struck a note of sexual ambivalence in The Troll Garden, the references to Wagner add to
the mood. There are in fact three Wagnerian allusions in Cather's story:
the Siegmund-Sieglinde duet from Die
Walküre (signifying the characters' discovery that they
are twins); Klingsor's garden from Parsifal; and
a little-noted reference to the "witchery of Freya" (46), connecting
Caroline and her apple garden to the goddess of love Freia (or Freya) in
the prologue to the Ring, Das Rheingoid. The
strong note of incest in the Siegmund-Sieglinde duet and in the
references to Klingsor are particularly important in discussing
questions of Caroline's sexuality, although the Freia allusion may
ultimately be more revealing of Cather's purpose in framing Caroline's
tormented night in the lodge as a kind of microcosm for the larger
issues in Wagner's tetralogy.
Cather was well versed in the action of "Thou art the Spring for which I sighed in Winter's cold embraces"
are the words which come back to her, and with them she feels again
d'Esquerré tenderly putting his arm at her and lifting her right
hand from the keyboard. The gesture transforms Caroline into
Sieglinde. Willa Cather has not given us a woman whose destiny is
linked with the vast affairs surrounding the strange gold ring, but
she has given us a Sieglinde, nevertheless-a woman who finds her
spiritual twin, her namesake Siegmund. (38)Die
Walküre, as is apparent from her 17 June 1899 review
in the Pittsburgh Courier of a performance given
by the Metropolitan Opera, featuring Lilli Lehmann as Sieglinde: "The
scene which follows [Sieglinde's return to the stage] is probably the
most exalted love scene ever set to music, and all Frau Lehmann's
stilted posings could not mar it. When Siegmund throws open the door,
letting the moonlight in, and sings his song of spring and love, then
for the first time the human element enters the cycle of the Ring" (World and the Parish 624). Siegmund announces the
joining of Spring and Love in his expansive "Winterstürme" in
terms that parallel his meeting with Sieglinde: "Zu seiner Schwester /
schwang er sich her" ("To clasp his [Spring's] sister / here he has
flown") (90). Sieglinde is clearly associated with the love that lay
hidden in the couple's hearts. But now, with the coming of Spring and
Siegmund, "Die bräutliche Schwester / befreite der Bruder" ("The bride
and sister / is freed by her brother") (90). The linking of Siegmund
with Spring and Sieglinde with Love is repeated in Sieglinde's
impassioned reply, "Du bist der Lenz, / nach dem ich verlangte" ("You
are the Spring, / that Spring I have yearned for") (91). The duet rises
in intensity until, intoxicated with their love for each other, the two
embrace. Cather's use of this passage in an early story such as "The
Garden Lodge," as well as in the far more mature The
Song of the Lark, indicates that she was so haunted by the
power of the music that she structured fictional events around its
narrative skeleton. For example, Richard Giannone's detailed study of
Cather's use of music includes an extended explication of the action of
"The Garden Lodge" in Wagnerian terms:
Yet if Caroline actually hears words that are meant to be sung by a woman to a man, and there is no soprano present, is Caroline's acting the role of Sieglinde or Siegmund, or both? And if she assumes for a moment the role of Siegmund, is the "spiritual commotion" that Giannone detects in Caroline (39) even more deeply rooted in her psyche than the confusion engendered by her doubts about the artistic life?
Perhaps Caroline, like Cather, "found music compelling because it offered
her a text without words" (O'Brien, the artifice of a performance of an opera like [Beethoven's] Emerging
Voice 171), enabling a reading of the world unacceptable to a
heterosexual viewpoint without offending the opinions of heterosexual
music lovers. Sharon O'Brien in fact pinpoints
Fidelio [which] visually offers the
possibility for transformation and inversion of gender and
sexuality: when a woman dons male attire and becomes the object of
another woman's love, the lines between heterosexual and homosexual,
sexual and nonsexual, male and female-fixed in the social
world-become blurred upon the stage. (171)
We might add that when Caroline Noble stages a performance of Die Walküre in which she is
simultaneously the Sieglind and Siegmund-as well as the accompanist!-she
has already outdone Beethoven (and probably Mozart and Richard Strauss,
too) in extending the permutations of sexuality and gender that make
opera in travesti a fascinating if deeply
Freudian event on the stage.
For it should also be remembered that Wagner's "exalted love duet" is
sung by brother and sister, invoking a taboo that does not seem to
trouble Cather or generations of operagoers who surrender to the
beauties of Wagner's music. Yet the Siegmund-Sieglinde relationship is
nevertheless a strange model for Caroline to follow, given her own
ambivalent relationship with her brother Heinrich, who had committed
suicide and who was even more hopelessly romantic than her father. On
the surface, Caroline's yearning for d'Esquerré betrays her frustration
with a prosaic husband who plays the unfortunate role of a kindly
Hunding. Thus, according to Sharon O'Brien, "Caroline Noble's love for
Raymond d'Esquerré . . . momentarily surfaces when she plays Sieglinde
to his Siegmund" ( His power she knew, lay not so much in anything that he actually
had-though he had so much-or in anything that he actually was; but
in what he suggested, in what he seemed picturesque enough to have
or be-and that was just anything that one chose to believe or to
desire. His appeal was all the more persuasive and alluring that it
was to the imagination alone, that it was as indefinite and
impersonal as those cults of idealism which so have their way with
women. (52)Emerging Voice 115, n.26). Yet
despite the heterosexual symmetry that Caroline and d'Esquerré suggest,
there seems to be an echo of an imbalance between the two, which is
heightened by Cather's otherwise superfluous italicization of
Sieglinde's words. In reading into Caroline and d'Esquerré's
relationship a presupposed tendency toward romance, are we ignoring
Cather's signals and instead, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's words, "moving
blindly from a sense of the good, the desirability, of love and
sexuality to the automatic imposition on [oneself] of a specifically heterosexual compulsion"? (Epistemology of the Closet 196). For Cather, it seems, Wagner's
verse portrayed love in an ungendered language, or more succinctly, in a
language in which gender mattered less than sexuality. Apart from her
use of Wagner, Cather also takes great pains to permit her reader to
imagine a wide range of possible characterizations of d'Esquerré's
appeal. On stage the tenor himself is as vague about the objects of his
love as is Caroline: "For the moment, he, too, believed again, desired
again, he knew not what, but something" (53). In language that otherwise
suggests d'Esquerré's phallic presence, Caroline proceeds to undercut
his masculine appeal to her:
Cather cannot resist a misogynistic slap at feminine "cults of idealism," but I think the general tone of the passage requires us to take her meaning literally: that d'Esquerré suggests "just anything that one chose to believe or to desire," including, perhaps, a homosexual rather than heterosexual love. Earlier in the story, when Caroline realizes that she has underestimated d'Esquerré's power, Cather compares Caroline to overbold swimmers who forget "the ever changing moods of their adversary, the sea" (51). The image of the sea in all its teeming fecundity seems inappropriate as a simile for masculine strength, emphasizing further that Caroline's adversary is not the man whose spirit haunts her but something she has suppressed within herself and that is reminiscent of Kingsley's "sins that have no name": "the nothingness of time and space, of system and discipline, of closed doors and broad waters," in short, "the wail from the donjon deeps when the watch slept" (56).
The allusions to Parsifal are somewhat less
complicated, although just as suggestive. Cather seems intuitively to
link d'Esquerré's spent energy and the need to regain his strength in
the garden lodge with the dissipation that colors Wagner's last opera.
According to Robert W. Gutman, "Not only the snobbery of racism but also
its inevitable Neronic concomitants of inbreeding, cruelty, depravity,
and an atmosphere of exhaustion make Parsifal
seem to distill the essence of fin de siècle
mysticism and demonism" (473). The world of Klingsor's castle and garden
is a world of magic and dreams and of sexuality that poisons those who
engage in it. For instance, Kundry has sexual relations with Amfortas
before the opera begins, causing the dreaded wound that finally kills
him. The "guileless fool," Parsifal is tempted by Klingsor's Flower
Maidens and Kundry to abandon his quest and to spend a life of pleasure
with them, but he rebukes their efforts and, after retrieving Amfortas's
spear, rejoins the sanctified if sterile world of the Monsalvat
monastery. In Cather's story, d'Esquerré steps out of the world of
Klingsor's garden for the safety and security of Caroline's garden
lodge, yet, like Kundry, he still practices the arts of a necromancer
(Giannone 40). He changes stout matrons into slender girls, "Young and
old, however hideous, however fair, they yielded up their heat-whether
quick or latent" (51). Even the "stony fastnesses of apartment houses,"
from which d'Esquerré coaxes his Amazon fans, bear a resemblance to
Klingsor's castle. And Caroline herself plays out the narrative thread
of Wagner's bizarre work; her troubled sleep, showing to her "the
nothingness of time and space," mirrors the struggle between Monsalvat
and Klingsor and is acted out with the violence of an unwanted sexual
encounter. Caroline is literally ravished by her dreams. She awakens as
dawn streaks the sky above the garden lodge: "her eyes opened wide and
she sprang up and sat holding dizzily to the cushions of the couch,
staring at her bare, cold feet, at her labouring breast, rising and
falling under her open night dress" (Troll Garden
55). She creeps back "guiltily" to her own bed, carefully avoiding any
noise that might awaken the servants, and rejoins Harold Noble at the
breakfast table, looking, in his estimation "rather fagged" (56).
It seems most appropriate to Cather's purpose that Caroline is raped not by the dashing tenor but by an idea that she has harbored about herself, an idea that has the sexual potency of a man without its being embodied in a masculine figure. We may perceive this idea as a suppressed lesbian identity or as a lost opportunity to join the masculine world of artistic achievement. In any event, the idea seems to have little to do with Caroline's entrapment in a conventional love triangle, a fact that is reinforced by Cather's passing reference to Freia at the beginning of the story.
Freia's garden, according to the action in Das
Rheingold, provides the golden apples that maintain the gods'
youth. At the beginning of the second scene, Wotan realizes the
stupidity of his agreement to pay the giants Fafner and Fasolt for their
labor in building the new palace Valhalla by handing over to them Freia,
the goddess of love. In order to save Freia from such a fate (and also
to enable her to continue to supply him and his entourage with the
golden apples, without which they will grow old and wither), Wotan
cooperates in a scheme to pay off the giants with the ring formed of the
Rheingold. Fafner murders Fasolt in a dispute over possession of the
ring, and the foundation is laid for the ensuing disasters that
conclude, at the end of Götterdämmerung, with the
destruction of the gods and of Valhalla.
Caroline's link to Freia is established through gossip that circulates
about her:
The garden to the left and the orchard to the right had never been so
riotous with spring, and had burst into impassioned bloom, as if to
accommodate Caroline, though she was certainly the last woman to
whom the witchery of Freya could be attributed; the last woman, as
her friends affirmed, to at all adequately appreciate and make the
most of such a setting for the great tenor. (46)
Why "the last woman"? For later we are told that the success of Caroline's garden is hardly accidental: "She superintended the care of the grounds herself. Her garden, indeed, had become quite a part of her, a sort of beautiful adjunct, like gowns or jewels" (50). Perhaps the unlikeliness of a comparison between Freia and Caroline stems from her hard manner, her businesslike way with her family and d'Esquerré. Howard knows her weaknesses, however; while, on the one hand he desires to locate some sentimentality in Caroline, on the other, he suggests demolishing the garden lodge that d'Esquerré has just quitted and replacing it with a much grander summer house. He backs off when he realizes how attached Caroline is to her memories of the tenor's visit. The parallels between the politics of Caroline's marriage and those of Wotan's circle are fascinating. After a nervous interlude in which Caroline and Freia each are nearly bartered away by the men in their lives, a bargain is struck that permits the men to keep their women and also to get the new houses (Caroline's summer house and Freia's Valhalla) that they have wanted all along.
"The Garden Lodge" in fact reinforces David Stouck's observation that "Cather often viewed marriage as a destructive relationship, especially for the artist" (183). The emotional and physical gaps between Howard and Caroline Noble are perhaps less threatening than in Cather's later fiction, but the Nobles' marriage is merely one of the few "good bargains" that a man and woman can make for each other when confronted by the economic facts of life and when the need to seek sexual satisfaction with a member of the opposite sex is less powerful than the desire for companionship and mutual support. Caroline decided to marry Howard Noble with all of the cool headedness she brought to her decision to replace her father as the head of the household. It was merely a business decision, prudent, safe, and the means to an economic end; and Howard does not seem to have wanted it otherwise.
The final laugh shared by Caroline and Howard has always struck me as
unsettling. Howard, too, has had trouble sleeping: "It seems to me that
you are looking rather fagged, Caroline. It was a beastly night to
sleep" (56). What goblins might he have been subjected to while Caroline
was crashing away at Die Walküre? As
they rise laughing from the breakfast table, I find myself imagining
that the fate of their marriage and summer house are closely bound to
the actions of the Ring. Things have reached a tentative
resolution at the end of Das Rheingold, but there
are three more operas to come before the world passes away in the flames
that consume Valhalla. For Caroline, the "wail from the donjon deeps"
has only been muffled; it has not been extinguished. And even if
Caroline takes the apparently easy route of abandoning her romantic garb
for the safety of her marriage, her suppression of the shadows that
haunted her during her night in the garden lodge will ultimately, in E.
K. Brown's words, "threaten the very core of personality" (117).
The movement from possession to loss, from union to separation, is the
deep and central pattern of Jim Burden's experience in My Ántonia. It is first announced in the fact of his
orphanhood, then repeated in his experiences of nature, and finally
developed in the long, slow renunciation and forfeiture, the gradually
widening breach, of his relationship with Ántonia. In
ever-widening arcs, Jim's narrative traces and retraces what is
fundamentally one loss, repeated and reinscribed: the loss of preoedipal
fusion with the mother. My essay explores the multiple presentations of
this single paradigm, in which the child falls from an imaginary state
of preoedipal wholeness into what Jacques Lacan calls the Law of the
Father, the world of loss and time that is also the world of culture.
Margaret Homans remarks that Western metaphysics is founded on the myth
that, "sorrowfully but fortunately," "language and culture depend on the
death or absence of the mother and on the quest for substitutes for her"
(2, 4). Jim's narrative bears out this remark; his language is a form of
desire, which constantly seeks but can never arrive at that lost
body.
It is true that at the end of the novel, in "Cuzak's Boys," Jim retrieves
his friendship with Ántonia. This development has led some
readers to suppose that, now that he has reestablished contact with her
"rich mine of life" (353), he will pass beyond the barrenness of his own
adulthood, as the Introduction describes it, and enter anew into rich
and full experience. Jim himself seems to believe this; he alludes to
his plans to "tramp along a few miles of lighted streets" with Cuzak and
to go hunting "in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water" (370) with
Cuzak's sons. Sleeping in the hay with Leo and Ambrosch, eating
Ántonia's kolaches, Jim seems to regain
his own childhood and to become another of Ántonia's children-a
magically timeless boy who will play alongside the children whose names
echo names from the novel's beginning: Ambrosch, Nina, Yulka. However,
such a blissful reading of the novel's final pages is highly
problematic. Jim has no future with Ántonia; whatever reunions
take place will truly concern not Ántonia but, in Jim's
revealing phrase, Cuzak and and "Cuzak's boys." Furthermore, we cannot
be certain that Jim will return to Nebraska. Once before he has told
Ántonia, "I'll come back" (322), but he has chosen to stay away
for twenty years; a similar ambivalence may overtake him now. In the
Introduction, admittedly, Cather's persona "I" (heard only in these few
pages) informs us that "Jim had found [Ántonia] again after
long years, and had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him"
(n.p.), but this reference need not apply to occasions beyond the
novel's end. Finally, even while Jim is with Ántonia, the
undertone of exile and impermanence is strong. Though he may believe he
has come home, the bittersweet truth is that, except for art, he has no
home. The loft he sleeps in, the fields he walks, the orchard he stands
in, rich with fruit in its triple enclosure, are not his own, but
Ántonia's.
After the initial reunion that ends the novel, Jim's retrieval of
Ántonia takes place most truly not in his life but in his
language. Despite Jim's putative occupation as a lawyer and his
insistence, in the Introduction, that My
Ántonia is an "artless" narrative, Jim's vocation is
art. He
exists only as the (fictive) creator of this highly artful novel. Though
the brief biographical information given In the Introduction, which is
about Jim but not by him, might seem at first to contradict this
assertion, in reality it confirms it, for it shows us that, apart from
the act of writing the pages that attempt to embody what Jim calls "my Ántonia" (emphasis mine), he belongs
to the world of death. Childless, trapped in a sterile and unloving
marriage, a practitioner of the law that helps the railroads
develop-that is to say, annihilate-the open prairies, he is something
like the shadows in Hades as the Odyssey
describes them, who, drinking the hot, rich blood of the sacrificial
beasts, take on substance just long enough to tell their stories. Apart
from Ántonia, Jim has no story; of the twenty years that
intervene between parts 4 and 5 of the novel-years during which he ages
from twenty to forty, marrying, becoming a lawyer, settling in New
York-he says not a word at all.
Yet neither would Jim have a story to tell had he been with
Ántonia. His vocation is art, and art for him—as for Cather
herself, as, indeed, for many of the great modernists—is the parable of
loss. In this context, book 4 of My
Ántonia, "The Pioneer Woman's Story," reveals itself as
crucial, for it subtly and precisely situates loss in the process of
creativity. Jim has come back to visit Ántonia, but only
briefly, before beginning law school at Harvard. She has suffered, has
borne an illegitimate daughter, and has returned to the family farm.
Their paths have been diverging and will continue to diverge: Jim's,
toward success within the law, until he becomes, as it were, the
exemplar and practitioner of the Law of the Father; Ántonia's,
increasingly back toward the realm of the material, the maternal. In a
passage filled with longing and nostalgia, they walk in the fields and
he tells her, "I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife,
or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man" (321).
In phrasing similar to Cathy's in Wuthering
Heights-who cries out to Nelly Dean, "Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he's always, always in my mind"—Jim tells
Ántonia, "You really are a part of me. . . . The idea of you is
a part of my mind" (321). Jim at this time is twenty years old;
Ántonia is twenty-four. She is, furthermore, more accessible
than she has ever been. Though she is not ashamed of being an unwed
mother, she is sad and very lonely; she needs him. Nor does he seem to
disqualify her because of her sexual experience. Yet for all Jim's
words, for all Jim's longing, inexorably they part. Then, the question
naturally arises, why does Jim not marry Ántonia?
There are almost too many reasons. The first and perhaps most obvious is
that of class and education: Jim would no more take a farmer than
Ántonia would make a lady. "Things will be easy for you,"
Ántonia predicts at the end of "The Shimerdas," when Jim goes
off to school and Ántonia returns to the fields to help her
family. "But they will be hard for us" (140). Other reasons are more
subtly established in the text. While Jim does not seem to disqualify
Ántonia because of her sexual experience-though, in fact, he
has already told Lena that he had "better go home and look after
Ántonia" (268) -Jim's allusion to Byron's "When We Parted" in
"The Pioneer Woman's Story" hints at his bitterness and anger over what
he unconsciously sees as Ántonia's betrayal. "We met," he says
of himself and Ántonia, "like the people in the old song, in
silence, if not in tears" (319), and it is hard to know how much of
Byron's accusation against a faithless lover Jim's allusion is meant to
carry. The subtext cannot be entirely unintended:
But how, exactly, are we to interpret the effect of these lines? In Jim's
imagination, has Ántonia betrayed chastity, or has she betrayed
Jim? How aware is he of his latent accusation? And what is the nature of
his entanglement, anyway? When he tells Ántonia that he'd like
to have her as a mother, a sister, a sweetheart, or a wife, the very
profusion of possibilities indicates the problem: choosing all, he
chooses none, for they cancel each other out. Paradoxically, this is
what Jim most deeply does seem to desire. Blanche Gelfant and others
have pointed out the pattern of sexual eschewals and evasions that
characterizes Jim's narrative, in which, incapacitated by an infantile
and morbid fear of sexuality, he backs away from any real chance to
become involved with a woman. Gelfant argues that this tendency in Jim
reveals Cather's own terror of surrendering her own autonomy, her own
fear of sexuality as threatening the precarious boundaries of selfhood.
I agree, yet would add that, insofar as Jim is Cather's persona, the
only possession of Ántonia that he truly does seek is
imaginative, linguistic. In this sense, he gets what he wants. Faced
with the choice Yeats phrases as "Perfection of the life, or of the
work" (242), he chooses the latter, for, insofar as Jim is Cather's
persona, he participates in her conviction, as she wrote in 1891 in her
essay on Thomas Carlyle, that "Art of every kind is an exacting master,
more so than even Jehovah. He says only, 'Thou shalt have no other gods
before me.' Art, science, and letters cry, 'Thou shalt have no other
gods at all.' They accept only human sacrafices" (Kingdom of Art 423; quoted Woodress 74). Seeking not physical
but linguistic possession of Ántonia, Jim must choreograph the
loss that brings forth language-the loss of Ántonia that
repeats and represents his initial separation from the mother.
Shortly after Jim tells Ántonia that she is "a part of my mind,"
they walk home across the fields. Jim describes the sunset:
The sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west.
While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a
cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a
bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two
luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on
opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every
sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up
high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to
stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic
that comes out of these fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a
little boy again, and that my way could end there. (322)
These lines, seemingly just a passage of landscape description, suggest the deepest reason for Jim's separation from Ántonia. They present the epiphanic moment as the moment of farewell; briefly, meaning flares forth, and there is potency in "every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain." The sun gives way to the moon in the sky, the imagination begins to come into its own, and the beloved actual, or the actual beloved, is on the point of vanishing. "In that singular light," nature enacts the tense dance between male and female entities or symbols in which we may see Jim's plight: like the stalks and shocks and trees, he must draw himself up, phallically differentiate himself, from the "solemn magic" of the maternal earth. In nature, each thing is intensely individuated, yet all are grounded and held in a harmonious tug and flow. Jim's situation is more poignant. "In that singular light" the percipient self remains single, does not join with the body of the mother. Only childhood and death are states of wholeness, places where "my way could end." In between, Jim is poised longing yet leaving, pulled back toward the realm of the mother, the longed-for realm of childhood, yet in the act of flight.
Jim's separation from Ántonia in "The Pioneer Woman's Story"
takes place twenty years before his reunion with Ántonia in
"Cuzak's Boys," but it casts its long shadow forward and teaches us how
to read the end of the novel. Like Proust's narrator-persona Marcel in
All narrative, in its movement forward toward resolution and backward
to an initial moment, a paradise lost, is overlaid with what has
been called an Oedipal logic-the inner necessity or drive of the
drama-its "sense of an ending" inseparable from the memory of loss
and the recapturing of time. Proust's title, Remembrance of Things Past, Jim dies in the
end in order to be reborn in, and as, his autobiography; his future will
lie in the act of linguistically rendering "the little circle" (372) of
his experience. As in Remembrance of Things Past,
the circle begins with an initiatory experience: for Jim, a symbolic
death and rebirth his first night on the prairie; for Marcel, the first
withholding of his mother's kiss. The narrative in both instances then
traces a long trajectory through separation, disillusion, and
intensifying, nearly final, silence and circles around to close with a
sudden rediscovery of the sources of identity, which enables a
reclaiming of the past. This is the Oedipal pattern that Teresa de
Lauretis sees as universal to narrative; in a passage from Alice Doesn't, which centrally pertains to my own
reading of My Ántonia, she writes:
A la
Recherche du temps perdu, epitomizes the very movement of
the narrative: the unfolding of the Oedipal drama as action at once
backward and forward, its quest for (self) knowledge through the
realization of loss, to the making good of Oedipus' sight and the
restoration of vision. Or rather, its sublation into the higher
order attained by Oedipus at Colonus, the superior being capable of
bridging the visible and invisible worlds. (125-26)
Henceforth the snake has its tail in its mouth. Marcel's narrative quite
frankly does not lead to a world outside itself. Jim's may appear to, in
his references to planned reunions with the Cuzaks, but action in My Ántonia is essentially complete once
Jim has found Ántonia again. Like Marcel's, his narrative leads
not to the world outside but always to rereading.
The adultery between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter not only is the act that
initiates the narrative but also-because Hawthorne places it outside and
before the narrative, rarely alludes to it, and never describes it-comes
to seem archetypal and universal, a re-enactment of the Fall, a
definitive precondition for experience. Something similar is true of
Jim's orphanhood in My Ántonia. Itself
unrepresented, it nevertheless exerts a powerful subliminal pressure
throughout the novel. Like the adultery in The Scarlet
Letter, it precedes and initiates the narrative: newly
orphaned, Jim must leave his childhood home in Virginia and travel to
his grandparents in Nebraska. But like the adultery, too, its specific
events remain shadowy: neither the deaths that orphan Jim nor his
reactions to it are ever described. Therefore, Jim's orphanhood suggests
a condition beyond its specificity, loss itself as an origin. "A loss of
something ever felt I-" (#959, 448), Emily Dickinson writes. Behind the
youthful radiance of My Ántonia,
Dickinson's bereavement is also Jim's.
