Read together, the essays in this volume introduce us to the greening of literary studies, a.k.a. ecological literary studies, ecocriticism, environmental literary studies—all terms for a field that is young, in flux, and determined to remain so. These essays also reintroduce us to a Cather we risk forgetting in recent decades' focus first on gender, then on class and race. I'm referring to the Cather who is profoundly identified with the places that shaped her and that she wrote about.

Place seems "poised to resume its place as a vital human concept," Glen Love observes as he anticipates the next one hundred years when literary scholars . . . will find themselves, along with other humanists and social scientists, engaged in important, ecologically based interdisciplinary work with the natural sciences. We will necessarily become more interdisciplinary because we live in an increasingly interconnected world, because we need all the intellectual resources we can muster to find a sustainable place within it, and because we will see more and more the relatedness of all of this to the work we do as teachers and scholars of literature. Love offers an interdisciplinary reading of The Professor's House that is, "if not overtly scientific, at least leaning in that direction." He calls for acknowledging archetypes (among other influences) in Cather's art as representing "biology and the commonality of human nature." Love argues for the role of science in literary criticism, not to replace interpretation but to reinvigorate it, in (for example) "reconsidering the interpretation of archetypes."

"My own journey to ecocriticism transpired via a series of environmentally preoccupied conference papers on Willa Cather," Cheryll Glotfelty recalls in "A Guided Tour of Ecocriticism, with Excursions to Catherland." From those beginnings a decade and a half ago, Glotfelty comes full circle to reflect upon ecocriticism generally and upon ecocriticism of Cather specifically. An ecological critical method addresses "the interconnections between human culture and the material world, between the human and the nonhuman."

What is the right relation between human beings and nature? The question fundamental to today's environmental movement is hardly new, as Joseph Urgo reminds us. After situating Cather within the conservationist debate of her time between utilitarians (who urged reserving land for profitable use) and preservationists (who sought to preserve natural resources for aesthetic, recreational, and spiritual reasons), Urgo argues that My Ántonia models a preservationist aesthetic in which landscape and memory are inextricably entangled. In "Biocentric, Homocentric, and Theocentric Environmentalism in O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop," Patrick K. Dooley explores Cather's "divided alliance" in terms of a problematic position illustrated by Aldo Leopold's essay, "The Land Ethic," the classic statement of ecological ethics. And in "Willa Cather: The Plow and the Pen," Joseph W. Meeker reads O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia as espousing an ethic of development rather than of the environment. For Meeker, Cather presents the natural world merely as setting for her characters and as raw material for her pen; furthermore, she "shows little knowledge or curiosity about the natural processes surrounding her characters" and is "disinterest[ed] in her ecological context."

Thomas J. Lyon reads Cather differently. "The dynamism of nature admits of only permeable borders; requires for its understanding a consciousness loose and free to move," he writes in "Willa Cather, Learner." "The learning state is one of intense empathy, involving transcendence of the usual self," and

when the full range of consciousness is awakened, our native sensitivity to relationship comes alive. This larger cognizance is inherently ecological, and lets us see and feel the environment in a participative, intimate way. Willa Cather is one of our greatest nature writers—without even being a nature writer—because she had this living sense of the biotic community. Her capacity to feel for places and for trees— for the cottonwoods being cut down by 1921's modern Nebraska farmers, for example—came from the same well of consciousness as her novelist's sympathy for character. . . .

For Cather the instinctive standard of excellence in human endeavor, the reference, is nature.

"Sometimes Cather lets us directly into her own creative, environmental imagination," enacting ecological consciousness.

In "The Comic Form of Cather's Art: An Ecocritical Reading," Susan J. Rosowski maintains that the interrelatedness of ecological criticism calls for reading Cather's work as a whole. Philosopher Susanne K. Langer offers a starting point for Rosowski; beginning with Alexander's Bridge Cather moved away from the ego-consciousness of tragedy's end-directed plot with its heroic individual and toward the episodic, contingent form of comedy, which celebrates the "pure sense of life itself" in a pattern of eternal renewal.

Ecological criticism's interest in the relation between language and nature invites reading literature alongside the botanist's field guide, the gardener's plot, the architect's plan, and the composer's score. As Janis P. Stout demonstrates, Cather's personal copy of F. Schuyler Mathews's Field Book of American Wild Flowers (1902) offers one such starting point. This was the field book Cather carried on her nature walks from 1917 to 1938, heavily annotated in her hand. Cather's "observant eye" trained by nature walks may lie behind her choice of Benda for the drawings of My Ántonia, Stout continues; "Benda in fact captured in these spare drawings much of the essence of Cather's spare style."

In "Social (Re)Visioning in the Fields of My Ántonia, Jan Goggans reminds us that along with training the eye to see, ecological theory and botanical guides represent "significant ways of thinking about how humans exist in their environment." Ecologists' arguments about plants (native versus exotic) present an entry into cultural and political constructions of nativism in Cather's novel: how a "'native' like Jim Burden can tell the story of an 'exotic' like Ántonia Shimerda." My Ántonia shifts the paradigm away from nativism and toward a "flexible notion of place-based community," according to which "one's identity is constructed by the community into which one plants oneself."

Frank Lloyd Wright provides a starting point for Guy Reynolds in "Modernist Space: Willa Cather's Environmental Imagination in Context." "For both Cather and Wright, 'fit' (a kind of spatial symbiosis between the man-made and the natural) constitutes the regionalist style." The result is what Reynolds calls Cather's "organic modernism" in which "the environment of Nebraska is used as an analog for novelistic form; landscape might even create form." By such a view, Cather's Midwestern environments are "akin to the spatializing tactics of radical modernists—artists working in literature but also in architecture and painting."

Music provides an entry into depiction of place for Philip Kennicott in "Wagner, Place, and the Growth of Pessimism in the Fiction of Willa Cather." "Cather was that rare Wagner listener particularly alert to the power of these encounters" between characters and natural spaces, Kennicott writes; and with that alertness comes her awareness of the political and philosophical debates surrounding his music. One of Ours provides the example, which, Kennicott suggests, is "a Wagnerian world worked out in American terms."

Literature's analogy to music appears in "Willa Cather's Great Emersonian Environmental Quartet." In this essay Merrill Maguire Skaggs recalls the role that gender plays in culture and environment: Cather played "riffs" on Emerson's Nature when she wrote an environmental tetrology that began by critiquing phallocentricWestern culture in The Professor's House and culminated in creating the fully realized female lives of "Old Mrs. Harris."

Interconnections among nature, culture, and art are the subject of "The Creative Ecology ofWalnut Canyon: From the Sinagua to Thea Kronborg." Here Ann Moseley recalls the actual place that Cather drew upon for her character's artistic awakening, when "her life becomes inextricably intermingled with its ecology— with its geological and cultural history and with its natural life." While nature figures sparely in My Mortal Enemy, sensitivity to the relation of literature to life motivates "Unmasking Willa Cather's 'Mortal Enemy,'" where Charles Johanningsmeier argues that S. S. and Hattie McClure are "the real-life models for the novel's characters" and [interprets] what Cather's relationship to them was.

Ann Romines explores questions of memory, creativity, culture, and place in Cather's writing about Virginia. After Cather's family emigrated to Nebraska, Romines writes, Willa "was confronted with one of the major tasks of her life. She had to learn how to remember Virginia, how to live and write with her Southern inheritance." Then Romines argues "that much of Cather's best fiction before her specifically Southern novel of 1940 [Sapphira and the Slave Girl] is, on some level, engaged with the problem of how to remember and to render the South."

In "Character, Compromise, and Idealism in Willa Cather's Gardens," Mark A. Facknitz reminds us that interconnections between culture and nature are revealed in gardens. The garden confirms what we know: "nature gives us, not glimpses of her inward truths, but reflections of cultural assumptions." Situating Cather in her time, Facknitz notes the "prairie stoicism" of her refusal to succumb to facile alternatives. "She guessed that in the modern moment we needed to travel farther, to ever less comfortable liminal zones like the canyons once inhabited by the Anasazi, to be able to intuit incorruptible nature." "What happens," Facknitz writes, "at the threshold between gardened space and wilderness is transcendence . . . of basic categories of understanding."

Just as the essays collected here introduce ecological literary studies and demonstrate Cather's centrality to ecocritical ideas and issues, so they invite a reconsideration of the language we use and the stances we take. There is among these essays a remarkable absence of jargon. Rather than performing poststructuralist games of complicating, transgressing, interrogating, and contesting, these essays esteem simplicity, seek connections, and model humility. I recall Glen Love's discussion of archetype and essence and Ann Moseley's exploration of how abstracted elements represent intrinsic form. In a similar vein Mark Facknitz observes, "Finally, the return to simplicity is the point, the destination of the pilgrimage, the first principle of horticulture and the central aesthetic recognition that transformed Cather from an American realist into a survivor of modernism and a major writer." And Tom Lyon reflects that in "her simplicity of prose" lies Cather's desire "to convey the sense of the thing itself, in the first purity of response before description."

This introduction ends with acknowledgments. We have many institutions to thank for supporting the international seminar from which many of these essays emerged: the Nebraska Humanities Council, the Cooper Foundation, the Kimmel Foundation, and the Steinhart Foundation. And there are individuals, also, who supported this inquiry: At the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, Richard Edwards, Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs; in Red Cloud, Steve Ryan, Executive Director of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial. And through it all, Margie Rine, seminar coordinator, was at the heart of the seminar and of subsequent work on this volume.

For the prospective interdisciplinarian, the cluster of ideas surrounding the terms place and human nature increasingly offers literary scholars across-field entry into interesting territory. To begin with place, Aristotle announced in his Physics that "the power of place will be remarkable." Many writers— George Eliot, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Eudora Welty, Ernest Hemingway, Laurence Durrell, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Scott Russell Sanders, bell hooks, to name a few—have directly asserted the importance of place, often attributing to it the role of indispensable participant—even leading character—in their work; "[C]all it what you like," D. H. Lawrence said, "[b]ut the spirit of place is a great reality" (16).

As might be expected, it is the eclectic field of geography that has done most to bring place-centered insights of writers and thinkers into the purview of scholarly investigation. Geography has been called the Mother of the Sciences, since it distills and concentrates questions about the nature of our physical surroundings, questions which have been common to all people, everywhere. Throughout human history a regional geographic sense has been a given in all cultures. "Beyond that of any other discipline," geographer David Lowenthal writes, " the subject matter of geography approximates the world of general discourse; the palpable present, the everyday life of man on earth, is seldom far from our professional concerns" (241). More than any other subject, Lowenthal argues, geography studies aspects of human surroundings on the scale and within the contexts in which they are usually encountered in everyday life.

Such broad-gauge interests and claims have not gone unchallenged by those who find in them evidence of theoretical and methodological fuzziness. Even while defending his field's interests in and dependence upon many allied disciplines in the natural and social sciences, geographer N. Peter Haggett allows that his field "is unusual (perhaps promiscuous) in the range of its trading partners" (12). The wide-reaching concepts of place and region came under particular questioning in the middle and late years of the twentieth century as outmoded and diminished perceptions no longer relevant to a world of interchangeable, media-fed urban settings and ubiquitous shopping mall experiences. Academics of various disciplines regularly announced the end of nature, place, and region, and a fiction writer like Don DeLillo, in White Noise, provided ominous evidence of an apparent postmodern erasure of place. Critic Dana Phillips notes how one of the book's teenage characters updates her so-called address book: "She was transcribing names and telephone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had telephone numbers only, a race of people with a seven bit analog consciousness" (qtd. in Phillips 237). Were White Noise to be published today, instead of in 1985, the author would doubtless be underscoring the characters' placelessness with e-mail and other computer-related identities.

Still, even during this recent history in which place has been threatened with displacement, it has proved resistant to efforts to dismiss it. With the growing emphasis upon ecological thinking, the rapid joining of interdisciplinary fields in the sciences and social sciences, and the rise of new approaches in the humanities like ecocriticism, place would seem poised to resume its place as a vital human concept. The work of contemporary human geographers like Yi Fu Tuan, Edward Relph, and Robert David Sack, for example, has kept the place of place before us. Sack reminds us of the importance of holding together concepts that other fields take apart: We cannot live without places, and yet modernity is so quietly efficient at creating and maintaining them that whatever the mix and whatever the thickness, thinness, or porosity of places, their existence and effects often seem to be invisible. We run the risk of becoming geographically unaware at the very moment we have to be most aware. . . . A geographical awareness helps reveal how the segments of our lives fit together. It shows how we are cultural and natural, autonomous and independent. Most important, it focuses our will on our common purpose as geographic agents— transforming the earth and making it into a home. (257)

Important arguments for the revaluation of place have also been provided by philosophers of place, from early proponents like Gaston Bachelard and Simone Weil to recent contributors like Edward S. Casey, J. E. Malpas, and David Abram. Their line of reasoning is increasingly influenced by the allying of place to body, in the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which the primacy of the lived world of bodily experience is the foundation for all human thinking, meaning, and communication. "Just as there is no place without a body," writes Edward S. Casey, "so there is no body without place. . . . [W]e are embodied-in-place. . . ." (Getting Back into Place 104). Phenomenology thus confronts a narrowly reductionist cultural constructionism with the lived body, the source of our place in the world and, as Casey calls it, the common but unrealized root of our thought (Getting Back into Place 50). Phenomenology may be seen to intersect literary analysis in the pioneering rhetorical criticism of Kenneth Burke, and his perception of poetry, or any verbal act, as "symbolic action," or "the dancing of an attitude," which has at its base level a bodily or biological expression (The Philosophy of Literary Form 8, 9, 37).

Phenomenologists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their recent book, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, employ the findings of the cognitive sciences to argue for the authenticity of the embodied mind and reason. Lakoff and Johnson recognize that if all human reasoning is embodied, then a valid theory of human meaning will have to be grounded in that science for which there is "broad and deep converging evidence," namely evolutionary-ecological Darwinism, which holds that human rationality is not unique but builds upon forms and inferences present in so-called lower animals (92, 4). In looking to evolutionary biology as the basis for their theory of a human nature, Lakoff and Johnson join literary critics like Joseph Carroll, in Evolution and Literary Theory, and Robert Storey, in Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundation of Literary Representation. Both of these recent works of literary criticism were anticipated to some extent by Joseph Meeker's pioneering 1974 study of evolution and literature, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology.

What may be seen in such studies, then, is an important movement toward interdisciplinarity, combining literary and humanistic interests with the braided scientific concepts of evolution and ecology. Place itself has, through the influence of humanistic geographers, been revivified as a field of study and positioned for collaborative inquiry. Phenomenology, the study of the experiential core of our lives, has added the working of the body and mind to the power of place, bringing philosophy and the cognitive and life sciences into the mix. The rise of an ecocritical view point in the discipline of English literature has led literary critics to begin considering these issues from a fresh, new perspective. Even the academic Left, long resistant to evidence of biological influences on human behavior, or to even the concept of a human nature, may be moving toward a rapprochement with such ideas, as is suggested in renowned ethicist Peter Singer's new book, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation. Such realignment may be expected to continue, as evidence mounts in the biological and cognitive sciences that inherited factors have a major role in human behavior.

It seems inevitable to me that literary scholars of the next one hundred years, widely anticipated as the Century of the Environment, will find themselves, along with other humanists and social scientists, engaged in important, ecologically based interdisciplinary work with the natural sciences, bridging the two-culture gulf between them. We will necessarily become more interdisciplinary because we live in an increasingly interconnected world, because we need all the intellectual resources we can muster to find a sustainable place within it, and because we will see more and more the relatedness of all of this to the work we do as teachers and scholars of literature. Anthropology-trained Gary Snyder offers a comfortable common-sense stance for spanning the divide between the humanists and the evolutionary-based sciences when he writes: Recollecting that we once lived in places is part of our contemporary self-discovery. It grounds what it means to be "human" (etymologically something like "earthling"). . . . [H]ow could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions—gravity and a livable temperature ranging between freezing and boiling—have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place" (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature's stricter lessons with some grace. ("The Place, the Region, and the Commons" 29)

If, as I believe, we are edging toward a virtual science of place, embodiment, and human nature that will undergird our reading and criticism of literature, the work of Western writers like Willa Cather, for whom these concepts have been of defining significance, will serve as fertile ground. Notable scholarship on Cather and place has, of course, already been done, in books like Leonard Lutwack's ground-breaking The Role of Place in Literature (1984), Judith Fryer's Felicitous Space (1986), Laura Winters's Willa Cather: Landscape and Exile (1993), and Diane Dufva Quantic's The Nature of the Place (1995), as well as in numerous chapters and articles from Cather scholars through the years. Many of these pieces appeared in the pages of Western American Literature, which, during the long tenure of Tom Lyon as editor, kept alive the power of place and region when it was all but dismissed in other literary venues.

Susan J. Rosowski has called attention in her 1995 article, "Willa Cather's Ecology of Place," to "a Cather we have scarcely met" (37), whose emplaced ideas were formed in the intellectual excitement of pioneering botanists and ecologists Charles Bessey and Frederic Clements at the University of Nebraska, whom Cather knew and admired in her student days and long after. Citing Michael Kowalewski's "Writing in Place: The New American Regionalism," Rosowski finds in Cather's fiction and its relationship to the discipline of scientific ecology a proper response to Kowalewski's call for "'something challengingly new'" in place studies (48). In what follows, I intend to push still further in what I hope to be the direction of the new, with a consideration of a portion of Cather's The Professor's House from an interdisciplinary perspective, one if not overtly scientific, at least leaning in that direction.

I begin with the suspicion that what is challengingly new may turn out, in a sense, to be old, even archaic, but still, perhaps, challenging in its reconsideration of concepts ignored or pronounced dead by prevailing poststructuralist theory.

My admiration for The Professor's House goes back some thirty-five years since I first read it. It has been a perennial choice of texts for my classes in American and Western literature at the University of Oregon. This is the fourth scholarly essay I have written on the book. It may be, along with My Ántonia, the most frequently investigated book in the Cather canon. Cather has written approvingly of Sarah Orne Jewett's observation that "[t]he thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature" (Willa Cather on Writing 47). If such things become literature, it must be because they come to tease the mind of the audience as they did the mind of the writer.We can, of course, recognize the description of an archetype here. But what is the archetypal or mythic appeal of The Professor's House, and why should it draw author and reader as it does? I believe that the answer lies inWilla Cather's environmental imagination—which is, I would argue, a biological and topographical imagination— and what is surely one of its most intriguing and suggestive manifestations, "Tom Outland's Story" and the secret of the Blue Mesa.

Putting it that way makes it sound like a Nancy Drew mystery. But that is how archetypes work. For all of our acculturated subtlety, memorable literature draws us in by appeals that may be shaped by culture but whose origins are often subcultural, epigenetic, in the language of evolutionary biology. Great writers often draw from such primal sources, as Constance Rourke pointed out in her classic study of American humor: "inevitably genius embraces popular moods and formulations even when it seems to range furthest afield. From them literature gains immensely; without them it can hardly be said to exist at all" (130).

Terms like epigenetic and evolutionary biology, or even nature, will perhaps raise for some the uneasy state of essentialist debate among ecofeminists, or call to mind connections to the conflict over sociobiology, which arose in the 1970s and 1980s with the publication of Edward O. Wilson's textbook by that title. Although the ideas underlying the term sociobiology have already been assimilated into the working theory and assumptions of many scientists and social scientists, what Mary Midgley has called "the fear of biology" continues to haunt other social scientists and humanists. Writing of this phobia, Midgley says:

This is not a denial of evolutionary theory itself, which is usually conceded as correct in its own sphere, but a steady rejection of any attempt to use it in the interpretation of human affairs. A sanitary cordon is erected at the frontier between the physical and social sciences, at which biological explanations generally and evolutionary ones in particular still tend to be turned back, marked with an official stamp which may read "Fascist," "Racist," "Galtonist," "Innatist," "Biological Determinist," or at times most grimly of all, merely "biological."

This habit is fortunately on the way out, and a modest two-way traffic now does go on, to the general advantage. But a good deal of work is still needed to explain—as is always necessary in these cases—the distortions which gave rise to the prejudice in the first place, and just why they are not actually a part of biological science. (7)

Since Midgley published these words in 1985, a great deal of such explaining has gone on and a considerable amount of crossdisciplinary work has arisen in the natural and social sciences and even in some of the humanities, where human behavior is, of course, a matter of concern. The conception of a universal human nature has, as the result of this and earlier research, increasingly challenged and replaced the widespread assumption, as demonstrated in the second epigraph to this essay, that human nature is a dead idea, and that all human behavior is the product of social conditioning. This axiom, dating from the work of anthropologists Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and others in the early twentieth century, was, partly at least, a wholly justifiable reaction to the early distortions of evolutionary theory that were common at the time. Unfortunately, the baby—human universals—was thrown out with the bath-water distortions. The denial of biology has remained politically appealing ever since because it has made the perfectibility of humankind seem an easy goal. What it wrongly assumed was that there was no middle ground between grim biological determinism and blue-sky freedom. What it overlooked was the presence of several million years of the evolution of the human brain and body into common social behavior. The attempt within the social sciences to purge human behavior from human biology has eroded during the last few decades in the face of growing evidence to the contrary, as seen, for example, in the work of Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and others in the groundbreaking 1992 anthology on evolutionary psychology, The Adapted Mind.

