Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Cather's fiction about the Catholic mission in the Hispanic Southwest, is a historical novel, but one that approaches its subject in an elusive, teasing manner. The story begins in the aftermath of the Mexican War (1846-48) victory that enabled the United States to annex California and New Mexico, an area that had constituted half of Mexico's territory. The conflict cost thirteen thousand American lives and nearly $100 million. It epitomized the nascent imperialism encouraged by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, presaging future wars in the decaying colonies of the old Spanish Empire. Mexico also focused the burgeoning debate over slavery, as politicians argued over whether the new territories should become Free Soil or slave states. Emerson, conscious of this sectionalism (the beginning of the conflict that led to the Civil War), remarked with uncharacteristic pessimism that the United States would conquer Mexico, "but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic, which brings him down. . . . Mexico will poison us" (Emerson 430-31).

Melodramatic details of political and military history are, however, largely absent from Cather's irenic novel. Although historical figures who featured in the war and its aftermath appear in the book, either under their own names (Kit Carson) or fictionalized under another (Father Latour represents Lamy, the first archbishop of New Mexico), Cather eschews the dramatic foreground of history. Her novel portrays the hinterland of history; it covers the quotidian background, the everyday ministrations of Fathers Latour and Vaillant as they reform and strengthen their Church. The priests, in fact, see themselves as men on the fringes of history: "As Father Vaillant remarked, at Rome they did not seem to realize that it was no easy matter for two missionaries on horseback to keep up with the march of history" (199). With characteristic Catheresque deflation, Latour's next ride to an important clerical conference is cut short by illness; he returns to his garden in Santa Fe, turned back again from the "march of history." When major historical incidents are mentioned, such as the infamous Bent massacre or the expulsion of the Navajo from their lands, Cather's prose is laconically subdued. Her plain style is notable in a passage where the church leaders discuss the results of the war: "They were talking business; had met, indeed, to discuss an anticipated appeal from the Provincial Council at Baltimore for the founding of an Apostolic Vicarate in New Mexico-a part of North America recently annexed to the United States" (4).

The annexation is undemonstrably mentioned at the end of the sentence, as if it were an aside or an item of interesting but minor news. A flattened tone is typical of the novel's almost parodically "objective" recording of history: terse details of time, place, and event are given. The novel's opening phrase, "One summer evening in the year 1848, is a good example of this, as is the similar beginning to book 1, One afternoon in the autumn of 1851." Carefully encapsulating three timescales (year, season, time of day), these sentences seem to represent a self-conscious pastiche, a stylized mimicry of historical fiction's claim to give accurate details of where and when the action took place. This historical positioning allows the reader lacking contextual knowledge to proceed unimpeded, but it also deploys a recognizable discourse, the precise, factual, rigorously empirical prose of nineteenth-century American "Common Sense" writing.

Common Sense philosophy underpinned this prose. Adopting the work of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers-Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, Alexander Gerard-the American educational and critical establishments were schooled in Common Sense principles: the primacy of facts and common sense, observation as the basis of knowledge, careful inference as the extension of that knowledge, and, above all, a distrust of speculation (Martin 107-48). Recent work on Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville reveals the troubled and ambivalent response of these writers to Common Sense. Faced with a readership of Common Sensibility, the writer was to be confined to what was known and what was logically inferable from that factual basis (Clark 26-38; Manning 53-59). Hence the pressure on Melville to write travelogues (a record of what actually happened, guaranteed by the foregrounded presence of an observing, testifying chronicler) and his reactions to the interdictions against speculation "Benito Cereno" turns on Delano's Common Sense belief that the situation can be entirely comprehended through what he sees and hears, but a speculative leap of imagination is needed by Delano to pierce through to the reality). Hence also Hawthorne's critique of Common Sense in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, where he defends the speculative play of the novelist's imagination: When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of a man's experience. The former-while as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart-has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. (1)

The term historical romance suggests a dialectic between empiricism and imagination, an oxymoronic combination of fact and fancy. Cather polarizes these tendencies in the genre. On the one hand, there is the novel's basis in historical actuality, the incorporation of "real" figures such as Kit Carson and the deployment of a Common Sense discourse to record the minutiae of history. On the other, Cather encompasses experiences outside the range of Common Sense: mystery, miracle, transcendence. Numerous episodes revolve around a sudden insight, the illumination of everyday (Common Sense) reality by what one can only call a spiritual or mystical light. When Latour hears the angelus the timbre of the bell transports him to a different time and place: "Before the nine strokes were done Rome faded, and behind it he sensed something Eastern, with palm trees,-Jerusalem, perhaps, though he had never been there. Keeping his eyes closed, he cherished for a moment this sudden, pervasive sense of the East. Once before he had been carried out of the body thus to a place far away" (43).

If Common Sense style is metonymic, logically moving along a chain of inferable propositions, then the style here is metaphorical: one sensation replaces another; immediate reality dissolves into another time and place. And that reality might be wholly imaginary-the sense of something Eastern, the intimation of a place never visited. The oxymoronic combination implicit in Hawthorne's preface is here pushed further: a character grounded in historical reality is pictured in a moment of extreme imaginative speculation.

Critics, uncomfortable with the contrasts of this shifting text, have attempted to reconcile these conflicting elements. Early readers were intrigued by the novel's generic ambiguity and strove to place it as history, biography, or fiction; one reviewer even created the hybrid genre historical biography (Gilman 2). Later critics studied Cather's sources to illuminate the factual basis of the novel and then analyzed the "romance" aspects of the text, Cather's spiritual and imaginative insights. The result is a Cather who harmonizes contradictory creative impulses and conflates polarities, the writer summed up in Hermione Lee's balanced phrases: "both pioneer and historian, actor and author, female and male voice, receiver and rewriter of history" (Lee 288).

Behind these phrases lies the recurrent critical wish to find that either organic synthesis or the yoking together of contraries is the essence of art. However, Cather's texts can also be read as inconsistent, disrupted, or fractured. Throughout her major novels there is, if anything, an increasing "gappiness" as the texts move towards ever-increasing formal dis-integration. My Ántonia (1918) employs the inset story of Peter and Pavel, a digression away from the New World to the European folk memory of the immigrants. The Professor's House (1925) is broken structurally by the interpolation of "Tom Outland's Story," a tale that is temporally, geographically, and narratologically separated from the rest of the novel. Increasingly, Cather showed scant regard for preserving unities, whether of place or time or point of view. Death Comes for the Archbishop continues the dis-intergrative process, collating a heterogeneous range of discourses: folk talk, historical detail, anecdotes about Mexican and Indian life, the spiritual biographies of Fathers Latour and Vaillant. The novel eschews a strongly plotted narrative line as Cather juxtaposes one discourse against another within a loose, discontinuous format. Constructing her novel in this way, Cather seemed to have strained the definitions of the novel. In fact, she was eventually to defend the form of Death Comes for the Archbishop, which to many seemed to have no form at all, on the grounds that this was a narrative, not a novel. Her defense, written as a letter to Commonweal in 1927, extrapolated from Hawthorne's account of the historical romance's imaginative freedom. She displaced his plea for speculative liberty into a discussion of narrative form, claiming for herself absolute compositional freedom: "I am amused that so many of the reviews of this book begin with the statement: 'This book is hard to classify.' Then why bother? Many more assert vehemently that it is not a novel. Myself, I prefer to call it a narrative. In this case I think that term more appropriate" (On Writing 12).

A novel's form is not, however, simply a question of form. The structure of the novel is deeply related to its embodiment of ideological issues. Her experiments with novelistic form have major implications for the ideological meanings of the texts: structure, the architecture of a novel, helps to define its ideological configuration. Narratology has taught us to read for the oddities in the construction of a text; we now search for moments of incoherence or asymmetry rather than for formal coherence, organic wholeness, or symmetry. At these cruces the text's engagement with ideology is to be found as ideology erupts into the text or is silenced and suppressed. To use a geographical metaphor, we can think of the gaps in her novels as fissures or rents in the terrain of the text.

Death Comes for the Archbishop, a novel about the Southwest and its Pueblo cultures, extends academic efforts to understand Hispanic and Indian America. Turn-of-the-century anthropologists and archaeologists undertook some of their most pioneering work in this hinterland. Cather was familiar with studies by Charles Lummis, whose 1892 text, Some Strange Corners of Our Country, was published as the enlarged and suggestively retitled Mesa, Canon, and Pueblo in 1925, and Adolph Bandelier, the early explorer of the Santa Fe region, which she adored. One can follow the cultural osmosis whereby this academic primitivism seeped into the culture at large. After universities established departments of anthropology in the 1880s and 1890s, popular magazines responded to public interest in the subject with photographic essays on the dwindling Indian tribes. The Pasadena Eight, a group of Californian photographers, had explored Arizona and New Mexico from the 1870s onward, recording the Hopi snake dance. In Cather's lifetime, Edward S. Curtis's massive twenty-volume record, The North American Indian (1907-30), was widely celebrated. Emphatic racial, cultural, and geographical divisions encouraged works that were analogously divided, as if the Southwest were too diverse for the encompassing imagination, and disrupted efforts to enclose the local culture in unified narratives. Thus, Lummis's New Mexico David (1891) is subtitled "Stories and Sketches of the Southwest" and brings together anecdotes, travel sketches, and tales. In Notes for a New Mythology (1926) and Mornings in Mexico (1927), Haniel Long and D. H. Lawrence eschewed conventional genres, creating instead a bricolage of personal reflection, travelogue, history, and anthropology. In the American Grain (1925), William Carlos Williams's iconoclastic history, is another such work-heterogeneous, experimental, a freeing of the multiple voices of American history. As a new area of America (the Southwest) and other peoples (Indians, Mexicans) became part of the American story, writers and artists developed forms that were increasingly polyphonous and "open."

Cather explored this new openness. She exploited Hawthorne's pledge of authorial autonomy (the romance obeys "circumstances . . . of the writer's own choosing or creation"), capitalized upon the polyphonous breadth of other Southwestern works, and in so doing enlarged the range of her fiction to include a subject normally on the fringes of American culture: Catholicism. Catholicism was an unusual subject for an American writer, especially in the 1920s. Traditional Protestant suspicions about the authoritarianism of the papacy (indicated by the Church's links with feudal governments) placed Catholicism and American democracy at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Anti-Catholic feeling went through one of its periodic revivals during the 1920s. Add to this opprobrium and misunderstanding the low regard in which Christianity itself was held by critics and novelists in a period when America's literary intellectuals were alienated from the fervent Protestantism sweeping the country, and one begins to see how idiosyncratic an achievement Cather's novel is. For the Protestant utopianism of progressive social reformers does not seem to have been widely shared by novelists. When Christianity was written about, it was the object of satire, not celebration. A genre of antievangelical fiction runs from Harold Frederic's Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), a novel Cather admired, through Howells's Leatherwood God (1916) and on to Elmer Gantry (1927), the latter a bestseller in the year when Cather's own Christian novel was published (Cather, World 709-11; Hart 242). Harold E. Stearns could not find a contributor to write about religion for his 1922 symposium on America, Civilization in the United States: An Enquiry by Thirty Americans, and attacked Christianity in "The Country versus the Town" (1921): "Our own rural Middle West is to-day too largely led by the broken-down evangelical cretinism so well exhibited in Mr. Howell's [sic] last novel" (141).

"Evangelical cretinism" was also mocked by Cather, in both her private and her public writing. In a letter of 1896 she scoffed at Presbyterian Pittsburgh, the town where, she wrote, every girl had her church work in the way that other young women had fans or powder boxes (Letter to "Dear Little Neddius"). An early story, "Eric Hermannson's Soul" (1900), satirized fundamentalist Free Gospellers (359-79). In 1907-8 Cather undertook for McClure's magazine the supervision of Georgine Milmine's biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science; the series of articles was taken as a satirical attack by church leaders, and the book remains proscribed by Christian Science.

Cather was received into the Episcopalian Church in 1922, and much of the creative energy that went into Death Comes for the Archbishop arose from a radical transformation in her religious feelings. She wrote about Catholicism when she herself had recently joined a Protestant Church, but the reasons for Cather's attraction toward Rome probably lay in the faith's cultural and historical significance. For Cather, Catholicism was not the monolithic autocracy caricatured by American nativists; it was instead a repository of European culture, endlessly adapting itself to alien environments. In the early novels, therefore, the Church is akin to the immigrant peoples celebrated and has a similar ideological significance, representing an enriching cultural pluralism.

Cather's Catholicism is a faith of amalgamating, incorporating power, a church founded on the benevolent axioms of cultural heterogeneity and racial difference. Even Catholicism is transformed and hybridized in the new land-Cather is interested, as ever, in the quickening effect of transporting a culture-and in Death Comes for the Archbishop she shows how the Church itself changed for the better. The Church, which in its transported form is a progressive force, becomes a medium for the reform of the backward Mexican territories. The novel begins in Europe-in Rome-and follows the transplantation of modern Catholicism to America; it charts the replacement of a feudal despotism by the benevolent autocracy of Rome. Latour, another wanderer, brings a moderate clerical authority to Mexico, supplanting the corrupt priests Martinez and Lucero, who, cut off from Rome, have drifted into petty tyranny. An absolutely deracinated Church, Cather suggests, lacks the tolerance gained from strong ties with Europe; but, as the cardinals' conference implies, a wholly rooted one is moribund. The "Midi Romanesque" church that Latour builds in the New Mexico wilderness symbolizes the harmony of Catholicism and America, the middle way between stasis and movement, rootedness and migration.

Catholicism is an amalgam of different cultures, as Latour realizes when he hears the angelus rung: "The Bishop smiled. 'I am trying to account for the fact that when I heard it this morning it struck me at once as something oriental. A learned Scotch Jesuit in Montreal told me that our bells, and the introduction of the bell in the service all over Europe, originally came from the East. He said the Templars brought the Angelus back from the Crusades, and it is really an adaptation of a Moslem custom'" (45).

Cather exploits cultural fusion to witty effect here; the casual reference to a "learned Scotch Jesuit in Montreal'" could only occur in one of her novels. She relativizes Christianity, placing it in conjunction with other religions and unraveling the various cultural skeins in Catholicism. The bell results from a chain of artistic transfers: "The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans have taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors" (45). Spaniards, Mexicans, Navajos, Moors-Cather's cultural archaeology finds a cosmopolitan mix of races behind the manufacture of the bell. Cather frequently interprets events through a multiracial or multicultural stencil. At the start of the novel, when the Mexican mission is being discussed in Europe, the Catholic clergy is presented as representing a spread of cultures. As the reader' eye moves down the passage, a characteristic mixture of races stands out: They were talking business; had met, indeed, to discuss an anticipated appeal from the Provincial Council at Baltimore for the founding of an Apostolic Vicarate in New Mexico-a part of North America recently annexed to the United States. This new territory was vague to all of them, even to the missionary Bishop. The Italian and French Cardinals spoke of it as Le Méxique, and the Spanish host referred to it as "New Spain." Their interest in the projected Vicarate was tepid, and had to be continually revived by the missionary, Father Ferrand; Irish by birth, French by ancestry-a man of wide wanderings and notable achievement in the New World, an Odysseus of the Church. The language spoken was French-the time had already gone by when Cardinals could conveniently discuss contemporary matters in Latin. The French and Italian Cardinals were men in vigorous middle life-the Norman full-belted and ruddy, the Venetian spare and sallow and hooknosed. Their host, García María de Allende, was still a young man. He was dark in colouring, but the long Spanish face, that looked out from many canvases in his ancestral portrait gallery, was in the young Cardinal much modified through his English mother. With his caffè oscuro eyes, he had a fresh, pleasant English mouth, and an open manner. (4-5)

These paragraphs reveal a profusion of national or provincial identities: Italian, French, Spanish, Irish, English, Norman, Venetian. An apparently simple exercise in physiognomic description, the passage counterpoints accuracy about racial origin against a fondness for the hybrid-Father Ferrand, "Irish by birth, French by ancestry," and García María de Allende, the Spaniard with the English mother. Cather discriminates among her priests with an anthropological precision, defining them through racial and geographical origin as if they were members of different tribes.

America's nineteenth-century theories of civilization had projected a hierarchical model of race. Stadialism demarcated and ranked races through numerous stages. This constellation of ideas, formulated by the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers and given a fictional representation in Walter Scott's novels, suggested that society evolved through distinct stages: a barbarian stage gave way to increasingly sophisticated cultures, agricultural then industrial, until present-day urban society was reached. The United States seemed to be a startling confirmation of this theory; a traveler moving across the country could see the various stages, spread across the terrain. Hence Thomas Jefferson's famous panoramic overview (1824): Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, substisting and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day. (Jefferson 74-75)

The American patchwork of Indian, pioneer, and urban settlements seems to confirm the stadialist thesis. The indigenous Indan population serves as an index whereby the gap between earlier and later stages can be gauged. Stadialism envisaged linear progress, the ascent of civilization through increasingly sophisticated stages toward ultimate perfectibility.

What did novelists make of stadialism? George Dekker's study, The American Historical Romance, which looks at writers from Cooper up to Cather and Faulkner, proposes that stadialism formed the historiographical and racial matrix that underpinned a great tradition of American novels. Dekker claims that stadialism "was not racist-quite the contrary" and that it fostered an inquisitive, quasi-anthropological outlook. Believing that modern society had emerged step by step from earlier civilizations, the stadialist was de facto interested in "savage" peoples; the "primitive" illuminated the modern. Moreover, as Dekker points out, the novelist, an heir of romanticism, often had a sympathetic concern for "the savage and barbarian peoples doomed by progress." Nominally siding with the progressive forces (the city-dwellers, the "civilized"), the novelist in fact found much to admire in out-moded cultures, which seemed to retain an integrity and passion lost by later stages (Dekker 73-98).

When Dekker discusses Cather the intellectual grip of his stadialist model on specific novels seems to slacken. The underlying limitation of Dekker's thesis is that stadialism was essentially an eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century paradigm; it provides a philosophical and historical context for American fiction that undoubtedly existed around 1800 but grew less relevant as the century wore on. By the twentieth century its configurations had changed drastically, and few novelists illustrate the paradigmatic shift away from stadialism to the extent that Cather does. Fundamentally, Cather revises difference and categorization. She applies to her European tribes an anthropologist's discrimination, and whereas until now difference had been enlisted in theories of control and repression, here difference is affirmed for its own sake. Indeed, Cather's hierarchy is a hierarchy of cultural relativism; individuals and races are evaluated according to their ability to migrate, transplant themselves, and absorb foreign influences.

In one section Latour meets the old Mexican woman Sada, who has been prevented from entering the local church by her Protestant Anglo master (the unflattering picture of Protestantism continues Cather's early satires). Latour takes Sada into the church: "Never, as he afterward told Father Vaillant, had it been permitted him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion as on that pale December night. He was able to feel, kneeling beside her, the preciousness of the things of the altar to her who was without possessions; the tapers, the image of the Virgin, the figures of the saints, the Cross that took away indignity from suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with Christ" (217).

The epiphany occurs on a December night, in the company of an apparently mundane character; the scene exemplifies Cather's interest in the transcendental insight emerging out of the ordinary moment. Latour, God's vicar, himself experiences God's presence vicariously through Sada, and the setting is cluttered with other examples of the vicarious: the Virgin, saints, the Cross. Cather provided a gloss on the scene in her Commonweal letter: "But a novel, it seems to me, is merely a work of imagination in which a writer tries to present the experiences and emotions of a group of people by the light of his own. That is what he really does, whether his method is 'objective' or 'subjective'" (On Writing 12-13). Or, as Cather wrote in a letter late in her career, stories are made from the grafting of an outside figure onto part of the writer's self (Letter to Mr. Phillipson).

Cather's aesthetic principles predisposed her to a favorable view of Catholicism. An art based on empathy resembles a faith of vicarious spirituality; both require a broadening of the imagination as the consciousness extends itself beyond the self into the sensibility of another. Furthermore, her notion of empathy was transformed into an ideological principle; she developed empathy into a form of "only connect" liberalism attuned to moments when cultural or racial gaps are at least temporarily bridged. This notion is not given an explicit formulation, nor is it projected as watery, vague sentimentality. In brief, parablelike vignettes such as the story of Sada the novel indirectly builds up a composite and detailed fresco of the varieties of empathy. When the European priest empathizes with the Mexican peasant, the difference and rewards of crossing cultural and personal barriers are moviingly intimated. The bridging takes place in silence; Latour and Sada arrive at mutuality, an unspoken communion, through the objects in the church: tapers, Madonna, Cross. Cather here seems presciently sensitive to language and to the potentially blinding, authoritarian power of a discourse that attempts to comprehend and explain alien cultures or the Other.

As Edward Said's Orientalism famously demonstrated, Western observers, in the very act of creating a discourse to understand the Orient, effectively appropriated those foreign civilizations with a subjugating, colonizing language. Said asserts that there is no such "real thing as 'the Orient,'" since it has been "excluded, displaced" by the written statements of Orientalists; that "both learned and imaginative writing are never free, but are limited in their imagery, assumptions, and intentions"; and, therefore, that every nineteenth-century European "in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric" (21, 201-2, 204).

Before we reach the episode about Sada, we read passages describing the angelus, the casting of the bell, and the conflation of Christianity and Islam. Cather has already demonstrated how Western faith has been touched upon and changed by the Other. The Sada incident deepens these observations, teasing out the implications of multiculturalism at the level of personal encounters. (The effect is similar to that in My Ántonia, where immigration and assimilation-the so-called Americanization process-are grounded in comic scenes about language learning.) Latour, faced with an enigmatic and alien culture that demands interpretation, is in a position very much like that of Said's Orientalists. But what is notable in the Sada episode is the creation of a discourse, a medium for understanding, outside of European written or spoken language. The symbols of the Catholic Church are by usage European (though Cather shows how even a Catholic ritual like the ringing of the angelus has its origin in the oriental religion of Islam), but the gist of the passage is that these objects can be appropriated by Sada and transferred from Europe to New Mexico. Empathy and cultural transmission reverse the usual trend of European encounters with the Other; Sada masters the presiding language (here, the symbols of Catholic worship), and Latour becomes a passive recipient (it is "permitted him to behold").