Pearl is the visible sign of her parents' transgression in The Scarlet Letter. The sign of Jim's loss, in
contrast, is displaced and evanescent. My
Ántonia contains only two allusions to his parents. In
the second, Jim describes not his grief, not his tears, but only the
trace of his grandmother's tears. He has arrived at the burden homestead
in the middle of the night and has slept until the following afternoon.
He awakens, then, to find his grandmother smiling down on him, but he
can see that she has been crying and senses her grief for his father,
"her little boy" (9). The other reference to Jim's parents helps to
explain his subsequent lack of grief and renders them even more shadowy.
His first night on the prairie, Jim must travel hours by wagon from the
train station in Black Hawk to his grandparents' farm. Kneeling at the
bottom of the wagon, peering out over the side as it jolts and rumbles
through the darkness, gazing up at "the complete dome of heaven" (8), he
discovers how completely he has left the past behind. Many years later,
he writes of this night: "I did not believe that my dead father and
mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for
me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led
to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me" (8).
So powerful is the influence of the new land, not yet even a country but
"the material out of which countries"-and selves-"are made" (7), that
Jim cannot carry his past identity with him. The rupture is complete: both
the parents and the self that claimed them and defined itself
accordingly have died.
When Cather herself arrived in Nebraska in 1883, she was part of a large
family group that numbered her parents, her brothers Roscoe and
Douglass, her sister Jessica, her grandmother Rachel Boak, her mother's
niece Bess Seymour, and the family servant Marjorie Anderson (O'Brien
60-61). The effects of orphaning Jim, her alter ego, are complex. Partly, she
is following the example set by many other novelists-Brontë, Dickens,
Melville, James, Twain, to name a few-of orphaning their protagonists in
order to clear the ground of family entanglements and to concentrate on
their formative experiences. Partly, too, as Sharon O'Brien points out,
orphaning Jim enables Cather to express the loneliness and dislocation
of her own move to Nebraska, "Depriving him of parents reflects the
emotional, if not the literal, truth of her own uprooting; he is at
first the abandoned, the erased, self" (66). Orphaning Jim also permits
Cather to affirm the privacy, the subjectivity, of her own childhood.
One imagines the Cather family's arrival in Nebraska resembling not
Jim's arrival but that of the Shimerdas, as both Jim and the Benda
woodcut in the original edition of My
Ántonia portray it: a generic scene of adults, children,
and baggage in a huddle on the station platform, visually intriguing as
a group but with little chance for anyone-least of all a child-to
express inwardness or individuality. Traveling only with the equally
naÏve (and only marginally more authoritative) farmhand Jake Marpole,
Jim is free to become the protagonist of his own Bildungsroman, and he experiences his journey freshness and
romance heightened by his vacation from inscription in the family. Everything
seems wonderful: the candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, and watch
charms that newsboys sell to the credulous Jake, the Life of Jesse James that Jake buys Jim ("one of the most
satisfying books I have ever read" [4]), and most of all the friendly
passenger conductor beyond Chicago, who impresses Jim as "an experienced
and worldly man who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation he
threw out lightly the names of distant states and cities. He wore the
rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he
belonged. Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he
was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk" (4).
Present for only a moment in the novel, humorously and off-handedly
described, this passenger conductor serves nonetheless as a resonant
example of Cather's craft of the novel démeublé.
Like Queequeg in Moby-Dick, whose body is
tattooed with the secrets of the universe in the hieroglyphics of his
native Kokovoko (a place "not down in any map; true places never are"
[Melville 150]), the conductor with his secret fraternal orders and
hieroglyphic cufflinks seems a guide, however inscrutable, to realms
beyond the self. To the child Jim, he seems manliness and adventure
incarnate, the possessor of vast and virile knowledge. Jim's bond with
the conductor does not develop; a chance and brief encounter, it is one
of those loose ends that unravel ceaselessly. But as an example of what
Thomas Mann calls Steigerung, or heightening, it
charges an overtly domestic and realistic narrative with mythic
overtones and helps to establish the aura of dislocation, initiation,
and incipient transformation that pervades the opening of My Ántonia.
Fittingly, then, it is the conductor who first makes Jim aware of his
fellow travelers, the Shimerdas, and in particular the girl with the
"pretty brown eyes" (5), Ántonia. Jim shrinks from meeting her
at first, as he will later shrink from claiming her, out of a
disinclination to become involved with foreigners ("you were likely to
get diseases from foreigners," Jake opines [5]) or with females. In
retrospect, however, Ántonia's presence on the train seems to
Jim premonitory, nearly uncanny: the figure who is to become central to
his life was present (like a mother, like a twin) at the beginning.
Separately, together, Jim and Ántonia move forward into
Nebraska, the uncreated realm or "creation state" of radical beginning
(Thorpe 212).
At the novel's start, Jim focuses on his arrival;
his narrative sends Ántonia among her family and their bundles
rumbling off into the darkness in Krajiek's wagon and describes his nighttime ride. At the novel's end, however,
a subtle change in Jim's account of this first night occurs: so
important has Ántonia proved to the linguistic shaping of his
experience that he writes as if the two of them had ridden in the wagons
together, parallel and doubled: "This was the road over which
Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at
Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being
taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the
rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that
obliterating strangeness" (371). Like twins they emerge together in the
swaddling, preoedipal darkness and begin their journey down the "road of
Destiny" (372). Orphanhood releases Jim into this pattern of surrogacy
in which one's true kin are not defined biologically, but emotionally or
spiritually. Though, of course, Jim soon resumes sonship in his
biological family, the figures who become his true surrogate family are
not his grandparents but his wistfully imagined
mother-sister-sweetheart-wife, Ántonia, and the elegant,
exhausted man who gazes into his eyes and sees "far ahead into the
future for me, down the road I would have to travel" (87), Mr. Shimerda.
Jim thereby becomes a poetic autobiographer, as does Cather herself, who
writes the myth of her own arrival in Nebraska. In Jim's understanding,
he is as if reborn his first night on the prairie, and just behind that
first night lingers the figure of the conductor-path to
Ántonia, hieroglyphic guide.
Psychoanalytically, orphanhood would seem to have a potential double
significance. Loss of the mother through her death would repeat and
intensify the separation from her suffered in the Oedipal crisis with
the child's "fall" out of preoedipality into the symbolic order. Loss of
the parents through both their deaths would represent a further fall,
for, orphaned, the child would be shaken loose from an assured and
clearly defined place within the symbolic order and would become an
exile, cast out from the original structure of relations that signified
home. But Jim is only an incipient Ishmael, who does not have the
desperation or energy or courage to remain outside. Conventionality
undoes him; he never becomes an inquisitor of structures, a vagabond, or
an isolato. Within a day of his arrival on the
prairie, his genuinely liberating voyage-which begins on the train with
his excitement, his fascination with the conductor, and his first
fragmentary impressions of Ántonia, and which culminates in his
experiences of lapsing out both in the wagon under the night sky and the
following afternoon in his grandmother's garden-closes over like water
behind him. Once he rejoins his family, he soon steps into the path of
their expectations and is molded and repressed to the shape of success
in modern society. Seen in one light, his life reveals the emptiness of
being a good boy: he is permitted no dancing, no beer and sausages at
Anton Jelinek's saloon, no passionate sexuality, no children, no fruit
cave, no garden. Seen in another, more sublime, it exemplifies the
"human sacrifices" demanded of the artist. But however one finally
judges it, the pattern is the same: Jim never attains his early felicity
again, and the rest of his narrative traces the arc of jouissance and separation, possession and loss, which
constitutes his experience.
In one sense, then, Jim does not get very far, metaphorically speaking,
following his guide. But looked at otherwise, as Jim eventually shapes
his story, all of it opens out from that first train ride. Perhaps then,
as with Ishmael, felicity and its passing are the secret of the guide.
The Virgilian roundedness of Jim's narrative is far different from the
ragged, pyrotechnic grandeur of Ishmael's, but a longing like Ishmael's
in his great soliloquy in "The Gilder" seems to haunt Oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,-though long
parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,-in ye, men yet may
roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few
fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them.
Would to God these blessed calms would last. . . . Where lies the
final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the
world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the
foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose
unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity
lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. (Melville
602)My Ántonia as part of "the thing not named . . . the
overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the
emotional aura" (Not Under Forty 50). "Oh grassy
glades," muses Ishmael, staring into a sea that briefly resembles a
calm, sun-dappled prairie:
We remember Jim's words, "I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there." But, as Ishmael says, "Once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally" (602). Within time, there is only the endless tracing of what Jim calls the "little circle" of man's experience, only the restless retelling of the story.
In Felicitous Space, Judith Fryer discusses the
nature of American pastoral narrative along the lines of argument set
forth by Annette Kolodny in Lay of the Land.
Fryer proposes that "in America . . . there has been a male need to
experience the land as maternal because of the threatening, alien and
potentially emasculating terror of the unknown" (229). Quoting Kolodny,
she writes, "Our 'most American' writers . . . embrace the myth of the
eternal return, made possible by the discovery of a land unblemished and
fertile upon which is projected 'a residue of infantile experience in
which all needs-physical, erotic, spiritual, and emotional-[can be] . .
. met by an entity imagined as quintessentially female'" (230, Kolodny
153-56). According to Fryer, traditional American pastoral-the work of
Cooper, Thoreau, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, and Hemingway, for
instance-traces the movement of its protagonist "back into the realm of
the Mother, and then . . . out of that containment in order to
experience the self as independent, assertive, and sexually active"; she
also points out that such success experience in American pastoral is
always fraught with "violence and guilt" (230).
Fryer goes on to question the applicability of this conception of
pastoral to women writers, and specifically to Willa Cather: "This
conception of the American pastoral narrative as a 'deeply romantic'
promise held out by the beckoning, compliant, supportive 'deeply
feminine' landscape, the unsettled wilderness that in America offers to
the male individual 'the medium on which he may inscribe, unhindered,
his own destiny and his own nature'-just how useful an approach is it to
Willa Cather's 'novels of the soil'?" (231). We are asked to conclude:
very little. In Fryer's words, "References to a prescriptive patriarchal
tradition . . . has [sic] little to do with Willa
Cather's perceptions of the land and her descriptions of the people who
are of the land" (232). There is truth in what she says in the cases of
O Pioneers! and The Song of
the Lark. And yet, contrary to Fryer's conclusions, her remarks
regarding the American pastoral tradition just exactly describe Jim
Burden's narrative in My Ántonia. His is
the narrative par excelence that traces the
movement "back into the realm of the Mother, and then . . . out of that
containment in order to experience the self as independent, assertive,
and sexually active"; his quest, further more, is certainly fraught with
guilt, though only indirectly with violence.
It has been argued that Cather herself stands elsewhere, that she
deliberately creates Jim as an untrustworthy narrator and so exposes and
criticizes the tradition he represents. Intention has come to be a
thorny issue in Cather studies, because in so many ways Cather is
subtle, elusive, impossible to pin down, and because so many different
readers have interpreted Cather's fiction according to their own
agendas. With regard to leaned over-and this is something I remembered clearly when "I want my new heroine to be like this-like a rare object in the
middle of a table, which one may examine from all sides." She moved the lamp so that light streamed brightly down on my
Taormina jar, with its glazed orange and blue design. "I want her to stand out-like this-like this-because she Saying this her fervent, enthusiastic voice faltered and her eyes
filled with tears. Someone you knew in your childhood, I ventured. She nodded, but did not say more. (139-40)My Ántonia,
however, I believe that Cather's distance from Jim is much less than has
sometimes-wishfully-been imagined. Far from separating herself from Jim
in order in order to point out his shortcomings or the failures of the
patriarchal pastoral tradition, Cather is intensely invested in his
narrative. Jim is her fictive autobiographical persona; admitting the
difference in gender, his perceptions, values, choices, and limitations
are largely Cather's own. Furthermore, she wholeheartedly participates
in his feelings for Ántonia. Certainly there is evidence to
support this interpretation, for instance, in the anecdote Elizabeth
Shepley Sergeant tells of a memorable conversation with Cather. "In the
spring of 1916, I had the first inkling that Willa had a new story in
mind." The two women were drinking tea together in Sergeant's New York
apartment, discussing Henry James and his notion of the
incommensurability between reporters and "originators," or artists, when
suddenly Cather
My Ántonia came into my hands, at
last, in 1918-and set an old Sicilian apothecary jar of mine, filled
with orange-brown flowers of scented stock, in the middle of a bare,
round, antique table.is the story."
Or there is Cather's letter to Carrie Miner of 27 January 1934, in which
she writes of the emotion and excitement that went into her creation of
Ántonia, the other early immigrants, and her own first
experiences on the prairie. Unfortunately, I am not permitted to quote
from this letter, which would seem to lay rest to the claim that
Cather's relation to Jim is detached or ironic. Briefly, though, to
paraphrase: Cather has just received a medal for My
Ántonia from the International Mark Twain Society, but
she does not want Carrie Miner to advertise the fact around Red Cloud
because she does not want people pestering Annie Pavelka, driving out to
her farm to look her over, and concluding that Cather has lied. She
defends herself against readers' charges of idealization or exaggeration
by insisting that she wrote from real feeling, which can never be
falsified. In portraying Annie, she says, she was not limning body parts
but attempting to capture this feeling; she did not exaggerate but
instead meant just what she said.
Cather herself, then, embraces in My
Ántonia the "myth of the eternal return" to which Fryer
alludes and the myth of the land and its human embodiment as
"quintessentially female." I cannot agree either with Fryer's conclusion
regarding Cather's distance from the male pastoral tradition or with
Sharon O'Brien's conclusion in The Emerging Voice
that Cather discovers a strong, sure woman's authorial voice with O Pioneers!; that having resolved the gender
conflicts that troubled her early life, she writes from this assurance
hereafter. (I should mention that O'Brien now also questions this
conclusion.) In My Ántonia, Cather is
primarily a male-identified writer, both in that she writes within the
tradition of patriarchal pastoral as defined by Kolodny and Fryer and it
that she renders herself via a male persona. What Ántonia, as woman, represents for Willa Cather, as woman, is expressed by Jim Burden, who speaks
for Willa Cather, as writer. Cather's adoption of
a male persona argues that she participates in what Margaret Homans
calls the constitutive "myths of our culture" (4), which suggest that
women, as Woman, embody the literal-the realm of nature or matter-and
therefore need not, indeed cannot, write, that women do not have the
distance necessary from the worldbody, the motherbody, to seek to close
that distance in language. As Homans writes, "The literal is ambiguous
for women writers because women's potentially more positive view of it
collides with its devaluation by our culture" (5). Cather's affection
for Annie Pavelka and creation of Ántonia evince her
honoring-even her near-enshrining-of the literal; Cather's creation of
Jim and identification with him suggest that she shares the ambivalence.
Jim's experiences in nature, during his childhood, reveal just how
closely Cather patterns his narrative along the lines of American
patriarchal pastoral, as Kolodny and Fryer describe it. In this regard,
it is fruitful to look at the differences between two versions of a
child's arrival in Nebraska: the first, Cather's account in a 1913
newspaper interview of her own first trip across the prairie; the
second, her reworking of this account about four years later for Jim. In
the first, Cather stresses the harshness of the land and her own
emotional desolation:
I shall never forget my introduction to [the land]. We drove out from
Red Cloud to my grandfather's homestead one day in April. I was
sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding on
to the side of the wagon box to steady myself-the roads were mostly
faint trails over the bunch grass in those days. The land was open
range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and
further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come
to the end of everything-it was a kind of erasure of personality. I would not know how much a child's life is bound up in the woods and
hills and meadows around it, if I had not been jerked away from all
these and thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet
iron. (
Kingdom of Art 448; quoted in O'Brien
63)
O'Brien contrasts this passage with Cather's descriptions of her first
family home at Willow Shade, in Virginia, as presented in the "Epilogue"
to Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). The
Virginia passages from which O'Brien quotes emphasize the gentleness and
beauty of the land, the soft rolling hills of the Blue Ridge, and the
convivial domesticity of the big family kitchen. In her view, Cather's
descriptions of Virginia and Nebraska "reveal the psychological and
emotional dynamics of the mother-daughter bond." The gentle, pastoral
Virginia world is maternal; consequently "the abrupt change in landscape
signifies both the separation of self and other, and the loss of
maternal protection and nurturance: the child is rudely 'jerked away'
and 'thrown out' into a forbidding, sterile country 'as bare as a piece
of sheet iron.'" As Cather presents the move to Nebraska, it re-enacts
the original separation from the mother; and though, in life, this
separation generally bears good results as well as bad, "Cather's early
memory is more negative than ambivalent, stressing loss rather than
birth or rebirth; indeed, the barren land both causes and reflects the
death of the self" (63-64).
This reading is acute, though to argue from texts written at two such
disparate times as 1913 and 1940 creates an either/or symmetry that the
intervention of history renders problematic. What is striking to me, as
well, is the nature of the changes made when Cather comes to rewrite her
own first memories for Jim:
Cautiously I stepped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees
and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to
see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was
a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was
nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of
which countries are made. . . . I had the feeling that the world was
left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside
man's jurisdiction. . . . The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew
not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived
anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt
erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I
felt, what would be would be. (7-8)
There is a vast difference between the two passages. Both describe an
erasure of personality caused by the child's exposure to the vast, flat
land, but in the first instance the tone is entirely negative. Cather
describes a loss of home and a desolating sense of deprivation; she goes
on to say in the interview that she was so homesick that she could not
eat for weeks. Jim, in contrast, is not homesick, because he is coming
home, rediscovering home; he experiences a mythically charged regression
back through the symbolic order-he has left "man's jurisdiction"-into
the realm of the mother, the "material out of which countries are made."
What has been and will again become a self is cradled "between that
earth and that sky," fetally surrounded, and, though it is possible to
read the statement, "I did not say my prayers that night; here I felt
that what would be would be," as expressing a stunned fatalism, even a
sense of terror, it is also possible to read it as expressing a
surrender to being carried through existence in amniotic peace. There is
no need to pray, no one to pray to, no one to pray. O'Brien calls this a
"mythic descent into the underworld of nothingness, and nonbeing" (67),
and Hermione Lee speaks of "this dark negative space, like chaos before
the Word" (140). It is also profoundly fruitful, a kind of quiet jouissance; carried through the vast,
all-encircling darkness, Jim rediscovers his oneness in and with the
mother's body.
This sense of nurturant space carries over into the whole of "The Shimerdas." Hermione Lee writes: "From the moment Jim emerges from the train, and sees Ántonia and her huddled, 'encumbered' family also emerging, the shape of his narrative replicates the process of growth from infancy to adulthood. Like a child's book, the first section has simple, coloured, apprehensible things standing out on every page-food, clothes, animals, plants-in a primary environment of smells, warmth, light, space, snow, sky" (140). The aura of childhood is intensified subliminally, poetically, by the powerful creation of a maternally infused world. Book I is the book of the mother; its central gesture-one writ large in the circular shape of the novel itself-is one of projecting, encircling, enfolding. From the "complete dome of heaven" (8), to the great circle where the Indians used to ride that stands out "when the first light spray of snow lay over it . . . like strokes of Chinese white on canvas" (62), to Mr. Shimerda's homely grave with its uncut shaggy grasses, like a shrine or "little island" (119) between two roads that curve protectively around it, to the pumpkins and ground-cherries that nestle against the fields, book I reinscribes the shape of completeness and enclosure, the circle. Even when terror, danger, or sorrow rears its head-as in Jake's and Otto's belief that the great circle marks the site where Indians tortured their prisoners or in Mr. Shimerda's suicide-it is lulled by being encircled. In their essence, memory, autobiographical narrative, and storytelling all strongly tend toward containment and enclosure; more specifically, these particular stories, with the calligraphic "great circle" and the "little island," seek their own resolution in lingering images of circularity.
The best example of this encircling process occurs in the famous story of Pavel and Peter and the bride who was thrown to the wolves. Genuinely terrifying, this is one story every reader remembers: the troikas flee across the snow, the bodies shriek and tumble to the marauding wolves, the church bells ring at dawn, and Pavel and Peter set forth on their guilty wanderings. But the story just barely does not overturn the novel, for it is distanced and contained, so that we see it as if through the wrong end of a telescope. It comes to us doubly translated and at four removes: Pavel tells it in Russian to Mr. Shimerda; Ántonia overhears it, translates it for herself into Bohemian, and then tells it in English to Jim; Jim gives it as part of his manuscript to the "I" persona of the introduction; and this persona finally publishes the manuscript as a novel. It happened, besides, long ago and far away, in the fabular Ukraine, on the other side of the world from Jim's Nebraska. The story seeps into Jim's fantasies-"At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia" (61)-and as critics have pointed out, its implications regarding misogyny and violence are somewhat unsettling. Interestingly, however, both Jim and Ántonia derive "a painful and peculiar pleasure" (61) from the story; theirs seems to be a mutual sadomasochistic gratification in which traditional male and female roles are not clearly defined. Then too, Jim's wording regarding his fantasies makes it impossible to tell what part he plays in the scenario: is he ruthless murderer, hapless witness, struggling bridegroom, or powerless bride? His involvement in the story is characterized not so much by misogyny or aggression as by polymorphous perversity; he plays all parts in his imagination, in the same way as he will later in the Wick Cutter episode. Snuggled down in the wagon with Ántonia, scared blissfully half to death as he listens to her tell him Pavel's story, Jim experiments with the boundaries of identity and safety. Here, the boundaries hold; repetition and complicity bring pleasure out of terror, and the children's safe journey home provides a reassuring counterpart to that other, tragic ride.
Like the other violent passages of My
Ántonia-Ántonia's story of the tramp and the
threshing machine, or the Wick Cutter episode, or the bloody details of
Mr. Shimerda's suicide-the story of Pavel and Peter is essential to the
novel. It helps to keep the novel from going soft, establishing a stress
of recalcitrant materials against the Virgilian roundedness that seeks
to finish and polish experience. It provides an analogue for the
predatory ferocity, rage, and masochistic frisson
in the face of danger that run deep and strong in children, no matter
how well behaved. The way it flares out, temporarily possesses its
audience, then gradually diminishes, to be subsumed (in the following
chapter) in a return to daylight, resembles the irruption of dream or
other unconscious energies against the ordinarily well-defended ego.
Susan Rosowski points out how, in Cather's handling of Pavel's story,
Russia and Nebraska seem to merge: the steppes blend with the prairie,
the howl of wolves becomes the cry of coyotes, and "different voices
combine to tell a truth so profound all of nature speaks of it, the
tragedy of life in a wilderness" (81). Also, however, the juxtaposition
of Pavel's story with the chapter that follows, in which Jim,
Ántonia, and Yulka ride out through the winter sunlight on
Jim's new sleigh as far across the prairie as "Russian Peter's house"
(64), permits Jim to master the unpleasant stimuli of Pavel's story and
bring them under the dominance of the pleasure principle by means of
modulated repetition; it is what Freud calls one of the "ways and means
. . . of making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be
recollected and worked over in the mind" (Beyond the
Pleasure Principle 37). Both desire and danger repeat in diminuendo: instead of an adult marriage, Yulka
fantasizes about settling down with Jim and her sister to "live in
Russian Peter's house" (64), and instead of ravenous wolves, the
children are threatened by cold and howling wind, which leaves Jim with
a bad attack of quinsy. But Pavel and Peter are outcast; after his
terrible deed, "even Pavel's own mother would not look at him" (60).
Jim, in contrast, is welcomed back into his grandmother's loving embrace
and finds comfort in her basement kitchen, which "seemed heavenly safe
and warm in those days-like a tight little boat in a winter sea" (65).
How poignant it is, then, that Pavel's and Peter's fate proves to be
prophetic for Jim, who for different reasons from theirs becomes in
essence like them, an exile and a wanderer.