Although there are behaviors and beliefs particular to specific cultures, there are also many that are common across all cultures, as anthropologists Donald E. Brown, George Murdoch, and others have established. Within the category of human universals are our similarities in living in social groups rather than alone; in our tendency to form cooperative relationships and to accept reciprocal obligations; in the underlying structure and semantics of human languages; in human facial, hand, and arm gestures; in our use of fire; in our territoriality (including our attraction to specific places); in the play of children; in our distinctions between close and distant kin; in age-grading and age distinction; in division of labor; in dominance relationships between men, women, and children; in rules of social unit membership; in conflicts structured around in-group and out-group relationships; in reasoning; in distinguishing right from wrong; in religious or supernatural beliefs, and so on.

It is necessary to stress that such classifications carry no evaluative judgments. As bioethicist Peter Singer writes: I am not saying that because something like hierarchy, or male dominance, is characteristic of almost all human societies, that therefore it is good, or acceptable, or that we should not attempt to change it. . . . My point is not about deducing an "ought" from an "is" but about gaining a better understanding of what it may take to achieve the goals we seek. (38)

Human universals offer corroboration of our place within, not above, nature. They are evidence of the commonality to which we are bound in our evolutionary history. It is worth noting, for example, that many traits like language, reasoning, tool-making, even culture itself, which once were confidently assumed to separate us from the rest of the animal world, have now been shown to exist in other animals, especially in our closest relative, the chimpanzees, with which we share nearly all of our genetic makeup. The discovery that reason itself is evolutionary, say Lakoff and Johnson, "utterly changes our relation to other animals and changes our conception of human beings as uniquely rational. Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them" (4).

If human nature affirms, as seems self-evident, the validity of what we call the human condition, archetypes of wide-reaching significance take on an importance that has been ignored in recent decades and are deserving of much greater attention. That Cather found the story of the far mesa archetypal is beyond dispute. She made it the emotional center of two of her novels, The Song of the Lark and The Professor's House, and of her 1909 short story "The Enchanted Bluff," and elements of it, as David Harrell points out in his From Mesa Verde to The Professor's House, are found in many of her other works. Cather admitted in a 1925 interview that "'[w]hen I was a little girl nothing in the world gave me such a moment as the idea of the cliff dwellers, of whole civilizations before ours linking me to the soil,'" and Edith Lewis identifies the mythic elements of this early enchantment when she says of Cather's visit to Walnut Canyon in 1912, "'She had never seen any cliff-dwellings before; but she and her brothers had thought and speculated about them since they were children. The cliff-dwellers were one of the native myths of the American West; children knew about them before they were conscious of them'" (qtd. in Harrell 8).

Harrell's book details revealing differences between "Tom Outland's Story" and the factual history of Mesa Verde's discovery, as well as the scientific archaeology and anthropology subsequently carried on there. In doing so, Harrell underscores many of the elements by which Cather sets aside historical reality in order to heighten the mythic and emotional power of her story. The Blue Mesa carries a particularly thick texture of meaning for Cather. Further inquiry into her treatment of human nature and embodied place in Tom's relationship to the Cliff City indicates something of her keenly archetypal and place-centered imagination.

Most noticeably, of course, the mesa's height as a natural feature of the landscape lifts it to a metaphorical level that Cather reserves for her characters' moments of high spiritual achievement. But within the mesa's heart is the Cliff City, enclosing a cluster of incipient meanings central to the novel. "TomOutland's Story," like the work as a whole, is engrossed with the human need to find one's place, literally and figuratively. The Blue Mesa not only draws Tom Outland into his search for the right place, but also offers in the Cliff City the opportunity to ponder the human significance represented by the stunning record of a civilization that has been built into it. "Carving out places," writes geographer Robert David Sack, "and creating a world occurs in the simplest preliterate societies. Identifying parts of the landscape, clearing sites, erecting shelter, bounding areas, establishing rules about what should or should not be in the place, knowing where to be and when, where to find this or that resource, and conveying all this through an oral tradition is world-building" (7). No less is it in a written tradition, not only in "TomOutland's Story," but in books 1 and 3 of The Professor's House, where the characters in a modern setting are also carving out places and trying to find their roles within them.

Thus, Cather has tapped into the nascent archetypal potentialities of the Cliff City, which lies waiting for what Tom can make of it, a lost civilization that was the product of millions of years of evolutionary development, during all of which time, place, and geography were life-and-death matters, when the ability to read the landscape correctly amounted to a survival factor. Yet the cliff dwellers' evolutionary step forward, a literal leap from earth into a fixed habitation, and an agricultural rather than a wandering way of life, could not, in Cather's perception of it, survive the aggressiveness of surrounding hunter-gatherers who, unlike the cliff dwellers, suffered no decline in the arts of war as the price of high cultural attainment. All of this embedded in the parallel context of the Professor's contemporary world in which ideals continue to fall victim to a reigning aggressive materialism.

The reigning irrationalist assumptions in poststructuralist criticism may have denied the reality of nature and human nature, but Cather, like those I have been citing, had not. If Cather is seen today as politically suspect from such perspectives, perhaps it is time to begin questioning the politics, rather than Cather. Joan Acocella, in her important new book on Cather and academic politics, notes that Cather is the victim of "political critics' revenge on the 'liberal humanism' of the fifties and sixties" (64). Acocella writes, "How wearying is the tone of recent political criticism of Cather, so aggressive, so righteous, calling her to the dock to answer whether she was as good as the critic" (68). Cather calls up the perception of a shared human condition not only through her own commentary but also through the words of characters she admires, like Father Duchene and Tom Outland. Note that Cather puts into Father Duchene's mouth what she calls, in her 1916 Mesa Verde essay, the most plausible explanation of the Cliff Dwellers' extinction (Rosowski and Slote 85).

Duchene feels reverence for Tom's Cliff City because it represents the desire of "humanity" for a home, "some natural yearning for order and security. They built themselves into this mesa and humanized it" (221). To Tom, Father Duchene calls the Cliff Dwellers "your people" (221), a characterization that Tom accepts when he later upbraids his friend Roddy for selling the artifacts that belonged "to all the people . . . to boys like you and me that have no other ancestors to inherit from. . . . I'm not so poor that I have to sell the pots and pans that belonged to my poor grandmothers a thousand years ago" (242-43). Later, in book 3, Professor St. Peter longs to "look off at those long, rugged, untamed vistas dear to the American heart. Dear to all hearts, probably—at least calling to all" (270). My italics in these passages emphasize Cather's implicit argument for a deeper human unity than today's unexamined assumptions of absolute cultural relativism might find acceptable. Tom's sins as an excavator doubtless qualify today as cultural appropriation, and it is useful to have these aspects of his story pointed out to us. But we also need to keep in mind that they are consistent with Tom's deep sense of his own human bonds with the lost inhabitants of the Cliff City. We might also reflect, with some humility, that for their time, these actions would have been seen largely as Cather saw them, as noble and self-sacrificing. And if we were alive at the time, we would, at our best, likely have seen them that way as well.

Moreover, Tom's perception of a shared humanity takes on new significance in the light of recent genetic research that leads most scientists to discount the idea of separate and distinct human races. Steve Olson, in Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past through Our Genes, notes that traditional racial classifications ignore the overwhelming genetic similarity of all human individuals. "One need go back only a couple of millennia to connect everyone alive to a common pool of ancestors" (Olson 47). Tom's universalist sentiments are now verified by the dna in our Darwinian bodies.

In the same context, Tom's reverential naming of the mummi- fied body of the woman among the ruins as "Mother Eve" proves remarkably prescient. A recent genetic discovery finds that all of the mitochondrial dna sequences that exist in all six billion of us in the world today come from the mitochondrial dna of one single woman who lived about 200,000 years ago, our common ancestor, the so-termed Mitochondrial Eve (Olson 23-27, 237).

Cather reminds us of the presence of the archaic human past within any of us when she reveals, in book 3, that a discouraged Professor St. Peter had reverted to a preintellectual state and had become "a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods and water. Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him" (265). Cather uses style itself here to convey her meaning, with sentences and phrases shortened and freed from qualification and subordination, disregarding any reach for graceful synonyms that might muffle the hard truth: "sun sunned . . . rain rained . . . snow snowed."

It is as if Cather were anticipating, and undercutting, the postmodern assumption that culture and language have somehow lifted us above our biology and rendered our bodies and their elemental emplacement inconsequential. Such invocations of a deeply felt presymbolic existence are frequently encountered in Cather and to note them is to memorialize many of her most powerful scenes: the children on the river sandbar, glimpsed from the window of a passing train, recalling to Bartley Alexander of Alexander's Bridge the dreams of his youth; young Jim Burden feeling himself melting into the slow fecundity and self-sufficiency of the pumpkin patch; Ántonia's children swarming up out of the root cellar in a kind of evolutionary fast-forward, an explosion of the victory of the life force over the underground world of the dugout that claimed the Shimerdas in their early days on the Divide, and which still holds the father in his suicide's grave; Thea Kronborg of The Song of the Lark lying on the floor of her bedroom, bathed in moonlight which seems to pour its essence into her young body, thirsting with creative desire.

Cather's art is, of course, complex enough to embrace other influences than the archetypal. But, given the tendency of much contemporary criticism to dismiss anything that speaks of biology and the commonality of human nature as deterministic or reductionist—while single-mindedly promoting its own brand of cultural reductionism—we should be at pains to reexamine what Dorothy Van Ghent described years ago as a quality of Cather that "allowed the back door of her mind to keep open" to archaic and instinctive influences. For Van Ghent, Cather's best fiction is characterized by "a sense of the past not as an irrecoverable quality of events, wasted in history, but as persistent human truth repossessed—salvaged, redeemed—by virtue of memory and art" (5).

One such line of reexamination is presented by Edward O. Wilson in his latest book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. There Wilson applies a theory of gene-culture coevolution to an interpretation of the arts. "We know that virtually all human behavior is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature" (126). Briefly summarized, "culture is created by the communal mind, and each mind in turn is the product of the genetically structured human brain" (127). Here and in his earlier book, Biophilia, Wilson uses, to illustrate the creation of an archetype, the example of human reactions of fear and fascination toward snakes—spread across many different cultures of the world—as the genetic component, formed out of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution in proximity to snakes. "Poisonous snakes have been an important source of mortality in almost all societies throughout human evolution. Close attention to them, enhanced by dream serpents and the symbols of culture, undoubtedly improves the chances of survival" (127). The culture draws upon those reactions of fear and fascination to create art, thereby transforming the natural snake into the archetypal serpent of art.

One recalls, at this point, Cather's versions of zero at the bone on the matter of snakes: the ominous dread of the snake-serpent expressed in the "Snake Root" chapter of Death Comes for the Archbishop, or Jim Burden's battle with the giant rattlesnake in My Ántonia, a creature presented in unmistakably prototypical terms, who "seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil. Certainly his kind have left unconscious memories in all warm-blooded life" (45-46). Such primal memories also manifest themselves in The Professor's House with the intrusion of the snake-serpent into the relationship between Professor St. Peter's two daughters, Kathleen and Rosamond: "'When she comes toward me, I feel hate coming toward me, like a snake's hate,'" Kathleen confides to her father, whose response is described as an anguished suffering in which he replies, "'We can't, dear, we can't, in this world, let ourselves think of things—of comparisons—like that'" (85). Then there is the rattlesnake that strikes old Henry Atkins, Tom and Roddy's cook and companion, as they are exploring mesa ruins, killing the old man almost instantly. Although, as David Harrell reports, snakes were not a problem in the actual Mesa Verde–Wetherill excavations (126), the "terrible" (216) death of old Henry seems another example of Cather's heightening of the mythic trials of Tom's quest.

Traditional Freudian interpretations of snakes as phallic representations and dreams as forbidden wishes that evade the brain's censorship have been recently seriously questioned or replaced by biological explanations. As Wilson says, "If brain and mind are at base biological phenomena, it follows that the biological sciences are essential to achieving coherence among all the branches of learning, from the humanities on down to the physical sciences" (Consilience 81). What is new from an interdisciplinary point of view, then, in such literary criticism (as is also seen in the books of Joseph Carroll and Robert Storey), may require us to reconsider something old, something akin to the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism, sweeping through graduate English departments forty years ago. The work of Frye, who has been called by Frank Kermode "the major figure in literary criticism of our century," may, according to Carroll, today be severed from its questionable mysticism and obsolete science and revised by strong new underpinning drawn from recent research in the cognitive and behavioral sciences (117, 382-90).

Wilson rightly emphasizes that a theory of the biological origin of the arts is only a working hypothesis, vulnerable and meant to be tested, but that it offers the humanities the attraction of a reinvigoration of interpretation, just as science would benefit from the interpretive and intuitive power of the arts. A scientific theory that is consistent with what we know from the recent cognitive sciences is worth our attention as literary scholars in reconsidering the interpretation of archetypes, those defining elements of art, reminding us, as Robert Frost put it, of what we didn't know we knew. Such a rapprochement with science squares with the existing evidence, then, and may offer exciting new possibilities for productive interconnections. If the sciences have a role to play in interpretation, they cannot replace interpretation, as Wilson acknowledges. The human brain is the world's most complex biological phenomenon, with 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections. Thus the variety and intensity of responses and connections as they play back and forth between artist, subject, and critic are virtually infinite. There will always remain work for the critic to do.

The Professor's House, particularly "Tom Outland's Story," then, is rich in archetypal elements, as has been noted in several critical treatments, especially in David Harrell's book, in Susan Rosowski and Bernice Slote's 1984 article, "Willa Cather's 1916 Mesa Verde Essay: The Genesis of The Professor's House," and in John N. Swift's 1986 essay, "Memory, Myth, and The Professor's House." It seems likely to me that the publication of "Tom Outland's Story," as reported by Cather, in French, Polish, and Dutch, as a short narrative for school students learning English, may owe something to the appeal of TomOutland as a version of the code Western hero ("On The Professor's House" 30). "Tom Outland's Story" reminds us that "The Western" in fiction and film is a clear example of the appeal of archetypes across cultural lines, leading to theWestern's emergence by the mid-twentieth century as what has been called a contemporary world-wide myth.

"Tom Outland's Story," centered as it is upon the discovery and archaeological investigation of the Cliff City, is a particularly packed meditation on biological-cultural coevolution in which Cather recreates a complex pattern of human history including, incidentally, a deadly serpent and a Mother Eve, but most important a hidden lost Eden that sprang from its hunter-gatherer origins on the plain into a fixed habitation, a Catherian city in the sky, named for the sky's color.

Along with these thematic elements, an interdisciplinary and scientifically aware reading of the novel might note its sensitive response to the often-ignored phenomenological base of our directly felt bodily experience. Cather affirmed such experience when she claimed that "art appeals primarily to the senses" (Willa Cather in Person 146). Tom's life on the Blue Mesa is one of heightened physical attunement to his surroundings: a keenly sharpened sense of colors, sights, tastes, textures, sounds, silences, and especially the feel and smell and taste of the air itself. These pre-reflective sensations, like Shakespeare's bites and blows of weather, "are counselors / That feelingly persuade me what I am." They suggest Merleau-Ponty's claim of "our primordial inherence in the world." The frequently noted array of houses and dwellings in the novel seem related to the sense of bodily emplacement that such structures arouse, returning us, as Edward Casey suggests, to our bodily emplacement "immeasurably enriched" (Getting Back into Place 178). Like the phenomenologists, Cather never loses the sense of normative significance that characterizes subjective physical experience.

If the thing that teases the mind is the archetypal element, it does not become literature, as Jewett and Cather affirm, until it is put down rightly on paper. Human universals are fine, but it's what the writer does with them that counts. To conclude, it is worth calling attention to the artistry with which Cather puts down on paper the climactic moment of "TomOutland's Story." In the episode of discovery Cather skillfully creates a form that clusters the final revelation of his search with a heightened sense of place and bodily sensation. To apply Kenneth Burke's terms, form is the arousing of an expectation in the minds of the audience and then the adequate satisfying of that expectation ("Psychology and Form" 31). Cather has carefully prepared us as readers for this moment.

The Blue Mesa, high and intriguing, has occupied Tom's thoughts and hopes of exploration since he had first seen it, perhaps even before, as it had teased the imagination of prairie children, who knew of such a place before they were conscious of it. Now, several strayed cattle from the herd in Tomand Roddy's care have swum the river and disappeared in the canyon winding into the mesa. Tom quickly prepares to follow them. He swims the river with his horse and, at first running beside the horse to keep warm, begins trailing the cattle into the canyon as it twists back into the mesa. Cather's keen sense of place and the lived sensations of the body in place are immediately evident in Tom's description: The bluish rock and the sun-tanned grass under the unusual purple-grey of the sky, gave the whole valley a very soft colour, lavender and pale gold, so that the occasional cedars growing beside the boulders looked black that morning. It may have been the hint of snow in the air, but it seemed to me that I had never breathed in anything that tasted so pure as the air in that valley. It made my mouth and nostrils smart like charged water, seemed to go to my head a little and produce a kind of exaltation. I kept telling myself that it was very different from the air on the other side of the river, though that was pure and uncontaminated enough. (200)

Here is the bodily phenomenological immediacy of the opening window in the crowded interior of the Dutch paintings, which Cather later cast as the metaphor for "Tom Outland's Story": "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).

Soon the ground becomes so rough that Tom hobbles his horse and goes on alone. "My eyes were steadily on the ground—a slip of the foot there might cripple one" (201). The act of coming into the country calls to mind Leonard Lutwack's observation that "[t]he quality of a place in literature is subtly determined by the manner in which a character arrives at it, moves within it, and departs from it" (59). Hemingway, whose style and manner had much to learn from Cather, was also deeply engrossed with writing about coming into a place, walking into the country. "Some days," he wrote, "it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it" (qtd. in Tanner 82). As Stephen L. Tanner points out, for Hemingway, [m]aking country—that is, creating place—was the real challenge. "The people were easy to do." He [Hemingway] thinks of a number of writers who do people well and concludes, "They weren't after what he was after." People were easy to do, he reasons, because "nobody knew anything about them. If it sounded good they took your word for it." Implied here is that everybody knows what a sense of place is; they won't take your word for it—you must satisfy their sensuous and emotive apprehension of topos or physical location. (85)

Cather shares what Tanner calls Hemingway's topographical imagination, making the most of the excitement of coming into the county, walking into the country. Nick Adams, walking into the country of the Big Two-Hearted River has much in common with Tom Outland walking into the Blue Mesa. Basic to Tom's experience is the primacy of bodily movement, swimming the river, running, walking and scrambling over stony ground, fi- nally stopping to catch his breath, a moment of physical repose after strenuous motion, which will find its counterpart in the immortal repose of what he is to see. Cather's sensitivity to the significance of human movement is a novelist's corroboration of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's claim that "[p]rimal animation and tactile-kinesthetic experience are at the core of our infancy and remain the unsurpassed core of our adult being. Indeed, the wonder of being lies in aliveness and the wonder of aliveness originates in movement. Human being, and the being of all who must learn to move themselves, is foundationally and essentially kinetic" (The Primacy of Movement 271).

Cather at this point in the story skillfully heightens our eventual gratification of fulfilled expectations by purposefully misdirecting our attention for the moment to the ground, under Tom's feet, with its dangerous footing, a jumble of stones fallen from above. It was such rough scrambling that I was soon in a warm sweat under my damp clothes. In stopping to take breath, I happened to glance up at the canyon wall. 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. It was as still as sculpture—and something like that. It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower. (201)

Tom happens to glance up. From his ground-held scrutiny of the jumbled and chaotic canyon floor at his feet, his eyes lift in an involuntary glance, and he beholds—just when he and we least expect it—the secret of the Blue Mesa. A revelation of composition overhanging formlessness, confusion transformed into composition, both the country and the materials out of which countries are made. The vision suggests an actualized creation myth of the early people of this place, in which chaos is magically transformed into a fitting home place. The climactic sentence beginning "Far up above me" may be one of the great sentences in Cather, in literature. Periodic, dramatic, a string of parallel phrases serving to heighten the significance of the very simple main clause that follows: "I saw . . ." and all rounded off by the single suggestive modifier, "asleep." In this fine moment Tom lifts up his eyes to the hills, and the teased mind gets it all down rightly on paper. This is why the writer writes and why the reader reads.

To sum up, what I am arguing here is that, to paraphrase Henry James, the house of criticism has many rooms. And many of them deserve more looking into. There is nothing more worthwhile for the scholar or for scholarship than honest interdisciplinary work. I join my colleague William Howarth in urging variety in environmental criticism and "in knowing more disciplines than literature" (7). And no interdisciplinary work has more to offer now than the various fields of biology, ecology, physical anthropology, and evolutionary psychology, to which literary theorists and critics have thus far paid little attention.