In Cather's intellectual milieu there were similar attempts to explore the problematic relationships between colonist and colonized, civilized and "primitive," European and Indian. Comparison with these other texts enables us to position Death Comes for the Archbishop and to evaluate what I have called its "only connect" liberalism. Cather researched the novel during a stay with the ubiquitous Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, New Mexico, in 1925. D. H. Lawrence was the most famous guest at the artists' colony Luhan had established; the two novelists met in New Mexico, and each worked on a book about the indigenous Indian culture of the area. Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico (also published in 1927) celebrates the utter difference, or Otherness, of the Indians. At the start of the book Lawrence watches a monkey but rejects the evolutionary connection between it and him: "He's different. There's no rope of evolution linking him to you like a navel string. No! Between you and him there's a cataclysm and another dimension. It's no good. You can't link him up. Never will. It's the other dimension" (15). The "other dimension" is at the heart of Lawrence's thoughts about race and culture; he founds his theories on this idea of radical otherness. He then tries to understand Indian culture without subsuming it under the Western order of things, while he castigates other European observers for the sentimentality of their writing about primitivism. Sentimentality hints at a reconciliation of the Indian and the European, but for Lawrence there can be no such rapprochement. He endlessly reiterates the point that Indian and European mentalities are utterly divorced: "The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united. They are not even to be reconciled. There is no bridge, no canal of connexion" (55).

The difficulty with this is that the more Lawrence insists upon difference, the more he writes the Indian into his own discourse; the separateness Lawrence insists upon is bridged by his need to mobilize the Indian for didactic purposes. Because Lawrence continually uses primitivism to attack atrophied civilization, the reader is always aware of his vatic, intercessory voice. No matter how much we are told that "there is no bridge, no canal of connexion," this voice constitutes that very connection; Lawrence cannot resist positioning himself as someone who knows, who has the privileged inside knowledge and is able to describe Indians to the ignorant European. And in the moment of positioning himself Lawrence undoes his own claims to distance and disconnection.

Lawrence is trapped in the interpretive cul-de-sac described by Edward Said: attempts to understand the Other are acts of power, and the discourse itself is so ridden with the colonizer's ideology that it becomes another form of colonization. Said's analysis presents a traditional humanist hope-that works of art enable the artist and reader to enter into or understand cultures other than their own-as ultimately futile. The upshot of Said's argument is, first, to devalue the power of local or individual resistance to the dominant ideology (we are all ineluctably conditioned by an a priori discourse) and, second, to present cultures as essentially insular and atomized. Cather, on the other hand, anticipates the issues dealt with in Said's work (the collision of cultures, the decoding of the Other) but holds back from endorsing his extreme conclusions. Her fiction dramatizes the act of knowing; her characters are shown in the process of exploring alien culture; the dominating Orientalist discourse is deferred. Characters are likely to be mystified by what they find or to lapse into silence; Cather suggests that a productive nescience, a profitable bewilderment, occurs when the Western intelligence meets Indian or Mexican culture. Latour realizes that the Indians' religious inheritance cannot be abruptly erased by receiving them into the Church; there are areas beyond empathy and outside the range of cultural transfer. "The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn't think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him" (92.).

Translation was important to Cather as proof that people can transmit their language and literature to other nations and races. For Cather, a much-translated writer, the translation of her work into different languages provided another opportunity to see transmission and cultural reformulation at work. She was, for instance, pleased with the foreign reception of Death Comes for the Archbishop, and she boasted that My Ántonia had been translated into eight languages (Cather, Letters to Carrie Sherwood). Thus, to admit that translation is not possible might at first seem to signal a severe defeat, but Cather makes the hiatus into a form of unspoken communication. She writes, just before the passage quoted above, "They relapsed into the silence which was their usual form of intercourse" (91-92). Tolerant reticence might be a means to communicate (the title of one section-"Stone Lips"-catches this paradoxical sense of mute communication). These silences or lacunae are a way for Cather to explore the gaps in understanding between two markedly different cultures. Writing about silence, Cather faced the problem of how to write about the failure of communication. The pressure of language, as Mornings in Mexico demonstrated, is to keep on, to fill up the silence. Accepting the limitations of the realist text, Cather's solution was to write silences into her prose, dramatizing these hiatuses and fissures in understanding.

Stadialism and savagism would not have countenanced the encounter between Latour and Jacinto; figures from different phases of societal evolution, they would have been kept apart, within their demarcated stages. The new interest in the Southwest and its primitive civilizations loosened this hierarchy, blurring boundaries to allow the meeting of previously polarized cultures. Ironically, though, Americans-anthropologists, photographers, and writers-began to appreciate the Indians just at the point when their culture was dying out, finally extinguished after a century of exterminations and forced removals. The new primitivism focused on a way of life that was, or was about to be, lost. The stadialist had felt a lingering fondness for the outmoded civilization, but this nostalgia now gained a keener edge. Anthropology, photography, and writing became the media to record America's loss of its indigenous peoples. A fundamental question then arose: as civilizations progress, is there an unavoidable loss of admirable qualities (of integrity, passion, community-the qualities often associated with the "primitive")? If there is loss, is it balanced by the gains of entering a more advanced phase of civilization?

Cather dramatized these questions. In the late 1920s she was drawn to the dilemma of societal progress. The Professor's House and Death Comes for the Archbishop are mapped to represent that dilemma, being divided between the "primitive" and the civilized, the Southwest and the East Coast or Europe, agrarian and technological communities. On one side, mesas and cliff-dweller settlements; on the other, the civilized centers of progressive power (bureaucracy, business, academe). It is to the issue of progress that I now want to return.

On first reading, Death Comes for the Archbishop seems to endorse progress. Entitling one section "The Old Regime" and including episodes that, with the precision of moral exempla, delineate the corruption of the Mexican clergy ("The Legend of Fray Baltazar"), Cather foregrounds the conflict of old and new authorities. Her alterations to the historical actuality serve to sharpen this conflict. The real Padre Martinez was not as bad as Cather makes him, and she probably overstates the inadequacies of the old regime (Scott 66-67). Her exaggeration of his evil heightens the novel's morality-play structure, the schematic contrast between good and bad priests.

Other modifications of her historical sources affect the politics of the novel; Cather gives us her own idiosyncratic reading of the progress of civilization. Lamy, the prototype of Latour, had been strongly identified with the Americanization of the Southwest. An ultramontane (i.e., an advocate of firm papal power), his authority was harnessed to the extension of American influence throughout the new territories; he worked as an agent of centralized spiritual and temporal power. The U.S. government in turn supported Lamy's efforts (Scott 121-46). Cather, however, plays down Latour's links with the government; Americanization is referred to but once, and then Latour claims that the Church is the best medium for this policy: "The church can do more than the Fort to make these poor Mexicans 'good Americans'. And it is for the people's good; there is no other way in which they can better their condition" (36).

Latour is less fervent and more pragmatic than the historical Lamy. Cather's progressivism is apolitical; she takes the politics out of progress by suppressing or eliding the ideological implications of her sources. The novel's correlation of corrupt administration, private vice, and reforming zeal reminds us that Cather had worked for McClure's during the heyday of muckraking. Like the muckraking journalists who exposed the political and business scandals of early-twentieth-century America, Cather attacks maladministration and champions reform but refuses to enter into wider political debate. Latour's pragmatic, nonpartisan reforms echo the missions of Cather's fellow journalists, for example, Lincoln Steffens. Exposing municipal corruption in The Shame of the Cities (1904), Steffens rejected "a ready-made reform scheme," adding that "the only editorial scheme we [the muckrakers] had was to study a few choice examples of bad city government" (Steffens 233). Although the tone is different, this is the spirit of Death Comes for the Archbishop: a circumscribed analysis in which the faults of a system are personalized or moralized rather than being interpreted in terms of underlying economic or political structures. Hence Cather's highly individualized images of evil: corruption becomes the manifestation of personal turpitude, a grotesque defect denoted by virulent physical appearance. Thus, Buck Scales "was tall, gaunt and ill-formed, with a snake-like neck, terminating in a small, bony head. Under his close-clipped hair this repellent head showed a number of thick ridges, as if the skull joinings were overgrown by layers of superfluous bone. With its small, rudimentary ears, this head had a positively malignant look" (67). Cather's externalized, reified portrait of malice could come from a scheme of humors, and the allegorical name Buck Scales emphasizes this character's reptilian two-dimensionality. Instead of social process and interaction, Cather projects a frozen, tableaulike image of personal corruption.

But elsewhere another form of progress emerges as Cather develops a more pointedly political sense of injustice and reform. Her treatment of Kit Carson is a case in point. She undermines Carson's heroic status. He had passed into American mythology as soon as his explorations of the West were reported in John Frémont's journals in the 1840s, and after he served in the Mexican War Carson became a national hero. In Moby Dick, published just after the war, Melville mock-heroically refers to Carson when Ishmael asks whether Hercules, described as "that antique Crockett and Kit Carson," should be admitted into the pantheon of whalemen (373). As Carson became a prototypical American hero, his many biographers iconized a muscular Christian devoid of the usual cowboy vices. Cather's Carson is demythologized. He is smaller and slighter than Latour expects, and a Catholic (nineteenth-century biographers glossed over this fact); and his role in the capture of the Navajo in their ancestral lands is squarely acknowledged: "Carson followed them down into the hidden world between those towering walls of red sandstone, spoiled their stores, destroyed their deep-sheltered corn-fields, cut down the terraced peach orchards so dear to them. When they saw all that was sacred to them laid waste, the Navajos lost heart. They did not surrender; they simply ceased to fight, and were taken. Carson was a soldier under orders, and he did a soldier's brutal work" (293-94).

Whereas there was a seamless correspondence between Buck Scales's appearance and his character, in this case there is disparity: Carson's "far-seeing blue eyes" and mouth of "singular refinement" (75) belie his "brutal work." Evil becomes a complex matter since appearance and reality do not match. Latour says at the end of his life that "I have lived to see two great wrongs righted; I have seen the end of black slavery, and I have seen the Navajos restored to their own country" (292). Carson's removal of the Navajo constituted one of the "great wrongs," but to look at him one would never have guessed his involvement in wrongdoing. It is important that his actions are presented as the result of a larger process of political decision making; Carson is an employee and not an autonomous free agent. He is "a soldier under orders" doing "a soldier's brutal work." The implication is that potential good is corrupted by institutional duty, by the political machine. Buck Scales's corruption seemed to arise from the very shape of his body; Carson's body is pure, but his actions are warped into badness by political imperatives. As Latour thinks of the Indian wars, "a political machine and immense capital were employed to keep it going" (292).

The problem with these comments is that they sit uneasily alongside the novel's earlier presentations of individualized corruption. The tone of the novel is disrupted. After Latour's reforms to the contingencies of the situation are accommodated, his meditation on progress in the Southwest suggests a trenchant, idealistic, politicized overview. We can see that Cather's ironic undercutting of Carson (she replaces the myth with a historically culpable figure) has led her toward the kind of political questions that the rest of the text seems to have overlooked. She has, in fact, raised the very questions provoked by the Mexican War that were to lead to the Civil War, questions about exploitation, expansion, and slavery. Having apparently turned away from these topics, Cather turns back to them, but too late in her text to grasp fully the implications of Latour's comments. Hence the contradictions besetting Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather condemns the corruption of the old regime, making Lucero and Martinez unequivocally evil, but she also records the savagery of the new order, for instance, in the hunting down of the Navajo. From a stadialist perspective this might seem readily explicable. Stadialism accepted the savagery of the old and the inevitable harshness of the new because it believed that there was underlying movement toward better civilizations. Cather therefore seems to be taking a classically stadialist line on the evils of historical progress. But as we saw earlier, in much of the novel Cather works against the stadialist model, notably in her sympathetic portraits of "primitive" peoples. Behind this contradiction lies a basic paradox: Cather simultaneously envisages the history of the Southwest as a matter of personalities and a matter of ideologies. It is possible to read the novel in either way, and finally one has to recognize the astigmatism of this text: Cather cannot quite focus her conflicting interpretations of American history.

At the troubled core of the progressive ideology (where, as I said earlier, the relative worth of old and new civilizations is evaluated and where the benefits or losses of progress are finally accounted for) Cather found herself unable to resolve this contradiction. She then moved away from the Common Sense, laconic style of the historical romance, finding that this medium could not account for the conflicting, paradoxical pressures of progressivism. Occasionally a compromise could be found within the boundaries of Common Sense. With the story of the Navajo, Cather illustrated the persistence of the old ways (the Navajo are accommodated in their government reservations) and a shift into a new phase of civilization (the U.S. administration is, after all, responsible for the Southwest). But other Indian tribes presented less purchase for Cather's desire to find a middle way between the old and the new. Hence Jacinto's dying pueblo: It seemed much more likely that the contagious diseases brought by white men were the real cause of the shrinkage of the tribe. Among the Indians, measles, scarlatina and whooping-cough were as deadly as typhus or cholera. Certainly, the tribe was decreasing every year. Jacinto's house was at one end of the living pueblo; behind it were long rock ridges of dead pueblo,-empty houses ruined by weather and now scarcely more than piles of earth and stone. The population of the living streets was less than one hundred adults. (123)

In this tale of decline and fall the white men's diseases are to blame. In the text, an asterisk at the end of the last sentence ("one hundred adults") takes the reader to a footnote: "In actual fact, the dying pueblo of Pecos was abandoned some years before the American occupation of New Mexico." That is, although the extinction of Pecos is clearly attributed to white civilization, it is disengaged from American imperialism; Cather separates the U.S. involvement in the Southwest from Indian deaths caused by European diseases. All this is later explained in the main body of the text, since Cather goes on to discuss Coronado's expedition to the area, thereby pinpointing the Spanish origin of the various contagions. Cather, then, chooses to refute emphatically the United States' role in this destruction, even to the extent of breaking up her prose with a footnoted insertion. The footnote authoritatively overrides the main body of the text, supplanting fictional history with the "objective" history of footnotes, facts, and authenticated chronology. In effect this is a convoluted negotiation of the progressive dilemma: Cather acknowledges the white man's destruction of the Indian settlements but circuitously evades the question of American involvement. The fact that Cather uses a footnote to achieve this solution shows how much strain the progressive dilemma put on her prose. The disruptions, contradictions, and anomalies of "progress" fissure the even surface of Cather's prose. Indeed, at this point the problem cannot be contained within the main body of the text.

A progressive contradiction is recognized and focused, but in order to "solve" the problem Cather shifts into a different discourse, the overriding footnote. Elsewhere, especially when she is writing about superseded or outmoded civilizations, her writing becomes symbolic, mythic, or parablelike. Her "transparent," laconically factual style is then disrupted by an ambiguous, shifting, layered mode. Cather returned at several points in her career to a story that repeatedly produced this discourse: the myth of the Enchanted Mesa was the subject of an early story, "The Enchanted Bluff" (1909), and of a section of The Professor's House, and it recurs in Death Comes for the Archbishop. It is the story of how an Indian tribe, in fear and defiance of the outside world, withdrew onto an isolated rock, where they died from hunger after the only stairway from their fortress was destroyed:

All this plain, the Bishop gathered, had once been the scene of a periodic man-hunt; these Indians, born in fear and dying by violence for generations, had at last taken this leap away from the earth, and on that rock had found the hope of all suffering and tormented creatures-safety. They came down to the plain to hunt and to grow their crops, but there was always a place to go back to. If a band of Navajos were on the Ácoma's trail, there was still one hope; if he could reach his rock sanctuary! On the winding stone stairway up the cliff, a handful of men could keep off a multitude. The rock of Ácoma had never been taken by a foe but once,-by Spaniards in armour. It was very different from a mountain fastness; more lonely, more stark and grim, more appealing to the imagination. The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need; even more feeling yearned for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and friendship. Christ Himself had used that comparison for the disciple to whom He gave the keys of His Church. And the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign lands,-their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them.

Already the Bishop had observed in Indian life a strange literalness, often shocking and disconcerting. The Ácomas, who must share the universal human yearning for something permanent, enduring, without shadow of change,-they had their idea in substance. They actually lived upon their Rock; were born upon it and died upon it. There was an element of exaggeration in anything so simple! (97-98)

The rock embodies the Indians' faith, devotion, and steadfastness; to Latour the rock exemplifies the "strange literalness" of Indian life. Latour, or the narrator-the style becomes noticeably more indirect as the passage proceeds, making it difficult to attribute the thoughts to one or the other-speak a heightened, sacred language. With phrases such as "when one came to think of it," the prose mimes a kind of biblical exegesis, an extended interpretation of the rock's significance. That meaning is largely theological. In heightened religious language and with devotional intensity the passage occludes the historical status of the rock, its place in a story of conquest and resistance. All that is left is fleeting references to the pursuing Navajo and the "Spaniards in armour" who finally took the fortress.

It seems that the mesa's importance is as a theological symbol; but the Enchanted Mesa suggested itself in The Professor's House as a tale about the primitive peoples of America and their defeat by white civilization. The story of the mesa provided a vehicle for Cather to ask questions about this historical process. Should the earlier communities be mourned? Why had they failed to survive? Patricia Lee Yongue believes that Cather then used the Enchanted Mesa story to answer these questions. The story of the cliff dwellers in The Professor's House is, in Yongue's view, a cautionary tale about societies that fail to progress. The cliff dwellers "allowed their beautiful, naturally-endowed culture to deteriorate into a waste land by all avoidance of technological change . . . by failure to make any effort to save themselves or actively to expand their customs to the rest of the New World" (Yongue 27-39). Technological acumen and territorial acquisitiveness, qualities absent from cliff-dweller life, were of course the foundation of America's nineteenth-century progress. Cather, Yongue argues, transformed the mesa story into an exemplary parable about the value of Yankee progress. The cliff dwellers had not been sufficiently similar to the civilization that overtook them; if they had been, they might have survived.

It is surely more convincing to interpret the cliff dwellers and the Enchanted Mesa as expressions of Cather's nostalgia for older and "purer" civilizations. The lack of commercialism or covetousness, the dedication to craftsmanship, the pacific sense of community-all of these qualities were admired by Cather. We might even interpret the story as a kind of utopian fiction. After all, the cliff dwellers are presented as an idealistic ur-Christian community. Their utopian, godly settlement is another version of the American "city on the hill," the theocratic community at one with itself and with the landscape in which it is placed. Cather's heightened rhetoric signals her own fascination with (and yearning for?) this utopia. But then there is the fall of the rock to the invading Spaniards. One does not have to agree completely with Yongue to admit that Cather is interested in the fall of the ideal community; in the moment of envisaging her city on the hill she cannot hold off awareness of the city's inevitable demise.

The cliff-dweller settlement, like Ántonia's homestead on the prairies, demonstrates Cather's interest in what we might call a fragile or compromised utopianism. In these cultured and harmonious communities she imagined her own version of the American ideal society; but in both cases the utopia is circumscribed. Ántonia's home, beautifully poised between the Old and New Worlds and their languages, is an idealized projection of a liberal Americanization that would accommodate European ways in the New World. Yet the simple fact that this utopia extends to just one house, and not the wider society, shows that the dream was limited. The Enchanted Mesa likewise possessed a doubleness in Cather's imagination: the incarnation of a craft-based, theocratic utopia; the disintegration of that ideal, whether through a combination of insularity and rapacious mobility, as here, or through the community's own cruelties, as in The Professor's House. Cather interlarded the two versions (utopia and dystopia), producing the layered parables of the rock and the Enchanted Mesa. And the reason that the Enchanted Mesa can sustain a variety of interpretations-theological exemplum, progressive dystopia, or nostalgic idyll-is that Cather is caught between conflicting discourses. She is simultaneously drawn toward idealism and disillusion, trying to imagine a progressive ideal even as she turns back on herself and undermines those ideals. The writer's imagination is attracted toward an ideal that it knows cannot be sustained.

Cather's narrative relaxation, her ability to accommodate or incorporate elements that seemed to be beyond the immediate scope of her ostensible themes, led to a liberal openness in her fiction. We have seen how this led her to define her text as a narrative rather than as a novel. Now, however, we can also see that expansiveness might become a form of evasion. Unable to unravel the dilemma of progress, Cather accreted various answers instead of resolving the central issues. She described her novel as an exploration of narrative, deploying examples of archaic forms of story such as the legend or the frieze. The "essence" of this method, she wrote, is "not to hold the note . . . but to touch and pass on." She wanted "to do something in the style of legend, which is absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment . . . something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition" (On Writing 9). Her formalist claims have been honored by critics who read the novel either as an homage to older storytelling or as a modernist experiment. For Mary-Ann and David Stouck the novel utilizes the medieval "paratactic" structures identified by Eric Auerbach, "a series of loosely related 'pictures,' each of which captures a gesture from a decisive moment in the subject's life" (Stouck and Stouck 293-307). And for Hermione Lee this structure is not an antiquarian idiosyncrasy but "a sophisticated version of symbolism, a modernist refusal of naturalism" (270).

Neither homage to medieval storytelling nor modernist abjuration of traditional narrative seems to me a fully satisfactory reading. Is the formal experiment simply a structural idiosyncrasy, or does it have broader implications? Might it not affect the ways Cather represents American history? We have already seen that the swerve from naturalism to symbolism, noted by Lee, has much to do with the inability of straightforward realist prose to contain the conflicting pressures of Cather's America. The discussions of the novel's form quoted above posit a formalism hermetically sealed off from the historical matrix in which Cather wrote. Yet the novel's form cannot be isolated from the issues of race, primitivism, Catholicism, and progress. In the novel's form we find the embodiment of Cather's thought, the grammar and syntax with which and through which she articulated her investigation into America's past.

The novel's discontinuous storyline, discrete tableaux and anecdotes, interpolated legends and historical asides, and lack of dynamic plot or taut structure give it an open, paratactic form. Parataxis presents a story without the hierarchical structure to combine and rank its constituent elements; it is the opposite of a historiography, which causally locks one event onto another in a chain of historical connection. Even if at certain points the text is clear about its ideological stance (e.g., about Carson and the Navajo), the episodic construction isolates these moments, because Cather has chosen "not to hold the note . . . but to touch and pass on." Faced with the jostling, contradictory evidence about the benefits of American progress, Cather favored narrative structures that revealed ideological tensions but refused to work out solutions to these dilemmas. The narrative structure becomes the embodiment of her simultaneous opening up and occlusion of the progressive dilemma. As we have seen, the text incorporates the new primitivism, carrying with it a tolerant receptivity to Indian culture, racial heterogeneity, and Catholicism-all of which are aspects of American culture that narrow definitions of American progress would have excluded. Nonetheless, Cather cannot finally combine, incorporate, or reconcile her own perspectives on progress, and her open text shades into an evasive text.

In "A Yankee in Canada," the first parts of which were published in Putnam's Magazine in 1853, Thoreau writes testily of his visit to Quebec in 1850. At the outset he observes that what he "got by going to Canada was a cold" (3). Puzzled that a country so "wild and unsettled" seems older than the United States, he concludes that the answer lies in the antiquity of Canadian institutions, in "the rust of conventions and formalities" (80-81). Left over from the feudal system, the all too visible machinery of aristocratic enterprises makes it impossible for a person to be "wholesomely neglected" (83). Although the "purity and transparency" of the air are commendable, one is constantly made aware of the government (34). Every day it "parades itself before you. . . ; every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the Champ de Mars and exhibits itself and toots" (83-84). One must, I think, admire the word toots in this context-irreverent, onomatopoetic, unit of sound that mocks the pageantry Thoreau endures from his Yankee perspective even as it heralds a fundamental statement about the value of human existence. For when he concludes that because of such governmental omnipresence the individual is "not worth so much in Canada as in the United States," we see that Thoreau with a cold is still Thoreau, a man who celebrates what he calls "the primitive and ultimate condition of man," who prizes individuality over community, singularity over tradition (82-83).