Generally, however, experience at this stage of Jim's life is presented
as benign. Book I of My Ántonia offers
an extraordinary mixture of delight and safety, through its return to
the magical, maternal shapes of childhood. Lee remarks that action in
book I is characterized by the child's "pull between earth and space,
near and far, solidity and dissolution"; Jim and Ántonia "are
always coming out from underground (Jim from his secure kitchen,
Ántonia from her dark constricting cave) into infinite space"
(141), in a replication of birth that will be echoed at the end, when
Ántonia's children burst forth into the sunlight from the fruit
cave. What strikes me, similarly, is Jim's recurrent creation of
womblike shapes that promise safety, as if to write the body of the
mother into the vast, obliterating terrain. The Burdens' underground
kitchen smelling of gingerbread, with its little half-windows laden with
geraniums and looking right onto the ground; the tunnel dug through the
snow to the barn; the badger hole near the garden with its "friendly"
badger; the labyrinthine prairie dog town; even the Shimerdas' sod
house, which seems wonderful and cozy as well as grim to children; and
the hole in its wall, where Ántonia and Yulka sleep, keeping
warm in the earth like the badger-all of these images help to ground the
child in an unfamiliar and potentially overwhelming landscape and
intensify the reader's sense that, though Jim is actually ten years old,
he is also symbolically newborn and reliving the preoedipal state
through his creation of these surrogates for the mother.
The climax and quintessence of these images, however, is Jim's interlude
in his grandmother's garden, the first full day after he arrives. Taking
a copper-tipped cane to guard against snakes, Jim and his grandmother
set off to the garden, a quarter mile from the house; the way Jim
describes the scene, it seems to flow directly from his midnight ride,
as chaos leads to Eden, or the dismantlings of darkness lead to the
re-created morning. The world he enters is animistic, Indian, with
"motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and
in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide,
and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping" (16).
Reaching the garden, he helps his grandmother dig potatoes-another
grounding image: the warmth, the earthly roundness-and, after she
Ieaves, he settles down alone with his back against a pumpkin "in the
middle of the garden" (17). Down in this sheltered draw bottom, he
listens to the wind hum and sing along the level ground above him and
watches the grasses wave. As O'Brien points out, he experiences what
Gaston Bachelard calls "intimate immemsity," a combination of "deep
intimacy and infinite extent" (70, Bachelard 202; Fryer uses the phrase
as well, 310), in this landscape that circles and shelters him yet opens
right on to "only sun and sky," into which one could float "like the
tawny hawks which sailed [overhead] making slow shadows on the grass"
(16). He is at the omphalos, the mystically
charged center of creation; around him, existence radiates, and the
musical hum of the wind resounds: the spirit blowing where it listeth,
or the resonant Om! that in Buddhist thought
expresses the music of existence. As he sits as still as possible in the
garden, he lapses out into a state of recaptured preoedipal
completeness, the "oceanic feeling" of oneness with the universe that,
Freud theorizes, may provide the "physiological basis" for "much of the
wisdom of mysticism" and that remains as a trace of the infant's
experienced nondifferentiation from the mother (Civilization and Its Discontents 11-21). "Nothing happened,"
Jim writes. "I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that
lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to
be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when
we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air,
or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be
dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it
comes as naturally as sleep" (18).
Where Jim sits in the garden, "snakes could scarcely approach unseen" (17). It is not long, however, before he must do battle with the "circus monstrosity" (45) of a rattler who inhabits the prairie dog town. Actually, in life, it was Annie Sadilek who killed the snake, not Willa. Cather, however, transfers the battle and its victory from Ántonia to Jim, with results that are psychologically revealing. But the meaning of the revelation is ambiguous. Jim has been chafing against the four years' age difference between him and Ántonia, resenting her "protecting manner" and "superior tone"; she has been acting like his mother. His masculinity is threatened-"I was a boy and she was a girl"-and he wants her not only to treat him "more like an equal" but also to "defer to me in other things than reading lessons" (43). Given this scenario, what Jim does is clearly Oedipally symbolic: killing the snake, he makes a successful stab at asserting his own virility and earns the right to consider himself Ántonia's protector. He appears to resolve the Oedipal conflict triumphantly, defeating the boychild's "ancient, eldest Evil" (47), the rival, belittling phallus. Ántonia praises him wildly, dancing around him and calling him "big mans" (46). Of course, as Jim eventually admits, his triumph is moderated by the fact that he has not fought much of a rattler; his old, fat, sluggish adversary is less full of fight than full of prairie dog. Still, the most important victory is won; henceforth, Jim is a "big fellow" (50).
But Cather's own role in this episode seems to be more complex. My
interpretation here is frankly conjectural, based on Cather's
description of the snake. Powerfully phallic, he is a creature of
"abominable muscularity" and "loathsome, fluid motion"; he makes Jim
sick and looks "as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality
out of him" (45). He is, furthermore, the only snake I can think of who
takes the shape not of an S but of a W. I believe that this W
derives from "Willa," or the masculine "Willie," as Cather conceived of
herself in her youth. Furthermore, her initials, "W. C." are also the
initials of Wick Cutter, the moneylender in My
Ántonia who embodies everything loathsome about sexual
desire, combining a distasteful effeminacy with a ruthless phallic
urgency. Killing the snake, in this context, seems to be not a step
forward toward the successful resolution of the Oedipal crisis but a
profoundly regressive gesture, in which Jim's deed symbolically enacts
Cather's repression of her own sexual self and her retreat to an
imagined state in which bonding between self and beloved other
(Annie/Ántonia, both dear companion and stand-in for the
mother) could be complete and unconflicted. Through Jim, Cather clears
the maternal labyrinth of the prairie dog town from the presence of the
"ancient, eldest Evil," the usurping, phallic father whose intrusion
spells the child's loss of the mother and fall from preoedipal
wholeness; the roles are internalized, however, so that the father
function becomes an aspect of the desirous self. Finally, therefore, the
killing of the snake suggests not only Cather's longing to reclaim
preoedipality but also her desire to get rid of the named self, the
conflicted "Willa/Willie," the self represented by a W. For if, as Lacan suggests, the fall into language accompanies
and signifies the fall into separation, then to know oneself as named is
to know oneself as hopelessly embroiled in desire and absence. "That is
happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great" (18); that
these words are inscribed on Cather's tombstone in Jaffrey, New
Hampshire, reveals how deeply she shares Jim's longing, finally
appeasable only in death. Identity as conscious of itself, named unto
itself, knows itself apart from the mother and therefore desolate in the
body of the world, as Adam and Eve stood desolate once Eve succumbed to
the serpent and they knew themselves in the Garden.
In Alice Doesn't, Teresa de Lauretis discusses the
work on plot typology of the Soviet semiotician Jurij Lotman in ways
that correspond closely to my reading of My
Ántonia. According to Lotman, plot originates in what
de Lauretis calls a "text-generating mechanism" that is "coextensive
with the origin of culture itself" (116); elsewhere, de Lauretis quotes
Barthes's similar remark that narrative "is international,
transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself"
(79, in de Lauretis 103). The myths or texts generated by this mechanism
are cyclical, not linear, in their temporality and are synchronized with
the cycles of nature-the movement of the heavens, the hours of the day,
the seasons. In this type of text, human life itself is not seen in
terms of linear temporality, "but as a recurrent, self-repeating cycle
which can be told starting at any point" (116-117); beginning and end,
birth and death are simply events that are "inherent to a certain
position in the cycle, and repeating themselves from time immemorial"
(Lotman 163, in de Lauretis 117).
Along with this type of text-generating mechanism, which establishes laws, continuities, and connections between remote and discrete phenomena, Lotman posits another text-generating mechanism, which establishes anomalies rather than laws and which gives rise to linear, oral narratives that deal with, in de Lauretis's phrase, "incidences, calamities, crimes, chance occurrences-in short, anything contravening, or in excess of, the mythically established order of things" (117). Lotman argues that modern fictional narrative derives from the reciprocal interaction of these two typologically older types of texts: the mythical and the historical, the cyclical and the linear, the universal and the specific.
He goes on to specify two different types of characters in narrative:
"those who are mobile, who enjoy freedom with regard to plot-space, who
can change their place in the structure of the artistic world and cross
the frontier, the basic topological feature of this space, and those who
are immobile, who represent, in fact, a function of this space" (167, in
de Lauretis 118). He specifies, further, two functions, both open-ended
and therefore endlessly repeatable, which comprise elementary narrative
sequence: "entry into a closed space, and emergence from it." He
continues, "Inasmuch as closed space can be interpreted as 'a cave',
'the grave', 'a house', 'woman', . . . entry into it is interpreted on
various levels as 'death', 'conception', 'return home' and so on;
moreover all these acts are thought of as mutually identical" (168, de
Lauretis 118). It remains for de Lauretis to spell out the implications
of such a system for the gendering of narrative:
the hero must be male, regardless of the gender of the text-image,
because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is
morphologically female and indeed, simply, the womb. The implication
here is not inconsequential. For if the work of the mythical
structuration is to establish distinctions, the primary distinction
on which all others depend is not, say, life and death, but rather
sexual difference. . . . [The] hero, the mythical subject, is
constructed as sexual being and as male; he is the active principle
of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of
differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to
life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a
resistance, matrix and matter. (118-19)
This formulation has obvious and far-reaching implications for My Ántonia, regarding both the shape of
the narrative and the dual nature of Jim's story—its mythicality, its
Oedipal universality, and yet its historical and personal specificity.
As Hermione Lee points out (and I have already mentioned), the novel is
characterized by a repeated fluctuation between enclosure and emergence.
Near the beginning, naturally, the emphasis is recurrently upon images
that suggest preoedipal fusion with the mother, encirclement, and the
act of birth: these images are echoed cyclically, generationally, near
the end of the novel, when the children burst forth from the fruit cave.
As Jim's narrative proceeds into his adolescence, the fluctuation
between enclosure and emergence continues, but the emphasis falls upon
his eager yet reluctant going forth-an increasingly attenuated process
that ends in a twenty years' narrative silence, a kind of death or
enclosure, the spell of which is broken only with his return to Nebraska
and symbolic rebirth. In this and other ways, circularity is everywhere
inscribed in the novel. In O Pioneers!, Cather
refers to the "two or three human stories" that "go on repeating
themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the
larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over
for thousands of years" (119). My
Ántonia shares this sense of mythical recurrence, in which
any given birth, life, and death-even any given rise of a
civilization-is merely a position in the circle that repeats itself
"from time immemorial." Ántonia is "a rich mine of life, like
the founders of early races" (353); "Cuzak's boys" are like Aeneas, or
like Romulus and Remus; the Nebraska cornfields will "enlarge and
multiply until they [will] be, not the Shimerdas' cornfields, or Mr.
Bushy's, but the world's cornfields; . . . their yield [will] be one of
the great economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia, which underlie
all the activities of men, in peace or war" (137). Yet against this,
what poignancy of the specific Cather is able to create. "Optima dies . . . prima fugit": Jim,
Ántonia, before them Mr. Shimerda, their moment in American
history, while the prairie still bears the trace of the galloping
buffalo, all flare forth as vividly and briefly against their setting
sun as the little grasshopper or the famous plough, heroic and mortal,
desire's "picture writing" (245).
Lotman's and de Lauretis's formulations pertain especially, however, to the narrative functions of Jim and Ántonia. At the beginning of the novel, Jim and Ántonia are both its heroes. Inseparable companions, by and large sexually undifferentiated, they share equally in adventures, even though the narrative voice is Jim's. But gradually they draw apart and begin to fulfill their gender-ascribed plot functions. Jim, increasingly mobile, comes restlessly to traverse both narrative frontiers and the American frontier; Ántonia, increasingly immobile, comes finally to represent not only a human agent but also the function of space: to Jim and the I-persona, the voyaging pair of the novel's introduction, she "seemed to mean . . . the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood" (n.p.). The division between Jim and Ántonia has many stages, all of them marked by sexual difference. Two of the earliest are revealing, in that they suggest the patterns that will pertain thereafter. I have already discussed Jim's battle with the snake as re-enacting the archetypal male confrontation with the "ancient, eldest Evil," in Oedipal terms the rival phallus. The episode becomes even more suggestive once one notices that it follows directly upon the episode of the grasshopper, in which Ántonia is presented in her archetypal gestures: first, huddled down against the earth in her thin cotton dress to catch the last blaze of summer, and then reciprocating the gift when she shelters the frail, defenseless grasshopper in her hair. So it will always be. It is not that Ántonia does not have her adventure, for she does; as narrated by Jim, however, even her adventure—her rebellion, her love for Larry Donovan, her illegitimate daughter—serves to tie her more closely to her female biology, to center and ground her in the topography of cave, grave, house that, Lotman argues, is identical with the womb. Her "special mission" (367), Jim concludes, is to create and sustain the "deep-founded sheltering" (Stevens 381), which is her body writ large.
No wonder Jim cannot marry Ántonia. Finally, regardless of the
affection and the history between them, they come to inhabit such
different realms of being—or to fulfill such different plot
functions—that to see them reunited, standing in the "triple enclosure"
(341) of Ántonia's orchard, is simply to realize their
incommensurability. In the gendered myth that informs My Ántonia, Ántonia represents the body of
the world. The narrative of Jim's life describes his fall away from
union with the worldbody, into the Law of the Father. But his act of
narrative itself constitutes a perpetual desirous return toward the lost
motherbody from which his life necessarily departed. That the world lost
to experience may be recreated and repossessed in art is one great theme
of Modernist fiction. In My Ántonia, the
gendered pattern informing this theme is especially apparent. Like
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Marcel
Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, My Ántonia offers a particularly
explicit version of the myth that all symbolic language is a series of
substitutions for that lost body.
In the climactic scene of "Tom Outland's Story" in The
Professor's House, the quarrel that ends in Roddy Blake's departure
from the Blue Mesa, Tom accuses his partner of being a traitor "like
Dreyfus." By selling the mesa's artifacts to a German collector, Blake, too,
has "sold [his] country's secrets" (242-43). Completely ignoring this
personal attack, Blake responds with a passionate defense of the French
captain: "The man was innocent. It was a frame-up."
Blake's response to Tom is critically resonant because literary and cultural
"frame-ups" are central to The Professor's House.
Radically framed by the story of the St. Peter family, "Tom Outland's Story"
is structurally presented as a literary "frame-up." This framing of Tom
Outland's first-person narrative within The Professor's
House is a brilliant example of the "significant design" that
Cather believed characteristic of good fiction (in the best fiction, Cather
wrote in her essay on Sarah Orne Jewett, "the design is the story and the
story is the design" [49]) because framing is the subject as well as the
form of The Professor's House. Compositionally, Tom's
story is set within the St. Peters' story "like a turquoise set in dull
silver" (epigraph). Conceptually, Tom's story of his adventures on the Blue
Mesa is a frame-up in the gangster-film sense that Blake uses the word: it
weaves a plot that incriminates the innocent. The Dreyfus within "Tom
Outland's Story"-the victim of a frame-up inspired by cultural and racial
prejudice-is the only woman in Tom's mesa adventure, the mysterious female
corpse discovered in Cliff City.
The first of four "original inhabitants" found on the Blue Mesa, "Mother Eve"
provokes speculation because, unlike the other corpses (the "bodies of old
people" prepared for funeral rites and found together in a burial chamber),
Eve is a young woman who was apparently murdered in her home. Baptized by
Henry Atkins, the "castaway" Englishman who plays Friday in Tom and Roddy's
Crusoe adventure, Eve is given a history to confirm her name by Father
Duchene, the missionary priest who tutors Tom. After Atkins dies of a snake
bite, Father Duchene spends a week on the mesa with Outland and Blake to
study their work and to offer advice about the significance of their
findings. Duchene sum up the results of his week's study in a tentative
portrait of the "superior people" who produced the pottery, jewelry, and
tools uncovered by Outland and Blake. Twenty years among the Pueblo Indians
permit Duchene to speak with some authority, and his description of the
cliff settlement points to two crucial ruins that the amateur "excavators"
have overlooked: the granaries that testify to the highly advanced state of
the tribe's agriculture and the "amphitheatre," the center of ancient
religious life on the mesa (218-19). The most important part of Duchene's
account of the cliff dwellers, however, is given in the casual footnote that
Tom Outland appends to his transcription of the priest's report:
Mother Eve had greatly interested Father Duchene, by the way. He laughed
and said she was well named. He didn't believe her death could throw any
light on the destruction of her people. "I seem to smell," he said
slyly, "a personal tragedy. Perhaps when the tribe went down to the
summer camp, our lady was sick and would not go. Perhaps her husband
thought it worth while to return unannounced from the farms some night,
and found her in improper company. The young man may have escaped. In
primitive society the husband is allowed to punish an unfaithful wife
with death." (223)
A miniature framed story within the larger framed story of Tom Outland's narrative, Duchene's "tragedy" of Eve may not shed light on the mysterious destruction of her tribe, but it emphatically illuminates the destruction at the heart of "Tom Outland's Story." Not only is she murdered in the lurid prehistoric past imagined by Father Duchene, but in the present time of Outland's adventure, mummified Eve is destroyed when the mule carrying her down from the mesa slips and falls to the bottom of a canyon. Significantly, the fatal fall of the Blue Mesa's Eve is caused by the oversized packing case of the German exporter who buys the mesa's artifacts from Blake. Too wide for the cliff trail, boxed Mother Eve falls more than a thousand feet to the bottom of Black Canyon (238). Figuratively speaking, Duchene also destroys Eve by encasing or boxing her. Duchene's story, like the biblical name he laughingly approves, forces Eve into a cultural framework that destroys her native identity. Like Alfred Dreyfus, Eve is the victim of a frame-up.
The cultural bias that distorts Duchene's vision of Mother Eve is most
vividly represented in the section of "Tom Outland's Story" that immediately
follows the story of Eve, Tom's account of his trip to Washington, D.C. The
sharp juxtaposition of Duchene's sketch of peaceful, domestic, and communal
Cliff City life and Tom's descriptions of the monstrous War Department that
dominates and represents the bureaucratic strife of "Washington City"
emphasizes cultural differences that Duchene ignores in conceiving of Eve as
an adulterous "lady." Duchene's portrait of a "lady" is incongruously framed
by the Judeo-Christian precepts embodied in the name of the "pretty little
fluttery Southern" belle who attracts Tom in Washington (229). The "nice
little Virginia girl" who works as a stenographer at the Smithsonian and
helps Tom get an appointment with an Institution official, Virginia Ward is
of major significance to The Professor's House,
despite her minor role in the plot of the novel. Twice described by Tom
Outland as a "little thing" (228, emphasis mine),
Virginia Ward is further objectified by her symbolic name: Virginia Ward is the product of a patriarchal culture predicated
on female chastity and subordination (like that of a ward to her legal
guardian).
When he urges Tom Outland to appeal to Washington for professional archeologists, Father Duchene speculates that the civilization of the Blue Mesa might provoke a rewriting of American history (222). His story of Eve, however, demonstrates that Duchene finally stops short of recognizing the radical nature of the challenge Eve poses to traditional conceptions of the American West. It is hardly an accident that Cather allows a woman to reign as the most prominent "original inhabitant" of the mesa: the civilization of Cliff City is not only a domestic culture but also, in contrast to the exclusively patriarchal culture of Washington City where Virginia Ward is the feminine ideal, cliff dweller city was matrilineal.
The matrilocal, matrilineal structure of Pueblo society was recognized as
early as the 1880s by archeologist John Bourke, who accompanied the first
railroad builders into Arizona and New Mexico (Eggan 272-73). By the time
Cather wrote The children belong to the mother's clan. The Moki women are not
conspicuous for their virtue. Illegitimate children receive the same
attention as those born in wedlock. The Moki wives enjoy a better position than the women of most other
Indian tribes. They own the houses, the sheep, goats, and other domestic
animals . . . and the harvested crops. The husband has no right to
dispose of any household utensil without his wife's consent. It is to
her that application must be made in the arranging of all purchase or
barter. (139)The Professor's House in the mid-1920s,
Elsie Clews Parsons, Barbara Freire-Marreco, H. R. Voth, and others had
published studies indicating the "Crow-type," matrilineal family structure
of the Hopi, Zuni, and Keresan tribes of Laguna and Acoma. Although the
primary source of "Tom Outland's Story" is well known-Cather interviewed a
brother of Richard Wetherill, the first explorer of the Mesa Verde and the
prototype of Tom Outland, when she first visited Mesa Verde in 1915-Cather
has cited only one secondary source of her Cliff Dweller material (Woodress
263-64). In an article on Mesa Verde published in The
Denver Times (31 January 1916) and in her 1938 letter on The Professor's House reprinted in On Writing, Cather acknowledges a debt to The
Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, Southwestern Colorado: Their Pottery
and Implements by Gustav Nordenskjold (Rosowski and Slote 81).
Cather clearly relies on Nordenskjold in her descriptions of the artifacts
and architecture of Cliff City. Nordenskjold does not, however, describe
"Esther"-the female mummy who inspired Mother Eve-in his account of the
human corpses discovered on Mesa Verde because she wasn't discovered until
after his manuscript was completed in 1893. While Nordenskjold's book
antedates the discovery of the particular woman featured in "Tom Outland's
Story," it does include a general discussion of women in the Hopi (or, as
Nordenskjold calls them, the "Moki") tribes that he identifies as
descendants of the extinct cliff dwellers. Nordenskjold describes both Hopi
matrilinity and the female economic power that results from matrilocality:
An avid student of the Southwest and its native culture from the time of her first visit to New Mexico in 1912, Cather would most likely have realized the full implications of these details in Nordenskjold: Hopi culture is shaped by principles of matrilinity that are radically opposed to the patriarchal biblical tradition of Eve. By changing the name of the Mesa's female mummy from Esther to Eve, Cather emphasizes the incongruity between Cliff City culture and the Judeo-Christian interpretive framework used by its male explorers. While "Esther"-a Jewish hero who became queen of Persia and saved her people from massacre-at least hints at the power of women in cliff-dweller society, Eve is a paradigm of female dupability and wifely subordination that completely misrepresents this original inhabitant of the Blue Mesa.
Cather signals the highly conjectural nature of Duchene's theory of Eve and
suggests that she "knows" Eve as Duchene does not through the numerous
rhetorical hedges that attenuate the priest's story: "I seem to smell. . . . a personal tragedy. Perhaps when the tribe went down to the summer camp. . . . Perhaps her husband thought it worth while to return"
(emphases mine). The traditions of matrilineal descent among the Hopi
(which, following Nordenskjold, Cather identifies with the extinct tribe of
the Mesa Verde) validate suspicions raised by Duchene's words and indicate
that Eve is thoroughly misunderstood by her male historian.
Nordenskjold's observation that "Moki women are not conspicuous for their virtue" points to the central flaw of Duchene's story. As archeologist Mischa Titiev explains in his study of the Oraibi Mesa, the matrilocal organization of Hopi society precludes the high regard for monogamous female chastity that is the essence of Duchene's "lady." Since marriage is an economic gain for the female household, which stands to acquire another productive member, premarital sex was frequently encouraged as an inducement to marriage (Titiev 38-39). Still more relevant to Duchene's "tragedy" of an adulteress are cultural traditions of marital fidelity and strict monogamy, and here again the realities of life on Blue Mesa contradict the priest's story. The economy of villages such as Cliff City made extramarital affairs the rule rather than the dramatic exception Duchene describes in his story. Because of their divided lives, which Tom Outland accurately reconstructs-"Like all pueblo Indians, these people had had their farms away from their dwellings. For a stronghold they needed rock, and for farming, soft earth" (203)-husbands would be separated from their wives for days at a time. While grazing sheep on distant pastures and while planting and harvesting, the men would live in huts on the plains below the mesa. During their husbands' absence, women would have sexual relations with other men almost as a matter of course. Fidelity between marriage partners of mesa tribes was thus rare; if adultery became a source of dissension between a wife and husband, a divorce would be simply effected by the latter's return to his mother's house (Eggan 34-35). Not only was adultery too common to occasion the drastic punishment Duchene describes, but such punishment is inconceivable in light of the traditions of matrilocal residence and female ownership of house and land. In such kinship systems, the wife's oldest brother and not her husband is the head of the house and the authority in all matters of family government (Schneider 1-29). In marital disputes of all sorts, including adultery, a wife would typically have the full support of her lineage or house, and the husband would be regarded as an outsider without rights. He could simply be expelled from his wife's house.
Whatever the circumstances of her death may be, Eve's story is not Duchene's
history. The significance of this critical misreading or frame-up in "Tom
Outland's Story" is made clear by the story that frames Tom's narrative.
Duchene's misreading of Eve is paralleled within the novel proper by Godfrey
St. Peter's consistent misreading of his own "ladies" and his consequent
misperception of Tom Outland. That visual art inspired The
Professor's House emphasizes the novel's preoccupation with
problems of seeing. The exhibition of Dutch genre paintings depicting
"warmly furnished" domestic interiors illuminated by a "square window, open,
through which one saw the masts of ships, or a stretch of grey sea," which
Cather saw shortly before writing The Professor's
House and credits with inspiring the novel, informs both the novel's
inset structure and its concern with framed or biased vision (Cather,
"Letter on The Professor's House" 31-32). Vividly
juxtaposing the confined space of a domestic interior and an unlimited
outdoor expanse beyond a window, Dutch genre scenes such as Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1659) not
only influenced the general structure of Cather's novel but also inspired
its central setting, the third-floor study with a "single square window"
where St. Peter works (15-16). The principal setting of The Professor's House is a Vermeerlike tableau vivant that reveals
St. Peter's misperceptions of both the interior and exterior spaces
counterposed in the picture he inhabits. St. Peter misreads both the
"female" space of his house and the blue vastness of "Outland's country" in
a way that radically links him to Father Duchene and his misconception of
Eve.