Cather's unusual richness of mind and imagination repays study from the many ecocritical approaches that are now developing in response to individual and collective environmental imaginations. She avoids the one-dimensional approach that reads culture and nature according to the current reigning ideological stance. Her version of the Cliff Dwellers' story also questions much of the current romanticizing of the hunter-gatherer past as an ecological paradise, yet she recognizes in it our common evolutionary development. She sees the promise of the stunning architecture and the ordered agriculture of the early mesa people, "growing strict fields of corn and beans," in the words of Gary Snyder's fine poem "Anasazi" (3), but she understands the Cliff Dwellers' vulnerability to human and natural-based catastrophe. She looks beyond culture to its roots in human animality, as is suggested in the mummified figure of Mother Eve, with its broken skull, its pierced side, and its face frozen in a scream of agony. The mummy's scream is the embodiment of the human potentiality for destructiveness or sexual aggression. The emptiness of the Cliff City, whether one attributes it to murdering marauders or prolonged drought, is a lesson in stone that biology counts, that past human life has been almost unbearably hard, and that all progress has been dearly bought.

In this sense, "Tom Outland's Story" and The Professor's House remain intensely contemporary, calling upon us to face our own nature. Reading the scene as a human tragedy, an ecological violation of the local carrying capacity, or an earlier "global warming," the silence and emptiness of the Cliff City reminds us that we cannot culturally construct the world any way we choose.

Cather's best work demonstrates that it is not the minor differences that divide humans culturally but the major similarities uniting us as a species that make for memorable literature. For "TomOutland's Story," as for all stories, the medium is the message. Stories are one thing that makes us human, and their origins are at the heart of our evolutionary development. Tom's story is the opening window letting in the disregarding wind that sweeps away pettiness and confusion and joins us to reverberating human experience. Narration serves an ancient and literally humanizing function of lining out a meaningful structure from the wretched mess of ordinary existence. That this particular story contains its own questioning of the cathartic power of such narrative—as seen, for example, in Tom's guilt over his dismissal of his friend Roddy Blake, and in Professor St. Peter's virtual withdrawal from his family and from life itself under the near-suffocating influence of Tom's heroic idealism—these are ironies that nevertheless depend for their effect upon the continuing appeal of Tom's archetypal example. Like the drawings in the Lascaux caves, "Tom Outland's Story" reminds us of the timelessness, the antiquity of human aspirations as they reach for meaning and coherence through artistic expression.

My own journey to ecocriticism transpired via a series of environmentally preoccupied conference papers on Willa Cather. After working the ground in Cather's fiction for several years I felt the need to formulate a general critical manifesto, which I presented with some trepidation at the 1989 Western Literature Association conference in a paper entitled "Toward an Ecological Literary Criticism," coincidentally the same year that Glen Love delivered the wla Presidential Address, entitled "Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism." Both Glen and I urged that the time had come for literary scholars to respond more actively to the environmental crisis. Glen speculated that literary studies have remained indifferent to the environmental crisis in part because "our discipline's limited humanistic vision" has led to a "narrowly anthropocentric view of what is consequential in life" (229). He recalled that Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It was rejected by a New York publisher on the grounds that "'These stories have trees in them'" (225), and he recommended that the profession learn to revalue nature-oriented literature, literature that can redirect us from "ego-consciousness" to "eco-consciousness" (232). While Glen urged his colleagues to rethink pastoralism and to pay more attention to nature-oriented literature, I argued for an ecological critical method, proposing the term ecocriticism for a critical practice that would take as its subject "the interconnections between human culture and the material world, between the human and the nonhuman" (4).

I suggested that Elaine Showalter's model of the three developmental stages of feminist criticism might provide a useful scheme for cataloguing three analogous efforts in ecocriticism. The first stage in feminist criticism, the "images of women" stage, is concerned with representations, concentrating on how women are portrayed in literature. Analogous efforts in ecocriticism study how nature is represented in literature—virgin land, Eden, Arcadia, howling wilderness. The second stage Showalter distinguishes, the women's literary tradition stage, rediscovers, reissues, and reconsiders literature by women. In ecocriticism, similar efforts recover and describe the genre of nonfiction nature writing and, in addition, identify and study ecologically oriented fiction, poetry, and drama. Showalter's third stage is the theoretical phase, which raises fundamental questions about the symbolic and linguistic construction of gender and sexuality. Similar work in ecocriticism examines how literary discourse has constructed the human. This critique questions dualisms prevalent inWestern thought that separate mind from body, men from women, and humanity from nature.

What was curious, from the point of view of this manifesto calling for the "greening" of literary studies, is that much ecocritical work had, in fact, already been done. When I drafted a working bibliography of ecocriticism, it grew to 330 titles. Behold, ecocriticism already existed. What didn't exist was any institutional presence of this vibrant field of study—no journals, no jargon, no jobs. Thus began a tremendously collaborative effort to create a scholarly community and put ecocriticism "on the map." The result is that today, as an anthology released just this month notes, ecocriticism "boasts a national organization, a journal, Modern Language Association (MLA) affiliation, a proliferation of courses across the land, and a lengthening shelf of book-length studies" (Harrington and Tallmadge ix). The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) was established in 1992 and now has one thousand members, with chapters in Japan and England, biennial conferences, a scholarly journal (ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment), a newsletter, an annual bibliography, a graduate mentoring program, special regional symposia, and a superlative web site (www.asle.umn.edu). The ecocritical movement has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the London Times, the Utne Reader, PMLA, and elsewhere. As Lawrence Buell, chair of the English Department at Harvard and author of The Environmental Imagination, recently observed in a special ecocritical issue of New Literary History, "the study of literature in relation to environment" has "begun . . . to assume the look of a major critical insurgency" (699).

Perhaps the new visibility of literature and environment studies inspired this year's Cather seminar theme. Reviewing recent and emerging ecocriticism of Willa Cather reveals a strikingly variegated palette of green readings. I should warn you that some of these treatments fault Cather for being unenvironmental. I believe that such attacks do not endanger Cather's reputation as a major writer but, rather, confirm it. Critics of neglected authors must necessarily highlight the strengths of their subject; it is only when a writer's canonical status is secure that he or she begins to attract heated scholarly debate. Thus, I view these skirmishes as a healthy sign in Cather studies.

Louise Westling, in a chapter on "Willa Cather's Prairie Epics" in her 1996 book The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction, concurs with a 1990 essay by Mike Fischer entitled "Pastoralism and Its Discontents: Willa Cather and the Burden of Imperialism." Westling reads Cather as writing from "imperialist nostalgia" (80) in the tradition of the pastoral poet Virgil, "sentimentalizing . . . colonized space" (72) and "encod[ing] a benign version of the conquest of the Plains, erasing its violence" (81). Thus, buffalo slaughter and Indian wars—the precursors to immigrant settlement—form no part of Cather's prairie epics. ForWestling, despite Cather's feminist sympathies and strong female characters, her prairie novels ultimately "remain part of a male semiotic economy of heroic action that inscribes the individual will upon the face of the earth" (81). The "love and yearning" that Alexandra in O Pioneers! feels toward the wild land serves to romanticize the fact that what she will do is "buy up" (59) the land of her bankrupt neighbors and plow it under for profit and property. In a pattern that Westling finds present throughout American literature, "Cather has inscribed a kind of Manifest Destiny for her entrepreneurial Amazon, masking Alexandra's aggrandizement as joyous eroticism" (68). In creating prairie epics that leave the violence offstage, Cather performs the "cultural work" (72) of "grant[ing] literary validation to the process of exploitation that the railroads set in motion" (59).

Susan Rosowski's 1999 Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature shares Westling's interest in Cather's prairie epics and is also keenly attuned to gender issues in American literature, but this study of "national identity and the American West" (ix) reaches very different conclusions. Rosowski traces expressions of desire in Cather's writing about the West, beginning with her earliest published work, proceeding through the short stories and on to O Pioneers!, culminating in My Ántonia. Rosowski charts a progression that moves from "an untamed nature to be conquered to a wildness within to be freed" (67). She argues that "[r]ather than writing about a virgin land waiting to be despoiled, Cather conceived of the West as female nature slumbering, awakening, and roaring its independence" (79). In Rosowski's reading of Cather, then, the land is never subdued; it retains its wildness and generativity, which is closely allied with the wildness in women. Rosowski concludes that in prairie epics such as O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, Cather "sent Adam packing and claimed paradise for women, restoring to them a psychosexual identification with nature and appropriating for them the promise of nature's wildness" (79).

Gerard Dollar, discussing The Professor's House, disagrees. In his 1998 essay "Misogyny in the American Eden: Abbey, Cather, and Maclean" he notes a disturbing tendency in American nature writing to "define women out of paradise" (97-98). Dollar interprets the Blue Mesa scenes in The Professor's House as a version of "the western Eden—or, the wilderness Edenic" (98) and, in the vein of Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land, he finds that nature is "a site for men both to escape women and to bond with other men" (98). In this male "quest for a sacred space in nature" (99), one finds the paradox that the highest spiritual development, through contact with nature, is found alongside what Freud would surely label arrested development. The male's affirmation of a wilderness self comes at the price of denying or repressing a sexual self and a social self; it is as if the natural world becomes the man's true spiritual mate—an idealized womanly Other who makes flesh-and-blood women at best an irrelevancy, at worst a temptation away from "pure" male self-fulfillment. (99) Thus, Dollar concurs with Westling's contention that Cather is writing squarely within the American male literary tradition.

While gender-conscious ecocritical readings produce certain patterns of findings and create particular kinds of debates, readings that take a more androgynous or gender-blind view of Cather and her characters tend to focus on philosophical or formal issues rather than feminist ones, thus engaging a different set of questions and opening up yet another way to understand Cather's environmental imagination. Judith Fryer's 1987 essay "Desert, Rock, Shelter, Legend: Willa Cather's Novels of the Southwest" finds similarities between Cather and painter Georgia O'Keeffe, artists who found the Southwest to be "felicitous space," a term coined by Gaston Bachelard in his The Poetics of Space, referring to spaces that create a feeling of being centered and safe. As artists their challenge is to craft works of art in which desire is "concentrated within form" (29). For Cather, this meant "paring down language so that words exist as objects—physical things implying spiritual connectedness" (Bachelard 29). Fryer's version of ecocriticism studies the formal properties of Cather's work, showing how the desert landscapes of the Southwest influenced her prose style.

Carol Steinhagen, in a 1999 article entitled "Dangerous Crossings: Historical Dimensions of Landscape in Willa Cather's My Ántonia, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop" takes a philosophically inflected approach to some of the same Southwestern texts. Steinhagen identifies characters who yearn for the "all" feeling, a dissolution of ego, a melding with nature. Of course, there is a danger to this "crossing": dissolution of the ego means death of the individual self. Achieving a sense of oneness with nature depends upon experiencing an ahistorical nature, a land before landscaping. Even to think of land as landscape implies a distance and separation from it, which is a historical development tied to rationalism. In Death Comes for the Archbishop Cather comes the closest to making the dangerous crossing into prelandscaped land in that she gives the underground river scene great power, she respects the Native way of dissolving into the landscape, and she shows Bishop Latour at the end of his life embracing the fresh morning air. Yet in her next novel, Shadows on the Rock, Cather retreats back into history, praising the settlers' transformation of the land into civilization. Being "beyond landscape" finally posed too much of a conflict for Cather, "who used her pen to create a country of 'the material out of which countries are made'" (80). In other words, Steinhagen points out, writing itself is a form of landscape making.

Ecocritics of Cather's work are quickly establishing what might be called a "canon" of environmental scenes, which have become critical meccas. One of these passages describes Alexandra's "new consciousness of the country" and appears on the poster of this seminar. Another takes place in Grandmother Burden's garden in My Ántonia when young Jim leans back against a warm pumpkin and experiences a moment of unity with the universe: "that is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great," which, incidentally, are the words engraved on Cather's tombstone. Steinhagen began her reading of Cather with this scene, and William Howarth in "Ego or Ecocriticism? Looking for Common Ground" (1998) also gravitates to it, but rather than pondering its metaphysics, he looks at its physical grounding. Howarth questions why this mystical insight takes place in a prairie draw, of all places. He points out that the dynamic process of erosion and deposition that created the draw and made it so fertile—such a fit place for a garden—contrast sharply with the grasslands on the levels, which were ultimately ploughed under and planted with monoculture crops, depleting the soil, drying it out, and exposing it to winds that blew it away, leaving the grasslands today a depressed and depopulated region. In his analysis of this single moment in the novel, Howarth draws upon the sciences of ecology, geology, and biology, thus illustrating one of his principal tenets that ecocriticism be interdisciplinary.

Turning now to emerging ecocriticism on Cather, I note two dominant trends as well as a constellation of concerns that might foretell the future of scholarship in this area. By far the most frequently repeated word in articles and presentations on Cather's ecological imagination is place, as in "Sense of Place," "Function of Place," "Representations of Place," "Use of Place," "Reading in Place," "Experience of Place," "Erotics of Place," "Legacies of Place," "Hierarchy of Place," "Voices of Place," "Theory of Place," "Place as Agency," and "Placing Cather." Clearly, as one recent paper is entitled, "Place Matters" in Cather studies, suggesting the power of one way of understanding ecocriticism as "add[ing] place to the categories of race, class, and gender used to analyze literature." A second favorite word is garden, as in "Willa Cather's Gardens," "Eve's Garden," "Creation Garden," "Old and New World Gardens," "Regionalism's Writers of the Garden," and "Poetics of Gardening." Indeed, gardens are crucial to the signifying system of Cather's writing and will reward closer attention; the topic might make a nice special issue of Cather Studies.

Other topics mirror emerging trends in ecocriticism itself. Lawrence Buell in his 1999 NLH article "The Ecocritical Insurgency" maps five areas of flourishing ecocritcal activity. First, as Howarth has forecast, Buell notes a strong contingency of science-oriented ecocritics, those who synthesize literary studies and environmental sciences. Correspondingly, recent papers have appeared with titles such as "Conservation," "Flora and Fauna," "Field Guides," "Contested Waters," "Organic Modernism," and "Interdisciplinary Convergences." Second, Buell finds in today's ecocritical discourse what he calls "theory anxiety," manifested by both hostility to and engagement with social construction theory. This area of study is reflected by papers on "Constructing Environments," "Construction of Race," "Ecological Realism," and "Dialogic Environmentalism." Third, Buell notes a proliferation of studies of landscapes, regions, and places, and of particular landscapes such as wetlands, mountains, rivers, watersheds, forests, and deserts. Landscape in Cather has received much notice in the past and continues to attract attention with papers on "The Prairie," "Panther Canyon," "Virginia," "Rural Nebraska," "Desert Landscapes," "The Great Plains," and "The Divide." Buell's fourth area describes various recent critiques of anthropocentrism and androcentrism, directing attention to representations of human/nonhuman relationships and issues of dominance, a topic often treated by ecofeminists. In this vein, one finds papers on topics such as "Land as Other," the "Human and Nonhuman," "Heidegger," the "Gaze," and "Crossing Boundaries." Finally, Buell acknowledges activity in environmental rhetoric, in "unpacking modes of articulacy across every expressive genre" (709). This kind of cross-generic work is featured in papers on "Eco-Candor" in Cather's letters, Cather's "Comedies of Survival," and Cather's relationship to essayists such as Montaigne, Emerson, and Thoreau, and poets such as Wordsworth. It would appear, then, that despite the relative lack of a Cather presence in ASLE, Cather scholars are in synch with current trends in the study of literature and environment.

To conclude this tour of ecocriticism, I'm going to list some ecocritical projects that I'm hoping Cather scholars will pursue in the coming years. I'm not greedy—there are only a thrifty seven items on this list: Bibliography, Cities, NeglectedWritings, Other Disciplines, Bodies, Animals, and Literary Ecosystems.

In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt issued proclamations establishing Muir Woods National Monument (California); Grand Canyon National Monument (Arizona); Pinnacles National Monument (California); Jewel Cave National Monument (South Dakota); Lewis and Clark Cavern National Monument (Montana); and Wheeler National Monument (Colorado). Also, in 1908, Jim Burden had a reunion with Tiny Soderball in Salt Lake City. We don't know whether they went to Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah, but it too was proclaimed a national monument in 1908. In 1909 Congress passed An Act to Create the Calaveras Bigtree National Forest, authorizing the acquisition of lands in California to protect stands of Sequoia washingtoniana. Early that same year President Roosevelt issued a proclamation establishing Mount Olympus National Monument (Washington), and later in 1909 President Taft issued proclamations establishing Oregon Caves National Monument, Mukuntuweap National Monument (Utah), and Shoshone Cavern National Monument (Wyoming). In 1909, conservationists appointed by Roosevelt found their momentum checked by conflicts with Congress and Taft appointees. As a result, conservation became the subject of national debate, pitting the utilitarians, those who wanted to reserve land for subsequent, profitable use, against the preservationists, who were more anxious to preserve natural resources for aesthetic, recreational, and spiritual reasons.

The rate of park and monument creation slowed but did not stop under Taft. In 1910, Congress passed the Withdrawal Act authorizing the president to withdraw public lands from entry and reserve them for "water-power sites, irrigation, classification of lands, or other public purposes." And, to protect the logging industry, Congress reaffirmed its ban on the creation or enlargement of national forests in six Western states. However, also in 1910, Congress established Glacier National Park (Montana) and President Taft issued a proclamation establishing Rainbow Bridge National Monument (Utah). In 1911, the first of four National Park Service conferences convened at Yellowstone National Park to explore the need for a National Park Service (the others were held in 1912, 1915, and 1917); participants included officials of the Interior Department and the Forest Service, the owners of park hotels and camps, and representatives for the railroads. Perhaps Jim Burden was there.

When Cather began writing My Ántonia in 1916, conservationist momentum received a second wind under Woodrow Wilson. That year Congress passed the National Park Service Act, creating the National Park Service and housing it, significantly, within the Department of the Interior. The Park Service was created expressly to "promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations . . . by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments, and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." Commercial logging and recreational hunting were prohibited, and grazing was sharply controlled. The passage of the National Park Service Act was a victory for the preservationist side of the conservation movement (An Act to Establish).

In 1916 Congress established Hawaii National Park and Lassen Volcanic National Park (California). President Wilson also issued proclamations establishing Sieur de Monts National Monument on Mount Desert Island, Maine, and Capulin Mountain National Monument, New Mexico—these are located, coincidentally, in two of Cather's favorite states. Northeast Harbor, where she stayed later in her life, is the tip of Mount Desert Island. Three years later, in 1919, Lafayette National Park (renamed Acadia National Park [Maine] in 1929) was established by Congress. In 1917 Congress established Mount McKinley National Park (Alaska) and at the National Park Service conference that year attendees explored the role of the parks in American life. In 1918, the year My Ántonia was published, Congress approved a Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which implemented a 1916 Convention (between the United States and Britain, acting for Canada) for the Protection of Migratory Birds, and established responsibility for international migratory bird protection. The next year Congress established Grand Canyon National Park (Arizona) and Zion National Park (Utah), while PresidentWilson issued a proclamation establishing Scotts Bluff National Monument (Nebraska).

The era of My Ántonia was one of national landscape preservation. But national-parks creation is no coincidental context for the novel. Among the book's points of genesis wasWilla Cather's trip to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915. In addition, Cather was subtly influenced by the public debate over preserving natural lands—especially since some of those landscapes, in Maine, New Mexico, and Colorado, for example, were in places to which she would often return and so would have wanted unchanged. The forty years between 1880 and 1920 are known as the "formative years" of American environmentalism (and ofWilla Cather), and the first decade of the century is described by one historian as having been seized by a kind of "national panic" for conservation as a result of the closed frontier (Worster 7). The era is marked as well by the cultural work of writers intent on making conservation a matter of public spirit and national policy. We may want to include Willa Cather within this environmentalist, intellectual awakening.

The "panic" phase of the conservation movement culminated in a conference of governors held at the White House in 1909, where President Roosevelt proclaimed that "[t]he conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our National life" (qtd. in Blanchard, "Introductory Statement"). A joint statement by the governors echoed Roosevelt and declared that the "conservation of our natural resources is a subject of transcendent importance, which should engage unremittingly the attention of the Nation, the States, and the People in earnest cooperation" (193). Speakers at the conference included scientists, policymakers, legal experts—the roster included William Jennings Bryan, whose statement might have been ghostwritten by Jim Burden: [L]ast September I visited the southern part of Idaho . . . I had been there ten years before. I had looked upon these lands so barren that it seemed as if it were impossible they could ever be made useful. When I went back this time and found that in three years 170,000 acres of land had been reclaimed; that where three years ago nothing but the sage brush grew they are now raising seven tons of alfalfa to the acre, and more than a hundred bushels of oats; when I found that ten thousand people are living on that tract; that in one town that has grown up in that time there are 1,910 inhabitants, and that in the three banks they had deposits of over $500,000—I had some realization of the magic power of water when applied to these desert lands. (204, emphasis added). The similarity to Jim Burden's rhetoric of progress is striking. We might say that Bryan saw those Idaho farmlands as "one of the great economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia" or the cornfields of Nebraska (My Ántonia 132).

