In Willa Cather Living (1953), Edith Lewis accounts for the gestation of Shadows on the Rock (1931) in a single image, that of Cather gazing meditatively from a window in the Chateau Frontenac upon the town of Quebec below: "But from the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the Frontenac on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memory, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinarily French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent"(153-54). Set atop the rocky eminence of Cap Diamant, controlling the St. Lawrence by virtue of its geographical position, Quebec became the first permanent French settlement in the New World. Writing of it in Shadows on the Rock, Cather has Euclid Auclair see Quebec as "this rock-set town [which was] like nothing so much as one of those little artificial mountains which were made in the churches at home to present a theatric scene of the Nativity; cardboard mountains, broken up into cliffs and ledges and hollows to accommodate groups of figures on their way to the manger; angels and shepherds and horsemen and camels, set on peaks, sheltered in grottoes,clustered about the base" (4-5). Thus Quebec harkens his memory back to an Old World association that diminishes the naturalness and beauty of the place. For her part, his daughter Cécile sees Quebec as her home: she loves "being on the river" (195) and runs "up the hill with a light heart" (54), her identity wedded to the Cap Diamant and the town of Quebec, herself a "woman for Canada" (42). Quebec's ultimate permanence and its people's cultural transformation came at some price—after a turbulent colonial history followed by over 150 years of serene neglect at the hands of first the British colonial authorities and then English-speaking Canada, Cather saw it for the first time. To her, Quebec physically announced its own gestation—the signs of Brittany and Normandy transported to the New World caught her imagination.

Though a lifelong Francophile, Cather did not see Quebec until 1928, when at the age of 54 she traveled along with Lewis to the city on her way to summer at Grand Manan, New Brunswick. While they were there Lewis fell ill with flu, leaving Cather with several days to explore the old town on her own. She was ripe for the place in many ways: her father, with whom she had been exceptionally close, had died earlier that year; her mother was declining and, she knew, had not many years left. Given such concerns, and a sharpened sense of her own aging, Cather gazed down upon Quebec from the height of Cap Diamant; in Gary Brienzo's words, her eyes "came to rest upon Quebec as an emblem of stability, tradition, and peace" (50).

Exploring the city, Cather found in it a history and physicality that confirmed the continuity between European culture and New World conditions—it seemed to her a miraculous gift. What Cather saw led her to research the historical underpinnings of Quebec, though in this instance her library was initially the reading room of the Chateau Frontenac. There she found the histories of Francis Parkman—what David Levin has called "history as romantic art"—and, equally important, The Jesuit Relations. These volumes, which Cather probably saw in the form of Reuben Gold Thwaites's massive 73-volume limited edition, are more precisely entitled The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791 (1896-1901). The Canadian historian W.J. Eccles has called them "the most important single source for the history of Canada during the period of company government" (40; that is, before 1663, when a Royal Colony was established in New France). The volumes related to the early history of the town of Quebec had a powerful impact upon Cather, providing another window upon the pattern that was under her eyes.

The story of Cather's composition of Shadows on the Rock has been told elsewhere (see Woodress and Skaggs). Neither is it appropriate here to trace her various sources. Yet, looking at the novel today, one is struck by what resulted from Cather's gaze. As she asserted, the view from atop Cap Diamant left long shadows indeed. Shadows on the Rock makes the isolation and vulnerability of Quebec very clear: clinging to the shore of the St. Lawrence, rising above the river to command the heights, protected to the rear by the St. Charles River, even after 80 years of established settlement the town was still a frail French presence in North America. By taking up the Relations—and by taking from that work—Cather extended her gaze from the town into the vast interior country. For trader and missionary alike, Quebec was the center of civilization for New France, but its reach extended West into Cather's own Missouri River basin. This was, she asserts emphatically, New France—an Old World culture slowly transforming itself into a New World phenomenon. So Cécile becomes mother to "the Canadians of the future" (278).

The information Cather gleaned from the Relations provides instructive examples of her process of composition. Cather used this material in two ways, primarily. First, she took exact details from the Relations as the basis for her characterization of Bishop Saint-Vallier, Laval's young replacement (64: 121, 123, 147); indeed, Cather lifts the friction between the two men from the pages of volume 64, and she creates as a kind of counterpoint a moving scene in which the younger man's hubris is transformed, after years away in France, into serene humility. Most striking, however, is her appropriation of the story of the martyrdom of Father Noël Chabanel. Although she creates a fictional character, Father Hector Saint-Cyr, to narrate the incident, she draws her details "without alteration" from the Relations accounts (Bloom 81; see Jesuit Relations 35: 147ff., 40: 35ff.; Cather, Shadows 150-55). As Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom noted some time ago, Cather thereby "makes the historically accurate point that [Chabanel's] heroism was eclipsed by the fame of his fellow missionaries, Fathers Jogues, Lalemant, and Brebeuf." Temperamentally ill-suited to be a missionary, repulsed by the behavior of the Natives, unable to learn the Natives' language despite years of effort and previous successes with European languages, Chabanel experienced a Canadian life of "unrelieved horror"; he emerges in Shadows on the Rock as a martyr "of spiritual and intellectual endurance, not for personal satisfaction but for the exultation of God" (Bloom and Bloom 81).

What Cather created in Shadows on the Rock conforms to the confrontation documented in the Relations. Though intended as propaganda and often tinged with the lurid attractions of the exotic, the Relations also record the meeting of two worlds, two cultures, two ways of seeing and being. The "Voyage into Substance"—the phrase is Barbara Maria Stafford's—they depict may be seen at every conceivable level: factual, theological, geographical, anthropological, and literary, among others.

For her part, and on her own, Cather undertook to dramatize this "meeting" in her fiction. That is what the essays gathered here elaborate: hers was an imagination open to nuance—of various sorts—that could then be delicately situated within the pages of her novels. Disarming in its apparent simplicity, that art renders as perhaps its great subject precisely that meeting of two worlds, both embodied in Cather's own inner being: the intellectual and cultural inheritances of Europe meeting the "great fact" of the settlement of New World, whether in Quebec, Nebraska, New Mexico, or Virginia. Ever given to tracing the myriad implications of these confrontations, Cather put it best when she wrote to Wilbur Cross just after the publication of Shadows on the Rock that "And really, a new society begins with the salad dressing more than with the destruction of Indian villages. Those people brought a kind of French culture there and somehow kept it alive on that rock, sheltered it and tended it and on occasion died for it, as if it really were a sacred fire—and all this temperately and shrewdly, with emotion always tempered by good sense" (On Writing 16).

Many of the essays appearing here were presented, in earlier versions, at the Sixth International Willa Cather Seminar held in Quebec City in June 1995. Sponsored by St. Lawrence University,Trent University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation, the seminar brought 130 people to Quebec City for a week of discovery not unlike Cather's own in 1928. There seminarians also gazed down from Cap Diamant, held sessions in Bishop Lavel's seminary, and discovered Quebec perhaps as Cather did—seeing the city, "Kebec," as she refers to it in Shadows, not as France but rather as Canada: "Ah, yes, the Canadians of the future—the true Canadians" (Shadows 278). And by meeting there in late June—the seminar began amid celebrations of St. Jean Baptiste (Quebec's Fête Nationale, its "national" day) and ended to the muted festivities of Canada Day, scarcely evident as a celebration these days in francophone Canada—we late-twentieth-century seminarians felt the power that the province of Quebec today invests in its pursuit of sovereignty, an urge borne of its French identity in North America, that identity formed first when shadows were initially cast before French eyes from the height of Cap Diamant above the town below. As we witnessed, Cather's Quebec stands there today as it did when she first saw in the city below a correlative for her imaginings over Old World culture transformed into New, "as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent."

E. K. Brown, Cather's first biographer and a Canadian, observed that even before she began Shadows on the Rock "Willa Cather had been in Canada much more than most American writers" (204). More famously, Hemingway and Faulkner spent time in their youth in Canada—Hemingway as an employee of the Toronto Star newspaper, and Faulkner in a period of service with the Royal Air Force in Canada— but Cather's connections to Canada extended over a lifetime. Current criticism highlights Cather as a traveler, a border crosser. Joseph Urgo, in Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration,argues persuasively that Cather's fiction is inordinately preoccupied with travel, that displacement, exile, and transformation are the psychic condition and meaning of her art. And in discussions of sexuality and subversion, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler have explored the transitivity of Cather's imagination, the crossing of gender and sexual borders in her writing and in her personal life. Here, in the light of her Canadian writings and experience, I will ask specifically what it meant for Cather to cross a national boundary, considering the idea of "border" as it has been theorized in contemporary criticism—as a trope of difference,whether of gender, ethnicity, race, or culture.

In Border Traffic: Strategies of Contemporary Women Writers, Maggie Humm posits that feminist fictions deliberately choose to describe the kinds and experiences of women that exist beyond the borders of traditional literary representation—the experiences, for example, of witches, Creoles, lesbians,and so on (2). In this light we might say at once that Cather reveals a radical feminist dimension, a border-crossing instinct, for she chose as heroines women who are outside conventional stereotypes: women, like Thea Kronborg and Lucy Gayheart, who are artists; women who are old, like Gabrielle Longstreet, Mrs. Harris, and Sapphira Colbert; the female child, Cécile Auclair; and immigrant women, like Ántonia Cuzak, who labored on farms and as domestics. Most striking is the gallery of immigrant women in Cather's fiction, for in their stories (Ántonia as an unwed mother, Marie Shabata as an adulteress, the Danish laundry girls, and the three Bohemian Marys as women of easy virtue) Cather merges foreignness or ethnicity with transgressive behavior.

Ethnicity was in fact the subject of Cather's first story, "Peter," and in her subsequent portrayal of the diverse ethnic makeup of the pioneer Midwest, Canada figures in the inclusion of French-speaking settlers who had come to Nebraska from Quebec. Cather was herself aware of French-Canadians from the time she was a child newly arrived in Nebraska. In Catherton precinct of Webster County there were French-Canadian settlers who built a small frame Catholic church called St. Ann's. The church was the center of their community. In O Pioneers! Cather gives a vivid account of transplanted French-Canadian culture in the story of Amédée Chevalier, the Sainte-Agnes church fair, and the confirmation service. Although Cather refers to her settlers simply as "French," she leaves no doubt about their Canadian origins in the passage where Emil Bergson says teasingly to Amédée's wife that her baby looks like it might have had an Indian ancestor. Amédée's mother, we are told, "had been touched on a sore point, and she let out a stream of fiery patois" (216). The Nebraska novels comprise transplanted peoples, exiles sensitive to issues of ethnicity and race, and in foregrounding their lives in her fiction—examining the plight of working women, making her foreigners "heroines"—Cather subtly challenged the master narratives of American culture and the conventional boundaries concerning ethnicity, gender, and class.

Whether Cather had childhood experience of Canadians beyond her neighbors in Catherton precinct, we cannot say. However, as a young book reviewer she exhibited some knowledge of Canadian literature and the debates about Canadian culture at the end of the nineteenth century. She cites Seth Low,then president of Columbia University, as having said there is no literature in Canada because there is no national life, but she refutes that statement in a discussion of Gilbert Parker's The Seats of the Mighty: A Romance of Old Quebec (1896), claiming that "a generation of young men . . . are making the most of Canada's literary possibilities" (World and Parish [WP] 355). Among those young men she would have included Bliss Carman, Charles G. D. Roberts, and mistakenly, American-born Richard Hovey, all of whose work she reviewed positively. She praised these three poets for their fresh treatment of nature as a literary theme and heaped special praise on Roberts' verse: it is "wonderfully beautiful," she wrote, "rich in expression and redolent of wood life and field life, of Canadian forests and meadows" (WP 886). But as Merrill Skaggs has observed, what is especially interesting in her review of Parker's Quebec romance is her citing of Low's remark that Canadian culture was like a plant whose roots drew nourishment from the other side of the Atlantic but lost most of it under the sea. As Skaggs puts it, we have formulated here a question—something like, "How does a transplant like Quebec find the cultural sustenance to survive?"—a question that will become a central theme in Cather's Quebec novel written more than 30 years later (127).

Cather did have close professional contact with at least one Canadian when she was working for S. S. McClure in New York. Georgine Milmine, who collected the materials for the biography of Mary Baker Eddy, was a newspaper woman originally from Canada. Unfortunately we have no significant knowledge about Milmine, nor do we know anything about the relations between the two women. We only know that they did work in close conjunction for a time in preparing the McClure's articles for book publication, for as Kevin Synnott verified, both of their handwritings are on the manuscript (Stouck xxvii).

Cather first imagined Canada as a geographical setting when she wrote her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912). Much of the story's significant action takes place along the rivers of Quebec where the engineer hero, Bartley Alexander, has built two bridges. It was near the site of his first project, a suspension bridge over a wild river, that he met his future wife, Winifred, a Canadian woman described as very proud and a little hard. While in Quebec, Alexander also takes great pleasure in the company of Winifred's aunt Eleanor, who likes to talk army and politics. These are not sentimental portraits of women; they suggest Cather's view of English Canadians as shrewd, practical, and British colonial in character. Alexander's Bridge reaches its tragic climax when the cantilever bridge being built at a place named Moorlock crashes into the river, taking the engineer and many of the workmen to their deaths. Cather based the incident on an actual event that happened near Quebec City: on 29 August 1907 a bridge being built to span the St. Lawrence River collapsed and more than 80 men were killed, including the chief engineer, who had gone out on the bridge just before it broke apart. The principal designing engineer was an American, Theodore Cooper of New York, who had not been on the site during the bridge's ill-fated construction (see Hinz; E. K. Brown 157-59; Slote xv-xvi). The Canadian backdrop for the story might easily be dismissed as of little consequence—a conventional setting for an engineering feat that conquers the wilderness—but this is a novel persistently about crossing geographical,political, and sexual borders. The hero travels not only repeatedly to Canada but to England, where he conducts a protracted affair with a woman he had known in his youth. In the story's moral order Alexander's border crossings are sexual transgressions, and his death takes place because he has broken all bounds.

The only other mention of Canada in Cather's early fiction is the brief vignette of Tiny Soderball in the Yukon in My Ántonia. Historically, this is a fairly conventional use of Canada as a wilderness setting where adventurers try their luck, but imaginatively Tiny's story belongs with those of a group of women in Cather's fiction who choose unconventional lives. Instead of marrying a Black Hawk boy and settling down to raise a family, Tiny is persuaded by a "roving promotor" to leave for Seattle and manage a lodging house for sailors there. The narrator makes it clear that the business is not likely reputable ("all sailors' boardinghouses were alike")but that Tiny's interest is in making money. This she continues to do when she hears of gold being discovered in the far north. After helping to found Dawson City during the Klondike gold rush, Tiny goes off "into the wilds"(301), where she lives on a claim and eventually realizes a considerable fortune from trading and selling claims on percentages. She winds up in San Francisco, a wealthy woman, but she has lost her zest for living. The Canadian north, like so many other non-American destinations in Cather's fiction (I think here of Germany for Thea Kronborg, France for Claude Wheeler), is a place beyond the border where characters are able to come closer to their inmost identity and integrity. Significantly in this light, when Cather actually came to know Canada from first hand experience, she did not continue to view it as a place of testing or adventure but saw it as a locus at the very center of her pastoral imagination.

As far as we know, Cather herself did not actually cross the physical border in to Canada until after her close friend Isabelle McClung was married and living in Toronto. Isabelle married Jan Hambourg, a concert violinist of Russian Jewish and English background who was known in both Europe and North America for his skilled and sensitive performances. Jan frequently gave concerts with his brothers Boris, a cellist, and Mark, also a violinist. With their father, a musical scholar, they taught music much of the year from the family home in Toronto. Cather made two lengthy visits that we know of while Jan and Isabelle were living in Toronto: in 1919 she spent June and July in the city, and in 1921 she stayed nearly five months, from April until late August. On both occasions she was working on One of Ours, finishing the novel during her second visit. It was on this second visit that she read the account of Lyra Garber Anderson's death in a clipping that had been forwarded to her and the idea for A Lost Lady came to her. James Woodress tells us that Sinclair Lewis was in the city at this time and that he praised her work highly, telling his audience of her whereabouts; accordingly she was reluctantly swept up in a round of social events for a couple of weeks. However, and perhaps this is what is most important here, Toronto on the whole served as a retreat from the attention of friends, business associates, and well-wishers and provided her a space for uninterrupted work. (Incidentally,Cather would have traveled to the city on the TH&B rail service, passing through the small city of Hamilton on Lake Ontario, which may have suggested the name of the setting for The Professor's House, with its protagonist of French-Canadian ancestry.)

In 1922 the Hambourgs moved permanently to Europe, but that year Cather was again in Canada, this time making her first trip to Grand Manan Island. According to Marion Marsh Brown and Ruth Crone (information verified by Helen Cather Southwick), Cather first learned of the island from a librarian at the New York Public Library who told Cather the remote fishing island in the Bay of Fundy was "probably the quietest place in the world" (6-7). Cather decided to investigate, and after leaving Bread Loaf in Vermont, in early August 1922 she took a train to New Brunswick via Montreal. She rented a cottage for a month from Sarah Jacobus, a woman from New York City who ran a small resort at Whale Cove. She wrote to a friend of her pleasure in the quiet and remoteness of the island, where mail only came three times a week on a little steamer from the Canadian shore. For the next 18 years she and Edith Lewis returned almost every summer. In September 1926 they bought a piece of land in a spruce wood near Whale Cove and employed two carpenters from North Head to build a Cape Cod-style cottage; it was completed when they arrived for the summer of 1928. Above the living room was a large attic, which Cather chose for her study; from the window she could look out over the cliffs and the sea. Grand Manan was the one place in the world where she felt she could work without interruption, and all of her books from A Lost Lady to Sapphira and the Slave Girl were composed in part on the island. If Toronto seemed to provide Cather with a retreat from her public,Grand Manan served this function even more so. On that foggy island in the Atlantic, writes E. K. Brown, Cather felt "securely hemmed in from the world" (203) and at a considerable remove from all mundane things. After she had to leave her Bank Street apartment in New York, during which time the family home in Nebraska was also broken up, Grand Manan, writes Lewis, "seemed the only foothold left on earth" (153), not just a retreat but a refuge from an uncaring and rapidly changing world.

In Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner reminds his readers that when Americans are aware of Canada at all, it is most often as a border, a margin, an end to things American (3). But perhaps Cather came to view Canada as an alternate American tradition. It is interesting to know that Gather belonged to the Grand Manan Historical Association, a rather striking piece of information about someone who was not a joiner, who in the 1930's zealously guarded her privacy. (Proof exists in the society's membership list printed in The Grand Manan Historian 5: 72.) I was told by Kathleen Buckley that Cather was persuaded on occasion to attend society meetings by her friend, Doctor MacCauley. Early Grand Manan history focuses on the lives of a group of United Empire Loyalists—New Englanders chiefly—who fought on the royalist side and after the Revolutionary War took refuge in what remained of Britain's empire to the north. The Loyalists had sought to preserve an ideal of order and justice stemming from the British monarchy and they saw Canada providing a sanctuary line. Perhaps the Cather who wrote One of Ours and The Professor's House, profoundly disillusioned with the materialism of contemporary American life, also came to see English Canada as providing a sanctuary line, a still-pastoral alternative to America's increasingly urban, technology-dominated culture. Certainly by the late 1920s there is evidence in her fiction that her political sympathies were conservative, and perhaps she felt a strong attraction to living for part of the year within the British Empire.

Her feelings about Canada grew even stronger and more focused once she came to know Quebec. It was because she traveled almost every summer to Grand Manan that she discovered the subject for her one novel set wholly in Canada. She was on her way to the island in June 1928 by a roundabout way when she first saw Quebec City. Lewis came down with the flu during their stopover, and they wound up staying at the Chateau Frontenac for 10 days. Cather was immediately attracted to the city and its environs. Lewis describes the imaginative excitement Cather felt: "from the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the Frontenac on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memory, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinarily French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent" (153-54). Cather explored the city alone, visiting the Ursuline Convent, the Laval Seminary, the Church of Notre Dame des Victoires, and the marketplace in the Lower Town. When Lewis was well enough they made an excursion to the Ile d'Orleans. All the while Cather was reading Canadian histories from the hotel library. In 1929 Cather again traveled to Grand Manan by way of Quebec City, and that summer she began to write Shadows on the Rock, returning to Quebec in November and again at New Year's to get a feeling for the city in the dead of winter. She made a fifth visit to Quebec on her return from a trip to France in 1930— "the slow progress up the St. Lawrence," writes Lewis, "between woods on fire with October, was its climax—a dream of joy"(160). It had not been her intention, but she stayed several days and this last visit, according to Lewis, brought her closest to her story. She finished writing Shadows on the Rock in the winter of 1930-31.

In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua writes that crossing borders brings one closer to "one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity" (preface). Visiting Toronto and traveling to Grand Manan, Cather crossed a political border that translated for her into a physical retreat, but when she came to know Quebec City she crossed a border, I believe, that led to the psychological heart of her artistic and spiritual being. This is not to say that she came to identify herself as French-Canadian or Catholic. On the contrary, in her letter about Shadows on the Rock to Governor Wilbur Cross she says explicitly that she encountered in Quebec a "feeling about life and human fate that I could not accept, wholly," something pious and resigned. She further marks her distance from French-Canadian life when she says of her novel, "It's very hard for an American to catch that rhythm—it's sound like us" ("On Shadows" 15,17). But it was a feeling about life, persisting from another age, that she could not help but admire, and through her gift of sympathy she captured the Canadian spirit of place and the Catholic vision of a world informed and regulated by spiritual rites.

Benjamin George, in his essay on Cather as a "Canadian" writer, claims that"she came to hold a close affinity with Canadian ideals and attitudes, pointedly different from those of her own national ethos" (249). He develops his thesis by quoting Northrop Frye, who has characterized Canadians as hampered by a "garrison mentality," referring thereby to an inward-looking, negative aspect of Canadian culture concerned to hold the threatening wilderness at bay, a colonial fear of the unknown (225). Cather quickly recreates the beleaguered condition of early Canadian life in her novel: outside of the city of 2,000 was the forest, and "[t]he forest was suffocation, annihilation; there European man was quickly swallowed up in silence, distance, mould, black mud, and the stinging swarms of insect life that bred in it" (Shadows 7). But Russell Brown has more recently suggested a positive aspect to this garrison consciousness when he urges that we see it as an aspect of a larger human desire for sanctuary and for safe borders(Borderlines 32). In such a statement we recognize one of Cather's strongest themes in Shadows on the Rock, where Canada is "a possible refuge, an escape from the evils one suffered at home" (31), when envisioned by the French apothecary, where even children are consciously aware of "the goodness of shelter" (66). When she is ill in bed, Cécile mentally roams about the town, always aware of "the never-ending, merciless forest beyond." The lives of her friends, the roofs and spires of the town, the crooked streets all "seemed to her like layers and layers of shelter, with this one flickering, shadowy room at the core"(157-58). There is no desire at the imaginative center of this text to repudiate or escape from the garrison but rather there is a need to nurture and augment it, to keep alive and shelter that bit of French culture on the rock. As Cather recreates it, seventeenth-century Quebec was not a colony determined to create a new society but one determined to preserve an old one; it was not the Puritan "city upon a Hill" for all eyes to see (John Winthrop's words) but a Catholic preserve for the Holy Family and a vision of heaven.

The Canadian/American border has produced theories of culture that turn on such binaries as northern/southern, colonialism/republicanism, individualism/socialism. One of the strongest of these binaries is that of stasis/movement. Where American critics like Janis Stout and Joseph Urgo have interpreted themes of flight,exile, and the open road as expressive of their country's originary and defining experience, Canadian critics, again like Russell Brown, have pointed to the writings of the Loyalists and their themes of homesickness and longing to return home as founding imaginative expressions. The idea of "home," suggests Brown, serves to order Canadian narratives just as the idea of the "road" so often organizes American writings ("Road Home" 27). E. K. Brown attributed much of the emotional power in Shadows on the Rock to Cather's memories of her home in Nebraska and her relationship with her father—for when the author was a child the Cather family had been uprooted and had started life over in conditions as harsh as those in Quebec (217-18). The controlling emotion in the hook experienced by Cécile is a kind of homesickness, a clinging to what is known and secure in the face of threatened upheaval and departure. This emotion is dramatized poignantly in Cécile's visit with the Harnois family on the Ile d'Orleans (their rough menage contrasts sharply with the Auclairs' passion for cleanliness and order) and reaches an acute pitch at the end of book 5, "The Ships from France," when Cécile believes she must soon leave Quebec, the only home she has ever known. There is also a political dimension to this nostalgia for the past, for it focuses on the imperial order that has created the colony and on a veneration of the old religious and political leaders, Laval and Frontenac, who have helped nurture and sustain it. It is expressed on an intimate level in Cécile's relation to her dying mother. "As long as she lived," we are told, "[Madame Auclair] tried to make the new life as much as possible like the old. . . . her chief care was to train her little daughter so that she would be able to carry on this life and this order after she was gone" (23). Madame Auclair believed firmly that the French were the most civilized people in Europe and "[s]he wanted to believe that when she herself was lying in this rude Canadian earth, life would go on almost unchanged in this room" (25). In writing about Canada, Cather plumbed the most conservative depths of her being, which from a postcolonial perspective seem marooned in another age. Urgo, however, has argued persuasively that even in creating this world so far removed from the present Cather reveals that great changes take place with each generation (Cécile, for instance, abandons her loyalty to the Old World for the New) and that identities, cultures, and cosmologies are all "shadows" that pass over the rock with time (97-111).

The attraction to home that is so powerful in this novel has conservative manifestations in mode and genre. A narrative of the road is most likely to be written in the romance mode and in the genre of adventure fiction, whereas a story of home is likely to be a pastoral, the affirmation of a retreat, a safe place where life remains simplified and seems not to change. Ann Romines has demonstrated the primacy of the domestic in Cather's fiction, but in this light a distinction can be drawn between Shadows on the Rock and her other narratives; in novels like My Ántonia or One of Ours the domestic theme is circumscribed by the larger ones of adventure and exile that take the protagonist away from home. There is no adventurer figure of parallel importance to Jim Burden or Claude Wheeler to undercut the primacy of the domestic theme in Shadows on the Rock; there is only the fear that Cécile experiences of being removed from home and that, in fact, never takes place.

We know since Bakhtin that the novel is most characteristically dialogical, but in Shadows on the Rock we do not hear the contesting voices of the age in Bakhtin's sense of dialogue; we have only a very muted sense of social and political changes taking place. Cather recognized in her letter to Cross that what she was trying to do was not very novelistic—it was more like music, like a song rather than a story. Moreover, in direct contrast to Bakhtin's understanding of the novel, she was determined not to "mix kinds," ("On Shadows" 16; italics in original) so that her narrative (again in her own words) is about something narrow, "lacking in robustness and full of pious resignation" (15). As an instance, when Cécile's nostalgia is strongest—during her visit to the family on Ile d'Orleans—the language retains the stiff and formal character that Cather thought best suited her remote subject. Cécile feels uncomfortable around the rough country girls and their talk, but we never hear the girls speak; rather, we are told that "(w)hen they showed her the pigs and geese and tame rabbits, they kept telling her about peculiarities of animal behavior which she thought it better taste to ignore. They called things by very unattractive names, too" (190). We don't hear the actual words from that intersection of "high" and "low" cultures; the dialogue is translated into a monologue, preserving the character of something remembered and politely rephrased. The speaker of the text and the characters instead formulate their thoughts in the maxims and aphorisms of the past. We are reminded, for example, that the Latin poets insisted that those who died in the land of their fathers were blessed (263); and in another such generalization we are told that men trained at court all become a little crafty (258). By muting the actual voices of the age in favor of received wisdom, Cather has created a pastoral that attempts to exclude time and change—and perhaps a peculiarly Canadian form of pastoral whereby the security of the garrison has primacy over nature,whether it be a rural retreat or the wilderness.