In the "one room still furnished"-and still very starkly furnished-within his
house, the Professor defines his art as a negation of the "warmly furnished"
interiors of Dutch art. St. Peter conceives his interior as a masculine
space, the antithesis of the living rooms and kitchens that Cather describes
in her account of the paintings that inspired The
Professor's House. Sanctioning only the periodic invasions of
"bloomless," sexless Augusta, the seamstress who shares the study for two
weeks every spring and fall, St. Peter defends his third-floor "atelier" as
a bastion of male intellect fortified against the female domesticity that
lies beneath him. The "headless" female dressmaking forms that St. Peter
sees as representative of the "ladies" of his household invite us to view
the architecture of the Professor's house anatomically: St. Peter's attic
study constitutes the rational male head above the mindless female body of
his house.
The monastic seclusion and remoteness of the Professor's study clearly
identify him as a disciple of Euripides, whom St. Peter admires for the
bitter misanthropy of his old age rather than for the great tragedies of his
prime. "Smiling-quite agreeably," St. Peter recalls Euripides as an old man
who ended his life in a hermit's cave after discovering domestic life to be
an "insupportable" contaminant to his peace of mind (156). As St. Peter sees
it, the intellectual "conception" of his "sons"-his eight-volume history of
The Spanish Adventurers in North America-requires
careful "insulation" from the lower realm of "cruel biological," female
conception that produces his two daughters (21). To ensure his "isolation
[and] insulation from the engaging drama of domestic life," the Professor
not only "neglects" domestic comfort in the appointment of his study but
also diligently excludes them as "perilous" threats to his "habit of living
with ideas" (162). Cather's descriptions of St. Peter's "cuddy" suggest that
the Professor positively embraces discomfort to approximate the rugged life
of his manly Spanish adventurers. While the room's "very ugly" wallpaper has
"faded into an inoffensive neutrality," its suffocating stove and
"tormenting" naked light bulb continue to assault St. Peter as the sun in
the Southwest once attacked his caballeros.
Like his Spanish adventurers, who are literally chevaliers or men on horseback, St. Peter lives by a chivalric code
that perceives women as "little things" like Virginia Ward. St. Peter scorns
the ladies of western chivalric tradition as thoroughly as he admires their
venturing knights, and this misogyny informs both the monastic austerity of
his study and his meditations on his mannequin women. While Augusta objects
that her sewing forms are "unsuitable companions for one engaged in
scholarly pursuits," St. Peter goes to ludicrous lengths to defend his two
"terrible women"-"the Bust" and "the wire lady"-as his literary muses.
Headless and therefore without speech, the female dummies (or, more
pertinently, dumb-ies) inspire St. Peter with a sense of his uniquely male
powers of articulate utterance or authority. In contrast to the "lumpy
solidity" of the female conception represented by these "ladies," powers of
male authority allow St. Peter to give birth to ideas in books.
The Professor's House radically undercuts St. Peter's
view of his literary success. While Professor St. Peter presents his Spanish Adventurers as a product of "isolation [and]
insulation" from the trivial concerns of his female household, the details
of Cather's novel expose St. Peter's theory of artistic conception as a
critical misconception. St. Peter's ideal "sons," Cather shows, are
immeasurably indebted to the real women of The Professor's
House.
In the scholarly austerity of his genre interior, a male den that makes no
concessions to "instinctive" female taste, St. Peter presents his
intellectual art as a repudiation of the arts of domestic life (50). The
major pictorial image that Cather uses to describe St. Peter's art, however,
insists upon the importance of the female "forms" that the Professor
ridicules. The tapestry Cather offers as a metaphor for the unique style of
St. Peter's unconventional history suggests that the best work in the
eight-volume series emerged not from the "isolation [and] insulation" of
artistic disengagement, as St. Peter assumes, but from his susceptibility to
the "engaging drama of domestic life":
When he was writing his best, he was conscious of pretty little girls in
fresh dresses—of flowers and greens in the comfortable, shabby
sitting-room—of his wife's good looks and good taste—even of a better
dinner than usual under preparation downstairs. All the while he had
been working so fiercely at his eight big volumes, he was not insensible
to the domestic drama that went on beneath him. His mind had played
delightedly with all those incidents. Just as, when Queen Mathilde was
doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux,-working her chronicle of
the deeds of knights and heroes,—alongside the big pattern of dramatic
action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and
beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important
chapters of his history were interwoven with personal memories.
(101)
A feminine, communal, and domestic masterpiece, Queen Mathilde's tapestry
contradicts St. Peter's assumption that art requires an "ungracious
drawing-back" from the women of his "human house" (159). As an image of the
best writing in the Professor's history, the playfully feminine border that
interweaves Mathilde's chronicle of male conquest implies that St. Peter's
wife and daughters are integral to the conception of his "sons" and are not,
as he supposes, "perilous" distractions. St. Peter is especially indebted to
his wife and oldest daughter for financial support, yet he proudly refuses
to acknowledge this debt. The disclaimer in St. Peter's account of his
intense double life as a writer and teacher is remarkable because it is so
thoroughly discredited by details that emerge later in the novel:
By many petty economies of purse, he had managed to be extravagant with
not a cent in the world but his professor's salary-he didn't, of course,
touch his wife's small income from her father. By eliminations and
combinations so many and subtle that it now made his head ache to think
of them, he had done full justice to his university lectures, and at the
same time carried on an engrossing piece of creative work. (29)
St. Peter similarly denies that he has ever "received one dollar from the Outland patent" (135). Incidents such as the St. Peters' trip to a lecture series at the University of Chicago, however, endorse Mrs. Crane's objection to the Professor's disclaimers: St. Peter benefits indirectly-if not directly-from the money in his family (135). In Chicago, Louie Marsellus cancels the St. Peters' reservations at an inexpensive hotel and books them a suite at the Blackstone. Far from protesting this arrangement, St. Peter quickly forgets "his scruples about accepting lavish hospitalities" (92).
Nowhere explicitly mentioned, the expense of the life-style that makes St.
Peter's literary pursuits possible is everywhere implied in The Professor's House. While St. Peter proudly
insists that he's never touched his wife's money or the money his daughter
Rosamond inherits from Outland, on a deeper, almost subconscious level he is
aware of his indebtedness. In the final book of the novel, St. Peter
reflects that "his married life had been happy largely through a
circumstance with which neither he nor his wife had anything to do." His
wife's inheritance from her father "had made all the difference in the
world" (257). That happy married life subsidized by Lillian's income
includes the luxury of time for writing and research (St. Peter not only has
the summers to himself while his wife and daughters vacation in Colorado but
also enjoys a three-year leave of absence from teaching while working on his
books) and domestic comforts important to St. Peter's sense of well-being
(he is able, for example, to indulge his predilection for foreign imports:
Spanish sherry, Italian wine and cheeses, French swimming visors, and Irish
linen).
The image of Queen Mathilde's tapestry suggests that the Professor's history
is in some way dependent upon the womanly arts that order his domestic life,
and the details of St. Peter's career clearly indicate the nature of this
dependence. St. Peter's remark about Outland's invention is equally
applicable to his own long years of literary invention: "Without capital to
make it go, Tom's idea was merely a formula written out on paper" (138).
Without the personal and financial support of his wife and, later, Rosamond
and her husband, The Spanish Adventurers would have
been no more than an aborted conception. Praising St. Peter's outspoken
criticism of the "new commercialism" that makes modern life "an orgy of
acquisition," critics have traditionally taken St. Peter at his own word and
have failed to consider his life-style (Stouck 100-104). Few have noted the
hypocrisy of the Professor's diatribes against "corrupting" fortune. In
refusing to acknowledge that his ideal Spanish sons are indebted to the
material wealth of his wife and daughter, St. Peter is both ungenerous and
dishonest.
In suggesting that St. Peter's history relies upon domestic arts managed and
subsidized by Lillian, Queen Mathilde's "chronicle" subtly controverts the
more prominent allusion to French art that St. Peter provides to describe
his intellectual pursuits. While the "playfully" feminine border of the
Bayeux tapestry identifies the Professor's "terrible women" as vital
components of his art, the literary framework of Anatole France's Le Mannequin d'Osier insists upon the enmity between
female parlor and male study that informs the interior decor and remote
location of St. Peter's "dark den." As often as Augusta objects that her
dressmaking forms are "unsuitable companions" for a scholar, St. Peter
reassures her by pointing to a literary precedent for the "ladies" who share
his study: "If they were good enough for Monsieur
Bergeret, they are certainly good enough for me" (19). But what is
"good enough" for St. Peter is rather bad for his wife, Lillian, who is cast
by this reference to Le Mannequin d'Osier into the
role of Monsieur Bergeret's ill-tempered and unfaithful wife. St. Peter's
allusion "frames" Lillian in the same way that the Blue Mesa's "Eve" is
framed by her biblical name and Duchene's story: she is grossly
misrepresented by a literary framework that invites us to misread her.
Implicitly identified by her husband's joke with Madame Bergeret-a woman
whose interest in her husband's intellectual pursuits is limited to the
seduction of his favorite student-innocent Lillian St. Peter is, like "Eve,"
trapped into playing the role of an adulterous femme fatale by the stories
and histories of patriarchal tradition.
St. Peter's attitude toward his wife cannot be considered apart from his
idealization of Tom Outland, since he sees Outland as the antithesis of
Lillian and the domestic and social graces she represents. In terms of the
Dutch genre scenes that inspired The Professor's
House, St. Peter's conception of corrupt and corrupting female interior
space is counterpointed by his vision of the "innocent blue" outer space
that St. Peter views from his window and associates with Tom Outland.
Remembering Outland as a rough child of the frontier who had never been
housebroken, St. Peter fondly recalls Outland's poor table manners, his
extreme discomfort in a suit and tie, and his slide down Lillian's polished
stairs (117-18). Ignoring the silent testimony of Cliff City-a sculpture in
stone that tells the story of an American West civilized by "domestic
virtue" and "arts of peace," which developed as warrior arts declined
(219-20)-St. Peter continues to see "Outland's country" as the mythic
landscape of dime-novel westerns and cowboy movies. For St. Peter, the West
remains the "rugged, untamed" frontier "dear to the American heart" (270):
it is an escape from civilization, rather than a cradle of civilization.
St. Peter's "rugged, untamed" sea of prairie and desert sets the stage for
his cowboy hero, Tom Outland. As his wife notes, St. Peter's exalted vision
of Outland is colored by "chivalry of the cinema" (270). Questioning her
husband's judgment of Outland's "simple and straightforward" character,
Lillian warns St. Peter against imagining Tom as a Hollywood legend come
true. In pointing to the silver-screen heroism that limits her husband's
vision of Outland, Lillian anticipates later critics who complain about
Outland's stereotyped character. Joseph Wood Krutch, for example, objects
that Outland is "merely a hero," an "abstraction" full of storybook glamour
but without real substance (56). Krutch is right: Tom Outland is America's most "storied" hero. Living a free life
on the desert plains, Tom Outland is Tom Mix. When St. Peter's
cowboy-student turns scientist and invents a revolutionary aircraft engine,
Tom Mix becomes Tom Swift, exchanging the western frontier for the more
modern frontier of outer space.
The Professor's House makes it clear, however, that
Outland is a stereotyped hero from St. Peter's point of view and not from
Cather's. While St. Peter dismisses his wife's criticism of Outland as
provoked by jealousy, Cather's text subtly supports Lillian's reservations
about her husband's student. Most notably, an important scene in the first
section of the novel hints that Outland falls into sudden disfavor with
Lillian not because she feels that the boy is supplanting her as St. Peter's
most intimate companion, as St. Peter supposes, but because she sees and
objects to a situation of which her husband is unaware: Outland is
romantically involved with both St. Peter daughters at the same time.
That the sexual politics of the Professor's house are considerably more
complex than the Professor realizes is most evidently implied by a crucial
exchange between Kathleen, the St. Peters' youngest daughter, and her
husband, Scott McGregor, on the night of the St. Peters' Christmas dinner
party. Earlier that evening, Louie Marsellus had called attention to the
extravagance of his Christmas gift to Rosamond, an emerald necklace, by
recalling a "little bracelet" of turquoise that she'd worn when they first
met (107). Rosamond had been visibly upset by her husband's reference to
Outland's gift, and as the McGregors are driving home Scott asks Kitty
whether it's possible that her older sister still cares for Outland despite
her apparent devotion to Marsellus. Kitty's response is remarkable because
it is so disproportionate to her husband's simple question:
"Do you suppose she has some feeling for him still, under all this
pompuosity?" "I don't know, and I don't care. But, oh, Scott, I do love you very
much!" she cried vehemently. . . . "Sure?" he muttered. "Yes, I "Awful nice of you to have told me all about it at the start, Kitty. Most
girls wouldn't have thought it necessary. I'm the only one who knows
ain't I?" "The only one who has ever known." "And I'm just the one another girl wouldn't have told." (109-10)
do!" she said fiercely, squeezing his
knuckles together with all her might.
What "it" is that Kitty has confessed to Scott is partially clarified by the
question that ends the scene. Reassuring McGregor that she always knew he
was "the real one," Kitty asks, "You know you are the
real one, don't you?" McGregor's response suggests doubt: "I guess!" (110).
Kitty's final question makes sense only if McGregor is aware that there has been another man in his wife's life. The circumstance stances surrounding Kitty's engagement to McGregor imply that Tom Outland was this "other man." St. Peter recalls that Kathleen has been deaf to his advice only once, "and that was when, shortly after Rosamond's engagement to Tom, she announced that she was going to marry Scott McGregor" (65). Objecting to the marriage only because McGregor seems unsuitable for Kathleen, St. Peter misses the point implicit in the suddenness of this second wedding announcement: Kathleen's engagement is a jealous reaction to her sister's impending marriage to Outland. The cryptic exchange between Scott and Kitty on the night of the Christmas party intimates a triangle that explains the strained relations between Kitty and Rosamond. That McGregor is "the only one who has ever known" about "it" rules out the possibility that Kitty has merely confessed her love for Outland because her father is well aware of that. Indeed, the conversation between Kitty and St. Peter in the Professor's study demonstrates that their mutual love for Outland is the strongest bond between St. Peter and his youngest daughter (130-32). Whatever Kitty has told McGregor must amount to more than a story of innocent infatuation. Outland had evidently been involved with Kitty before his engagement to her sister, and at some point shortly before or after her marriage Kitty told McGregor about the liaison.
"Felt upon the page without being specifically named there," the relationship
between Outland, Kitty, and Rosamond is presented in the classic Catherian
fashion defined in "The Novel Démeublé" (On Writing
41). While the details of this triangle are deliberately left vague, enough
is implied to suggest that Outland has deceived St. Peter, who regards him
as "an older brother" to his daughters (132). Outland's relationship with
St. Peter follows the pattern of his partnerships with Roddy Blake and
Professor Crane (the physics professor whose help in developing the Outland
engine is never acknowledged by his former lab assistant): Outland "requites
faith and friendship" with betrayal, neglect, and deception (253).
To my knowledge the scenes suggesting Kitty's liaison with Outland have
attracted no critical attention. This oversight is important because it
indicates the power of St. Peter's idealization of Outland. St. Peter's
"noble" cowboy is the lone frontiersman as "dear to the American heart" as
the frontier itself, and readers have consequently followed St. Peter's lead
in misreading Outland as a hero. Readers who have praised Outland as a
symbol of the "selfless" western spirit gradually being eroded by "the
feminization of modern society" (Gilbert and Gubar 207) fail to give proper
credit to Lillian's suspicions about Outland and his "not altogether
straightforward" conduct because they have also failed to give proper weight
to the betrayal at the climax of "Tom Outland's Story." In his introduction
to the inset narrative, St. Peter encourages us to give little weight to
Outland's repudiation of Roddy Blake: "It was nothing very incriminating,
nothing very remarkable . . . the sort of thing a boy is sensitive
about-until he grows older" (176). "Humanized" by collective need, the rock
that represents "loyalty in love and friendship" exposes Tom Outland's
frontier virtue as a vice (Death Comes for the
Archbishop 97). Against the background of the Blue Mesa, rugged
individualism appears not as the "manly, mature" integrity St. Peter sees in
Outland but as a denial of the human ties that distinguish civilization from
"mere brutality" (221). Outland's repudiation of Blake is both a logical
culmination of his "adventure" and a foreshadowing of his later violation of
the Professor's fatherly trust, since the "singularly individual" sense of
self that St. Peter most admires in Outland is a quality that limits his
sense of duty to others.
The hero of Cather's story is not St. Peter's hero, Tom Outland, but the woman who serves as "a corrective, a remedial influence" that offsets Outland's individualism (280). Augusta's sense of obligation to "the world of men and women" is as limitless as Outland's is limited; St. Peter recalls times when she "used to telephone Mrs. St. Peter that she would be a day late, because there had been a death in the family where she was sewing just then, and she was 'needed'" (280). Augusta saves St. Peter from the ultimate in "singular" individualism-the solitude of death-not only by physically rescuing him when he is asphyxiated by gas in his study but by inspiring him through the example of her life. Compelling St. Peter to recognize that he is "outward bound" and tied to the human community, Augusta is clearly allied to Mother Eve and Cliff City. Like Eve, Augusta is "framed" by a false scheme (an investment scam). Like Eve's Mesa, Augusta counters the example of Tom's repeated betrayals (of Roddy Blake, Professor Crane, and Professor St. Peter) by providing a model of "loyalty in love and friendship."
If "the design is the story" of The Professor's House
because the novel is preeminently concerned with conceptual
frame-ups-Duchene's misreading of Mother Eve; St. Peter's misperceptions of
both Outland and the "ladies" of his house-an important question remains:
why does the novel Cather described as a "nasty, grim little tale" so
anxiously explore critical misreading (Woodress 367)? While an interest in
the way readers such as Duchene and St. Peter take and mistake histories and
stories (like those of Eve and Outland) is natural for a writer, Cather had
particularly pressing reasons to explore this subject in 1925. The crisis of
domicile in The Professor's House is significantly
precipitated by St. Peter's "Oxford prize for history" (33). The five
thousand pounds attached to this award "had built [for St. Peter] the new
house into which he did not want to move" (33). As many readers have noted,
the details of St. Peter's literary career closely parallel Cather's; the
Oxford prize is a fictional version of the Pulitzer Prize that Cather won
for One of Ours in 1923. The Oxford-Pulitzer Prize
not only shapes the plot of The Professor's House (by
building the new house that threatens to uproot St. Peter from the house
where he wrote The Spanish Adventurers) but also
informs the novel's thematic concern with critical misreadings.
Of all Cather's works, none was more hostilely received and consistently
misinterpreted than her Pulitzer-Prize-winning The book was generally dismissed by male reviewers as a woman writer's
romanticized, outmoded view of modern combat. It was, Mencken
charged-evidently using the worst epithet he could imagine-very like the
work of a "lady novelist." For the first time, Cather was explicitly
judged as limited because of her gender. Trespassing on the preserve of
masculine fiction in the last section of the novel, in which her hero
Claude Wheeler enters the war in France, Cather had tred on forbidden
ground and so, many reviewers agreed, exposed the limits of the female
imagination. (114)One of
Ours. Anticipating that readers would be wary of a war story by a
woman, Cather changed publishers for this novel because she believed her
story of Claude Wheeler would require the special publicity and promotion
that Alfred Knopf promised and that Houghton Mifflin had failed to provide
for her earlier novels (Letter to Ferris Greenslet, 12 January 1921).
Cather's worries proved justified. As James Woodress notes, the most
influential reviewers of the novel-including old Cather champions such as
Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken-were emphatically negative (333). Sharon
O'Brien summarizes the sexism that pervades the most prominent reviews of
One of Ours:
Considering war fiction a genre beyond the scope of "lady novelists," critics
such as Mencken misread One of Ours as thoroughly-and
as misogynistically-as Duchene misreads Mother Eve. More specifically,
contemporary male reviewers consistently failed to see that the war in One Of Ours is romanticized only from Claude
Wheeler's point of view, not from Cather's. At least in part, then, The Professor's House is a brilliant novelization of
Cather's experience as a "lady novelist." She charts maps of male
misreadings that clearly explore frame-ups of women in literature.
The early studies of pueblo social structure by Elsie Parsons (on the
Zuni, Laguna, and Acoma), Barbara Freire-Marreco (on the Tewa tribes
of the Hano pueblo), and H. R. Voth (on the Hopi) are cited and
masterfully synthesized by Frederick Eggan in Social Organization of the Western Pueblos. Eggan argues
that the various pueblo tribes derive from a proto-culture organized
according to matrilineal principles and that present variations in
pueblo social organization are caused by varying degrees of
acculturation after contact with the patrilineal systems of the
Spanish and the patrilineal moiety systems of other Native American
tribes. Eggan's landmark study has been subsequently challenged and
revised. In particular, Robin Fox (The Keresan
Bridge, 1967) and Alfonso Ortiz (The Tewa
World, 1969) contend that Eggan's theory that the
matrilineal clan and household were the "basic organizing
principles" of pueblo society is valid only for the western pueblos.
Fox and Ortiz, respectively, argue that the social structure of the
Keresan pueblos (which includes Mesa Verde, the model of Tom
Outland's Blue Mesa) and the eastern Tewan pueblos are not
"acculturated versions of a basic western pueblo Crow-type original"
but were instead originally structured as patrilineal moiety systems
(Fox 73). In moieties, a dual organization-such as the division of a
tribe into summer and winter people-is the basic structuring
principle; in patrilineal moieties, a woman joins the moiety of her
husband upon marriage.
Cather's understanding of pueblo ethnography was, of course, that of
a nonspecialist, and her knowledge of the variety of the pueblo
tribes of Arizona and New Mexico was limited. Both in her 1916
article on the Mesa Verde for the Denver
Times (31 January) and in The Professor's
House, Cather seems to follow the lead of pioneering
archeologists such as Jesse Fewkes in identifying the lost tribe of
Mesa Verde with the Hopi. This mistake (Mesa Verde was most probably
settled by a Keresan tribe) reinforces my hunch that Cather
believed-or willfully imagined-that "Mother Eve" belonged to a
matrilocal culture, since the matrilineal principles of the Hopi are
indisputable and were well know in the 1920s. Gustaf Nordenskjold,
the primary source of Cather's archeological details in The Professor's House, repeatedly cites J. G.
Bourke, who described the social customs of Laguna in the late
nineteenth century, when railroads were being built across New
Mexico and Arizona. As Eggan notes, Bourke clearly perceived the
patterns of matrilocal residence and maternal control in Laguna,
noting in his journal: "Children bore names referring to the clan of
mother or to that of the father. The women owned the houses. Women
possessed, even if they did not always exercise, the right of
proposing to the young men of their choice. . . . The power of the
wife over property is apparent to every purchaser: upon her consent
depends the closing of bargains, which she cements or breaks
arbitrarily" (Eggan 273).
When Willa Cather's The Professor's House was
published in 1925, it was greeted with a mixed critical response. Early
reviewers objected particularly to the novel's experimental structure. Since
then, however, the novel has received increasing critical attention and is
today considered one of Cather's major achievements. Many commentators on
the novel have chosen biographical and psychological approaches, or a
combination of the two. While these readings have yielded valuable insights into the
work and its relation to the author, they have rarely concerned themselves
with the larger historical and cultural context of The
Professor's House. My explication attempts to fill this gap by
relating Cather's protagonists, Godfrey St. Peter and Tom Outland, and her
cultural and social criticism to the historical theories of Oswald Spengler,
published in his widely influential work, The Decline of
the West. It is not the primary goal of this intertextual analysis
to postulate a dependence of The Professor's House on
The Decline of the West. Rather, it aims at
revealing a whole new layer of meaning and explaining aspects of the novel
that have so far not been addressed and thus appear arbitrary. While the
influence of Spengler on writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald has long been acknowledged, it is surprising that Willa Cather's
Spenglerian vision of America in The Professor's
House, published in the same year as The Great
Gatsby, 1925, has so far escaped the critics' attention.