Bryan's sentiments reflect the conservation movement's initial, utilitarian motivation: to protect American resources from irresponsible or wasteful development and reserve them for responsible and profitable use. Gifford Pinchot, America's first professional forester, the head of the Forestry Division in the Roosevelt administration, a staunch utilitarian and arguably the founder of United States conservation policy, outlined three "great facts" about conservation in 1910. "The first great fact about conservation is that it stands for development. There has been a fundamental misconception that conservation means nothing but the husbanding of resources for future generations. There could be no more serious mistake." Conservation, in Pinchot's definition, means "first of all the recognition of the right of the present generation to the fullest necessary use of all [natural] resources. Conservation demands the welfare of this generation first, and afterward the welfare of the generations to follow" (42). Secondly, "conservation stands for the prevention of waste" (44). And third, "[t]he natural resources must be developed and preserved for the benefit of the many, and not merely for the profit of a few" (46). These three principles, efficient use, minimization of waste, and maximum distribution of profit, or effect, remain central to government policy today. They are as well, curiously enough, central to Cather's aesthetics, where the efficient use and elimination of wasted words produce the maximum effect of meaning. However, Cather seems less utilitarian than aesthetic in her thinking about landscape and language.

On the side of the preservationists, foremost among its principles was that preservation meant not saving everything, but selecting some aspects for preservation (the most striking, notable, or emblematic) and allowing others to go to market development. Some critics today take issue with the aesthetic principle by which the preservationists advocated national-park creation and maintenance. Alison Byerly labels it "part of the picturesque legacy" that "has had a crucial effect on public land management policies. It has taught us to value nature," she asserts, "but the criterion for evaluation is the quality of the aesthetic experience a landscape provides." She refers to the paradox whereby we experience the natural world only after constructing it, "by constructing an aesthetic image of the wilderness that allows us to avoid confronting its reality" (Byerly 53-54). Byerly is right, of course, and that was the point, just as the aim of art is to select and simplify, in Cather's words: "finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page" (On Writing 102). The creator of a national park does much the same thing, deciding how much forest can be allotted to the logging company while preserving the spirit of the whole for the citizen's aesthetic experience of the wild. Deep into a national forest, one might thus experience the inexplicable presence of the trees not standing, the millions of acres that have been cleared and developed around the preserve for the good of that same civilization that possesses the "unaccountable predilection of the one unaccountable thing in man," as Cather once described the aesthetic impulses of humanity (On Writing 19).

Liberty Bailey, in The Holy Earth (1915), argued that "[o]ur relation with the planet must be raised into the realm of spirit; we cannot be fully useful otherwise.We must find a way to maintain the emotions in the abounding commercial civilization" (2). Bailey's work was part of a larger movement among naturalists to redefine the American's sense of the land, away from profit making and toward spirit making. Establishing an aesthetic appreciation for wildlands, in other words, was a crucial and quite consciously advocated concept among naturalists in Cather's era. A decade earlier, Nathaniel Shaler, in Man and the Earth (1905), linked environmental awareness to Darwinian evolution, suggesting that the "esthetic sense is the result of a natural process of development" (181). Shaler argued that human beings are stewards of the planet, who "have been sorely hindered by ancient misunderstandings" and so now need to be "reconciled to their great house and eager to help its order" (232-33). Dallas Lore Sharp, in The Lay of the Land (1908) praised the new "back-to-nature" trend in national magazines. "And this desire to know Nature is the reasonable, natural preparation for the deeper insight that leads to communion with her" (124). Sharp quotes Charles Kingsley and anticipates Jewett's remarks to Cather: "'He is a thoroughly good naturalist,'" says Kingsley, "'who knows his own parish thoroughly'" (214).

This was the milieu into which Cather offered My Ántonia— one where policymakers and technocrats, capitalists and intellectuals, were grappling with the right relation between human beings and nature. At issue was the question of how to preserve the American wilderness experience as an art form, how to transform carefully selected wildlands into sites of heightened experience, valued by virtue of the capitalist sacrifice of profit represented by preservation. Preservationist aesthetics reflect Cather's own aesthetic principles as well. In "The Art of Fiction," Cather suggests, "Any first-rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it" (On Writing 103). Any first-rate park, say, the Grand Canyon, must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good canyons sacrificed to highway bridges. Natural resources might thus be understood as the national imagination, out of which crystallize its first-rate landscape experiences.

Not since the beginning of the frontier era had so much public energy gone into the question of human life and its environment; but here, in the decades following the close of the frontier, leading to the publication of My Ántonia, the question took on a new urgency. Conservation commissions met at the state, national, continental, and international levels. In 1908, the National Conservation Commission conducted an inventory of U.S. natural resources, and issued its three-volume report in 1909. In 1910, Commissioner Charles Van Hise called for "a profound and wide campaign of education which must begin at the universities, in national and state organizations, and must extend from them through the secondary and primary schools to the whole people. There is no other question before the nation of such fundamental importance to the distant future of the country" (13). Hise cites Supreme Court decisions that recognize the state as possessing "a standing in court to protect the atmosphere, the water, and the forests within its territory, irrespective of the assent or dissent of the private owners of the land most immediately concerned" (363). And in 1911, Mary Huston Gregory made a connection Cather would have appreciated, when, after listing "the many special beauties which are among the world's wonder-places," she asserts that "[t]o these must be added the relics of ancient civilization, the homes of the Cliff Dwellers, the work of the Mound Builders, and such fragments as still remain of the occupation in various times and places of certain Indian tribes, and of the Norsemen and the Spaniards" (303).

Jim Burden is emblematic of the conservation debate. He is both a legal counsel for the railroads (and so he profits by land development), and he is a preservationist, someone you can count on for funding "big Western dreams" (xi) of uncovering secret canyons and lost parks. It's Jim's "interest in women" that sparks this narration, as we know, and just as the nation has set apart certain landscapes to allow its citizens to enjoy nature, Jim "set apart time enough to enjoy [his] friendship" with Ántonia (xii). There's an equation at work there: Jim's connection with Ántonia does for him what the nation's connection to its landscape does for its people. The parallel evoked is an aesthetic experience, which for Cather is serious and vital business. After all, the "gift" in the portfolio is a novel. The novel, as it emerges from the nationalparks era, is an aesthetic projection of the will to preserve. What Jim gives Cather when he gives her his manuscript is indeed a gift—something worth saving.

Jim remembers very little about his initial ride into the prairie: "I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long day's journey through Nebraska" (5); "I do not remember our arrival at my grandfather's farm" (8). However, once he becomes accustomed to the landscape, his memories sharpen and subsequent days are not so lost. "I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother" (15); and "All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me" (27). From this point on, every incident of significant memory for Jim Burden will be preceded and framed by an account of the natural world, some natural occurrence or setting preserved within the narrative.

"One afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the warm, grassy bank where the badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight . . . I had seen ice on the little horse-pond that morning, and . . . we found the tall asparagus, with its red berries" (36). So begins chapter 6, the scene where Jim and Ántonia come across the grasshopper, living past his season, "as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him" (37), whose song ("a thin, rusty little chirp" [38]) in turn reminds Ántonia of a woman she remembers, Old Hata, with her "cracked voice" (38). Both memories—Jim's of the reading lesson and Ántonia's of Old Hata, are preserved within the contours of the natural world.

The snake-killing episode, which alters their relationship, opens, "This change came about from an adventure we had together" (41) and then, before getting to the narration of events, Jim provides a thick description of landscape by way of preface, or perhaps, acknowledgement: "There had been another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled— hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling, burry stalks" (42).

Sometimes the seasons are keyed to significant recollections: "While the autumn color was growing pale on the grass and corn- fields, things went badly with our friends the Russians" (48); or "the debt grew faster than any crop he planted" (49). Seasons also envelope narrative points in time. "The first snowfall came early in December. I remember how the world looked from our sitting room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning" (60); "As soon as the snow had packed hard I began to drive about the country in a clumsy sleigh" (61). The day Mrs. Shimerda and Ántonia come to visit is similarly contextualized: "The week following Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year's Day all the world about us was a broth of gray slush, and the guttered slope between the windmill and the barn was running black water. . . . One morning, during this interval of fine weather, Ántonia and her mother rode over" (85); and later, "The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the 20th of January" (88).

You will recall how Jim's memories of Mr. Shimerda are inextricable from his consciousness of winter. "There, on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It was as if I had let the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were sitting there with him. I went over all that Ántonia had ever told me about his life. . . . Such vivid pictures came to me" (98). Shimerda's grave, finally, is in itself an attenuated national park, a patch of preserved landscape, "with its tall red grass that was never mowed" (114) but was instead consciously preserved, untouched by roads and unsurveyed by the development companies, set aside to allow tired drivers a chance to wish him well.

Consistently, in "The Shimerdas," Jim's memories are acknowledged and made possible by memories of the landscape, in turn housing Jim's memories: "One Sunday I rode over [to the Shimerda's] with Jake to get a horse-collar which Ambrosch had borrowed from him and had not returned. It was a beautiful blue morning. The buffalo-peas were blooming in pink and purple masses along the roadside, and the larks, perched on last year's dried sunflower stalks, were singing straight at the sun, their heads thrown back and their yellow breasts a-quiver. The wind blew about us in warm, sweet gusts. We rode slowly, with a pleasant sense of Sunday indolence" (122-23).

In the town setting of "The Hired Girls," however, Jim's experience with the landscape is limited to an upstairs window where "we could see the winding line of the river bluffs, two miles south of us," a view he refers to as "compensation for the lost freedom of the farming country" (141). Nonetheless, this glimpsed landscape fuels memory. For example, Jim recalls teasing Ántonia as she prepares a cake one "crisp autumn evening, just cold enough to make one glad to quit playing tag in the yard, and retreat into the kitchen" (154). He recalls just when the dancing pavilion arrived: "It must have been in June, for Mrs. Harling and Ántonia were preserving cherries" (187). Even his pre-college exercises in rote memorization are closely associated with that glimpsed landscape: "Morning after morning I used to pace up and down my sunny little room, looking off at the distant river bluffs and the roll of the blond pastures between, scanning the Aeneid aloud and committing long passages to memory" (224). Ántonia, about to tell the story of the tramp who jumped into the thrashing machine, acknowledges first that: One day it was just awful hot. When we got back to the field from dinner, we took things kind of easy. . . . I was sitting against a straw stack, trying to get some shade. My wagon wasn't going out first, and somehow I felt the heat awful that day. The sun was so hot like it was going to burn the world up. After a while I see a man coming across the stubble, and when he got close I see it was a tramp. (171)

The hired girls are memorable because they literally embody the landscape—their bodies have worked it and it has in turn graced them with figures and spirits that Jim can recall with ease: "[O]ut-of-door work had given them a vigor which . . . made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women" (192). Jim's de sire to maintain a constant, unchanging vision of Ántonia, then, parallels his own era's efforts at land preservation. "Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she was, oh, she was still My Ántonia!" (218). Remembering Ántonia is an act of preservation, both for her sake and for Jim's. Like an American visiting the Grand Canyon, what Jim wants from Ántonia is perpetual wildness and youth. " Ántonia seemed to me that day exactly like the little girl who used to come to our house with Mr. Shimerda" (230).

While a university student, Jim becomes cognizant of what until then had been subconscious: the connection between landscape and memory. "Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it" (254). When one of those figures, Lena Lingard, appears before him, he articulates Cather's preservationist trope in the novel, aligning his twin desires to memorialize Ántonia and to be the first to memorialize and thus preserve the Nebraska landscape. "It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry ofVirgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry" (262). If there were no landscapes like those preserved in national parks and on land reserves, there would be no nation, no historical sense, no experience of wildness, and no spirit of American identity— there would be no country into which to bring his Muse. He brings this connection with him when he returns to visit Ántonia in "The Pioneer Woman's Story" and finds that he remembers "the conformation of the land as one remembers the modeling of human faces" (298). To Jim the experience is one of recognition: the knowledge of who he is, embedded deeply in the contours of the landscape.

Jim's reunion with Ántonia awakens him to his past and to his own memories of youth. In the same way that a national park evokes within us the origins of America as wilderness, as frontier, as the material out of which a country is made, visiting Ántonia in "The Pioneer Woman's Story" leads Jim to feel "the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there" (313). And as he leaves, recall, he believes "that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass" (314), preserved forever by the face of Ántonia and the conformation of the land. The preservation of "My Ántonia," furthermore, is a gesture toward remembering the significance of all the girls, especially those like Tiny Soderball and Lena Lingard, whose lives have developed so well as businesswomen. By preserving Ántonia, Jim memorializes them in the same way that a national forest preserves all forests behind the civilization. If Ántonia had had a good marriage to Donovan and disappeared into middleclass life, then all the girls would have been forgotten and the Muse would have never entered the country.

After his visit, Jim is off to law school to learn how to serve the railroads and other commercial and utilitarian purposes. Nonetheless, the space of twenty years cannot lessen the power of Ántonia to bring him back. Her eyes are worth preserving: "I had seen no others like them since I looked into them last, though I had looked at so many thousands of human faces" (321). In her orchard Jim is restored to his own youth. Like an urbanite at Yellowstone, Jim feels that "[e]verything was as it should be: the strong smell of sunflowers and ironweed in the dew, the clear blue and gold of the sky, the evening star," so that early days return to his mind. "I began to feel the loneliness of the farm-boy at evening, when the chores seem everlastingly the same, and the world so far away" (336). His experience in Black Hawk is quite different, as we would expect, as town is the site of development and progress. "Most of my old friends were dead or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing to me, were playing in the Harling's big yard when I passed; the mountain ash had been cut down, and only a sprouting stump was left of the tall Lombardy poplar that used to guard the gate. I hurried on" (357). Tocounter this assault on memory, Jim leaves town and wanders "out into the pastures where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt at home again" (358). Progress has no memory, though life, as we live it, is constructed out of a fleeting present and continuously expanding recollections. Without memory, significance cannot construct. Cather wrote My Ántonia in the era of the establishment of national parks, when the frontier's closure meant that the wildness of open lands, if it were to continue to form the soul of the nation, had to be preserved. Bringing the Muse into her country at this time meant explaining, on aesthetic grounds, why we must preserve the landscape and reserve significant portions of it as monuments to what it was that formed the national psyche and spirit.

When Jim leaves town for his origins, he finds that the road that brought him from Black Hawk to his childhood home "had been ploughed under when the highways were surveyed," except for a half-mile or so. Nonetheless, the preservation of this half-mile is enough: "I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness" (359). In 1910, Gifford Pinchot claimed that "[t]he success of the conservation movement in the United States depends in the end on the understanding the women have of it" (101), and women's organizations played an important role. Cather employed her understanding by showing how one young lawyer's consciousness could be changed by a woman's representations—hers, and Ántonia's—changed for the better, as far as his effect on land policy may proceed. In 1921, Cather told the Lincoln State Journal she had "made a plea for the preservation of the native trees. . . . Farmers say that cottonwood draws moisture from the fields. I am not asking them to plant more, but to let stand those great trees that are dear to the pioneers" (40). How can we convince people of the value of preservation? Cather's contemporaries—scientists, governors, presidents, jurists, naturalists—argued for the education of Americans about the value of preserving lands from finite development.

In My Ántonia, Cather models a preservationist aesthetic by constructing a work of art in which her protagonist's capacity to remember his own life is inextricable from the landscape of his childhood and the figures with whom his childhood was entangled. A major portion of his own past, Jim admits, consists of what " Ántonia's name recalls to me" (xiii). And if it were not for these preserved places—preserved by Ántonia's choice to stay on the land—Jim would quite literally have no memories; he would have lived no life and may have remained, perpetually, crossing the country by train. His initial blanks—"I do not remember crossing the Missouri River or anything about the long day's journey through Nebraska" (5); "I do not remember our arrival at my grandfather's farm" (8)—might then extend as a kind of horror throughout his experience, like some Muse who can't find the country calling her name.

Jim Burden was "an obscure young lawyer" (x), a railroad man, known for his interest in "hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons," an interest as strong as his "interest in women" (ix)—both of which interests, in women and in lost canyons, are identified, by Cather, as "Western and American." Before starting My Ántonia, Cather visited Mesa Verde, not quite a canyon, but lost for some time. David Harrell claims that "this trip to Mancos and Mesa Verde in August 1915 was not just a stimulating excursion but also the major step along the way toward the composition of one of her finest narratives," The Professor's House (35). More immediately, Cather's visit to Mesa Verde in 1915 provided her the direct inspiration for a novel she began right after the trip, one with aesthetic, not factual or contentsimilarity to Mesa Verde National Park. It was her visit to the ruins of Mesa Verde—or more accurately, her visit (when she quite literally got lost in the park), as Jim Burden, someone who "means action" (xi) when he travels—that awakened Cather to a connection with deep cultural currency in the second decade of the twentieth century, that between knowledge of the landscape and the human capacity to remember.

Traces of Cather's Mesa Verde excursion may be found on the pages of My Ántonia. Cather wrote about her trip to the Anasazi ruins in an essay published in the Denver Times in 1916. "In the morning you take another train for Mancos," Cather wrote, describing the trip to Mesa Verde, "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). Jim Burden's description of his train ride from Chicago to Black Hawk is quite similar: "[W]e were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence" (4). As Cather approached Mesa Verde in 1915, she noted how it "stood as if it had been deserted yesterday; undisturbed and undesecrated, preserved by the dry atmosphere and by its great inaccessibility" (Rosowski and Slote 84). The prairie landscape, in turn, preserved its meanings for Jim, and he notes how "The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things" (ix). Of the Cliff Dwellers, Cather wrote: "The great dramas of the weather and the seasons occupied their minds a good deal, and they seem to have ordered their behavior according to the moon, the sun, and the stars" (Rosowski and Slote 85). They must have known what Jim Burden knew, that "[t]he pale, cold light of the winter sunset . . . was like the light of truth itself" (167) because "[o]n the farm the weather was the great fact." In the winter, in Black Hawk, "the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched," like some mummified old corpse (175). "Certainly it is the human record, however slight, that stirs us most deeply, and a country without such a record is dumb, no matter how beautiful" (Rosowski and Slote 85). Cather wrote this first of Mesa Verde, and then, a year or so later, of Nebraska: "There was nothing but land: not a country at all," (7) until Jim Burden emerges with his preservationist ideals: "for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country" (256).

Cather's experience at Mesa Verde had a profound effect on the shape of her fiction and on her aesthetic sensibilities. But one thing she may have realized right away: The preservation movement of the early twentieth century (Mesa Verde was established as a national park in June 1906—just one month after Tom Outland leftWashington, by the way) applied not only to ancient ruins but should properly inform as well the way we think about the landscape we live in now. Mesa Verde—the national park, the Anasazi use of landscape, the American act of preservation— is writ large in the structure and form of My Ántonia. In its historical context, the novel suggests that while we may want to restore and remember the ruins of ancient civilizations, and preserve our frontier heritage by setting aside wilderness landscapes, we also must work to insure that the past we are making now survives future development. All that is left, once the human beings have died, is the landscape they created. "All of our landscapes, from city park to the mountain hike, are imprinted with our tenacious, inescapable obsessions," according to Simon Schama. "So that to take the many and several ills of the environment seriously does not, I think, require that we trade in our cultural legacy or its posterity. It asks instead that we simply see it for what it has truly been: not the repudiation, but the veneration of nature" (Schama 18). All use is veneration: what human beings do with the landscape, from cliff dwelling to plowing to (yes) pavement, is veneration in the sense that it is done to further civilization. Neither utilitarians nor preservationists can claim to represent nature's preference, when both utilitarians and preservationists are inextricable from the natural environment they embody and inhabit. When Jim acknowledges "all the human effort that had gone into" the "flat tableland" of Nebraska, transforming what was once a wild landscape into a patchwork "broken up into wheatfields and cornfields" and changing "the whole face of the country" (298), he creates an aesthetic experience of the latest American land-dwellers and their way of inscribing a civilization into the landscape. Mesa Verde Park saves not so much the Anasazi—they're long gone—but saves the idea that landscapes embody the past. Preserving landscapes, in turn, is remembering: it is the aesthetic expression and the physical behavior of memory itself.