If Cather, in crossing the border into Canada, was attracted to an older political order and a way of life less marked by the modernism and materialism of twentieth-century American culture, her attraction to seventeenth-century Quebec was especially rooted in the idea of a way of life that had seemed to survive almost unchanged for three centuries. In Shadows on the Rock Cather is deeply preoccupied with humankind's mortal and corruptible nature—the foregrounding in the text of diseases, injury, and death has led John J. Murphy to describe the novel as a "compendium of pain" (31)—but at the same time human suffering is seen as providentially ordered because in the Catholic context it provides the sufferer with a purgatorial passage leading from innate depravity to promised redemption. This vision knows no political or geographical boundaries. The members of the religious orders who helped establish the city did not experience borders. When they crossed the Atlantic, they carried their family with them: "they brought to Canada the Holy Family, the saints and martyrs, the glorious company of the Apostles, the heavenly host. . . . They had no hours of nostalgia, for they were quite as near the realities of their lives in Quebec as in Dieppe or Tours. They were still in their accustomed place in the world of the mind . . . and they had the same well-ordered universe about them" (97). While Quebec is "entirely cut off from Europe" (3), it is experienced as spiritually complete in itself. For Cécile, in the high altar of Notre Dame de la Victoire, resembling a feudal castle, there is an image of the kingdom of heaven—like Quebec, "strong and unassailable" (65). The city, as Murphy observes, is repeatedly represented as a holy place: Auclair reflects at the outset of the narrative that the rock-set town is like a theatrical setting for the Nativity (5); in a snow-fall "the whole rock looked like one great white church, above the frozen river" (136); and in a particularly fine passage we are told that in the early sunlight of a summer morning "the rock of Kebec stood gleaming above the river like an altar with many candles, or like a holy city in an old legend, shriven, sinless, washed in gold" (169). In such images Cather communicated what she experienced as the spiritual integrity of Quebec, a feeling about life based on a medieval cosmology that transcended borders of every kind.

In the closing years of her writing career Canada remained significant to the play of Cather's imagination. The epilogue to Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a novel about racial boundaries, brings the escaped slave girl, Nancy, to Virginia for a visit after 25 years of living in Montreal. Canada again is envisioned as a refuge, a very real sanctuary line, and this final section of the novel is constructed artfully around the contrast between life in a northern English colony and the post-Civil War Southern state. The post-Civil War generation, we are told, is "gayer and more carefree . . .perhaps because they had fewer traditions to live up to. The war had done away with many of the old distinctions. The young couples were poor and extravagent and jolly" (277). Nancy has been part of a very different social order and has decidedly changed from living in Montreal; she dresses elegantly and expensively, and she has lost her Southern speaking habits, pronouncing each syllable of a word distinctly, and using phrases of deference like "by your leave" (286). She works for a Madam and Colonel Kenwood, who are in England for the spring, and is married to the Kenwoods'' gardener, who is half Scotch and half native Indian. Nancy's success, her alleged superiority to the other former slaves in the Colbert household, is predicated on her place in a world that still has traditions and makes distinctions.

In "Before Breakfast," the second to last story she completed, Cather created her only fictional portrait of Grand Manan. In this story a Boston stockbroker, Henry Grenfell, has a cabin on a little island in the North Atlantic, where his business correspondence is never forwarded to him. If Canada had come to represent a place where things did not change, where old traditions continued, that comforting sense of time is exploded when Cather's protagonist is confronted by geological time and the brevity of human existence. Cather was here no doubt incorporating something of her own experience, for not far from her cottage was Ashburton Head, a rock face rising straight up from the beach and known locally as the "Seven Days Work," because in its layers of rock seven different periods of geological time are in striking evidence. Cather wrote of Quebec that there was a feeling about human life and fate there she could not wholly accept—a feeling of "pious resignation." I would argue that in "Before Breakfast" she accepts in a very positive way the message of the rock and the shadows cas ton it so briefly. Henry Grenfell, confronted with the brevity and insignificance of life at every turn, thinks to himself as he is about to put in his eyedrops, "Why patch up? What was the use . . . of anything" (148). But the sight of a young woman swimming out to an old sliver of rock in the frigid Atlantic waters precipitates in him a reaffirmation for living, and the story ends good-humoredly with an image of a frog making a leap in the evolutionary process, crossing a border.

Cather herself physically completed her journeying in Canada. Her longstanding interest in the country propelled her in the summer of 1941 to return from visiting her brother in California via the Canadian West. Lewis recounts that they went from San Francisco to Victoria, British Columbia, which, she says, "[Cather] had always wanted to see" (191)—perhaps, I would speculate, because Victoria was reputed to have preserved the English character of its origins in much the way Quebec City had remained so French. They stopped for several weeks at the Empress Hotel, where Cather spent most of her time reading in the spacious hotel garden, and then returned east on the Canadian Pacific Railway. The trip across the Canadian prairie apparently was not very comfortable or enjoyable, for the car in which they rode had been 20 years out of service and was only being used again because of the war. But in making that trip, Cather in her lifetime saw all the regions of the Dominion. It was the last earthly border she would cross.

One of the French translators of Willa Cather, Marc Chenetier, once remarked playfully that he found translating Cather's work relatively easy because her language was almost like French to begin with. In saying so he was modestly putting aside his talent for rendering Cather's work faithfully in his beautiful translations but he also captured an essential characteristic of Cather's style, one that I wish to analyze here. Keeping in mind that Cather taught Latin, read French literature (both past and contemporary) in French, and had a French cook who hardly spoke English, read the beginning of the chapter entitled "Hidden Water" in Death Comes for the Archbishop:

An hour later, as darkness came over the sand-hills, the young Bishop was seated at supper in the mother-house of this Mexican settlement—which, he learned, was appropriately called Agua Secreta, Hidden Water. At the table with him were his host, an old man called Benito, the oldest son, and two grandsons. The old man was a widower, and his daughter, Josepha, the girl who had run to meet the Bishop at the stream, was his housekeeper. Their supper was a pot of frijoles cooked with meat, bread and goat's milk, fresh cheese and ripe apples.

From the moment he entered this room with its thick white-washed adobe walls, Father Latour had felt a kind of peace about it. In its bareness and simplicity there was something comely, as there was about the serious girl who had placed their food before them and who now stood in the shadows against the wall, her eager eyes fixed upon his face. He found himself very much at home with the four dark-headed men who sat beside him in the candle-light. Their manners were gentle, their voices low and agreeable. When he said grace before meat, the men had knelt on the floor beside the table. (Later Novels 290)

This beginning refers to the Spanish culture rather than to the French one. It is therefore foreign to an American reader as well as to Latour and introduces a series of linguistic displacements from English to Latinate languages. As a former teacher of Latin, Cather was well-equipped to be aware of the common root the French and Spanish languages share. In choosing to place the setting in a Spanish settlement first, she has the readers discover the American countryside through the eyes of some Spanish settlers, as they are themselves observed by a Frenchman, and her language reflects the Latinate perception of the world.

The English translation of the Spanish "Agua Secreta" comes after the original expression because it conveys only a vague idea of the place. The Latin etymology is secretus and means more than the word "hidden." Primarily, it means "separate, distinct," and then "isolated, secluded," and finally, "secret, hidden." The Spanish word, in which the Latin root still resonates, conveys this meaning of an isolated place, which is lost in the English translation. This is probably what motivated Cather when she gave the original version of the name first and then drew her readers' attention to it with her translation. She thereby acknowledges the validity of the Spanish settlers' vision of the American landscape and her translation underlines the fact that each language betrays one particular perception of reality.

From the prologue in Death Comes for the Archbishop, we know that the choice of a language is crucial, as is the fluency in any foreign language, for missionaries. When the cardinals meet in Rome, the language they use conveys a different orientation from their previous use of Latin as a spoken language, "The language spoken was French—the time had already gone by when Cardinals could conveniently discuss contemporary matters in Latin" (Later Novels 278). And in the course of the novel, even if the priests learn Spanish and English, they remain French in their outlook on the world around them. Here, I will attempt to trace the remnants of French that can sometimes be heard in the English the narrator uses to convey another vision of the New World.

Cather, needless to say, did not write in faulty English nor in a form of English that may sound odd to a native speaker. On the contrary, she plays the crafty game of writing in perfectly correct English that still manages to "sound" French or Latinate. In the passage quoted above, Spanish compensates for the lack of differentiation between genders in English. Indeed, just as the young woman does not sit down at table with the men, gender roles are clearly marked linguistically by the masculine "o" ending of the name "Benito" and the feminine "a" of "Josepha." The same gender marker can be found in the name of the place, Agua Secreta, whereas the gender difference disappears in the English translation of "water"—where the"-er" ending is the same, independently of gender, in such words as "daughter," "housekeeper," and "widower." However, the masculine ending in "o" seems to be disseminated in the assonances in "o" that surround the masculine crowd in the family, "his host, an old man called Benito, the oldest son, and two grandsons" (290). The Germanic root of the word "son" makes this vowel parallelism possible between the two languages. The feminine "a" is neutralized into the subsuming "-er" ending, whereas the masculine "o" persists in an alliterative form. This linguistic framework provides a representation of the sexual roles in the microcosm of Agua Secreta, where a small Spanish society lives in seclusion in the midst of another country.

In this old village the past has been preserved without the slightest change, enshrined as a religion, set out of time and transmitted by the elders in an act of memory. There are "old men trying to remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren" (294). What matters here is that their faith has been transmitted in the forms it had before the French Revolution: "Benito did not know what year his grandfather had settled here.. . . 'But it was soon after the time when the French killed their king. My grandfather had heard talk of that before he left home, and used to tell us boys about it when he was an old man' " (291). The connection with the Old Regime in France is made through storytelling. And reading the passage as if the story told here had something to do with French prose, we will notice how closely its rhythm resembles that of classical seventeenth-century French prose.

Indeed, the style of the passage seems to be an invitation to mark the rhythm of the sentences as in French poetry or prose, in which every syllable is a unit independent of any stresses, while taking into account punctuation marks such as the comma. It sounds as if Cather flattened out the stresses of the English language the better to emphasize the syllabic and syntactic rhythm of her prose. In "A Chance Meeting" (published in Not Under Forty [1936]), as Cather remembers her meeting with Flaubert's niece, she is as sensitive to the rhythm of Flaubert's sentence as his niece is (and this proves that she read his work in French): "When I happened to speak of the splendid final sentence of Hérodias, where the fall of the syllables is so suggestive of the hurrying footsteps of John's disciples, carrying away with them their prophet's severed head, she repeated that sentence softly, 'Comme elle était tres lourde, ils la portaient al-ter-na-tiv-e-ment' " (Stories 823-24).

Her commas often take all the importance of a caesura in French verse, for example, in binary sentences: "From the moment he entered this room with its thick whitewashed adobe walls, Father Latour had felt a kind of peace about it." The sentence makes this peace heard in the stability in the sequence of the one- or two-syllable words in the sentence. Several sentences present a similar structure: "Their manners were gentle, their voices low and agreeable. When he said grace before meat, the men had knelt on the floor beside the table." There are six syllables in the first half of the first sentence and twelve in the second half of the second sentence. This rhythm is not lost in the French translation since the sentence almost becomes an alexandrine (a twelve-syllable line, with the caesura usually after the sixth): "Leurs gestes étaient doux, leurs voix basses et plaisantes"(La Mort 40). And the following sentence in translation is an alexandrine,with the caesura in the middle: "Leur colonie, dit-il, était bien peu connue." Here again, in the English original as well as in the translation, the regular rhythm and the binary structure of the sentences convey an impression of peace in the whole passage. If Cather's text translates so well into French, it is because the rhythm of her prose and her syntactic structures often coincide with their French equivalent, which is that of the seventeenth- century aesthetics and literature dear to Father Latour.

The priest enjoys reading his favorite authors again and again—Madame de Sévigné, Pascal, and St. Augustine, whose Confessions were widely read in the seventeenth century (and later) in translation by Arnauld d'Andilly (1649-71). "Bernard read aloud to him the rest of the morning; St. Augustine, or the letters of Madame de Sévigné, or his favorite Pascal" (444). The common point shared by these three authors is that they profess an ideal simplification of style and narrative truth. St. Augustine states in the Confessions, "How his pride gave him a disgust for the Scripture, because of the simplicity of its style" (trans. d'Andilly 96). And St. Augustine explains his first reaction when reading the Bible: "I was not able to penetrate such sublime secrets, neither to belittle myself to appreciate its elocution, which is simple and humble. . . . In my pride I scorned its simplicity, and my eyes were not clear-sighted or piercing enough to discover its secret beauty" (96). In the course of his confessions, St. Augustine illustrates his conversion from an oratory style to his search for biblical truth in a simple style devoid of pride. In a similar way, although in a very different context, Madame de Sévigné pays a compliment to her daughter on the style of her letters: "Your words only serve the purpose of making yourself clear; and in this noble simplicity, they are endowed with a power one can not resist"(74). As for Pascal, the clarity and simplicity of his style are legendary for a philosopher. His writings on "The Art of Persuasion" must have been on Cather's mind when she wrote, "The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification" (Stories 836). Although strictly speaking it is unproven, it seems highly probable that Cather had read more than just Les Pensées by Pascal, as she draws a lot from his other works and, in particular, from his texts relating his scientific discoveries. (Pascal proved the existence of the vacuum in physics, and Cather uses his biography and personal writings extensively to build up the Pascalian character, Tom Outland, in The Professor's House, for example (Palleau-Papin). In any case, she was familiar with the seventeenth-century ideology and rhetoric of the group called Port-Royal, in which Pascal was one of the most famous figures.) In "Concerning the Art of Persuasion," Pascal writes: "The best books are those which readers believe they could have written. Nature, which alone is good, is quite familiar and common. Hence I do not doubt at all that these rules, being true, must be simple, naive, and natural as they are. . .. I should like to call them humble, common, familiar. These names suit them better" (211).

The simplicity of Cather's style is connected with her highly classical conception of the French language, in which she sees an unencumbered lightness, as she characterizes it in her expression "the light and elastic mesh of the French tongue" (Death, 444). A process of narrative simplification is certainly at work in the passage with which I began. The pastoral simplicity of the meal is suggested in the predictability of the enumeration in pairs, "Their supper was a pot of frijoles cooked with meat, bread and goat's milk, fresh cheese and ripe apples" (290). The peaceful binary rhythm of this sentence echoes that of the whole passage. And as far as the syntax goes, it is also highly simplified and therefore in keeping with seventeenth-century French aesthetics.

In this passage Cather's unencumbered syntax makes it easier to compare the English text to its French translation and reach certain conclusions regarding her style. In most cases her syntax does not present any strictly English structure that would be difficult to translate literally into French, using the same grammatical framework. The paragraph quoted above, describing the settlement of Agua Secreta, translates into the same groups of words of the same grammatical function in French. To take but one example, the following sentence presents the traditional structure of a subject, a verb, and complements, with the time and place complements on either side of the subject-verb group and a relative clause ending the sentence: "An hour later, as darkness came over the sand-hills, the young Bishop was seated at supper in the mother-house of this Mexican settlement—which, he learned, was appropriately called Agua Secreta, Hidden Water" (290). This grammatical structure is kept word for word in the French translation: "Une heure plus tard, alors que l'obscurité envahissait les dunes, le jeune évêque était assis à souper dans la maison mère de cette colonie mexicaine, qui, apprit-il, s'appelait justement Agua Secreta, I'Eau Cachée" (La Mort 39).

Stretching the comparison, it sounds as if Cather avoided the most idiomatic structures of the English language and conformed her expression to its French equivalent, or the structures that both languages share. According to the comparative linguist Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher, "the proportion of main, independent or subordinate clauses is not the same in the two languages" (111). She explains how "subordinate or adjunct elements" and relative clauses in French are often "turned into main clauses" in English (113-14). Usually an English text and its French translation present a difference in the order the adjunct elements are placed regarding the main clause, whereas in Cather's case, the order is the same because mainly postpositions and antepositions, which do not disturb the sentence structure in either language, are used. Occasionally Cather will include a discreet interpolated or incidental clause within a main clause, which is a process slightly more common in French than in English; she will often use antepositions and accumulate elements at the opening of the sentence, which is common in French and tolerated in English; and finally, she will use postpositions, common in both languages, in English in particular. "If in English postposition is generally preferable to anteposition, on the other hand anteposition is preferable to imbrication, which delays the introduction of the main clause but does not dismantle it"(Guillemin-Flesher 125). In the sentence studied here, there are two antepositions ("An hour later, / as darkness came over the sand-hills,"), two postpositions ("which . . . was appropriately called Agua Secreta, / Hidden Water"), and one brief imbrication, discreet enough not to dismantle the sentence ("—which, he learned, was appropriately called ..." [italics mine]). This imbrication ("he learned") interrupts the structure of the sentence in English, which is stressed by the use of the dash introducing the relative clause with the adjunct elements. The dash is a way to stress the separation between the clause and the intrusive expression, making it more acceptable in English. Finally, it is as if Cather were following a middle course between both languages, almost excluding from her use of English the structures that do not translate into French easily or as if the French translation were already part of the original text, as a negative image waiting to be developed.

Reading Death Comes for the Archbishop or Shadows on the Rockcould be an exercise in sharpening our perception of what Henry James calls"a faint shade of strangeness" in The American: "Here and there Madame de Cintré's utterance had a faint shade of strangeness, but at the end often minutes Newman found himself waiting for these soft roughnesses. He enjoyed and he marveled to see that gross thing, error, brought down to so fine a point" (124). It is hardly a coincidence that this novel is mentioned, albeit in another context, in The Professor's House. Cather plays with her mother tongue as if she had a new ear for it, sensitive to all its shades and even strangenesses, as if she were transcribing it, rather than translating, from another language. The philosopher and critic Gilles Deleuze explains the genesis of one language from within another:

It is neither a case of bilinguism nor multilinguism. One may mix two languages, going back and forth from one to the other, and yet either one will still be a homogeneously balanced system and mix words only. But this is not how great writers proceed. . . . They do not mix two languages, not even a minor and a major language, even though many of them are part of a minority as a sign of their vocation. Rather, what they do is invent a minor usage of the major language in which they express themselves exclusively: they set this language to a minor key, as in music the minor mode stands for dynamic combinations in perpetual imbalance. . . . One might as well say that a great writer is always a foreigner in the language he uses, even if it is his native tongue. (137-38)

One cannot say that Cather mixes both languages but she invents a transposition of English in the minor key of the classic French writers she mentions in her text. The French missionaries Cather's narrator often uses as focalisers transfer their cultural and linguistic heritage onto the country they discover. Deleuze believes that "what is exceptional in American literature is that its writers have the faculty of telling their own memories as those of a universal people made up of immigrants from all countries." Every American writer submits English to certain linguistic transformations that take one step further the process of "inventing a new universality (14, 93).

It is as if a "ghost" language (Deleuze 149) ran beneath Cather's English, enabling her to convey another vision of the New World through the minor mode of the French language, even for readers who do not speak any French, as Peter, in Cather's story by the same name, understands the language of Sarah Bernhardt in spite of the language barrier: "He did not know French, and could not understand a word she said, but it seemed to him that she must be talking the music of Chopin" (Collected Short Fiction 542). In the music of her prose, Cather has brought English closer to the French rhythm and syntax to transcribe a North American reality. When Vaillant says to Latour, "During your absence I have found how particularly precious is that shrine to all Catholics in New Mexico" (emphasis mine 304), the basic structure of his sentence sounds predominantly French compared to what would be the more "normal" English formulation: "I have found how particularly precious that shrine is to all Catholics in New Mexico." Similarly, the following sentence shows a structure that is fairly rare in English, though common in French,"His wooden bird he had bought from an old man" (329). The translation of this sentence sounds very natural in French, "Cet oiseau de bois, le Padre I'avait acheté" (La Mort 110). Or again, the following question is more familiar in French; the intonation and the question mark alone can be enough to indicate a question form in an affirmative sentence, as when Noël Pommier asks Jacques, in Shadows on the Rock, "You will be very content with fine new shoes, my boy?" (Later Novels 514). The more correct interrogative form in English would be, "Will you be happy with your new shoes, my boy?" In writing like this, according to Deleuze's analysis, Willa Cather follows the tradition of the great American writers who, like Melville in Moby Dick,"invent a foreign language which runs through the English language, and carries it along—it is the OUTLANDISH, or the Deterritorialized, the language of the Whale" (93). And yet Cather's English, like Melville's, is perfectly correct English but English taken to a limit defined by each author.

As for the vocabulary, Cather injects French words or passages into Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock in particular, thereby conveying a vision of the French culture linguistically. For example, Latour says to Vaillant, apropos their difficult transaction with Madame Olivares to get her to confess her age in public, "I don't think I ever assisted at anything so cruel" (394). This seems to be a word-for-word translation from the French "assister à," whereas the usual English translation of this expression would be "I ever witnessed" or "saw" or "attended"—all the more so that the English meaning of "assisting," although possible here (because Father Latour lends a hand to influence the lady), is not as probable as the meaning of the French "assister." Another kind of example can be found in Shadows on the Rock: "she made the ménage for her father" (469). This phrase is translated directly, yet partially, from the French "faire le ménage," instead of the more correct "did the cleaning."

The narrator seems to be playing with the various meanings of a word, according to the language in which it is understood. The word "citron," for example, as it is used in the description of the glass fruits: "Between the tall silver candlesticks stood a crystal bowl full of glowing fruits of coloured glass: purple figs, yellow-green grapes with gold vine-leaves, apricots, nectarines, and a dark citron stuck up endwise among the grapes"(501). The words "figs," "apricots," and "nectarines" are very close to their equivalent in French, even in the spelling. Under the effect of accumulation of French words this enumeration produces and in the francophile context of the novel, in which many French words are not even italicized, one may hesitate when coming across the word "citron." Does it have the English meaning of "a yellow, thick-skinned fruit resembling a lime or lemon but larger and less acid" (Webster's New Universal Unabridged), or the French meaning of a lemon? The context hardly clarifies this, as the Saracens who made the glass fruit were familiar with both the English meaning and the French. Only its color could be an indication as to the right meaning since the English citron may be darker than the lemon. The North American meaning of the word sounds less probable here considering the eastern origin of the fruit. And yet, in her other fictions Cather certainly means it to be the North American melon that is the size of a large apple and dark green in color and can be made into sweet pickle. Cather may not have known that citron melons were exclusively North American and would not have been represented in glass fruits by the Saracens. However, beyond any possible mistake, the effect of this word in the enumeration of the glass fruits is that of a linguistic flow between the different meanings, in which the word seems to fluctuate from one language to another, giving a particular depth to the linguistic sign. Cather invites the reader to decipher her slight variations from a strict usage of the English language to grasp the new freedom she breathes into her American expression.

Another passage in Shadows on the Rock presents a more intricate switch from English into French. It begins with the description of Jacques Gaux, who is "a chunky, rather clumsy little boy of six, unkept and uncared for, dressed in a pair of old sailor's breeches, cut off in the leg for him and making a great bulk of loose cloth about his thighs. His ragged jacket was as much too tight as the trousers were too loose, and this gave him the figure of a salt-shaker" (495). As far as the story goes, the old breeches that give him the ridiculous "figure of a salt-shaker" probably come from the sailors who go to his mother's house. And from a linguistic point of view, the very existence of the boy is inscribed in his resemblance to a "salt-shaker," as the narrator immediately makes clear in the rest of her description of Jacques's family: "Antoinette was Canadian-born; her mother had been one of 'the King's Girls,' as they were called. Thirty years ago King Louis had sent several hundred young Frenchwomen out to Canada to marry the bachelors of the disbanded regiment of Carignan-Saliéres" (emphasis mine 495). Here, Cather is playing on the word "saliére," "salt shaker" in French, to establish a connection between the caricature of the boy's figure and the political decision that decided his genealogy. Jacques is the victim of a linguistic determinism in that he was shaped into the name inscribed in his family's history. The play on words across languages is as casual as the political decision to marry off soldiers en masse and reflects Cather's dry humor, as she turns a French name into a caricature in English.

In the case of a minor character whose name is "Madame Renaude," Cather gives away the pun immediately, explaining her nickname:"Renaude-le-liévre, she was called, because she had a hare-lip, and a bristling black moustache as well" (493). The two facts given as an explanation for her nickname draw our attention on two elements: first, she is called a "liévre" or hare because of her "hare-lip"; but the fact that the word "liévre" is always masculine in French is not enough for the narrator, who adds a gender-oriented comment on the woman's manly (or harely?) moustache, thereby pinpointing the perfect adequacy between the name and the character, which the French language, with its use of gendered nouns, renders more convincingly than a translation would. Similarly, the narrator often gives French nicknames first, followed by their English translation, to emphasize their unexpected but appropriate depiction of the character, as in the case of "La Grenouille et L'Escargot" in Shadows on the Rock: "They were commonly called La Grenouille and L'Escargot, because, every summer, when the ships from France began to come in, they stuck in their window two placards: 'FROGS,' 'SNAILS,' to attract the hungry sailors, whether they had those delicacies on hand or not" (496); Cather also describes Joseph Vaillant as "Blanchet" in Death Comes for the Archbishop: "His hair, sunburned to the shade of dry hay, had originally been tow-colored; 'Blanchet' ('Whitey') he was always called at the Seminary" (298).

Another example of punning with French names remains hidden in the text, unexplained by the narrator. In Shadows on the Rock, when Cécile visits the Harnois family on the Ile d'Orléans, she escapes to a beautiful meadow after her first sleepless night. "She felt she had escaped for ever from the Harnois and their way of living" (586-87). "Harnois" was the old French spelling of "harnais" (that is, a "harness") which prevailed until the eighteenth century (just as the French were called "les François" or "les Français" in modern spelling). Thus Cécile's feeling of having escaped from the rigid harness of those rural people is emphasized in their name.

Sometimes the French words depicting the geography of Quebec or of France contain discreet puns as well. For example, Pierre Charron comes from the Languedoc region in southern France, which is a sunny area, and this explains the classic pun in English between the words sun and son, applied to a French reality here, "For Charron, that evening, the apothecary brought up from his cellar some fiery Bordeaux, proper for a son of Languedoc, and the hours flew by" (576). Cather's narrator gives a clue in her use of the adjective "fiery," which draws our attention to the sun shining on this "son of Languedoc." Or elsewhere, the meaning of the French name "Beaupré" infiltrates the English sentence in which it is used: "On one shore stretched the dark forest, on the other the smiling, sunny fields that ran toward Beaupré" (582.). The name of "Beaupré"—or "beautiful meadow"—seems to be putting the fields under the obligation of being "smiling" and "sunny" under the happy eyes of Cécile and Pierre.

More generally speaking, passing from one language to another, from one signifier to another, entails a shift in the signified and another vision of the world. When Cécile tells Jacques about the life of Saint Edmond, she begins, "He was an English saint, and he became Archbishop of Cantorbéry. But he died in France, at the monastery of Pontigny" (518).The balance between the English nationality of the saint and his death in a French monastery is exemplified by the choice of languages in the expression "Archbishop of Cantorbéry." In this sentence in English, the English name "Canterbury" is given in its French adaptation in an interesting collusion of languages that sounds fairly illogical at first. In doing so, the narrator Cécile brings about a subtle reorientation of her speech and clearly endorses the French viewpoint, even though she expresses herself in English. This odd word "Cantorbéry" is here as a reminder that the original language in which the character would have expressed herself, had she had a life outside the text, would have been French.

The authorial voice makes this linguistic adjustment all the clearer when she has Cécile read the story of Saint Edmond in French from the original text, without giving any translation in the original edition of the novel. Cather seems to be ready to drown the American reader who does not know French in this language, as if immersion were her answer to cultural differences. And just as the French hagiography appropriates the life of Saint Edmond, the overall narrator of Shadows on the Rock makes hers the(fictional) French origin of the story she tells in English, while constantly reminding the readers that this is only a translation or at best a transcription. The lengthy quotation Cécile makes from the French version of the saint's life is given as such, without any translation, with all the power and authority of an original version reproduced in its entirety. The long quotation from the French is reproduced in italics and is clearly delineated from the rest of the narration, as if the narrator also wanted to mark a certain distance from this foreign text grafted onto the body of the novel.