Unlike in Fitzgerald's case, there is no scholarly evidence as yet that
Cather read The Decline of the West before she wrote
The Professor's House. It is, however, highly
unlikely that Spengler's widely reviewed and discussed ideas would have
escaped her attention. Der Untergang des Abendlandes
was published in two volumes in 1918 and 1922, respectively. The English
translation by Charles Francis Atkinson appeared in 1926 and 1928, published
in London by G. Allen and in New York by Alfred A. Knopf. Even though the
translation of volume one appeared a year after the publication of The Professor's House, Cather could have had prior
access to Spengler's ideas. Before starting the novel-Cather worked on it
from the fall of 1923 to the winter of 1924-25 (Woodress 212)-she traveled
in Europe for six months, where she may have become familiar with Spengler's
theories. Moreover, the two volumes of The Decline of the
West were widely reviewed in American publications after their
appearance in Germany in 1918 and 1922, respectively.
Willa Cather may have frowned upon any connection between Spengler's theories
of history and her novel if indeed she was serious in her commentary on The Professor's House in a 1925 interview with Rose
C. Feld. On this occasion, she announced that in her new novel "there will
be no theories, no panaceas, no generalizations. It will be a story about
people in a prosperous provincial city in the Middle West. Nothing new and
strange, you see" (II). I cannot help but feel, however, that her
pronouncement must be treated with as much seriousness as Mark Twain's
warning against a critical reading of The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn in the novel's famous "Notice."
Spengler's theory of history is romantic and organic, postulating that each culture is a biological entity with an innate development pattern and a predetermined life span of about one thousand years. His metaphors of the four seasons and the stages of human life serve to illustrate that each culture emerges, grows, matures, and eventually dies, not by divine force but by inherent destiny. Spengler refers to eight cultures that have so far existed: Egyptian, Indian, Babylonian, Chinese, Greco-Roman, Arabic, Mayan, and Occidental or Western. Of particular importance to Europe, as Konrad Falke points out in his 1922 review, "are [the] ancient or 'Apollonian' culture, with its instinct for physical beauty and development; Arabian or 'Magian' culture, with its all-pervading fatalism; and the Western or 'Faustian' culture, with its ever-present consciousness of infinite progress" (696). Spengler illustrates and supports his claims with a dazzling array of details. Applying his theory to his own Western culture, he shows it to be in decline, having reached the last stage of cultural evolution, civilization. This stage of cultural decay is characterized by the rise of the world-city, which draws people from a natural, instinctive existence close to the earth to an artificial, intellectual one in the cities. The sense of being a people is destroyed and replaced by cosmopolitanism. This lack of form and tradition is associated with the rise of imperialism, the preoccupation with science and machines, the emergence of money as a dynamic force, and the spread of atheism and voluntary sterility among civilization's final men. Spengler places Napoleon at the threshold of Western civilization. The rise of democracies is accompanied by the increasing dominance of the power of money until this plutocracy is replaced by Caesarism, the rule of tyrannical dictators who preside over the final dissolution of their culture in a period of great wars.
Since the idea of "Faustian" culture is so significant to Cather's novel, it warrants further explanation. According to Spengler, Faustian man is preoccupied with space, expanse, restless geographic and intellectual exploration. Time is perceived as eternal space as infinite, and will is the means by which Faustian man imposes himself on the world. His quest for the unachievable manifests itself in scientific innovations and imperialist expansion. As his culture wanes, he becomes increasingly intellectualized and rigid; Nature-feeling is replaced by Nature-knowledge. As culture turns into civilization, Faustian man must yield to plutocrats and the new Caesars. The rise of civilization is accompanied by a widespread lack of faith, the sign of a spiritually exhausted culture. A longing for death among civilization's final generation heralds the end of a culture's life cycle.
My reading of The Professor's House as Willa Cather's
Spenglerian vision of America applies these characteristics of civilization
specifically to the two protagonists, Godfrey St. Peter and Tom Outland. Of
central importance to this analysis are Spengler's view of civilization as
the last stage in a culture's life cycle and its association with intellect,
science, atheism, imperialism, money, sterility, the rise of the world-city
and cosmopolitanism, the emergence of Caesarism, and the longing for death.
In addition, Spengler's grim historical determinism, his insistence on
destiny, his commentaries on architecture as a reflection of culture, and
particularly his portrayal of civilization's final men will shed new light
on the development and inner dualism of Cather's protagonists, Godfrey St.
Peter and Tom Outland.
While many critics have commented on the dualism in St. Peter's personality,
no one has related his inner division to the larger historical context. As
an intellectual city dweller and cosmopolitan alienated from his cultural
environment, St. Peter shows many of the characteristics Spengler ascribes
to those destined to live in the declining phase of civilization. As a
culture draws closer to its death, its people lose their vital link to the
soil as they are increasingly forced into the anonymity of large cities.
There, separated from the power of the land-cut off from it, even, by the
pavement underfoot-Being becomes more and more languid, sensation and
reason more and more powerful. Man becomes intellect, "free" like
nomads, whom he comes to resemble, but narrower and colder than they.
"Intellect," "Geist," "esprit," is the specific urban form of the
understanding waking-consciousness. All art, all religion and science,
become slowly intellectualized, alien to the land, incomprehensible to
the peasant of the soil. With the Civilization sets in the climacteric.
The immemorial old roots of Being are dried up in the stone masses of
its cities. And the free intellect-fateful word!-appears like a flame,
mounts splendid into the air, and pitiably dies. (2:92)
St. Peter is indeed an intellectual nomad, having left his native Michigan to wander through France, Spain, and the American Southwest in pursuit of his scholarship. He is languid and increasingly fatigued, preparing for his death as the novel draws to a close. He is also alienated from the land, even though he has retained an instinctive sense that having roots in the soil of a specific place is imperative. It appears that the transition from a vital culture to a climacteric civilization is reflected in St. Peter's character.
Spengler views the geographic migration from country to city, which
accompanies the shift from culture to civilization, as a weakening factor.
His metaphor for the way in which civilization molds human beings is
"petrification." As he puts it, the "intellectual age and the stone-built,
petrifying world city [follow] mother-earth"
(1:31, italics added). On a personal level, St. Peter has undergone just
this process. His name, of course, suggests stone, and his self-imprisonment
in the "shadowy crypt" (Cather 112) of his attic manifests his entombed
existence. Cather emphasizes the result of this petrification in her
description of St. Peter's head: "The mould of his head on the side was so
individual and definite, so far from casual, that it was more like a
statue's head than a man's" (34). Interestingly, Spengler notes that in the
urbanized setting of civilization, "Costumes, even faces, are adjusted to a
background of stone" (2:94).
Cultural decline and urbanization, according to Spengler, go hand in hand with an ever-increasing intellectualization. "The city" is intellect" (2:96), he writes and adds that in civilization's final men "intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by exercise in thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejune" (2:103) St. Peter, a primitive nature lover in his youth , has turned into a monkish scholar, dedicated to a life of the mind. Time for his studies and time for his family are carefully allotted and ardently protected. He has even managed to "train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours of the day" (27). In his attic he seems to lose much of his vitality. When his wife, Lillian, expresses concern that he might become increasingly "lonely and inhuman" (162), St. Peter merely replies, "Well, the habit of living with ideas grows on one, I suppose (162). Only occasionally St. Peter satisfies his intuitive need for communion with nature in his garden or in the lake. Lillian disapproves of his swimming, and her lacking understanding of her husband's needs is a sign of their marriage's deterioration.
St. Peter's petrification is also evident in the setting. Spengler explains that houses are powerful reflections of cultural life (2:88, 124). The cliff dwellings signify integration into the land. The Marsellus mansion symbolizes the power of money and opulence. Godfrey's old house and the attic, peopled with empty sewing forms, are symbols of petrification, entombment, and ostracism from family and the world at large. St. Peter is imprisoned in the "dark den" (16) of his study, where he hides behind his desk from the outside world. His only companions are his manuscript notebooks and Augusta's dressmaker's forms. He has grown so fond of these dead, hollow companions that he forbids Augusta to remove them to the new house. In his insistence on the immutability of his lifeless environment, another symptom of his petrification, St. Peter anticipates his near death and his later acceptance that he was "falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family" (275). To escape the oppressive isolation in his attic, St. Peter seeks refuge in his garden.
This aspect of the setting is particularly illuminating because here Cather
shows that her central character is trapped between a modern urban
civilization to which he belongs against his will, and a pastoral,
earth-bound world he yearns for but cannot regain. Again, Cather's ideas
closely resemble Spengler's in The Decline of the
West. Spengler equates the last stage of a culture with the city and
notes, "It is the Late City that first defies the land, . . . denies all Nature. It wants to be something different
from and higher than Nature" (2:94). "Extra muros," Spengler
explains, nature is tamed and domesticated, and "intra
muros arises an imitation Nature, fountains in lieu of springs,
flower-beds, formal pools, and clipped hedges in lieu of meadows and ponds
and bushes" (2:94). The latter, of course, describes exactly the appearance
of St. Peter's garden. Cather emphasizes that "his walled-in garden had been
the comfort of his life-and it was the one thing his neighbors held against
him" (14). It is a French garden, carefully designed and meticulously
maintained. The linden trees are symmetrical, the greenbrier clipped into
great bushes. For twenty years St. Peter has imposed himself upon this
ground to create a seemingly natural, though artificially created, retreat
in the tradition of eighteenth-century European landscape architecture, and
finally he "had got the upper hand of it" (15). Referring to the lifeless
setting of modern civilization, Spengler sees "stony house filled with
coloured dust and strange uproar" and adds that "men dwell in these houses,
the like of which no nature-being has ever conceived" (2:94). St. Peter
compensates for the unhealthy effect of "the dusty air and the brutal light"
(14) in his house by drawing close to his walled garden.
The disagreement St. Peter encounters with his landlord, the German-born farmer Appelhoff, over the use of his garden illustrates the contrast between Godfrey, the reluctant city dweller, and the down-to-earth immigrant peasant, who anticipates Anton Rosicky in his earth-consciousness and skepticism of urban life. Appelhoff lives close to the soil; his little house seems to grow out of the hillside, its red brick basement "covered with hop vines" (51). His garden is brimming with apples and sickle pears, and he uses the blossoms of the linden tree for medicinal purposes. It is hardly surprising, then, that Appelhoff confronts the professor with this disapproving comment: "'I don't like dem trees what don't bear not'ing,' said the old man with sly humour, remebering the Professor's glistening, barren shrubs and the good ground wasted behind his stucco wall" (51-52). Appelhoff is reminiscent of Spengler's ideal peasant, whom he describes as "the eternal man, independent of every Culture that ensconces itself in the cities" (2:96). St. Peter's fondness for the old man may well be rooted in his awareness that they share a peasant soul. We must remember that Godfrey grew up on a farm and developed so keen a sense of place that the departure from his home almost killed him.
St. Peter's character is marked by a reluctance to accept change or to
accommodate himself to the world around him. Instead, he retreats into
isolation and a worship of youth. If his yearning for lost youth manifests
an unexpected lack of maturity, his rejection of modern America constitutes
his quarrel with the forces of history. St. Peter is a product of his time,
whether he likes it or not. Early in the novel, he reluctantly admits that
"he could not evade the unpleasant effects of change" (15), that he had to
return to the now empty house. What the Professor confronts here is his own
impending displacement by the monetary rewards of his scholarship. He lives
in an age of commercialism from which he cannot extricate himself. Spengler
stresses, "We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of
full Civilization" (1:44), and he adds:
For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this
moment of its development-the moment when money is celebrating its last
victories, and the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches with quiet,
firm step-our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us
within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the
living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the
freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that historic
necessity has set
will be accomplished with the
individual or against him. (2:507)
Godfrey finally acknowledges this determinism as he reviews "the design of his life" (265). He insists on the romantic notion that only his youth was genuine, while "his career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning" (264). Not even his histories had anything to do with his "original ego" (265).
Indeed, St. Peter's scholarly field stands in sharp contradiction to his earlier, earth-bound self, "the original, unmodified St. Peter" (263), the young Kansas boy, "a primitive, . . . only interested in earth and woods and water" (265). The Professor spent much of his adult life on a colonial effort that required an initial uprooting of the colonists from their homeland and resulted in the further uprooting of the native cultures they encountered. This topic, however, is entirely appropriate, for imperialism is the mark of a declining civilization.
The novel's theme of imperialism reflects, then, both Cather's preoccupation
with a declining America and St. Peter's inevitable part in it. Spengler
refers to imperialism as "the typical symbol of the passing away," for
"imperialism is Civilization unadulterated" (1:36). He claims that expansion
for the representatives of civilization is not a matter of choice but a form
of destiny. "The expansive tendency," he argues, "is a doom, something
daemonic and immense, which grips, forces into service, and uses up the late
mankind of the world-city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware" (1:37). As
an expert in Spanish colonial history, St. Peter vicariously experienced one
of Europe's great hegemonic endeavors while researching his eight-volume
study, The Spanish Adventurer in North America. Yet
there is another clue in the novel that firmly links the Professor to
Western culture's stage of decay. Godfrey St. Peter's middle name is
Napoleon, whom Spengler places as the great imperialist figure "on the
threshold of Civilization" (1:38). Spengler, Napoleon and expansionism are
synonymous, and his influence reaches into our century. Says Spengler,
"Napoleon inwardly rules us, all of us, our states and our armies, our public opinion, the whole of
our political outlook, and the more effectually the less we are conscious of
it" (2:439n). This connection becomes apparent when Cather, referring to
Rosamond's conspicuous consumption during her shopping spree in Chicago,
writes, "She was like Napoleon looting the Italian palaces" (154). Cather
ties St. Peter by name and family history to the age of imperialism. In
fact, it is "the Professor's darkest secret. At the font he had been
christened Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter. There had always been a Napoleon in
the family, since a remote grandfather got his discharge from the Grande
Armée. Godfrey had abbreviated his name in Kansas, and even his daughters
didn't know what it had been originally" (163). Why is the Professor so
secretive about his name? He drops it when he is eight years old. But why
does he continue to deny this name even in adult life, despite his love for
France? Perhaps his suppression of his family's link to Napoleonic
expansionism must be seen in the same light as St. Peter's confession that
imperialism, the subject of his life-long research, had nothing to do with
the essential St. Peter; it was an attempt to deny his destiny of living in
a declining civilization.
Cather's strategy in The Professor's House is to
project the historically inevitable progression from culture to civilization
into the evolution of Godfrey's self. What has slumbered all these years
under the guise of Godfrey St. Peter, the intellectual nomad, cosmopolitan,
and city dweller, was his young, earth-bound, primitive self. It was this
obliterated self that had urged him to stay in touch with the natural world,
whether by working the soil in his garden or immersing himself in the blue
lake. His instinctive sense that roots are vitally important is evident in
this passage, "Coming upon a curly root that thrust itself across his path,
he said: 'That is it'" (265-66). St. Peter realizes here that the modern
world has disconnected him from the geography of his youth, but more
importantly from a self that was in tune with the universe, not separated
from it by the thick walls of houses and ivory towers. His malaise, then,
stems from the replacement of a vital, earth-conscious culture by a sterile,
urban civilization, dictated by the aging process inherent in every cultural
entity. In her historical pessimism Cather echoes here not only Spengler,
but anticipates D. H. Lawrence's pronouncement in his "A Propos Lady
Chatterley's Lover": "Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great
uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in
the universe" (354).
St. Peter resembles Spengler's final man not only in his intellectualism, the
petrification of his self, his dislocation from the earth, and his
association with imperialism. Three other features underscore this affinity:
his sterility, loss of religious faith, and longing for death. In his
portrayal of a declining culture, Spengler emphasizes "the sterility of civilized man" (2:103) as a typical symptom. To be
sure, Godfrey has two daughters, Kathleen and Rosamond, for whom he shows
love and concern, but any intimate relationship with his wife, Lillian,
seems to have ceased. Moreover, at the end of the novel, he arrives at this
insight: "He seemed to know . . . that he was solitary and must always be
so; he had never married, never been a father" (265). By distancing himself
from any notion of family and reproduction, he affirms his essential
sterility. In this context, it also appears significant that the marriages
of both of St. Peter's daughters are childless, as is the couple with whom
Tom Outland stays in Washington.
The Professor's lack of religious faith is particularly symptomatic of
Spengler's final man. His name, Godfrey, as John Swift points out, signifies
a freedom from God (308). St. Peter also tells Augusta, a devout Catholic,
"You'll never convert me back to the religion of my fathers now, if you're
going to sew in the new house and I'm going to work on here" (24), and he
regrets that no one will in future remind him of the religious holidays.
Later, St. Peter's questioning of Augusta on the Magnificat draws this
response: "Why, Professor! Did you receive no
religious instruction at all?" Godfrey explains: "How could I, Augusta? My
mother was a Methodist, there was no Catholic church in our town in Kansas,
and I guess my father forgot his religion" (99). Spengler contends that
"atheism comes . . . with the dawn of civilization. It belongs to the great
city, to the 'educated man' of the great city who acquired mechanistically
what his forefathers the creators of Culture had lived organically" (1:409).
Perhaps even more relevant to St. Peter is the following statement: "The
megalopolitan is irreligious; this is part of his
being, a mark of his historical position. Bitterly as he may feel the inner
emptiness and poverty, earnestly as he may long to be religious, it is out
of his power to be so" (1:409). St. Peter's lecture on science, religion,
and art explains in some detail the waning of faith in modern civilization.
This passage shows particularly effectively how similar Cather's and
Spengler's ideas on these issues are.
The Professor argues that the rise of cold scientific analysis has undermined
the mystery and morality of human existence. "I don't think much of science
as a phase of human development" (67), says the Professor and adds that "the
old riddles" are more important to human beings than science's "ingenious
toys" (68). Religion, he contends, with its pageantry, symbolism, and art,
enriched human life and allowed men and women to believe "in the mystery and
importance of their own little lives" (68). Life, religion and art once were
inseparable. Reflected in the great cathedrals is the expression of God's
will through art. Architects, artisans, and artists, the Professor
concludes, "might, without sacrilege, have changed the prayer a little and
said, 'Thy will be done in art, as it is in heaven'"
(69). St. Peter's scathing attack on science, then, is motivated by his
belief that it has destroyed this unity between man and the numinous. Now,
the professor complains, "it's the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that
taketh away the sins of the world" (68).
A look at a 1924 interview with Rose C. Feld indicates that Cather uses St. Peter here to express her own views on art and the scientific-technological age. Commenting on the deplorable state of modern art, she says: "The world goes through periods or waves of art. Between these periods come great resting places. We may be resting right now" (11). Spengler, of course, viewed modern art as inferior attempts to represent the megalopolitan consciousness, as a decline into formlessness and artificiality. In the same interview, Cather blames the technological age for the loss of beauty and creativity: "Restlessness such as ours, success such as ours, striving such as ours, do not make for beauty. . . . It is possible that machinery has finished us as far as [our sensitivity for art and beauty and our creativity are] concerned. Quick transportation is the death of art" (Feld 11). A final look at Spengler's comments on religion will shed more light on St. Peter's struggle with faith and his relationship to Augusta.
In his lecture on science and mystery, St. Peter echoes Spengler's contention
that the modern intellect "has done with the irrational for good and all and
despises any waking-consciousness that still knows or acknowledges
mysteries" (2:309). In doing so, it has laid the foundation for the
exploitation of nature and materialism. Atheism or fraudulent
"mock-religion" accompanies this development (2:310). However, as
civilizations wane and enter into their final phase, Spengler discovers a
phenomenon that he terms Second Religiousness
(2:310). This is the spiritual complement to Caesarism, the political
manifestation of Late Civilization. The people in this age of reason, having
cut themselves off from nature and the numinous, again discover the need for
spirituality. Spengler writes that when "the possibilities of physics as a
critical mode of world-understanding are exhausted, . . . the hunger for
metaphysics presents itself afresh" (2:311). He refers to the Augustan Age
of the Classical period as one example of the Second Religiousness
phenomenon (2:310). Could it be that Augusta personifies this new faith for
the Professor? After all, she saves him from certain death, and when she
visits the recuperating professor, "she sat down by the table and again took
up her little religious book. St. Peter, with half-closed eyes, lay watching
her-regarding in her humankind, as if after a definitive absence from the
world of men and women. If he had thought of Augusta sooner, he would have
got up from the couch sooner. Her image would have at once suggested the
proper action" (279-80). Augusta's piety halts St. Peter's drift toward
death and gives him the fortitude to endure "the bloomless side of life"
(280) that up to now appeared intolerable to him. The old woman's faith
welcomes him back into the human family.
Before Augusta's intervention, the Professor's fatigue earlier in the novel
had turned into a longing for death, another symptom of Spengler's final
man. Spengler observes in him a "metaphysical turn
towards death. The last man last man of the world-city no longer wants to live-he may cling to life as an individual,
but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this
collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death" (2:103-4). Even
Cather's depiction of the defective gas stove-"the fire made a flickering
pattern of light on the wall" (276)-which symbolizes St Peter's impending
death, strongly resembles Spengler's already quoted portrayal of the death
of civilization: "The immemorial old roots of Being are dried up in the
stone masses of its cities. And the free intellect-fateful word!-appears
like a flame, mounts splendid in the air, and pitiably dies" (2:92).
Augusta's intervention gives the Professor a new lease on life, a reprieve.
The stage of Second Religiousness, however, is only a prelude to a culture's
final dissolution. In this sense, the conclusion is not an unqualified happy
ending. A comment by Willa Cather on The Professor's
House suggests that it may even be ironic: "Incidentally, this is the
first book I've ever written with any irony in it. . . . I've always been
much too interested in the way characters conquer fate to realize that,
after all, fate conquers them in the end" (Butcher 9). Oswald Spengler, no
doubt, would agree wholeheartedly.
Tom Outland is generally viewed as the incarnation of Godfrey St. Peter's younger self, whose unexpected entrance into the Professor's life trigger the emergence of St. Peter's obliterated, "unadulterated," original identity. The young man himself seems to remain untainted by the corruption of the modern world through his early death in World War I, which elevates him to a seemingly mythical stature. But is this view justified, and if not, how does Tom fit into the Spenglerian scheme? The reading referred to above clearly fails to explain Tom's contradictory behavior at Blue Mesa and his dividedness between a longing for rootedness and his restless wandering. Nor does it account for the significance of his scientific invention, his replacement by Louie Marsellus, and the underlying meaning of his death. All of these aspects of Tom's character do, however, become readily intelligible when they are viewed in light of Oswald Spengler's historical theory of organic, cultural life cycles, particularly as it relates to science, money, urbanization, mobility, and expansion in the last stage of culture, civilization. This critical approach also clarifies why Godfrey and Tom are not only similar in their youthful, idealized selves but also in the way their epoch has molded their lives, creating the internal exile and disenchantment that mark the two men. Both represent a declining American civilization as part of the more comprehensive decline of the West. The Professor's drift toward death and Tom's untimely end are then only superficially the result of a midlife crisis and chance, respectively. The underlying cause of their demise is destiny, inherent in the inexorable workings of Spengler's historical process that dictates the life cycle of a culture.
Tom's relationship to the Professor is central to the novel, for it is the only ray of light in Godfrey's darkening existence. Tom's vitality and association with the West, his contempt for materialism and trivia, and his extraordinary mind make him the ideal man St. Peter himself once was and now longs to be again. Inevitably, St. Peter, as Thomas Strychacz has shown convincingly, fails to see the contradictions in Tom's idealistic search to retrieve the past and his culturally determined desire to control and take possession (56). Tom fails to stem the Professor's decline, for Outland is not a timeless, mystical hero, but the product of his time and culture, destined to make decisions and to take actions that can only be explained by the historical matrix into which he was born.
Like St. Peter, Tom is an intellectual nomad typical of Spengler's late
civilization, yet he is even more rootless than the Professor. His journey
from obscure origins in the West is not only a quest for an education in the
East but also a search for a home he never truly possessed. He temporarily
finds it in St. Peter's family: "There was evidently something enchanting
about the atmosphere of the house to a boy who had always lived a rough
life" (124). As the child of "'moved people'" (115), adopted by a railroad
engineer who himself moves from place to place, Tom grows up in an age of
mobility and expansion. For this reason he is particularly sensitive to the
idea of a home, a fact that he first reveals following his discovery of Blue
Mesa. Coming upon an irrigation ditch, Tom realizes that "there must have
been a colony of pueblo Indians here in ancient times: fixed residents, like the Taos Indians and the Hopis, not
wanderers like the Navajos" (194, italics added). He suddenly acknowledges
the importance of having a place of one's own: "To people off alone, as we
were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour
and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of
message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every
day" (194). Perhaps Tom sees here that he is quite detached from the soil,
living outside of the land, as his name suggests. Later on, "a narrow path
worn deep into the stone ledges that overhung the village" (210) becomes
another symbol of a people's tenure in the land, of an ancient sedentary
culture that had succeeded in cultivating the "arts of peace" (219) and
"built themselves into this mesa and humanized it" (221). This sense of
place stands in stark contrast to Tom's own restlessness.