Almost eighty years later Willa Cather saw Quebec for the first time and came away with a different judgment about the traditions that had long sustained its life. What struck her about the city, as she wrote to Governor Wilbur Cross after four additional visits and the writing of Shadows on the Rock, was the persistence of a "narrow but definite" culture from another age into the present-an ethos she could not embrace but "could not but admire." Admitting the difficulty of defining that ethos, she likens it to "an old song, incomplete but uncorrupted." "The text," she continues in a provocative (and thoroughly postmodern) trope, "was mainly anacoluthon, so to speak, but the meaning was clear" ("On Shadows" 15).

Let me pause for a moment with the substantive anacoluthon, a term that suggests the kind of narrative Cather set out to write in Shadows on the Rock. Dictionaries define anacoluthon as an abrupt change within a sentence from one grammatical construction to another, quite inconsistent one, frequently for rhetorical effect. For example: "I warned him that if he continued gambling, what will become of him?" The Greek root of the word, an + akolouthos, means "not following." Cather invokes such a meaning when she says that "the text" of Quebec was "mainly anacoluthon." It came to her as something "not following," not sequential, as "an incomplete air" not linear or in standard progression. More importantly, it allowed her to transform, in the act of acknowledging, the distinction Thoreau found so important, to focus on family, community, and tradition even as she annexed historical examples of individuality that challenge and enrich the narrative. Cather is careful, as she says in her comments on Shadows, not to "mix kinds," not to "explode into military glory" after having settled into a seat "by the apothecary's fire" (16). But she also takes some calculated chances with the mood of this novel by exposing it to the light (and half-light) of radical spiritual ventures clearly outside the range of Cécile Auclair's domain and then converting these singular odysseys to communal stories, to the stuff of legend, for Cécile's edification.

To give coherence to a Quebec that came into her consciousness as a nonsequential text, Cather centers her fiction in a family that mediates between present and past, New World and Old, between the concerns of "an orderly little French household" and those of a surrounding world ("On Shadows" 16). Moreover, she takes pains with her setting, both geographical and temporal, circumscribing it carefully to make the physical narrowness of Quebec a factor in her composition, choosing the final year of Frontenac's life (1697-98) to lend an autumnal tone to a narrative that remembers years of tumult and wonder.

Family and setting function together from the outset of the story. When Euclide Auclair watches La Bonne Espérance disappear down the St. Lawrence River en route to France one October afternoon, he realizes that "not a sail would come up that wide waterway" until the next July. "No supplies; not a cask of wine or a sack of flour, no gunpowder, or leather, or cloth, or iron tools. Not a letter even, even-no news of what went on at home" (Shadows 4). The thrust of these negatives differs radically from that of Jim Burden's initial description of the prairie in My Ántonia as having no fences, no trees, as being nothing but land, not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. Whereas the latter set of negations erases the familiar as the condition of making a new start, the former itemizes what must be preserved for the purposes of continuance. One of Cather's strategies in making Shadows a novel of place is to make it a novel of preservation-not only of customs and traditions but of foodstuffs and supplies. At the beginning Cather thus establishes a sense of separation from the source, from home and nourishment. And she follows quickly by characterizing the West as interminable and threatening, a "dead, sealed world," a place of "suffocation," in which "European man was quickly swallowed up in silence, distance, mould, [and] black mud" (6-7). It is not the West of most American fiction.

"Cut off" from a Europe that is at once cultured and decadent, and in fearsome proximity to the primordial, Cather's Quebec is an isolated settlement, protective of the customs and religious beliefs that have given it a transplanted identity. Its topography enhances its lack of space and its hierarchical ambience, with Upper Town perched above Lower Town, and no building on the rock "on the same level with any other" (5).

For Cather in Shadows, the family is the primary repository of values. Not only does Cécile go sledding on Holy Family hill with her little friend Jacques but the people of Quebec, we learn from Madame Pommier, have a special veneration for the Holy Family; according to Bishop Laval, no place in the world surpasses that devotion (101). And the association of Cécile with the Holy Mother (traced convincingly by Susan Rosowski) blends the secular and the sacred in a provocative dualism. In a more quotidian way, the Auclair household is a model of order. For Cécile's mother "household goods" were the equivalent of household gods; without them, she "could not imagine life at all." Thus, in moving to Quebec, her effort was to reduplicate the domestic harmony she had known in Paris. "As long as she lived, she tried to make the new life as much as possible like the old." Mme Auclair's chief concern was to inculcate in young Cécile the regard for order and continuity that "had come down to her through so many centuries" and so impress on her that M. Auclair's "whole happiness depends on order and regularity." "At home, in France," she once tells Cécile with a burst of Gallic pride, "we have learned to do all these things in the best way, and we are conscientious, and that is why we are called the most civilized people in Europe and other nations envy us" (23-25).

One senses by means of Cather's subdued eloquence the deep contentment with which Cécile assimilates the pattern of household duties-revealed in such quiet albeit resonant matters as her awareness of her father's taste for gooseberries, her fear that the parsley will freeze, and her kindness to Blinker and Jacques. And one sees how the habits and rituals of Quebec reinforce the sense of sanctuary that she feels at home. Hearing Bishop Laval ring the bell for five o'clock (A.M.) Mass, Cécile feels "a peculiar sense of security, as if there must be powerful protection for Kebec in such steadfastness, and the new day, which was yet darkness, was beginning as it should. The punctual bell and the stern old Bishop who rang it began an orderly procession of activities and held life together on the rock, though the winds lashed it and the billows of snow drove over it" (105). Again, afflicted with a slight fever, Cécile lies in bed passive and content, listening to the rain and to her father ("an accomplished cook") preparing dinner, watching the firelight glow on the furniture and the brass candlesticks. When her mind roams abroad, Quebec and its environs contribute to her feeling of safety: "the dripping grey roofs. . . , to the lighted windows along the crooked streets, the great grey river choked with ice and frozen snow, the never-ending merciless forest beyond. All these things seemed like layers and layers of shelter, with this one flickering, shadowy room at the core" (158-59). From a cocoonlike perspective Cécile presides over a sheltering world. Even the "merciless forest," mercifully attenuated by the orderly procession of her thoughts, adds to her sense of herself as secure-and as central to the scene.

Predictably, Cécile's visit to the Harnois is uncomfortable: her protective context is not portable. Predictably too, the motif of withdrawal and return (used by Hawthorne in such works as "Young Goodman Brown" and The Scarlet Letter) works its transformational magic: Cécile returns home after two nights on the Ile d'Orléans feeling "at least two years older," no longer a little girl "doing what she had been taught to do." As she prepares dinner for Pierre Charron and her father, a graduating sense of purpose awakens within her. The coppers and clouts and brushes around her are not just objects, she realizes, but "tools"; and "with them one made, not shoes or cabinet-work, but life itself. One made a climate within a climate; one made the days,-the complexion, the special flavour, the . . . happiness of each day as it passed; one made life" (197-98). Cather's eloquence gives Cécile a new dignity.

In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Latour offers a very French, and I might say Catheresque, praise of Father Vaillant's soup: "I am not depreciating your individual talent, Joseph," the Bishop says to his friend, but "a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup" (39). In her comments on Shadows, Cather observes that "a new society begins with the salad dressing more than with the destruction of Indian villages." "It's very hard for an American to catch that rhythm," she adds; "it's so unlike us" ("On Shadows" 16-17). With an aversion to salad dressing and to the destruction of villages, Thoreau had no way of catching such a "rhythm." But his Concord colleague Emerson made the principle underlying Cather's statement central to the argument of Nature in 1836: "The invariable mark of wisdom," Emerson wrote, "is to see the miraculous in the common" (44). As Shadows on the Rock attests, that is what Cather, with her focus on Euclide and Cécile Auclair, encourages us to see.

But if Cather encourages us to see the miraculous in the commonplace through her gentle emphasis on such things as the Auclair sofa and fireplace, she also exposes the commonplace to the extraordinary. On the periphery of a carefully established domestic tranquility, she inserts a variety of what Ann Romines aptly calls "narratives of elsewhere," some from France, some from the tropics, some from the Canadian wilderness (Romines 151), but none more powerful, more ambivalent, or more singular than those relating to female religious figures from Canadian history. A first-time reader of Shadows might well be aware that Count Frontenac, Bishop Laval, and various missionaries to New France were historical figures; in one way or another, they appear as necessary (almost institutional) parts of the setting. But the number of "real" historical women who stand dramatically in the environs of this novel-Marie de l'Incarnation and Catherine de Saint-Augustine from the mid-seventeenth century, Jeanne Franc Juschereau and Jeanne Le Ber from years contemporary with Cather's narrative-would surely surprise such a reader.

Cécile is aware and in awe of the religious heroes of the past. On All Souls' Day "all the stories of the rock came to life" for her. The walls of the Jesuit church "seemed sentinelled" by "martyrs who were explorers and heroes as well; at the Hôtel Dieu, Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustine and her story rose up before one; at the Ursulines', Marie de l'Incarnation overshadowed the living" (Shadows 95).

And well she might. For of all the religious figures mentioned in Shadows Marie may be the most astonishing and most enduring of all. More than twenty studies of her life and letters have appeared in this century alone; she has been discussed at scholarly conferences, in journal articles, and in monographs on spirituality. In 1931, the very year in which Shadows was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a popular biography of Marie by Agnes Repplier was a Literary Guild selection. In 1956 Aloysius G. L'Heureux's study of her mystical vocabulary was published. In 1971 Guy Oury's impressive edition of her letters and journals, most of them reporting on events in Quebec, appeared. (It was from a letter in an earlier edition of Marie's Correspondance that Cather took the epigraph for Shadows on the Rock.) And in 1989 Irene Mahoney's volume of her selected writings, complete with a helpful biography, was published.

Born Marie Guyart in Tours in 1599, this Ursuline-to-be yearned to enter a convent from the time of her adolescence, but at the behest of her parents she married Claude Martin, a master silk worker. Two years later her husband died, leaving her with a six-month-old son. I cite Agnes Repplier's account of this sad event as guileless evidence of how marginally husbands existed in this binary world of God and cloister: "The model wife of Proverbs could not well have surpassed [Marie] in diligence and discretion. Her spouse seems to have been affectionately disposed, and fully alive to her merits. The birth of a son so filled his heart with content that there was nothing left for him but to die, which he accordingly did, after two years of married life" (Repplier 22). Now a twenty-year-old widow, Marie was torn between a desire for the convent and her responsibility to her son. Interestingly in the light of Jeanne Le Ber's experience some years later, she retired to an upper room in her sister's house and there prayed for guidance. Unlike Jeanne Le Ber, however, Marie continued to work in the world, in her brother-in-law's business, and during the next five years, while she had several mystical experiences and revelations about the Holy Trinity, she assisted in the management of that business, bargained for prices with stevedores and merchants, and generally conducted it with a great deal of success. At the age of thirty-one she entered the Ursuline convent in Tours-and the story, perhaps apocryphal, in many accounts of her life is that her son ran to the convent door behind which she prayed, crying out, "Give me back my mother."

Marie's own account is much more riveting (and it validates the fundamental truth behind the melodramatic story): she was concerned, as she says in her journal, about leaving her son, then not quite twelve years of age. The devil urged her to think both of her son and of practical matters, using arguments that seemed "persuasive since I was considering the good of the present moment." In a sentence indicative of her convoluted state of mind, she says that God assured her that "he would take care of him whom I wanted to leave for love of God in order to follow his divine counsels more perfectly." When friends and acquaintances "came up with fresh objections," however, Marie felt "besieged on all sides," as if her soul were being "wrenched" from her body. No obligation seemed as strong as her love for her son; yet she kept hearing an "inner voice" that said it was not good "to be in the world any longer." Accordingly, putting my son into the hands of God and of the Blessed Virgin, I left him, as well as my elderly father, who cried pitifully. When I said goodbye to him he found every possible argument to stop me, but my heart remained unshaken. . . . Then there flowed into my heart an inner sustenance which would have enabled me to pass through fire, giving me courage to surmount all and accomplish all. Then he transported my spirit where he wanted it to be.

. . . on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul 1631, I left what I loved the most. My son came with me, crying bitterly in leaving me. Watching him, it seemed to me that I was being cut in two. Nevertheless, I did not let my emotions show. Dom Raymond presented me to Reverend Mother St. Bernard, who, with the whole community, received me with extraordinary charity. Previously I had received the blessing of the archbishop of Tours, who wished to see me before my entrance. (L'Incarnation, Selected Writings 94-95)

Thus, exemplifying what Irene Mahoney (herself a member of the Ursuline community) calls an "implacable determination for total consecration," Marie Guyart Martin sundered ties with her son and her father to embark on a life of austerity and prayer (L'incarnation, Selected Writings 5). Influenced by the teaching of Pierre de Bérulle, who advocated a severe asceticism as a way of assimilating the mysteries of Christ, she dedicated herself to Christ as Incarnate Word-hence her religious name. During her years in Canada she was very much a practical woman as well as a mystic. (Mahoney describes her as an "active/contemplative" both in France and in Quebec [15].) As her letters-many of them to her son, who became a Benedictine monk-report, she drew up contracts for the construction of the Ursuline convent, did it a second time after the convent burned in 1650, took an interest in mines and salt pits, had wells dug, and even tried to interest merchants in exporting porpoise oil. In his extensive study of New France, written almost a century ago, James Douglas considered Marie's letters to be "more valuable as sources of contemporary history than even the Relations of the Jesuits" (438). Aditionally, Marie learned Indian languages and produced French-Anglonquin and Algonquin-French dictionaries and even an Iroquois catechism. Bishop Laval she held in high regard. But when Laval approved a new constitution for the Ursulines (written largely by the Jesuit missionary Père Lalemont), Marie refused to accept the parts she did not like (L'Incarnation, Selected Writing 28-29).

Marie de l'Incarnation was forty years old when she founded the Ursuline convent in New France in 1639. In 1648 Catherine de Saint-Augustine, aged sixteen, arrived from France to work at the Hôtel Dieu. (The Récollets had come in 1615, the Jesuits in 1625, and François de Montmorency-Laval would arrive as apostolic vicar in 1659.) For twenty years Catherine worked at various positions in the hospital, first as depository, then as senior Sister of Mercy, then as mistress of novices. In 1668 the community contemplated electing her mother superior of the Hôtel Dieu, but, Willa Cather's narrative notwithstanding, Catherine died before that responsibility was given to her. Thus, she did not choose Jeanne Franc Juschereau to succeed her as superior, nor did she, as Cather writes, train "her to that end" (Shadows 42). Mother Juschereau was just eighteen years old when Catherine de Saint-Augustine died. But it makes a good story to have the mystic Hospitalière from Normandy select the practical Canadienne to take her place. And Mother Juschereau was indeed superior when the fictional Auclair and Cécile called on her in 1697. (The occasion for their visit was a sprained ankle, also fictional as far as I can discover.)

It is from Mother Juschereau that Cécile learns about the marvels of Catherine de Saint-Augustine's life. And, as James Woodress has pointed out, it was from her considerable reading-from, among others, Francis Parkman, from Mother Juschereau's Histoire de I'Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, and from the correspondence of Marie de l'Incarnation-that Cather drew her portrait of Mother Catherine as one who had "burned her life out in vigils, mortifications, visions, raptures, all the while carrying on a steady routine of manual labor and administrative work, observing the full discipline of her order" (Woodress 431; quotation from Cather, Shadows 42).

Marie had met Mother Catherine in 1650 when she stayed for three weeks at the Hôtel Dieu after fire destroyed the Ursuline convent. In August of 1663 she wrote a long journal-like letter to her son in France ("Mon très cher fils") about a violent earthquake, a "tremblement de terre," that had shaken Quebec some months before. Shortly before the earthquake, a Christianized Indian girl had heard a forceful voice say that in two days "la terre sera agitée, et qu'elle tremblera d'une manière qui étonnera tout le monde." Two days later, at the very time predicted, another person, "qui a de très grande communications avec Dieu," had suddenly known that the Divine Majesty was "extrêmement irritée" at the sins of the country. While this person had offered prayers to God and also prayed for the Jesuit martyrs of Japan on their feast day, she had had "un pressentiment ou . . . assurance infaillible" that God was about to punish Quebec. Immediately after that, and "un peu devant le tremblement arrivât," she had seen four furious and enraged demons, at the four corners of Quebec, shake the earth with great violence until God made them desist (L'Incarnation, Correspondance 687-88).

When Marie's son subsequently inquired about the person who had had this vision of the demons, Marie replied that it was Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustine. She then appended the story of Barbe Halé (or Halay), who was "vexed" with demons by the malignity of certain magicians and sorcerers: while this girl was in the hospital, troubled continually by the demons, Catherine de Saint-Augustine guarded her day and night. It was extremely difficult for Catherine; only God and her confessor knew how enraged the demons were at her spiritual courage. They appeared to her in hideous forms and battled her outrageously, but Catherine was fortified in her "grand travail" by Père de Brébeuf, who appeared to her often and consoled her in her troubles (813). Finally, the demons and the magicians were vanquished by the intercession of this saintly man. After these victories, the Lord made Catherine signal favors, visiting her and caressing her "beaucoup."

There is no doubt that contemporary stories about Catherine de Saint-Augustine attracted attention. Responding to a request from the Jesuit Joseph-Antoine Poncet in Rome, Marie wrote (in 1670) that although he asked "mon sentiment" about Catherine, "je vous diray entre vous and moy que je ne suis pas trop sçavante en ses affaires." She knew that outwardly Catherine was what "une bonne religieuse doit être," charitable and efficient in her hospital work. She attributed the "étranges tentations et les persécutions atroces" that beset Catherine day and night for sixteen years to a persistent "maladie" and again referred to the manner in which Brébeuf helped her (886). There seems little doubt that Catherine de Saint-Augustine was in fragile health throughout much of her life and that she cast herself as a tormented victim suffering for the sins of the country. Emotionally conflicted, nourished by what later psychologies would term hysteria, she underwent extreme waves of self-loathing, alternately hating and loving the demons, desiring to be damned so that she could show her love of God even from the depths of hell. It is perilous theology.

Lest we think of Catherine de Saint-Augustine as unique in her visions and Marie de l'Incarnation as the street-smart doyenne of the nuns reporting on an eccentric friend, it is well to remember that Marie's early life was punctuated with mystical visions of marriage. L'Heureux's study of her mystical vocabulary finds a pattern in her prayer: her description of "her second Trinitarian vision" (in 1627) suggests an "impression amour-lumière." She speaks of a mystical marriage with the Divine Word as "her spouse"-and in one of her prayers petitions the Lord to "let me embrace you and die in your sacred arms" (156-57). Again, her mystical marriage with the Trinity is "a mutual possession" (165). Although there is some ambiguity in her language, she seems frequently to be enraptured by what L'Heureux terms "post-nuptial states of union" (176). Long before L'Heureux undertook his specialized study, Parkman reviewed Marie's desire for a mystical marriage and concluded that "here is a case for the psychologist as well as the theologian; and the 'holy widow,' as her biographers call her, becomes an example, and a lamentable one, of the tendency of the erotic principle to ally itself with high religious excitement" (2:177). Parkman did balance this individual portrait with lavish praise for the "self-abnegation" of the "hospital nuns of Quebec and Montreal." "Too busy for the morbidness of the cloister" (a typical Parkman judgment), they were models of that benign and tender charity of which the Roman Catholic Church offers so many examples. Nor should the Ursulines and the nuns of the Congregation be forgotten among those who, "in another field of labor, have toiled patiently according to their light" (4:356).

Cather read Parkman both carefully and critically. And she accounted for the courage and good humor of the Quebec nuns by transposing Parkman's general praise into her own idiom: "They were still in their accustomed place in the world of the mind (which for each of us is the only world), and [had] the same well-ordered universe about them. . . . In this safe, lovingly arranged and ordered universe . . . the drama of man went on at Quebec just as at home, and the Sisters played their accustomed part in it" (Shadows 97). Just as Cécile thinks of Quebec as "her town" and lives securely inside its familiar boundaries, the nuns (according to Cather) breathe an atmosphere of supernaturalism that allows them to domesticate the universe (61). We do not know all of the stories about Catherine de Saint-Augustine that Mother Juschereau relates to Cécile. And no one tells specific stories about Marie de l'Incarnation, despite the reputation for sanctity she has in the novel and despite her actual work with Indian languages. But as the evidence suggests, these are formidable and renowned women, part of the surrounding context of Shadows on the Rock. And we learn something of Cather's priorities in dealing with the material offered by Quebec from the fact that she would mute the impact of such volatile lives in composing her "series of pictures . . . left over from the past" ("On Shadows" 15). Which is to say that Cather eschews a readily available and highly dramatic matière in Shadows, that she transforms a lurid spirituality into an aspect of Cécile's sheltering landscape. Thus Cécile comes to think that the martyrdoms of the early church were not "half so wonderful and so terrible" as those of the Jesuit missionaries: "And could the devotion of Sainte Geneviève or Sainte Philomène be compared to that of Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustine or Mother Marie de l'Incarnation?" (Shadows 102). In order for Cécile to remain blissfully central to the story, demons and mystical marriages must give way to devotion, an omnibus term that distances reality, just as (in a secular mode) Auclair's reading of Plutarch's Lives to his daughter distances the idea of honor, locates it not in Quebec, not in France, but in Rome, where it assumes classical and undisturbing form.

When Mother Juschereau says that Cécile must know all of the stories about Catherine de Saint-Augustine, the apothecary's daughter replies that "there is no end" to those stories, and the Mother Superior agrees (37). Cécile does hear two stories: the homiletic tale of Catherine having Masses said for the sinner Marie, who died an outcast in a cave in France, and the much-told story of the conversion of an English sailor (a French Huguenot in the original sources) when Catherine ground up some powder from Brébeuf's skull and added it to his gruel. Cather measures the quality of Cécile's, and Mother Juschereau's, credulity in this case by having Euclide Auclair cast doubt on the so-called "miracle" (125-27). When M. Auclair listens in polite silence to her later story of angels repairing Jeanne Le Ber's spinning wheel, Cécile begins "to feel that his appreciation or miracles was not at all what it should be" (129).