Shadows on the Rock is not, after all, a hagiographic story even if many passages refer to the lives of saints as a background picture of the times. It functions as a reminder that a given language conveys its particular vision of life, religion, and its own construction of the world. It is no accident if Cécile later repeats in her own speech a passage from the French she has just read: "But I expect He is often near you and keeps you from harm, as He said to Saint Edmond; moi qui suis toujours à vos côtés et vous accompagne partout" (519). These quotations from the French remind the readers that in the novel the Canadian world of the late seventeenth century is perceived through the medium of early-twentieth-century American English. They show that another language operates from within the narrator's English, conveying an incidental view now and again, in a text that appeared so homogeneous at first sight, without disrupting its wholeness and coherence.

As the narrator sprinkles her text with many words in French, sometimes in italics, sometimes not, she draws our attention to the French reality they define. The French word "grille," for example, is mentioned many times to describe the numerous railings that bar the view of many characters in Shadows on the Rock, signifying the many barriers of the seventeenth-century French culture, as between the secular and the sacred world. In the convent, grilles shelter the nuns from the rest of the world: "Their voices, even when they spoke to one through the veiled grille, were pleasant and inspiriting to hear" (526). There are also the grilles barring Jeanne Le Ber from the profane world: "In the basement cubicle was the grille through which she spoke to her confessor, and by means of which she was actually present at mass and vespers, though unseen" (549). Or the grilles stand between well-to-do people and other classes, when as a little boy, Auclair observes the town house of the Count de Frontenac in Paris. "Every morning he looked out from his window on the same stillness; the shuttered windows behind their iron grilles, the steps under the porte-cochère green with moss" (474). The meaning of these "grilles" become clearer on the following page. "Three young men were leaning out over the grilles beating rugs, shaking carpets and wall-hangings into the air" (475). Here, the "grilles" stand in front of the windows but do not fully bar them. Such architectural elements are presented in French in Cather's text because the various meanings of the word "grille" all convey the French reality of the time, and yet it is easily understandable, as the word has passed into English.

Moreover, the names of people, places, and political and ecclesiastical functions all give the configuration of seventeenth-century France, which would seem "incomprehensible" to us were it not for the context in which Cather brings them to life, just as the French reality is beginning to be "incomprehensible" to the Canadian settlers. "Indeed, Auclair's chief service to his patron was not to administer drugs, but to listen occasionally, when the Governor felt lonely, to talk of places and persons,—talk which would have been incomprehensible to anyone else in Kebec" (614-15). While the Canadian settlers see in the mother superior of the convent only her ecclesiastical function, the narrator chooses to convey more information to the readers in parentheses, as Cécile Auclair herself would well have understood: "The Reverend Mother (Jeanne Franc Juschereau de la Ferté was her proud name) held rather advanced view son caring for the sick" (486). Her full name, given in parentheses, serves several purposes. First, it stresses her French filiation, even though she identifies with Canada, with the name "Franc" or "French" in old French. It also plays across languages on the word "Ferté" when it is described as a name full of "pride," or "fierté" in French. And finally, the ear of Cather's narrator is sensitive to the alliterative strength of the sound doublets in "j" with the words "Jeanne/Juschereau" and in "f" with"Franc/Ferté." The words seem to resonate their pride, as in alliterative poetry.

In her choice of subject matter in Death Comes for the Archbishop as well as in Shadows on the Rock, Cather chose to "deterritorialize" her use of English, to borrow the expression Deleuze coined, especially in her mention of ship names in the last part of the novel. The names are given in italics and signify the worldview of those who baptized them, as well as the orientations of the narrator, in the way she orchestrates their appearance in her text. The following ships are named, sometimes several times: La Bonne Espérance(465), La Gironde (495), La Licorne (532), La Garonne (592), Les Deux Frères, Le Profond (594), La Reine du Nord, Le Faucon (595), Le Saint Antoine (603), Le Duc de Bretagne, Le Soleil d'Afrique (608), La Vengeance (614), La Manon (634), and La Seine (635). Several remarks can be made from such a list, which Cather drew from actual ship names of the time. To begin with, the titles of nobility are here placed on the same footing as common names such as "la manon" which is a standard name for a woman and may connote loose behavior as well. Moreover, the names of southern regions in France such as the Garonne or the Gironde seem to coincide with a country defined more by the intensity of its sunlight than by a very precise geographical concern, as the name "soleil d'Afrique" seems to indicate. This latter name coincides with the southern opening at the end of the novel,which begins with the theme of the parrot Captain Pondaven brought back from his southern voyages and ends with the mention of the exotic seashells Jacques brings to Auclair from his own voyages. The names of the ships recall the mapping of a world that no longer exists as such but in a fragmented way, underlying the fact that the French words of a foregone era have already become exotic for American readers as well as French. Indeed, the names of the ships are moveable in time and place, and their transfer into an American story of the 1930s displaces them as strange importations and linguistic remnants having escaped all translation attempts.

Cather "deterritorialized" her own language for the so-called French novels because she saw in seventeenth-century French aesthetics something akin to her own. Her characters may read Pascal because she found in this author some of the principles she had formulated in her famous essay "The Novel Démeublé," in which she used a French past participle to impart her meaning in an English expression. We could finally read Pascal again, in "Concerning the Art of Persuasion," keeping Cather in mind: "Nothing is more common than good things; the only question is how to discern them; it is certain that all of them are natural and within our reach and even known by every one. But we do not know how to distinguish them. This is universal. It is not in things extraordinary and strange that excellence of any kind is found. We reach up for it, and we are further away; more often than not we must stoop. The best books are those whose readers think they could have written them. Nature, which alone is good, is familiar and common throughout" (446). Cather submits her use of English to the restraint of a foreign language the better to impose an order on her expression and to incorporate other cultural references in an American text. What she wrote of Sarah Orne Jewett could be applied to herself and to her special ear for the French language: "The 'sayings' of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech—it is a gift from heart to heart" (Stories 852). Cather seems to have thought and felt in this language, midway between French and English, in which her characters of French background speak and feel, conveying a new, displaced, and incidental view of their surroundings.

Cather's sensitivity to the French language and her conscious linguistic effort to strain the limits of English and submit it to an encounter with a more Latinate language are not wholly isolated if we consider some other modernist writers of the time. The critical works of T. S. Eliot come to mind, in which he analyzed the importance of Latin and the Romance languages in English and American literature. We could apply his remark on Milton's use of Latin to Cather's use of French, when he writes, "An acquaintance with Latin is necessary if we are to understand, and to accept, the involutions of his sentence structure, and if we are to hear the complete music of his verse" (149). In an essay on Ezra Pound, Eliot emphasizes the importance of Pound's immersion (and fluency) in the Romance languages, including French, and in particular the dialect of Southern France or Provençal: "He was supersaturated in Provence; he had tramped over most of the country; and the life of the courts where the Troubadours thronged was part of his own life to him." He goes on to analyze the most Latinate work by Pound. "His Canzoni are in a way aside from his direct line of progress; they are much more nearly studies in mediaeval appreciation than any of his other verse; but they are interesting, apart from their merit, as showing the poet at work with the most intricate Provençal forms" (166-68). This echoes Cather's early admiration for the "pastoral" people of southern France and their seemingly natural ability to achieve a poetic expression in their "songs," as she recorded her first journey to Provence. "They make songs as they make wine down in this country; it grows up from this old red soil that bred the first troubadours ages since, it distills from the pines, it breaks from the red grapes" (in Europe 171). And as for Eliot himself, notwithstanding the influence of French on his English verse, he wrote several poems in French, among which are the 1920 poems "Le Directeur," "Mélange Adultère de Tout," "Lune de Mid," and "Dansle Restaurant."

In the literary context of her time, if some of Cather's later novels are steeped in the French culture and language, her experimenting with a foreign expression and worldview is yet part of the modernist experience of the 1920s and 1930s (and continuing well into the 1940s and later with Pound's successive Cantos). Yet she played at "deterritorializing" her native tongue with subtlety and did not write in a way that would make the novels incomprehensible to someone with no knowledge of French; neither did she write in an obscure manner that would necessitate an abundant use of footnotes to make her text understandable. As always, her art is such that she either explains her allusions, blends them invisibly into the flow of her own prose, or when she quotes French words and sentences without translating them, manages to clarify the whole passage in context. No matter how sophisticated her prose and intertextual references, Cather is accessible at all levels of reading and immensely enjoyable in all cases,whether we are trying to trace all the intricacies of her style or simply reading her as a wonderful teller of tales.

Many reviewers and critics have seen Willa Cather's two novels of the 1930s as competent works but at the same time as products of a waning talent, as clearly less accomplished and less significant than her earlier fictions. In light of such assertions, David Stouck's having declared Lucy Gayheart(1935) Cather's "most complex novel philosophically" is particularly interesting (214). I would assert that Shadows on the Rock, published in 1931, stands with Lucy Gayheart in its philosophical complexity and would argue that a key to understanding the philosophical implications of Shadows on the Rock lies in Cather's character Pierre Charron. If, as Susan J. Rosowski has said, Shadows on the Rock is a book in which Cather addresses "modern themes of alienation, loss, despair, and annihilation" (176), it is also a work in which Cather suggests a centuries-old response to these same fundamental human problems.

James Woodress has called the half decade from early 1928 "the most stressful and discouraging period" of Cather's life (413). During this time Cather was trying to adjust to a new home in New York, to cope with her father's death, and to deal with her mother's debilitating stroke. "Life does beat us up sometimes," she wrote to Mary Jewett in May 1928, and "we must take our drubbing"; to Zona Gale she wrote in late 1929 that life "had been hitting her pretty hard" (Woodress 414, 420). Cather, however,was attempting to maintain a stoic courage in the face of these trials. Like Mrs. Harris in "Old Mrs. Harris," published in 1931, she realized,"Everything that's alive has got to suffer" (141).

It was during 1918 that Cather visited Quebec for the first time. Though she evidently had never before seriously considered writing about Quebec,the breakup of her family in conjunction with her visit to Quebec in the summer of 1928 clearly provided the inspiration for the story and the setting of her next book. Subsequent visits to Quebec enabled Cather to explore the city further and provided her the opportunity to do much of the research she deemed essential to her work.

The research Cather did was certainly conscientious. Edith Lewis notes that Cather was "always very painstaking about her facts—she intensely disliked being careless or inaccurate, and went to much trouble to verify them"(161). The historical Quebec material, unlike the Nebraska settings and characters, could not come out of Cather's own experiences and acquaintances; it had to be discovered. At the Chateau Frontenac, where Cather and Lewis stayed, Cather spent hours in the hotel's library reading Canadian history, most notably in the works of Francis Parkman (Lewis 154).The list of additional readings is lengthy and impressive (see Woodress431-32).

Curiously, previous Cather criticism has not explored the role of one of the most important, and certainly one of the most obvious, of all of Cather's sources for Shadows on the Rock, the sixteenth-century French philosopher Pierre Charron. Many Cather scholars have recognized and studied her use of actual historical personages in the novel. No previous criticism, however, has recognized the French philosopher as the character's ancestor. E. K. Brown noted many years ago that there were "well-to-do Charrons, traders in Montreal and associates of Jacques Le Ber, the father of the recluse. "Declaring Cather's Charron "an imaginary personage," Brown asserts, "it was doubtless because she had come across their [the Montreal Charrons'] track that Willa Cather gave Pierre their name" (185). While John March's A Reader's Companion to the Fiction of Willa Cather, published in 1993, notes that there was an actual Pierre Charron, that comment is followed by the statement that the fictional Charron "bears no resemblance" to the actual person (145).

The actual Pierre Charron was born in Paris in 1541. As a canon in Bordeaux, Charron attained a considerable reputation for his remarkable eloquence, for which he was rewarded with appointment as chaplain to Margueret of Navarre, queen of France. In part because of his reputation as a speaker, Charron met Montaigne in 1589 and the two became close friends. Montaigne, in fact, died in Charron's arms and, as a token of his affection and esteem, bestowed on Charron his family coat of arms.

According to most twentieth-century histories of philosophy, Charron's friendship with Montaigne has been at the same time both the source of his fame and the cause of his lack of proper recognition. Especially throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Charron was often referred to as "I'herbier de Montaigne," the disciple of Montaigne, and his works were often regarded simply as derivative of the more famous works of his more famous friend. Charron's two most important works, Les Trois vérités (Treatise on the three verities), published in 1594, and De la sagesse (Treatise on Wisdom), published in 1601, however, have in last hundred years come to be seen as extremely important works of original genius. In his History of Civilization in England, Henry Thomas Buckle declared Charron's Treatise on Wisdom "in some respects, even more formidable than Montaigne's [Essays]" (375). Eugene F. Rice Jr., echoing the opinion of a number of contemporary commentators, has called the work "the most important Renaissance treatise on wisdom" (178), and Charron's major biographer, J. B. Sabri, declared it "the philosophical Summa of humanism at the end of the sixteenth century" (281).

Although neither Lewis nor others mention Cather's having read Charron's works as background for Shadows on the Rock, Cather's use of the name Pierre Charron suggests that she did know of the philosopher. (That she was familiar with the works of Montaigne and Pascal has been known for quite some time.) More importantly, a reading of the novel demonstrates that Cather almost certainly not only knew of, but had read, Charron's Treatise on Wisdom. Seeing Shadows on the Rock in light of Charron's work enables the reader to view the novel not simply as a nostalgic look at lost childhood and broken family ties but also as a profound exploration of the human condition.

In A Treatise on Wisdom, Charron distinguishes three kinds of wisdom—divine,worldly, and human—but his true subject, he makes clear, is human wisdom. "Our book," Charron declares in his preface, "is intended for daily life, and to form a man for the world, and instruct him in human wisdom which is of law and reason" (xxiii). According to Charron, while knowledge is rather easily acquired, wisdom is hard won.

In the skeptical tradition, in which he is such an important figure, Charron argues that one ultimately can know little of himself and adds that it is "great folly" for one to think otherwise (63). We are born to search for truth, but the only certainty is uncertainty (125). Charron's motto, "Je ne sçay" ("I know not"), he believed, must be every being's motto, even as we seek to "know." Human wisdom, that wisdom that one can use in a practical way in day-to-day living, is attainable, however. Wisdom, Charron contends, is a gift to be discovered, developed, and cultivated. One must keep faith, accept what happens, and await revelation in order to better understand the course of one's life. The wise being is one who acknowledges the limits to one's knowing yet seeks and discovers those virtues—prudence, justice,fortitude, and temperance—that are essential to rational, quiet contentment.

In Shadows on the Rock rational, quiet contentment certainly has been established in the household of Euclide Auclair, "the philosopher apothecary of Quebec" (3). His late wife had entrusted to their young daughter, Cécile, a sense of "our way"—notions about tradition, propriety, and fine feeling—that Cécile has embraced with an enthusiasm that belies her age. On her deathbed Madame Auclair had told Cécile, "You will see that your father's whole happiness depends on order and regularity, and you will come to feel a pride in it. Without order our lives would be disgusting, like those of the poor savages" (24). Cécile's preservation of order, cleanliness, and regularity in familial affairs has assumed an almost ritualistic character. Dinner is the most important event of the day; Euclide regards the evening meal as "the thing that kept him a civilized man and a Frenchman" (16-17). The Auclairs always dine at six o'clock in the winter and at seven o'clock in the summer, "as he used to do in Paris" (10). Each day, when he returns from his errands, Euclide finds a fire burning in the fireplace and the dining table "set with a white cloth, silver candlesticks, glasses, and two clear decanters, one of red wine and one of white" (9). After dinner he retires to his shop to post his ledger and then rejoins Cécile for several hours of reading. They normally conclude the evening with a walk around the city,"nearly always the same" (21). As Charron declares in his wide-ranging discussion of social institutions, "There is nothing more beautiful than a house-hold well and peaceably governed"(72).

Implicit in Cather's portrait of Cécile, a young girl living a very ordered and secure life, is Cather's sense of her own life as a mature woman who had come to know much about chaos, suffering, and despair. While Quebec under the rule of Count Frontenac had become a bastion of orderly and civilized activity in the midst of the Canadian wilderness, that wilderness was, nonetheless, always out there, formidable and in many cases frightening. In Cather's novel it is, in fact, one of several correlatives to uncertainty, fear, and dread.

One passage early in the novel is especially telling in this respect. After an initial description of the city of Quebec, Cather shifts her attention to that "black pine forest" that "stretched no living man knew how far. That was the dead, sealed world of the vegetable kingdom, an uncharted continent choked with interlocking trees, living, dead, half-dead, their roots in bogs and swamps, strangling each other in a slow agony that had lasted for centuries. The forest was suffocation, annihilation; there European man was quickly swallowed up in silence, distance, mould, black mud, and the stinging swarms of insect life that bred in it" (6-7). Cécile's later journey into the world outside Quebec, to visit the Harnois family, is a terribly disturbing experience, presented in archetypal terms. Her guide, Pierre Charron (here rather conveniently suggesting the mythical boatman Charon) takes Cécile across the river to the Ile d'Orléans. Though Cécile is awed by the physical beauty of the island, she is shocked by the crude dress and behavior of the Harnois children. "Uneasy and afraid of something," she spends a restless first night, unable to sleep (191).

The next morning Cécile slips away into the woods, climbs toward the ridge in the middle of the island, and comes out on "a waving green hayfield with a beautiful harp-shaped elm growing in the middle of it." She falls asleep under that "symmetrical tree" and awakens a long while later, feeling "rested and happy,—though unreal, as if she were someone else" (193). Her sense of well being is short-lived, however, and as darkness approaches, "dread and emptiness [awake] in Cécile's breast again, a chilling fear of night" (194). Unable to endure the forest and the Harnois household any longer and desperately homesick for Quebec, Cécile begs Pierre to take her home. On the third day, then, she returns home, to the order, the neatness, and the security of the Auclair household. In those three days young Cécile had come to know all too well some of those shadows that threatened the rock of Quebec, as Cather in those three years from 1928 to 1931 had come to know all too well those shadows of displacement and death in her own life. In Charron's Treatise on Wisdom, Cather—herself feeling lost, abandoned, and tormented—may well have sought and found some answers, some source of healing.

As noted previously, Charron's basic assertion is that an individual cannot know for certain the answers to any of the most essential human questions. An individual, however, naturally seeks to discover truth. "We are born to search for truth, but to possess it belongs to a higher power," Charron says. "Truth is not his who thrusts himself into it, but his who strives to reach it" (21-22). (This latter comment calls to mind Myra Henshawe's assertion that "in religion seeking is finding" [Cather, My Mortal Enemy 94]). What an individual can discover, Charron contends, is how to live in a kind of contentment, with a stoic acceptance of life's vicissitudes. "Sorrow is the only true evil man is wholly born to," Charron asserts, "and it is his natural property" (57). "It is folly to grieve for that which cannot be mended, to fear that which cannot be avoided" (164). All moral philosophy, according to Charron, is best expressed in two words of Epictetus, "Sustain and abstain" (On Wisdom 34). Charron no doubt would have appreciated Cather's comment that Shadows on the Rock is a book "full of pious resignation" (On Writing 16).

The philosopher's comments are particularly interesting given the role of the noble woodsman in Cather's novel. An admiring Euclide Auclair reflects that he had liked Charron from the first time he had met him: From his first meeting with him, Auclair had loved this restless boy (he was a boy then) who shot up and down the swift rivers of Canada in his canoe; who was now at Niagara, now at the head of Lake Ontario, now at the Sault Saint Marie on his way into the fathomless forbidding waters of Lake Superior. To both Auclair and Madame Auclair, Pierre Charron had seemed the type they had come so far to find; more than anyone else he realized the romantic picture of the free Frenchman of the great forests which they had formed at home on the banks of the Seine. He had the good manners of the Old World, the dash and daring of the New. (171-72)

Pierre Charron is, however, much more than a dashing coureur de bois or mere romantic stereotype. Seen in the context of the philosopher Charron's assertions, Cather's Pierre acquires a much greater significance. On one level he is a dashing New World type who is contrasted to the Old World colonists who have settled in Quebec, but on another level he clearly lives a type of life recommended in and possesses many of those qualities praised in A Treatise on Wisdom. Cather's character, in fact, is much like Charron's ideal man.

The philosopher Charron's great contribution to the development of Western philosophy was his creation of a moral system independent of religion. As noted previously, Charron's A Treatise on Wisdom does not concern itself with that wisdom that is associated with or that is the result of knowledge. Rather, his concern is with "human wisdom," or preud'hommie. As Eugene F. Rice Jr. explains in his discussion of Charron, "Charron calls this wisdom preude prudence, an habile et forte preud'hommie, a probitébien advisée, the 'excellence and perfection of man as man'"(180).

Citing several ancient sources, Charron begins his treatise with the declaration that "The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable of all advice . . . is to study and learn how to know ourselves"(I). Charron continues, however, that since any knowledge that an individual might gain, either through the senses or through reason, is limited, humanity finally must await the revelation of the Divine. Charron presents the wise man who, while he awaits divine revelation, lives virtuously according to nature and a natural morality, with his actions as the manifestations of his virtue. (In his glorification of the man who lives a simple life according to nature, Charron here, of course, anticipates Rousseau's "noble savage" by 150 years.) Cather's woodsman, "hero of the fur trade and the coureurs de bois"(170), with "the good manners of the Old World, the dash and daring of the New" (172), liked and trusted by the Indians, admired by all for his courage, his loyalty, and his fairness, is the perfect example of the philosopher's ideal natural man, who possesses preude prudente and an habile et forte preud'hommie.

Moreover, in the context of Pierre Charron's comments in A Treatise on Wisdom, Jeanne Le Ber's role in the novel is particularly interesting. The story of Jeanne Le Ber, "the recluse of Montreal" (130), occupies much of the middle section ("The Long Winter") of Shadows on the Rock. Her "very unusual nature" had been evident from the time she was a small child. Though, as the daughter of the richest merchant in Montreal, Jeanne Le Ber had many suitors, she insisted that for her "the only real world lay within convent walls" (132). She took a five-year vow of chastity at 17, renewed that vow, and then after l0 years of "the absolute solitariness of the hermit's life" in her parents' house (132), she "entombed" herself in a cell behind the altar of the chapel of the Sisters of the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin, never again to come forth.

Although one might admire Jeanne Le Ber's passionate vision, self-sacrifice,and dedication, her cold aloofness is powerfully emphasized in Cather's depiction. Under the exterior of "pleasing girlhood," one of her teachers had noted early on, was "something reserved and guarded" (130). Despite her parents' concern, then despair, Jeanne maintained her solitary life, refusing even to speak to them. Despite her dying mother's plea that she come to give her a farewell kiss, Jeanne does not, answering only that she is praying for her. While Cécile is intrigued by the tales of Jeanne, it is hard to imagine her finding this part of Jeanne's story admirable or inspiring.

Cather, in fact, makes it quite clear that what appeals to Cécile about the legend of Jeanne Le Ber is the story of the angels' visit and the miracle of the spinning wheel, "For long after the night when Cécile first heard of the angels' visit to Mme. Le Ber, the story was a joy to her.. . . By many a fireside the story of Jeanne's spinning-wheel was told and re-told with loving exaggeration during that severe winter" (136). To young Cécile the story of the angels' visit to Jeanne is "a joy." The story of Jeanne's life is not. The story of the spinning wheel recounts a miracle, and Cécile tells it over and over to little Jacques. And it is that story that is repeated "by many a fireside" throughout Canada "with loving exaggeration" (136).

Finally Cather tells us, "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-hearteda ssumes a form. From being a shapeless longing, it becomes a beautiful image" (137; italics mine). For the simple-hearted, the very young Cécile included, such stories of miracles are indeed fascinating.

To Pierre Charron, however, the story of Jeanne Le Ber's life is disturbing and painful. Although it might be argued that Pierre's reaction to Jeanne Le Ber's choice of a solitary life is simply that of the rejected suitor, his despair over Le Ber's life clearly has a more profound basis. To Pierre,that life, lived in "resignation and despair" (183), has been wasted. Having seen and heard her from his hiding place in the chapel, 20 years after she began her "entombment," Pierre is overwhelmed by the sight of her "stone face" and the sound of her voice, "harsh and hollow like an old crow's," "hoarse, hollow, with the sound of despair in it" (180, 182). The story of Jeanne Le Ber may be inspiring to some, but it is thematically fitting that it is the central narrative in that section of Shadows on the Rock titled "The Long Winter." If one seeks a heroine in Cather's novel, one would better examine the life of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, whose spiritual dedication was manifested in "a steady routine of manual labor and administrative work," carried out while she "observed the full discipline of her order"(42).

Perhaps a better understanding of Pierre's reaction to the life of Jeanne Le Ber may be found by again examining the philosopher Charron's A Treatise on Wisdom. Charron makes his position on the life of solitude very clear. His book, he announces in his preface, "is intended for daily life, and to form a man for the world" (xxiii). He is not writing for those who would "flee the world and the company of men. But Charron aims at men committed to the world. He wants to instruct them in the active virtues of public, private, and business life, not turn them into monks, theologians, or professional philosophers" (Rice 179). It is much harder to live one's life in the world, subject to the world, Charron asserts, than it is to separate oneself and pass one's life in solitude (On Wisdom 46-47). He cannot praise a cloistered virtue. For any person living life in the world among others, engaging in everyday activities, and attempting to sustain human relationships, life presents difficulties and inevitably leads to disappointment and loss. "Pleasure is not always unalloyed, and there is always something wanting," Charron remarks in his comments on human misery, "grief is often entire and absolute, and the greatest pleasures touch us not so nearly as the lightest sorrows" (57). Yet one need not surrender to despair, for wisdom "is a mild and regular managing of the soul," and wisdom ends in tranquillity (On Wisdom 198-99).

Pierre Charron's entry into Shadows on the Rock comes in book 4, "Pierre Charron," after the section titled "The Long Winter." If the winter, like the forest wilderness, represents hardship, uncertainty, and a kind of spiritual as well as physical death, Pierre Charron's arrival in Quebec coincides with a rebirth of hope and a new sense of life. The colony of Quebec, under the civil order and authority of Count Frontenac and the religious order and authority established by Bishop Laval, has endured, despite the cold, the darkness, and the forest wilderness that surrounds it. Pierre arrives on the first day of June, when "the quickening of all life and hope which had come to France in May had reached the far North at last"(109). His arrival inspires in Cécile a sense of well being, as does his reappearance in book 6, "The Dying Count." At major crisis points in her life, Cécile turns to Pierre. At the beginning of the "Pierre Charron"section, Cécile runs to Pierre's embrace, throws her arms around him, and exclaims, "Oh, Pierre Charron, I am delighted at you, Pierre Charron!"(170-71). And later, when Pierre, having heard of the count's illness, returns to Quebec, Cécile again throws her arms around him and cries,"Oh, Pierre, Pierre Charron!" "Never in all her life," Cather writes, "had she felt so strong and so true, so real and so sure" (264). While his physical strength and forest daring are presented in romantic style, thus making him a fitting hero for the novel as well as for young Cécile, Pierre's strength of character is also emphasized. His face, we are told, is "full of experience and sagacity" (172).