Just as St. Peter is torn between following his primitive, earthbound self and catering to the demands of his intellect, Tom is divided between a mystical sense of the earth, a desire for rest and home, and a thirst for expanse and scientific inquiry. Even as he cherishes the mystery of the cliffs and hesitates "to expose those silent and beautiful places to vulgar curiosity" (205), Tom cannot help but act as the member of an expansionist civilization. Armed with "an ax and spade" (207), veritable symbols of colonialism, Roddy and Tom are soon "engaged in roadbuilding" (210), effectively opening up the mesa not only to vulgar curiosity but also to the removal of the cliff dwellers' cultural artifacts, thus continuing a long tradition of hegemony in the American Southwest.
Tom himself plays a key role in the destruction of the order he so deeply, and undoubtedly sincerely, admires in the Anasazi structures. The extent to which he is determined by his historical circumstances becomes most apparent here. He cannot resist interfering with the sacred quality of the site in order to examine its "specimens" (223) scientifically. As Susan Rosowski noted, he acts like "a modern version of the 'brutal invaders' (Cather 221) who ravaged the ancient tribe" (133). Instead of leaving the artifacts in their original context, he destroys their order, only to create a new one in the inventory and descriptions he enters in his daybook. Significantly, this document is a "merchant ledger" (212), foreshadowing the sale for profit of the priceless objects and linking Tom, despite his later attempts to distance himself, to a rapacious money economy. Spengler, incidentally, views the invention of double-entry bookkeeping as an expression of "mechanistic thought" and as one of the decisive events in the rise of Western money economy (2:490). As if to make up for his interference, Tom tidies up the ruins before his departure and conceals his book, containing in language the order he has destroyed in fact, in a cupboard in one of the cliff dwellings. Unaware that the seeds for further desecration of the ancient site have been sown, Tom leaves for Washington.
His journey to the capital becomes a nightmarish trip into a Spenglerian
metropolis. He leaves as a romantic idealist, dreaming of generating
interest in the Anasazi antiquities in Washington, only to get involved in a
Kafkaesque encounter with a self-serving, bureaucratic machine that is quite
indifferent to aboriginal American cultures. The urban way of life, Tom
discovers, enslaves people and breaks their spirit, traps them in a
continual race for material gain and prestige. Tom is appalled and leaves
empty-handed "to get back to the mesa and live a free life, and breath free
air, and never, never again to see hundreds of little blackcoated men
pouring out of white buildings" (236). This frightening vision of social
uniformity is entirely consistent with Spengler's view of the world-city. In
a 1922 review article on The Decline of the West,
Konrad Falke points out that "Spengler considers our great metropolises as
mills, slowly grinding the self-assertive freemen, who were the founders of
our liberties, into an unindividualized proletariat, ready to be kneaded
like flour by a despot's hand into any desired form" (697). Cather herself,
in a 1921 lecture at Omaha, had complained about democracy's tendency to
create sameness, and she deplored the mounting evidence that Americans were
becoming mechanized (Brown 226), as the image of the bureaucratic automatons
in The Professor's House clearly suggests.
Upon his return to the Southwest, Tom again shows that he has not lost entirely his intuitive faculties, for his sense of mystery and the sacred affords him a brief moment of happiness on the mesa, "a religious emotion" (251). His "filial piety" (251) for the place shows that he has found a home in the cliffs. The mesa, as John Swift points out, becomes a surrogate for the family relations Tom lacks (305). Moreover, Tom now acknowledges the importance of taking possession of something whole. Commenting on the concealed ledger book, he says: "I didn't feel the need for that record. It would have been going backward. I didn't want to go back and unravel things step by step. Perhaps I was afraid that I would lose the whole in the parts" (252). This pronouncement is of considerable significance because it suggests that Tom embraces mystical intuition and rejects his scientific, analytical orientation. However, just as his dream of a free life on the mesa is short lived, he is destined to abandon this mythic mentality. His account of the experience to St. Peter affirms the domination of his scientific mind, for he expresses his discovery of wholeness in the terms of the analytical scientist he has become: "I remember these things, because, in a sense, that was the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all-the first night that all of me was there. This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole. It all came together in my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you begin to see where they are leading" (250). This passage reflects the shift from what Spengler calls "Faustian Nature-feeling" (1:417) to the intellectualization and preoccupation with science typical of the last stage of Western culture.
Evidently, Tom, like Godfrey, is a divided character, longing for permanence in a restless world, drawn to the past yet trapped in an ongoing historical process that determines his course. He shows many characteristics of Spengler's Faustian man, the unique type of discoverer and inventor in the old age of Occidental culture, who wills to impose himself upon and direct Nature. This tendency to reshape and to order surfaced during Tom's discovery of Blue Mesa. His association with Professor Crane and his research, his invention of the Outland Vacuum, and his replacement by Louie Marsellus further illustrate that Tom embodies a declining civilization.
Dr. Crane serves as Tom's scientific mentor. St. Peter confirms that "the
older man had been of great assistance to the younger, without doubt" (142).
Crane, whose name overtly links him with the machine age that heavily relies
for its progress on the achievements of modern physics, is a dreary,
lifeless loner who suffers ill-health and lives "in the most depressing and
unnecessary ugliness" (142). His personal malaise reflects Spengler's dim
view of modern physics as a discipline:
Western physics is drawing near to the limits of its possibilities. At
bottom, its mission as a historical phenomenon has been to transform the
Faustian Nature-feeling into an intellectual knowledge, the faith-forms
of springtime into the machine-forms of exact science. And, though for
the time being it will continue to quarry more and more practical and
even "purely theoretical" results, results as such, whatever their kind,
belong to the superficial history of a science. (1:417)
This quote accurately describes the transformation of Tom's intuitive sense of nature into the rational mode of the natural scientist under the tutelage of Dr. Crane. Crane resembles Spengler's modern physicist, whose main concern lies with the problem of space, the "chosen badge" (Spengler 1:81) of Western civilization. St. Peter points out that Crane "doesn't care about anything but the extent of space" (87), and that "he was all the while carrying on these tedious and delicate experiments that had to do with determining the extent of space" (141). With his help Tom develops his invention, which will prove as beneficial to aviation as it is detrimental to St. Peter's family.
One may wonder why Cather chose the Outland vacuum as Tom's innovation. Could she have had in mind the emptiness of modern civilization that permeates the pages of the novel, the vacuum into which so many of its characters are drawn? A look at Tom as Spengler's Faustian inventor will provide another clue. He possesses western culture's "discoverer's soul," whose "great inventions slowly ripened in the deeps, to emerge at last with the necessity of a Destiny" (2:501-2). The link of his invention to aviation is also appropriate in this connection, for Faustian man's "intoxicated soul wills to fly above space and Time. An ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body, and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars. . . . Hence the fantastic traffic that . . . finally raises itself above the roads and railways and flies in the air" (2:503). Tom's background shows that he is both heir to and facilitator of these historical developments. Born on the road in the back of a prairie schooner, raised on the railroad, he emerges as the brilliant innovator who "had discovered the principle of the Outland vacuum, [and] worked out the construction of the bulkheaded vacuum which is revolutionizing aviation" (40). Tom is spared the commercial success of his invention and is replaced after his death by Louie Marsellus, the prototype of the successful entrepreneur and financier.
Besides the dominance of the intellect, money power is a key feature of Spengler's declining civilization. It accompanies the dislocation of culture from the soil, the rise of the world-city-economy, and democracy. Clearly, Cather uses Louie as a foil to Tom; Louie knows and uses money, Tom rejects it. Louie represents the new moneyed leader, Tom the romantic who is interested in ideas rather than material possessions. Cather highlights this distinction ironically by calling the new Marsellus mansion, an imitation Norwegian manor built with the proceeds of Tom's invention, "Outland." Cather's architectural structure, which lacks veracity and reflects only its owner's crass materialism, is reminiscent of Jay Gatsby's "French" Hôtel de Ville in Fitzgerald's novel. This naming is intended as a sign of Louie's and Rosamond's gratitude, but Tom's name is stained by its association with the Marsellus's conspicuous consumption and poor taste. Tom's name would obviously be more appropriately attached to the cliff house at Blue Mesa, as Kathleen suggests when she tells her father, "Now that Rosamund has Outland, I consider Tom's mesa entirely my own" (131).
The contrast between Louie Marsellus and Tom (and Godfrey St. Peter, for that
matter) can be explained by Spengler's contention that "th[r]ough the
economic history of every Culture there runs the desperate conflict waged by
the soil-rooted tradition of a race, by its soul,
against the spirit of money" (2:485). Tom and St. Peter are sufficiently in
tune with the earth to recognize the corrupting potential of America's crass
materialism. Their opting out of the pursuit of money remains, however, a
noble if ineffective gesture, for, as Rodney Blake put it, "It would come to
money in the end" (244).
Indeed it does! Ironically, St. Peter's academic achievements bear unwanted
material fruits that threaten to move him out of his old study and into the
new house where he does not belong. Ironically, and sadly, Tom's bequest to
Rosamond corrupts her and destroys harmony in her family. As St. Peter
remarks: "If Outland were here to-night, he might say with Mark Anthony,
'My fortunes have corrupted honest men'" (150).
Louie Marsellus, the new entrepreneur who understands the dynamic force of
finance and employs money as a "category of thought"
(Spengler 2:482), replaces Tom, the idealist. He recognizes the commercial
potential of the Outland vacuum and raises the capital to turn it into a
marketable product. In doing so, he acts as the "acquisitive middleman or
intervener" who engages in "a refined parasitism," sustaining himself quite
literally on another' s life (Spengler 2:478). To be sure, as an individual
Louie is quite a likeable character, but he embodies the money power that
can hurt those who are not as experienced in the financial market as he is.
Augusta's loss of the equivalent of six months' wages in an investment
against which Louie had counseled serves as a telling example. His plan to
plunder European antique shops and smuggle his booty through a Mexican port
into the United States, taking the reverse route on which the cliff-dweller
artifacts left America, aligns him with the acquisitive, imperialist forces
typical of the final stage of cultural development.
Finally, what are we to make of Tom's death? Is it "chance" (260), as St. Peter suggests? Or is the war, which "in one great catastrophe, swept away all youth and all palms, and almost Time itself" (260), to be understood as the expression of historical forces? Spengler viewed World War I as a result of Caesarism, the form of government that presides over the final dissolution of a civilization and the emergence of a new one. Both mind and money must succumb to the "Caesar-men" of the "Imperial Age" (2:432), and "the conflict of intelligences that had served as substitute for war must give place to war itself in its most primitive form" (432). Tom's death, then, personalizes the end of his civilization, which collapses in a period of gigantic military conflicts. Cather's quote from Longfellow is particularly pertinent to Tom, even though she refers to it in connection with St. Peter's thoughts of dying. Tom does find the "house," his tomb, in the war. More importantly, his life and death have been determined by the mold that preceded his birth. In the context of this reading of the novel, the mold signifies the cultural and historic matrix that shapes the inexorable life cycle of the culture into which Tom is born. Erich Franz, summarizing Spengler's notion of destiny in a 1920 review article, writes, "Each important individual existence is compelled by inexorable law to conform to the phase of the culture to which it belongs" (258). Tom's fateful death, then, is more than chance, more even than a saving grace to protect him from possible corruption; it stands for the predetermined death struggle of a culture that has run its course.
The multiplicity of similarities between Willa Cather's novel and Oswald
Spengler's monumental work, as they relate to both general concepts and
specific details, is indeed startling. Could it be that for Cather
Spengler's work falls into the same category as "the things [the account]
did not say" (262), which the Professor admired so much in Tom's diary? If,
however, Willa Cather did not read Der Untergang des
Abendiandes, her Spenglerian vision of America's decline stands as
a remarkable example of how a period's Zeitgeist can crystallize
independently in the works of writers who are related in their keen
awareness of historical changes.
Matthias Schubnell has dedicated this essay to his mentor at the University of Heidelberg and longtime friend, the late Ronald Hindmarsh-Midwood.
Prominent among those who examine The Professor's
House from a biographical perspective are James Woodress
and Leon Edel. Woodress argues that "the portrait of the Professor
is not entirely understandable without recourse to the author's own
life" (210). Leon Edel applies Freudian theory to the novel, only to
find it wanting in explaining the text fully. He views Cather's
novel as an account of Godfrey St. Peter's depression and considers
the protagonist's retreat into his attic room as an infantile
clinging to the security of the womb (229). Yet despite this
apparent neurosis, Godfrey's melancholy and longing for death are,
according to Edel, not sufficiently motivated. Nor can a Freudian
approach do justice to the novel's social criticism. Given these
limitations, Edel offers a biographical reading and shows in great
detail how the Professor's neurotic pursuit of security parallels
Cather's own, emphasizing particularly her early dislocation from
Virginia (232) and the loss of her close companion, Isabelle
McClung, who in 1917 married Jan Hambourg (234).
E. K. Brown, whose Willa Cather: A Critical
Biography was edited and completed by Leon Edel, endorses a
psychological approach by quoting from Alexander Posterfield:
"Briefly, [the novel] is the story of a scholarly professor at a
Middle Western University passing through that critical, uneasy
period between middle and old age-at least, it should be taken as a
study of such, otherwise its meaning is difficult to perceive
exactly" (239). A more recent critic, James F. Maxfield, elaborates
on this idea and suggests that Godfrey experiences a "mid-life
crisis," an "empty nest syndrome," and a "postpartum depression of
artists and writers" (73). Maxfield adds that psychologically the
Professor's move to his new house reopened the scar left by St.
Peter's displacement from Kansas as a boy and that the Professor's
suffering results from the failure to find " the maternal nurture
and comfort he sought" (84). He sees Augusta's care for him at the
novel's ending as St. Peter's first positive experience of female
nurture (84). John Swift offers a mythic/psychological reading of
the novel, approaching the text by way of Eliade and Freud. He
argues that the novel represents "an essentially religious document
whose central formal movement is the rediscovery of the archaic
'strong time' and the distanced but recoverable paternal figures
whose presence lends that time its strength" (308). Swift concludes
that for both Tom and Godfrey this mythic/psychologic quest ends in
failure.
John H. Randall, Jr., also employs a psychological reading, and he
anticipates some of my own findings in focussing on Cather's
interest in history. He begins his explication of The Professor's House by diagnosing St. Peter as
"suffering from the emotional confusion attendant on the male
climacteric" (202) and explains the tension in the novel as
resulting from "the conflicting claims of creative effort and human
relations" (202). What makes Randall's piece particularly relevant
to this study of the novel is his mention of Cather's theory of
history, which he sums up as follows: "In her eyes, the same thing
is happening to European and American civilization that happened to
the civilization of the cliff dwellers; both were fated to be
destroyed by barbarian hordes. She believes that the peaceful and
creative peoples of the earth are invariably annihilated by the
brutal vulgarity of the destructive" (218). Randall writes this in a
section entitled "Duchene's Theory of History: The Decline of
Civilizations." It is not only this title that is reminiscent of
Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West.
His contention that in the novel "Western civilization is
interpreted as being in its death throes and breathing its last
gasp" (219) echoes Spengler's central thesis. Despite these seeming
allusions to Spengler's theory of history, Randall fails to make a
connection between Cather and Spengler. Instead, he relates Cather's
historical assumptions to the Populist thought of the 1890s, which
protested the destruction of rural America by a modern, commercial
and industrial age (215).
The following reviews constitute only the most detailed responses
that would have been accessible to Cather before and during the
writing of The Professor's House. Living Age
printed Erich Franz's review of volume I, entitled "The Death of
Western Civilization," in its July 1920 issue, and Konrad Falke's
review of volume 2, "An Historian's Forecast" (a review of Oswald
Spengler's Welthistorische Perspektiven),
followed in the September 1922 issue. Franz's piece is of particular
interest because his summary of Spengler's criteria for the late
stage of a cultural life cycle shows startling similarities to
Cather's novel. Among others, "journalism, emigration, childless
families, worship of money, great cities are characteristic traits
of [a culture's] second and barren stage" (258). If one considers
Scott McGregor, the disenchanted journalist, the emigration of St.
Peter's family from France to Canada to the Midwest and his own
internal emigration from a dissatisfying society, the childless
families of both his daughters and his own confessed sense of
sterility, Louie's and Rosamond's fortune and conspicuous
consumption, and Cather's primarily negative portrayal of large
cities such as Chicago and Washington, the parallels speak for
themselves.
In addition, five other publications dealt with Spengler's ideas
extensively between 1922 and fall of 1924: Thomas Mann's "German
Letter" appeared in the Dial in 1922.;
Richard Grützmacher's "Oswald Spengler" in Living Age in July 1923; W. Nathanson's
"Culture Versus Civilization" in Open Court
in the summer 1923; Henry De Man's "Gemany's New Prophets" in the
July 1924 Yale Review; and W. K. Stewart's
"The Decline of Western Culture: Oswald Spengler's 'Downfall of
Western Civilization' Explained," published in Century in September 1924, made specific references to
intellectual cosmopolitanism, scientific thinking, imperialism,
voluntary sterility in large cities, the rise of a plutocracy and
Caesarism as typical features of a dying civilization (594-95). All
of these features figure prominently in The
Professor's House. Finally, the publication of the preface
to The Decline of the West, translated by
Kenneth Burke, coincided with the final phase of Cather's
composition of the novel. Burke's translation, containing the
central arguments of Spengler's thesis, appeared in three
installments in the Dial between November
1924 and January 1915.
In making "the case" of Willa Cather's modernism, Phyllis Rose focuses upon
Cather's writing through Death Comes for the
Archbishop, which she evaluates as "the most daring and innovative of
Cather's works" and interprets as the one that "perfectly embodies the
antiillusionist aesthetic which many of her early books strove for" (Rose
138). While serving well to demonstrate Cather's modernism, such a focus
leaves its story incomplete. Beginning in 1927 or thereabouts, Cather began
to shape an independent narrative response to modernism culminating in Lucy Gayheart (1934), where she subtly interrogated
and refashioned certain core assumptions of modernist aesthetics (Lucy Gayheart 45). As Cather's Lucy
Gayheart was until recently largely ignored, however, so questions
concerning the nature of art and aesthetics have been ignored while in the
past two decades we have focused upon issues of gender, class, and race. I
propose that we return to aesthetics, recognizing that it is a new
aesthetics we are returning to-one informed by insights from feminism,
structuralism, and post-structuralism. To be more specific, in reading Lucy Gayheart, I believe that we have focused
disproportionally on the dazzling story of Lucy and her failed flight to
romantic glory at the expense of the novel's subtle narrative technique that
originates in the "mental complexion" decisively shaping the novel through
its narrator, Harry Gordon.
With this reading I am suggesting that Lucy Gayheart
is both better than and different from its critical reputation. In the
densely informative Willa Cather: A Literary Life,
James Woodress deems Lucy Gayheart an "extremely
interesting novel without being a superior piece of fiction" (461). The
comment summarizes the interpretive impasses Lucy
Gayheart has encountered over the years. Until recently, Lucy Gayheart was largely ignored as slight; in the
last decade, various readers have argued variously that the book may be more
than romantic dross. Paul Comeau judges it as "complex and experimental as
anything [Cather] has written" ("Willa Cather's" 199); Susan Rosowski argues
that it is a female Gothic in which Cather's plot focusing on the
vulnerability of a young woman's emerging sexuality is at odds with the
novel's emotional energy invested in the aging men courting her; and Merrill
Skaggs interprets Lucy as a character doomed by her "lack of high
seriousness" in a morality tale teaching the importance of a woman's
claiming her own life. In entering the rapidly diversifying traditions of
recent Cather scholarship, I argue that Harry Gordon is the overlooked
narrator of the entire novel, the most squarely encountered and accepted of
Cather's long line of male tellers.
From its opening, Lucy Gayheart is a novel that is
about memory as well as one that develops in memory. As such, it is the
culmination of Cather's critical musings that gradually moved memory to
center stage, as if she were fulfilling her midlife statement, "Life began
for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember" (Sergeant 107).
According to Edith Lewis, Cather's longtime friend, Cather immersed herself
in memory-life during the writing of A Lost Lady,
twelve years before Lucy Gayheart. "She was very much
preoccupied with the past out of which her story sprang . . . surrendering
herself to memories, impressions, experiences, [lying] submerged in her
consciousness; letting them come to the surface, and relate themselves to
the theme" (Lewis 127). Cather's practice evokes the layered congeries of
memories, events, and images that, in the mind of Harry, the single
recollecting narrator, make of Lucy Gayheart a
unitary novel of a scope and depth that story-centered readings do not
readily recognize.
In an aesthetic reading of Lucy Gayheart, Harry's
struggles as narrator with "a series of pictures remembered" result in a
different novel from readings focused on Lucy Gayheart's plight as
frustrated heroine. When a reader looks at the novel through the eyes of
Harry as filtered through his "mental complexion," she may discover a shift
in Cather's compositional orientation in the 1930s. In the unexceptional
person of Harry and his conflicted perceptual-introspective environment,
Cather explores a conviction that art is intimate with life and that
people's remembered pictures make an essential difference.
In an award-winning article on Sara Coleridge and Virginia Woolf, Bradford K.
Mudge provides a framework useful for narratively exploring each of Lucy Gayheart's three central figures. Like Sara
Coleridge, each character "struggled . . . to order a life threatened
suddenly by a late shift in perspective, by the unasked-for traumas of
self-revision" (242). In the world that is Lucy Gayheart, each encounters
such a "trauma" of self-confrontation, undergoes a "late shift in
perspective," and inherits in it a potential for "self-revision." The
exquisite interplay of the traumas-made in a series of often palimpsestic
cross-cuttings from memory to the present in the recollection of one of
them, namely Harry Gordon, himself engaged in a prolonged attempt at
"self-revision"-constitutes the novel.
Unfortunately, content-directed readings defer or blur recognition of Lucy Gayheart's narrative breakthroughs and its
developing, chiastic structures. Because the structure is so exquisitely integrated
throughout, one may not immediately recognize Lucy
Gayheart's form for what it is: an aesthetic structure that
completes itself only with the final section of the book. Small wonder,
then, that Cather reveled at having gotten "the ending right" (Woodress
461). It is also small wonder that Wallace Stevens, modernist connoisseur of
poetic density, has singled out Cather for intricate narrative prowess: "We
have nothing better than she is. She takes so much pains to conceal her
sophistication that it is easy to miss her quality" (381).
Intricate structural frameworks increasingly compelled Cather's attention.
"The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the
barriers and limitations; he decides a certain composition, a certain key, a
certain relation of creatures or objects to each other" (Cather, On Writing 123). In Lucy
Gayheart's three-part structure, this novel's salient "key" clue
emerges: like a musical opus, Lucy Gayheart rounds to
its full sonority in the harmonic interplay roused by a final section's
potential. In each section, Lucy Gayheart foregrounds
and contrasts overlapping acts of memory. Each section is initially
identified emotionally with a single character's particular kind of
"self-revision" and, most importantly, with an identifiable relation to
time. The significance of Lucy Gayheart as more than
a lightweight romantic story depends upon careful assessment of the
often-criticized final section, whose importance and difficulty Cather
apparently recognized. She called it the "best part" (Letter to Akins), the
one she had the occasion and craft to get right.
As Lucy Gayheart slides around in time and memory,
juxtaposing the time of the remembering with the time of the original action
of the remembered event, various core contexts-Lucy's, Sebastian's, and
Harry's-intertwine. Recognitions of shiftings between overlapping temporal
and thematic contexts provide, then, a "key" to this novel's densely rich,
narratively unexpected experiements in the ways of memory, knowing, and
time. As Hermione Lee has observed, the novel is certainly "something more
than the 'Ballad of Lucy Gayheart'" (343). More than a piece of nostalgia,
by means of its structure Lucy Gayheart enacts a
reconciliation to the present in the person of Harry Gordon, a virtually
forgotten narrator. The book's delicate complexity emerges more clearly in
examining closely the two areas that most finely constitute it: the temporal
frameworks and the matter of the telling.
Eudora Welty concludes that while Cather's writing forges links between
present and past, it displays what she calls "a lack of middle distance"
(6). Similarly, Hermione Lee senses a disjunction in Cather between past and
present (348). In my reading, Lucy Gayheart
overwrites such a two-part focus by introducing that "middle distance" in a
turn of narrative attention that undermines the dominance of either a future
or a past. Lucy Gayheart acquires this "middle
distance," a felt sense of the narrative present connecting past to future,
by means in part of the future-perspective synonymous with the ever active
hurrying of Lucy's present toward her future. In consequence of the future
framework that Lucy thus sets, Harry Gordon becomes a figure engulfed in a
present he cannot inhabit comfortably and Sebastian becomes a figure
enveloped in the past that drowns him. In contrasts between the temporal
frameworks of the three-Lucy, Sebastian, and Harry-the novel gradually
engenders a "middle distance," which in the third and final section becomes
for Harry neither wholly past, nor present, nor future: "time had almost
ceased to exist" as "the future . . . suddenly telescoped out of the past"
(220).