In preparation for her visit to Cliff City, Willa Cather read C. C. Mason's 1914 report "The Story of the Discovery and Early Exploration of the Cliff Houses at the Mesa Verde." Mason was among the first modern Americans to come upon the Anasazi ruins. Mason describes finding four skeletons in Cliff City: "The skull of each of the three older people had been crushed in, and between them on the floor was a large stone ax, the blade of which just fitted the dent in the skulls" (qtd. in Harrell 50). Cather provides an identical detail in casting the death of Mr. Shimerda, when Jake testifies that Krajiek's axe "just fit the gash in the front of the old man's face" (93). That's evidence of a (Merrill) Skaggsian literary conversation, either between Cather and Mason, Mother Eve and Mr. Shimerda, or the mysteries of Cliff Dwellers and the equally awesome experiences of early Sod Dwellers in the Nebraska prairie lands. In any case, to know these landscapes is to look squarely into the face of such mysteries; one can miss them no less likely than one can dodge an axe to the forehead. The aesthetic experience of Mesa Verde stimulated Cather's thinking about her own Nebraska childhood. It led her to return to materials she had explored in O Pioneers! but without the interest in land speculation or triumphant female farmers and unconsummated love affairs. What Jim Burden gave Willa Cather when he presented his manuscript to her was something he saw in Ántonia that Willa Cather had not recognized before her visit to Mesa Verde. The realization may have effected so profound a transformation that she imagined she had become another person as a result.

At the fourth National Parks Conference in 1917, Herbert Quick, member of the Federal Farm Loan Board, issued a call for American authors to write about American natural settings, "to fill the literature of the United States . . . with the beauties and the graces and the charms and the grandeur of the national parks of this country." This, Quick argued, "would be the finest thing in the world for the people of this country, because," as Jim Burden might have said, "as a matter of fact, a man sees in nature what he takes to nature. A man brings back from the journey nothing more nor less than what it gives him." The national parks, like the national literature, declare "that the time has now arrived when we must make our own legends, and our own superstitions" (Interior 130). Today, the American ecologist and philosopher David Abram, at the forefront of contemporary ecocriticism, has much the same argument: "Our task . . . is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land." The "we" in Abram's words is us, critics and peddlers in literary studies. "Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves—to the green uttering-forth of leaves from the spring branches" (Abram 273). Reading land out of the language of Cather's novel requires that we ask again what it was that Cather sought to preserve in My Ántonia. In 1918, Jim Burden gave Willa Cather what the nation was busily giving itself through its frenetic efforts to preserve as much of its wildlands and natural wonders as was possible given the equally frenetic demands of American capitalism and corporate expansion. In Jim Burden's legal portfolio was Cather's revelation ("the old pull of the earth") of the autochthonous quality of memory. The era Cather lived in was consumed by the connection it sensed between the American landscape and the nation's vitality—its history, its economy, and its future. In Congress, in commissions, and in literary expression, the nation was groping to remember, despite rapid expansion and world war.

From our perspective, and with our charge to write language back into the land, we can see that the culture of national-park creation was one that desired above all the preservation of its own memory, and so inscribed its sense of the past into landscapes to rival the ruins of ancient civilizations. Of the Anasazi, Cather wrote, "They seem not to have struggled to overcome their environment. They accommodated themselves to it, interpreted it and made it personal; lived in a dignified relation with it. In more senses than one they built themselves into it" (Rosowski and Slote 85). She may as well have described her own era, as the nation accommodated, interpreted, and assured that emblems of its national wildlands would be available forever as sites of personal experience. Jim's gift to her contained the landscape, the open expanse, and the grounded revelation of Willa Cather's environmental imagination. In more senses than one, she built herself out of it.

Environmental imagination is not a term that lends itself to precise definition, but most of us recognize it when we encounter its symptoms. It is there in Gary Snyder's lifelong exploration of connections between the human soul and natural systems. If we were discussing Faulkner, we would consider his deep rootedness in the mountains of the rural South. We would find environmental imagination hard at work in the writings of John Muir or Henry David Thoreau, and in the rich naturalism of Loren Eiseley. What such writers share is a profound love of the natural world and an active curiosity about its complex processes. They generally feel that a person cannot know who they are without also knowing where they are and what dynamics govern the natural world around them. Characteristically, they see the natural world as possessing high integrity and value within itself that is not dependent upon people's uses of it. They are also likely to see nature as a source of wisdom and understanding, and as a means through which the human soul can best fulfill itself. They love natural processes, they seek to know them intimately, and they find their best art and thought through immersion in places of natural power.

Clearly, there are many kinds of environmental imagination. The writers I have just mentioned are examples of authors for whom participation in their natural scene is a high priority. There are others who see nature as a challenge to be met, and from them we get novels of adventure and conquest. Still others perceive natural processes as the means for humans to fulfill themselves. For these authors, the land is an instrument for the revelation of human character and purpose. As people change their land, they fulfill themselves.

The question before us is how, or whether, Willa Cather is at home among such writers. The best places to look for evidence are in her novels in a Nebraska setting, for there the land and its character clearly play a major role. These books include many vivid descriptions of prairie landscapes, complete with the seasonal changes that provide suffering and joy to their inhabitants, together with the chancy opportunity to earn a living. The prairie ecosystem is the setting upon which these stories unfold. The Nebraska prairie also acts as a character in these novels, interacting with all the human characters and influencing their lives in powerful and subtle ways. The land is often referred to as if it were a person. Although Willa Cather made many forays into distant times and geographic settings for her novels, the Nebraska prairie at the end of the nineteenth century seems to me to be the center of her artistic spirit.

The first section of O Pioneers! is titled "The Wild Land." Here and there are homesteads and sod houses, "But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes . . . the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness" (21). The wildness of the land, despite its savage beauty, is a negative quality to be overcome, not a positive attribute to be learned from. What is most noticed about the wild land is the lack of human influence: "Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening" (25).Wildness in this context simply means, "not yet cultivated."

The instrument of cultivation, and the symbol for human civilization, is the plow. In the early stages, "The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings" (25). In the course of the novel, it is the plow that converts the land into a source of wealth and status and becomes a central image of the human spirit triumphant. The wild land is an impediment, "like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces" (27). Wildness is "unfriendly to man," and taming it for human benefit is the central story of the novel.

Only one character is shown to value wildness as a positive quality, and others regard him as slightly daft. Crazy Ivar loves the land the way it is, and makes no attempt to farm it. His home is dug into a clay bank, "without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done" (40). He lives beside a pond with his neighbors the ducks and geese. "He understands animals" (37), says Alexandra, and he earns his living by doctoring horses and cattle and hiring his labor to farmers. No guns or killing are allowed on his property.He sees his land from the perspective of the birds that migrate above it: "they have their roads up there, as we have down here" (45). It is from Ivar that Alexandra learns that "Hogs do not like to be filthy" (47), and she modifies her practices to help them keep clean. Although Ivar is an isolated oddball in this farming community, he proves to be durable and plays minor but significant roles throughout the novel. Ivar's is the only voice that speaks for the wild environment, and it is a small voice that goes easily unnoticed.

The central story of the novel is Alexandra's effort to tame the land and preside over "the last struggle of a wild soil against the encroaching plowshare" (49). Alexandra's conquest of the land is more that of a lover than a warrior: "For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning" (64). Yet it is only through human effort that the land is capable of fulfillment: "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman" (64). Alexandra's love seems to be just what the land wants, for it repays her handsomely: "It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found that we were rich" (108). The image of land being awakened by a loving touch to make people wealthy is uncommon enough to draw raised eyebrows from other pioneers.

Cather does not supply many details about the process of taming the prairie and converting it into prosperous farmland. She skips over the years of hardship and toil, referring only vaguely to the failures and disasters that many must have suffered. Her narrative leaps over the miseries and resumes when the land is populated by many successful farmers, linked by good roads and connected to markets by railways. There are now churches and schools and an active social life where people compete and cooperate with one another. In Alexandra's words, "the country had become what she had hoped," (191) no longer wild, but a benign setting for the exploration of human character and relationships.

Human relationships dominate the latter stages of the novel, with greed and jealousy leading to murder and suffering. The land is no longer the focus of attention, except as an object to be possessed. When, at the close of the story, Carl says to Alexandra, "You belong to the land," she responds with: "The land belongs to the future. . . .We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while" (272-73). The natural world, here as elsewhere, is defined and given value by the people who inhabit it.

In The Song of the Lark, Cather shows how a woman can be transformed from a farm-town girl to a sophisticated musical artist. That journey is like the personal transformation that Cather saw in her own life. Thea, the transformed operatic singer, returns to her prairie home and feels "that she was coming back to her own land" (202). This earth seemed to her young and fresh and kindly, a place where refugees from old, sad countries were given another chance. The mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind of amiability and generosity, and the absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a wider range.Wire fences might mark the end of a man's pasture, but they could not shut in his thoughts as mountains and forests can. It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang—and one's heart sang there, too. Thea was glad that this was her country, even if one did not learn to speak elegantly there. It was, somehow, an honest country, and there was a new song in that blue air which had never been sung in the world before. . . . She had the sense of going back to a friendly soil, whose friendship was somehow going to strengthen her; a naďve, generous country that gave one its joyous force, its large-hearted, childlike power to love, just as it gave one its coarse, brilliant flowers. (202-03)

Like Thea, Cather seems to feel that the absence of dramatic landscape features bestows a freedom on the human spirit, permitting it to explore new and creative territories. This "friendly soil" is the foundation upon which Cather's art rests as well. Yet neither Cather nor her heroine draw their inspiration from living on their land. Instead, they leave it at an early age for travels in large American and European cities. And it is not the prairie that unlocks Thea's creative energy, but the spectacular scenery of Arizona cliff dwellings.

Thea's visit to a ranch in northern Arizona becomes for her an epiphany of her career as an artist. There, amid forested mountains and canyons, she discovers her vocation. While bathing at a pool in a swift flowing stream, she reflects upon shards of pottery left by ancient Cliff Dwellers: "The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?" (279). From this point on, Thea knows that she is called to her art, and her strength grows rapidly. Now she has energy and ambitions that had been absent from her life on the prairie. Later, she watches an eagle sailing above her in the canyon and salutes it as a symbol of her newfound power: "O eagle of eagles! Endeavor, achievement, desire, glorious striving of human art!" (293). Near the end of the book, when her life as an operatic soprano is fulfilled, she reflects that her work as an artist has grown from the early experience in the mountains of Arizona: "Out of the rocks, out of the dead people . . . I don't know if I'd ever have got anywhere without Panther Canyon" (408). The prairie context seems to provide a sense of freedom and expansiveness, as well as the comforts of a well-loved homeland, but something more is needed to stimulate the creative imagination. This is found in the varied and colorful landscapes of northern Arizona and in reflections upon the ancient people who once lived there.

The ancient people appear briefly in My Ántonia also, but only as a fading image that goes without exploration or explanation. Narrator Jim Burden describes their traces: "Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was, faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to ride" (60). No surviving Indians appear in the novel to explain what the great circle might have meant to those who made it. It is a remnant of the prairie's past with no discovered significance for the present. These marks from the past are echoed near the end of the novel when the narrator encounters old wagon tracks that can still be seen on the now-mechanized prairie: "On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared—were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them. . . . They looked like gashes torn by grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses" (359). The land bears reminders of the past, whether in the unknown traces of the native people, or in the vividly remembered images of childhood. This is a central theme of the novel, identified by the narrator as "the precious, the incommunicable past" (My Ántonia 238).

Jim Burden, the narrator whom Cather created to tell this tale, deserves some attention from a modern perspective. After his childhood in Nebraska, Burden left the prairie to live in New York, where he is "legal counsel for one of the great Western railways" (1). Although he has left Nebraska for city life, "he loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development" (Grumbach xi). From a farmer's perspective, the railroad surely made the prairie economically successful, if that is what is meant by development. Jim Burden's daily work is never described in the novel, but it is not hard to imagine what a lawyer for the railroad might have been occupied with during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Among his tasks would have been the acquisition of as much land as possible for rights-of-way and for commercial and real estate development. Whatever his sentimental ties to the land might have been, they were surely tinged with a strong capacity for its exploitation.

It is through Jim Burden's eyes that we learn about the prairie environment. His first views are not very encouraging: "There seemed to be nothing to see: no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. . . . Between that earth and that sky, I felt erased, blotted out" (7). This initial sense of emptiness soon becomes transformed into richer imagery as the land slowly reveals its living character: As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. . . . more than anything else I felt motion in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping . . . (14-15) This vividly described sea of red grass reappears in the imagery of the novel often, although it is never named. Gradually in the course of the novel it disappears, presumably as it is replaced by cereal grains and corn. Near the end of the book, there remains only a remnant of it still growing at a protected gravesite. The passing of little and big bluestem, the native prairie grasses, leaves only faint traces, just as the Native people and the early pioneers had done.

Prairie wildlife also gets some attention. Jim and Ántonia visit a prairie-dog town and notice that it is a well-organized community where "an orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on" (42), rather like that of the human pioneers, many of whom also lived underground or in sod huts. It is there that Jim Burden performs his heroic feat of killing a large rattlesnake with a shovel. The snake was "old and Lazy" and he was "sunning himself after a cold night." Yet Burden does not merely move away from him, but attacks because "his abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick" (44). When he has crushed the "disgusting vitality" out of the snake, Burden reflects, "I had longed for this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy" (45). His act is celebrated by Ántonia and the other settlers because his adolescent heroism has triumphed over "the ancient, eldest Evil" (45-46).

The prairie wind and wildlife are mingled in Burden's imagery: The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others. They made me think of defeated armies, retreating; or of ghosts who were trying desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on. Presently, in one of those sobbing intervals between the blasts, the coyotes tuned up with their whining howl; one, two, three, then all together—to tell us that winter was coming. (51)

Apocryphal wildlife stories also appear in the novel. A Russian settler tells of a wedding party in Ukraine, where several sleds full of celebrants were attacked and devoured by wolves, "hundreds of them" (55). The teller of the tale escaped by throwing the bride to the wolves in order to lighten his sled, and the disgrace that followed caused him to leave Russia and emigrate to Nebraska. The story terrifies the children and haunts their dreams, but it has nothing to do with wolves, who do not occur in hundreds to attack sled trains.

There are visions of the prairie that become deeply symbolic, and these provide references to other literary images. One in particular is worth recalling in some detail:

We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and somewhere off in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless, leaning against each other. The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.

Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back into its own littleness somewhere on the prairie. (236-37)

The case is complicated a few pages later where the conversation has turned to Virgil's Georgics, a collection of pastoral musings from the first century. Cather quotes Virgil: "'Primus ego in patrium mecum . . . deducam Musas'; 'for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country'" (My Ántonia 256). Bringing the Muse into a pastoral setting may be a responsibility that Cather felt she shared with Virgil. As if to confirm this, Virgil is again referred to: "where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, 'I was the first to bring the Muse into my country'" (256). The pen and the plow are fused into the beatific image of the symbolic sunset, with Willa Cather bringing her Muse to Nebraska.

Questions still remain about the character of Willa Cather's environmental imagination. It is worthwhile to consider the political and social context in which environmental consciousness was growing in America during her lifetime. Willa Cather was born in 1873, one year after the establishment of Yellowstone as the world's first national park. Other national parks like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon were created in the next few decades. Serious conservation movements became active beginning in 1890. The administration of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) saw the establishment of federal agencies to conserve parks, forests, soils, water, and wildlife. The writings of John Muir were popular and widely read in the early 1900s. Even my own ancestor Ezra Meeker, who had crossed Nebraska with an ox team in 1852, was working hard to preserve sections of the Oregon Trail as an historical landmark. If Cather was aware of these contemporary developments, little evidence of them appears in her Nebraska novels.

Cather herself appears to have had an ambiguous relationship with the prairie land she claimed to love. As soon as she could in her youth she left Nebraska and spent most of her life in large Eastern and European cities. She did not use her agricultural roots to develop an environmental art and philosophy, as we have seen Wendell Berry do from his small Kentucky farm in our own time. She lies buried in New England, far from her Nebraska ancestors.

Two major forces were at work to change the prairie environment during the period of Cather's Nebraska novels, and she portrays them both in a positive light. Agriculture and the railroads combined to transform the prairie irreversibly. Jim Burden, the railroad lawyer, reflects at the end of My Ántonia on these changes: The old pasture land was now being broken up into wheat fields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. There were wooden houses where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards, and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women, and men who saw their lives coming to fortunate issue. The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modeling of human faces. (298)

The environment that Willa Cather evokes does indeed have a human face. It appears as if it were a character in these novels, interacting with human characters and changing their lives. It is also the landscape and setting for human growth and development, and the source for experiences of beauty and transcendence.

It is unlikely that Willa Cather will find a place among the great literary examples of the environmental imagination. She may have loved her prairie home, but her love was not strong enough to persuade her to live with it and learn its natural history. She shows little knowledge or curiosity about the natural processes surrounding her characters. One commentator speaks of Cather's "hatred of modern science" (Grumbach xxviii), which may well account for her disinterest in her ecological context. There is no environmental ethic that emerges from her work, but rather an ethic of development that supposes that land fulfills its destiny when it is successfully farmed. The land provides a background for her stories of human growth and development, but it is not loved and studied to find its own integrity and value, let alone its own story. The land is raw material in the hands of Cather's Muse, and it is the setting where the plow and the pen come together.

Three years ago, my wife Jan and I were enjoying an autumn Sunday morning in The Mill, in Lincoln, when, as it seemed, Willa Cather walked slowly past our little table. Dressed for church as a good, still family-involved twelve-year-old ought to be, her figure square-built and still androgynous-seeming, her person quiet and unobtrusive, this girl circled slowly and attentively through the big room. Her mind was absorbed in the diverse mix of coffee-drinkers and paper-readers, whom she saw one by one, without staring. This intelligent young girl was gathering material. Sounds and images and the warm, bakery fragrance of the place, the whole ambience, were registering. You could see learning happening as clearly as watching India ink spread indelibly into soft paper.

I am going to argue that the real Willa Cather was also and above all a learner in this same way, and that her deepest-going books are about learning—that is, about sensitivity and vulnerability, and the extraordinary beauty of human consciousness when it is young and free.

This sensitivity is also, I believe, the basis of the ecological imagination. Cather's capacity to see a man or a woman, to imagine their inward life, is at root the same as her ability to feel the "light reflecting, wind-loving trees in the desert" (The Song of the Lark 37) and to describe the living landscape of a redrock canyon, or the open prairie. It is all one sensibility. It is in terms of this awareness, this capacity to learn, that she understands life and the characters in it. What is the real, fundamental difference between Thea Kronborg and her sister Anna? Between Claude and Bayliss Wheeler? Between Alexandra on the one hand and her brothers Lou and Oscar Bergson? I think the ruling question for Willa Cather was, has the freshness been kept? Is the person still alive at the quick, and learning?

We might also ask, historically, whether we, as a people immersed in machinery and our much-worshiped market, are losing the one fine thing we've got, the capacity to learn and in that openness to give sympathy?

The essential difference between Claude and Bayliss Wheeler is a matter of elasticity of consciousness. The crux of Godfrey St. Peter's terrifying crisis is that the freshness of discovery and learning, renewed by his relationship with Tom Outland, and which he, Godfrey, had then somehow conveyed in his histories, is leaving him. The mysterious essence of the New Mexico morning for Archbishop Latour, the something "that whispered to the ear on the pillow," revives youthful sensitivity and appetite. It keeps him a learning, young man.

To learn, in the sense I am outlining, is not at all to gather knowledge in the sense of discrete facts. Learning in the "Tom Outland" way, as we might call it, is not an intellectual process, but rather a continuing unsettlement and opening of consciousness as a whole. The power to relate, to see inside, to feel with another, transcends intellect and language.

By the same token, the power to understand ecosystems, to sense in one's bones the relational glue that holds the natural world together, does not come about by accumulating data. You can hang dozens of radio collars on animals, and by satellite come to know where the animals spend their time, but this information hasn't anything to do with a member's insight.

The data-gathering kind of knowledge is in fact not entirely benign. It feeds into the philosophy of materialism and mechanism. Data-gathering, when dominant in the mind, leads toward coldness and arrogance. René Descartes, who described dataconsciousness as clearly as anyone has, went so far as to argue that animals didn't really suffer pain. They are machines, he wrote (37-38). A novelist, a great novelist, needs a consciousness much deeper, much more comprehensive.

I think it will shed light on Willa Cather's achievement, in particular her ecological sensitivity, to look at the human mental spectrum and try to say what most of us do with our evolutionary gift.

Picture, if you will, the range of our capabilities. At one side of the spectrum, is the power to distinguish this from that, to see things one at a time in linear sequence. Obviously, this sense for sequence is the seat of our straight-line conception of time. It is also where the simple naming aspect of language has its foundation.

This corner of consciousness also sponsors dualistic conceptions. "Upper" is distinguished from "lower"; "inner" from "outer"; "good" from "not good." When dominant in one's life, this dualistic consciousness supports hierarchies and invidious distinctions and underlies, eventually, the pathologies of racism and nationalism and the fury of religious violence.

The most generative of the entity-oriented and dualistic conceptions, undoubtedly, is "me," "I," "ego," the sense of a separate, subjective inwardness. I say "generative" because "me" is not just one entity among many. It is the home base for certain habits of perception, a certain restricted kind of education and culture.

Its seemingly sharp focus, that small corner of consciousness, grants what seems to be sureness. But by creating a self as separate observer, it simultaneously creates incompleteness. This combination of precision and anxiety gives rise to a pathological, vicious circle of need and desire, in which more is never enough.