As Merrill Skaggs has observed, an aura of the miraculous pervades Shadows on the Rock, echoing the commemorative rituals of miracle plays from centuries before (Skaggs 134-36). Just as the Puritans in seventeenth-century Massachusetts attributed their destinies to Divine Providence, so the citizens of Quebec, with a vibrant iconographic faith, saw heavenly intervention in the fortunes of New France. In 1690, after the town had survived the attack of Sir William Phips's fleet and driven off his forces, the church in Lower Town was renamed Notre Dame de la Victoire "in recognition of the protection which Our Lady had afforded Quebec in that hour of danger" (Shadows 64). According to Cather, a banner of the Virgin "had stood untouched" throughout the bombardment, "though every heretic gun was aimed at it" (95). Parkman supplies a somewhat different version of the action (and a wry gloss on miracles) when he writes that a picture of the Holy Family had been attached to the spire of the cathedral in Upper Town to invoke Divine aid. "The Puritan gunners wasted their ammunition in vain attempts to knock it down. That it escaped their malice was ascribed to miracle, but the miracle would have been greater if they had hit it" (5:274).

As a true daughter of Quebec and its unalloyed faith, Cécile stands apart from any skepticism about miracles. For her, "all the miracles that had happened there . . . took on the splendour of legend" (Shadows 95). It is thus with a sense of "joy" that she hears the story of angels repairing Jeanne Le Ber's spinning wheel. And that story, we learn, "was told and re-told with loving exaggeration during that severe winter," even in the remote parishes. "Wherever it went, it brought pleasure, as if the recluse herself had sent to all those families whom she did not know some living beauty,-a blooming rose-tree, or a shapely fruit-tree in fruit. Indeed, she sent them an incomparable gift" (136-37).

Not only is Cécile entranced by this story but it has the support of the selfless Bishop Laval when he asks Pierre about the health of "the aged nun Marguerite Bourgeoys" (another historical figure) and "Mlle Le Ber" and then adds that "all the sinners of Ville Marie [Montreal] may yet be saved by the prayers of that devoted girl" (175). Yet this same Jeanne Le Ber separates herself-in life as in the novel-from a loving family, imposes on herself vows of chastity and silence, and immures herself in her own room in her parent's house. After a passage of years, Cather writes, Jeanne's mother died: "On her death-bed she sent one of the household to her daughter's door, begging her to come and give her the kiss of farewell. 'Tell her that I am praying for her, night and day,' was the answer" (133).

Cather adds no comment to this bit of dialogue. And none of the characters comments on the apparently well-known incident. Only Pierre Charron, with his personal involvement, has anything but admiration for Jeanne Le Ber. In addition to Pierre's account of two meetings with the recluse, the second a haunting portrait of spiritual aridity, Pierre once says to Euclide Auclair (out of Cécile's hearing), "If the venerable Bourgeoys had not got hold of that girl in her childhood and overstrained her with fasts and penances, she would be a happy mother today, not sleeping in a stone cell like a prisoner" (177). Although it seems tinctured by Pierre's sense of loss, this is the only explicit criticism of extreme asceticism in the novel.

How are we to take this refusal to go to a dying mother's bedside in the face of her explicit request? How are we, for that matter, to regard a mother who steels her heart against the tears of her young son as she enters a cloistered convent? The conduct of Jeanne Le Ber and Marie de l'Incarnation certainly follows from the desire for total consecration that Irene Mahoney sees as characteristic of seventeenth-century Bérullian spirituality. Yet there is a provocative difference between the two women's actions. Whereas Marie entered the Ursuline convent in Tours with the approval of her spiritual adviser, Dom Raymond of the Feuillant Fathers, Jeanne disregarded all counsel in adopting the life of a recluse: "Even her spiritual directors, and that noble soldier-priest Dollier de Casson, Superior of the Sulpician Seminary, advised her against taking a step so irrevocable" (132). Moreover, despite the extraordinary qualities that set her apart, Marie entered a community that welcomed and supported her. Jeanne, on the other hand, remained solitary in her life of renunciation. Her actions express a preference for individuality over community, for singularity over tradition-an oxymoronic but powerful combination of Bérullian and Thoreauvian asceticism.

It is interesting to note in Shadows that Cécile's favorite teacher at the Ursuline convent school was Sister Anne de Sainte-Rose, so minor a character that she does not actually appear in the novel. Whether Cather found Sister Anne ready-made or invented her in whole or in part, I do not know. But the portrait she supplies offers a reprise-patently nonsequential, conspicuously surprising-on the lives of Marie de l'Incarnation and Jeanne Le Ber. Sister Anne, we read, was "a niece of the Bishop of Tours, [who] had been happily married, and had led a brilliant life in the great world. Only after the death of her young husband and infant son had she become a religious. She had charm and wit and the remains of great beauty-everything that would appeal to a little girl brought up on a rude frontier" (60-61). The similarities and the differences between the experiences of Sister Anne and of Marie and Jeanne are manifest. Sister Anne is a mélange of what is most human in the other two women. Marie and Jeanne inspire awe, but Sister Anne is Cécile's favorite.

Whether Cather realized it or not, the implacable spirituality of Marie de l'Incarnation and Jeanne Le Ber was a shaping part of what she calls "the curious endurance of a kind of culture" in Quebec ("On Shadows" 15). When Bishop Laval washes the feet of young Jacques, we witness a spirituality born of humility in this prince of the Church, who has seen Christ in the person of a small boy. Washing Jacques's feet is an act of prayer. When Jeanne Le Ber chooses to help her mother by means of her own idea of prayer rather than by a prayerful accession to her mother's request, we witness a spirituality troubling in its uncompromising nature. The point is not that Jeanne refuses to spare a moment from her life of prayer to visit her dying mother but that Jeanne has such a single-minded and self-defined idea of prayer that she cannot conceive prayer in any form but that of her own making. And this suggests a disquieting fanaticism, ambivalent because it seems as prideful in its insistence on self as it seems heroic in its insistence on seeing all things in an eternal context.

Precisely how Cather feels about Jeanne Le Ber is difficult to say, but if we follow the old adage of trusting the tale we might make a tentative distinction between the popular consequences of Jeanne's actions and the actions themselves. The text of Shadows leaves no doubt that Jeanne's parents grieved at her self-imposed seclusion and that the story of angels fixing her spinning wheel brings "an incomparable gift" to many families in Quebec. To that passage Cather adds the following statement: "The people have loved miracles for so many hundred years, not as proof or evidence, but because they are the actual flowering of desire. In them the vague worship and devotion of the simple-hearted assumes a form. From being a shapeless longing, it becomes a beautiful image; a dumb rapture becomes a melody that can be remembered and repeated; and the experience of a moment, which might have been a lost ecstasy, is made an actual possession and can be bequeathed to another" (136-37). Strong language this-privileged, impossible to confute. It conveys a profound appreciation of the effect of miracles, evoked and validated by the story of this recent one. Jeanne Le Ber brings beauty to the lives of "the people." In doing so, however, the woman who desired "the absolute solitariness of the hermit's life" ironically becomes, and not for the first time, the talk of Quebec (132). And since all available evidence points to Jeanne as the source of the wondrous story, the adamant recluse must be seen as the creator of her own legend. Granting the depth of her spiritual commitment to suffer for the sins of Canada, Jeanne Le Bar may be the most reflexive figure in American literature since Arthur Dimmesdale.

Because she serves as a character in a novel that prizes family, Jeanne functions as what Susan A. Hallgarth calls an antitype of Cécile; the narrative danger is that her unrelenting force might make an admiring Cécile pallid by comparison. In a take that takes note of the Canadianization of Quebec, however, Jeanne carries the burdens of the old days, Cécile the promise of the new (though offstage with her four sons in the epilogue). Presenting the heiress turned recluse as someone who might have married the fictitious Pierre, moreover, gives added credence to an already engaging coureur de bois-to Pierre's final story about an unhappy Jeanne with despair in her voice and, crucially, to his dual emphasis on family and religion. "It was clear enough," Cather writes, that for Pierre "the family was the first and final thing in the human lot," the family "engrafted with religion" (174). Pierre becomes the rock his name signifies.

Only when Frontenac dies, and with him the security of the world she knew, is Cécile threatened in her own town and in her own home. At that point it is she who would like to become reclusive, to disappear into a hole, to evade what she has always recognized as responsibility. With a welcome greeting from the Auclairs (and from the reader as well), Pierre not only restores her sense of stability but brings an energetic competence to the family he will join. Susan Rosowski is right to puzzle over the things Cécile "has no comprehension of or curiosity about" (188). One can explain that lack of curiosity, of course, but only by saying, again, that Shadows on the Rock is a novel of refuge rather than a novel of engagement. The anomaly is that Cather locates her place of refuge in the eye of a mystical hurricane. For the lives of such figures as Marie de l'Incarnation, Catherine de Saint-Augustine, and Jeanne Le Ber contain high and ambivalent drama inimical to stability and order. And thus the necessity of Cécile, ingenuous, trusting, nourished by things of the home, while wilder winds than she would ever know emanate from the Ursuline convent, from the Hôtel Dieu, and from Montreal. For better or worse, Cécile blends the sensational into the sheltering landscape of this novel. For better or worse, Cécile, in conjunction with her scholarly father, offers a way of orchestrating a "text" that Cather saw as "mainly anacoluthon."

Critics of Willa Cather seem confused by the narrative strategies in My Mortal Enemy (1926): the sometimes cursory vision of narrator Nellie Birdseye, the "unfurnished novel" technique, a complex system of cultural allusions, a difficult and contradictory heroine in Myra Henshawe, and (to some) an uncomfortable religious resolution. Approaches have focused on love, money, or religion-seldom all three-in grappling with Myra. The last category, religion, has divided critics into those who deny its seriousness or see it as a negative ingredient, those who conclude that it is essential, and those who idealize or condemn Myra according to their religious preference.

This study presumes Christian charity to be the novel's central issue, fusing the themes of religion and love and also money, which functions both as a material substitute for and a symbol of virtue. I use Thomas Aquinas's treatise on charity and, for more accessibility, C. S. Lewis to articulate traditional Christian concepts of love. My presumption does not preclude a thorough analysis of the text, however. Every chapter and scene is handled to avoid a selective treatment, and for clarity I divide the analysis into ten parts, first addressing techniques and critical perspectives.

The most helpful criticism has addressed technique. My Mortal Enemy illustrates the principles expressed in Cather's 1922 essay "The Novel Démeublé," a revisioning of the "popular superstition that 'realism' asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects" (37), and also her significant dependence on webbed allusions. Cather's ideas on unfurnishing define the minimalist art Richard Giannone acknowledges as narrator Nellie's ability to communicate the "presence of the thing not named" ("Novel Démeublé" 41) in, for example, her conclusion to the New Year's party in part 1, which "recalls Cather's language in describing the unnamed things in the unfurnished novel" (Giannone 179). Reflecting on Emelia's singing of Bellini's "Casta Diva" from Norma, Nellie writes: "For many years I associated Mrs. Henshawe with that music, thought of that aria as being mysteriously related to something in her nature that one rarely saw, but nearly always felt; a compelling passionate, overmastering something for which I had no name, but which was audible, visible in the air that night, as she sat crouching in the shadow" (48, emphasis added). The introduction of this aria is an example of the related technique Bernice Slote describes as Cather's "secret web of connections and relationships that . . . illuminate and in many ways redefine [Cather] as a person and as an artist" (2).

This "web" technique, climaxing in My Mortal Enemy and adding complexity to brevity, should not be confused with Cather's unfurnishing technique, for such "webbing" typifies very "furnished" novels like Moby-Dick. The allusions in Cather's novel contain not merely what Nellie fails to know but what she presents indirectly. Harry B. Eichorn recognizes the "technique [as] usually associated with poetry[;] Miss Cather may have been providing a clue to it by making Nellie an admirer of the modern poets" (137). The "secret web" of classical allusions has been clarified in recent studies by Mary Ruth Ryder and Erik Ingvar Thurin, and the novel's symbolism of jewelry and gems has been interpreted by Kathryn T. Stofer.

"The Novel Démeublé" serves as the best introduction to the unfurnishing technique, which is thematically and formally relevant to My Mortal Enemy. Cather attacks the "property-man," who clutters the novel with "material objects and their vivid presentation" (35), before she distinguishes quantity from quality by relating the first to the disposable and temporal (36) and the second to art and the eternal: "Out of the teeming, gleaming stream of the present [art] must select the eternal" (40). Selection is the artist's access to divinity, and powers of observation and description "form but a low part of his equipment" (36). Cather wants to separate true realism from the cataloguing of "mechanical processes.... manufactories and trades.... physical sensations" (37). Such subjects are "unworthy of an artist" and indicate that "he defeated his end," the exploration of constantly vital moral issues rather than "their material surroundings" (38-39). The surroundings are of interest only as "the emotional penumbra of the characters themselves" (40). Cather then addresses execution, claiming that the "higher processes of art are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then . . . unlearn it, . . . disregard his accomplishment.... subordinate it to a higher and truer effect." Her most famous statement places artistic creation beyond language and in "whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there.... It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it . . . that gives high quality to the novel or the drama as well as to poetry itself" (41-42). The essay concludes with an extraordinary plea for an art of disembodiment, as far as that is possible, and for a room as bare "as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended" (43). E. K. Brown called My Mortal Enemy Cather's "boldest experiment" and "a pure instance of. . . 'the novel démeublé" (250); it is so because it traces a journey from body to spirit, from life to ashes-the residue of divine contact.

Susan Rosowski offers the most complete assessment of secular love issues in My Mortal Enemy and relates them to technique. The novel is "an awakening" to sentimental notions of love, she argues, and Cather's "only novel devoted to romantic love" (146). Within the Cather canon it represents "a freeing of storytelling from those aspects of romanticism that had reached a dead end" (144): "When Myra speaks . . . it is as if a character from a fairy tale . . . were to . . . step forward . . . and say, 'Let me tell you what it was really like"' (150). Myra's final question is the climax of her revision and identifies the romantic love that failed to gratify her. Rosowski sees Myra as identifying in religion "a different kind of love . . . in which 'seeking is finding . . . desire was fulfillment"' (151) James Woodress complements Rosowski's reading with insights from Cather's letters. Cather revealed that Chicago Tribune critic Fanny Butcher "really stated what she was trying to get at in the story. Butcher had written: 'Under the flotsam of those lives [Myra's and Oswald's] there is a steady rhythm of the fundamental hatred of the sexes one for the other'" (385). In an application of Eric Fromm's Art of Loving Mildred Bennett concludes that Myra and Oswald's union is a "symbiotic" one in which the sadistic and masochistic partners "have fusion without integrity" (18). Myra's anguish is failure to find "unconditional love (which is God) through her relationship in marriage" (19).

We should expect that in 1926, the year between the faith crisis in The Professor's House and the pilgrimage that is Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather would explore religious complexities; however, critics are increasingly troubled by them. Hermione Lee finds "the religious feeling of My Mortal Enemy . . . disconcerting" (221), and Merrill Skaggs finds "Myra's latter-day Catholicism . . . not especially convincing" (108). Lee is disturbed by Myra's theatrics, "that nothing is real for her, not even her own death, unless it is dramatized" (z16), adding that religion operates as a form of determinism and emerges as superstition and vindictiveness (221-22). David Stouck fails to make religion central but recognizes this movement toward Christian reckoning (121-22) in judging Myra and her uncle unregenerate sinners (i126-27). Other critics encourage a religious approach but fail to follow one: E. K. Brown affirms that Myra's prototype was a woman "whose life and nature could be understood only by one whose religious sense had become acute" (248), and in their introductions to My Mortal Enemy Marcus Klein and A. S. Byatt acknowledge the essential religious mystery of Myra's story.

Ironically, some of the critics who focus on the novel's religious issues are overly judgmental. Stephen Tanner perceptively sees as "the primary problem of interpretation . . . the evaluation of Myra's religious conversion" but accuses Myra of failure to demonstrate "essential" Christian qualities (30). He accepts Nellie's gloss of Myra's definition of religion as Myra's meaning and uses Paul Tillich to discredit it (34). In order to conclude that Myra's deathbed conversion is a travesty, Tanner is forced to dismiss the young priest as "'boyish,' impressionable, and consequently pliable" (33). Eugene England offers a tag to the Tanner reading and, with the help of René Girard, arrives at Tanner's conclusion that Myra's religion is the antithesis of Christ's (129). However, Dalma Brunauer and June Klamecki consider Myra's mortal-enemy question as paralleling "the anguished cry of Jesus in Gethsemane" (34). The best treatment of religion in My Mortal Enemy is by Michael Murphy, who alone stresses the importance of the tension caused by marriage outside the church (42). He commends Cather's unusual sophistication in viewing the spiritual struggles of an older Catholic woman from the perspective of a young and impressionable Protestant observer- who only dimly perceives. Myra is not modern, in that she challenges sentimental American approaches to mortality (48) and "hopes to regain some dignity in Roman rituals that acknowledge mortality and consecrate suffering and death" (46). Murphy reminds us that Myra refuses to deny her guilty past and responsibility for abandoning her faith for romantic love.

In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis reiterates the needs of natural loves to be guided by "something more, and other" (55), in order to serve as "preparatory imitations of . . . the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put to a higher service" (24). Discussing sex (Venus) in love (Eros), Lewis cautions against worship of either or their combination. Sex is a "Pagan sacrament" in which the participants represent "forces older and less personal" than themselves: "the masculinity and femininity of the world.... The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the Earth-Mother.... But we must give full value to the word Play" (103). "St. John's saying that God is love," continues Lewis, "has long been balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author (M. Denis de Rougemont) that 'love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god'; which of course can be restated in the form 'begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.' This balance seems . . . an indispensable safeguard" (6-7). Platonic romanticism canonizing "falling in love" as "the mutual recognition of earth souls . . . singled out for one another in a previous and celestial existence" cannot help Christians, who must use Eros merely as an approach, "a paradigm . . . built into our natures, of the love we ought to exercise toward God and Man" (107-8).

Rosowski's view of My Mortal Enemy as a "freeing of storytelling from those aspects of romanticism that had reached a dead end," specifically "romantic love . . . by definition sentimental, an excessive emotion for which death is the happiest ending" (144-45), resembles Lewis's conclusions about romantic love vis-à-vis nature religion. Nature is an incarnation of God's glory, he argues, but "we must make a detour" in order to reach God; "nature 'dies' on those who try to live for a love of nature" (20-22). Eros gives content to the word charity, as nature does to the word glory, but must be "chastened and corroborated by higher principles" for the approach to God (110). The mortal lover-god's tinseled crown must be replaced by a crown of thorns: "The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of marriage but in its sorrow, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in [the husband's] unwearying . . . care or his inexhaustible forgiveness" (105). In Christian marriage the Sky-Father and Earth-Mother are replaced as models by Christ and the church: "Husbands shoud love their wives just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her to make her holy" (Ephesians 5:25). Without the grace to accomplish this transition the marital relationship wit collapse into "a sort of disredemption" (114), each partner "ravenous to receive and implacably refusing to grow, jealous, suspicious, resentful, struggling for the upper hand, determined to be free and to allow no freedom, living on 'scenes'" (115).

The retrospective second chapter of My Mortal Enemy establishes Myra's guilt in marrying Oswald, Oswald's innocence in marrying Myra, and Nellie's bias, naiveté, and arrangement in relating their romance. It opens with a description of the Driscoll estate, which Myra has distinguished as the "best [thing] in Parthia" (7). The park of trees, later identified as apple (15), surrounded by a "high, wrought-iron fence" (11) where the Sisters of the Sacred Heart now pace "two and two" (15), suggests a forbidden precinct, the Eden from which Myra Driscoll was expelled for eloping. This forfeiture is the price she must pay for rejecting John Driscoll's ultimatum: "If she married young Henshawe, he would cut her off without a penny" (14-15). Driscoll is "a coarse old codger, so unlettered that he made a poor showing with a pen" (13). His story resembles that of Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen: he began as a poor boy, made a fortune employing peons in the Missouri swamps, built a great house, kept fast horses, and became the town's first citizen. But in Myra's mind, perhaps because of his association with the church, he confuses with God, and the meaning of his given name, "God is gracious," relates his money and gifts to saving grace. Encouraged and sustained in her romance by Nellie's Aunt Lydia and with head high (her typical proud gesture), Myra left "a great fortune behind her" (16). She had been "very fond" of old John and "a good deal like him" (12-13), but she chose Oswald.

Myra's motives are confusing. Did she fall in love to demonstrate her independence, because Oswald's father was "an Ulster Protestant whom Driscoll detested" (13)? Did she react to her uncle's persecution of Oswald, which drove the young man away to New York, or did she resent the ultimatum? Did she marry civilly because it was a quick process, or did she break with the church because Driscoll's money seemed to put him on the side of God? "A poor man stinks, and God hates him" (15), her uncle had warned her. Over thirty years later Myra laments to Nellie, "I broke with the Church when I broke with everything. else and ran away with a German free-thinker; but I believe in holy words and holy rites all the same" (85). The church is lumped with "everything else": Driscoll, his fortune, the community. However, Oswald was not the alternative to these, and Myra condemned herself by construing him as such. Oswald clarifies this near the end: "It is one of her delusions that I separated her from the Church. I never meant to" (99). Nor was the freethinking a cause of Driscoll's opposition to the match; the old man seemed motivated by Irish hate for an Ulster man. In effect, Myra constructed her own alternatives and set romantic love against God. "The real question," writes Lewis, "is which do you serve . . . ? To which claim does your will, in the last resort, yield?" (122-23)

According to the religious conscience surviving her break with the church, which she associates with her Irish heritage (including old Driscoll), Myra is living in sin and cannot transfigure her relationship with Oswald from natural love to charity. Aquinas clarifies her alienation metaphorically: "just as the light would cease at once in the air, were an obstacle placed to its being lit up by the sun, even so charity ceases at once to be in the soul through the placing of an obstacle [sin] to the outpouring of charity by God" (24:12). Myra's civil marriage puts her in darkness, becomes a spiritual death, which explains Nellie's juxtaposing it with Driscoll's funeral, the extravagant religious ceremony the wedding should have been. Nellie admits that "John Driscoll and his niece had suddenly changed places in my mind, and he had got, after all, the romantic part" (19). Ironically, Oswald, freethinker that he is, suffers no such spiritual impediment.