Each character in each of the novel's books maintains a distinctive rapport with time. Sebastian is gripped by the past, Lucy gropes toward a fugitive future, and Harry struggles stalwartly to fill up a present with which he is oddly stuck. The first, Sebastian, an entrenched past lingerer, suggests Cather's complexly ironic attitudes toward the modernist artist. While overweening aesthetic needs cripple effete Sebastian for daily living, epistemologic uncertainties shatter his peace and decisively cripple his art. At the beginning, Sebastian discovers himself a failure with his wife, with his musician friends, and, most shatteringly, with his art. Into the center of his emerging personal trauma slides Lucy Gayheart, quite accidentally. Seemingly incapable of connection with others except for that shadowy, diabolic accompanist, James Mockford, Sebastian plays out his life in self-serving nostalgia. For instance, upon the death of a childhood friend, he senses with unreasonable dread, "Now, all in a moment, it came over him that when people spoke of their dead youth they were not using a figure of speech" (77).
Forced as the other two major characters will be to confront the past,
Sebastian laments, "The lid once off, he began remembering everything, and
everything seemed to have gone wrong" (78). At the end of his self-pitying
self-confrontation, he concludes hopelessly: "He had dragged the bottom, and
brought up nothing worth remembering. His mind could not find a comfortable
position to lie in. . . . Wasn't there one lovely, unspoiled memory?-In the
present wasn't there somewhere a flower or a green bough that he could hold
close and breathe its freshness?" (79-80). In his Weltschmerz, Sebastian, like Eliot's Prufrock, is possessed by the
fear that he "had missed the deepest of all companionships, a relation with
the earth itself, with a countryside and a people" (78). He fruitlessly
exudes modernist angst and its corollary, dissociation from past and
personal circumstance. Lucy Gayheart suggestively frames Sebastian's
sentimentality with Lucy Gayheart's recognition of his balked potential and
emotional aridity. Lucy uneasily senses his frozen distance when she
realizes that "he seemed very careful never to come too close to people,"
and she discerns his isolation when she realizes that "he had renounced
life" (52-53, 87). In spite of such insight, however, Lucy cannot curb her
craving for the protective citadel that the "invisible, inviolable world" of
his art seems to promise for the future, and she goes off with exaggerated
expectations to Sebastian's elevated, cloisterlike chamber of art (104).
The novel juxtaposes this stereotypically modernist model of art as inviolable stasis introduced in book 1 with Lucy's fluid sense of time associated with book 2. While delicate Sebastian looks back upon life as riddled with disappointments and loss, Lucy looks expectantly forward toward the glowing richness Sebastian as artist purportedly offers. Ever nostalgic, Sebastian turns back into emptiness; in contrast, Lucy, rapt in future, is identified with "life hurrying forward" (24). This fluid, forward movement propels her through the novel. Under Sebastian's influence, she feels herself "going with something much stronger than herself" (136); after his death, she determines to "go back into the world" (184); and after Harry abandons her on an icy road, she resolves that-"She must not give in to it, she must hurry on" (198).
While Sebastian appears leached of vitality, Lucy quivers with energy. She
emerges on the first pages of the novel, "darting . . . giving her body to
the wind as if she were catching step with it" (3); the final pages of book
2 recall "how often she had run out on a spring morning, into the orchard,
down the street, in pursuit of something she could not see, but knew!" (183)
and confirm that shortly before her death she still moved as though
"everything in her was reaching outward, straining forward" (184). Contrast
heightens the impression of her forward-moving intensity. Whereas Pauline,
her aggrieved sister, is "always walking behind
herself" (168, emphasis added), Lucy moves as if "straining" ahead of
herself with a "swiftness, mischief, and lightness" (227).
Interestingly, the two men with whom Lucy could become romantically involved
respond in inverted ways to Lucy's ability to move toward something. Sebastian sinks
deeper into the past-pool of inertia in which he ultimately drowns, while
Harry uneasily inherits an ill-fitting present. In the face of the novel's
excentric plot and discourse circles-Lucy's, Sebastian's, Harry's-Hermione
Lee terms Lucy Gayheart "a redistributed narrative,"
finding its structure not a "linear accumulation," but "a conjunction of
'timeless moments'" (270). These overlapping stories, these "timeless
moments," constitute the final harmony of the composition of Cather's
"three-part sonata." Lee's admonition to read the novel as a series of
"timeless moments" or charged focal points rather than as a consecutive
linear narrative helps formulate a more aesthetically acute reading of this
dense book about human understanding.
As the third major re-membering presence, Harry Gordon rounds out temporal dichotomies between Lucy and Sebastian and between past and future, completing the novel's three-part structure in the process. While Sebastian stews in regrets over an elusive past and Lucy ogles a potentially inexhaustible future, Harry Gordon faces head-on the lonely job of living in a flat present surrounded by inert, often invidious people. Book 3, Harry's section, is that little examined part of the novel that completes Cather's "score," infusing into what could appear saccharine tragedy a dense, full-bodied, harmonic texture.
The remembering vein of Harry Gordon, a man glued to the present-tense world
yet turned toward a past he cannot bury, introduces a resonantly significant
present tenseness, the "middle distance" of which Welty speaks. This
orientation becomes apparent in the rapid-fire verbal shifts into and out of
the present tense that appear in the novel's opening chapters. Such temporal
fluctuations acquire importance from the first sentence, which establishes
the novel's overall time in the present, but in a present linked to a past,
"In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still
talk of Lucy Gayheart" (emphasis added). Almost coyly the narrative
continues this present-tense flavor, "They do not talk of her a great deal,
to be sure; life goes on and we live in the present" (3). This tense-frame
continues until the third page of the novel, at which point in one paragraph
there are two shifts into and out of the present.
Later, suddenly, in the closing of the first chapter in book 3 (immediately
after Lucy's father's funeral), the present tense abruptly breaks in, and
the reader receives a direct statement of Harry's hitherto unmentioned
predicament, his need for strength, "He has need of it, for he has much to
bear" (208). These intrusions of present tense identify Harry's
present-tense location on the night of Mr. Gayheart's funeral. Provoked by
Lucy's father's funeral, Harry manages then to complete, in the present,
what had previously been an obsessive, traumatically insistent, effort to
understand. In the final book, verbs move between narrative past and
psychological present. When Harry sits alone in his study in front of the
fire on the evening of the funeral, remembering the past twenty-five years,
temporal adverbs lace his discourse: "tonight," "years ago," "now,"
"sometimes." Then, toward the middle of book 3, a felicitous, thoroughly
present-tense reconciliation occurs in Harry: "He is
not a man haunted by remorse; all that he went through with long ago. He
enjoys his prosperity and his good health" (224, emphasis added).
Once noticed, this mingling of time frameworks gives pause. It signals an
unexpected role and importance for Harry in the action and harmonics of Lucy Gayheart's narrative structuring. Once the
present-tense moments are identified as Harry's, miscellaneous "intrusions"
of tense and feeling suddenly identify Harry's "mental complexion." For
instance, in Harry's perspective, Lucy exists simultaneously in the present
and in the past: "Afterwards," recalls Harry, "from day to day, he had to
see her at a distance, pass her on the street. That grace of person appeared
more marked now, when she was withdrawn, than in the
days when she had been careless and gay" (215, emphasis added). The word
"now" reveals a persistent present-tense mode in the diegetic arena of
Harry's night by the fireside. In reviewing his life with Lucy, Harry reveals in
narrative terms his uncertain shifts between past and present perspectives
upon "his" elusive Lucy Gayheart.
Just before the celebrated epiphanic vision of Lucy's spatially frozen, yet volatile footprints, Harry bonds himself tangibly to the present-tense locale. While in the opening, the shift into present tense acknowledges continuity with the past, at the close the shift is made into virtual present as Harry observes, "What was a man's 'home town,' anyway, but the place where he had had disappointments and had learned to bear them?" (231). In other words, at novel's end, Harry weds himself to that place and time.
Temporal relations in Lucy Gayheart corroborate contemporary recognitions
that in her later years Cather developed an energized confidence in the
potential for living. The novel draws to an unsettled, perhaps unending,
ending in middle-aged Harry's dogged self-confrontation, which, whatever
else it may be, bespeaks "that energy which moves quietly, but always moves"
(189). Such
positive potential in a male narrator in Cather's work contrasts radically
with other male narrators such as Niel Herbert of A Lost
Lady and Jim Burden of My Ántonia,
narrators characterized by their inability to adapt to change. It seems that
the potential for more intimately inhabiting one's time persistently
fascinated Cather in the latter part of her life. With "Tom Outland's Story," in The Professor's House, an embryonic nesting within
things becomes a radiant potential for people: Tom realizes, "I wakened with
the feeling that I had found everything, instead of having lost everything"
(251). In Lucy Gayheart's extended narrative of
ever-persevering, self-involving Harry Gordon, Cather introduces a more
humanized, though bleaker and more ironic, version of the Tom Outland
potential in a turn of attention that invigorates much of her 1930s fiction.
This turn focuses on the ways people may become more intimate with
themselves in their settings.
In a speech on authorship and the novel written in 1933 when composing Lucy Gayheart, Cather optimistically avowed a
conviction that aesthetic endeavors may enhance people's capacity to live in
the complex modern world, "And we may say that for this latest and, not
loveliest, child of the arts; From the past, from the Russian and the French
and the English past, we may hope for the future" ("On the Novel" 170).
Earlier, in McClure's Magazine, she had emphasized
the imperative to fill up one's allotted time: "The individual possesses
this power [creativity] for only a little while, a few years. He is sent
into the world charged with it, but he it he can't keep it a day beyond its
allotted time. He has his hour when he can do, live, become" ("Plays" 72).
Current reassessments of Cather's allegedly past-directed energy, previously
identified with the past-regretting male narrators of her 1920s fiction, are
fertilely reconstructing the tenor of her 1930s opus.
Blanche Gelfant has called the third section of Lucy
Gayheart a "palinode," that is, a mode that "epitomizes an action
that belongs" to the structure rather than to the "character's performance"
(129). With a Harry-as-narrator reading, the entire novel records Harry's
"performance" as character and as narrator. Harry is undeniably an unusual
narrator, an invisible narrator who does not tell or write a story to others
so much as recollect it in himself, often in the third person. The novel is
overall Harry's extensive review of what has happened that has left him a
survivor in his story of Lucy's life. Book 3 becomes thus not a palinodic
"epilogue" added on to books 1 and 2 but a culminating palinodic section of
Harry's three-part ode. Gelfant's study introduces Harry as embryonic elaborator of "a
self-serving story" of Lucy as "infatuated heroine of romance" (130). Seen
as narrator in the entire novel, Harry struggles with himself not so much to
tell Lucy's story as to understand his part in the unfortunate history of
his Lucy Gayheart.
Initially, recognition of Harry's pervasive narrative presence emerges in
pieces, such as when he wistfully admits, "Life would have been much easier
for him, certainly, in those years after Lucy's death, if he could have told
someone about his last meeting with her" (220). Harry has hungered over the
years, it turns out, for a chance to tell his story to someone. His stifled
need for intralocution, the ache of that "dark place in his mind" (222), is
so great that he has taken to talking out loud in the presence of others,
"thinking aloud as he drove; talking, indeed, to his motor engine. Once when
he had his wife along, he forgot himself and came out with: 'Well, it's a
life sentence'" (221). After his abortive marraige proposal to Lucy in
Chicago, Lucy is said to break out scornfully at Harry in her rejection,
"Can't you understand anything?" (111). In the more
than twenty-five years after Lucy's premature death, Harry belatedly strives
to understand, and thus to respond to Lucy's scornful rhetorical question.
The results may correspond to what Gelfant has called an "inner
transformation" (130).
While in book 1 it may appear as though there is a framing omniscient narrator and three separate stories, by book3 it becomes apparent that Harry is maker and central actor in the entire recall. In each succeeding book and each reading, distance between Harry and his troubled construction of an understanding diminishes until the fireside reverie in book 3, when he finally moves toward some kind of resolution in his formerly stalled self-appraisal. Harry's memory work actually generates all three books of the novel, but that may become apparent only in book 3, when on the night of Mr. Gayheart's funeral, evidence of Harry's deliberate self-examination overtly appears with the statement: "Tonight was an occasion for remembering: he felt it coming on. Years ago he used to fight against reflection. . . . [N]ow he . . . had begun to understand it a little better" (214). In the light of Lucy's pejorative comment to the contrary in the restaurant, Harry's new-found understanding bespeaks a positive development. In the closing moments of that same evening by the fire, Harry appears to survive his overriding sense of complicity in the present tense: "He is not a man haunted by remorse; all that he went through with long ago" (224). In the process, he discovers "an expectancy" (223), an unexpected lightness: "His own body grew marvellously free and light, and there was a snapping sparkle in his blood that made him set his teeth" (224).
In his review on the night of Mr. Gayheart's death, the isolated, well-repressed underside of Harry's mental complexion drifts intermittently into view, both for him and for a reader attentive to Harry's narrating activities: "There was not," one abruptly learns, "in all the world, a living creature who knew of his last meeting with Lucy on the frozen country road beside the telephone post" (219). Harry, an obtuse figure who "had to be clubbed by a situation" (111), has previously kept his trauma to himself. Worsening the twenty-five years of acute isolation, no one in Haverford has had "the courage" (220) to confront impenetrable Harry as to the particulars of Lucy's death, a trauma precipitating his "late shift in perspective" and condemning him to the retributive re-visionings that constitute the novel.
Additional signs of Harry's acute internal divisions emerge about his
personal authority, his need for the "certainty of his ultimate mastery"
(217). While
it had appeared that Harry once "could feel things without betraying
himself. . . . kept that side of himself well hidden" (189), by book 3 this
zealous control explodes in words that reveal his pain: "tired and beaten,"
"grim," "melancholy," "cruel," "shameful," "bear," and "remorse." In the
course of his self-confrontations, especially in book 3, conventional Harry
of "firm, deliberate tread" (225) becomes a "not quite regular" (230) banker
with a "reputation for eccentricity" (211). His cashier complains that Harry
"had sprung too many surprises" (211) and was "more lenient than . . . [was]
proper" (213). Although Harry had assiduously cultivated appearances-of
mastery, money and might-reflective activities in Lucy
Gayheart uncover uneasy chinks in his protective armory.
Book 3 narratively "lays bare" an undercurrent of sensitivity and also exposes its opposite, Harry's furrowed, difficult nature. At fifty-five years, his is an uneven nature full of undigested pain, loss, and concealment. Early in book 1, this unevenness emerged in a single, tellingly dissonant image: "His things stood out, and weren't a part of himself" (45). Furtively insecure, Harry took "on a certain self-importance" in a big city "as if he were afraid of being ignored in the crowd" (45-46). An inner oscillation in Harry becomes increasingly evident as memory contrasts the cocky youth he had expected to be with his life of "melancholy pleasure" and his self-declared "barren" marriage (214, 216).
Harry's guilt-driven recall is studded with data that accentuate a doubleness in his self-appraisement, both of his prowess and of his ethical probity. Certain "he is going to have his way" (217), he fantasizes an "inevitable relation with Lucy" based upon an imperturbable feeling that "he and Lucy Gayheart would be together again" (217). Gradually, his narrative juxtaposes that arrogant certainty with a harrowing guilt both in terms of Lucy and of the town's opinion. Telling anecdotes condemn Harry and his professional facade, exposing "the genial, confidential tone, just tinged by regret, with which he refused a loan to a man who needed it" and emphasizing his stinginess, "People said he was hard in business and took advantage of borrowers in a tight place" (99, 18). In a slap at Harry's masculinity, Nick Wakefield, former rival for Lucy's favors, dubs Harry "a damned coward, for all your big chest. Afraid to go to poor Lucy Gayheart's funeral" (213).
Harry's narrative recall exposes a divided nature, torn between the practical and artistic worlds, between fact and feeling. While Harry concludes "facts are at the bottom of everything" 101), for Lucy quite the opposite was the case: "There was nothing real, . . . except her own feeling. That was real" (61). This fact-feeling dichotomy saturates the book, and appears in the split between Lucy's "airy" world of art and Harry's world of commercial fact. Until Lucy's death, tension between the worlds of the artist and the businessman, between Sebastian and Harry, often freezes the terms of Harry's recollection. For Harry, Lucy's art attachments are, then, an illness from which she will, it is said, "soon recover" (111).
In his conventional materialism and desire for mastery, Harry initially seems a thoroughgoing doppelgänger of other of Cather's s male narrators. In spite of his "mental nearsightnedness" (98), however, Harry goes well beyond Cather's earlier male narrators as gradually his recollections acknowledge failure to enclose or to own Lucy ever. The novel verifies the demise of a narrative focus in Cather by confirming limitation in the power of Harry's proprietory gaze. Instead, book 3, the section that Cather was delighted "to get right," verifies the potential of a narrative experiment, that of developing a thoroughly unexpected, modern narrating nexus in the unlikely materials of Harry Gordon's recollections.
In this most modern of modern novels, three often overlooked keys signal Harry's narrative centrality and provide a clue to Harry's omnipresent effort to understand: 1) the shift in narrative persons, 2) intermittent parentheses, and 3) extensive projections. From the outset, the novel presents no consistent focus of person or theme. The first pages shift from "they" (the townspeople); to "one," as in "one knew she was delighted with everything" (4); to "we," in "We missed Lucy in Haverford" (5). These shifts record Harry's shifting perspectives toward an event he gropes to articulate to himself.
In addition, the novel is rife with odd parentheses that bring out Harry's
multiple perspectives, his commingled sentimentality-remorse. Some
parentheses are banal additions of information: "(These are modern times,
1927)" (205). Others verify Harry's oblique presence throughout the novel,
as in asides, he interprets, gives causes, and disjointedly confronts his
feelings.
For instance, in the opening scene, Harry, who already knows enough to "be
quiet," reflects in parentheses on his calculated manipulations of Lucy's
affections: "(very musical bells, he had got them to please Lucy)" (11).
Similarly, in book 2, on her way to Mrs. Ramsay's house, Lucy considers
summoning her "old friend" (Harry) to an attempted reunion. A preemptory
parenthentical voice observes suddenly out of nowhere, "(no one refused any
request of hers)" (165-66). Soon thereafter at Mrs. Ramsay's house, while
Lucy plays the piano, an incognito Harry passes outside the window in and
out of parentheses: "Had Mrs. Ramsay turned and looked out of the window,
she would have seen a man's tall figure go somewhat pompously by. (The blind
was still up, and the interior of the lighted room was as clear to the
passer-by as a stage setting when the theatre is dark.)" (166). After this
fugitive image (which is parenthetically commented on from Harry's position outside the window), Harry
radically changes his path, not going his usual course but struggling with
himself on the sidewalk beside Mrs. Ramsay's house, "seized by a fierce
impulse to go straight to her front door and into the parlour,-he almost did
it." Apparently, Harry plans to circle the block and reconcile with Lucy but
cannot; "he had recovered himself, and he resumed his
way north" (166, emphasis added).
This vignette and its oddly submerged parentheses place Harry as involved
observer, self-declared "passer-by" and reveal his struggles about Lucy
shortly before the decisive fatal scene on the open
road. Later in book 3, Harry recalls that fateful night, admitting with
relief: "he had scarcely got himself by" (217). This scene and its dense
recognitions underscore the intensity of Harry's multilayered recollections
evident in parentheses and in the novel overall. Not all parentheses are
this dramatic, as revelatory of motive and covert response; overall,
however, they disclose the often oblique presence of Harry Gordon recalling,
interpreting, and reshaping in his reiterant, isolated compulsive reviews.
Thirdly, in his recall Harry projects his wishful perceptions as the perceptions of others, especially Lucy Gayheart. For instance, exclamations that appear to be Lucy's thinking provide stirring defenses of Harry's masculinity: "more than physical strength . . . [he] could keep up to the bitter end . . . take hold and never let go. . . . It might get a man almost anywhere, she thought" (189). Lucy is said to celebrate Harry's unrecognized worth: "some imagination . . . something flashed out of him" (175). Harry was said to be "deeply . . . moved" as compared with those around him (188). Such praise in the guise of Lucy's thinking exposes Harry's thwarted wish to be respected for depth, strength, and sensitivity.
Lucy Gayheart has often appeared to be a novel of
dreamy exaggeration and ill-guided romantic excess. Conceived as product of
Harry's uneasy meanderings, however, Sebastian and Lucy serve as projections
in Harry's imaginings. That possibility may explain the caricaturelike
quality Sebastian and Lucy sometimes present. Near complete lack of sympathy
for the world in which they live shapes Harry's versions of them and their
life together. Reports of Sebastian's relentlessly ineffective daily life
and of his melodramatic death speak therefore as much of Harry's antipathy
as they do of Sebastian himself. Conversely, the often saccharine
sensitivity of Lucy and her supposed adulation of Harry's qualities, both
physical and moral (which became such as to arouse distaste for Lucy in
Cather),
emerge this way in Harry's biased reconstructions. Given Cather's artistic
control and measure, the caricaturelike exaggeration seems as sure an
indicator of Harry's narrative centrality as any other feature of the
book.
Crosscurrented in this, Cather's sonata to multiple memory, is a belief about
artists and art: it is better to remember than to obliterate the past. At
first, Harry had sought to obliterate, forget, and passively admire. In
nights of recollection, he comes indeed to "remember" something "closer,"
something in himself more than to admire something external to him. As Lucy seems to have learned from the aging
soprano a genuine respect for honest human sentimentality even when filtered
through limited talent, Harry comes to recognize something the same in
himself (181). In the persons of Lucy, Harry, and Sebastian, the novel
explores delicately, yet pointedly, three early twentieth-century
perspectives toward art. Sebastian personifies the artist, whose aesthetics
divorce him from everyday life; Lucy is the romantic resolutely idealizing
the artist's trappings; Harry is the materialist who learns to respect
something of the intangible and to get closer to the ineffable in himself
and his objects. Harry's musing and shaping of his recollections around Lucy
Gayheart's footsteps (Harry's personal objet d'art par
excellence) emblemize a material and an art as remote from the art
of Sebastian as the earth from the stars. Her footsteps, inexorably
fleeting, are also vital, constantly present triggers in the everyday world
of powers he had stifled in himself.
Seen with Harry as narrative "trigger," Lucy Gayheart
is far more complexly intimate than a record of "an anonymous narrator . . .
recall[ing] the image of Lucy" (Woodress 458). During her struggle to revise
and compose Lucy Gayheart, Cather delivered a radio
speech about modern fiction in which she defines narrative freedom, "When we
learn to give our purpose the form that exactly clothes it and no more; when
we make a form for every story instead of trying to crowd it into one of the
stock moulds on the shelf, then we shall be on the right road, at least"
("On the Novel" 170). In the narrative person of Harry Gordon, Cather comes
upon that form, the "right," although most unexpected, mold that uniquely
fits this story of Harry's Lucy Gayheart
While Lucy and Sebastian dissolve into near unreal exaggerations, Harry
remains a genuine though unenviable man, embedded in an unenviable
day-to-day reality. This stymied, small-minded banker who continues in the
face of what he dubs "a long grilling" (221) succeeds, narratively anyway,
in "living out in the open" (107) and proves in the face of Lucy's
devastating accusations that yes, he can move in the direction of going "all
the way" (111). That is to say, Harry comes to take seriously more than just
the commercial and tangible world, to live in and with his world of
intangibles, feeling and understanding in his own contexts. The novel is, as
Cather suggested to Robert Frost about The Professor's
House, "really a story of 'letting go with the heart'" (Sergeant
215). The person "letting go with the heart" in this novel is Harry. For
Harry, such "going all the way" is initially vicarious, a "catching it from
Lucy . . . the best thing he had to remember" (223). The "it" Harry finally
catches is what the reader comes to know as Lucy
Gayheart, a novel that grows out of a conviction that everyday human
beings may possess "another kind of sweetness; a sympathy, a tolerant
understanding" (181).
Lucy Gayheart comes out of the literary 1930s and its
interest in average people, figures who are neither artistically oriented
nor aesthetically sophisticated. As far back as 1895, Cather had commended
what she called "the healthy commonplace," an arena never ignored or
deprecated and increasingly present in her later work ("Demands" 409). This
orientation toward an average world and its ordinary people decisively
shapes Cather's fiction throughout her career, but never more decisively
than here in Lucy Gayheart.