Now it will be objected that the "me" has an actual, empirical, indeed irrefutable reality. The self isn't just a conception: I amnot you, and you are not me.

At one level of perception, such realism is inarguable. Dr. Johnson can come and kick me in the shins, refuting idealism. But from an only slightly enlarged perspective, it is possible to unsettle the boundaries of biological identity. Where is this "I" in the absence of oxygen produced by the world of plants? Or in the absence of bacteria in the gut? As Gregory Bateson asked, when the blind man taps his white-tipped stick down the sidewalk, where exactly does this perceptual self begin? (LaChapelle 60). What makes Bateson's question difficult for us is the extent of our historical rooting in entity-perception. We see things one at a time, mostly, and as we do so, with each perception our separate selfhood is subtly reinforced. That reinforcement keeps us, half-satisfied, in one small region of the spectrum of consciousness.

Most of us then act out a somewhat defiant or assertive version of what the philosophers call "naďve realism." "I think, therefore I am," as Descartes put it. Personal identity is our rock, maintained by a strategic limiting of awareness, and becomes a project that occupies the vast majority of our hours, days, weeks, years, and lives. Let us call this activity the ego process. It is why so few of us are great novelists.

We become, instead, Lou and Oscar. While the distinctionseeing, entity-oriented kind of consciousness is our lens, we look out upon a separate-seeming world of objects and judge whether any particular one will be useful, beneficial, negative, or merely neutral. Following this course, we become permanently needy, somewhat dyspeptic judges. We try to secure a conceptually preferred world: the Bayliss Wheeler world, call it, or, in a darker way, the crafty realm of Ivy Peters and Wick Cutter.

A central, shared characteristic of the people I have just named is that they have ceased to learn, ceased to grow. They all repeat some sort of formula that has become their adjustment. They have bought into society's authority.

And of course that is what we all do. Part of what makes Willa Cather a great novelist is that she sees the making of this adjustment as a deeply sad thing. The portrait of Anna Kronborg, for example, is particularly poignant. Her life has, essentially, stopped. Somehow, Cather has let us into the shared human and inward reality of Anna and ourselves. The tragedy of not learning any longer—choosing, or seeming to choose, to jell inside and to close the doors—this human incompletion is one of the profound things not named in One of Ours, andOPioneers! and The Song of the Lark and A Lost Lady and My Ántonia, and indeed, I would argue, throughout Willa Cather's work.

But at the beginning, we are all "born interested," like Mrs. Ringer in Sapphira and the Slave Girl (119). Or as Rousseau put it, we are "born free" (165). We still know that there is such a thing as a lyric connection with the world, the simple and trusting opening of self that is the gift of sympathy. Evolutionarily speaking, we come with the full spectrum of consciousness. We read Cather, avidly, with a sense of return to completeness.

But society wants us to keep such experience in its place. Society prefers that we stay within the field of distinction-focused, linear thought. Things go according to the norm when each of us is predictably self-oriented. We are encouraged to have a rueful kind of lukewarm, nostalgic sentiment, broadly shared and agreed upon as the ineluctable "human condition." Passion is allowed in moments, but is thought of as something you get over.

Society is all of us together, our collective consciousness. It is an agreement by which the individual self is corroborated as a distinct, personal identity—given weight and standing. In return for this peer support, we agree, more or less, to live within the predictable field. This quiet transaction is what Willa Cather's near-contemporary, Mary Austin, called "the huge coil of social adjustment," in her 1912 novel, AWoman of Genius (6). All her life, Austin railed against the adjustment, the conformity, the loss of creative power, the narrowing of consciousness.

When does this sad reconcilement happen, and who are its agents? I think you could say it begins virtually at birth, because the infant's whole contact is with people who have already made the agreement, who are society. Certainly with the acquiring of language, especially the relishing of powerful words like me and mine, we reinforce from an early age the social understanding of existence. We learn the language of separate selfhood.

We also live within the aura of our parents. Mary Austin's mother, at least according to Austin, disliked her from before her first breath, and seemed to take every opportunity to shame her. In Austin's account, Susanna Hunter was simply not the sort of person who could understand her daughter's mystical experiences— her occasional ranging beyond society's mentality. When in 1892 Mary Austin gave birth to a not-quite-right child, her mother asked her what she had done, to receive such a judgement (Earth Horizon 257). It is a matter for wonder that in her writing, Mary Austin's sense of life is not more combative than it is.

Virginia Boak Cather, fortunately, took a different tack. Strict and rather formal in her manners and interactions with her children, she nevertheless instinctively respected their individuality— what we would call their space. They could be relied upon to become good people. This climate of spiritual regard, as I think of it, was of inestimable value for Willa Cather's development. It probably stands behind her mature ability to have Alexandra Bergson go to the prison and talk with Frank Shabata and to honor what was fine, in the end, in Sapphira Colbert.

But those accomplishments come later, and what was crucial in Cather's developing years was that there was no lid on discovery, no limit on the confidence one could feel in one's own mind. I think learning, as a talent, may be fairly fragile in our young lives. We are being told and shown on all sides that life is to be lived guardedly. We are encouraged always to stay within the lines.

But learning is a boundary-crosser. When consciousness expands beyond the fences and begins to loosen out to its rightful, intuitive, relation-perceiving range, that, one might say, is the awakening of learning. This movement means the coming alive of insight and caring, that is, compassion. It is the recovery into new life of the wordless, musical ranges of consciousness. It is an emergence. It is inherently positive and happy. It impels Lucy Gayheart down the sidewalk. It is the almost-felt, mysterious something just ahead, for Claude Wheeler. Godfrey St. Peter catches a fugitive glimpse of it when, from the closing-down grayness of midlife, he comes again to look at the seven lakeside pine trees. It is what makes Alexandra Bergson's face radiant, on the way back from the river to the Divide.

I think you could state as a kind of formula that the more confident and solidified the self is, the rarer learning will be. For a confirmed identity, there will be very few discoveries. The strategic perception that protects the self always looks ahead, radarsearching for what will be agreeable to it. In the world projected by the self, we only come upon what we plan to come upon, such as specific pleasures; and we avoid all negative items if possible. Living from this standpoint, there can be no real freshness. A Bayliss Wheeler world, in short.

We keep up a chatter, that there shall be no empty space in consciousness in which a contemplative, possibly unsettling, insight, or a genuine discovery, might happen. One could say that this stream of words and thoughts and judgments, almost totally occupying our days, makes up the furniture in the rooms of society, contributing to our astonishing, endless possession-gathering. To unfurnish this world, on the idea of the mind démeublé, would be to reestablish the possibility of simple quietness and direct touch.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote to Mildred Bennett in 1949, "She [Cather] felt, and said in print several times, and often in conversation, that for her the only part of life which made a real impression on her imagination and emotion was what happened to her before the age of twenty" (Bennett 151). James Woodress tells us that Cather "also believed that most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen." "That's the important period, she said" (Woodress 40).

The world, or society, has pretty much got us by the end of adolescence. We have, most of us, begun to fit into the economic lines, the simplifications of dualistic sexual-identity, and the other pathways of expectation. No blame—this is just the reality. But most of us, accepting a restricted life, are not going to be great novelists.

At first look, if learning means having a genuine, presenttense awareness, alive to the world, it may seem anomalous that Cather went back to the past for her best subjects. But I think she didn't go back in a linear, sentimental sense. Her use of nineteenth-century Nebraska and New Mexico and Virginia, and late-seventeenth-century Quebec, is not an act of nostalgia. It is a reinhabiting. William Faulkner's famous saying that the past isn't dead, it isn't even past, is only true for those with a living imagination (92). The ordinary or self-bound person who dwells in the past, as the phrase has it, has a sentimental and self-pitying attitude. He or she is seeing through the lens of self, looking for praise or blame. This is us, with Lucy Gayheart's well-meaning but limited friend Harry Gordon as our representative: " . . . it was a kind of mental near-sightedness, and kept him from seeing what didn't immediately concern him" (Lucy Gayheart 98). Harry Gordon could not write a novel of the past; to do that requires the identity-crossing range of consciousness. But it is poignant that he cannot write that kind of book and cannot even talk to anyone about what is most important in his life. Sadly enough, we understand him.

The dominant collective mind, society, urges Willa and us toward success in New York, that is, toward peer recognition and a good, widely recognized bottom line. What could be more attractive, by the collective valuation, than to become the managing editor of the premier magazine in the country?

As selves, we don't really want to be vulnerable to the world. But if we retain somehow, at some level, a cellular memory of the exhilaration and freedom that accompany learning, then there is conflict. We live day to day amidst what we have been taught to admire, that is, to aspire to, to bend our life to, to imitate.We can, on the other hand, experience some of what it takes to become a great novelist if we can leave off this admiring and begin to remember, that is, reenter the young state of open consciousness and learning.

The learning state is one of intense empathy, involving transcendence of the usual self. Therefore, I have to take issue with James Woodress's judgment, that Cather's "strongest impulse [was] the desire to preserve the inviolability of the self" (127). Woodress made this remark apropos of discussing sex in Cather's writing. He continued, "Throughout her work there is fear of sex, as character after character is destroyed by it or survives by escaping it" (127). He concluded that Cather had a "yearning for the pre-puberty years of sexual innocence" (299). Sharon O'Brien says essentially the same thing, that Cather "feared 'erasure of personality,' whether by dying in a cornfield or by losing the self in romantic love" (138). But I think this judgement may give too much centrality to sex and too conclusive a characterization of sex as threatening. But most of all I think they are wrong about the erasure of self.

These are two formidable critics in agreement on a salient point of analysis. But I think that Cather's strongest impulse was to preserve for herself the conditions in which learning can happen. I would call this hallowed state not the inviolability of the self but the sacredness of the empathic. Sex is only one of the tracks on which personal identity is regularized. In modern life, that is, under the conditions of distortion, it can be one of the factors actually hardening the self. We play sexual roles within gender assignments, surrounded with issues of possession and jealousy, just as we play economic roles. It is the ego-self that falls into sentimental, romantic love—and soon enough falls out of it.

Let me name some names. It is Myra Henshawe and Enid Royce and Marian Forrester who model firmness of self most spectacularly. Cather gives a salute to their stubborn inviolability, but she doesn't want to be them. She is much closer to Nellie Birdseye and Claude Wheeler and Niel Herbert. In their youthfulness, discovery shimmers just ahead of them.

When the full range of consciousness is awakened, our native sensitivity to relationship comes alive. This larger cognizance is inherently ecological, and lets us see and feel the environment in a participative, intimate way. Willa Cather is one of our greatest nature writers—without even being a nature writer—because she had this living sense of the biotic community. Her capacity to feel for places and for trees—for the cottonwoods being cut down by 1921's modern Nebraska farmers, for example—came from the same well of consciousness as her novelist's sympathy for character. The secret of free consciousness is that what it sees, it sees with love. Free consciousness is always learning, touching, absorbing—it interimpinges with the intensely meaningful blue sky and the light of sunset and the rustling cottonwood leaves.

For Cather the instinctive standard of excellence in human endeavor, the reference, is nature. Thea Kronborg's voice, even when she was a youngster, "was a nature-voice, Wunsch told himself, breathed from the creature and apart from language, like the sound of the wind in the trees, or the murmur of water" (The Song of the Lark 77). When Thea herself is becoming aware of "something about her that was different," and found that hunting for it sometimes didn't work, merely stepping "out of doors" was one of the triggering moves that could bring the mystery close again. "And when it was there, everything was more interesting and beautiful, even people" (79). Transcendence is intimately associated with natural landscapes: More than the mountain disappeared as the forest closed thus. Thea seemed to be taking very little through the wood with her. The personality of which she was so tired seemed to let go of her. The high, sparkling air drank it up like blotting-paper. It was lost in the thrilling blue of the new sky and the song of the thin wind in the pińons. The old, fretted lines which marked one off, which defined her,— made her Thea Kronborg, Bower's accompanist, a soprano with a faulty middle voice,—were all erased. (296) This erasure opens the mind to the great source. It lets us see where the truly inviolable, renewing power comes from, where the voice comes from. Erasure of the little self marks emergence into creative consciousness. The analogies and similes for this life passage naturally come from nature, because it is this waiting world that one is reentering.

Another week passed. Thea did the same things as before, felt the same influences, "went over the same ideas; but there was a livelier movement in her thoughts, and a freshening of sensation, like the brightness which came over the underbrush after a shower. A persistent affirmation—or denial—was going on in her, like the tapping of the woodpecker in the one tall pine tree across the chasm" (307).

All outdoors is on the side of the greater. Sometimes Cather lets us directly into her own creative, environmental imagination. The opening paragraph of chapter 6, in The Song of the Lark, is a beautiful enactment of ecological consciousness. Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked like a Noah's ark town set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and cottonwoods. A few people were trying to make soft maples grow in their turfed lawns, but the fashion of planting incongruous trees from the North Atlantic States had not become general then, and the frail, brightly painted desert town was shaded by the lightreflecting, wind-loving trees of the desert, whose roots are always seeking water and whose leaves are always talking about it, making the sound of rain. The long, porous roots of the cottonwood are irrepressible. They break into the wells as rats do into granaries, and thieve the water. (37) Cather's awareness moves with the water and the roots and the leaves, across categories, feeling the process. There is nothing linguistically extraordinary in this paragraph, perhaps, but if we recognize the importance of words—"light reflecting," "windloving," "seeking," "talking"—we see an unmistakable orientation toward process. The dynamism of nature admits of only permeable borders; requires for its understanding a consciousness loose and free to move.

To my mind, there is no more sure evidence of Willa Cather's having transcended the chatter of typical or conventional thought than her simplicity of prose. She seemed to recognize that what can be said, after all, is only the tiniest fragment of what is. The small corner of consciousness that I have been talking about in this essay is very much preoccupied with words, definitions, judgments, adjectives dramatizing our responses as selves. When we are firmly within the self, we think that when we say "maple," we are saying what the tree before us is. The better-informed will say "red maple," or even acer rubrum. But none of these descriptors touches the reality of the bark, the limbs, the presence on and in the ground. The more words we use, in fact, the further we move from the tree itself, from the primary meeting in which we share existence with it.

Her religiously chaste style, to use Glen Love's wonderful insight (303), is evidence that Cather knew well the seductive power of words. She is skeptical about them. She would like her writing to convey the sense of the thing itself, in the first purity of response before description.

Only the relational consciousness can feel the aura of a tree, the thing not named—never named—about it. The relational consciousness is not oriented toward words, and uses as few as possible. By simplicity, the reader is urged toward apperception.

When Cather wants us to be inside a character, using their eyes, she most often, most movingly, has them seeing nature. She doesn't "work up" scenery—she hated to have to "work up" something. Instead, at her best, she seems simply to inhabit the learning mind. She conveys the beauty and poignancy of Claude Wheeler's situation, newly arrived in France and about to be sent to the front, by showing his attention to what is growing: "Claude didn't want to go [with David Gerhardt, to a possible billet], didn't want to accept favours,—nevertheless he went. They walked together along a dusty road that ran between halfripe wheatfields, bordered with poplar trees. The wild morningglories and Queen Anne's lace that grew by the road-side were still shining with dew. A fresh breeze stirred the bearded grain, parting it in furrows and fanning out streaks of crimson poppies" (279).

From the voyage of the Anchises onward, Claude has been learning. Some, at least, of his former self has been erased, enough to open a certain door. And how do we know, have evidence, for this learning? We see nature through eyes that are opening. The rain had dwindled to a steady patter, but the tall brakes growing up in the path splashed him to the middle, and his feet sank in spongy, mossy earth. The light about him, the very air, was green. The trunks of the trees were overgrown with a soft green moss, like mould. He was wondering whether this forest was not always a damp, gloomy place, when suddenly the sun broke through and shattered the whole wood with gold. He had never seen anything like the quivering emerald of the moss, the silky green of the dripping beech-tops. Everything woke up; rabbits ran across the path, birds began to sing, and all at once the brakes were full of whirring insects. (285)

Having entered holistic perception, we move companionably with Claude when he ventures to summarize, philosophically, where he stands: "Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together" (328).

This is pure Cather, of course; it says what it says because the forest, where she and Claude (and we) have been walking, is the literal ground of such insight about context and matrix. This forest, by the passive urging of its wholeness, has enlarged and clarified consciousness.

How sad that Claude, seeing so much more clearly now, shortly must die. How regrettable that the entire world, so Cather thought, broke in two about the time this book was published.

Almost eighty years later, with a lot of hindsight, we can perhaps see some of what she meant by "broke in two." Certainly, the phrase has proved environmentally accurate. Where formerly there were contiguous, intact ecosystems, we live among fragments. Among the shards, we scurry toward a global life given completely to possession, cunning, and short-term prudence. With wild nature in tatters, it seems inevitable we will have a diminished sense of the whole. We might all become experts in contracts, guarding above all the inviolability of the self, and know little or nothing of the great contract.

We are living, in short, in a further state of what shadowed Willa Cather's last forty-five years. Thank goodness that she left us such a clear record of what it feels like, on the other hand, to be young, with the world and the mind in a loving partnership, opening together in the movement of learning. Thank goodness for the "shining eyes of youth" (O Pioneers! 274).

Applied to literary studies, ecology's principle of interconnection might be that reading a book in isolation is akin to reading a single chapter from a novel. It is a principle especially true for Willa Cather, who exhibited a lifelong attempt to see things whole, who understood wholeness to involve the fundamental biological pattern shared by all living things, and who recognized in the great dramatic form of comedy the artistic expression of that life rhythm. Indeed, Cather's genius lay in giving voice to what philosopher Susanne K. Langer calls "the pure sense of life [which] is the underlying feeling of comedy" (327). The purpose of this essay is to trace the ways in which she did so.

To begin we might remember that ecology shaped Cather's conception of the world as surely as the Bible did her sense of language. Within her family the young Willa had the model of a favorite aunt, Frances Smith Cather, an accomplished amateur botanist who with her husband emigrated from Virginia to Nebraska a decade before Willa's own family did so. Coming into her own as a student at the University of Nebraska, Cather witnessed the creation of the science of ecology, which arose not (as writers today often assume) from the transcendental naturalism of Emerson and Thoreau, argues historian Ronald C. Tobey, but rather from the struggle of grassland ecologists in Nebraska "to understand and to preserve one of the great biological regions of the world" (2). At the core of that struggle were the scientists centering around Charles Bessey along with his students and Cather's classmates—Roscoe Pound, Frederic Clements, and Edith Schwartz Clements. In fundamental ways Cather shared their experience of having been "raised on the frontier and [having] entered botany just as the successive booms of settlement were breaking upon the virgin soil," of looking to the prairies as "the heart, the enduring strength of the American continent," and of struggling to preserve the region (Tobey 2). From this effort the grasslands ecologists "created the science of ecology . . . in the United States" (Tobey 2-3) and Willa Cather created a body of work reflecting an ecological aesthetics.

That shared experience is evident in Cather's early fiction, where descriptions of nature that she knew firsthand are among the features that most clearly anticipate her mature art. In "On the Divide" (1896), for example, she described the effect of weather on crops in precise scientific detail: when "scorching dusty winds . . . blow up over the bluffs from Kansas," they dry up the sap in the corn leaves and "the yellow scorch creeps down over the tender inside leaves about the ear" (495). And in "The Treasure of Far Island" (1902) she describes the ongoing life of a sandbar, with all the changes that come with alterations in the weather: "In the middle of the island, which is always above water except in flood time, grow thousands of yellow-green creek willows and cottonwood seedlings, brilliantly green, even when the hottest winds blow, by reason of the surrounding moisture" (265). Such moments are spots of place akin to Wordsworth's spots of time.

By their very authenticity, however, such scenes often seem irrelevant to their stories' plots about famous playwrights and failed immigrants. Critical convention has it that Cather was searching for her subject during these years: East or West, London or Red Cloud, artists or farmers? Seeking she was, but for something far deeper than mere subject matter; she needed to find what feeling she wanted to express in her art, and then to find the form for that feeling. Cather's search culminated in Alexander's Bridge (1912) and O Pioneers! (1913), the books she joined in the essay she titled "My First Novels [There Were Two]." Together they explore attitudes toward nature in the alternative forms of consciousness that lie behind the great dramatic forms of tragedy and comedy.

Cather wrote Alexander's Bridge as a case study in feeling and form. She constructed her plot along a transparently familiar tragic pattern: it focuses exclusively upon an exceptional individual (the bridge-building engineer Bartley Alexander) who suffers greatly from a flaw in his nature, and whose suffering ends in catastrophe (his bridge collapses and he, going down with it, drowns). Yet Cather departed from convention in assigning her hero his flaw, which consists not of hubris but of youthful energy. The pride of achievement through individual endeavor versus the elemental, pagan energy of life—these are the terms of Bartley Alexander's divided self, and herein lies the brilliance of Alexander's Bridge. Cather inserted a comic feeling within a tragic form, then traced the consequences of the division. It was as if she imported scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream into The Master Builder, then documented the helplessness of Ibsen's hero against the pagan energy of Shakespeare's comedy.