I argue elsewhere ("Alembic" 48-55) that My Ántonia, Cather's only other first-person novel, should be approached as narrator Jim Burden's arrangement, that his picture making often diverges from what Cather would have produced in a thirdperson narrative, that in fact some scenes parody Jim's blind sentimentality. Nellie's narrative must be approached similarly, as the product of her own sophistication and a mixture of insight and blindness, and its brevity enables Cather to make the ordering obvious. For example, Nellie begins and ends with the string of amethysts; she balances the topaz-bestowing rich girl from "a breezy Western city" (33) in part 1 with the young woman journalist for whom Oswald "still wore his topaz sleeve-buttons" in part 2 (78), and she contrasts romantic Ewan Gray, who confesses to Myra about love, with Father Fay, the young priest to whom Myra confesses before her death (their names even rhyrne!). Saint Gaudens's copper image of naked Diana and the allusions to Norma in part 1 have their counterparts in the ivory corpus on Myra's crucifix and allusions to King Lear in part 2. Tensions are revealed through descriptions skillfully reducing setting to "the emotional penumbra of the characters themselves" ("Novel Démeublé" 40). The Henshawes' stellar phase, when they were "throwing off sparks like a pair of shooting stars" (64), is embodied in Nellie's rendering of Madison Square, "so neat after our Western cities; so protected by good manners and courtesy" (14), and in the "solidly built" "old brownstone on the north side of the Square" with chairs and curtains of "wonderful plum-colour" velvet (26) This is dramatically positioned against what Myra calls their "temporary eclipse" (62) in a new hotel "wretchedly built and already falling to pieces" in a sprawling California city tumbling "untidily into the sea" (57-58). The "high-ceilinged" openness and "manners and courtesy" are replaced by "palavery" Southerners tramping overhead, whose "stupid, messy existence [is] thrust upon [Myra] all day long, and half of the night" (66-67). Emphasizing the decline of all three principals (for "things had gone badly with [Nellie's] family" 1571) are the peeling and cracked furnishings and the fading "dear plum-coloured curtains" (63). Unsubstantial is the word Nellie uses to characterize the new setting (58). What she cannot realize, however, is the narrative strategy beyond her own that locates the temporal in the "solidly built" and the eternal in the flimsy.

But let us return to the retrospective second chapter, where the narrator's limitations and creativity, as well as her subject's guilt, are introduced. The extravagant funeral she remembers "very vividly" as a six-year-old is a coronation: "Driscoll did not come to the church; the church went to him" (18). The celebrant meeting the coffin at the door and the incensing become for Nellie special privileges, although this is routine for Catholic funerals (O'Connell 2-91). Nellie's memory strains her style, generates a series of ever-lengthening, repetitious clauses punctuated by breathless stops: "They surrounded, they received, they seemed to assimilate into the body of the church, the body of old John Driscoll. They bore it up to the high altar on a river of colour and incense and organ-tone; they claimed it and enclosed it" (18). This and the "thought of John Driscoll as having escaped the end of all flesh . . . as if he had been translated . . . to the pageant" mark a wishful thinker who will be severely disturbed by Myra's final question about dying alone with her mortal enemy. Indeed, even Lydia's comment that the Henshawes are only "as happy as most people" (17) is "disheartening" for Nellie.

Lydia is an intriguing influence. She has instructed her niece in the school of romance and encouraged Myra's defection. After Oswald was shut out of the Driscoll house, he and Myra courted at Nellie's grandfather's "under the protection of Aunt Lydia" (14), who on the night of the elopement prudently packed Myra's toilet articles and linen, as if they would relieve her destitution. Lydia repeatedly takes her young niece to the fenced-in Driscoll grounds and relives for her "that thrilling night (probably the most exciting in her life), when Myra Driscoll came down that path, and out of those big iron gates, for the last time" (16). Lydia develops in Nellie a propensity to seek her thrills in other lives, and as a teenager Nellie regularly visits the Driscoll place alone and adjusts reality to fit her craving for romance:

I thought of the place as being under a spell, like the Sleeping Beauty's palace; it had been in a trance, or lain in its flowers like a beautiful corpse, ever since that winter night when Love went out of the gates and gave the dare to Fate....

I knew that this was not literally true; old John Driscoll had lived on there for many years after the flight of his niece.(17)

This passage encompasses Lydia's legacy: the frustration with real events constantly straining her niece's narrative, and Myra's fatal decision to make love her god.

The novel's opening chapter increases in meaning after a review of the second. The use of the first person four times in the first sentence, noticed by Skaggs (98), confirms the egocentric nature of Nellie's narrative, while Myra's first glimpse of Nellie in Lydia's mirror suggests that Nellie exists essentially as a response to other lives. The reflection also suggests, as Skaggs notes (99), that Nellie is Myra's duplicate, spoiled by relatives and suffering youthful illusions. This explains Myra's abrupt "Does this necklace annoy you?" (6) when Nellie stares at the string of amethysts that is ultimately associated with Myra's mortal-enemy question. "I prod you," says Myra, "because I'm certain that Lydia and your mother have spoiled you a little" (7). Nellie is intimidated because Lydia has made Myra a celebrity, "the brilliant and attractive figure among the friends of [my mother and aunts'] girlhood" (3-4). When the "short, plump woman" rises to meet Nellie, it is "as if to remind [the girl] that it was [her] business to get to her as quickly as possible" (5); when Myra's eyes search Nellie, she feels "quite overpowered . . . and ... hopelessly clumsy and stupid" (6). Even after Myra throws her arms about Nellie, who wants desperately to be liked, the girl is bewildered: "I felt I didn't have half a chance with her.... I was never sure whether she was making fun of me.... Her sarcasm was . . . like being touched by a metal so cold that one doesn't know whether one is burned or chilled" (7). Nellie is relieved by the arrival of Oswald, by his comforting if "perplexing combination" of military durability and soft lunar eyes, "of something hard and something soft" (10). Anxiety and relief become a pattern in her relationship with characters she imagines as larger than life. This apotheosis is helped by Oswald's name (from the Old German words for "god'' and "power") and demeanor and by the lightninglike zigzags of glistening white in Myra's black hair, "which made it look like the fleece of a Persian goat" (6), a comparison suggesting divine contact as well as eroticism and perhaps even associating Myra with those deficient in charity on God's left hand (Matthew 25:32-45)

The first sign of the discord obliterating Nellie's illusions comes near the end of this chapter. Nellie marvels at the "kind of feeling" between these lovers when Oswald enters and Myra rises to kiss him, "clearly glad to see him" (8); but the strain of Myra's possessing her love object is immediately clear in an exchange over the new shirts Myra gave away because they gave Oswald a bosom. "I can't bear you in ill-fitting things," she says, "not if we go to the poorhouse" (9). Oswald's response anticipates the quarrel that devastates Nellie at the end of part 1: he looks at his wife "with amusement, incredulity, and bitterness" (9, emphasis added). Lee sees "the whole history of [the Henshawes'] relations . . . latent in [this] brief exchange" (213), and the reversal of sex roles Stouck notices later in the New York apartment (12 4) has its genesis here, although Nellie seems oblivious to the evidence of this she offers: Oswald's nursing of Myra in California, Myra's comment that hers "was no head for a woman . . . but would have graced one of the wickedest of the Roman emperors" (63), Oswald's uncertainty about courting or being courted (29), and Sarah Bernhardt's controversial 1900 tour as Hamlet. Skaggs's reading of this "power relationship," in which "Oswald plays a subservient and therefore (judged by patriarchal standards) a female role," as "appropriately assumed in a . . . pagan context instead of a Christian and Western patriarchal one" (95), describes a marriage in which love has become both god and demon.

The allusions to Diana in the third chapter clearly establish the novel's "pagan context." The New York section is dominated by Augustus Saint-Gaudens's statue of the goddess, which Nellie sees on the tower of Madison Square Garden through light snow. Diana, moon goddess of chastity, awakens guilt in Myra when she sees the moon rising behind the tower. Myra has been helping a young friend with a past, Ewan Gray, to romance another friend, Esther Sinclair, "the daughter of an old New England family . . . properly brought up" (23). The affair is roughly analogous to Myra's own, and she suspects that "very likely hell will come of it" (31), a clue to her life with Oswald. But Myra's guilt is outweighed by her dedication to Venus (perhaps misery wants company), and her trademark, like Venus's, is the variegated laughter that punctuates her fortunes. The moon here is a complex symbol and seems to relate to Venus and love as much as to Diana and chastity: when Myra discovers Nellie daydreaming in the square, she laughs, "Why, you're fair moonstruck, Nellie!" (26); and Oswald has "eyes . . . like half moons" (8, also 37 and 52), a romantic softness perplexing Nellie and suggesting failure. Erik Thurin acknowledges that Diana-Cynthia is sometimes a symbol of romantic love but that this is not the case here, where the moon instead relates to the threatening underworld goddess Hecate (287), whom Myra embodies when her mouth curls and twists "like a little snake" (40, 54, 89).

The Diana-Hecate axis that Thurin discovers indicates Cather's complex doubling of Christian and pagan contexts, although romantic love is represented here. Diana-Hecate anticipates and complements the Christian principles that contribute to Myra's reconciliation with the church in part 2. Nor Hall associates Diana-Hecate with female liberation and untamed instinct, which only at first seem to be the antithesis of Christianity. The adventure generated by the goddesses, "often ... inconveniently in mid-life [and involving] leaving the security of the city, home, family, and possibly even relationships, and finding a place where the only company is oneself" (124), is similar to Myra's subsequent religious journey. In the story of Demeter and Persephone, Hecate satisfies the hunger for reunion with parts of self surrendered in marriage. "The Artemis [Diana]-Hekate women . . . are able to welcome women out of marriages that kept them too much in the dark," writes Hall. "Coming up out of the darkness.... a woman needs to find her own capacity for illuminating and focusing in on unfamiliar surroundings-the tools she needs to find are Hekate's torch and the arrows of Artemis" (125). We should note that Myra herself compares love to distraction and sleepwalking in describing Ewan Gray's affair (23-24). Hall distinguishes Hecate at one point as "the part of [the emerging woman] that never left home and can therefore direct her returning steps" (13). Myra's marriage and her service to Venus seem to violate both the rules of Diana-Hecate and John Driscoll's Catholicism, for in both systems Venus-based relationships are dark relationships that lead one astray.

The local history of the Diana that Cather chose for My Mortal Enemy supports the alternative erotic nature of the moon. The Diana Nellie sees is the smaller, 1893 version of the original, which the architect Stanford White and the sculptor Saint-Gaudens considered too large for the tower that White had "adapted" from an original in Seville graced with a female figure representing Faith (Tharp 2-55). Both versions depicted the goddess nude and were considered sexually stimulating. The square, according to one journalist, was transformed from a gathering place for children to one of club men armed with field glasses. A policeman is supposed to have said, "'It's all along of her,' pointing to the summit . . . where Diana, adorned with only her beauty and a thin veneer of gilt, blazed in the sun People as has kids, says how she's immoralizing.... I don't think no such statue should be allowed myself, not in a public place"' (Tharp 257).

The contradictory nature of Cather's text regarding the goddess is repeated in details filtered through the narrator. The "fine, reluctant snow blurred" Nellie's first glimpse of New York (22), a description resembling a Childe Hassam painting in its muted outlines and use of reflected light. The details selected, however, are incongruous to the fairyland atmosphere Nellie seems to intend. The ice-covered liner Wilhelm der Grosse, being tugged upriver after a stormy crossing, was later armed as a commerce raider and sunk in 1914. Military imagery dominates the skyline behind the snow curtain: "the buildings on the Battery all ran together-looked like an enormous fortress with a thousand windows" (22-23). But the passage concludes fittingly for a "moonstruck'' observer: "From the mass, the dull gold dome of the World building emerged like a ruddy autumn moon at twilight." This detail anticipates the rising of the moon behind Diana at the chapter's end and Myra's confession of guilt about Gray's romance, while the military images anticipate the Henshawe conflict that will conclude part i. Similarly, Madison Square in falling snow seems "protected by good manners and courtesylike an open-air drawing-room" (24), although the concluding figure contains a threat: "Here, I felt, winter brought no desolation; it was tamed, like a polar bear led on a leash by a beautiful lady" (2-5). Gray's past is contradicted by his appearance: "he looked, that night, as fresh and undamaged as the flowers he wore" (28). These flowers, however, contradict themselves; the "few sprays of white hyacinth" (27) suggest loveliness only because they are white; the common purple variety, which immediately comes to mind, indicates sorrow.

Without ambiguity are the opals Gray intends to present to Esther. Myra recognizes them as omens of bad luck and perhaps inconstancy (Stofer 21). She exclaims, "Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world; why, for mercy's sake, add opals?" (28). Yet almost immediately Oswald confesses to Lydia, "Myra is so fond of helping young men along. We nearly always have a love affair on hand" (28). Surely Myra is false to Diana, which she recognizes: "Hush! I hate all women who egg on courtships." This talk occurs on Christmas Eve, a time when Myra would remember all she sacrificed for love. Earlier an Irish pennywhistle piper delays Myra's return to Oswald. "They always find me out" (26), she admits as the boy pursues her with "The Irish Washerwoman" and thoughts of her forebears. Being lavish as if she still had John Driscoll's fortune is a way to ignore her defection. Myra selects the most extravagant holly tree in the florist shop for Modjeska, gives a dollar to the florist's helper, and chides Oswald's pettiness before admitting her guilt as a servant of Venus.

In chapter 4 Christmas dawns in blinding light, anticipating the dawn Myra hopes for on the headland in part 2 and in contrast to the growing darkness in chapter 3. Oswald takes Nellie and Lydia to a service, and church and goddess are placed side by side: "the gold Diana flashed against a green-blue sky. We were going to Grace Church" (32). Myra's absence seems more than a strategy to allow Oswald to connive with Lydia about the cuff links; it suggests Myra's failure to accommodate her religious defection by substituting another church. The clear light also reflects a truth about Oswald, that he seeks the favor of young women. His young woman at this time, a rich girl from a breezy Western city, is not seeking advice on love or jewelry but wants to adorn Oswald. He asks Lydia to lie that the cuff links are a gift from her so he can wear them comfortably before Myra. His excuse is pathetic: returning the gift might contribute to the "hard knocks" the young woman will inevitably suffer in New York, and Myra would "punish herself and everybody else for this young woman's questionable taste" (33). Stofer recognizes the cuff links as reflecting Oswald's contradictory nature: topaz symbolizes divine goodness and faithfulness, but yellow on a man denotes secrecy, appropriate for the silent lover (20).

Contributing to the failure of the Henshawes' relationship, Lydia refuses the "out" Oswald provides her, that she can give the cuff links to some boy in Parthia. She resents Myra as "most unreasonable" with Oswald (34-35) and decides to go along with the deceit. Nellie is wiser in this situation. Reflecting on the Henshawes peacefully together in their front window, she says: "There was something about them, as they stood in the lighted window, that would have discouraged me from meddling, but it did not shake my aunt" (35). Christmas peace is disturbed by the gift, and Myra's exclamation that topaz is "exactly right for him" (36) is nasty, for Myra understands the language of jewelry. Stofer is perceptive about Myra's subsequent sarcasm at the opera: "Oh, Oswald, I love to see your jewels flash!" (37). According to Stofer, the remark "insinuates . . . an ironic, bawdy, double entendre aimed at his sexual organs and at what she implies to be his sexual infidelities" (20).

The infidelity issue contributes to Myra's restlessness in chapter 5, for it spoils the object of her sacrifice. Her visits with Nellie during Christmas constitute a study of the effects of loss of virtue. Like Augustine before conversion, she is "pulled in different directions by different wills" (Confessions 178), preoccupied with material luxuries she resents not having but feels will restore her to privilege, generally driven by concupiscence, which Augustine defines as "love of the world, the love of this life" (Synthesis 341) and Karl Rahner nuances as "the resistance of the sensitive to the spiritual part of man" (364). As if convinced of her sinfulness, Myra is incapable of freeing herself from a worldly level and is not her own person (Rahner 365). Her confusion is evident in her attempt to sophisticate Nellie by revealing her own hate for her, 'moneyed friends." Myra "took on her loftiest and most challenging manner" (39) among these people, notes Nellie; "the rich and powerful irritated her" (40). The curl at the corners of her mouth is not Hecate's serpent but that of envy. When she and Nellie jog by a wealthy acquaintance in a carriage, Myra is consumed by jealousy: "That's the last woman I'd care to have splashing past me, and me in a hansom cab!" she confides to Nellie, who evaluates this as "insane ambition" (41). The excuse of insanity is reserved in Aquinas's system for those who are envious of people far above them, but Myra's grief over the good fortune of friends she would rival or surpass is inexcusable, sinful, a violation of charity (Aquinas 36:2). Myra's comment after she tips the cab driver extravagantly-" It's very nasty, being poor!"---echoes John Driscoll's comment that "a poor man stinks, and God hates him" (15). These words have implications never intended by that crude old man, namely, that she is out of God's favor. Myra's perception of this, however dim, explains her frustration and ambition.

Cather's exemplurn. assumes sonata form: envy and hate, friendship and kindness, hate and bitterness. In the second "movement" Myra takes Nellie to visit a young poet friend, Anne Aylward, who is dying of tuberculosis. Myra now shines: "Never had I seen her so brilliant and strangely charming as she was in that sunlit study up under the roofs," recalls Nellie (42-). Although tenderness chokes Myra as she explains her friend's situation, this is really another form of worldliness. "I saw that her chief extravagance was in caring for so many people and in caring for them so much" (43), Nellie says immediately before describing Myra's equally choking bitterness toward a writer at the theater who once abandoned Oswald in a difficulty. "I could feel the bitterness working in her," writes Nellie before quoting Myra, who says: "It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends? . . . that's where the rub comes!" (44-45)——. This incident qualifies the visit to the poet. Aquinas would not view the sympathy Myra feels as virtue, but as passion, a sensitive response (Aquinas 30:3).

The Henshawes' New Year's party, which concludes chapter 5, gathers Christian and pagan strains to emphasize Myra's situation. Central in this scene is the Polish actress Helena Modjeska, described by Nellie as "a woman of another race and another period" whose "long, beautifully modelled hands . . . were . . . fashioned for a nobler worldliness than ours . . . to hold a sceptre, or a chalice-or, by courtesy, a sword" (45-46). The actress calls attention to the Diana context: "See, Myra.... the Square is quite white with moonlight" (47). She has moved from a chair by the fire, cloaked herself, and taken a seat by the window, "the moonlight falling across her knees" (47), to listen to the " Casta Diva" aria from Norma. Oswald stands behind her "like a statue." Modjeska resembles the old priestess figure to whom a young woman kneels in the Pompeii fresco described by Hall of a female initiation ritual involving Hecate (130-311). The actress embodies what Myra would reconnect to or become, and Oswald embodies what has separated her from both the chaste goddess to whom the aria is addressed and the church represented in the chalice image, in Modjeska's roles as the notoriously Catholic queens Catherine of Aragon and Mary Stuart, and in her own lofty faith. In part 2, a year after Modjeska's death in 1909, Myra has a Mass said for her. (As a young journalist, Cather wrote that Modjeska combined the dignity of cloister and court: "When I see her play I can understand how Dante loved Beatrice" [World and Parish 459].) During the singing Myra crouches beside the singer, "while the song grew and blossomed like a great emotion" (48).

Eichorn and Giannone speculate on Myra's thoughts in this tableau. Giannone emphasizes the duplicity of the aria: "All the while Norma reverently invokes the chaste moon and bids the divine rays to penetrate her life, she is herself unchaste" (181). Norma had violated her vows as high priestess by bearing sons to Pollione, proconsul of the hostile Romans, who subsequently fell in love with a young virgin. In the aria's second part Norma longs for an indication that Pollione's love for her has reawakened. Eichorn relates Cather's scene to the night in part 2 when Myra questions dying alone with her mortal enemy. He sees a resemblance between Myra and Norma "in the conflict of loyalties that both women find between religion and romantic love.... Norma is aware that her love for Pollione has brought her in conflict with both her religion and her country. She says at one point that Pollione's heart would be, for her, a substitute for life, fatherland, and heaven" (Eichorn 134). Myra's suspicions about Oswald renew her own losses, and Nellie is astute in relating the aria "mysteriously . . . to something in [Myra's] nature . . . a compelling, passionate, overmastering something . . . which was audible, visible in the air that night, as she sat crouching in the shadow" (48).

Part 1 ends in the explosion sparked on Christmas by Oswald and Lydia and hinted at in the conclusion (not sung at the party) of the Bellini aria, when the Druids plead for vengeance against the Romans and Pollione. The argument Nellie interrupts contrasts with the peaceful couple in the lighted window. Cather's interest seems to be the shattering of romantic fantasies. The tame beast of the Madison Square winter has reverted and become unleashed: "Mrs. Henshawe's angry laugh, and a burst of rapid words . . . stung like cold water from a spray" (49); the charming plum-purple velvet shelter has been invaded by the reality of a collapsing marriage, what Lewis refers to as "a sort of disredemption." The fight over the key dramatizes a poisoned union, each partner "ravenous to receive and implacably refusing to grow, jealous, suspicious, resentful, struggling for the upper hand, determined to be free and to allow no freedom, living on 'scenes"':

"How dare you lie to me, Oswald. How dare you? They told me at your bank that this wasn't a bank key... I stopped and showed it to them. . . ."

"The hell you did! . . . Then it was you who took my keys out of my pocket? and made me and yourself ridiculous. " (50)

"Now everything was in ruins," bemoans Nellie. "Everything about me seemed evil" (51).

In the coda Lydia and Nellie meet Myra on the train back to Chicago. She has left Oswald for a cooling off in Pittsburgh, her mouth twisting about "like a little snake" (54). Her parting shot is at Lydia, that she "needn't have perjured [herself] for those yellow cuff-buttons." But then she acknowledges her own failing powers, a desire for pearls, the moon-gem under the influence of Venus: "It's disgusting in a man to lie for personal decorations. A woman might do it, now, . . . for pearls!" The garnet-red feather on her fur hat, which Nellie earlier described as "sticking out behind" (20), is now "drooping behind." Its hue, supposed to safeguard friendship and remedy discord and anger, has not lived up to its reputation. "I'm sick of Myra's dramatics," declares Lydia. "I've done with them" (54).

Part 2 takes up the Henshawes' decline and the shattering of Nellie's world after a ten-year hiatus. The journey of all three principals, according to Bernice Slote, has moved "from romance to tragedy, from youth to age,... from East to West, from pagan to Christian.... (like Donne, a 'going Westward')," from "Christmas and New Year's . . . [to] spring-and . . . Easter" (18-iq). The picture of the Henshawes in the window of their New York apartment, with Myra "like a dove with its wings folded" (35), is a picture of an irreparable past. They now occupy separate rooms in a shabby hotel. Myra is dying, but Oswald, whose face Nellie reads as that "of one who has utterly lost hope" (61), manages to keep up enough spirit to clean his neckties, wear his topaz cuff links, and be overheard humming Schubert's "Fruhlingsglaube": "O fresh scent, o new sound! / Now, poor heart, be not afraid, / Now everything must change." Giannone sees the song as expressing Nellie's and Oswald's mixed feelings; he says that Cather uses it ironically to indicate change for the worse (177-78). However, Nellie's (if not Oswald's) romantic notions are being challenged, and the Henshawes' relationship is soon to be stripped to its reality. Myra and Oswald need to achieve a level of love beyond that from which they have fallen. For all three, opportunities for improvement lie in the future.