In Shadows on the Rock, Cécile is in the process of growing up. She had dealt with her mother's death and had continued the way of life her mother had established in the New World. She lives through "the long winter," and she "survives" the unpleasant visit to the Harnois family. Unlike Pierre,who has learned to accept hardship and danger as well as comfort and repose,who has learned to move with ease between the worlds of the colony and the forest, Cécile, in the course of the novel, is learning to deal with "the stern realities of life" (3). Her marriage to Pierre by novel's end on one level may be seen as a very predictable and sentimental ending to Cather's story. If Shadows on the Rock is read as a philosophical novel based on the writings of Pierre's real-life namesake, however, Cécile's marriage to Pierre may be seen to signify not only the culmination of a childhood infatuation but also a realization of Cécile's maturity. Moreover, if through Cécile Cather was "reinventing herself as a child"(Lee 301), Cécile's marriage to Pierre may be seen to imply Cather's acceptance of a philosophical position that provided comfort and wisdom during a crisis period in her life. Writing Shadows on the Rock, Cather wrote to Dorothy Canfield Fisher in May 1931, "had been her only refuge for the past three years" (Woodress 423). Like Cather, Cécile too had faced along winter after La Bonne Espérance had disappeared. "A life without security, without plans, without preparation for the future, had been terrible," both for Cécile and for Cather (Shadows 252).

Although Euclide Auclair has been "indeed fortunate" to live out his life "where nothing changed," Cather had not been so fortunate. She knew full well as she wrote this novel what it meant to feel "entirely cut off"(Shadows 4) from the world she had left behind. In the character Pierre Charron, Cather suggests a source of strength; in his namesake's healthy skepticism she apparently found a guide, in his advocacy of stoic endurance,a comfort. At the end of Shadows on the Rock Cécile retires to her room after having prepared dinner for her father and Pierre. She "turned to slumber," Cather says, "with the weight of doubt and loneliness melted away." Her last thoughts "before she slips into forgetfulness" are of Pierre, "a friend, devoted and fearless, here in the house with them, as if he were one of themselves." "He had not a throne behind him," Cécile reflects, "not the authority of a parchment and seal. But he had authority, and a power which came from knowledge of the country and its people; from knowledge and a kind of passion" (267-68). That is, his power came from knowledge and a kind of suffering.

In her book on Cather, Susie Thomas calls Shadows on the Rock, "an aberration." "The narrowness of vision," she says, "is wholly uncharacteristic" of Cather (166). Any narrowness of vision in Shadows on the Rock, I believe, is only apparent. The significance of Cather's fictional Pierre Charron has long been ignored, but a reading of the philosopher Pierre Charron's Treatise on Wisdom suggests that Cather's character certainly is no mere romantic stereotype and that Shadows on the Rock is much more than a mere sentimental remembrance of Cather's own childhood. Charron's Treatise on Wisdom, it would seem, informs much of a philosophical subtext in Shadows on the Rock, and this novel, like Lucy Gayheart, does, evidently, have a remarkable philosophical complexity.

For those who, like old Saint-Vallier, have been "uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves" (Shadows 279), Charron's gently skeptical stoic philosophy provides a practical guide for "daily life." In Shadows on the Rock, Pierre's face is said to be "full of experience and sagacity," as is his namesake's famous treatise on wisdom. In a letter to Elizabeth Vermorcken, written shortly after the novel's publication, Cather complained about those readers who said that in Shadows on the Rock they had been given chicken broth instead of roast beef. They should have trusted her, Cather declared, to know what she was doing (Lee 293). Cather was right, of course. They should have.

In her 1927 letter to Commonweal, written to explain how she wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather indirectly offered a possible interpretation for the novel itself: "I used to wish there were some written account of the old times when those churches were built; but I soon felt that no record of them could be as real as they are themselves. They are their own story, and it is foolish convention that we must have everything interpreted for us in written language" (On Writing 6, emphasis mine). In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather attempts to bring readers beyond"written language," trying to create on the written page that which is usually intelligible only with sound or sight. To teach us how to read beyond written language Cather offers two models, one aural and one visual: the Angelus bell and the figure of the southwestern mesa. The novel thus offers a pedagogy of interpretation: when we understand the mesa and the bell as tropes with which to organize our understanding of the novel, we arrive at new ways of reading Cather. She deliberately does not provide us with means to "translate" her landscape into meaning; we can only "divine"meaning—Cather's word for how we are to understand the "inexplicable presence of the thing not named" (On Writing 41). When we try to name the thing, we limit the full range of associations and reverberations; we do not hear the entire Angelus, and we do not see the full scale of the mesa. The aural and visual landscapes of the novel teach us to read; what we come to understand is that, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, tropes and topos are one and the same.

The novel makes meaning in much the same way as does the tolling of the Angelus bell in the beginning of the novel: a series of echoing associations that come together to form a whole. The bell's notes are "Full, clear . . .each note floated through the air like a globe of silver" (43), but until the last note joins the first in the air, the Angelus itself is not complete. When Latour first hears the Angelus bell, almost in his sleep, he has the "pleasing delusion that he was in Rome" (42). As the bell continues to ring the nine strokes of the Angelus, its sound sends Latour on an inner journey: "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. . . . 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. It had happened on a street in New Orleans.... he [had been]overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped . . . into a garden in the south of France. . . . And now this silvery bell had carried him farther and faster than sound could travel" (43). The bell's sound sets up a series of reactions in Latour's mind, bringing him to places that he has not physically seen but that the sound allows him to imagine. He travels to the Old World, to places of origin: Jerusalem, the holy city; Rome (and thus by implication the Vatican); New Orleans, one of the first cities in the United States; and the south of France, Latour's boyhood home. Although Latour's thoughts are linear—from distant to recent past—they are triggered by the sound of the bell all at once and experienced synchronously. This synchronous experience of time becomes central to the novel; the novel works to represent time and space, history and tradition, in nonlinear ways.

The story of the bell's provenance continues the movement from past to present, from Europe to America: "the inscription [on the bell] is in Spanish. . . . it must have been brought up from Mexico City in an ox-cart .. . and the silver of the Spaniards was really Moorish, was it not.... The Spaniards knew nothing about working silver except as they learned it from the Moors. . . . The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors" (45). Thus the skill of"infidel" Europe becomes the artisanship of Catholic Spaniards, the trade of colonized Mexicans, and finally the art and craft of Native Americans, who are in effect being displaced by the carriers of the traditions they have embraced. The two French priests, Father Latour and his companion Father Vaillant, listen to their Spanish bell ringing the Catholic Angelus in an American territory occupied first by the Native Americans, then the Spanish, then by the French, and finally by Americans. The bell's provenance illustrates historical movement; the tradition of silversmithing becomes away of tracing patterns of Old World imperialism and yet also suggests that, in Cather's mind, aesthetic traditions continue regardless of who is in power.

Cather's descriptions of landscape—the New Mexican mesa itself—provide the visual counterpart to the Angelus bell. The mesa offers another trope that we can use to help us read beyond language. Father Latour and Jacinto, riding through this landscape en route to Acoma, stop so that Jacinto can show Latour where they are going, "The Bishop following with his eye the straight, pointing Indian hand, saw, far away, two great mesas. . . . at this distance [they] seemed close together, though they were really some miles apart" (96). Mesas are perceptible only at a distance although distance can blur the perception of depth. The distance alters our perspective on the subject to the point that the distance—perspective—becomes the subject. And because each layer of a mesa is a compression or distillation of the landscape at a particular point in time, seeing the entire mesa allows us to see all the different eras of history at once: chronological time can be seen synchronously.

The layers of the novel, which resemble the striations in a mesa, create a novel structured to collapse seeming oppositions, such as pagan and Christian, Europe and America, past and present, into one another. In order to see the full range of these complexities, we need to learn to read the landscape. The mesa is the site of that lesson. Each term of the opposition becomes a striation of the novel, and by collapsing these seeming dialectics, Cather calls into question the idea that any one history, any one set of experiences, can define America. The mesa like structure of the novel incorporates Old World and New and finds the Old World in the New.

Latour's reactions to the mesa and to the sound of the bell are examples of how the novel attempts to layer Old World and New, but Latour himself also offers an example of the connection between old and new. Latour's name indicates the presence of this layering: the aesthetic ideals of Walter Pater, whose final novel was titled Gaston Latour (1888), about a Frenchman in the Middle Ages. This in turn is eerily echoed by Cather's last, unfinished novel: a story of two French boys from Avignon, set during the Middle Ages. Although Cather seems to have quoted Pater directly only once, in her 1925 preface to Sarah Orne Jewett's short stories, Bernice Slote suggests that Pater was one of those "great essayists . . . whose beliefs and whose rich, incantatory, or elegant styles certainly touched [Cather's]own" (36). Cather's early statement that "a novel requires not one flash of understanding, but a clear, steady flame and oil in one's flask beside" (qtd in Skaggs 11) resonates directly with what Pater wrote in the conclusion to The Renaissance: "to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life" (Bloom 60). Pater's "hard gemlike flame"and Cather's "clear, steady flame" are clearly similar fires. Pater's ideas pervade this novel to the extent that Latour becomes a sort of Pater on horseback. So, for instance, when Latour says to Joseph Vaillant that "I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you" (50) it rephrases Pater's dictum that one should "know one's own impression as it really is" (Bloom 17).

Latour's burning desire to build a cathedral worthy of the beautiful setting echoes a Paterian comment that Cather made to Mariel Gere in an 1896 letter, to the effect that there is no god but one god, and art is god's revealer. She said that was her creed and indicated her commitment to it (August 4,1896, Cather papers, University Archives/Special Collections Department, UNL Libraries). Latour is the artist figure within the artistic creation of the novel. He is not a representation of Cather herself although they do share a similarly Paterian vision. Latour's position at the end of the novel embodies Pater's idea that life is a "drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. . . . to such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down" (Bloom 59-60). In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather records specific incidents in the life of Latour and his friend, Father Vaillant, but fleetingly, with large gaps of time and space between episodes. Ultimately, however, the novel "fines itself down" to the moment of Latour's consciousness before he dies: a refined moment, a precise moment, but composed of a flood of memories. This refined moment in the flow is like one note heard in the midst of many or like one striation of earth in the totality of a mesa.

Latour, like Pater, is interested in the beautiful more than the sensual; when his parishioners want to please him they give him "something good for the eye" (179). Latour is made uncomfortable by the physical, a distaste nowhere more clearly marked than in the cave scene about a third of the way through the novel. Latour and his guide, Jacinto, are caught in a snowstorm and take refuge in a cave Jacinto knows of. The cave is a "mouth-like opening. . . . two great stone lips, slightly parted and thrust outward"(127). From the beginning, the cave signifies a kind of appetite and physicality that will be distasteful to the priest.

The cave is a place sacred to the Pecos tribe's rituals, which is another reason for Latour's discomfort—he is outside his parish, so to speak. Jacinto tells him the cave is "used by [his] people," which suggests that somewhere in the underground cavern (perhaps in the hole that Jacinto so carefully blocks off from the priest) is the snake holy to his tribe. In the cave it is Jacinto, not the priest, who tends the altar and sacred flame. Jacinto's religion is the New World's own "Old World"; the European traditions represented by Latour seem youthful in comparison. The cave is a labyrinth of holes, throatlike passages, mouths, and caverns, suggesting that the French priest seems to be at the opposite end of his Catholic church and its idea of heaven. It is not coincidence that the chapter is titled "Snake Root"; Latour is at the root of things, the base. The cave is the site where many of the novel's apparent oppositions are conflated. It also becomes a site wherein the New World of America reveals its significantly ancient roots.

There is something primitive about the cave: the strong, devouring femaleness of the cavities and orifices directly contrasts with the icons of"dolorous Virgins" above ground. This cave is the first of two feminized enclosures within which Latour will encounter something he cannot name or control, something akin to the sublime. This powerful force resides in the cave below the Sangre de Cristo mountains, which adds to the sense that its sacredness antedates the blood of Christ under which it hides. The "pagan" lies under the Christian surface implying the presence of an earth goddess whom Latour senses but cannot name. There are also other resonances and other beliefs in this cave and as a result Latour feels quite ill.

After Jacinto lights the fire, however, Latour—and the reader—encounter still other juxtapositions, other layers of meaning. The fire relaxes the priest, warms him to the point that he becomes aware of "an extraordinary vibration. . . . it hummed like a hive of bees, like a heavy roll of distant drums" (129). Jacinto, also hearing the thrumming noise, leads the priest through a tunnel. The two men go "along a tunnel . . . where the roof grew much lower. . . . Jacinto knelt down over a fissure in the stone floor, like a crack in china. . . . he put his ear on the opening. . . . Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long time" (129-30). We are not allowed to ignore the continuous penetration, deepening, revelation—the two men go from a low-roofed tunnel to a fissure, a crack, an opening, another crack. The priest and the Indian are moving toward the innermost sancta sanctorum. Finally, we are at the source of the vibration and Father Latour realizes:"he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with great majesty and power" (130). The priest has encountered the creative imagination via British Romanticism and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1816). In Coleridge's poem, of course, the visionary poet sees and hears: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. . . . . . . . . And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing. Coleridge's underground river is also a "mighty fountain," and its tumult causes Kubla Khan to hear "ancestral voices." What Cather gives us here is a site of disjunction, an implicit confrontation between Old Worlds: the allusion to Coleridge suggests the Old World of Europe, but the cave encloses one of the "oldest voices of the earth." The force of the flood is such that both Latour's Paterian Catholicism and Jacinto's Native American mysticism are humbled before its ancient sound. The voice of the ancient river echoes the voice of the bell: both sounds transport the priest, although the river terrifies him because he cannot name what it is that he hears. Latour and Jacinto do not talk about what they have heard—the priest's only response is "[i]t is terrible" (130)—they simply return to sit by the fire.

Evelyn Hively suggests that this cave scene provides "one of the strongest points of contrast in religions in the book" (158), but I would suggest that we are not being asked to contrast religions. Instead, we are forced to question which set of beliefs is informing the other. Can either be privileged? We are presented not with a contrast but with a relationship that implies connection, a connection that makes Latour uncomfortable because it asks him to acknowledge beliefs other than his own. Thus when he and Jacinto return to the cave, the fire that Jacinto had kindled is "giving off a rich glow of light in that lofty Gothic chamber" (131). Prior to the encounter with the underground river, the cavern was only like "a Gothic chapel" "of vague outline" (129), but now, as if the encounter with the Romantic imagination has transfigured the cave, it is "that lofty Gothic chamber" (134 emphasis mine), a specific site, recognizable to the priest in a way the voices of the river are not. Only after the cave actually becomes a Gothic chamber can the priest fully relax, eat, and sleep. Nevertheless, this Gothic space is also sacred to Jacinto's tribe and contains a river that reverberates with the sounds of histories that make Latour's religion seem brand-new by comparison. The cave becomes a nexus of shifting, apparently contradictory meanings: the cave's stone lips will provide refuge, but the refuge's smell makes the priest ill; the fire burns away the odor, but the voice of the river makes him dizzy. The cave is a place for Indian rituals and the site of High Romantic imagination. It seems hollow, but it supports mountains and from it emerge landscapes.

This already complicated scene is further tangled by Jacinto's presence, which becomes another site of simultaneous meaning. The priest, thinking Jacinto asleep, moves closer to the hole Jacinto had walled up, wanting to examine it more closely. What he sees instead is Jacinto, transfixed by the "oldest voice," in a posture Christlike and mystical: "there against the wall was [Jacinto], standing on some invisible foothold, his arms outstretched against the rock, his body flattened against it, his ear ...listening; listening with supersensual ear, it seemed, and he looked to be supported against the rock by the intensity of his solicitude" (132). Jacinto is simultaneously the Romantic poet, the figure of Christ, and a Native American mystic. Jacinto can hear the voice of the sublime, even be supported by it—the "invisible foothold" —while his body is in the position of one who has been crucified. The cave is a place of Indian ritual, Romantic tropology, and now Christian typology. The phrase "he looked to be supported against the rock," which seems simple enough on the surface, in fact adds ambiguities. The phrase could imply that Jacinto is "looking for support" from the so-called rock of the church. However, it is also possible that he is asking the river for the strength to resist—"against"—the church.

Father Latour's vertigo, or what he thinks is vertigo, is caused by hearing the underground river. But Cather creates a dizzying scene for the reader as well, pushing us ever deeper into the cave, layering histories, typologies, and mythologies, until we too, feel that it is unlike anything we have experienced. Jacinto is the type of Christ, arms outstretched, supported by an intense "solicitude," a curious word to use here because according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means both "care" and "disquietude, uneasiness." But Jacinto is also the Spanish word for hyacinth flower, which calls to mind the myth of Hyacinth and Apollo. Apollo loved Hyacinth, but when a discus Apollo threw was blown off course by the jealous Zephyr, the West Wind, the discus struck Hyacinth on the head and killed him. From his lover's body Apollo created the hyacinth flower, giving his lover immortality of a sort. The figure of Jacinto blends two stories of immortality and transubstantiation, one Christian, the other pre-Christian and homoerotic.

The multiplicity created through the layers of meaning in Jacinto's name continues the layering we have seen in descriptions of the cave: it is a Gothic chamber and a devouring (feminine) mouth. The vibrations in the cave are pastoral, "like a hive of bees," and threatening, "like a heavy roll of distant drums." And although Father Latour is the priest, it is Jacinto who lights the purifying flame and leads the way to the source; Latour's ritual shave no meaning below the earth. The cave and Jacinto suggest the difficulty of deciphering what exactly is "Old World": the Old World of the Americas before the European settlers or the Old World of Europe. These layer simplicitly allow Cather to question whether terms such as "New World" and "Old World," "ancient" and "modern" can provide adequate definitions with which to interpret history. We have to move beyond such seemingly dichotomous relations into a mode of interpretation that does not privilege any one set of tropes over any other.

As we move out of the cave, histories appear before us like the striations in the mesas: the river flows "under ribs of antediluvian rock," and from this antediluvian space we move up and out, into the "tender morning"outside the cave's mouth. The morning landscape that greets the two men when they emerge from the cave is a "gleaming white world," covered with "virgin snow," a new world, a blank. The virgin snow appears to cancel out the ancient systems of belief: the European's Virgin obliterates the stone lips of Jacinto's cave. The branches outside the cave are "laden with soft, rose-coloured clouds of virgin snow" (132), an almost paradisiacal image: the pearly gates to the New World. The landscape and the description of the morning move us to a consideration of history and the movement from an Old World to a New, a shift that seems at first to be a straightforward linear progression. But the entire mesa, including the cave that supports it, is created from layers of Old World and New; the layers support and enable one another. Cather attempts to move us beyond written language in our apprehension of these layers of meaning: what happens in the cave happens through our raft of associations with the brief words she gives us. The language is the tip; it is not the whole. We comprehend the whole only when we cease to focus on singular, particular images.

Within the cave we begin to understand how the novel's layers complicate easy understandings of religion and history; the landscape outside the cave presents a visual correlation for that lesson. Latour's encounter with Sada, the Mexican slave, rewrites the cave scene in order to stress this visual lesson even as it presents another example of the complicated structures underlying the apparently simple surface of the novel. Their meeting, chronicled in the chapter called "December Night," begins with Father Latour's dark night of the soul and seems to be an overt paean to Catholicism and its salutatory powers. Once we see all the layers of this scene, however, we also see Latour's position as a Paterian observer and notice that what is at work in Latour's church is something much older than catholicism. What happens between Latour and Sada reinforces the importance of seeing the whole rather than focusing on the particular.

The encounter with Sada stresses sight, highlighting the importance of the visual over the verbal. The courtyard between Latour's house and the church is covered with snow, an etching in black and silver: "the court was white with snow, and the shadows of walls and buildings stood out sharply in the faint light" (212). This snow is different from the blizzard that obliterated the trail and forced Latour into the stone-lipped cave. Here in his own church-yard Latour is in control, able to observe. Unlike in the cave scene, no voices terrify him. There is almost no sound at all except for Sada's confession and prayers. The whole scene emphasizes the way light plays over surfaces: from the silhouette of the church tower against moonlit clouds and shadows on the snow to Latour's candle shining on Sada's "dark brown peon face" and the "red spark of the sanctuary lamp" in the pitch dark of the church (214).

Even Sada's prayers express themselves visually. Latour is moved by the belief he sees on her face when she tells him it has been 19 years since she has "seen the holy things of the altar" (214, emphasis mine). Latour had never "seen such pure goodness shine out of a human's countenance" (213, emphasis mine). When Latour lets Sada into the church, to the Lady Chapel, he sees "the working of [Sada's] face. . . . the beautiful tremors [that] passed over it [and] tears of ecstasy" (214). All this light and shadow suggests Cather's essay "Light on Adobe Walls," her unfinished fragment about the possibilities of artistic representation. The artist can paint not sunlight but "only the tricks that shadows play with it. . . . some emotion . . . that happens to give him personal delight . . . that makes one nerve in him thrill and tremble" (On Writing 124). Both Sada and Latour experience this "thrill," Sada by seeing the Lady Chapel, Latour by seeing Sada's belief.

The visible power of Sada's ecstasy allows Latour to share her emotion: "He was able to feel, kneeling beside her, the preciousness of the things of the altar. . . . he received the miracle in her heart into his own, saw through her eyes" (217-18). Earlier Latour had said miracles "rest upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always" (50). Ironically, the miracle Latour experiences with Sada involves him seeing "through her eyes" rather than his own. These moments of fine perception, moments that imply a fleeting unity, are described in the conclusion to The Renaissance, in which Pater talks about those instants when we are able to distinguish from among a "flood of external objects" and receive a "single sharp impression" (Bloom 59). Latour's "miracle" and Pater's "single sharp impression" are similar, if not identical, moments of perception that produce almost identical results.

Sada becomes the site of a Paterian miracle: what Latour sees in Sada helps him, as Pater says, to "gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded"(Bloom 61). This gathering up of sensation brings Latour to a moment of fullness, of being at one with what is outside himself: "the peace without[the church] seemed all at one with the peace in his soul" (219). This is a marked contrast to Latour's feeling at the beginning of the chapter, when"doubt .. . made him feel an alien. . . . his soul had become a barren field" (211). Even at the moment of fullness, however, there is what Pater calls a "vanishing away" (Bloom 60) in the description of "the line of black footprints [Latour's] departing visitor had left in the wet scurf of the snow" (219). The silvery beauty of the newly fallen snow is now "wet scurf"; the moment of seeming "all at one" vanishes into a line of departing footprints. The Paterian moment is fluid, not static:"those impressions of the individual mind . . . are in perpetual flight"(Bloom 60). Thus this entire scene becomes a kind of passion play about a moment of beauty moving us out of ourselves. We recognize and "fine down" an impression, but at the moment of fining down there is loss. Latour is joined with Sada and feels his inner peace merge with the peace of the external world. But the footsteps vanish, and the next chapter begins with the announcement of the death of Eusabio's son.

Latour comforts Sada by giving her not warm words but a "little silver medal, with a figure of the Virgin"—something to look at. He thinks this a good gift for Sada "for one who cannot read—or think—the Image, the physical form of Love!" (219, 220). He offers her not language but an image, something which her soul can "adore" (220). Sada's ability to gain comfort from an image reveals to Latour the limitations of his intellectual—verbal—faith, "his prayers were empty words and brought him no refreshment" (211). Vision seems more important than language, an idea that may explain the elision over the name Mary: the name is not as important to Sada as is the feeling she gets when she sees the altar in the Lady Chapel.

Latour sees the Lady Chapel only in terms of Catholicism, but Cather creates layers of meaning in this feminized enclosure as well, linking it to the stone-lipped cave in which Latour found such uncomfortable refuge. Cather's description of the spiritual presence in the Lady Chapel links the Virgin Mary with other, earlier goddesses who offer comfort to the wretched: Latour is able to "feel all it meant to [Sada] to know that there was a Kind Woman in Heaven.... [o]ld people, who have felt blows and toil and know the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness. Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer" (217). Latour's God is dismissed in lieu of this other divine force that can understand female pain. This is not only a rare expression of female solidarity on Cather's part but also a link between the Mariolatry of the Lady Chapel and the ancient snake-goddess in the cave.

The female divinity within the Lady Chapel finds further expression in the images of the transformative moonlight that bracket the scenes inside the chapel itself. When Latour wakes up in the night and decides to go to the church, he sees the "full moon ... [that] threw a pale phosphorescent luminousness over the heavens" (212). Afterward, as Sada slips off into the dark, "the full moon shone high in the blue vault, majestic, lonely, benign" (219). The moon, of course, has long been considered a female symbol and suggests again that Latour's religion should be seen in the context of older religions that have not been supplanted as much as they have been subsumed. Marina Warner, in her study of the Virgin Mary, places the Virgin in a context similar to what Cather does here. Warner suggests the possibility of a "chain of descent from Hippolyte [queen of the Amazons] to Diana to the Virgin. . . . that the Amazon queen venerated in Cappodocia was subsumed into the fertility goddess Diana of Ephesus, and that the memories of her emblem . . . survived in the city where the Virgin Mary was proclaimed" (280). Warner also points out that"Diana was associated with the moon . . . and the Virgin Mary is identified with the moon and the stars' influence as well as with the forces of fertility and generation" (225). It seems no accident that the title of the chapter that follows the scene between Latour and Sada is titled "Spring in the Navajo Country." We go from "Woman, divine" to spring: the power of the goddess is still at work.

The moon shining down on Latour as he looks down at Sada's vanishing footprints suggests an older religion, one that Latour would not or could not recognize. The image of the moon and the image on the medal Latour gives Sada are two incarnations of this "Woman, divine": the two virgins—Diana and Mary—watch over the priest and the suffering woman. These female divinities connect the ancient goddess with the Catholic icon with the stone-lipped cave's snake: the chapel becomes an extension of the cave. Just as Mary and her chapel support the church and the cave supports the mountains—recesses that strengthen—so too the "space" or gap in the text where the word Mary might appear supports the presence of Diana or any "Woman, divine."

The final paragraph of this section shifts from Latour alone, locking "his church," to the moon alone in the arched "blue vault" of the heavens and then back to Latour, looking at Sada's footsteps in the snow. Latour has his church, the moon has hers (the blue vault of the heavens), although what Latour may briefly sense but does not understand is that the Lady Chapel, the moon, and the cave are all connected. The rapid shifts in focus—from church to moon to Latour—are another manifestation of the novel's layers, again creating a deeper structure than at first seems apparent. As with the notes of the Angelus bell, this scene is not complete until the final note, sounded by the presence of the moon, has been heard or seen.

Cather's layering process moves us out of a dichotomized "either/or" reading of the novel into a way of reading based on "both/and." Thus Jacinto embodies both Christian and pre-Christian identities as well as that of the Romantic poet, Sada worships at the altar of an ancient goddess who is also the Virgin Mary, and Latour's cathedral is an edifice built from, and out of, a variety of traditions. The cathedral is "worthy of a setting naturally beautiful" (175) and it will be built in the style of the Midi Romanesque, which Latour says is "the right style for this country" (243). After it is finished, the cathedral seems to be one with the southwestern landscape; it is both southwestern and French, organic and constructed: "the tawny church seemed to start directly out of those rose-coloured hills. . . . the towers rose clear into the blue air while the body of the church still lay against the mountain" (272). The description of the church on the mountain is similar to Jacinto's position clinging to the wall of the cave—both church and man unify seeming opposites. Pater seems to have presciently described Latour's church in "Winckelmann," when he explains that "Christian art was still dependent of pagan examples, building the shafts of pagan temples into its churches" (Bloom 213). Although Latour may not have actually used the shafts of pagan temples, his church is supported by the cave wherein Jacinto's goddess-snake is enclosed.

Latour's cathedral becomes not a colonizer's monument but an example of what can happen when, as Pater described in his essay on Coleridge, "a mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the limitations of the particular, the individual, [and] attains a strange power of modifying and centralising what it receives from without, according to the pattern of an inward ideal"(Bloom 150). Latour's idea about what "his" cathedral should look like moves free from the particularities of convention and allows him to build a church that reminds him of something "nearer Clermont" in the Santa Fe hills that he describes as the color of "the dried blood of saints and martyrs preserved in old churches in Rome" (272). His inward ideals about the sacred and the beautiful guide him in designing his monument. Pater's idea seems an apt description, not just of what the cathedral represents within the text of the novel itself but of what the novel itself represents in terms of Cather's aesthetic project and as we will see, of what happens in Latour's mind before his death. The "particular" would seem to force a choice in interpretive modes but the "inward ideal" can be adapted to suggest a way of reading that allows multiples, takes us beyond the words on the page.