With two radically different principles at work, Alexander's Bridge has a decidedly schizophrenic feel. Its form (the tragic plot) is like the fixed trajectory of the tracks along which the Canadian Express takes Cather's engineer hero to Quebec, where his bridge will collapse and he will die. Struggling to break out of this trajectory is the youthful energy that quickens in him when he attends a comedy featuring a woman he had loved in his youth, and for whom the playwright wrote the part of a donkey girl. As Bartley Alexander realizes, this is no love story, however. The "seductive excitement in renewing old experiences in imagination" involved "not little Hilda Burgoyne, by any means, but . . . his own young self" (40-41). Despite Alexander's best efforts to subdue it, the life spirit of youthful energy proves irresistible, gaining force until even as the plot is taking him to inspect his "incurably disabled" bridge, "the unquiet quicksilver in his breast told him that at midsummer he would be in London" (124, 118).

The theme of the divided self provided a way for Cather to explore the radical (and, therefore, structural) difference of these feelings. Alexander's choruslike philosopher friend Lucius Wilson establishes the premise of division when he acknowledges Alexander's great ability, then comments, "I always used to feel that there was a weak spot where some day strain would tell. . . . The more dazzling the front you presented, the higher your facade rose, the more I expected to see a big crack zigzagging from top to bottom . . . then a crash and clouds of dust" (12). This is the division Cather explores when, after having given her hero the flaw of youthful energy, she traces his suffering as he comes to realize that focused ambition and youthful energy are feelings so fundamentally different they demand different lives. "I am not a man who can live two lives," he cries; "Each life spoils the other" (82).

Alexander describes well—albeit melodramatically—what was at stake for the tragic hero in the schism Cather was exploring. On the one hand the accomplishments that "gratified his pride" came because he directed his energies into building the great bridges that tamed rivers and won the beautiful Winifred for his wife. Such successes come only with the "power of concentrated thought" (39). On the other hand, the feeling quickening within Bartley has nothing whatsoever to do with the great man he had become and everything to do with "that original impulse, that internal heat" that all life has in common. As the "force . . . that is the thing we all live upon" (17) and "the one thing that had an absolute value for each individual" (39), it makes the pride of individual achievement absolutely irrelevant, for rather than distinguishing a hero from ordinary human beings, it distinguishes organic life from inorganic matter. And this feeling—this impulse, heat, force—gives rise to a loss of self antithetical to the ego-consciousness of a heroic individual. It is the feeling of being in a stream of life rather than of building a bridge.

In art, the dramatic forms of tragedy and comedy express these radically different conceptions of life. The end-directed tragic plot traces the life of an individual man or woman, which follows the rhythm of birth, growth, and death; the episodic, contingent form of comedy celebrates the multifaceted forms of life itself in a pattern of eternal renewal. Whereas the tragic spirit lies behind Alexander's struggle against the consequences of his actions and the inevitability of his plot, the comic spirit lies behind his enjoyment of the pauses that suspend that plot when he forgets where he is going and responds to the gray weather on a ship crossing, the smell of acacias on an evening walk, and the atmosphere of London during a carriage ride. When Bartley agonizes over his personal fate, he expresses the egocentrism of the tragic spirit's consciousness of an end: "'That this,' he groaned, 'that this should have happened to me!'" (69). When Hilda wonders how people can ever die, she expresses the comic spirit's view that "Life seems the strongest and most indestructible thing in the world" (95).

Bartley Alexander's tragedy is that the comic spirit is stronger than he, and that it will undo him. By tracing his suffering, Cather describes and eventually pays homage to its radically subversive nature. What lay ahead for Cather was finding a way to express this spirit that "wanted so much to live" (102). Before moving on, however, she had to finish off her tragic hero, and finish him off she did. Tragedy's "crisis is always the turn toward an absolute close," Langer observes, in that "[t]his form reflects the basic structure of personal life" (Langer 352). Bartley's bridge collapses and he goes down with it, the workmen pulling him under in a last desperate attempt to hang onto the great man. In a coda Cather provides tragedy's obligatory benediction by assuming a choruslike voice and reflecting, "For Alexander death was an easy creditor. Fortune, which had smiled upon him consistently all his life, did not desert him in the end. His harshest critics did not doubt that, had he lived, he would have retrieved himself" (131).

Bartley's harshest critics may have forgiven him, but Cather herself disowned Alexander's Bridge as uncongenial, and even her most sympathetic readers agreed. "I could not find in the story the author of strength and latent power I valued in life," her friend Elizabeth Sergeant wrote; "When Bartley's bridge went down, and he with it . . . the death was minor, the great chorus of tragedy failed to sound" (Sergeant 75-76). Cather must have realized, as Bartley Alexander did, "There was nothing to do but pull the whole structure down and begin over again" (122). But if not tragedy, what? The answer lay in the feeling of youth quickening within her character, so closely connected with the nature around Bartley and the country where he grew up. Released from the incompatible form of Alexander's Bridge, it found expression in apparently disparate writing that would come together as O Pioneers! "Soon after [Alexander's Bridge] was published I went for six months to Arizona and New Mexico," Cather later reflected of that period. It was as if she was fulfilling Bartley Alexander's yearning for the Western places of his youth, and in the Southwest she found the balance she needed. "The longer I stayed in a country I really did care about, and among people who were a part of the country, the more unnecessary and superficial a book like Alexander's Bridge seemed to me," she reflected; "I did no writing down there, but I recovered from the conventional editorial point of view" ("My First Novels" 92). After she left the Southwest Cather returned to Nebraska, spending "five weeks in June and July in Red Cloud, where she visited with old neighbors and watched the wheat harvest for the first time in several years" (Stouck 285). While there she wrote a poem about youth that she titled "Prairie Spring"—the life instinct exemplified briefly in Bartley Alexander had found another form. "This is how the wheat country seemed to me . . . when I first came back from the Southwest," she noted on the copy of "Prairie Spring" that she included with a letter to Elizabeth Sergeant. Then (the feeling quickening within herself taking yet another form) in that same letter she wrote that "on the edge of a wheat field she had the idea for another story—she was going to call it 'The White Mulberry Tree'" (Stouck 286). And then—seeing "The White Mulberry Tree" and "Alexandra" together—she realized that she had a two-part pastoral on her hands (Sergeant 86). This time the form for her story was coming from the materials themselves; this time her subject was nature, which she now comprehended as life itself.

"The country insisted on being the Hero and she did not interfere, for the story came out of the long grasses," Cather wrote to Elizabeth Sergeant (qtd. by Sergeant 92), then added that she thought the people—Swedes and Bohemians—were rather interesting, too (to es, 21 October 1912). She opened O Pioneers! with "Prairie Spring," the poem at its genesis that celebrates the vital energy distinguishing organic life from inorganic matter. Its first half describes a lifeless landscape of flat land, miles of soil, empty roads, and "eternal, unresponsive sky." Then—by an explosion of vitality—the second half celebrates the life instinct: Against all this, Youth, Flaming like the wild roses, Singing like the larks over the plowed fields, Flashing like a star out of the twilight . . . Whereas in tragedy an individual is the measure of all things, comedy celebrates instinctual energy and elementary purpose common to all organic life "to maintain the pattern of vitality" (Langer 328).

"Prairie Spring" is Cather's song of youth, and it announces a narrative that, in the manner of Whitman, celebrates the ongoing pattern of life as a stream in which all living forms participate. O Pioneers! is about communal rather than individual history: its episodic structure reflects interconnectedness, and its theme of reiteration expresses continuity. Human stories—like the lark's song—are those of youth repeated over and over for thousands of years, and allusive echoes of pastoral establish that reiteration. As numerous critics have pointed out, Virgil's Ecologues lies behind Alexandra's creation of a garden farm, and the biblical Garden of Eden lies behind Marie and Emil's love and death in an orchard. Yet to focus upon literary allusions is to miss the larger pattern of O Pioneers!, which incorporates human stories into the rhythm of universal life connecting men and women to other life forms. Though Alexandra and Carl will marry, the greening of a new world in O Pioneers! does not concern their generativity (they marry as friends in middle age, presumably to remain childless). Instead, the new world of Cather's comedy has to do with the interconnectedness of all of life by which atoms pass from one life form to another in ongoing, everlasting renewal. "Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out again, in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth" (274). The final words of the narrative return to the opening poem's celebration of youth in the cyclic manner of comedy.

In Alexander's Bridge Cather had tried her hand at tragedy; in O Pioneers! she "hit the home pasture" with comedy. O Pioneers! is Cather's breakthrough expression of a feeling that was so pure she was already confronting issues of the pastoral as its vehicle. The pastoral's fault line lay in its separation of art from life, most obviously seen in its artificial contrast of rural simplicity versus urban complexity. Cather suggested cracks in that fault line by noting the incongruities of Alexandra's house (where she is more comfortable in the kitchen than in the dining room) and by placing a threshing machine on the cultivated Nebraska landscape and sacrificing Amadee to it (an action anticipating Leo Marx's machine in the garden). She identified the fault line itself, however, when she acknowledged the cloying unreality of the pastoral. Upon seeing the splendor of Alexandra's farm, Carl remarks, "I . . . think I liked the old country better. This is all very splendid in its way, but there was something about this country when it was a wild old beast that has haunted me all these years. Now, when I come back to all this milk and honey, I feel like the old German song, 'Wo bist du, wo bist du, mein geliebtest Land.' Do you ever feel like that, I wonder?" Carl asks (110).

"Where are you, where are you, my beloved country?" Carl's question haunts O Pioneers! as a lament for reality beneath pastoral's milk and honey. Though Cather had celebrated the feeling fundamental to comedy (the pure sense of life) with the literary form classically adapted to that feeling (pastoral), the form had taken her away from life's specificity and complexity, and she must have been still "starving for reality" (Preface viii). Here I draw upon research for the Cather Scholarly Edition, where we've realized that though Cather celebrated Nebraska in O Pioneers!, she didn't do so by the level of engagement with place that would distinguish her subsequent writing. That is, though the actual Divide between the Republican and Little Blue rivers figures (generally) behind the fictional Divide ofOPioneers!, and though most readers (incorrectly) equate Hanover with Red Cloud, I suspect we wouldn't make those connections were we not trained by Cather's later writing to look for specificity of place. Similarly, her characters in O Pioneers! seem to spring directly from myth unleavened by life. Whereas Alexandra is a reincarnation of the corn goddess and Emil and Marie a retelling of Pyramis and Thisbe, there is no comparable lived experience behind these characters, nobody like Annie Sadilek Pavelka behind Ántonia. If, as Joseph Meeker writes, "biology is the study of life itself, and esthetics is the study of the illusions of life created symbolically by man" (127), O Pioneers! calls for questions of aesthetics. That was to change, however.

Deep mapping began with The Song of the Lark (1915), Cather's Kunstleroman, in which she not only grounded but rooted herself in the world. She opened her story in Moonstone, Colorado, a small town so closely based on Red Cloud, Nebraska, that a map drawn from the fiction might guide a visitor through the actual town even today. Importantly for this essay, in writing of nature Cather resembles a biologist who is studying life itself, adopting the manner—as Douglas J. Colglazier has argued—of a field guide. A detailed description of Thea's walk out of town past patches of sunflowers, over a washout and a deep sand gully, and past a grove of cottonwood trees begins with a micro environment of place when Cather describes Moonstone, set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and cottonwoods. A few people were trying to make soft maples grow in their turfed lawns, but the fashion of planting incongruous trees from the North Atlantic States had not become general then, and the frail, brightly painted desert town was shaded by the light-reflecting, wind-loving trees of the desert, whose roots are always seeking water and whose leaves are always talking about it, making the sound of rain. The long, porous roots of the cottonwood are irrepressible. They break into the well as rats do into granaries, and thieve the water. (37) For her story about youth's awakening to something beautiful, Cather traces Thea's relationship with nature as directly as she traces species of trees along the boardwalk out of town. Thea passes her childhood in a botanist's version of Noah's Ark, the small town of Moonstone, "set out in the sand and lightly shaded by grey-green tamarisks and cottonwoods." She suffers when in Chicago she is cut off from the country, and she is restored to creative vitality by entering into the earth in Panther Canyon. There she awakens to a feeling about nature as an everlasting stream, a feeling that she carries within herself until, when on stage at the Met singing Sieglinde, "that deep-rooted vitality flowered in her voice, her face, in her very finger-tips" (410).

The conception of life as a stream is critical to Thea's development, and Cather structured her novel to give Thea her idea in substance. As she was to reflect in Death Comes for the Archbishop, "There was an element of exaggeration in anything so simple!" (103). She moved Thea deep within the earth to a canyon with a stream at its heart, where she would experience the presymbolic feelings that give rise to all life forms. There "certain feelings were transmitted to her" (272) of yearning and desire, and they are as radical as it is possible to be. That is, they have to do with the impulse that distinguishes organic life from inorganic matter. "Down here at the beginning, that painful thing was already stirring," which is "desire of the dust," Cather writes, then explains that stirring as "the shining, elusive element which is life itself" (275-76, emphasis added). As Thea comprehends, this element—this life spirit—is what all life forms have in common. It animated the ancient women who had once climbed the water-trail as well as the nest-building swallows flying around her and the dwarf cedars giving off an aromatic smell in the sun. This is the life instinct that quickened in Bartley Alexander, then broke into the song of youth in "Prairie Spring" that heralded O Pioneers! In human beings this same life spirit gives rise to art, as Thea realizes in an epiphany while bathing in the stream at the canyon's heart: life is an everlastingly full and continuing stream, art is form given briefly to life, and the artist is a vessel. It is an audaciously direct exposition of a feeling that had long been teasing Cather's mind. That feeling—that conception of life and, therefore, of art—is comedic.

However, the larger form of The Song of the Lark follows the career of a young artist fulfilling her personal destiny, and, as such, it is at odds with any feeling of nature as an ongoing stream of life. The narrative builds toward the diva Kronborg's performance of Sieglinde, the crowning achievement of Thea's trajectory toward success (like a rifle shot, her lover Fred Ottenburg told her), rather akin to hitting a home run. On the one hand, the pure sense of life itself reappears in the description of Thea feeling "like a tree bursting into bloom" (478); on the other, the linearity of its plot driven by the ambition of its hero contradicts that feeling.

Though Cather came to believe she had taken the wrong turn in The Song of the Lark, her full-blooded plot perfectly accommodated her longstanding hunger for reality. Sated, she returned to the pastoral in My Ántonia (1918), this time to make it her own. When Jim Burden (the sensitive aristocrat) escapes from the city (New York) to the country (Nebraska) to restore himself, the pastoral pattern is so transparent that Cather could expect her readers to recognize it as such and thus to recognize her innovations upon it. My Ántonia is an antipastoral pastoral in that Jim's fantasy of escaping to unblemished nature is contradicted by the complexities of Antonia's life and the place she inhabits. My Ántonia is also the pastoral reinvented in that Cather celebrates the comic impulse of rebirth in Ántonia as an Earth Mother while—at the same time—she pays tribute to the complex authenticity of actual people and places with an ongoing life in the real world. In other words, Cather integrated the literary and the biological, the constructed work of art and life itself when in creating her Earth Mother she was faithful to a particular geography and the circumstances of its time. There was an actual girl, Annie Sadilek, who actually lived in a dugout when she was a child, and who eventually married and as Annie Sadilek Pavelka actually had a fruit cave that she actually showed to Willa Cather, and that visitors toWebster County can actually enter today.

As I have argued elsewhere, My Ántonia is America's most fully realized birth myth. In it Cather achieved what she had been struggling toward in O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark—a marriage of form and feeling, art and life. It is not surprising, perhaps, that My Ántonia would be the last time Cather treated regeneration as a given. Having affirmed a living world, Cather began to fear for its survival. When a character says, "It's always been my notion that the land was made for man, just as it's old Dawson's that man was created to work the land" (One of Ours 67), he acts as spokesman for the tragic plots of man against nature that appear in One of Ours (1922) and A Lost Lady (1923). Both involve "the question of property" (One of Ours 80) that arises when the American West, having been charted and settled, falls to the mercy of men like the land-hog Nat Wheeler and the unscrupulous lawyer Ivy Peters. These are the characters who commit acts of indiscriminate violence against nature so powerful they explode throughout the texts, affecting the meaning of everything else. In Nebraska, mutilation takes the form of a cherry tree lying beside its bleeding stump, a blinded woodpecker wildly seeking to regain her perch, and a silvery marsh that, drained, vanishes from the story. And in France, violence against nature assumes the massive scale of war that leaves "long lines of gaunt, dead trees, charred and torn; big holes gashed out in fields and hillsides . . . winding depressions in the earth, bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying along the road, and everywhere endless straggling lines of rusty barbed-wire, that seemed to have been put there by chance,—with no purpose at all" (One of Ours 358).

The pure sense of life fundamental to comedy "is the realization in direct feeling of what sets organic nature apart from inorganic: self-preservation, self-restoration," Langer reflects (327- 28). Seen in both communal and individual biography, the struggle to regain equilibrium when threatened by disruption is a principle common to all life forms, and one articulated by Cather. "The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts" (Preface, Not Under Forty), she famously reflected of the year that Mussolini formed a Fascist government, the New Ku Klux Klan gained political power in the United States, and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was published, along with One of Ours. When the next year she received a Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, disruption became personal. "The struggle to preserve the integrity of her life as an artist, its necessary detachment and freedom, cost her something," Lewis recalled; "But . . . it was self-preservation" (Lewis 136-37). She began writing The Professor's House, the "most personal" of all Cather's novels, according to Lewis. Lewis was not referring to autobiographical details, of course, but rather to the novel's concern with self-preservation and self-restoration. Maintaining "the pattern of vitality . . . is the most elementary in stinctual purpose" of life, and when it is disturbed, an organism seeks to regain equilibrium in order to maintain that biological pattern, Langer writes (328; see Meeker 39). She is describing the fundamental rhythm of comedy, but she could have been describing The Professor's House.

For her exploration of feelings about living and dying, Cather tried "two experiments in form" ("On The Professor's House" 30). One involved inserting a story into a novel, the second came from Dutch paintings of an interior with a square window opening onto the sea, and—the important point—both concerned how form influences feeling. To translate these forms into her narrative, Cather wrote her novel as three books, each of which presents a distinctive structure and language; together, they trace the relation between the forms humans construct (building houses and writing books) and the feelings they experience. Book 1, "The Family," in its single-minded preoccupation with house building and decorating, is a postmodern experience of being out of place (outland), confined within overcrowded interiors, until—feeling stifled—St. Peter responds by recalling his former student, Tom Outland. Book 2, "TomOutland's Story," is the narrative equivalent of an open window with its uncluttered, spare account of "carving out place" (as Glen Love has written) on the Blue Mesa. And finally, at the novel's core, book 3, "The Professor," is St. Peter's meditation upon the earth itself as the resting place—the home—of the life force expressing itself in the everlasting pattern of renewal. "He was a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods and water. Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him. He was not nearly so cultivated as Tom's old cliff-dwellers must have been—and yet he was terribly wise. He seemed to be at the root of the matter; Desire under all desires, Truth under all truths. He seemed to know, among other things, that he was solitary and must always be so; he had never been married, never been a father. He was earth, and would return to earth" (241).

The comic rhythm is the loss and recovery of equilibrium, which is the life rhythm shared by all living things. When an organism has been disturbed, it seeks to regain the vitality of dynamic form by overcoming or removing obstacles, by slight variations, or by opportunistic adaptations (see Langer 327-28). That is precisely the rhythm of The Professor's House, which is narrative seeking equilibrium. The narrative's opening line ("the moving was over and done") establishes disruption as the premise to which the following three books respond with its organismcum- character, Godfrey St. Peter, and as important, with the opportunistic adaptations of its radical narrative shifts. Through these adaptations the narrative retrieves the vitality of first principles by moving Godfrey St. Peter from a family narrative of individual personalities (book 1), to recover an ideal narrative of adaptation to place (book 2), and—finally—to retrieve the instinct to survive that is fundamental to all life forms (book 3).

Whereas The Professor's House was an experiment in form, Cather's next novel was an experiment in feeling. "How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, . . . all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre . . . leave the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and small" (42-43), she had written in "The Novel Démeublé," and My Mortal Enemy tested her idea in substance. Its opening pages recall the night when its heroine, Myra Driscoll, walked out the front door of her uncle's house with only the clothes she was wearing, though her friends threw some articles out a back window in an ironic reenactment of throwing furniture out the window. The story that follows presents "the play of emotions, great and small" as Myra Henshawe steps out of her role as the heroine of a love story and realizes that she is a victim of feeling.

The important point for any ecocritical reading is how radically Cather strips the world away in this most severe rendering of the novel démueblé. Separation from place appears in multiple forms of dispossession: in disinheriting her, Myra's uncle severs her from the place of her childhood, a stone mansion in a ten-acre park; in falling upon increasingly hard times, her marriage takes her to the placelessness of a New York apartment, then to rented rooms in an unnamed sprawling western city; and in telling her story, her author casts her upon a bare stage.