Harry, though a small-town banker, is an unexceptional man in matters
aesthetic and artistic. In Harry's recollection emerging from everyday
material and aesthetic capacity, Cather has made a wholly modern book. It is
not a record of unbridgeable aesthetic distances between artist and objects
of art but rather a book of the art of the immediacy of everyday living.
Cather, though qualifiedly to be sure, accepts tenacious Harry, no sensitive
intellect or dreamer of dreams, but one who achieves finally an
accommodation to his inner self, in some limited way to his future home
town, and thus to the commonplace truths of his everyday life. Lucy Gayheart
had earlier mused in pleased wonderment at her own suddenly altered
experience of art, when, having just fallen in love herself, she finds
herself knowing the music of love in a mysterious new way: "A new conception
of art? It came closer than that" (31). For Harry, as for Lucy and Cather,
the matter of one's relation to art, life, and memory need be just
that-"closer." In this aesthetic reading, the present-tense orientation and
its rich "middle distance," coupled with Lucy
Gayheart's harmonic development in a series of pictures remembered,
remembered closely and often sweetly, reveals Cather's compassionate sense
of art, living, and the everyday human capacity to reflect and introspect.
In Cather's writing about writing, to be human is to be more substantial than
to be mainly or merely artistic. Lucy Gayheart in
1935 reflects what Cather observed in a late undated fragment: "Art is too
terribly human to be very 'great'" (On Writing 125).
Lucy Gayheart-Cather's nonmodernist modern
novel-presents Cather's respect for and contribution to an evolving,
guardedly positive, response to American circumstances that would cultivate
involvement, not disenchantment. Such movement toward life identifies Cather as an
American incarnation of the lucid "Mediterranean classicism" that Malcolm
Cowley extols in his classic reflection about belonging and
estrangement. Cowley's term captures the direction of Cather's distinguished career
and the ethos of Lucy Gayheart, a novel concerning a
struggle to belong substantially in one's life and its settings. Cowley's
study also points out a fundamental division, an antinomy characteristic of
the period in which Lucy Gayheart grows. "The
atmosphere of New York is a hysterical classicism," Cowley observed, "to be
distinguished from the classicism of the Mediterranean, which results from
sympathy with one's environment instead of rebellion against it" (203).
Unlike the "darkening vision" of life that has been imputed to it (Woodress
449), Lucy Gayheart, in its reach and complex depth
and its still barely discernible narrator, radiates potent, fertile belief
in the possibility of and need for developing that hard-to-come-by and
elegantly classical "sympathy with one's environment."
We've known since 1953, when Edith Lewis published Willa
Cather Living, that Cather turned immediately to Francis Parkman
when she fell in love with Quebec at first sight. In taking a new route to
her Grand Manan retreat during the summer of 1927, she came, she saw, and
she was conquered by "the Norman outlines of the town of Quebec" (Lewis
153). Immediately upon discovering this place that seemed miraculously
preserved from another time, Cather wished to research Quebec's past; as
immediately, she pounced on Parkman's histories, with which she was already
familiar, that she found in the Hotel Frontenac library. Thus we've "always"
known that Cather used Parkman when she began to construct a novel with a
Quebec setting; Lewis even tells us why: "Willa Cather was always very
painstaking about her facts-she intensely disliked being careless or
inaccurate, and went to much trouble to verify them" (161).
Perhaps because this information seemed straightforward, few scholars have
thoroughly investigated the Parkman connection. In the recent past, however,
two articles have called attention to elements of Parkman's work that one
can recognize in Shadows on the Rock. This essay will
offer new emphases on these facts that have recently been reconsidered. The
full extent of Cather's reliance on Parkman's material has not yet been
measured. Further, studying this source reveals a number of new and
interesting insights about Cather. I will touch briefly on representative
characters illustrating the connection, then identify representative
incidents, images, and themes that Parkman furnished to Cather. Perhaps this
sort of investigation about how Cather used one source will encourage
further studies of Cather's use of sources generally, suggest some possible
principles behind her selection of useful facts, posit a plausible guess
about her patterns of rejection or denial of selected facts, and speculate
on Cather's in receptivity to Parkman's asides and analogies.
The first caveat in this era of old and new historicisms, however, is that
four historical periods must be held in mind simutaneously, if one is to do
justice to Cather's novel. The first is the present of 1927-31, in which
Cather first imagined and then researched and wrote her book. That present
was deeply colored by the traumas of her father's and then her mother's
death. The
second is the extended post-Civil War era from 1865 to 1893, during which
Francis Parkman wrote his seven-volume France and England
in North America. This present of Parkman's composing time colors
that historian's perceptions as inevitably as any other era affects its
published books. Thus, Parkman's presentations of Indian torture practices,
which seem racist, exaggerated, or simplistic to a recent historian, should probably
be considered in light of the fascination with cannibalism in the late
nineteenth century. Parkman indeed reported, and Cather repeated, what the readers of his
time were most interested in knowing.
A third and crucial historical period is the present of the novel itself,
1697-98. Parkman comments that this year is a time of rare calm in the
turbulent Quebec saga, a lull before the wars of the eighteenth century
began: "The policy of the governor [as opposed to unwise orders from Louis
XIV] prevailed; the colony returned [after a 1696 raid on the Onondagas led
by Frontenac] to its normal methods of growth and so continued to the end"
(Frontenac 302). Early in February 1698, word
arrived that a peace treaty between France, Spain, England, and Holland had
been signed in Europe. In Shadows on the Rock, before
Frontenac dies, he even refers in passing to the Treaty of Rijswijk (239).
Thus, for the principal year of this novel, there was documentably no
dramatic strife in the history of Quebec, even with the colonies to the
south of New France. The atmosphere of undisturbed peace was a crucial
attracting agent for Cather in that time when she needed a "rock of refuge"
(Robinson 258). Parkman supplies the essential facts to support Cather's
symbolic use of this year, a time that is both peacefully static and also
running out, when he remarks, "The scratch of a pen at Ryswick had ended the
conflict in America, so far at least as concerned the civilized combatants"
(Frontenac 303).
By August 1698, peace between Frontenac and the English was unraveling again.
As Parkman paints the next scene, however, "The shadow of death was upon him
[Frontenac]. Toils and years, passions and cares, had wasted his strength at
last, and his fiery soul could bear him up no longer. A few weeks later he
was lying calmly on his death-bed" (Frontenac 306-7).
Cather could not follow Parkman's cues more precisely than she does, after
he writes, "In November, when the last ship had gone, and Canada was sealed
from the world for half a year, a mortal illness fell upon the Governor"
(Frontenac 308). On November 22, Parkman relates,
Frontenac dictated his will and bequeathed tokens to his friends. The
much-loved governor died on November 28, fully lucid and composed, at age
seventy-eight.
The fourth historical epoch always present in Shadows on
the Rock is the medieval period that seventeenth-century Quebec
suggested first to Parkman and then to the receptive Willa Cather. The association
between the two epochs infuses the works of Parkman from first to last and
clearly matched and confirmed Willa Cather's delighted perceptions. This
essay recognizes the relevance of all four historical epochs in Cather's
novel; it also acknowledges the equal relevance of Francis Parkman to all
four historic levels of consciousness.
First it is important to note that Cather used substantial material from each
of Parkman's first five volumes Pioneers of France in the
New World, The Jesuits in North America, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, The Old Regime in Canada, and Count
Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. The most important
volumes to her were the second and fourth, not the fifth volume, which
concerns Frontenac. It is reasonable to assume she skipped over great
swatches of material in these volumes, whenever her attention flagged.
Further, one can find what severed her focus and sent her finger flipping
past pages and chapters; often, gory violence, attention to the English, or
any emphasis on fighting engaged in or physical hardship endured outside the
Quebec sphere of influence. Thus, one can see her tracks here and there in the
volume on La Salle, but her passing references primarily acknowledge his
importance as a heroic memory still cherished by Frontenac and by Pommier
the cobbler (Shadows 83).
When Cather is absorbed in a page, she is a careful footnote reader,
evidenced in the phrases and facts she later used, both in Parkman's main
text and in his footnotes. The centennial two-volume Library of America
edition of Parkman's France and England in North
America (completed in 1893) is invaluable for the Cather scholar,
because in it the footnotes that interested Cather are printed at the bottom
of the page. In addition the chapter subtitles are supplied in the table of
contents so that one can easily spot those names that reappear in Cather's
novel-for example, Fathers Lalemont and Jogues, the Intendant Champigny, or
the Carignan-Salieres regiment that brought drummer boy Giorgio's
grandfather to New France.
Two linked names will illustrate Cather's inclusion and exclusion of Parkman
material concerning specific characters. Jacques Le Ber and his daughter
Jeanne reveal important facts about Cather's choices as she surveyed her
Parkman treasury. Jacques Le Ber captivated Parkman. Parkman returns to him
repeatedly, apparently finding in this Montreal merchant one of the most
intriguing personalities of New France. We meet Le Ber first as La Salle's
host, where he is described as "one of the principal merchants and most
influential inhabitants of the settlement," who was first an ally of La
Salle and Frontenac and afterward, "one of their most determined opponents"
(La Salle 786). In Parkman's initial descriptions
Le Ber seems of a lower class and more petit bourgeois life-style than
Cather's "rich merchant" (Shadows 56). Cather does
not, in fact, pick up Parkman's subordinate details; for example, Le Ber
"was accustomed to sell goods across his counter in person to white men and
Indians, his wife taking his place when he was absent" (La
Salle 786). In Parkman, Le Ber seem much nearer industrious Young
Benjamin Franklin in spirit than he does to the lavishly hospitable
plutocrat of Cather's pages. He appears in later Parkman pages (still
espousing Franklinian common sense) to dispute the "pious falsehood" of a
Sister Jumeau, who untruthfully confessed for herself peasant origins (Regime 1140). And finally, he seems a typical
parvenu, as Parkman presents him: "Money smoothed the path to advancement,
so far had the noblesse already fallen from its old
estate. Thus Jacques Le Ber, the merchant, who had long kept a shop at
Montreal, got himself made a gentleman for six thousand livres" (Regime 1282-83). Parkman's Le Ber is shrewd,
politically flexible, enterprising, and willing to move with an eye to the
main chance. He is too colorful for Cather's novel, especially since his
Montreal base of operations threatens to deflect attention from Quebec, as
Montreal in fact did in real life. Cather chooses to erase facts available
about Le Ber and to render him only as a generic silhouette.
Jeanne Le Ber, conversely, is someone Parkman renders briefly, whom Cather
appropriates whole, using almost all of the details Parkman presented. A
first reference describes "the mediaeval pietism of Jeanne Le Ber, the
venerated recluse of Montreal" ( Mademoiselle Jeanne Le Ber belonged to none of these sisterhoods. She was
the favorite daughter of the chief merchant of Montreal, the same who,
with the help of his money, got himself ennobled. She seems to have been
a girl of a fine and sensitive nature; ardent, affectionate, and
extremely susceptible to religious impressions. Religion at last gained
absolute sway over her. Nothing could appease her longings or content
the demands of her excited conscience but an entire consecration of
herself to heaven. Constituted as she was, the resolution must have cost
her an agony of mental conflict. Her story is a strange, and, as many
will think, a very sad one. She renounced her suitors, and wished to
renounce her inheritance; but her spiritual directors, too far-sighted
to permit such a sacrifice, persuaded her to hold fast to her claims,
and content herself with what they called "poverty of heart." Her mother
died, and her father, left with a family of young children, greatly
needed her help; but she refused to leave her chamber where she had
immured herself. Here she remained ten years, seeing nobody but her
confessor and the girl who brought her food. Once only she emerged, and
this was when her brother lay dead in the adjacent room, killed in a
fight with the English. She suddenly appeared before her astonished
sisters, stood for a moment in silent prayer by the body, and then
vanished without uttering a word. "Such," says her modern biographer,
"was the sublimity of her virtue and the grandeur of her soul." Not
content with this domestic seclusion, she caused a cell to be made
behind the altar in the newly built church of the Congregation, and here
we will permit ourselves to cast a stolen glance at her through the
narrow opening through which food was passed in to her. Her bed, a pile
of straw which she never moved, lest it should become too soft, was so
placed that her head could touch the partition, that alone separated it
from the Host on the altar. Here she lay wrapped in a garment of coarse
gray serge, worn, tattered, and unwashed. An old blanket, a stool, a
spinning-wheel, a belt and shirt of haircloth, a scourge, and a pair of
shoes made by herself of the husks of Indian-corn, appear to have formed
the sum of her furniture and her wardrobe. Her employments were spinning
and working embroidery for churches. She remained in this voluntary
prison about twenty years; and the nun who brought her food testifies
that she never omitted a mortification or a prayer, though commonly in a
state of profound depression, and what her biographer calls "complete
spiritual aridity." When her mother died, she had refused to see her; and, long after, no
prayer of her dying father could draw her from her cell. "In the person
of this modest virgin," writes her reverend eulogist, "we see, with
astonishment, the love of God triumphant over earthly affection for
parents, and a complete victory of faith over reason and of grace over
nature." In 1711, Canada was threatened with an attack by the English; and she
gave the nuns of the Congregation an image of the Virgin on which she
had written a prayer to protect their granary from the invaders. Other
persons, anxious for a similar protection, sent her images to write
upon; but she declined the request. One of the disappointed applicants
then stole the inscribed image from the granary of the Congregation,
intending to place it on his own when the danger drew near. The English,
however, did not come, their fleet having suffered a ruinous shipwreck
ascribed to the prayers of Jeanne Le Ber. "It was," writes the Sulpitian
Belmont, "the greatest miracle that ever happened since the days of
Moses." Nor was this the only miracle of which she was the occasion. She
herself declared that once when she had broken her spinning-wheel, an
angel came and mended it for her. Angels also assisted in her
embroidery, "no doubt," says Mother Juchereau, "taking great pleasure in
the society of this angelic creature." In the church where she had
secluded herself, an image of the Virgin continued after her death to
heal the lame and cure the sick. (Regime 1350). Parkman
then proceeds with a succinct, two-page description that furnishes all of
the nuances Cather needed for her novel's most memorable character. I quote
Parkman's pages, recommending particular attention to the phrase "cast a
stolen glance at her," which may have triggered the incident Cather
constructed in which Pierre Charron steals a forbidden midnight glance at La
Recluse:
Regime
1351-53).
As the description of Jeanne Le Ber makes clear, Cather appropriates every
aspect of this historical character, relying strongly on Parkman's
interpretation; but she also mined his histories for images, seemingly
incidental events, and themes. Parkman, for example, describes one
miraculous conversion that Cécile Auclair later discusses with her father.
According to Parkman, after one arrival of ships from France with many new
settlers and replacements sent from the King, the hospitals were crowded
with the sick, for the journey had been long and hard.
The priests were busied in converting the Huguenots, a number of whom
were detected among the soldiers and emigrants. One of them proved
refractory, declaring with oaths that he would never renounce his faith.
Falling dangerously ill, he was carried to the hospital, where Mother
Catherine de Saint-Augustin bethought her of a plan of conversion. She
ground to powder a small piece of a bone of Father Brebeuf, the Jesuit
martyr, and secretly mixed the sacred dust with the patient's gruel;
whereupon, says Mother Juchereau, "this intractable man forthwith became
gentle as an angel, begged to be inconstructed, embraced the faith, and
abjured his errors publicly with an admirable fervor." (
Regime 1232)
In like manner, we can read in Parkman of "Chabanel, once a professor of
rhetoric in France, now a missionary, bound by a self-imposed vow to a life
from which his nature recoiled" ( Chabanel had been a professor of rhetoric . . . [and] was fond of the
decencies, the elegancies of life. From the beginning his life in Canada
was one long humiliation and disappointment. . . . His humiliating
inability to learn the language was only one of poor Chabanel's
mortifications. He had no love for his converts. . . . On Corpus Christi
Day, . . . he . . . overcame his temptation. . . . [H]e made a vow of
perpetual stability (Jesuits 657).
Cather's versions of each of these incidents, however, elaborate on these
facts. In her words:
perpetuam stabilitatem) in
the Huron missions. . . . Two years later he perished. (Shadows 150-54)
Beyond such incidents that give Shadows on the Rock
its air of authenticity, Parkman also supplies images that Cather in turn
develops into themes. La Salle, for example, is associated with feet that
went "too far" (Shadows 82). Parkman's presentation
explains the judgment, though his admiration for "the masculine form of
Cavelier de la Salle" is very clear. Parkman describes La Salle, "with feet
firm planted on the hard earth," as a man who "breathes the self-relying
energies of modern practical enterprise" as "step by step he advanced
towards his purpose." While his enemies "denounced and maligned him," we are
told, he "dreamed of a western passage to China and nursed vague schemes of
western discovery" (La Salle 777). Later, "when his
earlier journeyings revealed to him the valley of the Ohio . . . his
imagination took wing over the boundless prairies and forests. . . . His
ambition had found its field. He would leave barren and frozen Canada
behind, and lead France and civilization into the valley of the Mississippi"
(La Salle 777). Finally, of course,
La Salle was murdered by one of his own men as his party made its way back
to Canada from Texas, on foot.
La Salle's feet are present in Shadows on the Rock
because the last for his shoes remains on display in Pommier's cobbler shop.
The object, however, allows Cather not only to insert a plausible reference
to one of Parkman's major heroes but also to expand the reference into a
whole theme about feet and where they should go. To go anywhere, feet must
be cared for; and caring for the feet of little Jacques Gaux unites the
whole town: the governor pays for his shoes, the artisan makes his shoes
well, the playmate Cécile knits his socks, and old Bishop Laval bathes and
kisses his feet when Jacques is small and lost and crying.
Cather herself, of course, manufactures Frontenac's gift to little Jacques of
a pair of shoes. Yet Frontenac appears in Parkman's histories, as well as in
Cather's novel, to be most effective in his dealings with children and
Indians. He always addresses Indians as children and says when he commends
them, "You have done well, my children, to obey the command of your Father.
Take courage: you will hear his word, which is full of peace and tenderness"
(La Salle 782). Thus Parkman's portrait furnishes
Cather with her theme of good fathers abounding in Quebec to watch over the
settlement's children. By the end of Frontenac's life, Parkman tells us, he
has projected the image of a good father so effectively that that the
humbler citizens he governs well (as opposed to those nearer his equal, with
whom he habitually quarrels), consider him the love and delight of New
France" (Frontenac 308).
Parkman supplies images not only for Cather's heroes but also for her
heroines. The first positive image of a mature woman in Shadows on the Rock is Mother Juchereau, who tells who tells
Cécile stories while making artificial flowers. According to Parkman, "The
nuns of the Hotel-Dieu made artificial flowers for altars and shrines, under
the direction of Mother Juchereau" (Regime 1311-12.)
The image assumes importance in the novel because it introduces the theme of
the superiority of art and artifice over nature. The domestic and practical
arts are especially celebrated in this novel, and Parkman also provides the
symbols of such celebration. They come not only through Mother Juchereau's
artificially lasting blooms or Frontenac's glass fruit but also through
Cécile's artfully ordered kitchen.
Parkman stresses the importance this colony placed on domestic stability and
order. Shiploads of "King's girls" were sent as brides for the settlers, and
"Orders were issued, a little before the arrival of the yearly ships from
France, that all single men should marry within a fortnight after the
landing of the prospective brides" (Regime 1262);
further, "Bounties were offered on children" (Regime
1263). The domestic arts in Canada were prized so highly that French opinion
maintained "the advantage that women have in this place (Montreal) over men, for though the cold is very wholesome to both
sexes, it is incomparable more so to the female, who is almost immortal
here" (Regime 1264).
The need for an epilogue stressing Cécile's growing family is partially
explained by Parkman's facts that bounties were given to each girl who
married before the age of sixteen (Regime 1261) and
that fathers whose daughters reached sixteen and were still unmarried were
fined (Regime 1262). Parkman also supplies this
nformation about the women of Quebec: "They have wit, . . . delicacy, good
voices, and a great fondness for dancing. They are discreet, and not much
given to flirting; but when they undertake to catch a lover it is not easy
for him to escape the bonds of Hymen" (Regime 1371).
Quebec girls, Parkman informs us, were said to get husbands faster than
Montreal girls because the ships from France landed first at Quebec (Regime 1374). With al this information supplied by
Parkman, it is no surprise that Cather could not end her novel until Cécile
was fully engaged in "bringing up four little boys, the Canadians of the
future" (Shadows 278).
While her novel ends by referring to a happy home, however, Cather's novel
begins as ships leave. Implicit in all the images of ships leaving or time
running out is a fear of abandonment and loss. As Cather's novel recognizes,
the colony needed reassuring objects or arts to make a dark, cold place feel
less like exile and more like home. The isolation of Quebec and the tenuous
link to France maintained only by vulnerable ships is also an explicit theme
in Parkman:
On the Lower St. Lawrence, where it widens to an estuary, . . . a ship
from France, the last of the season, holds her way for Quebec, laden
with stores and clothing, household utensils, goods for Indian trade,
the newest court fashions, wine, brandy, tobacco, and the king's orders
from Versailles. Swelling her patched and dingy sails, she glides
through the wildness and the solitude where there is nothing but her to
remind you of the great troubled world behind and the little troubled
world before. (
Regime 1340)
Especially remarkable among the links between Parkman and Cather, in fact, is
Cather's use of Parkman's moving end to chapter 23 in And now we, too, will leave Canada. Winter draws near, and the first
patch of snow lies gleaming on the distant mountain of Cape Tourmente.
The sun has set in chill and autumnal beauty, and the sharp spires of
fir-trees on the heights of Sillery stand stiff and black against the
pure cold amber of the fading west. The ship sails in the morning; and,
before the old towers of Rochelle rise in sight, there will be time to
smoke many a pipe, and ponder what we have seen on the banks of the St.
Lawrence. (The
Old Regime in Canada. Here the history provides an overture
containing Cather's future motifs already elaborated for her. She will later
orchestrate them for her book's central arias, merely using Parkman's end as
her beginning:
Regime 1376)
After the many other symbols, images, themes, incidents, and characters have
been mentioned, however, the two overriding themes in Shadows on the Rock are the association of late
seventeenth-century Quebec with the Middle Ages and the assertion that the
life lived in Quebec was suffused by a sense of miracle. Both themes are
dominant in Parkman's histories, as several quotations above have already
indicated. For example, Indians, seeing La Salle as a champion who will
protect them against the Iroquois, are said to have "gathered around his
stronghold like the timorous peasantry of the middle ages around the
rock-built castle of their feudal lord" (La Salle
934). Speaking later of French quarrels, Parkman says, "An obscure corner of
the vast regions in dispute became the scene of an intestine strife like the
bloody conflicts of two feudal chiefs in the depths of the middle ages" (Regime 1072). The "scene for an artist" supplied by
the fort named Port Royal is further sketched as "mediaevalism married to
primeval savagery" (Regime 1077). And later still,
Parkman comments, "The great difference between the position of the Canadian
seignior and that of the vassal proprietor of the Middle Ages lay in the
extent and nature of the control which the Crown and its officers held over
him" (Regime 1277). For one such as Cather, who was
predisposed to favor the symbols, signs, and sites of medieval Normandy,
Quebec furnished not only the vista reminiscent of those she admired but
also a history to confirm her impression. Parkman made the pleasing analogy
first; it is no wonder that she accepted his authority in order to anchor
her facts accurately.
She also found in Parkman a mind as willing as she was to circle skeptically,
with distancing irony, around the concept of miracle. Just as she had been
exploring the idea throughout her three previous novels, so he had also kept
the idea in sight throughout his maturity as he sketched the history of New
France. One plausible explanation for Cather's heavy reliance on Parkman's
works, in fact, is that through their repeated use of those key words that
she had repeatedly explored for several previous years and volumes, Parkman
seemed uncannily to be speaking in her vocabulary and to her immediate
concerns. For example, he describes one early missionary as "the fanatical
Chaumonot, whose character savored of his peasant birth,-for the grossest
fungus of superstition that ever grew under the shadow of Rome was not too
much for his omnivorous credulity, and miracles and mysteries were his daily
food; yet, such as his faith was, he was ready to die for it" (Jesuits 657). Though Parkman sounds sarcastic as
Cather did not, Chaumonot's world view is not dissimilar to Augusta's in The Professor's House or to Joseph Vaillant's in Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Parkman also gives Cather the cue for her heavy emphasis on Christmas, the time she most emphatically associated with miracles. For example, "Christmas came, and was solemnly observed. There was a midnight Mass in the chapel. . . . And as Membre elevated the consecrated wafer, and the lamps burned dim through the clouds of incense, the knee