Before Latour dies, his caretakers think that "his mind was failing," but Latour does not care about their opinion. They do not realize that his mind "was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life" (290). Latour ranges through time and space, drawing on all episodes of his life without highlighting any one in particular:He observed also that there was no longer any perspective to his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his cathedral. He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. (290)None of Latour's history is lost to him: it is all there, all comprehensible. He has "modified" and "centralized" his past; it becomes what one reader called "the tower of consciousness." Of course, Latour's very name indicates his position: he is in la tour, the tower. Latour's far-ranging memories and associations echo the pattern of associations set in motion by the silver bell ringing the Angelus much earlier in the novel. In both instances he moves free from the particular—there is "no perspective"—yet each memory is a specific moment and the moments form a flow. It is this perspective—in which there is no perspective, in which everything, Old World and New, Catholic and pagan, youth and age, is layered together—that the novel pushes us to maintain while we read. We are asked to read with a perspective that, like Latour's, loses nothing, comprehends everything.

Willa Cather maintained a lifelong fascination with both real-life and fictional heroes. Among her earliest readings were Homer, Shakespeare, Emerson, and Carlyle—all writers whose subjects could be termed heroic. Clearly this fascination with heroes was interwoven with her preference for romanticism. As Bernice Slote observes in her introduction to The Kingdom of Art, Cather "obviously liked these patterns of romance, whatever the story .. . [because] romance exalts courage, honor, daring, love, and all the emotions she considered ennobling; it also represents the creative, exploring truth of the imagination" (63).

As Cather's art developed, her use of the "patterns of romance" changed rather dramatically from a focus on the outer "heroic action" of romance in which the "hero is the exemplum of courage, daring, and the strong passions that give life purpose and strength" (Slote 63) to the "creative, exploring truth of the imagination" to what Harold Bloom has called the "internalization of quest-romance" (15). Her active male protagonists—Bartley Alexander, Jim Burden, Tom Outland, and Archbishop Latour, for example—and her proactive female protagonist Thea Kronborg embody the heroic quest archetype of separation, initiation, and return described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (30). However, this powerful paradigm proves inadequate to explain the heroic roles of the characters in Shadows on the Rock—especially the role of female protagonist Cécile Auclair.

The traditional quest structure cannot elucidate the heroic ideal in Shadows on the Rock because this structure presupposes a central action, and as many critics have observed—and even complained—this novel has little or no plot and thus little or no action. Instead of focusing on external action, Cather sets her novel in "the internal arena," where, according to Dana A. Heller, the great romantic poets found "the true drama of the quest"(5). Indeed, Carlyle declared in On Heroes and Hero-Worship, a book that Cather read in her youth (Slote 42), "The hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the true, divine and eternal, which exists always, unseen to most" (184). Even Campbell emphasizes the inner quest, asserting that "The passage of the mythological hero may be overground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward—into depths where ... long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world"(29). Heller believes that this romantic internalization of the quest "anticipates the feminization of the form by creating a kind of heroism not determined by physical strength but by intellectual and visionary endeavors"(5). The paradigm that best explains this internal heroic quest is that of "the hero within" as discussed by Carol Pearson. Like many feminists, Pearson recognizes that "The great books on the hero, such as Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, assumed either than the hero was male or that male heroism and female heroism were essentially the same"(xx). In her study, Pearson found that "although on the archetypal level the patterns of male and female heroism were quite similar, they differed profoundly in detail, tone, and meaning from analogous stories about men"(xx). However, Pearson also declares that many feminist theorists "overemphasize differences" in male and female heroes and proposes to explore "female and male journey patterns together" (xx). In The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By, Pearson expands the idea of the hero to portray the lifetime heroic journey based on the "additive" but "not strictly linear" (xxii) archetypal stages of the Innocent, the Orphan, the Martyr, the Warrior, the Wanderer, and the Magician. Although some correlation exists between Pearson's archetypes and the standard Jungian archetypes, such as the correlation between her Magician and Jung's Wise Old Man or Wise Old Woman, her focus is quite different from that of the classic psychologist. Defining archetype as "essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived" (Basic 289), Jung focuses on the unconscious whereas Pearson explores "the archetypes active in our conscious lives" (xxvii)—archetypes that in Shadows on the Rock Cather, the artist, has filled out with symbols and characters that are "the material of conscious experience" ( Jung, Aspects 107).

Many of the characters in Shadows on the Rock exist primarily on the level of archetype, or shadow. As Susan J. Rosowski has observed, the characters in Shadows on the Rock, like many of the settings and incidents, "all have the reality of an idea for which capital letters are appropriate: Cécile is Mother, Jacques is Child, the Rock is Loyalty, and the wilderness beyond it Annihilation" (Voyage 187). According to Pearson's archetypal paradigm, we may read the young Cécile as the archetype of the Innocent, Jacques as that of the Orphan, Jeanne Le Ber as the Martyr, Pierre Charron as the Wanderer, Count Frontenac as the Warrior, and Euclide Auclair and Bishop Laval as Magicians—one secular and one religious. In addition to providing the key to understanding how these characters embody specific archetypes, Pearson's archetypes also explain the personal growth that occurs within the protagonist Cécile Auclair and, to a lesser degree, within other major characters in the novel.

James Woodress's complaint that "the dramatis personae of the novel tend to be flat" and "two-dimensional" (430), justified by Merrill Skaggs as the appropriate form for what she views as Cather's "miracle play" (After the World 137), can also be explained by the concept of archetype, of the primordial forms that become Cather's Shadows on the Rock of Quebec. Along with the archetype of the Innocent, which will be discussed later in the context of Cécile Auclair's growth, the archetype of the Orphan is what Pearson calls a "preheroic" archetype. According to Pearson, "Life inevitably will liberate Innocents from their illusions, but Orphans, more than any other type, need help crossing the threshold and embarking upon their heroic journey" (37).

The archetypal Orphan in Shadows on the Rock is Jacques, "a chunky, rather clumsy little boy of six, unkept and uncared for, dressed in a pair of old sailor's breeches" by his "irreclaimable" mother 'Toinette Gaux (49-50). Even young Cécile notices that "This child never looked very well. He was not thin,—rather chunky, on the contrary,—but there was no color in his cheeks, or even in his lips. That, Cécile knew, was because he wasn't properly nourished" (63). The help that Jacques needs to embark on his own heroic journey comes not from his mother or his unknown father but from the Quebec community—from Bishop Laval who, seeing in him the type of the Christ Child, takes him home one cold night, feeds him, and ceremonially washes his feet; from Count Frontenac, who provides the money for a pair of shoes to protect his feet from the intense cold; and finally from the Auclairs, especially from Cécile, who "had first noticed Jacques playing about the market place, and begun to bring him home with her, wash his face, and give him a piece of good bread to eat"—adopting him and caring for him as she had cared for her sick mother (51-52).

Like most orphans, Jacques's primary fear is of abandonment, first of all by his worthless mother and then by the "jolly Breton sailor who had played with him in the summer and carved him a marvelous beaver" before sailing off on La Garonne (68). Through the love of Cécile and other citizens of Quebec and through the religious instruction about the Holy Family that Cécile gives him, however, Jacques begins to move beyond the Orphan stage, to give love as well as to take it, when he gives his beaver to the Christ Child in the Auclairs' crèche. Although we do not follow Jacques's journey closely, we discover in the epilogue that he has become a sailor, a Wanderer, but that between voyages he returns to the Auclair household and stays in Cécile's old room, vacated upon her marriage. Just as Cécile's engraved cup had once symbolized her home, so do Jacques's shells and corals in Auclair's apothecary shop symbolize that Jacques is no longer an Orphan.

Whereas an Orphan, such as Jacques, "seeks rescue from suffering, the Martyr embraces it, believing it will bring redemption" (Pearson 98). Shadows on the Rock is filled with stories of martyrs but the most dramatic martyr, perhaps even, as Skaggs asserts, the "most exceptional presence in this novel is that of Jeanne Le Ber" ("A Good Girl" 35), the recluse who steals "down the stair-way like a shadow on her way to mass" (132). Certainly Jeanne Le Ber is the most problematic character in the novel. Wearing "a little haircloth shirt next to her tender skin" (131) even as a child and ultimately sacrificing marriage to her childhood friend Pierre Charron as well as her life with her own family, Jeanne Le Ber embodies the Martyr's belief "that salvation must be earned by suffering" (Pearson 101). Alone in her cell, Jeanne encounters both the personal shadow of her own sins and the archetypal Shadow of Original Sin itself. According to Jung himself—with whose works Cather may have been familiar through her friendship with Jungian enthusiast Elizabeth Shepley Sargeant (Sargeant 238-40), "The encounter with the dark half of the personality, or 'shadow,' ... is as important as that of sin in the Church" (Basic 462).

A question arises, however, about the motivation of a Martyr such as Jeanne Le Ber. Is her sacrifice as useless as the embittered Pierre believes after, in stolen meetings with her, he hears her "harsh and hollow" voice, "like an old crow's" (180), and sees her "stone face" that "had been through every sorrow" (182)? Is her sacrifice even self-serving and manipulative like that of the pseudo-Martyr, such as the young Saint-Vallier? Certainly Cather—like Pierre—must have asked these questions as she wrote Shadows on the Rock, for Jeanne Le Ber had to face some of the same personal choices about life and family that Cather and her autobiographical protagonist Thea Kronborg faced. Although Thea completed her opera tour instead of returning to see her dying mother and Jeanne Le Ber sent the message "Tell her I am praying for her, night and day" (133) instead of responding personally to her mother's deathbed plea, Cather herself delayed work on Shadows on the Rock to make two long visits to her own mother, who had suffered a stroke while visiting Douglass Cather in Long Beach, California, after the death of her husband (Woodress 417).

As Shadows on the Rock shows, however, Cather believed that the mission of the spiritual traveler, whether in the realm of religion or art, is vital not only to the traveler but also to the community in which he or she lives. Thus a true Martyr like Jeanne Le Ber is, as Pearson observes, "not trying to bargain to save self but believes that the sacrifice of the self will save others. That is what the Christ story is about: sacrificing to save others" (103). Significantly, Cather introduces Jeanne Le Ber's story with Blinker's report of the "miracle at Montreal. The recluse has had a visit from the angels," he continues, "the night after Epiphany.... That day she broke her spinning-wheel, and in the night two angels came to her cell and mended it for her. She saw them" (128). This miracle—brought about, we must assume, by Jeanne Le Ber's vicariously enduring the suffering of all human beings just as Christ literally bore their sins—brings the angels closer to all Quebec: "By many a fireside the story of Jeanne Le Ber's spinning-wheel was told and re-told with loving exaggeration during that severe winter. The word of her visit from the angels went abroad over snow-burdened Canada to 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).

Jeanne Le Ber's gift is imaged as a flower, the archetypal expression of the feminine spirit as represented in classical myth by the spring reunion of Persephone with Demeter and in Christianity by the rose symbolism of the Virgin Mary. In The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and Christian Theology, Ann Belford Ulanov declares: "In the highest expression of the feminine spirit both heaviness and materiality are transcended, not to vanish into abstraction but to be transformed. It is a process often symbolized by a flower. The feminine spirit, like a blossom's scent, always remains attached to earthly foundations as to something concrete and individual but also exquisite in beauty and grace. The downward-going road of the feminine spirit is a road of the lowest dung, of the commonest air and water, of the everyday soil of experience in which one receives and achieves transformation" (189). Thus Jeanne Le Ber's intense suffering and self-abasement, symbolized spatially by the lowest of her three cells, from which she makes her confessions, sprout and grow into the flower of the gift of faith that she distributes throughout Quebec in the form of the "beautiful alter-cloths and vestments" she makes in her upper cell (134). But Cather extends the image of the flower even further in this highly symbolic passage: "The people have loved miracles for so many hundred years, not as proof or evidence, but because they are the 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 the moment, which might have been a lost ecstasy, is made an actual possession and can be bequeathed to another" (137).

Through the imagery of this passage, Cather equates religion and art as she has so often done before, most notably in her essay on Carlyle, in which she states that art is a "more exacting master . . . even than Jehovah" (423), and in Professor St. Peter's statement that "Art and religion (they are the same thing in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had" (The Professor's House 69). The connection in the above passage from Shadows on the Rock, however, is not so much that of sacrifice or fulfillment as that of desire—the process of spiritual desire that creates a miracle in either religion or art. The archetypal longings, the shadows of the moment, are transformed by art and religion into a miracle, into permanent images and symbolic objects that embody archetypal truths. Like Jung and Paul Tillich, Cather is—through Jeanne Le Ber—seeking "a revitalized spiritual life through return to and reinterpretation of symbols" (Ulanov 103-04). Thus the symbol of the lamp, like that of the flower, takes on a dual meaning in Shadows on the Rock. For Jeanne Le Ber the sanctuary lamp symbolizes the divine light that she wants to become to her community: "watching that spot of light," she prays, "I will be that lamp; that shall be my life" (131). For Cather, as for other romantic writers, the lamp is, as explained by M. H. Abrams, a symbol of divine inspiration, "the divine Idea beamed from God into the soul's mirror, thenceto be projected on the written page" (44).

Contrary to Pierre Charron's belief, Jeanne Le Ber, like any true Martyr, does not intentionally pass her suffering along to others. "Heroes," as Pearson declares, "not only endure hardships, they maintain their love of life, their courage, and their capacity to care for others. No matter how much suffering they experience, they do not pass it on to others. They absorb it and declare: Suffering stops here" (103). Thus Jeanne Le Ber not only releases Pierre, telling him that he should marry, but she also prays "that God may preserve you from sudden death without repentance, and that we may meet in heaven" (179). Pierre acknowledges to Auclair that he has indeed been preserved from sudden death three times, but it is not until after his own journey as the archetypal Wanderer that Jeanne Le Ber's sacrifice becomes transformative for him, embodied in the transformed self of Cécile Auclair.

Pearson's assertion that "the Wanderer is exemplified by stories of the knight, the cowboy, and the explorer who set off alone to see the world" (51) seems a ready-made description of Pierre, whom Cather describes as "a slender man in buckskins, with a quick swinging step. . . . He was not a big fellow, this Pierre Charron, hero of the fur trade and the coureurs de bois, not above medium height, but quick as an otter and always sure of himself" (169-70). Even Euclide Auclair's description of Pierre is archetypal, for to Euclide and his wife, "Pierre Charron had seemed the type they had come so far to find; more than anyone else he realized the romantic picture of the free Frenchman of the great forests which they had formed at home on the bank of the Seine" (171-72).

Pierre's identity as a Wanderer may perhaps be best understood in relationship to the archetype of the Martyr. According to Pearson, "the Wanderer makes the radical assertion that life is not primarily suffering," that "it is an adventure" (51). Like most Wanderers, Pierre's wanderings are motivated by a pivotal, or "transformative, person or concept" (Pearson 65)—in Pierre's case, by his "disappointment" over Jeanne Le Ber's rejecting him as a lover and taking her initial vow as a recluse. Pearson says that "Wanderers identify a person, an institution, [or] a belief system as the cause of their misery, and then they can avoid or flee the cause" or the "captor" (65). Thus Pierre flees from the wasteland of his emotional life to the literal wasteland of the forest where he squanders half of his money on "drink and women and new guns" (173). On returning to Montreal, "his behaviour was always exemplary, out of respect to his mother" (173), but he is clearly an outsider and he, like many Wanderers, experiences spiritual doubt (Pearson 52). Bitter over the miracles associated with Jeanne Le Ber, he initially rejects all miracles, telling the Auclairs and Captain Pondaven, "Oh, you have nothing over us in the way of miracles! . . . Here we have them all the time. Every Friday the beaver is changed into a fish, so that good Catholics may eat him without sin" (224).

Paradoxically, however, the Wanderer's "movement into isolation and loneliness ultimately leads back to community" (Pearson 72). For Pierre, it is his friendship with the Auclairs and his growing feelings for Cécile that bring about his transformation. Hearing of the death of Count Frontenac, the Auclairs' protector, Pierre rushes back to be with them in their sorrow, and the crisis begins to bring out the other archetypes in his life. Finding that Euclide has been too busy during the count's illness to keep food in the house, Pierre takes charge, bringing in a deer he has shot and telling Cécile, "You attend to everything else, but by your leave I will cook the venison in my own way" (266). More important than the food, however, is the warm friendship and calm wisdom that he brings into the household. Cécile's "last thoughts before she sank into forgetfulness were of a friend, devoted and fearless, here in the house with them, as if he were one of themselves. He had not a throne behind him, like the Count. . . , not the authority of a parchment and seal. But he had authority, and a power which came from knowledge of the country and its people; from knowledge, and from a kind of passion. His daring and his pride seemed to her even more splendid than Count Frontenac's" (268). By the conclusion of book 6, Pierre the Wanderer has gained "the Warrior's ability to assert . . . [his] own wishes in the relationship, the Martyr's capacity to give and commit to others, and the Magician's knowledge that there is no scarcity, that we can have all the love we need as our birthright" (Pearson 73).

As suggested by Cécile's comparison, the dominant archetypes of Pierre Charron and Count Frontenac are quite different. Whereas Pierre is initially a Wanderer, the count is primarily a Warrior. According to Pearson, whereas the Wanderer "identifies the dragon and flees," the Warrior "stays and fights" (74). Certainly Count Frontenac was always a fighter—in real life as well as in Cather's novel. Francis Parkman writes that Frontenac's "attitude towards public enemies was always proud and peremptory, yet his courage was guided by so clear a sagacity that he never was forced to recede from a position he had taken" (436). Auclair remembers his first sight of Frontenac in a soldier's uniform, a literal Warrior, and even in his old age in Shadows on the Rock he "still walked, rode, struck, as vigorously as ever, and only two years ago he had gone hundreds of miles into the wilderness on one of the hardest Indian campaigns of his life" (57). Frontenac is indeed one of the archetypal Warriors who, as Pearson says, "change their worlds by asserting their will and their image of a better world upon them" and who "take strong action to protect us all" (76, 82). "When the King had sent him out here nine years ago" Cather writes: "it had been to save Canada—nothingless. The fur trade was completely demoralized, and the Iroquois were murdering French colonists in the very outskirts of Montreal. The Count had accomplished his task. He had chastised the Indians, restored peace and order, secured the safety of trade" (237, 238). In addition to being the military savior of all of Quebec, the count was also the special protector of the Auclair family. "Since I was six years old," Euclide tells Cécile after Frontenac's death, "the Count has been my protector, and he was my father's before me" (261).

Even in defeat and in the ultimate battle with old age and approaching death, the count is a true Warrior. As he watches his patron standing "lost in reflection, Auclair thought he seemed more like a man revolving plans for a new struggle with fortune than one looking back upon a life of brilliant failures. The Count had the bearing of a fencer when he takes up the foil; from his shoulders to his heels there was intention and direction. His carriage was his unconscious idea of himself,—it was an armor he put on when he took off his night-cap in the morning, and he wore it all day, at early mass, at his desk, on the march, at the Council, at his dinner-table. Even his enemies relied upon his strength" (239). Although we don't actually see the inner development of the count, at his death we see the results of that development. According to Pearson, Warriors in the higher levels of their development "learn to be more subtle and politic," and ultimately they "give over control of the outcome and assert themselves as part of the dance of life" (97). Before his death Frontenac develops a deep respect for his old enemy Bishop Laval, and on his deathbed the "Count raised his eyebrows haughtily, as if to demand why his privacy was thus invaded. He looked from one face to another; in those faces he read something. He saw the nuns upon their knees, praying. He seemed to realize his new position in the world and what was now required of him. The challenge left his face,—a dignified calm succeeded it" (262). Like the Magician, this old Warrior has discovered that "at a deeper level, force does not work" (118). Like the Magician also, Frontenac has found a new "discipline [that] operates in a context of humility and a certain positive fatalism... . Magicians know," Pearson says,"that they are not the center of the universe; yet that knowledge does not distress them" (118).

Although both Pierre Charron and Count Frontenac—and later Cécile and Bishop Saint-Vallier—reach the level of the Magician, the characters for whom the Magician archetype is dominant are Euclide Auclair and Bishop Laval. As a "philosopher apothecary" (3), Auclair is both physician and scholar. Although he is religious, his wisdom derives from secular sources rather than divine ones. Thus he believes that while "sacred relics are all very well" for working miracles, these miracles are not performed "through the digestive tract," and if Mother de Saint-Augustin "had given her heretic a little more ground bone, she might have killed him" (126). Mild, thoughtful, studious, and creative, with a mind that is "free" (32), he rejects "modern" methods of treatment suggested by Bishop Saint-Vallier: the "cauterization of the arm, to draw the inflammation" away from Bishop Laval's "enlarged and congested veins" in his leg as well as the practice of bleeding for Count Frontenac (119, 257). Striving, like Pearson's Magician, "to live in harmony with the supernatural and natural worlds" and in "wholeness and balance within" (119), Auclair relies on practical and natural remedies, "tisanes and herb-teas and poultices, which at least could do no harm. He advised them [his patients] about their diet; reduced the surfeit of the rich and prescribed goat's milk for the poorly nourished"(29), and is preparing a herbarium, a "collection of medicinal Canadian plants" to take back to France (226). Moreover, he consciously avoids the Magician's temptation to misuse his power (Pearson 147), speaking out against the French fad of drinking viper broth and telling Cécile, "Medicine is a dark science" (212).

Whereas Euclide Auclair is a secular Magician, old Bishop Laval is a true spiritual Magician who is "able to inspire hope in others" that "it is possible to have a peaceful, humane, just, and caring world" because he himself has "learned to be peaceful, caring, and respectful of others"(Pearson 150). Laval himself lives in "naked poverty," having given all his "silver plate and velvet and linen . . . little by little, to needy parishes, to needy persons" (73). Laval's most meaningful experience as a Magician occurs one cold night when he finds the orphan Jacques crying outside Bishop Saint-Vallier's palace. Taking Jacques home, Laval ceremonially bathes the child's feet, musing: "This was not an accident, he felt. Why had he found, on the steps of that costly episcopal residence built in scorn of him and his devotion to poverty, a male child, half-clad and crying in the merciless cold? Why had this reminder of his Infant Savior been just there, under that house which he never passed without bitterness, which was like a thorn in his flesh?" (75). From this experience, the Magician in Laval realizes "that we are not life's victims; we are part of the unfolding of God" (Pearson 117). Reviewing his life after this experience, he sees that it falls into: "two even periods. The first thirty-six years had been given to purely personal religion, to bringing his mind and will into subjection to his spiritual guides. The last thirty-six years had been spent in bringing the minds and wills of other people into subjection to his own,—since he had but one will, and that was the supremacy of the Church in Canada" (75). Having passed through both the Martyr and Warrior archetypes on his way to that of the Magician, then, Laval learns not only the Magician's lesson "that it is only in giving . . . [one's] unique gift to the universe that true happiness and satisfaction can be found" (Pearson 118) but also his own personal lesson that "it was time to return to that rapt and mystical devotion of his earlier life" (Shadows 75).

Each of the characters discussed thus far—Jacques, Jeanne Le Ber, Pierre Charron, Count Frontenac, Euclide Auclair, and Bishop Laval—has a dominant archetype, even though other archetypes may be present in their lives. However, Cather shows two characters in the novel—Cécile Auclair and Bishop Saint-Vallier—living through more than one archetype. Although the order and duration of the various archetypes varies for different people, Pearson has discovered that the usual order differs for women and men. Significantly, Cécile's own journey closely matches the typical female pattern of Innocent, Orphan, Martyr, Wanderer, Warrior, and Magician (Pearson 8). Further, as suggested by John J. Murphy's analysis of the dominant theme in each book of the novel, the novel's overall structure also parallels the order of Cécile's development, the theme of order in book I paralleling the archetype of the Innocent, the theme of "the child in the family" in book 2 the archetype of the Orphan, the theme of self-denial in book 3 the archetype of the Martyr, the theme of the wilderness in book 4 the archetype of the Wanderer, the theme of national identity in book 5 the archetype of the Warrior, and the theme of maturity in book 6 the archetype of the Magician(Murphy 38-39).

When we are first introduced to Cécile Auclair, we hear only "a child's voice, singing" and then see "a little girl of twelve, beginning to grow tall, wearing a short skirt and a sailor's jersey, with her brown hair shingled like a boy's" (9). Like the archetypal Innocent, she "lives in an unfallen world, a green Eden where life is sweet and all one's needs are met in an atmosphere of care and love" (Pearson 25)—in Cécile's case, the care and love not only of her father, Euclide Auclair, but also the entire community of Quebec. Indeed, Pearson declares that the "closest ordinary equivalents to this experience [of the Innocent] occur in early childhood"(25). Both Cécile's archetypal innocence and her growth away from this innocence is shown later in the novel when, just having been told by her father than there are "men in France this day who doubt the existence ofGod," she looks up at him in bewilderment and asks, "Are there such men, Father?" (154). Along with the archetype of the Innocent but secondary to it, Cécile experiences the archetype of the Orphan. When the novel begins, her mother has been dead for two years, and 12-year-old Cécile keeps house and prepares dinner for her father. Mother Juschereau observes that "for an orphan girl, and one so intelligent [as Cécile], there would certainly have been a career among the Hospitalières" but that Cécile "certainly has no vocation" for it (39). By symbolically adopting Jacques, Cécile moves into the Martyr archetype, in which she chooses: "to give the gift of one's life for the giving's sake, knowing that life itself is its own reward and remembering that all the little deaths, the losses, in our lives always have brought with them transformation and new life, that actual deaths are not final but merely a more dramatic passage through into the unknown" (Pearson 115). Like the Virgin Mary and her son, the true archetypal Martyr, Cécile—by loving and caring for a prostitute's son—is "giving up rigid ideas about what the world should be and loving what it is" (Pearson 113). Thus Cécile's life is truly "a story of transformations," transformations that, Rosowski believes, project her symbolically toward sainthood ("Magnificat" 68). The transformative love of the Virgin Mary would be, in Pearson's paradigm, most closely associated with the Magician archetype toward which Cécile is moving. While Cécile is in the Martyr stage, then, she looks forward to the Magician archetype and even reverts to the Orphan archetype when she feels a "chilling fear of the night" in the dirty and disordered Harnois household (194).

Because of Cécile's devotion to housekeeping and domestic ritual, the house metaphor that Pearson uses to explain such variations in the primary order of the archetypes as experienced in the typical female journey is especially appropriate for Shadows on the Rock. Pearson explains that "encountering these archetypes is a bit like redecorating a house. We begin by moving into a house furnished in part by attitudes, beliefs, and habits passed on to us by our families and by our culture. Some people never make the house their own and so do not develop a distinct identity or style. Those who do take their journeys and . . . furnish their own houses do so at different paces and in different orders" (16). Whereas "some people do one room at a time, finish that, and go on to the next," Cécile is more like those who "do a bit in each room" because some of her psychological rooms—especially those of the Innocent and the Orphan—cannot be finished until she has more fully developed the Martyr archetype and encountered the archetypes of the Warrior and the Wanderer (Pearson 16).

In general, Ann Romines is correct when she implies that the "separation/return pattern so characteristic of Western storytelling" is absent from Shadows on the Rock, for the overall structure of the novel is, like the rock of Quebec, static rather than progressive ("After the Christmas Tree" 80). However, the central scene in the novel, the one in which Cécile and Pierre go on an "excursion" to visit the Harnois family on the Ile d'Orléans (184), does follow the separation, initiation, return pattern characteristic of the Warrior's journey. With the eye of the domestic artist, Cécile sees the island from the "highpoints of Quebec . . . as if it had been arranged to please the eye,—full of folds and wrinkles like a crumpled table-cloth" (184). On her actual journey Pierre is her physical guide but her mother is her psychological and spiritual guide, for Cécile packs her things in her mother's valise (185) and that night, sitting up alone to avoid sleeping in the dirty bed with the unwashed Harnois girls, she "thought a great deal about her mother," about "how her mother had always made everything at home beautiful, just as here everything about cooking, eating, sleeping, living, seemed repulsive" (192). On the Ile d'Orléans, Cécile experiences the archetypal fall from innocence. Symbolically, after her early return to her own home she does not "feel like a little girl, doing what she had been taught to do" and realizes that she performs her household tasks "for herself, quite as much" as "to please her father, and to carry out her mother's wishes" (196-97). Like the archetypal Warrior of the hero quest, Cécile has been reborn—a rebirth that is symbolized by the fire that she herself makes to prepare not just dinner but life itself. Cécile has indeed experienced the quest of the Warrior but, unlike the typical masculine Warrior, she has completed her quest as much by, as Romines observes of one of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's characters, "literally and metaphorically 'going in'—into a house and housekeeping" ("The Hermit's Parish" 148)—as by going out into the world.