True to character, Oswald warns Nellie not to "speak . . . nor seem to know" of Myra's illness (60), and there is evidence that Myra has failed to face the reality of her condition. "We are in temporary eclipse," she tells Nellie. "I gain strength faster if I haven't people on my mind" (62). But reality is difficult to avoid; it is evident in the faded condition of their furnishings and in the tramping overhead of the Poindexters. Myra blames her vulnerability on impoverishment. "Oh, that's the cruelty of being poor; it leaves you at the mercy of such pigs" (68), she angrily complains as those above run about "beating [her] brains into a jelly" (67). Her situation seems to prove the truth of old Driscoll's warning that God scorns the poor. She blames Oswald, who has been bumped from his last two jobs and now has a "humble position, poorly paid, with the city traction company" (69). Whenever she hears the tramping above, Myra "turn[s] sharply to her husband" (66).

Suffering has not reformed Myra, although the religious verticalism and Irishisms that have survived alongside her negative traits will become her channels of reform and refining. Her sincere happiness in seeing Nellie, whose appearance seems to fulfill the prophecy of the queen of hearts, is marred by Myra's uncharitable pronouncements about teaching as a profession fit only for "the stupid and the phlegmatic" (64), her impatience with generous youth, and her cutting remark that "half of [Nellie's grandfather's portrait] would be enough for anybody!" (65). Ironically, the portrait of perversity that Nellie makes of Myra ("She put my two hands to her cheeks, making a frame for her face" [62]) is overwhelming: "she sat crippled but powerful in her brilliant wrappings. She looked strong and broken, generous and tyrannical, a witty and rather wicked old woman, who hated life for its defeats, and loved it for its absurdities" (65). The portrait comes with sound, the angry laugh that seemed to say, "Ahha, I have one more piece of evidence . . . against the hideous injustice God permits in this world!" (65). Even Nellie can detect verticalism in the resentment of divine justice that Aquinas attributes to loss of charity (34:1, 5-6). In Myra's view, if the immediate cause of indignity is Oswald, the ultimate cause is God's hideous injustice."

Myra's comparison of the Poindexters to the stalled ox makes clear this double blame. While she turns "sharply" to Oswald when she hears the tramping, she uses imagery from Proverbs 15:17 to describe it: "Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith." This verse ironically reflects a condition her materialism and bitterness prevent her from turning into benefit: her stalled ox is not riches interfering with charity but the chastisement of poverty offered to enable the dinner of herbs to be eaten in love. Mrs. Poindexter becomes an instrument of evil: "the wicked are deaf like the adder. And . . . she has the wrinkled, white throat of an adder . . . and the hard eyes of one" (74). In Psalm 58:4-5, the deaf, adder-like wicked are instruments of demonic forces imagined to control human destinies (Clifford 767). These allusions develop from Nellie's comment "that the Henshawes had come on evil days" (60) and from references to obscure light: Myra's brave explanation that "we are in temporary eclipse" and Nellie's observation that the electric bulbs in Myra's room are "shrouded and muffled" (62). In the next chapter the Henshawe eclipse will slowly begin to pass to reveal Christ rather than Diana-Hecate. The inevitable fall into darkness before this dawn is implied in Myra's recollections: "Ah, we wouldn't be hiding in the shadow, if we were fiveand-twenty! We were throwing off sparks like a pair of shooting stars, weren't we, Oswald?" (64). Eichorn (129) recognizes Salisbury's contemplation of the king's defeat in Richard II---"I see thy glory like a shooting star / Fall to the base earth from the firmament" (2.4.19-20)---as the source for Myra's speech. In this context the shooting stars Myra and Oswald have been are doomed ones.

Chapters 2 through 4 develop each partner's opportunities for change. Nellie begins chapter 2 by listing Oswald's daily services to his wife: he rises at five in the morning to bathe her, make her bed, and give her breakfast; he leaves work for two hours at noon to give her lunch; and so on. These seem to be acts of charity, of virtue operating in freethinking Oswald. Lewis observes that the subject of such acts may be offering love to God unintentionally: "Love Himself can work in those who know nothing of Him" (129). Divine love enables the subject to serve God and neighbor through the same operation: "it is not . . . that we love God and because of this by a further and imperated act love our neighbor, as if one were our end and the other our means" (Gilby 468). The nature of Oswald's service lies in his motivation toward and understanding of the love object. Is the source of motivation obligation or, as Aquinas specifies, "delight and readiness" (32:1), marks of the act of charity? Oswald's gentleness and patience with Myra seem to indicate the operation of divine love, but Cather complicates his motives by blurring the object of his love.

While chapter 2 opens with a list of apparently charitable acts, chapter 3 opens with the "evident pleasure" he takes in the attentions of the young girl journalist with whom he frequently dines (77). Nellie's loaded comment that "he still wore his topaz sleeve-buttons" (78) reminds us of the quarrel about infidelity and anticipates Cather's final coda, where we confront the possibility that Oswald's love for Myra had somehow ossified or, rather, only avoided this through substitutes: the rich girl who bestowed the sleeve-buttons, the journalist who now gives him refreshment, and even Nellie herself, to whom Myra indicates that "it was a pleasure to him to have [Nellie] come into their life again" (90-91). "He was always a man to feel women, you know, in every way," Myra concludes. In his last conversation with Nellie, Oswald confides that "it's seemed to me that I was nursing the mother of the girl who ran away with me. Nothing ever took that girl from me. She was a wild, lovely creature" (104). This perspective undermines the transfiguration of his marriage, frustrates his opportunity to move beyond Venus-Eros. If charity operates in him, and I believe it does, it is not toward his wife but toward the maternal figure he serves.

Myra's situation is more complicated. The dingy room beneath the tramping Poindexters forms a penumbra for her ruined marriage, relieved by Nellie with cakes, flowers, and visits to the shore. During the first of these visits Myra discovers a headland topped with a twisted cedar. She christens the place "Gloucester's cliff," the imaginary place in King Lear where deere deluded Gloucester attempts to shake his "great affliction off" to avoid quarreling with the divine will (4.6-35-40). Here, after being "miraculously" saved from a "fiend" by "the clearest gods," he submits to his fate: "Henceforth I'll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself /'Enough, enough,' and die" (75-77). Instead of escaping as he had intended, Gloucester sees and accepts. His opportunity begins to operate in Myra in this scene above the Pacific.

The tree and the intensity of the afternoon sun generate a mysterious aura typical of Flannery O'Connor's fiction and transcending the general realism of Nellie's text: "From a distance I could see her leaning against her tree and looking off to sea, as if she were waiting for something.... The afternoon light grew stronger and yellower, and when I went back to Myra it was beating from the west on her cliff as if thrown by a burningglass" (72-73). A burning glass, which focuses the sun's rays to set objects on fire, in this context becomes an obvious symbol of grace. Myra is affected: her smile is "soft," her face "lovely." "Light and silence . . . heal all one's wounds . . . but one, and that is healed by dark and silence," she tells Nellie, anticipating death's cure. "It's like cold water poured over fever" (73). The relief mediates guilt and then hope as the sun lowers into the sea, the traditional crucifixion image: "'I'd love to see this place at dawn,' Myra said suddenly. 'That is always such a forgiving time.... it's as if all our sins were pardoned, as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution" (73). The imagery is strategic in evaluating Myra's reconciliation, as is her desire, implied in her conclusion, to return to old Driscoll in returning to God: "You know how the great sinners always came home to die in some religious house, and the abbot or the abbess went out and received them with a kiss?" (73)

Myra lapses when she returns to her room beneath the tramping Poindexters. She is aware of what she calls "two fatal maladies" (74), one physical and one spiritual, which mix in her complaints. As her neighbors become demons, her confession of greed, that she should have stayed with her moneyed uncle, combines the sins of defection and profligacy. Youth has "been the ruin of us both. We've destroyed each other" (75), she tells Oswald without bitterness. She smooths the hair of her god and then closes her eyes and covers them with her hands, remembering perhaps her youthful preoccupation, Eros "taking over and reorganizing" (Lewis 93-94). After receiving news of a friend's son who shot himself over love, Myra confides to Nellie, "Oh, how youth can suffer! I've not forgotten; those hot southern Illinois nights, when Oswald was in New York . . . and I used to lie on the floor all night and listen to the express trains go by" (87). In the same vein are her responses to two Heine poems. "Was will die einsame Trane" does her "good. You see, I was crying about things I never feel now; I'd been dreaming I was young, and the sorrows of youth had set me crying!" (79). The poem's opening lines suggest that Myra is ridding herself of her last impediments to vision: "Why does this lonely tear drop / Still dim my visionwhy?" Listening to the other poem, "Am Kreuzweg wird begraben," she identifies with the suicide buried at the crossroads; the blue flower of the sinner is her flower: "Oh, that's the flower for me, Nellie" (80). References to the night sky and the moon in both poems connect them to the pagan strain in the New York section. Hecate, the underworld Diana of eclipse, is also the goddess of crossroads.

Myra's "cruelty" to Oswald, generated by "the harm [she] did him" that "perhaps [she] can't forgive him for" (88), is an attempt to disillusion him, make him accept her reality and their ruined marriage: "We've destroyed each other.... We were never really happy. I am a greedy, selfish, worldly woman; I wanted success and a place in the world. Now I'm old and ill and a fright" (75). She "can't help" trying to "spoil the past" for him because "he's a sentimentalist, always was; he can look back on the best of those days when we were young and loved each other, and make himself believe it was all like that. It wasn't" (88). This is both a confession of guilt and a plea for recognition. Oswald's fantasy that he had been nursing the mother of the young girl who had eloped with him, that nothing had ever taken that girl from him, provides a meaningful context for Myra's most disillusioning statement: "People can be lovers and enemies at the same time....

A man and a woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other." What Oswald has done is romanticize his wife; what he has failed to do is cherish her for herself. She has constantly reminded him of her imperfections, complained about their poverty, both spiritual and material, flown into rages of jealousy when she suspected that female substitutes were sustaining the fantasy girl he would "rather have been clawed by . . . than petted by any other woman" (104). What is unhealthy is their preoccupation with the relationship itself, the failure to get beyond it. Myra recognizes as much when she concludes, "When there are children, that feeling goes through natural changes. But when it remains so personal . . . something gives way in one. In age we lose everything; even the power to love" (88-89).

Facing the reality of failure, Myra grows increasingly nostalgic for the heritage she gave up. She reflects on old Driscoll, on how unusual he was; his violent prejudices seem virtues "in these days when so few people have any real passions, either of love or hate" (81). She admires the satanic perversity of the clause in his will providing care for her in an institution for women in Chicago. She hopes he died with a decent feeling for her: "If he'd lived till now, I'd go back to him and ask his pardon.... as we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forebears put into us"(82). The imagery here repeats that at Gloucester's cliff: the sky and the abbott bestowing the kiss of absolution. We are reminded of the Irish lads who "always found [Myra] out" and piped "The Irish Washerwoman" for her (2-6). At the opposite end of her art life, Myra repeats "long declamations from Richard II or King John" (83), reminders of both strained and compliant uncle-nephew and uncle-niece relationships (Eichorn 128-32). Of course, the "stuff" put into Myra includes the church, and after these declamations she sends Nellie to Father Fay to request an anniversary Mass for Helena Modjeska, reminding Nellie that although she married before a justice of the peace, "I believe in holy words and holy rites all the same" (85). In the money she keeps in an old glove "for unearthly purposes," she reveals her usual confusion between money and God's grace.

Chapter 5 is the heart of Myra's struggle. She faces a process that Lewis calls "so difficult that perhaps no fallen man has ever come within sight of doing it perfectly" (134): she must transform (by acceptance) the mortal lover she suspects has been unfaithful into a mode of charity. Myra's condition deteriorates after her repeated visits to the headland and the growth of a tumor, making her physically and spiritually vulnerable, as dependent as she was self-assertive in the novel's first chapter. She now turns toward the church, ceases to complain, and adopts a "strange and dark" manner toward Oswald: "She had certain illusions; the noise overhead she now attributed entirely to her husband. 'Ah, there, he's beginning it again,' she would say. 'He'll wear me down in the end. Oh, let me be buried in the king's highway!"' (92). Eichorn identifies this request as from Richard II but falls to develop its meaning in either the Cather or the Shakespeare context. Both Richard and Myra are greedy actor-philosophers with a vertical view of Providence and bad relations with an uncle, and Richard's request, spoken in regret over imminent deposition, is part of a catalog of loss and repentance: I'll give my jewels for a set of beads, My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, My gay apparel for an almsman's gown, My Figured goblets for a dish of wood, My sceptre for a palmer's walking-staff, My subjects for a pair of carved saints, And my large kingdom for a little grave, A little little grave, an obscure grave, Or I'll be buried in the king's high way ... (3.3.147-55)

The first and sixth lines are echoed in Myra's attachment to "an ebony crucifix with an ivory Christ," which she unkindly demands when Nellie removes it from the bed: "Give it to me. It means nothing to people who haven't suffered" (92).

Myra's identification with the corpus (the icon balancing gilt Diana in part 1) relates to divine demands for atonement, and her changed attitude toward Oswald results from construing him as the divine power. She says "accusingly, at him rather than to him: 'At least let me die by candlelight; that is not too much to ask'" (93). Oswald is also the instrument of the charity she must accept: "It's bitter enough that I should have to take service from you-you whom I have loved so well" (92). Nellie records these words without understanding, or else they would prepare her for the question, "Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?" (95). Myra's bitterness is knowing that because of Oswald she had rejected the charity now being offered through him, that he refuses to accept her as herself, that whatever virtue he is capable of is being offered to "tha mother of the girl who ran away with [him]" (104) and must be accepted by her (Myra) as from a neighbor rather than as from a husband. Myra is no model, despite Father Fay's misleading accolade about "some of the saints of the early church [being] a good deal like her" (93), but she struggles to accept the inevitable, even as she punctuates it with dramatics. "We . . . draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves," writes Lewis, "but by accepting them and offering them to Him.... If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they shall break, so be it" (122).

The drawing near occupies Myra's last days, when her mind is "abnormally active" (93). She repeats her discussion with the young priest about the search for God, reflected in her desire for candlelight and dawn: "Ah, Father,.. . Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding" (94). This echoes a cluster of biblical passages, the most familiar being Matthew 7:7-8---"Seek, and ye shall find . . . he that seeketh findeth." Proverbs 8: 17 puts these words into the mouth of Wisdom: "those that seek me early shall find me." In Jeremiah 29:13 Yahweh adds the condition of intense love in addressing the exiles in Babylon: "And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart." In all three passages, finding, having, and arriving depends on disposition. Nellie's gloss, that "in religion, desire was fulfillment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded" (94), is only partially perceptive because it dispenses with the object of the quest. Myra's difficulty in accepting her situation is what motivates what Nellie distinguishes as "the burden . . . telling the tale":

The candles were burning as usual. . . . The sick woman began to talk to herself, scarcely above a whisper. . . .I seemed to hear a soul talking.

"I could bear to suffer . . . so many have suffered. But why must it be like this? I have not deserved it. I have been true in friendship; I have faithfully nursed others in sickness.... Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?" (95)

Myra's problem is evident in her statement that "I have not deserved it," that is, to have to respond to charity from Oswald, the idol until lately separating her from the church and its sacraments. At the theater in New York Myra had told Nellie that enemies were easier to forgive than friends; in Oswald she has to grapple with both.

Nellie looks at Oswald "in affright" after the whispered question, "but he did not move or shudder." Perhaps he comprehends more than Nellie, who at first interprets the words as "a terrible judgment upon all one hopes for" (95). Her subsequent idea is more thoughtful: "Violent natures like [Myra's] sometimes turn against themselves . . . and all their idolatries" (96). Oswald had been violently possessed, but now Myra would avoid him. The demand made on her or rather the invitation offered her (to use Lewis's term), is to turn idolatry into virtue, a transformation "so difficult that perhaps no fallen man has ever come within sight of doing it perfectly." Thurin recognizes the source of Myra's words in a phrase used by Euripides' Medea in addressing Jason (185), and he draws pertinent parallels between the two "violent" women: Medea is a moon worshiper who sacrifices a great position to marry a man who proves unfaithful and whom she tortures. If Thurin is correct, Cather's borrowing complements the Norma material similarly placed in the other part of he novel.

Bennett and Tanner are among critics who discredit Myra's religious reconciliation because she is unforgiving. When Myra expounds on lovers as enemies and tells Nellie, "Perhaps I can't forgive [Oswald] for the harm I did him," it is essentially her confession of jealousy, extravagance, and guilt that Oswald's "life had not suited him.... he ought to have been a soldier or an explorer" (52). But Bennett cites this confession as proof that Myra is inconsistent because she herself wants forgiveness (118). Bennett caps her argument with 1 John 4:20-21: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: and he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also." Tanner uses the same passage to verify "that Myra's conversion is more a matter of aesthetics than of theology" (35). Both critics fail to consider reconciliation as a process. For example, Myra admits her inability to forgive in the chapter previous to the one in which Nellie notices that she changes, that she stops complaining and lamenting. Tanner claims that "not even in her final hours-even after receiving the Sacrament-does Myra demonstrate ... essential [Christian] qualities"-" love, humility, repentance, forgiveness, and the renunciation of worldly values" (30). 1 suggest a closer consideration of the text and what Cather leaves out of it. Chapter 6 begins, "On the following day [after the question about her mortal enemy] Mrs. Henshawe asked to be given the Sacrament. After she had taken it she seemed easier in mind and body" (97). Subsequently she desires solitude and makes her way to the headland, where she dies. Has she failed to repent, forgive, love the way Christians are supposed to? What does her "ease" in mind and body mean? Might it be that freedom peace that quiets the confusion in and transfigures humanity? When Myra questions why she must take service from her mortal enemy and die alone with him, is she struggling with the grace to accept or, in the Christian sense, love that enemy?

In his treatise on charity Aquinas grapples with the passage from John's letter and an apparently contradictory one in Luke (14:26): "If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters . . . he cannot be my disciple." Aquinas clarifies John's argument as meaning that the love process first involves the visible rather than the most lovable, that the soul learns from things it knows to love what it knows not. The argument in Luke is that "we ought to hate our neighbor for God's sake, if . . . he leads us astray from God.... Therefore we ought to love God, out of charity, more than our neighbor" (Aquinas 26:2). Lewis defines hate here as rejection rather than aversion or wishing harm; it means "to reject, to set one's face against, to make no concession to" whatever or whoever interferes with or becomes an alternative to God (123). Through Nellie's evidence we merely approach a mystery that Cather presents the way she does because it is beyond language, must be "felt upon the page without being specifically named there." Aquinas explains that "what we ought to love in our neighbor is that he may be in God.... or love him on account of what he has of God" (25:1). Cather uses Nellie to distance us from that salvific movement from natural loves and hates to loving one's neighbor under the aspect of God. Myra's acceptance of Oswald's charity would be loving Oswald "on account of what he has of God," the gift of love.

There are still threads that need tying. Myra's cremation is a variation on Norma's death by fire and emphasizes, I believe, Myra's consummation in the divinity reflected in candles and at dawn. Oswald's Alaskan adventure indicates perhaps the awakening of the potential Nellie imagined in him. Nellie's chill from the string of amethysts is hopeful, keeps her disillusionment fresh, and motivates her narrative; it reveals that she has yet to fathom Myra, whose mystery has become an ongoing invitation, a grace, for transcendence.

At the end of her groundbreaking article "The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Ántonia," Blanche Gelfant exhorts readers of Cather's novel not to perpetuate the "violence and the destructive attitudes toward race and sex" Gelfant finds in Jim Burden's narrative (81). Gelfant writes: We must begin to look at My Ántonia, long considered a representatively American novel, not only for its beauty of art and for its affirmation of history, but also, and instructively, for its negations and evasions. Much as we would like to ignore them, for they bring painful confrontations, we must see what they would show us about ourselves-how we betray our past when we forget its most disquieting realities; how we begin to redeem it when we remember. (81-82)

Since the publication of Gelfant's article in 1971 much important work has been done to address the "disquieting realities" in My Ántonia. Following Gelfant's lead, Elizabeth Ammons has examined Cather's racist portrayal of Blind d'Arnault, and critics such as Judith Fetterley and Sharon O'Brien have discussed Cather's use of a male narrator as a disguise for her lesbianism. Yet another "negation and evasion" hides in Jim's narrative, one that, when acknowledged, actually supports the long-held view of My Ántonia as a "representatively American novel," but by redefining and expanding our vision of American culture. This "negation and evasion" begins with Jim's repression of Ántonia's role as an artist. Most recent critics agree that Jim's portrayal of Ántonia at the end of the novel is reductive-she has become a "mythic" figure, an "Earth Mother"- but they differ on whether Ántonia transcends this objectification. Cather does, however, offer us a way to read against Jim's narrative to find an alternative view of both Ántonia and Jim himself. Throughout the novel, Ántonia enters Jim's narrative by telling her own stories, so that, if we listen for her voice, My Ántonia is as much the story of Ántonia's development as an artist as it is the story of Jim's vision of her. That is, the growing recognition of the oral tradition in literary studies allows us to reread the novel with a new emphasis on Ántonia as a storyteller.

Although Cather often expressed her admiration of oral storytelling and other forms of folk or "low" art, her prevailing desire to position herself within the male-dominated and male-defined literary tradition prevented her from explicitly identifying Ántonia as an artist. Instead, through her references to Virgil, Cather emphasizes Jim's role as the storyteller who seeks to "bring the Muse into [his] country" (169). Still, once we view Ántonia as an artist rather than as Jim's muse, we find that she is only one of a group of nonprivileged creators in My Ántonia whose work provides an alternative to the tradition of Western high art. Traits that Cather elsewhere described as signifying the "true artist" characterize not only Ántonia but also Lena Lingard, Blind d'Arnault, and the actress in Camille. By highlighting these usually unnoticed artists in My Ántonia, we can begin to see new patterns and contrasts emerge from the jumble of impressions that Cather produces by including the stories and art of others. In sharp contrast to these unrecognized artists, who celebrate life and enliven others, we notice the suicidal men-Mr. Shimerda, a tramp, and Wick Cutter-whose efforts to control or ease the harshness and formlessness of life on the prairie result in self-destruction. Each of these men is associated in his own way with art as well as with the life-denying impulses of control or repression. Their violent efforts at control not only destroy their selves but suggest the deadness of art when it is full of sentimental platitudes or overwhelmed by despair.

This motif of destructive control that underlies the presence of death and lifeless art in My Ántonia exemplifies Jim's (and Cather's) conflicted relation to narrative itself. By allowing the entry of other voices and other artists, Cather produces what is now considered a "feminine" text. However, in the introduction she has Jim deny the artistic quality of his narrative because it lacks "form" (2), in other words, the single voice, the linear and climactic plot, and the stable objectification of "the other," which are valued in the Western literary tradition. In an interview, Cather likewise described My Ántonia as full of "structural fault[s]," but she acknowledged the necessity of her divergence from the conventional form of the novel. "I know [the structural faults] are there, and made them knowingly," she said, because "I knew I'd ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern" (Willa Cather in Person 79, 77). In fact, through the "formlessness" of My Ántonia, Cather allows for a vivid contrast between the vibrant art of the marginalized artist and the lifeless, ultimately life-draining art of the masculine dominant culture (epitomized in Jim Burden), which she ambivalently desired to join.