After this rebirth experience, Cécile begins a period of symbolic wandering during which she and her father await the ships on which Auclair and the count plan to return to France. The ship brings her an elegant blue dress and a gold brooch—the dress suggesting her new womanhood and the colors suggesting what Rosowski has called "the apotheosis of a French girl into a Canadian Holy Mother" (Voyage 184). Viewing this new self in a mirror would, as Pearson suggests, show how the "world outside" mirrors the "world inside" (134), but "Cécile had no looking-glass upstairs" and, for awhile, she rejects the roles symbolized by these clothes that one might wear "to mass or to a wedding" (214), perhaps even her own. Instead she maintains her childhood relationship by wearing one of her new jerseys to the dinner Pierre has planned for her and her father. After Pierre returns to the forest, Cécile watches miserably as her father makes preparations for their return to France: "The spirit of peace, that acceptance of fate, which used to dwell in the pharmacy on Mountain Hill, had left it and come abroad to dwell in the orchards and gardens, in the little stony streets where the leaves blew about. Day after day Cécile had walked about those streets trying to capture that lost content and take it home again. She felt almost as if she no longer had a home; often wished she could follow the squirrels into their holes and hide away with them for the winter" (229). Vicariously she even wanders with Pierre, the great Wanderer himself, wishing that she and Jacques "could govery far up the river in Pierre Charron's canoe, and then off into the forests to the Huron country, and find the very places where the martyrs died" (234).

The images of the "spiral" and the "sacred fire," both of which are introduced even before Cécile herself, symbolize Cécile's spiritual and psychological growth into the Magician archetype. According to Pearson, the three-dimensional spiral symbolizes the individual's growth toward wholeness, in which it is "possible to move forward while frequently circling back" (13). This spiritual movement is suggested macrocosmically by the "winding stair-way connecting the two halves of Quebec" over which Cécile travels (9), and microcosmically by the three-tiered cell within which Jeanne Le Ber experiences her inner journey. As discussed by Rosowski and Romines, fire is also a major symbol in Shadows on the Rock. Rosowski calls fire "the agent of transmutation" that "casts shadows that people a bare rock with figures of legend" (Voyage 184), whereas Romines emphasizes the role of fire in maintaining domestic ritual and order (Home 159). Moreover, in both classical and Christian religions, fire also symbolizes purification and spiritualization. Demeter attempted to make the child Demophoon immortal by burning away his mortality, and according to one nonbiblical source, Christ once said, "Whoever is near to me is near to the fire" (Ulanov 182-83).

This symbol of fire, then, suggests two qualities of the Magician archetype as experienced by Cécile. First, Romines's emphasis on domestic ritual suggests the artistic and creative aspect of the Magician who, as Pearson says, cannot exist "without ordering and arranging life" (116-17). Cécile is always concerned with domestic order; at the beginning of the novel she focuses on maintaining the order established by her mother, whereas later she creates her own order. Second, the transformative quality of fire suggests the fuller psychological and spiritual transformation of Cécile that is implied by her marriage to Pierre Charron in the epilogue. On one level, Cécile's marriage confirms her identity as a true Canadian. When she was a child, Pierre told her, "You and I are Canadians, monkey. We were born here" (174). She had been deeply disturbed by the thought of leaving Canada to return to France, and now she has become the mother of "the Canadians of the future" (278). On another level this marriage becomes a type of the holy marriage of the Virgin Mary. Combining Jungian psychology with Christian theology, Ulanov equates divine and human love or marriage, declaring that "the two loves are inseparable and that a fully developed human being is fully devoted to God. One sees, then, that the full expression of one's individuality is part of a full surrender to the divine. The full experience of human sexual love—in its literal and symbolic range of meanings—is the intimate experience of the Incarnate Word"(292). Euclide's affirmation that "Heaven has blessed her with children"(278) clearly connects Cécile and her union with that of the Virgin Mary. Whereas Mary bore a child who became the spiritual Savior of the world, Cécile bears young Canadians who will become "the Canadians of the future,—the true Canadians" (278). The narrative distancing of Cécile in the epilogue also suggests not only that Cécile has become a legend herself, like Jeanne Le Ber, but also that, like the Virgin Mary, she has experienced the apotheosis of the hero, has truly become a Canadian shadow or spirit.

Although Cécile is the emotional center of the novel, she is not the only character to undergo a major change. The most dramatic transformation occurs in Bishop Saint-Vallier, whose journey follows the typical male pattern of Orphan, Warrior, Wanderer, Martyr, and Magician (Pearson 8). Bishop Saint-Vallier's early journey is truncated, however, and he reaches the level of Magician only through forced wanderings and intense suffering. When we are first introduced to Bishop Saint-Vallier, he is like a proud but lonely Orphan who uses his "pain as a vehicle for manipulation" to "avoid fully confronting . . . rage and feelings of powerlessness" (Pearson 42) and who seeks attention by reorganizing and changing things "for the sake of change, to make a fine gesture" (Shadows 122.). He is also a pseudo-Martyr who "won all hearts by his splendid charities" but whose piety is "too conspicuous" and a pseudo-Warrior full of "arrogance and . . . rash impracticality" (124) who nevertheless tries unsuccessfully to impose his will on Laval, Frontenac, and Auclair (122,123,124). Self-righteously—and ironically, considering his own elaborate palace, Saint-Vallier claims that the dying Count "has agreat deal to put right with Heaven. He has used his authority and his influence here for worldly ends, rather than to strengthen the kingdom of God" (255-56). Fifteen years after Frontenac's death and 13 years after his own departure, Saint-Vallier returns to Quebec a broken but transformed man. The "wandering Bishop" (270), as Cather calls him, has experienced both a lengthy imprisonment in England and a long detention in France that have humbled him immeasurably. Instead of returning to his gaudy palace, the bishop now plans to live in two small rooms in the Hopital Géneral and serve as chaplain there. The bishop also asks about Cécile and exhibits his new Magician status, his "transformation," by the "warm and friendly silence" (279), the sense of community, that he now shares with Auclair.

The hero's relationship with community is an important concept in most heroic paradigms. The return of both Saint-Vallier described by Cather earlier as being "as changeable and fickle as a woman" (123)—and Cécile to the Rock of Quebec parallels Marilyn Sanders Mobley's description of "the return at the end of the female quest" that "is not a resignation to limitation or failure but a heroic expression of the desire to remain connected to the people and place of her cultural roots. . . , an act of triumph, or self-affirmation and communal celebration" (29). Campbell declares that the hero must return to "the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds" (193). And Pearson observes that "The reward for the hero's inevitably solitary journey, then, is community—community with the self, with other people, and with the natural and spiritual worlds. At the end of the journey, the hero feels and is at home in the world" (153). Indeed, Saint-Vallier now feels more at home in his bare quarters with his duties of chaplain than he had in the prisons and courts of Europe or even in his own bishop's palace, and Cécile—though narratively removed from us—feels at home in her adopted country of Canada.

The sense of community that results at the end of the hero's solitary journey is also related to the archetypal role of the artist. According to Pearson, the "archetype of the Magician teaches us about creation" (116). As a creative Magician "ordering and arranging life" (116-17), Cécile is herself the prototype of the artist. Moreover, as Mary Ruth Ryder suggests, in telling the story of the old count (262), of the adventurer who, like Aeneas, has carried "his gods with him into a remote and savage country"(Shadows 98), Euclide Auclair is also a type of the epic poet Virgil. Most importantly, however, in the Carlylean sense, as Patricia Lee Yongue has suggested (62), Cather herself becomes the Hero as Poet or Man of Letters as she tells the epic story of Shadows on the Rock. Whereas Carlyle denigrated the symbols of the Catholic Church (142-45), however, Cather uses the symbols of the Church—the Martyr, the Rock, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother—to give body and experience to the shadows of the mythic and historical past, thus transforming unconscious archetypes into conscious art. The "romantic glow" (67) of Cather's mind that Governor Wilbur Cross detected in his review of Shadows on the Rock thus derives from the creative lamp within, from the divine romantic vision of Cather as Poet or, to paraphrase Carlyle, Woman of Letters (181). It is with this blinding light that Willa Cather casts her heroic shadows on the Rock.

It is a paradox of the practice of literary studies that as postmodernism has weaned us from earlier ideas of the author as great originator, as hero, as priest, as godlike creator and taught us instead that the figure of the author is a function of the text, a figure we help to invent as we read, we have all become even more interested in writing and reading about authors. Literary biography is alive and well even though critical attention has centered on literary texts rather than the makers of those texts. I think the answer to this paradox lies in what Michel Foucault says about the author as a human subject. Foucault, while agreeing with the viewpoint that the author is none of the romantic notions I have listed and that any writer, like any other human subject, is the result of ideological shaping in a particular society, nevertheless warns in "What Is an Author?" that "the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its systems of dependencies" (137).

That is what I intend to do here, to use some of the memoirs and biographies of Willa Cather's life to speculate about what "system of dependencies" made her the author she was, able to "intervene" in cultural discourse to create a body of work unparalleled in her time and place. In doing so I reject notions that we can fully read a writer's work by simply reading her texts, no matter how sophisticated a set of critical tools we bring to those texts. If an author is a location where language, ideology, and an individual lived life meet, then it is always important to understand the linguistic, social, historical, familial, personal, and ideological contexts that enclosed the human subject who found writing such an essential act of self-definition. We carry on this biographical project in order to enrich our readings of the texts, but in making this broad search through the writer's life and times I think it is also important to remember that we bring ourselves, as human subjects shaped in our times, to the biographical and critical act. In Mapping Our Selves I have proposed that when we seek the figure of the author of works that we care for, we are engaged also in an act of self-construction, an act in which "I am tracing the pattern of the life of my own arteries of action, my own veins of response, searching for correspondence and difference, delighting indiscovery of the self [as well as] the other" (27). Therefore, in constructing the figure of Cather, I intend to be as honest as I can about my own agendas concerning the construction of female subjects in general.

In terms of salient facts, all the biographies and memoirs about Cather tell the same story: born in Virginia in 1873, the first child of a fairly well-off farming family, Cather moved with her family at nine years of age to Nebraska, spent a year on a farm on what is called "The Divide" before moving to the small pioneer town of Red Cloud, where she spent her teen years, followed by four years at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Her early adult life was lived as a magazine editor and school teacher, first in Pittsburgh, then in New York at McClure's Magazine. In her late thirties she was able to begin to devote herself full time to writing, while moving between New York, Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and later Grand Manan, New Brunswick. Trips back to Nebraska and to the Southwest were frequent and often of some duration. The biographies and memoirs also agree on the importance of a number of people who influenced her life, from her parents and siblings in her close-knit family through her many male mentors and employers and friends, as well as a series of female mentors and intimate female friends. But there the agreement ends. Although making careful use of often similar documentary material available to them at the time of writing, each memoirist, each biographer, constructs his or her own idea of the artist that is Willa Cather.

Since it would be too time consuming to go through each text comparing it to the others in detail, I have chosen two portions of Cather's life for comparison, to show how each biographer reveals his or her agendas of subjectivity through the handling of these two times. The two points for comparison are the phenomenon of Cather's concerted effort to dress like a boy, indeed to name herself William in her teens, and the incident of her brief but intense friendship with Louise Pound while at university. My choice of these incidents, while having the very practical benefit of their being time-limited events, happening at key moments in the early life of the artist and also referred to by all the biographers, are also chosen because of my own interest in the way writers deal with gender, especially how women play with and redefine issues of gender in order to enter into their art. By gender I do not mean simply biological sex or sexual orientation but a lifelong process involving these two categories plus many societal dictates and personal choices that make our gendering an evolving and ongoing life process. For me, consideration of gender is at least as important as the consideration of Cather's political and ideological commitments, her choice of mentors, her career history, or the growth of her aesthetic as a writer. Indeed, gender grounds and interweaves these contexts.

I find various versions of Cather in the five biographies I have chosen as my illustrations. The first biography, published in 1953, is by the Canadian scholar E. K. Brown, who died at an early age while he was still writing the text. His colleague and friend, Leon Edel, took up the task of completing the book from Brown's notes. Like the cover photograph on the 1987 reprint edition, the Cather Brown wishes to portray seems to be a kindly, intelligent lady school teacher who through the cultivation of her writing craft and an imaginative identification with the West, where she had spent her formative years, achieves great literature. In many ways Brown's biography has the effect of normalizing the sometimes amazing woman called Willa Cather, while extolling the kindly, literary craftsperson called Willa Cather.

Possibly this is the elderly Cather he knew, since there was an exchange of letters between them after he sent her a copy of an academic essay he had written about her work. She gently disagreed with his emphasis on place as a defining feature in a writer's life, but as James Woodress comments in his foreword to Brown's book the correspondence indicates a "remarkable" event in Cather's life. Not only does Cather exempt Brown from the "short shrift" she usually gave professors but she goes on "to reminisce about her life and work in a manner utterly uncharacteristic of her letters to persons she had never met" (vii). The two planned to meet, but Cather died before that could happen. Perhaps Cather, who worked hard at avoiding unorchestrated public images, including destroying much of her correspondence in later years, had found the biographer she wanted, one who took great pains with his cogent readings of her texts but, as Brown's biography indicates, knew when to draw the line in the revelation and especially the interpretation of the private life of the writer.

Brown only briefly mentions Cather's boyish attire and connects it with her other forms of rebellion against what he names "the conventionalism of Red Cloud . . . a network of caution, evasion and negation" (47). Thus it is not Cather who is strange. Indeed, the "young girl who dressed like a boy, preferred the conversation of unusual older men . . . who was reputed to hold dangerous opinions about religion as well as to enjoy cutting up animals" (48) must escape the town to the atmosphere of the university where Brown finds her much more at home. In order to construct a Cather who is much more at home in Lincoln than Red Cloud, he emphasizes her intellectual development at college, her beginnings as a writer, and quite rightly too, since Cather did not waste a moment of learning time at Lincoln. However, she did start university at exactly the age most of us do, eighteen, and almost certainly experienced gender as well as intellectual development. The friendship with Louise Pound is handled in a half-sentence by Brown: "Among her principal friends were Louise and Olivia Pound, the sisters of Roscoe and daughters of Judge Stephen M. Pound" (104). Thus Louise is placed safely in the company of her sister and both of them validated by their important male relatives. As Woodress points out, Brown was very dependent on Cather's longtime companion Edith Lewis for his information, and Lewis, as Woodress maintains in his foreword, wanted the kind of book that "touch[ed] on only such facts in [the] personal life as have to do directly with the work" (Lewis qtd. in Brown x). Indeed, it is in his handling of the works that Brown is strongest; his readings show a studied carefulness with text and an associative insight with metaphor and symbol that are compelling readings. As a critic writing at the height of New Criticism, the idea of locating the authors "systems of dependencies" would not be comfortable for Brown. To his eyes her "function" as author and her "intervention" in discourse were unproblematically those of a skilled artisan forging place and people into a great new literature of the North American West. Brown's subtitle, A Critical Biography, is well chosen since it is the critic's skill as a close reader that is most prominent in this text.

Phyllis Robinson's Willa: The Life of Willa Cather (1983) wants a Cather we can warm up to, as is indicated by the use of her first name as the main title and, accordingly, by her practice of calling her subject Willa rather than Cather throughout the text. Moreover, the pictures of Cather chosen for the inside of the text are ones that emphasize her considerable attractiveness as an adult woman. Robinson includes only one of the pictures of Cather in short hair and boy's clothing, and it is the one that I would describe as the most feminine of several shown in later biographies. Robinson's warm humanization of Cather, as opposed to Brown's low-key and rather distant approach to Cather's private life, gives us this narrative of her male clothing and activities: In the same way that Willa created a Nebraska and a Red Cloud that she could live with, she also created an identity of her own that satisfied her, one that was strong, independent, essentially masculine. According to one story, she cut her hair short because her mother was ill and couldn't comb her long curls, then decided that it suited her and wore it that way until she was halfway through college. She had the bluff and hearty manners of a boy and tried to dress as boyishly as possible and do the things that boys do. She liked to go barefoot and fish and canoe with her brothers on the Republican River, or hunt for buried treasure with them on the little island near the mouth of Indian Creek. (31) Robinson leaves us with the impression that all of this is mere healthy tomboyishness, chosen and shaped artfully by the budding writer, certainly not a jarring rebellion that might have shocked family, friends, and townsfolk and certainly not undertaken in conditions of stress or unhappiness.

Although Robinson calls the relationship with Louise Pound a "serious romantic attachment" and is forthright about the fact that Cather seemed "obsessed" and "infatuated" with Pound for two years, she suggests, through her descriptions of Pound—her intelligence, her beauty, her athletic accomplishments—that everyone was in love with her: "A fellow student, who knew both Willa and Louise, described Louise Pound in later years when she was teaching at the university and had become a world authority on folk literature, as having had a hold upon the imagination that was hypnotic"(59). Robinson does assert the importance of the relationship to Cather's youthful definitions of herself: "losing Louise caused Willa the most intense suffering she had ever known. In despair, she vowed to herself to bemore cautious and less impetuous in her affections in the future" (61). However, Robinson also argues that the "openness with which Willa talked about her feelings for Louise suggests that most people did not regard their friendship as perverse or as anything but a not uncommon college 'crush.'" She speculates that the principal effects of this event were to warn Cather off "the idea of loving women in any but a romantic sense" and to begin a life time habit of forming the "intimate relationships in her life . . . exclusively with women" (62).

Robinson exposes a number of the "systems of dependencies" of Cather's youth that would later mark her function as a producer of texts but she does so in order to normalize them or to show them as moderated by later life. Indeed, many biographers, while often emphasizing male difference and idiosyncrasy as proof of talent, seem to want to show that female subjects, no matter how talented, fit into our commonplace ideals of a good woman. While Robinson is the first biographer to suggest that the Pound episode is a marker event in the formation of the artist, she does not perform that necessary act of literary biography, the working through to the connections between life and art, the ways in which the gendering experiences of the young Cather become part of the package of insights and abilities that a writer brings to her work.

In fact, Robinson seems to accept one of Cather's estimations of her own psychology and artistic life as trouble free and rather incidental. Robinson quotes Cather's letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher after Fisher had written a rather lionizing piece lauding Cather as a "Daughter of the Frontier" and theorizing that the "one real subject of all her books . . . is the effect of a new country . . . on people transplanted to it from the old traditions of a stable, complex civilization" (Robinson 272). Cather wrote back, thanking Fisher for the compliments but disagreeing. Robinson summarizes the letter: "Willa had her own ideas, and she wrote to Dorothy that the common denominator of her books was escape. She had always fled the less agreeable for the more agreeable, she said, and she had never made a sacrifice to art"(272). Although the artist should be taken seriously when she expresses opinions regarding her life and work, biographers need not take them as the only authority on the subject. Indeed, their words should be treated with the same hermeneutic subtlety as other sources. In fact, "escape" is an intriguing symbol for understanding the life and work of this illusive woman, and it needs to be read as more symbolically complex than perhaps Cather meant Fisher to understand it or than Robinson understands it in her turn. As well, in estimating an author we should not underestimate the effect of gendering on women's ideas of themselves as artists. It has certainly been very acceptable for women to make light of their talents and skills, pretending they do it all for their own pleasure, to amuse themselves, and if others should take pleasure in their work, well then, all the better. At any rate, statements by authors concerning their own lives and art need to be viewed in the same critical light as others' assessments, with an awareness of personal bias, motivation, and cultural context.

Whereas the Brown text is an able critique of the writer's achievement that largely leaves out the woman, Robinson's is an absorbing narrative of the woman that in many ways leaves out many of the difficulties, challenges, and achievements of the writing. This is consistent with a biographical problem in the treatment of female subjects that Alison Booth explores in "Biographical Criticism and the 'Great' Woman of Letters." Examining the treatment of both George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Booth states: "biographical criticism of women writers, obeying dichotomous conventions, assumes that behind the great creative mind must be a woman who suffers, and, conversely, that the more the woman comes forward in the work. . . , the less great the work" (90). This cultural dichotomy forces biographers to choose between "ambitious" and "erotic" plots for women. If women are to be great writers they must be defined as ambitious for their work, as "the imperial masculine self" is (98). If they are to be defined as women then they are eroticized (or domesticated), made more "womanly," but unfortunately such a figure is "incompatible with greatness" (98).

The publication, in 1987, of James Woodress's Willa Cather: A Literary Life indicates the degree to which the choice of the "ambitious" plot can elevate the writer while denying her full humanity. Woodress is the beneficiary of his own previous book on Cather as well as Bernice Slote's lifetime of work on the biographical detail of Cather's life. He is warmly appreciative of his subject and her many accomplishments and talents without making any attempt to hide her faults. (It was Woodress who shocked my sensibilities as an ex-high-school teacher by relating that Cather sometimes "humiliated students whose ineptitude irritated her by reading their compositions aloud in class" [154]. She was the kind of teacher who was absolutely devoted to the brilliant student and intolerant of those who did not learn quickly.) Woodress's revelation of Cather's elitism fits with the kind of Cather he is constructing. It is, as his subtitle indicates, the "literary life" that concerns him, the way in which the life experiences are shaped to the purposes of a higher goal, literature, that matters to him. Woodress sees the artist as the crafter of herself, as master of her "systems of dependencies," as fully conscious intervener in language, the purposeful builder of a career, of masterworks. As he asserts in his preface: "The person who moves through these pages is an extraordinarily gifted woman. From her Virginia childhood and Nebraska adolescence she made her way through the world with energy and dedication. She went from college journalism to professional journalism, then to magazine writing and editing, pushing steadily towards her artistic objective. . . . It is the task of the biographer . . . to search among the shards to discover the abandoned designs and crudities later perfected" (xvi). From Woodress, then, we receive the sense of an artist as an architect of the self, purposeful from the start. Even if in later life that artist attempts to break the ties with her youthful self, the self is like a treasured ruin of an ancient building for Woodress, "shards" and "abandoned designs" waiting to be pieced together by the literary archeologist. The cover picture on the paperback edition of his biography indicates this aesthetic of biography. The mood of the portrait supports the intelligent, confident, even exacting purposefulness that Woodress's Cather displays. In fact, what Woodress makes of Cather is a kind of Cather heroine, larger than life, above us mere mortals. She is human, of course, but in grand ways that attract and win us.

His handling of the two exemplary incidents I have chosen are predicated on his firmly stated premise regarding Cather and the gender issue: "To state the matter simply, Cather was married to her art and sublimated her sexual impulses to her work. Throughout her life she gave art her highest priority, preferring her work to society, to family, to friends. Few people, of course could follow such a program rigorously, and Cather recognized her obligations to others" (A Literary Life 125). Woodress admits the extreme degree of Cather's teenage "show-off tomboy" ways and notes that they must have made her conspicuous in Red Cloud. He also admits that Cather did not just bob her hair as young women would a generation later but "cut it shorter than most boys," signed her name William Cather Jr. or Wm. Cather, M. D., and "wore boys' clothes, a derby, and carried a cane." He also speculates that "such a child must have taken her knocks from the local busybodies" (A Literary Life 55). However, for Woodress this is simply Cather's way of defying "Victorian norms of behavior for adolescent girls. Her goal in life was to become a surgeon, but that option was not open to girls, or so she must have thought, living in a little prairie town. As a result she refused to be a girl, adopted male values and attitudes and continued the tomboy life she led in her prepubescent years" (A Literary Life 55-56). Once again it is Cather's purposeful and very practical actions taken in the furtherance of a goal that are foregrounded. Woodress justifies his analysis of this stage of Cather's life in terms of her early construction of a masculine young protagonist in her story "Tommy, the Unsentimental." Just as the neophyte writer Cather reads no psychological significance into Tommy's gendering, neither does Woodress into Cather's. For Woodress, speculations about sexual orientation are of "considerable interest," but since "available data gives no objective answers" he sidelines these issues for issues closer to the portrait of the artist as master artisan that he is building. While not averse to speculating on other aspects of Cather's early life and to proposing a purposefulness in career matters that some facts of Cather's life may deny, he is adverse to speculation, analysis, and theorization about her gendering.

Although Woodress gives a detailed account of the Pound incident, he prefaces his narration with this framing remark: "To call this a lesbian relationship, as some critics have done, is to give it undue importance. Pound did not return the affection with anything like the fervor with which it was given. She had many admirers of both sexes, was not inclined to focus her attention on any one individual." Woodress subsumes the "infatuation" into what he calls "a tempestuous psychological experience during this period. [Cather] confessed to Fisher years later that during her youth she was mixed up, tormented; those were years of frenzy, she said" (A Literary Life 85). Importantly, Woodress's characterization of the period of the Pound relationship takes the emphasis off issues of gender and puts it onto issues of the development of the uniqueness of the individual functioning as a writer unencumbered by dependencies. The curious way in which the relationship ended, when Cather published a wounding lampoon of Pound's brother Roscoe, is not interpreted as the vengeful act of a rejected lover or even a woman "frenzied" by unfair gender expectations but as part of Cather's general and often unwise outspokenness, part of her early "crudities" that would later be melded into the courage to speak the truth that is part of art. Woodress concludes that "Cather was a long time learning tact and discretion" (A Literary Life 87).

The adoption of the "ambitious" plot as a yoke for the impressive body of evidence Woodress compiles leaves his biography in the ironic situation of allowing the reader to counter Woodress's arguments with Woodress's own evidence. For example, even though he insists on a Cather who is devoted to art, merely paying attention to others because she "recognized her obligations" (A Literary Life 124), his detailed chronology of her life shows that much of her time and imagination were involved in promoting very rich relationships, especially family relationships, often going out of her way, inconveniencing her art, in the short run at least, to further her relational life. For example, Woodress records without comment or interpretation that after the death of her parents Cather organized a family reunion, reshingled and opened the family house in Red Cloud (closed for the four previous years), and got everyone to come back for a successful celebration of their continuation as a family (A Literary Life 436).

Another result of adopting the "ambitious" plot is the appearance of a feature in Woodress's subjectivity agenda that is endemic in traditional biography: the degendering of the subject. I don't mean the desexualization or the deeroticization of the subject, although these may accompany degendering. I refer to the way in which many traditional literary biographies do not take gendering as seriously as they take categories such as race, class, religion, ethnicity, nationality, historical period, aesthetic training, or any number of contexts in which the literary artist can be considered. And this is true of male gendering as well as female gendering. A biography that is as detailed as Woodress's on its subject is Richard Ellman's James Joyce. As with Woodress's biography of Cather the model of the artist is that of a god above the fray. One has to read Brenda Maddox's Nora, the biography of Joyce's wife, to get a hint of the complex male gendering that both enlivened and tortured this talented man. It may be the wish of a writer to be portrayed as a distant, disembodied small god but it is not necessarily the job of biographers to paint the artist in the tones the artist would wish.

Certainly the author of Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice did not paint Cather as the artist would have wished. Published in the same year as Woodress's text, Sharon O'Brien's biography is self-conscious about exposing the biographical aesthetic that informs the work: In this book I do not intend to represent my subject's core, essential self, a futile project since the self is always changing, always in a process of self-creation. But some patterns can be discerned. . . . Willa Cather was creating rather than discovering a self by drawing on the cultural fictions available to her: the romantic story of self-discovery and the American story of self-transformation. So I use the romantic notion of the unique, essential self to explain Cather's literary and personal development because, in her social and historical environment, she used that belief to fashion the first half of her life.(7)

O'Brien is just as open about her intention to treat Cather as a gendered subject, in O'Brien's view a lesbian gendered subject: "I did not refer to her as a lesbian in the early drafts of the manuscript. But when I came across Cather's love letters to Louise Pound, written during her college years, I changed my mind. This important correspondence persuaded me that 'lesbian' did in fact capture Cather's self-definition and that my biography should consider the impact on the creative process of her need both to conceal and to reveal her experience of desire" (6). Concealing and revealing are at the center of O'Brien's concept of Cather, as shown in her choice of cover picture. This photograph was taken of Cather in 1910 when she was still the managing editor of McClure's Magazine. It presents a very concealing face and dress, opposed by a flamboyant hat, hinting at something quite different than the bland face of the successful editor.

Instead of devoting a page or two to the Cather-as-boy phenomenon, O'Brien names it cross-dressing (thus bringing the weight of feminist criticism on that subject to her argument) and devotes an entire chapter to the youthful gendering. She also includes six pictures of Cather in her boy phase. The chapter "Enter William Cather" uses an artist-as-performer approach, observing that Cather had a number of pictures taken by a professional photographer while in her boy's costumes and notes that there is often a sign of the feminine in her costume "a scarf, a ruffle, a ribbon" (The Emerging Voice 96). O'Brien reads both the deliberateness of having her portrait taken and the deconstructive feminine costume touches as conscious performance of gender experimentation. To illustrate to what degree Cather was breaking the rules of her contemporary milieu, O'Brien uses newspaper advertisements and social pages of the time to find Red Cloud standards of femininity and quotes local historian Elmer Thomas saying, "I remember Willa Cather most for her masculine habits and dress... . This characteristic in those days was far more noticeable because it was very seldom that women appeared dressed other than in strict feminine attire. . . . [she] even boasted that she preferred the masculine garb . . . [the] masculine sex. . .. To me she was never attractive . . . and I remember her mostly for her boyish makeup and the serious stare with which she met you. It was as if she said, 'stay your distance buddy, I have your number.' Enough. I did" (The Emerging Voice 97). O'Brien points out that even in 1973 when she visited Red Cloud, she was told that Cather "had been a 'hermapherdite' who 'wore men's shoes—had'em made special'" (The Emerging Voice 97).

O'Brien theorizes on the possible sources of Cather's gendering. She takes up Adrienne Rich's idea of the mother-daughter relationship as the great unwritten story of our culture, using Nancy Chodorow's theory of the more complex nature of the separation from the mother that is the girl-child's route to maturity and connects this theorizing to the female characterizations in Cather's texts. O'Brien asserts that although Chodorow is correct in saying that the daughter's turn to her father in her identity role, "is both an attack on her mother and an expression of love for her," (The Emerging Voice 103), "as long as Cather devalued women, she devalued herself; as long as she devalued herself, she could not commit herself fully to writing. In reconciling the seemingly contradictory identities 'woman' and 'writer,' she would ultimately challenge and revise social definitions of gender" (The Emerging Voice III). For O'Brien this struggle is the most important "system of dependency" in the development of the author function in Cather. The author cannot intervene meaningfully in discourse until she reconciles her contradictory definitions of femaleness.

This is the process O'Brien traces as the "emerging voice," of her subtitle, and the Pound affair is an important part of that tracing. In the chapter "Divine Femininity and Unnatural Love" she summarizes the letters to Pound and letters to Mariel Gere in which Cather's worries about her relationship with Pound. As well, O'Brien examines the context of attitudes toward female friendships at this time: "Whereas earlier in the century women's friendships were consistent with their dependent status, the affection between women who were declaring their equality—or even more unsettling, their similarity—to men threatened the social, moral, and sexual order. The creation of a category of 'deviance' then served as a means of social control as well as of boundary-setting" (The Emerging Voice 133). O'Brien posits an important social change happening at the historical moment of Cather's love for Pound. Formerly, when women were seen as nonerotic creatures, their friendships were safe; under these new conditions such friendships were not to be condoned. A teacher of Cather's had called love between women "unnatural" and Cather's discussion of this in one of her letters to Pound is the evidence that encourages O'Brien to identify Cather as lesbian: "When Cather told Pound that it was unfair that feminine friendship should be unnatural, she nonetheless agreed with Miss De Pue [her teacher] that it was, she betrayed a self-conscious awareness shared by her community, that women's friendship constituted a special category not sanctioned by the dominant culture" (The Emerging Voice 132).

For O'Brien, this knowledge of the nonsanctioned nature of the friendship supports her argument that Cather has knowledge of her own lesbianism and marks the Pound affair as the beginning of her search for a way to have a voice in a repressive society. O'Brien proposes that midway through college Cather shed her male costuming because "at the end of her Lincoln years Cather was ready to abandon overt signs of male identification since they had served their major function, aiding the adolescent girl's separation from her mother and her rejection of the feminine role" (The Emerging Voice 140). O'Brien disagrees with critics who see male identification as continuing for Cather because of her choice of male narrators and male personae. She sees these choices as in part a necessary concealment for a lesbian and in part Cather's strategy for confronting "erotically compelling women" who represent "the daughter/writer's psychological need to place the barrier of gender between herself and erotically powerful maternal presences" (The Emerging Voice 139). O'Brien traces the gendering of Willa Cather up to the publication of O Pioneers! and Song of the Lark, arguing that through her relationships with maternal surrogates, loving women who gave her emotional and physical spaces to write, Cather comes to discover her voice as a woman writer. O'Brien's readings of the stories and novels cannily bring together her theory of Cather's gendering with Cather's literary production, offering ananalysis of O Pioneers! that posits the artful joining of Cather's masculine and feminine self-definitions in the voice of the mature writer.

On the one hand, in my effort to shift from an exploration of the writer's "dependencies"—her "function" and "intervention" in art—to an exploration that appreciates gender as an underlying factor, I am very much indebted to O'Brien. On the other hand, I have a lingering dissatisfaction with O'Brien's work. Part of it has to do with the naming of Cather as "lesbian." Some epistemological problems arise with this naming. First, for people unaware of the debate going on in feminism concerning the meaning of that word and its rich history, the word can be limiting, positing that the need to hide one's desire for same-sex relationships programs the art. But more importantly, I find that once we name the gendering process by any name that we, in ordinary discourse, associate primarily with a sexual orientation—heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian—we tend to leave out what I consider the most important aspects of the gendering process, the way in which our personal desires are shaped, interact with, and confront a whole ideology of gender that is not simply about sexual orientation but about roles, power, politics, social order, and the aesthetics of cultural production. Gendering, as a lifelong process we are all involved in, is much bigger than our decisions to repress or follow our sexual desires for one sex or another as partners in our lovemaking. I am not suggesting that O'Brien neglects these factors. I am proposing that her biography, by ending where it does, fairly early in Cather's life story, tends to emphasize sexual orientation as the only important aspect of the gendering process.

O'Brien herself expresses interesting opinions about her biographical efforts. In her autobiographical article, "Feminist Biography as Shaped Narrative," she says that "knowing what I do now, I might have chosen to end my biography with some intimations of the darkness that was awaiting Cather after her literary emergence, providing a more muted ending than I did. . .. But such an ending was not consistent with the story of artistic emergence I then wanted to tell" (266). As well as her desire for shaping a happy—indeed, a victorious ending for Cather—O'Brien also confesses, in "My Willa Cather: How Writing Her Story Shaped My Own," that her positioning of her own subjectivity as "power-less daughter" with a fear that "powerful, self-involved" women would leave her "feeling annihilated" (3) was also a factor in her decision. Not only does the biography suggest, by ending at the moment of "emergence" of voice, that a resolution of the gender issues has been reached but also, by avoiding the years when Cather's power drive sometimes had eccentric and negative expressions, O'Brien's gender theory cannot approach the life of a woman of high achievement past the youthful stages, past the happy endings of breaking into the male-dominated world of public language. As a result, O'Brien's Cather, shown as successfully separated from her mother and matured through relationships with women mentors and friends, seems less a gendered person at the end of the biography and thus, by more traditional masculinist standards, a better writer. O'Brien concludes that gender is less central to the later novels.

Here I part ways with O'Brien. I would contend that gender—whether you are heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, celibate, impotent, merely bored, or obsessed with your sex life—gender, as opposed to sexual practice, because it is a socially produced factor interacting with the daily experience of living in a body, is always important no matter what your age. O'Brien ends her book with the words "the disclosure of a woman writer's power" (The Emerging Voice 448), and I believe that it is exactly when a woman takes up power, any kind of power, that gender conditioning becomes most problematic. Far from having arrived at a comfortable place in gender with her first successful novels, Cather's increasingly complex gendering is just beginning. Even though her sexual life may seem absent or at least settled by middle age, the ways in which she is defined as woman and writer are just beginning to come to the fore. I think there is much still to discover about the gendering of Cather in the second half of her life, discoveries that will help explain that "darkness" in the midst of public success that O'Brien notes in Cather's life, a darkness that plagues the life of any woman who takes up power in the public world.

I also think more biographical projects are necessary because, with the publication of O'Brien's and Woodress's contrasting biographies, Cather is starting to become the kind of cultural figure that Virginia Woolf is in England: the woman whose life and writing allow prismatic access to a particular cultural era. As a cultural figure she embodies salient features of her times and helps us characterize the age in which she lived. In characterizing that period we ultimately are seeking a way of knowing our own selves as products of these times of great change that have preceded our own. This possibility underlies Hermione Lee's argument in Willa Cather: Double Lives. In this first major British biography of Cather, Lee proposes to show that Cather is part of a larger "project to take over a male tradition of writing" (13) that involves writers such as Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Gertrude Stein. Her cover picture of Cather (on the American edition) reflects the large role she sees for Cather: it is a substantial, older Cather, suitably androgynous and strong looking under her unisex hat and enclosed by the natural space that O'Brien sees as essential to her part in the feminist project. Cather's function as writer in this feminist project is a critical one, "to appropriate the dominant male critique of female weakness and emotionalism" (Lee 13) and to "intervene . . . in a masculine language of epic pastoral" (5), a task Cather is perfectly situated to undertake as an American, a Westerner, and a successful professional woman and writer. Lee sees Cather as redefining the human relationship to space, by managing to stage the continuing "fracture" in the "American imagination between romance and realism, space and confinement, pioneering energy and elegiac memorialization" (12). She insists that Cather's ability to do this has "everything to do with her sexual alienation from conventional femininity" and is "emotionally defined by her deep feeling for one woman and her lasting companionship with another" (10). So although Lee avoids naming lesbian identity, she does insist on the gendering of her subject as a vital ingredient in the "project" in which she places her. Given this, it may seem surprising that Lee gives the boy phase short shrift, easily explaining it as "the symptoms of a furious resistance to parochial narrowness and the genteel conventions dictated by her mother"(38). Her judgment on the Pound relationship is equally swift, "Even if the whole Louise episode makes rather silly reading . . . it reveals for us . . . a touching mixture of bravado and anxiety about her sexuality"(42).

I find that this short shrift given to gendering is symptomatic of the arms-length distance Lee keeps from Cather's life as a girl growing up in Nebraska and her life as an American (not a British) woman throughout her text. I get the impression that Lee would prefer to move Cather to Europe with the other expatriates and that she often sees Cather's middle-class upbringing in Nebraska as entirely a negative feature to be shed by Cather. Lee observes at the end of the chapter called "Home": "Her re-vision of Nebraska was to be a struggle between sentiment and revulsion. Her return home would fill her each time with the old fear of never escaping and a recognition that this was the place which would always 'get' her" (44). Despite the fact that it is a welcome turn in Cather biographical representation to see a critic begin to place Cather in terms of both American and European literary histories as well as in a feminist enlargement of those histories, I think it is wise for biographers from outside the American context to investigate their own attitudes toward America when writing about American subjects. I think Lee's experience of Red Cloud, which she recounts in the introductory chapter, "Journeys," is an important statement of her relationship to her biographical subject. After deploring everything from Red Cloud's redneck attitudes to the eating habits of Nebraskans (she seemed to have met a very narrow range of them) she concludes, "I couldn't help feeling the extraordinary contrast between the immense landscape and the little, claustrophobic, provincial town, or noticing, even at a glance, the signs of cultural assimilation and stagnation Cather had anticipated" (3). Biographers coming from outside America to consider the life and work of this quintessentially American figure need to investigate their own national and cultural agendas concerning such subjects as margin and center and the class values that construct aesthetic values. In my own case, as a Canadian, I try to keep in mind how Canadians' experiences of space, western settlement, and national myth making have differed from those of our American neighbors, and I think British scholars will need to examine their attitudes toward high and low culture and the way in which America blurs boundaries in this regard. Critics like Lee also need to give special attention to the way English identity is especially informed by an intense and very specific class consciousness. Although America is not a classless society, class works quite differently in America than in England, and some of those rural stereotypes she found in the "Prairie Pizza" in Red Cloud may not be, in fact, as easily placed as she seems to think. However, I hasten to add that it is Lee's self-revelation in "Journeys," like O'Brien's in her articles on biographical process, that allow me as reader to better understand the biographer's construction of subjectivity. This treatment of the self of the biographer is welcome to the critic wishing to theorize the relationship of biographical subject and biographer, a necessary practice in a time when we no longer believe in the definitive biography.

Although, I hope, there will be future biographical projects on Cather, ones that make use of the now solid foundation of research that has been established, no biography can ever accomplish the special intimacy that a well-written personal memoir does. Even though I agree with O'Brien and other feminist biographers that a relationship exists between biographer and subject, that literary relationship cannot replace an actual relationship. The personal memoir, unlike biography, is always based on a relationship with the subject, and through detailed descriptions—not only the physical appearance, manner, dress, voice, and gesture of the other but also the quotidian details of conversation; the physical settings of meetings in homes, gardens, restaurants, and libraries; the telling of shared jokes, favorite sayings, and pet peeves; the narration of disagreements over everything from summer vacations to socialism—the memoirist embodies the subject for the reader. Biographers need to heed these details in making their dramatic reconstructions of their subjects and in heeding them they also need to acknowledge their debt to them.

I will quote at length from two memoirs of Cather, Edith Lewis's and Elizabeth Sergeant's, to illustrate what I mean by embodiment of the subject. Both reconstruct their first meetings with Cather. Lewis met Cather in the home of another admirable western woman, Sarah Harris: Willa Cather and Sarah Harris were having a spirited discussion about something,—I have no idea what—and after I was introduced, they paid no attention to me, but continued their conversation. Willa Cather, a rather slim figure, in a gray and white striped cotton dress, was sitting very upright in a straight-backed chair. She had curling chestnut-brown hair, done high on her head, a fair skin; but the feature one noticed particularly was her eyes. They were dark blue eyes, with dark lashes; and I know no way of describing them, except to say that they were the eyes of genius. . . . Willa Cather's eyes were like a direct communication of her spirit. The whole of herself was in her look, in that transparently clear, level, unshrinking gaze that seemed to know everything there was to be known about both herself and you. (xi-xii) Lewis does not stop at the physical description but goes on to describe Cather as an interactive person:

I had been silent, a fascinated spectator, while Willa Cather and Sarah Harris carried on their duel of words; but when I got up to go, Willa Cather accompanied me to the door, and there she stood and talked with me for fifteen or twenty minutes, giving me her whole attention. She talked to me as if we were fellow-students, both pursuing the same vocation [Harris had published Lewis's college themes] . . .

Willa Cather asked me how many hours a day I worked, and what I found the best time of the day for writing; what I liked best to write about. I do not think it was tact, or that she was trying to put me at ease. She had always a warm, eager, spontaneous interest in people. It was impossible for her to make a perfunctory approach to anyone; she wanted at once to get beneath the surface, to find out what they were really like.(xii-xiii)

In Sergeant's account Cather is framed by her career accomplishments, as the managing editor of McClure's (I have excerpted considerably as it is a long description): "Her eyes were sailor-blue, her cheeks were rosy, her hair was red-brown, parted in the middle like a child's. As she shook hands, I felt the freshness and brusqueness, too, of an ocean breeze. Her boyish, enthusiastic manner was disarming, and as she led me through the jostle of the outer office, I was affected by the resonance of her Western voice, and by the informality of her clothes—it was as if she rebelled against urban conformities." Once they are in Cather's office, where she is to look at Sergeant's writing, the breezy tomboy is gone: "Watching her with a beginner's tremor I felt the impact of something beneath her editorial mask: crude oil, red earth, elemental strength and resoluteness. Her sheer energy was alarming to a shy New Englander. . . . Nebraska had been mere geography to me till I met this tense dynamic person, with her homespun brilliance. Now I wanted to know where she ended and Nebraska began." Cather examines the manuscript and after some political sparring that is to become typical of their relationship, she judges it worthy of revision, introduces Sergeant to her chief, McClure, and officially becomes Sergeant's editor. Then, unlike a typical magazine editor, she accompanies Sergeant down in the elevator, in the same way as she escorted Lewis to the door, making a literary friend of her as she goes: "'There are only three or four people in the whole world with whom I can talk about books,' Willa Cather said to me with a confiding look and that hesitation in her voice which I already associated with emotion. . . . Flaubert, Balzac, Tolstoy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett—we were deep in them in two seconds, so deep that when the elevator stopped Miss Cather motioned it imperiously on its way" (33-40). Personally, I like this image of Cather and Sergeant riding up and down in an elevator, making literary critique:

Then as the elevator insisted on coming to a full stop, she gave me a little push, a sort of pat and cried effervescently, as the door slammed:

"To our next meeting!"

It was as if I had had a cup of champagne. (41)

As I read the ways that these women embody the charismatic Cather they knew, I was brought closer to the Cather that had been forming in my head while I read the biographies but that could not embody itself until I read these memoirs. An insistent set of related questions kept popping into my head: What was it like to raise a child as precocious and charismatic as Cather? What was it like to be in the same family, to be her grandparent, her sibling, her niece? What was it like to parent a child who was at once so insistently individualistic and at the same time so terribly needy of intimate relationships? What was it like to have a child who could equally charm anybody in town she wanted as a friend or shock the entire county with her goings on? How do you raise such a child so as to keep her safe while not perverting or destroying her special qualities? I realize that these are maternal or parental questions and I willingly admit that they stem from my own subject position as a family person, which makes me put myself in the place of her parents, her siblings, her extended family, and the townspeople of Red Cloud, the whole village that they say it takes to raise a child.

Many biographers take quite a stereotypical attitude toward the artist's family: it is either a site marking early influences to be shaken off as soon as possible in order to become the self-defining individual artist or it is seen merely as a passive vehicle of the ideological interpolation of the child. However, Cather was an artist—and I think the facts of her life bear this out—who was integrally and interactively involved with her family all of her life; that relational bedrock, more than any necessary separation from early influence, helped make her art possible. I offer a few family facts that I find biographers have not yet fully considered: Cather was her parents' first and only child for four long years. They thought her so special that when she went to college not only did they finance her (not a typical act for parents of a girl in that time) but they also locked up her room and despite the crowded household no other child was allowed to use it. Cather not only spent her childhood in intimate play with her brothers but actually went on holidays with them, at their enthusiastic instigation, when she was a middle aged woman. Cather's mother, the strong-willed imperious beauty noted by all biographers, was also the kind of mother who, when it was pointed out to her that young Willa was wasting the music teacher's time by asking questions about topics unrelated to music, is said to have retorted that the teacher had better come twice a week instead of once. Cather's relationship with her mother continued to be one in which her mother held great authority. For example, knowing how the heat depressed her daughter and made her cranky, her mother had to tell her, when she was old enough to know better, to please delay her annual summer trip home, she would be wise to come after the weather cooled a little (that was the year she and Lewis found Grand Manan). Cather was a special person to all her family members. Even her nieces remember fondly the pleasures of unpacking their aunt's wonderful, expensive clothing and shoes when she came on her many visits home. And in her old age Cather not only yearned to be with her extended family as often as possible and managed it as often as she could but she also took on a whole surrogate family, the Menuhins.

My reading of Cather's life and works convinces me that Cather remained her mother's child all her life. This does not mean she remained childish, as a Freudian separation analysis would read adult mother-attachment. Rather, her continuing intense bonding with her mother allowed her to be childlike in ways that creative people, especially creative women, must be. The fluid and vulnerable ego boundaries that result from such a bond can make life difficult at times, can cause many self-protective, eccentric behaviors but they also allow that necessary ability for the creative person wishing to express an art based on a relational universe: the ability—in a very dramatic and intensely physical, emotional, and psychological way—to become the other. The way that Cather, in her art, takes on the guise of so many very different others is a sign of that ongoing relational bond with the personal mother. As critics and biographers we need to entertain the idea that the dominance of the mother (and mother surrogates) in the psychic life of her offspring to the point that even as an adult the child never quite believes in her own separate existence, may well be a mark not of a failure to achieve maturity but of the achievement of a maturity based on the imaginative ability to put oneself intensely in the place of the other.

Therefore, when I analyze those two dramatic times in Cather's early life, I see in the cross-dressing a creative person able to enter so fully into the role of the other that she adopts costume, manner, attitude, and a full embodiment of the other. Her actions do not surprise me; I am surprised only by the wisdom of the parents who tolerated and permitted it. The intensity of her love for Pound indicates the degree to which she was intensely involved with the figure who is each person's first love, the mother. The negative side of this "system of dependency" has been theorized by many biographers of many artists; however, the positive and ongoing nature of the bond, the ways in which it enables the artist's function, her intervention in discourse, has not been considered. I find that Cather's ability to be her male characters and to construct female figures of such complexity rests in this system of dependency. And if, as Cather asserted to Fisher, her life theme was "escape," it was an escape that she undertook on behalf of that mother who could not escape the boundaries and conventions that held her.

As well, because Cather was an unmarried woman, I think biographers have overlooked how much she was a family person and how central a fuller understanding of that family life is to a richer reading of her fiction. Just as we need new insights into the nuances of gendering we also need to connect those insights to a more nuanced view of family. In putting Cather more completely back into her family we should not seek to give her any of the stereotypical familial roles in which unmarried women are cast by popular psychology: for example, as victim of unimaginative maternal conventionality or as unproblematically daddy's favorite girl or as selfless maiden aunt. So I would like to propose that future biographers begin to look at Cather as a family person and at Cather's family in a new way. To indicate one of the first directions that investigation might take, I think an extension of O'Brien's work on the mother-daughter relationship would be a good place to start. Chodorow has said that "daughters never abandon the intense preoedipal attachment to their mothers" (qtd. in O'Brien, The Emerging Voice 104) and Lewis records that "Willa Cather always said she was more like her mother than like any other member of the family" (7). For me, as for a number of feminist theorists, this relationship is the central "system of dependency" that forms the author function and builds and shapes the power to intervene in discourse. Bernice Slote has observed that "Willa Cather's imaginative world was one of subtle human relationships in settings of extraordinary physical reality" (ix). I propose that the most subtle relationship and the most extraordinary physical reality of Cather's life, both in her early development and in later life, were those with her mother followed very quickly by her grandmothers. Some of the exploration of the early effect of the mother-daughter bond has been done. However, in terms of the effects of the bond in Cather's later life—with all the illnesses and deaths, the bittersweet results of fame, as well as the considerable literary output and the central importance to her of female intimates—the subject has hardly been touched.

In a 1938 letter describing how she wrote The Professor's House, Willa Cather points to what seems to be an unlikely source of inspiration for her novel. Tracing her depiction of the Blue Mesa to the image of the sea in Dutch paintings, her account implicitly associates Tom Outland's southwestern adventures with colonial trade:

Just before I began the book I had seen, in Paris, an exhibition of old and modern Dutch paintings. In many of them the scene presented was a living-room warmly furnished, or a kitchen full of food and coppers. But in most of the interiors, whether drawing-room or kitchen, there was a square window, open, through which one saw the masts of ships, or a stretch of grey. The feeling of the sea that one got through those square windows was remarkable, and gave me a sense of the fleets of Dutch ships that ply quietly on all the waters of the globe—to Java, etc.

In my book I tried to make Professor St. Peter's house rather overcrowded and stuffy with new things; American proprieties, clothes, furs, petty ambitions, quivering jealousies—until one got rather stifled. Then I wanted to open the square window and let in the fresh air that blew off the Blue Mesa, and the fine disregard of trivialities which was in Tom Outland's face and in his behaviour. ("On The Professor's House" 31-32)

With its allusion to Dutch colonialism, the letter invites its readers to consider The Professor's House in the context of empire. The novel's apparently imperial origins reveal an aspect of Cather's fiction that scholars have only recently begun to examine. Joseph Urgo's 1995 study,Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration, and Guy Reynolds' 1996 work, Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire, both take as a central premise the notion that Cather's writing is "about empire" (Reynolds 46). For Reynolds her novels "fictionalize the transfer of European empires to America, and the subsequent growth of an American empire" (46); for Urgo her writing "confront[s] the poetic potential of a transnational, American empire in the process of formation" (131-32). The presence of empire throughout Cather's fiction is undeniable, but its treatment is less straightforward than these statements suggest. In Cather's writing imperial narratives coexist with a tendency to efface the United States's twentieth-century global role. The trajectory of her literary career displaces the American empire ever farther from its contemporary moment and setting, from the late-nineteenth-century settlement of the frontier to mid-nineteenth-century French missionary work in the Southwest to the seventeenth-century colonization of Quebec. Rather than focus on the relationship between the United States and the world beyond its borders, she retreats inward and backward to the settlement of the American West and the colonization of the New World. Her works transform the American empire into a thing of the past, while her emphasis on continental expansion keeps the United Stares figuratively at home. Far from implying Cather's detachment from political issues, however, this ambivalent treatment of imperialism reveals her embeddedness in them. She is not alone in her strategies of effacement and retreat: as Urgo points out, most Americans "do not talk about their empire" (132). Cather's writing participates in modern American life by exploring not simply the fact of U.S. imperialism but also the national unwillingness to talk about it.

The treatment of continental expansion in Cather's works is perhaps the most striking example of her simultaneous acknowledgement and suppression of empire. Although she does not explicitly use the term frontier in "Tom Outland's Story," the story itself, which depicts a young cowboy's exploration and domestication of a conveniently uninhabited southwestern landscape, is filled with allusions to frontier mythology. Even before we witness Tom's actions on the mesa the narrative presents him as the incarnation of the frontier experience. Tom's parents, like so many pioneers, migrated west in a "mover wagon" (104) when he was a baby. They died upon their arrival, leaving their son ignorant of his birthdate and utterly dependent on the frontier itself for his identity. A "fine-looking" boy who is "tall and . . . well-built" (95), Tom resembles the "true American frontiersman," described in the program for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, titled Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, as a "[y]oung, sturdy, . . . remarkable specimen of manly beauty"(7). He plays the conventional pioneering role of the scout, who carries "in his pocket the secrets [of] old trails and stones and water-courses" (235) when he leads the Professor through the Southwest on horseback. Moreover, Tom's domestication of the mesa recalls the settlement of the frontier. When he builds a log cabin on the mesa top, he invokes what Richard White has called "the chief icon of the nineteenth-century frontier, if not of American culture itself" (19).