The conflict between Jim's and Ántonia's narrative visions emerges most clearly during his visit with her at the end of the novel. After a twenty-year separation, Jim writes, "I did not want to find [Ántonia] aged and broken; I really dreaded it. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones" (211). During this visit, Jim replaces his early "illusions" about Ántonia with new ones, now seeing her as an asexual Earth Mother. But Ántonia manages to challenge Jim's narrative vision: she brings out old photographs that, as jean Schwind points out, allow us to see Jim for the first time (51). Tellingly, he appears as "an awkward-looking boy" and as a young man "trying to look easy and jaunty" (225). Clearly, Jim's self-consciousness and lack of ease and the effort he puts into achieving the appearance of being carefree and comfortable embody the critical vision Cather has of her male narrator. The revelation that Jim has been masquerading all along encourages us to question his reliability as a narrator of both his own and Ántonia's pasts.

But Jim finds that Ántonia does not simply possess pictorial representations of him. More importantly, she has made him into a character in the stories she tells her children. As she tells him, "these children know all about you and Charley and Sally, like as if they'd grown up with you" (215-16). After years of thinking of Ántonia as his own property, an "ideal" that "really [is] a part of me" (206), and above all a text for him to write, Jim finds that she has produced her own narrative. Ántonia's stories even rival Jim's own by contradicting the view of himself that he strives to assert. Although her children know "all about" Jim (and this is stressed by her sons' repetition of "we know!" in response to his feeble effort to tell them about "his" Ántonia), they are nevertheless surprised when Jim says, "I was very much in love with your mother once." To this Anton replies, "She never told us that" (222). Ántonia has probably told quite a different story, for it is clear that she has always thought of Jim as a child, from their early "nesting" together (19) to her inclusion of the adult Jim with the Harling children when she says: "I declare, Jim, I loved you children almost as much as I love my own" (215).

Indeed, Ántonia's stories seem to have included the boy who killed an aged and drowsy rattlesnake but to have omitted the portrait that evolves in Jim's account: the young man who boldly scorned bourgeois conventions by associating with hired girls,' The Cuzak children's familiarity with the story of his killing the snake revives Jim's uncomfortable awareness of the discrepancy between reality-the snake's age and his own fear-and Ántonia's exultation of his "manly" heroism. The children also realize that the story is a tall tale, for they tell Jim that Ántonia changes the snake's length from story to story (225). Although her story ostensibly emphasizes his "manliness," it actually portrays Jim's masculinity as a fiction. To Ántonia and her children, "Jim Burden" is still the "awkward-looking boy" whose picture elicits a giggle from Leo (225).

Feeling that Ántonia's narratives threaten his view of himself (as well as the authority of his narrative), Jim begins to distance himself from her in the final two chapters. Immediately after looking at the photographs and hearing the family legends about him, Jim refers to Ántonia only as the children's mother (226) and retires to bed with two of her sons. Although he has just left the presence of the real woman, he thinks of her as a work of art: "Ántonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade-that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer" (226). After reducing her to a new, unchanging image that he can firmly stick into the photo album of his mind, Jim abandons Ántonia the woman as the center of his narrative's interest. After years of fluctuation in his opinion and approval of Ántonia and her behavior, Jim feels that she is finally controllable. Once he turns his attention to her husband and sons, he sees Ántonia as a mother and housekeeper whose role as originator and accommodator of the family's life remains stable and safely behind the scenes. When he refers to her again in the novel's concluding paragraphs, "his" Ántonia is once again the little girl he knew when he was a child.

Jim's efforts to repress Ántonia's active role as an artist have been unwittingly perpetuated by critics who also overlook her artistry and see her only as the subject of Jim's art. Rather than thinking about the stories that seem to disrupt Jim's reminiscences as art produced by Ántonia and others, most critics have seen them as embedded in the text merely to advance Cather's themes. Although Jim enjoys Ántonia's stories, he thinks of them as "entertainment" for children (226), not as an art form. However, his description of her storytelling at the Harlings' house hints that it is something more important to Cather: "We all liked Tony's stories. Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart" (113). Instead of responding to Ántonia's stories as constructed narratives, Jim thinks only of her voice. In this way he deflects his-and the reader's-attention from her creativity and emphasizes her lack of any apparent artistic craft; her words "come right out of her heart," unshaped by the formal conventions of elite art.

However, Cather's presentation of Ántonia's storytelling allows for a more complex appreciation. Cather often links oral expression with art and artistic ability, and she values art that conveys and inspires unembellished emotion. In her earlier Song of the Lark, for example, the singer Thea Kronborg praises the voice specifically for being a "vessel" of "life itself": "What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself-life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars.... In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals" (304, emphasis added). According to Thea's definition, Ántonia's apparently artless stories are a lucid vessel for life and thus represent the purest form of art.

As Sharon O'Brien has argued, Cather's reviews of female opera singers present an alternative to the traditional association of "sword/penis/pen/male/artist" by suggesting a feminine version: "vessel/womb/throat/voice/woman/artist" (171). In the singer's voice, Cather finds a way for the female artist to link craftsmanship with the "natural power" of the female body (O'Brien 171); likewise, we can find in the storyteller's voice a linkage of the physical body with creative power. O'Brien argues that Cather also associates the talent of the female writer with her "voice," by which she implies not only literary style and tone but also "individuality, originality, and identity" (173-74). This is seen in Cather's preface to Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs, where she writes that "every great story . . must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique" (7). Cather uses voice to mean more than the tone and style of the writing by stressing its independence from the words on the page: this "quality of voice" is one that the reader "can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody" (Preface 7). Or, we might add, as one remembers an oral tale.

In Jim's description of Ántonia's storytelling, Ántonia's voice both her physical voice and her artistic style and tone-is unique and striking, with its "peculiarly engaging quality" and its implied roots in her "life itself": her breath, her heart, her female body. But, interestingly, female identity is erased, for Jim describes Ántonia in masculine terms: her voice is "deep, a little husky," and he refers to her by her male nickname, Tony. This elision points, on the one hand, to Jim's sense of Ántonia's slippery gender identity: her rough manner, appearance, and work in the fields make her seem too much "like a man," which (perhaps because of insecurity about his own manhood) he finds disconcerting and "disagreeable" (81). Then again, Jim's movement away from Ántonia's femininity when she performs her art suggests Cather's own ambivalence about favorably portraying a nonprivileged art form performed by an uneducated woman. By emphasizing Ántonia's masculine traits, Cather could give her storytelling all the power of the traditionally masculine voice of authority, but at the expense of Ántonia's identity as a female artist.

Ántonia's storytelling lies between singing as performance and writing as original composition. She belongs not to the Western literary tradition but to a tradition of oral literature, which values communal sharing rather than originality and solitary authorship. Cather displayed her high regard for storytelling and its influence on her own development as a writer when, in a Bread Loaf School lecture, she called the female storyteller of her Virginian childhood her "first teacher in narrative" (Bennett 208). Through Ántonia and others in My Ántonia, Cather tacitly celebrates the oral tradition of storytelling and allows other voices to enter and challenge her elite male narrator. But even though Ántonia's role as a storyteller emerges in bits and pieces, Cather never emphasizes it, and Jim always retreats from recognizing her as an artist; he wants Ántonia as a muse, not a rival. Ántonia's threat as a rival would be immense exactly because she creates stories under assumptions contrary to the tradition the adult Jim has been educated in (a tradition that, ironically, never seems to him to be as vital as his less sophisticated, "early friends" [168]). For Cather, emphasizing Ántonia's role as an artist would have been a bold act in 1918, for it would have aligned Cather with the folk culture of recent immigrants; also, if Cather had taken the perspective of an uneducated female storyteller, her novel would not have found a place within the elite, masculine American literary tradition being defined by contemporary male writers and professors. Still, although Cather never explicitly calls Ántonia an artist within the text of My Ántonia, her descriptions of Ántonia's storytelling and vitality clearly conform to the definition of artist that she held both against and alongside the definitions of her time and culture.

Cather most explicitly identified Ántonia as an artist when she said of Anna Sadilek Pavelka, the model for Ántonia, that "she was one of the truest artists I ever knew in the keenness and sensitiveness of her enjoyment, in her love of people and in her willingness to take pains" (Willa Cather in Person 44). Here Cather aligns the artistic personality with traits traditionally considered feminine -selflessness and sensitivity to the needs of othersand with the ability to enjoy life with enthusiasm. If in her early life Cather saw art as a masculine endeavor, she nevertheless began to attribute "feminine" qualities to the artist as early as the 1890s, in her college essays and reviews. In these essays, about writers from Shakespeare and Carlyle to "Ouida," as well as in her later comments about writers such as Jewett, Cather repeatedly describes the creativity of writers as involving a "gift of sympathy" (Kingdom 46, 422; Preface 7), which allows them to "actually [get] inside another person's skin" (Kingdom 449); an "exuberant passion" or "supreme love," which is more important to genius than "supreme intellect" or perfect form (Kingdom 434, 52); and a willingness to give themselves "absolutely to (their] material," to "[fade] away into the land and people of [their] heart, [and to die] of love only to be born again" (Preface 7). O'Brien argues that the traits Cather defines as necessary to the creative process can be seen as feminine because "even if the artist's social role was male and some aspects of creativity [were] metaphorically associated with paternity, the sympathy, identification, and receptive submission to inspiration Cather attributed to male writers in the 1890s and finally claimed for herself were considered feminine attributes by her society" (159-60). Besides being traditionally feminine, these traits clearly correspond to the enthusiasm and selfless empathy that Cather praises in Anna Pavelka and develops in Ántonia.

Ántonia's development as a storyteller begins from the moment Jim teaches her English. She expresses her delight in language when she excitedly wrings English words from Jim and then offers him a silver ring, an exchange he finds "extravagant" because he does not realize the value words have for her (19). As soon as she is able to talk "about almost anything," Ántonia tells Jim her first stories about the badger-hunting dogs in Bohemia and Old Hata (27). just as many of her stories link her Bohemian past with the American prairie, Ántonia's English remains a hybrid of her mother tongue and her new language. In contrast to Lena, who gives a new spin to American "flat commonplaces," Ántonia always has "something impulsive and foreign in her speech" (180). Her lively and original English and the energy of her enthusiasm recall Edith Lewis's description of the storyteller to whom Cather listened as a child: "Her talk was full of fire and wit, rich in the native idiom" (II).

Ántonia's stories are spontaneous and candid in their details of Bohemian life or the actions of people on the prairie. Jim is able to undervalue her stories because they do not fulfill the Western definition of high art. He thinks of her oral tales as interesting diversions rather than as an art form involving craft and skill, talents the young Cather herself found lacking in female writers (O'Brien 159). Unlike Jim, Ántonia is not concerned with authorial authority. She usually tells stories without manipulating their meaning, presenting people's acts in all their gruesome detail and offering her own reaction, if at all, as only one way of thinking about the story. Her object is always to represent what Cather calls "life itself." She does not try to assign motivation to the characters in her stories or objectify them as reflections of her own psyche, as Jim does. When she tells the story of the tramp who kills himself, for example, Ántonia ends with a question rather than an interpretation: "What would anyone want to kill themselves in summer for?" (115). Thus she opens up the meaning of her story to her listeners; and the story's reverberation in Jim's memory clearly suggests the effectiveness of her method. Similarly, she does not judge Peter and Pavel when she translates their story, which Jim, out of morbid fascination, retells in his own words rather than relating it as Ántonia told it. Time and again, her stories gain a new life in her listeners' minds, as when Nina Harling "interprets [Ántonia's stories about Christmas in Bohemia] fancifully, and . . . cherished a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia a short time before the Shimerdas left that country" (113).

Of course, in her stories Ántonia represents life as she remembers it, and she thus offers an alternative to Jim's narrative. The only story that she noticeably changes and interprets is that of Jim and the rattlesnake. Although she casts this story as a rite of manhood, Ántonia clearly still thinks of Jim as a child; for after he kills the snake, she tries to wipe his face with a handkerchief and "comfortingly" tells him that he is a "big mans" now (32). The story really serves as a rite of passage for Ántonia, as Jim perhaps realizes when he returns to the kitchen and finds her "standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story with a great deal of colour" (34). The killing of the snake launches Ántonia as an "epic" storyteller at the center of an audience's attention. By telling this story Ántonia actually displaces Jim as its rightful narrator, since according to the tradition of folk narratives, the narrator of a "hero story" based on real experience should be the "hero" himself (Dobos 177). As the storyteller, Ántonia in effect becomes its hero, even though her role within the tale is that of a helpless female. Ántonia's position as both the teller of and a character within this story parallels the two views we can take of her in My Ántonia: as a storyteller in her own right and the object defined by Jim's narrative. Contrary to Western ideas of high art, Ántonia does not insist on solitary authorship, but allows others to tell "her" stories. She encourages her, eldest son to tell the story of Wick Cutter's suicide-murder, with only "occasional promptings" (231) And, of course, she offers no resistance to Jim when he sees (and writes about) her as "anything that a woman can be to a man" (206).

The communal aspect of Ántonia's storytelling- both her responsiveness to her audience and their response to her-also reflects Cather's attribution of traditionally feminine qualities to the artist. After hearing Ántonia's story about the tramp who commits suicide, Jim thinks about the similarities between her and Mrs. Harling, both of whom have "strong, independent natures" and more nurturing characteristics: "They loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them.... Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it" (116). Instead of reflecting on Ántonia's highly disturbing tale, Jim takes refuge in more comforting thoughts, seeming to define a type of maternal nature while denying that he ever "tried to define it." However, if we read this passage in light of Cather's remarks about Anna Pavelka, it also describes the female artist. Here the sympathy, passion, and self-abandonment of the artist reappear. Most notably, Ántonia and Mrs. Harling enjoy watching others enjoy their domestic art. Because of their selflessness, Ántonia and Mrs. Harling are not bothered by the ephemeral nature of their work; instead, they work to provide pleasure for others. With their "relish of life," the two women make art from life rather than from memory and obsession, as Jim does, and without his concern about control.

That Ántonia's art includes both her storytelling and her domesticity is supported by Cather's linkage, in a 1921 interview, of farmers' wives with creativity: "The farmer's wife who raises a large family and cooks for them and makes their clothes and keeps house . . . and thoroughly enjoys doing it all, and doing it well, contributes more to art than all the culture clubs" (Willa Cather in Person 47). Certainly, Ántonia's family life and farm express her creative vision. Her children behave so perfectly that they seem to have been raised in a utopia; she even seats them at the dinner table "according to a system" that allows the older children to care for the younger ones (223). Ántonia draws upon European culture and language as well as upon the lessons she has learned from American women to create this harmonious family life. But as her husband's controlled discontent and their triple-enclosed garden remind us, she has achieved this harmony through hard work, by constantly keeping the forces of nature or individual dissatisfaction at bay. Although the seemingly paradisaical setting leads Jim to read Ántonia as an Earth Mother, her enclave on the prairie is ambiguously limited by its removal from society, as Katrina Irving points out, at the same time that it is peaceful and fertile (101). Ántonia's increased removal from the English language and from town life reflects her marginalization both as an immigrant and as an artist who works in a nonprivileged form. However, her children greatly appreciate her stories and display artistic talent themselves: Rudolph as a storyteller, Leo as a violinist, and Nina as a dancer. Ántonia provides American society not only with badly needed workers, as Irving argues, but with new artists.

Although Cather does not explicitly identify Ántonia, the other homemakers, or Lena the dressmaker as artists within the text of My Ántonia, her portrayal of women who do creative work without recognition realistically depicts the position of nonprivileged artists in Western society. In a culture that sees art as work created and signed by one person, and crafted according to rules deemed aesthetic by a cultural elite, the oral tales of a hired girl, the dresses of a small-town dressmaker, or the cheerful kitchen of a farmer's wife would not be valued as creative work. Even Cather, who claimed to view storytelling and domesticity as art, nevertheless strove to fulfill the standards of Western high art in her own writing. Yet the structure of My Ántonia, which formerly puzzled critics, is unconventional precisely because of her inclusion of the voices and tales of other storytellers; its structure could even be said to imitate the shape of Ántonia's storytelling and to realistically reproduce the effect and influence of all forms of art-high and low-on one's life.

In an interview, Cather insisted that the structure of My Ántonia was necessary to her subject: "My Ántonia . . . is just the other side of the rug, the pattern that is supposed not to count in a story. In it there is no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle for success. I knew I'd ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern. I just used it the way I thought absolutely true" (Willa Cather in Person 77). Cather's attempt to be "true" to her material recalls the value she placed an representing "life itself." Although Jim says his manuscript describes "pretty much all that [Ántonia's] name recalls to me" (2), he includes many memories in which Ántonia is only marginally important or is actually replaced by another "hired girl," Lena Lingard. The focus of My Ántonia moves away from Ántonia time and again, often to alight on another nonprivileged artist. If we look at some of these other artists-Lena, Blind d'Arnault, and the actress in Camille-we can see that they share Ántonia's lack of egoism; their attitude toward their art likewise contrasts with the Western (and highly masculine) tradition of artistic control, authority, and distinction.

Although Cather provides us with some biographical evidence that she considered Ántonia's storytelling and domestic work as undervalued forms of art, her attitude toward Lena as a figure for the female artist is less clear. Yet Lena can be seen as an artist, despite Jim's obscuring descriptions of her dressmaking as merely a business. Her interest in dressmaking obviously is not centered on financial success, which she is inept at managing, but on her enjoyment of the work itself, for the creative expression it allows. She makes the female body-both her own and her customers'-into her canvas by showing it to its best "effect" (179). From her earliest days of poverty, Lena has used whatever resources were at hand, making old clothes "over for herself very becomingly" (108). When she makes dresses for others, she abdicates some artistic control by working in a medium that becomes part of the aesthetic effect of the woman who wears it.

Lena derives sensual enjoyment from her art; Jim often finds her "in the evening ... alone in her work-room, draping folds of satin on a wire figure, with a quite blissful expression" (179). This enjoyment is significant in light of Cather's own attitude toward feminine attire. As an adolescent, Cather called dresses and skirts "the greatest folly of the Nineteenth Century" (Bennett 113), but as an adult she began to appreciate dresses when they were worn by other women. While living with Isabelle McClung, O'Brien writes, Cather came to see why "the female dress she found confining and unacceptable in adolescence could be redefined and reimagined along with the female identity it symbolized" (237). Cather's mature interest in feminine dress, which she incorporates in Lena, thus combined her attraction to its effect and her effort to fashion her own image as a woman drawn to other women.

Yet, ironically, by celebrating a woman's appreciation of the female body, Lena's similarly female-focused art paradoxically attracts heterosexual males. Like Ántonia, Lena does not assert artistic control by resisting men's efforts to "write" her into their own narratives. When she appears in Black Hawk, "a graceful picture in her blue cashmere dress and little blue hat" (103), she is the one making the picture, but Jim believes he is the one framing her. Lena is unthreatened by this appropriation of her sensuality; she recognizes that "it makes [men] feel important to think they're in love with somebody" (185). Jim responds to Lena's sensually self-confident and self-celebratory artistic power by idealizing her as his muse, just as he retreats from Ántonia's storytelling at the end of the novel by seeing her as a symbol of "immemorial human attitudes" (226).

Cather's linkage of the "true artist" with a "relish of life" and selflessness is not confined to her female characters. In the musicians Blind d'Arnault and Mr. and Mrs. Vanni we can see the same traits, for their music enlivens the stiffly conventional community of Black Hawk without being recognized as art. In a town where "the married people sat like images on their front porches," the Vannis' tent is an enabling space "where one could laugh aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence" (125-26). The music of these "cheerful-looking Italians" (114) lowers the inhibitions of the middle-class as it echoes through the town, "call[ing] so archly, so seductively, that our feet hurried toward the tent of themselves" (126). Thus, while Cather's female artists inspire others with an enjoyment of the sensual pleasures of daily life, her ethnically or racially marginalized musicians temporarily enable their audiences to enjoy and celebrate their own sexuality as an enlivening force.

This enlivening power appears clearly in the African American pianist Blind d'Arnault, whom Jim describes as providing the only "break in the dreary monotony" of March (116). Although Jim dismisses d'Arnault's music as violating Western standards of high art ("as piano-playing, it was perhaps abominable"), he nevertheless feels that it is "something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm" (121). Although Jim belittles d'Arnault's talent by describing it as instinctual, even bestial, and by calling his execution flawed, this only emphasizes that d'Arnault is not an artist who carefully gains a desired effect through life-draining intellectual effort, as do Mrs. Jim Burden's artists, who the unnamed narrator of the introduction dismisses as having "advanced ideas" but "mediocre ability" (2). Instead, d'Arnault's talent is expressed as a liveliness and a lack of rigid artistic control. Unlike Ántonia or Lena, d'Arnault has a more ambiguous attitude toward control of his art and toward his objectification by his audience. While Jim sees him as a "docile and happy" black (123, 118), d'Arnault seems to be playing with the expectations of his white audience by putting on what Houston A. Baker Jr. calls the "mask of minstrelsy" (47) in order to downplay the threat his powerful performance might inspire in that audience.

The signs of that threat-to both Jim and Cather-are evident in the defensive racism throughout the chapter devoted to d'Arnault. As Elizabeth Ammons argues, by choosing to include d'Arnault in her novel and yet resorting to racist stereotypes in her description of him, Cather ambivalently acknowledges her debt to African American art forms (Ammons, Conflicting Stories 132). Cather is also compelled to include a small portrait of d'Arnault's development as an artist when, in the middle of his description of the performance, Jim abruptly slips into an omniscient narrative recounting the pianist's past. Although this story is filled with racist descriptions and seems designed to dismiss d'Arnault's talent as freakish, it at times takes on d'Arnault's perspective, relating his childhood attraction to music and his wonder at the piano's "kind" response to his touch (120). The story must have been told by d'Arnault at some point, but Jim -tellingly- does not allow the black pianist's own voice to enter the narrative. Since it is impossible to imagine that Jim would hold such an intimate conversation with d'Arnault, it is more likely that someone else, perhaps Mrs. Harlin told Jim the story, which further removes d'Arnault's voice and narrative control from his life story. Instead, the story is interpreted through the distorting lens of a racist sensibility that lessens d'Arnault's threat to Jim's (and Cather's) allegiance to an elite Western aesthetic by obscuring his possession of the same kind of creativity that Cather praises in her criticism and portrays in this novel.