By depicting Outland as a frontiersman, Cather invokes a myth of unblemished American heroism: the popular notion that the West was "settled," rather than "conquered" (Grossman I), has long defined it as a kingdom won without the guilt Of studied battle. (Miller 187-88)

Since the late eighteenth century Americans have maintained a careful distinction between their "settlement" of the frontier and the invasiveness of European imperialism. As Patricia Limerick points out, this distinction still enables many Americans to imagine expansion with a clear conscience: "The term 'frontier' blurs the fact of conquest and throws a veil over the similarities between the story of American westward expansion and the planetary story of the expansion of European empires. Whatever meanings historians give the term, in popular culture it carries a persistently happy affect, a tone of adventure, heroism, and even fun very much in contrast with the tough, complicated, and sometimes bloody and brutal realities of conquest" (75). Rather than exposing the frontier's "brutal realities," the shift in Cather's letter from Dutch colonialism to Tom Outland's adventures on the Blue Mesa serves to empty the former of its associations with violence. The description of ships sailing "quietly" and the casual allusion to "Java, etc." make imperialism seem harmless and unintentional. At the same time, both the letter and the novel it describes perpetuate the notion that U.S. expansion is, by definition, continental: the antidote to the crowdedness of Dutch interiors may be the sea, but the antidote to "American proprieties" is the Blue Mesa. Although it implies that the exploration of the mesa is analogous to Dutch colonial trade, the letter manages to elide the real similarities that existed between European imperialism and twentieth-century American expansion. By 1925, when The Professor's House was published, the continental frontier had been officially closed for over three decades, and the United States was emerging as a world power. Nonetheless, Cather ignored the United States's growing involvement in Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of Asia and kept her novelistic focus on the American West.

This reversion to the mythology of continental expansion is not unique to Cather's work. According to David Wrobel, frontier narratives were quite common during the early decades of the postfrontier, postwar era: "During the 1920s there was a vast outpouring of writing on the American frontier, fueled in part by the publication of Frederick Jackson Turner's collection of essays, The Frontier in American History (October 1920). . . . The image of the frontier, it seems, provided a kind of solace for some in the uncertain postwar years"(98). What sets The Professor's House apart from its contemporaries, however, is the fact that it calls attention to its own gesture of bringing expansionism back home: Cather reduces her frontier narrative to a 70-page interlude within an otherwise domestic novel. Set at the turn of the century, "Tom Outland's Story" is carefully disassociated from the contemporary moment depicted in the other two sections. As a result, rather than simply displacing expansion from far-off lands to the North American continent, the novel takes the inward displacement of expansion as its subject. Like the Dutch paintings Cather describes in her letter, in which a window frame surrounds a view of the sea and situates it within a domestic interior, The Professor's House encloses its frontier narrative within the novel's tripartite structure. The framing of "Tom Outland's Story" locates continental expansion firmly inside the home: it keeps Outland, whose name itself suggests expansionism, safely inland.

Cather's unusual choice for an epigraph—a quotation from within the novel itself—alerts the reader to the fact that the novel is, in many ways, about its own structure. The line is from Louie Marsellus's recollection of the bracelet Rosamond was wearing when they first met, a bracelet Tom Outland had given her: "A turquoise set in silver, wasn't it? . . . Yes, a turquoise set in dull silver" (90). For James Schroeter, "[t]he point is that Book II is the 'turquoise' and Books I and III are the 'dull silver.' The whole novel, in other words, is constructed like the Indian bracelet" (370). By suggesting that The Professor's House recreates, in written form, one of the Native American artifacts Outland takes from the mesa, Schroeter aligns Cather's point of view with that of Outland himself. His formulation implies that Cather participates in, and thus endorses, Outland's romanticization and appropriation of Native American culture: "as those familiar with the values running all though Willa Cather's fiction will recognize, . . . the half-forgotten Indian bracelet represents true beauty, while the overvalued gold necklace [given to Rosamond by Marsellus] represents the false" (Schroeter 370). At first glance the epigraph seems to invite Schroeter's reading. The reference to turquoise foreshadows Cather's description of the mesa as a "blue, feature-less lump" (170), and the image of this blue stone framed by silver does indeed evoke the tripartite structure of the book. Nevertheless, as I argue below, the novel's treatment of its "turquoise" centerpiece, its portrait of Outland's frontier adventures, is far from uncritical. Moreover, Schroeter's assertion that the narrative simply rejects Marsellus's false materialism in favor of Outland's authenticity overlooks the fact that, by opening the novel with Marsellus's words, Cather hints at his unavoidable centrality. By invoking Marsellus's memory of Outland's gift, the epigraph underscores his replacement of Outland as Rosamond's husband. The irrepressible engineer, with his international connections and his money-making talent, supersedes the cowboy explorer of the Blue Mesa. Marsellus becomes a figure for the United States's shift from continental to overseas expansion, a rare acknowledgment in Cather's writing of American empire in its twentieth-century form. By giving his words such prominence in the epigraph, the novel implies the futility of resisting the nation's new, global role. As its language struggles to contain an empire that has already moved beyond U.S. borders, The Professor's House ends up depicting its own failure to preserve the myth of innocent expansion.

When she described the intended effect of The Professor's House in 1938, Cather chose to ignore the problem of Louie Marsellus and highlighted instead the ease with which a sea voyage to Java could become an adventure in an American desert landscape. If her fiction could not forestall the United States's shift to overseas expansion, it could at least figuratively domesticate the older, European, version of empire. In The Professor's House European imperialism finds its way into the United States in the form of several British characters, who look to Americans for lessons in expansion. Transplanted to the New World, the British are rendered innocuous and even foolish. Sir Edgar Spilling, for example, finds it necessary to travel to the American Midwest for information about a European empire (25-26). Whereas Sir Edgar is merely ridiculous, another British character, Henry, is "a pitiful wreck of an old man" (175), reduced to working as Tom and Roddy's cook and housekeeper on the mesa. The frontier domesticates (and ultimately kills) this "castaway Englishman" (175), whose many years at sea associate him with nineteenth-century British novels of imperial adventure.

If Henry's character seems to have sprung from the pages of imperialist literature, that literature itself provides Tom with his reading material. Like many other Cather characters, including Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! and Jim Burden in My Ántonia, Tom carries the idea of European empire into the American West in the form of books. As he discovers and explores the mesa, he reads classical epics and British adventure novels: "I'd brought my Caesar along, and had promised Father Duchene to read a hundred lines a day. . . . We had Robinson Crusoe with us, and Roddy's favorite book, Gulliver's Travels, which he never tired of" (167). Later, when Tom settles down on the mesa to spend a summer alone there, he reads Virgil's Aeneid, and his impressions of this foundational myth of empire-building ultimately blend with his memories of the mesa itself: "When I look into the Aeneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage—behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring" (228 ). While Tom's vision transports the world of the Aeneid to the landscape of the American Southwest, it also encloses the mesa itself within a book. The double image that he sees transforms the mesa into a work of art.

By figuring Old World imperialism as the stuff of literature, The Professor's House renders it safe and familiar; with the simple turn of a page these narratives' "undiscovered" destinations may be revisited again and again. When he runs out of new books, for example, Tom begins to memorize passages of Virgil. Moreover, because the rereading of adventure tales accompanies his own exploits on the mesa, the exploits themselves seem to repeat earlier acts of discovery. For the reader of The Professor's House the history of the Blue Mesa itself reinforces this sense of repetition. Although Tom and Roddy long to be "the first men" (166) to reach the top of the Blue Mesa, their exploration of this supposedly uncharted territory proceeds along a "well-worn path" (195). The realization that they are not "first," however, only enhances the excitement of their adventure. In Tom's words, "To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labor and care in the soil of an empty country" (173). His remark is telling: despite the "evidences of human labor and care," the country remains "empty." Imaginatively restored to emptiness, the American Southwest becomes a territory to be rediscovered time and again. Tom's own efforts at "tidying up the ruins to wait another hundred years, maybe, for the right explorer" (227) transform expansion into an activity that can be repeated infinitely within the same geographical space.

Many critics have noted that Cather's writing of "Tom Outland's Story" was itself a return to well-charted territory. Cather had visited Mesa Verde a decade before the publication of The Professor's House and described her own adventure in a 1916 newspaper article (the article itself was unknown to scholars until Susan J. Rosowski and Bernice Slote "discovered" and republished it in 1984). The 1916 article captures Cather's own experience of following a "well-worn path": "The journey to the Mesa Verde . . . is now a very easy one, and the railway runs within thirty miles of the mesa. . . .[You take] a friendly train with invariably friendly passengers and a conductor who has been on that run for fourteen years and who can give you all sorts of helpful information" (Rosowski and Slote 82). Rosowski and Slote observe that "Tom Outland's Story" repeats the very language of Cather's article: "The 1916 essay is 'Tom Outland's Story' in embryo: it contains the essential themes, techniques, and even images of the later story—and indeed, of the novel" (Rosowski and Slote 91). In Cather's descriptions, Tom's first glimpse of the Cliff City echoes that of his historical precursor:

After a long stretch of hard climbing young Wetherill happened to glance up at the great cliffs above him, and there, thru a veil of lightly falling snow, he saw practically as it stands today and as it had stood for 800 years before, the cliff palace—not a cliff dwelling, but a cliff village . . . lying in a natural archway let back into the cliff. (Rosowski and Slote 84)

I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it, on that first morning, through a veil of lightly falling snow. Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep. (The Professor's House 179)

Tom's exploration of the deserted Cliff City reenacts not only the journey of the cliff dwellers themselves and of the white explorers who followed them but also the exploits of characters in Cather's earlier fiction. Harrell notes that, "as an idea for fiction the discovery episode predates the rest of 'Tom Outland's Story.' . . . The proof lies in the number of times Cather used the scene in other stories before working it out to her satisfaction—or nearly so, at least—in 'Tom Outland's Story'" (85). Tom and Roddy's fictional precursors include Margie and Douglass, the two adult protagonists of "The Treasure of Far Island" (1902), who consider themselves the "original discoverers and claimants" of an island where they played as children (265). Margie's recollection of lying on a sandbar by a driftwood fire and devising "the conquest of the world" (273) prefigures the analogous scene in "The Enchanted Bluff" (1909), the most direct precursor to "Tom Outland's Story" (see Harrell 87-88). In "The Enchanted Bluff" several boys sit around a campfire on a sandbar island, planning their exploration of a 900-foot-tall rock in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Like the Blue Mesa, the bluff is the site of a deserted, ancient Indian village, frozen in time and suspended in the middle of a vast, empty desert landscape. Both the scene of children planning their conquests and the bluff with its Indian village continue to appear throughout Cather's later, better-known fiction. In Alexander's Bridge (1912), for example, Bartley Alexander looks out of his train window and sees a group of boys sitting around a campfire. In The Song of the Lark (1915) Thea Kronborg secludes herself in ancient southwestern cliff dwellings. The enchanted bluff itself makes another appearance in Death Comes for the Archbishop, when the archbishop encounters it while riding through the desert plains of the Southwest. Thus, when Tom discovers the Indian village atop the Blue Mesa, avid readers of Cather's fiction may experience an uncanny feeling of familiarity: the mesa already seems like home because we have been there so many times before. Expansion has become an endlessly repeated and seemingly safe return to origins rather than a potentially dangerous journey into the unknown. It is fitting, then, that when Tom revisits the Cliff City after his trip to Washington he behaves like "home-sick children when they come home" (217).

In The Professor's House, as in Cather's earlier writings, the supposed innocence of boyhood serves as a figure for the familiar, for the imaginary home to which the professor, in his withdrawal from the world, returns. At first it is Tom Outland who brings the Professor a "second youth" (234), but even after Tom's death St. Peter is able to revisit an earlier version of himself: "Tom Outland had not come back again through the garden door (as he had so often done in dreams!), but another boy had: the boy the Professor had long ago left behind him in Kansas, in the Solomon Valley—the original, unmodified Godfrey St. Peter" (239). Cather's earlier writings, however, often treat boyhood as the object of unfulfilled longings. The inaccessible mesa in "The Enchanted Bluff," for example, represents a moment of childhood that can never be recovered. According to the boy who tells the story, the Indian children were left on the bluff to starve after the massacre of their parents. The coda to "The Enchanted Bluff," in which the protagonists grow older without ever finding the village and its abandoned children, embodies the irretrievable quality of childhood itself.

If "The Enchanted Bluff" depicts an unrealized fantasy, "Tom Outland'sStory" asks what happens when the boys actually reach the Indian village. In part the narrative preserves the innocent overtones of the adventure by keeping its protagonist frozen in youth, like the children at the top of the bluff. Despite Outland's ability to bring the fantasy to fruition, his own life remains unfinished. He dies in the war and thus remains, in the Professor's memory, forever a "tramp boy" (233). Outland avoids the indignities of adult life that would have debased St. Peter's image of him: "What change would have come in his blue eye, in his fine long hand with the backspringing thumb, which had never handled things that were not the symbols of ideas? A hand like that, had he lived, must have been put to other uses. . . . It would have had to write thousands of useless letters, frame thousands of false excuses. It would have had to "manage" a great deal of money, to be the instrument of a woman who would grow always more exacting. He had escaped all that" (237).

In the Professor's mind at least, Tom's boyhood self lives on, untainted by the superficiality and petty deceptions that St. Peter associates with materialism. Similarly, the mesa remains frozen in its original, pristine state, as though it, too, were the object of only imaginary explorations. Although it has been "discovered" repeatedly, it appears untouched. Tom declares that he "had never breathed in anything that tasted so pure as the air in that valley" (178), and when he drinks from a spring he remarks, "I've never anywhere tasted water like it; as cold as ice, and so pure"(187). As for the village itself, "everything seemed open and clean. . . .[T]here was little rubbish or disorder. . . . Inside the little rooms water jars and bowls stood about unbroken, and yucca-fibre mats were on the floors." (186). The emphasis on order and cleanliness in these descriptions is striking, especially since it marks a dramatic departure from historical accounts of the actual Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, accounts that Cather consulted before writing "Tom Outland's Story." Harrell describes the filth and dilapidation of the dwellings prior to excavation: "the remnants of rooms and towers poked through piles of rubble, every step raised dust centuries old, and the only water around was unfit to drink" (213). By effacing the changes wrought by time and weather, Cather's fictional description makes the mesa new again and ready for "discovery."

Cather adds to this sense of renewal by revising an anecdote about a female mummy unearthed during the excavation of Mesa Verde. One historical account describes the well-preserved corpse of a woman, which the explorers decide to call "She," after the title character of H. Rider Haggard's romantic adventure novel. A tale of three Englishmen and their fantastic journey into southern Africa, She is, among other things, a well-known example of nineteenth-century British imperial fiction. In Cather's version of the mummy episode, the corpse is called "Mother Eve." By transforming "She" into "Mother Eve," The Professor's House obscures the literary allusion to imperialist adventure and substitutes instead an allusion to biblical origins. The change marks another figurative return home, a return to the mother of humankind. With the presence of Eve amid its already paradisaical beauty and purity, the mesa becomes a prelapsarian Eden.

The unspoiled qualities of the mesa make it an ideal source of the "fresh air" that "Tom Outland's Story" supposedly blows into the Professor's domestic life. Nevertheless, there are several hints that the Cliff City is not as Edenic as it appears to be. The apparent purity of Tom's motives, implied by his self-righteous claim that he "never thought of selling" the artifacts of the cliff dwellings and his refusal to touch the money Roddy earns by doing so (219-20), is undermined by his insistence on keeping "an account" of the artifacts in a "merchant's ledger" (189). Outland also admits that he "hoped we'd be paid for our work, and maybe get a bonus of some kind, for our discovery" (219). In Rosowski's words, "Outland appreciated the beauty and dignity of Cliff City; at the same time, he was a modern version of the 'brutal invaders' who ravaged the ancient tribe" (133). Tom's surprisingly cruel rejection of Roddy causes even Tom himself to be "frightened at [his] own heartlessness" (228-29). Perhaps the most blatant violation of Edenic purity is the horrifying murder that led to "Mother Eve's" demise: "there was a great wound in her side, the ribs stuck out through the dried flesh. Her mouth was open as if she were screaming, and her face, through all those years, had kept a look of terrible agony"(192). Father Duchene emphasizes the desecration when he surmises that "Mother Eve" had been punished by a jealous husband for committing adultery (201).

Materialism, ambition, jealousy: these are supposed to be the predicaments of the Professor's domestic life, which, according to Cather's 1938 letter, the "fresh air" of "Tom Outland's Story" was intended to alleviate. But the air that blows off the Blue Mesa is not much fresher than the air in St.Peter's house. The square window does not provide relief because the Professor and Outland are finally not that different from one another. It is difficult to separate Tom's voice from the Professor's, since the first-person narrative of "Tom Outland's Story" is actually a retelling, after Tom's death, of a story Tom told the professor years ago. Like Outland, St. Peter is simultaneously antimaterialist and implicated in materialism. He spends his career resisting the "new commercialism" in education (120), and he expresses his distaste for money throughout the novel. The Professor's disgust over a shopping trip he takes with his daughter Rosamond leads him to remark peevishly, "Let's omit the verb 'to buy' in all forms for a time" (134). Just as Outland asserts that "he must never on any account owe any material advantage to his friends" (151), St. Peter insists that "there can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. . . ; my friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue"(50). The Professor thus participates in the attempt to purify Outland by disassociating their relationship from financial concerns. Despite St. Peter's supposed antimaterialism, however, he admits that he and his wife "could not have been happy if Lillian had not inherited a small income from her father" (233), and he is "terribly selfish about personal pleasures"(17), from wine to luxury hotels to fine linen napkins.

In addition to the inconsistency of their respective antimaterialisms, Tom and the Professor share a tendency to withdraw from the rest of humanity. After Roddy leaves, Tom has the best summer of his life all alone on the mesa; he is so self-absorbed that, he later admits, "I'd forget all about Blake without knowing it" (228). Similarly, the Professor thinks "of eternal solitude with gratefulness" (248) and resolves that "[h]e could not live with his family again" (250). Even their places of retreat resemble one another: like the Professor's study, which is located "under the slope of the mansard roof" and has a "low ceiling" (7), the Cliff City has "a long, low, twilight space that got gradually lower toward the back until the rim rock met the floor of the cavern, exactly like the sloping roof of an attic"(186). Secluded in these claustrophobic spaces, both Tom and St. Peter are portrayed as rather self-righteous isolationists who deny their relationship to the world around them.

The actual effect of "Tom Outland's Story" is thus strangely at odds with Cather's letter. Her description links Outland's adventures to a seemingly innocuous vision of expansion, one that would be confined within U.S. borders but would simultaneously provide a liberating sense of unrestricted space, like the "feeling of the sea" in Dutch paintings. Cather's letter achieves this vision by simplifying the novel's imagery, by reducing the window to a source of fresh air. Like the paintings she describes, the Professor's study has a "single square window" (7) that encloses the outside world within its frame while allowing just enough life-giving air to enter the room: "[T]he window must be left open—otherwise, with the ceiling so low, the air would speedily become unfit to breathe" (17). Yet, although it is an important source of air, the Professor's window also represents the threat of death: "If the stove were turned down, and the window left open a little way, a sudden gust of wind would blow the wretched things out altogether, and a deeply absorbed man might be asphyxiated before he knew it" (17). When the stove does blow out at the end of the novel, the gas fumes nearly kill the Professor. Paradoxically, it is the open window itself that renders the Professor's world literally "stifling."

The view from the Professor's window contributes to this stifling quality. According to Cather's letter, the window that looks out over the sea in the Dutch paintings becomes, in her novel, a structural window that looks inland, at the Blue Mesa. In The Professor's House St. Peter's window overlooks Lake Michigan, which the narrator describes as an "inland sea"(20). Surrounded by land, the lake gives the illusion of far-off horizons while remaining safely inside the North American continent. This fantasy of overseas expansion at home foreshadows the depiction of the Blue Mesa and its setting: the mesa is surrounded by a "sea of rabbit brush" (172), and the Cliff City faces "an ocean of clear air" (191). The "inland sea" of Lake Michigan provides the Professor, who revels in the sight of its "innocent blue" (21), with a feeling of boyhood adventure that is free from associations with trade and colonialism. He underscores the lake's innocence by explicitly linking it to his own boyhood: "When he remembered his childhood, he remembered blue water" (20). Relying on the lake as an escape from the boredom of everyday life, he compares it to "an opendoor that nobody could shut" and imagines that "[t]he land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake,and you knew you would soon be free. It was . . . not a thing thought about, but a part of consciousness itself" (20). Here again, however, the novel calls into question the possibility of unrestricted "inland" space. By internalizing the image of the sea, by turning it into a metaphor for Lake Michigan and his own consciousness, St. Peter has made escape impossible. Ultimately he associates the sea with the imprisoning forces of his own life: "The university, his new house, his old house, everything around him, seemed insupportable, as the boat on which he is imprisoned seems to a sea-sick man" (131). Once a potential source of freedom, the sea becomes a site of imprisonment, just as the open window that provides fresh air almost leads to the Professor's suffocation. Expansive images, in other words, turn into their opposite in this text; their expansiveness cannot be sustained once they are brought "inland." Even the Professor's final realization that he is "outward bound" (257) with Augusta suggests not only that he is journeying outward but also that he is tied to her, like a prisoner. By questioning its own effort to apply figures of overseas imperialism to continental expansion—figures like an open window, fresh air, and the sea—the novel warns that American expansionist energies can no longer be satisfied at home.

If figures of expansion are suffocating when brought "inland," the figure of home itself can be fatal. The fate of the domestically inclined cliff dwellers calls into question the novel's privileging of the familiar and its emphasis on repetition and return, both of which make continental expansion seem more desirable than overseas expansion. Linking domesticity with extinction, Father Duchene speculates that, because the cliff dwellers stopped "roving" and settled permanently on the mesa, "they possibly declined in the arts of war . . . [and] were probably wiped out, utterly exterminated, by some roving Indian tribe without culture or domestic virtues" (198). The Professor underscores the connection between home and death at the end of the novel, when he recalls Longfellow's translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem, entitled "Grave": For thee a house was built Ere thou wast born . . . (248) In the Professor's mind at least, home has become a coffin.

As the novel uncovers the deeper implications of its own imagery, the characters' names betray hidden sides of their personalities. Unable to sustain the illusion of the frontier's openness, the text's language is barely able to suppress the international scope of twentieth-century American expansion. Tom Outland's name, for example, is an Anglicized version of the German Ausland, or "foreign country." The embodiment of continental expansion, this seemingly all-American cowboy has an implicit element of foreignness in him, a connection to the world beyond American shores. Similarly, the Professor has an allusion to empire hidden in his name. Originally christened "Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter" in deference to a grandfather who had fought in the Grande Armée, he "abbreviated his name in Kansas, and even his daughters didn't know what it had been originally" (143). Despite the Professor's secrecy, the legacy of European imperialism comes back to haunt him when his own daughter, whom he accompanies on a shopping trip, behaves "like Napoleon looting the Italian palaces" (135).

The precariousness of the novel's figurative language reflects the difficulty of figuring an expansionism that is contained and yet liberating, derived from European imperialism and yet distinct from it. By calling attention to its own difficulties, The Professor's House enables a critique of the internalizing quality of Cather's fiction more generally. Janis P. Stout notes that the "story of journeys combined with a clinging to home" is a "pervasive pattern in [Cather's] novels" (2o6), and Eudora Welty identifies this "clinging to home" with a tendency to move from the universal to the particular: "[I]t was [Cather's] accomplishment to bring her gaze from that wide horizon, across the stretches of both space and time, to the intimacy and immediacy of the lives of a handful of human beings" (68). For many critics the concern with home and the individual in Cather's works reaches its ultimate expression as a withdrawal into the mind. In the words of Hermione Lee, Cather is both "an original, adventurous explorer . . . energetically making her mark on an 'undiscovered continent'" and "a historian [who] . . .translates her landscapes, and the figures in them, into landscapes of the mind" (1). By portraying the writer as a pioneer, Lee engages in the very process that she describes. Like Cather, she moves expansion from the continental frontier to the realm of the imagination.

Lee's description of Cather as a "historian" links Cather to the Professor himself. In addition to his focus on the past, St. Peter's increasingly reclusive behavior makes him an ideal figure for Cather's project of internalizing expansionism. The similarities between the Professor's "internal quest" (Rosowski 130) and Cather's own strategy of internalization compel the novel's readers to examine her strategy critically. During the course of the novel St. Peter's inwardness becomes an almost fatal obsession. His cramped study provides an enclosure within the already confined space of his home, and he regards his desk as a further retreat, "a hole one could creep into" (141). To the Professor even a trip downstairs becomes a dangerous voyage: "On that perilous journey down through the human house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper" (18). Like the mental landscape of Cather's frontier, the Professor's study becomes almost indistinguishable from his mind, the most inward space of all. According to Rosowski, "[t]he upper recess of an abandoned house is the only inhabited portion of a structure now empty and dead; similarly, a narrow intellectualism is all that is left of St. Peter's own life" (131). Merrill Maguire Skaggs makes the connection between study and mind even more explicit: "All the living being done here anymore takes place in the 'dark den' of the third-floor attic study the Professor still works in; that is, what life he has left occurs in the upper story, in his head" (75). As St. Peter gradually withdraws from the world around him, retreating into his study and his mind with Outland's diary, his absorption in memories of the youth's adventures becomes so complete that the distinction between them and his own boyhood nearly collapses.

The Professor's internalization of Outland's adventures represents a continuation of his life's work, an eight-volume history entitled The Spanish Adventurers in North America. Although his research takes him to Spain, the American Southwest, Mexico, and France, he completes the writing itself in his study. As the narrator recounts, "the notes and the records and the ideas always came back to this room. It was here they were digested and sorted, and woven into their proper place in his history" (16). With its references to digesting and sorting, this description defines the Professor's scholarly project as one of absorbing and imposing order on the Spaniards' imperialism. The figure of weaving in turn, associates his work with the production of art: "Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux,—working her chronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes,—alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters of his history were interwoven with personal memories"(85). By interweaving the "dramatic action" of military exploits with a "playful" pattern, Queen Mathilde makes her narrative of violence seem harmless. Similarly, by bringing history into the home, by weaving together ideas of empire with "personal memories," the Professor transforms the conquest of the New World into a tale of "adventurers." The Professor's adherence to a fixed "design" (89) for his book highlights the aesthetic aspect of his project and links him to the artistically inclined cliff dwellers, whom Tom describes as "a people with a feeling for design" (182).

Like the weaving of violent deeds into a tapestry or the framing of the sea in a Dutch painting, the arrangement of flowers in the St. Peters' drawing-room defines aestheticization as a process of interiorizing and ordering: "There was, in the room, as [the Professor] looked through the window, a rich, intense effect of autumn, something that presented October much more sharply and sweetly to him than the coloured maples and the aster-bordered paths by which he had come home. It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious and bold, which selected and placed—it was that which made the difference. In Nature there is no selection" (61). The Professor's preference for cut flowers over those in their natural environment reflects his desire to control the world outside the drawing-room. Displaced from outside to inside, the flowers become even more beautiful, just as the stones from the Blue Mesa become "princely gifts" (103) when Tom brings them into The Professor's House. The unknown hand that "selected and placed" the flowers in the above passage recalls Cather's own "fastidious and bold" selection of an expansionist narrative from the annals of history (the nineteenth-century "discovery" of Mesa Verde) and her deliberate placement of it in the middle of her book.

Given the Professor's delight with the effects of interiorization, it is not surprising that his own garden seems more like an indoor space than an outdoor one: "There was not a blade of grass; it was a tidy half-acre of glistening gravel and glistening shrubs and bright flowers . . . and in the middle two symmetrical, round-topped linden-trees" (6). With its emphasis on tidiness, polish, and symmetry the garden is a model of discipline and control. The imposition of order is excessive, as if the Professor were afraid that his "tidy half-acre" might slip back into its natural state at any time. St. Peter's repeated conquest of his own backyard functions as a substitute for travel abroad: "In the spring, when homesickness for other lands and the fret of things unaccomplished awoke, he worked off his discontent here" (6). His half-acre allows expansionist energies that might otherwise be directed overseas to be channeled inward. As a popular symbol of America, the garden, like the mesa, alludes to the frontier, itself a mythological "Garden of Eden far removed from the evils of the Old World" (Wrobel 5, 4). Despite its Edenic associations, however, the garden's rigid precision has ominous overtones. As a figure for the frontier, it does not seem far enough removed from the "evils" of the Old World. In fact, it is more European than American: the Professor, we are told, "had succeeded in making a French garden in