D'Arnault's music makes possible an environment of playfulness and sexuality among those on the fringes of Black Hawk society, bringing the hired girls and the traveling salesmen together to dance. The pianist introduces sexuality into the text for the first time as something celebratory and enjoyable rather than as the socially disruptive force that Jim sees in Lena's sexuality. However, d'Arnault's role as the enabling agent of others' sexuality is highly problematic because it plays into racist stereotypes of African Americans. D'Arnault's own sexuality is portrayed as autoerotic; we are told that his music "worried his body incessantly" and allows him to enjoy "himself as only a Negro can. It was as if all the agreeable sensations possible for creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on those black-and-white keys, and he were gloating over them and trickling them through his yellow fingers" (121). While the marginalized members of Black Hawk are able to act on these "agreeable sensations" by dancing together, d'Arnault's sexuality is only figured as self-enjoyment. Meanwhile, Jim disappears as a body during this passage and does not participate in the dancing, which leaves him impotently excited and restless (123). Threatened by the African American artist whose music elicits a sexual response in him, Jim reasserts his own narrative control by repeatedly describing d'Arnault in demeaning and dehumanizing terms. Indeed, by associating d'Arnault's music with sexuality, Jim denies that it is art; but the ability of this music to evoke passion and pleasure-which so agitates Jim-points to its status as art according to Cather's definition.

Jim is again aroused (but less troublesomely) by a less than polished artistic performance when he and Lena attend a production of Camille in Lincoln. His view of the actress who plays Marguerite parallels his description of d'Arnault's unschooled and unrefined yet arousing performance: she is "a woman who could not be taught . . . though she had a crude natural force which carried with people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was not squeamish" (176). This depiction reflects Jim's ambivalence as an older man recalling his naivé and undeveloped artistic taste as a college student; yet he acknowledges that the performance, though "crude," is nevertheless powerful. While the actress is able to inspire the young Jim to "[believe] devoutly" in her performance (176), the older narrator attributes her effect to the play itself rather than to her talent: "Her conception of the character was as heavy and uncompromising as her diction.... But the lines were enough. She had only to utter them. They created the character in spite of her" (177). Like the music of the Vannis and d'Arnault, the play affects Jim emotionally, but by causing him to weep "unrestrainedly" and then to walk alone in the night "mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died only yesterday" (178). As Gelfant says, this emotional response is much stronger than Jim's reaction to his reallife "affair" with Lena (67); it is also notably stronger than his response to classical literature.

Importantly, both d'Arnault and the unnamed actress are very similar to real performers Cather reviewed: according to James Woodress, Blind d'Arnault is a composite of two African American performers known as Blind Tom and Blind Boone (291), and the actress in Camille appears to be based on Clara Morris, who played the same role in a performance Cather reviewed in 1893 Admitting that Clara Morris was "undoubtedly a loud actress" who dressed "gaudily and in bad taste" and was "coarse grained mentally and spiritually," Cather nevertheless prefers her "passion" to the "dainty" charm of other, more refined actresses (Kingdom 54). As she writes in another review: "The women of the stage know that to feel greatly is genius and to make others feel is art" (348). Although Jim excuses his response to these performances as the result of his immature aesthetic taste, Cather's emphasis on the importance of passion in art suggests that she includes the actress and the pianist in the novel as examples of the qualities that make a great artist. Cather's two fictional portraits of real-life performers in My Ántonia, when considered alongside the other unrecognized artists, point to her preoccupation with "low" art and marginalized artists who, although unrefined, are lively and sympathetic. From their sensibilities and ethnic diversity these artists create an original and undervalued American art.

Once we have pulled this one strand of the lively yet nonprivileged artist from the jumbled web of impressions produced by My Ántonia, we can see, on the one hand, a suggestive pattern of meditations on art and the artist and, on the other, a contrasting pattern of despair, the desire for death, and the controlling rigidity of repression, all of which form the dark undercurrent of the novel. Alongside her portrayal of creativity as a life force, Cather develops equally powerful images of the egoistic desire for control as a life-denying force, both in the motif of male suicides and in the appropriative hunger of Jim's narrative. Death erupts into the text in the form of mostly male suicides or murders, both premeditated acts. We see this motif in the stories Jim remembers: of Peter and Pavel, who throw a bride to her death to save their own lives; the suicides of Mr. Shimerda and the tramp in Ántonia's story; and Wick Cutter's murder-suicide. This recurrence of death as a male desire illuminates Jim's narrative choices, as well as his desire to harness and control Ántonia's "meaning" in his text. Indeed, the egoism of the desire for control in art and the appeal of death are linked in My Ántonia, much as Cather links selflessness in art to the enjoyment of life and sensuality. By associating each of the suicides with an art form, Cather literalizes her claim that any control or form that is imposed on a narrative is deadening: "To me, the one important thing is never to kill the figure that you care for for the sake of atmosphere, well balanced structure, or neat presentation.... Sometimes too much symmetry kills things" (Kingdom 79).

Although Mr. Shimerda is the first person explicitly identified as an artist in My Ántonia, he stands in bleak contrast to artists such as the Vannis, Blind D'Arnault, and Ántonia, who exude liveliness and connectedness to life. In Mr. Shimerda, Cather brings together the underlying concerns of the novel: the artist, repressed sexuality, excessive nostalgia, and death. Unlike the other marginalized artists, Mr. Shimerda always seems depressed: he has "melancholy" eyes and a face that "looked like asheslike something from which all the warmth and light had died out" (18). Having lost his enthusiasm for life, after his arrival in America Mr. Shimerda never again plays his violin. The extremity of this change hints at more than homesickness. As Ántonia explains, her father's feelings for his homeland center on the people he has left behind: "He cry for leave his old friends what make music with him. He love very much the man what play the [trombone].... They go to school together and are friends from boys" (59). The loss of the man he loved seems to have led Mr. Shimerda to give up his music. In this case, his loss-or repression-of love and enthusiasm is linked with his inability to perform his art and results in his death wish.

Despite Mr. Shimerda's marginal status as an immigrant, Jim respects him and his music because of their connection to European high culture. He repeatedly thinks of Mr. Shimerda in positive terms and dissociates him from the "crowded clutter" and dirtiness of the Shimerdas' cave (57). Of a higher class than his wife, Mr. Shimerda has a "dignified manner" and reminds Jim of old portraits of Virginian gentility (18). But Mr. Shimerda's sensitive gentility and repressed sexuality work against him on the American prairie; he lacks the vitality necessary not only to create art but merely to survive the hardships of such a life. It is not his art that is dead but his ability to invest himself any longer in his music. His suicide, which is long foreshadowed, becomes a puzzle to which Jim's narrative repeatedly returns, most obviously in its echoes in the other suicides described by Ántonia and her son. Although Ántonia's stories should be viewed as her creations, they are present in Jim's narrative, of course, only because he chooses to include them. Tellingly, of all the stories Ántonia tells Jim, he includes in full only the two that concern death-the story (which Jim retells in his own words) of Pavel's grisly act of self-preservation and the story of a tramp who commits suicide.

When Jim retells the story of Peter and Pavel in his own words rather than quoting Ántonia directly, he indicates that it has be come his story. Although he claims that he and Ántonia "guarded [the story] jealously-as if . . . the wedding party [had] been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure" (41), it is not clear whether Ántonia shares these emotions. Instead, Jim's reaction to the story fits in with his obsession with the issues of death and control; often, as he drifts off to sleep he imagines himself being drawn along in the sledge, but whether he sees himself as Pavel or as the sacrificed bridal couple is unclear. Pavel's gruesome decision to throw the bride to the wolves -knowing that her husband would jump out after her- is interpreted by their community as markedly selfish and (at an unconscious level, perhaps) antilieterosexual. Peter and Pavel's subsequent ostracism in Russia and Peter's broken life after Pavel's death stand at the center of My Ántonia as a moral tale (with a perverse fascination to Jim) of the social costs of exerting self-centered control.

By telling the story of the tramp, Ántonia again confronts Jim with a tale of death, but she is able to contemplate the puzzle of suicide, and by extension the horror of her father's violent death, without feeling despair herself. The tramp confronts her with this puzzle by selecting her to talk to: "He comes right up and begins to talk like he knows me already" (114). Significantly, Jim recalls that Ántonia tells this story in the middle of winter, which he describes as "bleak and desolate . . . as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer" (111-12). In contrast to Jim's idealization of summer, Ántonia remembers the discomfort of the heat and the blowing chaff of the threshing machine. Yet, in her story Ántonia repeatedly counters the tramp's desire for death with the concerns of life and survival. When he says the ponds are too low to drown oneself in, Ántonia responds that "nobody wanted to drownd themselves, but if we didn't have rain soon we'd have to pump water for the cattle" (114); then, after the tramp has been "cut to pieces" by the threshing machine, she comments that "the machine ain't never worked right since"(115)While her reaction to the tramp's death wish could be an attempt to repress her own despair, Ántonia manages to ward off depression by emphasizing her bond with her community in the fight for survival. She is able to sublimate the egoism that might lead to despair and accepts being "written" by the community's role for her.

Besides illustrating Ántonia's steadfast commitment to life, her story about the tramp also engages her with a mainstream American art form that is deadened by its sentimental nostalgia. Among the contents of the tramp's pocket is a "worn out" copy of a popular poem clipped from a newspaper. The poem, "The Old Oaken Bucket," by Samuel Woodworth, has as its theme a nostalgic view of childhood that recalls both Mr. Shimerda's painful homesickness and Jim's own nostalgia, which is the driving force of his narrative: "How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood, / When fond recollection presents them to view!"(1.1-2). By linking nostalgia with suicide, Cather implies that turning life into obsessive and falsified memory can be fatal, especially for the artist; we have already seen that Mr. Shimerda's lost love and inability to engage in his present life are deadly both to his art and to himself. Carrying this poem and a wishbone in his pocket, the tramp embodies a false and harmful American sentimentality that seeks to repress change and sexuality by glorifying childhood and the past. His comment "So it's Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy" (114) reveals his chauvinistic belief in a "pure" America, free of immigrants. The drunken tramp, adhering to his bigotry and sentimental poetry, reflects the lack of vitality of American art when it strives to keep out the "foreign" influences of marginalized artists such as Ántonia and Blind d'Arnault.

Wick Cutter, the third suicide in My Ántonia, claims to share this sentimental view of America's past as "the good old days," but his promotion of American ideals-such as those represented in the adages from Poor Richard's Almanack-is clearly hypocritical (134). Cutter is not an artist, except in his construction of elaborate plots to kill his wife, to rape Ántonia, and to gain money by ruining people like Russian Peter. By taking advantage of his hired girls, his wife, and immigrants, Cutter the con artist abuses the privilege of patriarchal power. He evokes a horrible fascination in Jim by acting on the sexual urges and the opportunities for mate dominance that Jim represses as negative and dangerous. Still, Cutter's narratives of control illuminate Jim's narrative strategies, for Cutter's manipulation of others' lives is a more overtly evil parallel to Jim's attempt to control Ántonia's meaning. Cutter designs his murder-suicide plot solely to assert his ,twill" even after his death. His need for control not only is destructive of others but is finally self-destructive as well.

When Ántonia's son Rudolph tells the story of Cutter's suicide, he asks: "Did you ever hear of anybody else that killed himself for spite, Mr. Burden?" (233). Cuzak, joking that only the lawyers benefited from Cutter's death, indirectly identifies Jim, now a lawyer himself, as a beneficiary of Cutter's legacy. By placing the story of Wick Cutter's suicide at the end of the novel, Cather covertly points to a connection between the ending of Cutter's life and the ending of Jim's narrative quest. Cutter acts out not only the sexual urges that Jim represses but also Jim's urge toward suicide, which permeates his narrative despite his efforts to repress it. The story of Cutter's suicide-murder scheme illustrates the spitefulness of suicide, but perhaps more importantly, the Cuzak children's giggles and "hurrahs" in response to Rudolph's telling of it shows Jim that even an act as self-controlled as suicide can be interpreted mockingly. This lesson forces Jim to look elsewhere for relief from his unhappy adult life.

Jim's ambivalent desire for death has followed him through the novel like his shadow on the prairie, which the adult narrator "remembers" as the sign of mortality, present even in his childhood. When he describes his arrival on the prairie, he repeatedly emphasizes the erasure of his identity, as he "dissolves" into or is "blotted out" by the landscape (14, 8). Unlike women like Ántonia or Mrs. Harling, who "become a relationship" when they lose themselves in the pleasure of others (Obscure 115), Jim is further isolated from people when he experiences what Cather called the "erasure of personality" she felt when she was first confronted by the vast space of the prairie (Kingdom 448). Newly orphaned, Jim imagines that this new land is empty even of his dead parents' spirits (8). Picturing death as "happiness," a dissolution "into something complete and great" (14), Jim clearly sees death as the only way he can ever attain the pleasure of selflessness that he admires in Ántonia. In fact, Jim's furtive glimpse of Mr. Shimerda's corpse suggests that death can also be a return to the comfort of the womb, for Mr. Shimerda lies in the coffin in a fetal position, "on his side, with his knees drawn up" (75). But after Jim has romanticized death as desirable and erased his memory of his dead parents, the grisly reality of willed death erupts into his narrative in the stories of the three suicides.

Included among his own memories, yet told by and about other people, the suicide stories become a part of Jim's past in which he seems to have no active role; they enter his novel as though against his conscious choice. However, that Jim also struggles with an urge toward suicide is suggested by his affinity with Mr. Shimerda. The only adult who does not take Jim "for granted" (20), Mr. Shimerda emphasizes his bond with the boy by offering him the gun that will later be used as a suicide weapon. In this scene the adult narrator projects foreshadowing of his own death backward onto his childhood. Setting the scene for the encounter, he describes the autumn sunset as having "the exultation of victory . . . like a hero's death-heroes who died young and gloriously" (28). Although distinguishing Jim's view of death as an adult from his view as a child is impossible, the idea that death as a youth is heroic, even victorious, fits in with his nostalgic obsession with his childhood. He even seems to wish he had died as a child: when he and Ántonia meet as adults near Mr. Shimerda's grave Jim feels "the old pull of the earth," which makes him wish he "could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there" (207).

Despite Jim's glorification of youthful death, Cather does not portray the suicides in My Ántonia as "triumphant endings," but as grisly acts that are selfish and hurt others. Both Mr. Shimerda and the tramp jeopardize the well-being of others, Shimerda by leaving his family dependent on the sympathy of the community, and the tramp by damaging the threshing machine. Cutter kills not only himself but his wife just so that his money will not go to her or her family after his death. Cutter's suicide at the end of the novel counterbalances Shimerda's suicide in book 1 and ends Jim's romanticized attraction to taking one's life. Rudolph's question about the novelty of Cutter's "killing himself for spite" is answered by the cumulative contrast of the suicidal men with the nontraditional male and female artists who encourage life and sensuality. Earlier, when Mr. Shimerda offers Jim his gun, Ántonia provides an alternative to the two males' desire for death and dissolution. She carries in her hair a faintly singing insect that reminds her of Old Hata, the Bohemian beggar woman who used to sing "in a cracked voice" for "a warm place by the fire" (27). Here Ántonia views art and warmth as equal means of exchange, thus linking creative work with the work of survival, without valuing one over the other; tellingly, she dwells not on Old Hata's talent (or lack of talent) but on the children's love for her. Her emphasis on the emotional relationship of the artist to her audience shows that Ántonia feels no need to promote the greatness of her talent. She accepts as a fact of life the artist's perpetual struggle for life, fighting poverty and cold, yet (to Jim's amazement) she manages to maintain her enthusiasm and even to convey it to others. Jim interprets Ántonia's nesting of the insect not as an act of empathic identification with Old Hata but as an example of her ability to provide the nurturance the artist needs to survive the hardships of life. As an adult, Jim wants to see Ántonia as continuing to fulfill his needs, so that he can derive the will to live as well as the material with which to create. Reaffirming his image of her as a maternal nurturer of life-an always asexual lover, mother, sister, muse, "anything that a woman can be to a man" (206)-allows him to continually circle back to his childhood without acting on his unhappiness with his adult life.

Jim's movement into memory to combat a tendency toward suicide is consistent with his assertion of control in creating his narrative. Since he derives his will to live from recollections of his earlier life, he attempts to force the people in his past to conform to the supportive roles he assigns them. In contrast with Ántonia and the other marginalized artists, who either imbue their audience with their "zest for life" or enable them to express their own sensuality, Jim's narrative is limited to its effect upon himself and his one chosen reader. Although he shares his finished manuscript with an old friend, its originating force is entirely personal; as Jim says in the introduction, "I've been writing down what I remember about Ántonia.... On my long trips across the country, I amuse myself like that, in my stateroom" (2). This image of the artist as isolated and amusing only himself more clearly fulfills the autoerotic and self-centered description Jim tries to apply to d'Arnault's piano playing.

The effect of such isolation on the artist is another of Cather's themes in her early reviews and essays. Alongside her insistence on the genius of sympathy and passion, Cather also emphasizes the loneliness of artists, whose dedication to their art requires that they separate themselves from the world and "suffer . . . the awful loneliness, the longing for human fellowship and for human love" (Kingdom 435). Although such isolation might be necessary for the traditionally defined Western artist, it is alien to performance artists such as Ántonia, whose art is communal by nature. As an adult married to a woman "incapable of enthusiasm" (1), Jim suppresses his longing for love by creating fictionalized characters who can fulfill his needs. When he reflects on his inability to "lose [hiniself]" in the "impersonal" classics as Gaston Cleric is able to do, Jim explains: "Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it" (168). Even when he shares his text with his friend, who also knew Ántonia, Jim controls the people of his "own naked land" exactly by making them his "own" and thus divorcing them from life: "They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else" (168).

Jim's inability to respond to classical literature with the same enthusiasm that he feels in response to nonprivileged art points to his uneasy initiation into the Western literary tradition. Indeed, Jim's adult depression and his obsession with Ántonia and other people in his past imply that his education has separated him from the art forms that he loved during his boyhood. As a boy, Jim enjoys listening to Otto's cowboy songs or Ántonia's stories and participating in the kitchen culture of cooking and handicrafts and reads popular books such as The Swiss Family Robinson and A Life of Jesse James. Even the first "book" Jim creates-as a Christmas present for Yulka- is a mixture of pictures from popular family magazines or advertisements and circus scenes formed of pasted pieces of calico. This quiltlike piecing together of low-brow art forms and a traditionally female handicraft is a forerunner of Jim's narrative about Ántonia, which he also pieces together from the art of other, nonprivileged artists; but this first book is created to please another person.

just as Jim does not make any value distinctions as a child between folk art and written "literature," O'Brien writes that the adolescent Cather "did not make distinctions between high- and middle-brow culture or between culturally defined 'masterpieces' and books of lesser distinction but wider popular appeal" (80). Jim's education in narrative forms follows Cather's own experience of growing up around female storytellers and then reading popular adventure stories alongside the classical literature that her male mentors taught her to read and to value. Despite her veneration for the classics, Cather often expressed in interviews and essays her appreciation of any "low" art that conveyed the liveliness, passion, and selflessness that to her represented artistic "genius." Although she railed against vulgarity and insisted on the discipline of the artist's craft, she was equally hard on elite yet lifeless art and always favored a performance or text, whether high or low art, that could "give voice to the hearts of men" (Kingdom 409).

Cather attempts to connect Jim's depiction of Ántonia-and by extension Nebraska-with Virgil's project of turning a celebration of rural life into high art. However, Jim's encounters with the vitality of nonprivileged American artists eclipse Virgil and "the world of ideas" associated with him (165). When he first studies the Aeneid, Jim isolates himself for the summer in "an empty room where I should be undisturbed" (147). As he recites the Aeneid aloud, he looks out his window at "the distant river bluffs and the roll of blond pastures between" (148). This vista, with its suggestions of female sexuality, is so much more enticing than his memorization of Virgil that Jim's narrative skips to his "one holiday that summer": a trip to that same river with the hired girls (148). In college Jim is distracted from his solitary reading of Virgil's Georgics by Lena's sudden appearance and his subsequent revelation that "if there were no girls like [Lena] in the world, there would be no poetry" (173). By reducing Lena and the other hired girls to his muses, he effectively erases their ability to create art themselves; they only exist to evoke his response to them. The ease with which he substitutes Lena for Ántonia as the source of his inspiration points to his desire to efface Ántonia's individuality: she is just one of the many "girls" to inspire poetry throughout time.

Still, by realizing the difficulty involved in bringing to life the supposedly universal and atemporal work of Virgil, Jim acknowledges the greater hold that the real people, who are merely objectified and marginalized by high art, have on his imagination. And, indirectly, his attraction to women such as Lena and Ántonia points to the powerful appeal of their creative work. When Jim finishes his own narrative, he supposes that it lacks "form" (2) because of his inclusion of the stories and music of all of the artists whose work enlivened his childhood. His appropriation of the energy of the female and marginalized male artists in his narrative without recognizing them as artists clearly enlivens the tale he tells. In alluding so boldly to Virgil, Cather introduces her characters, subject matter, and "formless" narrative style into the discourse of high art. However, she presents Ántonia and the other artists ambiguously, portraying them mainly as the inspiration for the narrative of a white male writer. By using the controlling vision of a male narrator, Cather unfortunately effaces the strength and clarity of the statement she might have made about art and the American artist and, as Elizabeth Ammons argues, erases the debt she owed to these nonprivileged artists and their art forms (Ammons, Conflicting Stories 132).

When Mr. Shimerda first moves to Nebraska, Otto Fuchs dismisses his music as useless on the prairie (16). But Cather's connection of nontraditional artists with a life force emphasizes that the community needs their enthusiasm in order to endure the hardship and monotony of prairie life. The lack of liveliness and physicality in the WASP culture of the Midwest emerges in bits and pieces in My Ántonia: Jim feels "surrounded by a wall of silence" in the Burden household (72), lingers in the winter twilight outside the stained-glass church window out of "hunger for colour" (112), and is amazed that Ántonia's children are "not afraid to touch each other" (224). just as our picture of Jim emerges from the elisions of his text and from Ántonia's photographs, a picture of the starkness of Midwestern American life emerges in contrast to the ambivalently detailed descriptions Jim gives of the women and "outsiders "-whether immigrants or African Americanswhose difference from him fascinates him. In such a society, the artists who break the monotony and lower the inhibitions of conventionality must come from outside the mainstream or elitist culture, from the ranks of the marginalized or disempowered. Precisely because of their lack of conventionally defined refinement and their position outside the realm of Western high art, such artists help to redefine and broaden our concept of American art. As Cather wrote of the popular comedian Nat Goodwin in 1894, nonprivileged artists like him form "a clan that is a very real part of American life and that has a strong influence in the moulding of American society, and it has a right to a representative in the great legislature of art" (Kingdom 129).