The bare stage provides a structural principle in that My Mortal Enemy resembles drama being performed rather than fiction being read. Its putative narrator, young Nellie Birdseye, isn't so much a teller of a story as the spectator of scenes that unfurnish the stage and narrow the focus, until, as if lit by a single spotlight on a bare stage, there is only the empty bed from which Myra has fled. It is here—with Myra vanished from her own play— that we confront how severely Cather has eliminated the world from her story. Look for nature and one finds only remnants and artifacts—topaz mounted in sleeve buttons, sprays of white hyacinth ornamenting a coat, opals flashing in a bracelet, and plum curtains lined with the cream-color lying beneath the blue skin of ripe figs. Windows, when they appear, are frames for curtains or backdrops for characters posed before them rather than openings onto the world.

Its central character gone, this performance is over, it would seem. But of course that is not how My Mortal Enemy ends. Nellie remains. I imagine her as disembodied voice speaking to the darkened theatre, reflecting that "[a] yearning strong enough to lift that ailing body and drag it out into the world again should have its way" (99). As Tom Outland's story lets in the fresh air that blew off the Blue Mesa, so Nellie's description of Myra meeting death on a bare headland lets in the fresh air that blows off the ocean. "That is always such a forgiving time," Myra says about seeing dawn from that place: "When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution" (73). Lest we fail to recognize the basic biological (rather than specifically religious) pattern in Myra's death, Cather distinguishes between forms of absolution in a coda. Though Myra had returned to the Church, she didn't change her will requesting "that her body should be cremated and her ashes buried 'in some lonely and unfrequented place in the mountains, or in the sea'" (102), and Cather ends the book with Nellie's voice recalling sometimes hearing Myra's "strange complaint breathed by a dying woman into the stillness of night, like a confession of the soul: 'Why must I die like this, alone with My Mortal Enemy!'" (102-03). It is the soul without disguise giving voice to insight into the essence of things. Freed from misdirected love, the life force that had gathered strength in Bartley Alexander and burst into voice in "Prairie Spring" remains strong, the life force by which the death of an individual is "a phase of the life pattern itself" (Langer 329).

When Nellie reflects, "A yearning strong enough to lift that ailing body and drag it out into the world again should have its way" (99), we may recall other easeful deaths in Cather's fiction where characters relinquish individual identity and rejoin the ongoing process of nature. The country receives Alexandra Bergson's heart to give it forth again in new life, the imprisoned spirit of Bishop Latour is released into the desert air, and Anton Rosicky returns in death to the open country he had always longed for. As Jim Burden realized in his grandmother's garden, "that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great" (My Ántonia 18). It is the quotation on the headstone marking Cather's grave.

Whereas Cather recorded the tension between feeling and form in The Professor's House and My Mortal Enemy, she celebrated their union in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather returned to the Southwest, this time not as preparation for writing about Nebraska but instead to write about the feeling of that desert country. Indeed, her account of writing the Archbishop is all about feeling. She found in the Southwest mission churches "a direct expression of some very real and lively human feeling" ("On Death" 5) and in Father Machebeuf's letters "the mood, the spirit in which they [the two priests Fathers Machebeuf and Lamy] accepted the accidents and hardships of a desert country, the joyful energy that kept them going" (10). She turned to legend as the form for this feeling because "In this kind of writing the mood is the thing—all the little figures and stories are mere improvisations that come out of it" (10). She did not start writing "until the feeling of it had so teased me that I could not get on with other things" (10). And so on.

The picaresque provided a form perfectly adapted to the feeling of joyful energy.With its loosely connected episodes, realistic details, and sequential (rather than consequential) action, Death Comes for the Archbishop is Cather's most fully realized comedy in the sense that Joseph Meeker uses for The Comedy of Survival: "[I]t is an image of human adaptation to the world and acceptance of its given conditions without escape, rebellion, or egotistic insistence upon human centrality" (182). Cather's narrative has the structural diversity of the picaresque in representing life as it occurs, the ease of language that is the antithesis of tragedy's elevated style, and—most fundamentally—a cosmic vision by which all things are related.

Though a narrative without accent would scarcely have a climax, Cather included a meditative core—a heart, as it were—for Death Comes for the Archbishop. By contrasting two manners of relating to nature, it presents her most explicit statement of environmental ethics.

When they left the rock or tree or sand dune that had sheltered them for the night, the Navajo was careful to obliterate every trace of their temporary occupation. . . . [J]ust as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a little (at least some mark or memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through water, or birds through the air.

It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. . . . They seemed to have none of the European's desire to "master" nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was . . . from an inherited caution and respect. It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse. . . . They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it. (246-47)

Critics customarily have treated Death Comes for the Archbishop as the other side of a divide, with the increasingly dark novels beginning with One of Ours on one side and the sunny Archbishop on the other. But in terms of issues Cather was addressing about the relation of feeling to form, The Professor's House, My Mortal Enemy, and the Archbishop belong together. Appearing in three consecutive years (1925, 1926, 1927), they are the astonishing output from a single sustained burst of creative energy, the most intense and productive period of Cather's life. Together they explore the fundamental relation of human to the world. The three novels are three iterations of an overall movement from ego to eco—the terms of today are precisely appropriate. By "letting go of the Ego," Godfrey St Peter regains "the ground beneath his feet"; after serving penance for the egoistic idolatries of her youth, Myra Henshawe dies overlooking the ocean; and Bishop Latour's decision to die in the Southwest reflects his understanding that life was "an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego itself" (304). It was a conviction apart from his religious life, Cather explains, "an enlightenment that came to him as a man, a human creature" (304, emphasis added).

This movement toward an eikos (the Greek word for "habitation") of ecology involved questions about forms of consciousness. The House of Fiction has many rooms, Henry James had written. I imagine that Cather might have muttered "of course," then retorted that the important point concerned the relation of the House of Fiction to Life. As if replying to James, Cather maps the movement from ego to eikos by the various habitations that appear on the pages of The Professor's House, My Mortal Enemy, and the Archbishop: an empty three-story frame house with narrow stairs leading to an attic study, a new house featuring a bath room, a Norwegian manor house being built on the shores of Lake Michigan, a New York apartment and boardinghouse rooms somewhere in a sprawling West Coast city, a sleeping cliff city nestled in a Southwestern canyon, one solitary hogan through which desert winds blow and another where "one seemed to be sitting in the heart of a world made of dusty earth and moving air" (Archbishop 242)—and the earth itself, which is our final home. The movement from ego to eikos appears in each of the three novels individually and also—more expansively—in the novels read together. That is, by 1927 the stifling interiors opening The Professor's House have given way to the cosmic view of Death Comes for the Archbishop, where "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!" (245).

Cather extended her vacation from life by writing the novel most distant to her in time and place. Shadows on the Rock (1931) concerned "the curious endurance of a kind of culture," she wrote, describing its principle of equilibrium in a system. Cather further described her book as about "a feeling about life," and she drew upon biology to explain its aesthetics. She compared the Quebec community to a colony of ants that—when their colony is kicked in—rebuilds, and she likened the ships returning each year to sea birds returning every year to "certain naked islands . . . mere ledges of rock standing up a little out of the sea, where the sea birds came every year to lay their eggs and rear their young in the caves and hollows" (225).

Writing Shadows established the equilibrium Cather needed to return to the places of her youth and the early memories they held. Obscure Destinies (1932), Lucy Gayheart (1935), and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) continued the cyclic pattern that Cather announced in O Pioneers! and maintained throughout her literary life. The three stories of Obscure Destinies provide widening perspectives of the little rural neighborhood in Nebraska she had written of so often, this time reiterating themes in the language of the country itself. "Neighbour Rosicky" is the pastoral revisited, but with neither the fantasy of O Pioneers! nor the escapism of My Ántonia. Rather than an Amazonian pioneer cultivating a mighty farm or an Earth Mother generating a New World, the Rosickys are ordinary farmers facing a drought. "The pastoral landscape does not permit thistles," Meeker comments (90); yet Russian thistles are invading the Rosickys' fields. Continuities take similarly ordinary forms of life as it is lived: Rosicky suffers a heart attack, learns that his son and daughter-in-law will remain on the land, and that she is with child. A coda presents his death within the continuity of the family and the everlasting pattern of nature when Doctor Burleigh pauses beside the graveyard where Neighbor Rosicky is buried, and reflects "[e]verything here seemed strangely moving and significant, though signifying what, he did not know" (60). The implicit question—what does this place signify?—prepares for the description of the graveyard where the life spirit of nature expresses itself in the simple acts of Rosicky's son cutting hay, moonlight silvering the grass, neighbors passing, horses working in summer, and cattle eating fodder as winter approaches. Nothing could be more undeathlike than this place; nothing could be more right for a man who had helped to do with work of great cities and had always longed for the open country and had got to it at last. Rosicky's life seemed to him complete and beautiful. (61)

Whereas "Neighbour Rosicky" affirms the pattern of renewal of life in nature, "Old Mrs. Harris" concerns the specifically human feeling of this pattern. Cather drew again upon memories of her childhood in Red Cloud to write a technical tour de force in that multiple points of view coexist as individuals and— simultaneously—as a family and a community. Vickie Templeton prepares to leave her family to attend the university,Victoria Templeton learns she is again pregnant, Grandmother Harris dies, and Victoria and Vickie will go on to "come closer and closer to Grandma Harris. They will think a great deal about her, and remember things they never noticed; and their lot will be more or less like hers" (156-57). Each character is a stage of life endlessly repeating itself; simultaneously, each is intensely individual and particular. Whereas Cather had celebrated the life force of youth in "Prairie Spring," the poem with which she began O Pioneers! so many years ago, she now acknowledges the feeling of a whole life fully lived: Victoria and Vickie "will look into the eager, unseeing eyes of young people and feel themselves alone. They will say to themselves: 'I was heartless, because I was young and strong and wanted things so much. But now I know'" (157).

For "Two Friends," Cather drew again upon the Red Cloud of her childhood, this time with the cosmic consciousness of the Archbishop. This simple story of a friendship that was senselessly broken contains at its heart a description of an event followed by a meditation on place. The description is of an occultation of Venus, or two planets in their rotation; the meditation is upon a dusty road in a Nebraska village, a precise spot of this planet drinking up the light from another planet: The road, just in front of the sidewalk where I sat and played jacks, would be ankle-deep in dust, and seemed to drink up the moonlight like folds of velvet. It drank up sound, too; muffled the wagon-wheels and hoof-beats; lay soft and meek like the last residuum of material things,—the soft bottom resting place. Nothing in the world, not snow mountains or blue seas, is so beautiful in moonlight as the soft, dry summer roads in a farming country, roads where the white dust falls back from the slow wagon-wheel. (176) As did The Professor's House, so "Two Friends" addresses the loss of equilibrium. "Things were out of true, the equilibrium was gone," Cather writes about the rupture in the friendship of men who, "when they used to sit in their old places on the sidewalk, . . . seemed like two bodies held steady by some law of balance, an unconscious relation like that between the earth and the moon" (188).

A large perspective of the world's smallness had been fundamental to Cather's writing from the time of O Pioneers!, with its opening description of the little town of Hanover perched on a windy tableland, trying not to be blown away. Nowhere, however, does she present relationship more forcefully than in Obscure Destinies, where the stories concern the relation of a family to the seasons of nature, of individuals to generations of a family, and of this world to rotations of the planets. The pattern of connection is aesthetic as well as biological: the stories Cather included in Obscure Destinies reiterate the patterns of her oeuvre with exceptional directness and clarity. In "Neighbour Rosicky" Cather recalls My Ántonia by returning to the family of Annie Sadelik Pavelka for her models, and in "Old Mrs. Harris" she recalls The Song of the Lark by returning to her own family. In a like manner, scenes ask to be read alongside one another. For example, Doctor Burleigh's reflection on the graveyard where Rosicky was buried echoes Jim Burden's reflection in his grandmother's garden: each describes the happiness of becoming part of nature, yet the phrase "complete and great" (My Ántonia 18) has modulated into "complete and beautiful" ("Neighbour Rosicky" 61).

Sapphira and the Slave Girl completes the return. Set inside the rural Back Creek community of Cather's birthplace in Virginia, it testifies to continuity in the most personal and direct of terms. Whereas in writing O Pioneers! Cather had imagined herself forging a new path in art, she concluded her last novel with an epilogue in which she recalled herself as a child for whom life lay ahead, unexpected and various. The genetic instructions and the historical forces for the works to follow are stored within the moment, as the oak is stored within the acorn. Her family would emigrate to Nebraska, taking her with them; there she would meet a hired girl, see her cousin struggle to find his way, and enjoy picnics in a neighbor's grove, and from these experiences My Ántonia, One of Ours, and A Lost Lady would spring. It is a profoundly comic perspective according to which the world seems neither pastoral nor tragic, but picaresque.

Cather's Virginia novel proved to be the final book published in her life, and it is fitting that with it she drew upon the earliest memories of her family. One recalls the recurring image in Cather's stories of a road becoming a circle: what youth sees as an intensely individual career, age understands is "the road of Destiny" circling back and repeating itself (My Ántonia 360). Represented by that circle are the themes of comedy—the ongoing rhythm of the life spirit in birth, growth, and death, as well as the comic rhythm of disruption and recovery of equilibrium. They provide the themes of Cather's stories that, when read together, give form to a whole life completely lived. They account for their mood as well. As Cather reflected in the conclusion of "Old Mrs. Harris," these are the great concerns that startle us out of our intense self-absorption, for acknowledging that we are subject to natural laws engenders humility before the processes of life on this earth.

In early 1919 Willa Cather wrote to her friend from childhood, Carrie Miner Sherwood, inquiring whether Carrie had received the gift she had sent her for Christmas, a print of Albrecht Dürer's watercolor of a hare. The painting shows a single animal on an empty white ground. It is rendered with such clarity that one can distinguish individual hairs in the animal's coat (see fig. 1). Cather's choice of this particular painting for her gift was, it seems to me, entirely characteristic of her way of seeing the world, which was also her way of rendering the world in her fiction. Like Dürer's painting, her writing was focused, finely but selectively detailed, and freed of background clutter. As Eudora Welty discerningly pointed out a number of years ago, Cather's fiction typically occupies either far panoramas or a clear foreground, while tending to be vacant in the middle distance. Again like the hare in Dürer's watercolor (with opaque white touches), her selected details are characteristically surrounded by blankness, the unsaid or the disregarded. Throwing the bulk of the furniture out the window, as she proclaimed a desire to do in "The Novel Démeublé" (42), she allows the reader's eye along with her own to focus on the few selected pieces that are kept in the room. It is largely this isolation of individual details against an uncluttered middle ground—perhaps like the microscopic views she would have experienced as a budding scientist in her adolescent years— that accounts for the effect of visual acuity in Cather's writing.

As Welty's remark about the locus of Cather's vision, either in the far perspective or in close focus, implies, she does not so much amass details as focus on a few specific details one at a time. For example: In Ántonia, out of what must have been a prairieful of grasshoppers, we see one specific grasshopper up close as Ántonia cups it in her hand, then slips it into her hair for safekeeping (40). In A Lost Lady, we see the "pointed tip" of the last poplar in a row—just that last one, and not the whole poplar but only its tip, with the "hollow, silver winter moon" poised above it (40). In Lucy Gayheart, the "point of silver light" of the evening's one first star (10).

There are many other examples that could be cited. Critics have often noted that these specific, isolated presences gain a luminous significance. They also gain visual clarity from being set alone against a blankness. When Cather wished to convey to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant the sense of her new heroine as she was beginning My Ántonia, she reached for a single glazed jar and placed it by itself on the clear space of Elsie's desk (149). In this anecdote illustrating the visual nature of Cather's thought processes, the concrete image of the jar established in the reader's mind becomes emblematic of the abstract idea of the heroine's centrality in the novel. It makes the idea real.

Cather's own association of reality with visual experience is evident in letters that she wrote to Dorothy Canfield in 1902 during her first trip to England. Writing from Ludlow, in Shropshire, she said that she had been tracking A. E. Housman through the scenes of his poetry and had seen with her own eyes the Severn River reflecting nearby steeples, the "lads" playing football, the nearness of the jail to the railroad switchyard in Shrewsbury, precisely as these details are reported in "Is my team ploughing" and "On moonlit heath and lonesome bank." Having seen these things, she said, she now realized that Housman's poetry was even truer than she had previously thought. Truth is linked with seeing. What made Housman's poetry truer for her was visual verification. She had seen the specific details recorded in his poems, verified poem against sight, and on that basis judged the poems true. Visual accuracy makes truth. What this means for the writing of poetry is that the poet must be able to evoke clear visual images in language. But before that can happen the poet must possess the power of observation, the ability to see clearly. If Housman had lacked that power, he would not have been able to carry these details into his poetry, and it would presumably have been less true.

Cather seems to have seen the world very much as Housman saw it—very clearly indeed. She seems to have possessed, as he did, close powers of observation that are translated into clear visual images conveying, as such images do in Housman's poetry, rich resonance. Recognition of the visual quality of her style is, of course, one of the staples of Cather criticism. Whether we think in terms of powerful symbolizing pictures like the plow against the setting sun or in terms of small visual details like the ring of dirt around the sink in the opening chapter of One of Ours (3) or the "thread of green liquid" oozing from the crushed head of the snake in My Ántonia (45), we recognize that her writing has the power to make us see. It also has the power to convince us of the keenness with which Cather herself saw.

More direct evidence of the sharpness of Cather's powers of observation is provided by a small treasure found at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, her personal copy of F. Schuyler Mathews's Field Book of American Wild Flowers (1902). Looking through this book that bears the evidence of Cather's observation of her natural surroundings is an enlightening experience—and moreover a very moving one; between the pages is a tiny clover, threadlike stem, tiny root ball, and all still intact, that she must have placed there. This is the field guide to wildflowers that she carried on her nature walks for over twenty years, from 1917 to 1938. It is heavily annotated in her distinctive hand with checkmarks or lines in the margin beside entries (for some 156 distinct varieties) and comments in the margin beside others. These annotations provide abundant demonstration that Cather was a remarkably close observer of plant life.

A number of entries in the Field Book record the dates and places where she saw particular plants. Mostly these indicate Jaffrey, New Hampshire, the rustic resort town at the foot of Mount Monadnock where she spent her autumns for many years, or Grand Manan, the island off the coast of New Brunswick where she and Edith Lewis had a cabin. Three times she records having seen certain plants—the calamus or sweet fig, the flowering dogwood, and the pinxter flower or wild honeysuckle—in Virginia during her visit in 1938, during the writing of Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Several times, as if Mathews's descriptions had jogged her memory, she notes that she had seen such-and-such a plant in Nebraska. But the most striking entries are those in which she actually adds details to the book's already detailed descriptions. These are astonishingly precise. When Mathews describes the "small dense clusters" of flowers on the arrow-leafed tearthumb (108), Cather adds that the clusters are club-shaped. When Mathews describes the "generally smooth stem" of the Canada hawkweed (526), she insists that the branches and stem were joined in sharp angles. When he describes the leaves of the white woodland aster as "smooth," she notes that on the underside they are bristly along the veins (484). On the back of one of the plates she wrote a long description of the habitat and characteristics of the exignous, with its sawtooth-edged, sessile leaves (486)—sessile meaning attached to the main stem at the base rather than with an intermediate stem.

We see in these annotations Cather's effort to observe the natural world as closely as she could and to describe it as minutely, in as accurate language, as she could. This practice of close observation that she brought to her experience of her various natural environments as she walked, hiked, and climbed translates itself, through the medium of her lucid prose, into precision of rendered details. Her descriptions evince a remarkable eye-hand coordination: a linkage of visual experience and verbal virtuosity.

A similar clarity and focus, as well as another kind of linkage of the visual and the verbal, characterize the illustrations of the first edition and (until recently) most subsequent editions of My Ántonia. It is these illustrations and, even more, the process of their conception and development for the text that I am primarily interested in here. We know that it was Cather herself who conceived the idea for the eight spare pen-and-ink drawings and selected the artist to do them, after having tried to make suitable drawings herself. My central questions are: Why did she choose W. T. Benda and why did she want illustrations of precisely this kind, which are actually quite different from Benda's usual work?

In the textual commentary to the Scholarly Edition of My Ántonia Charles Mignon states that Cather wanted Benda "because he knew both Europe and the American West" (512). That is indeed the reason she indicated on 24 November 1917, in a letter to Ferris Greenslet, her editor at Houghton Mifflin. W. T. Benda was in fact an immigrant from Bohemia (the national group primarily emphasized in My Ántonia) who had lived in theWest and paintedWestern subjects. Cather was aware of his work from her days as editor at McClure's; Benda illustrations appeared in a dozen or more issues of the magazine between 1906 and 1912. The letter to Greenslet of 24 November 1917 goes on to say that another reason she wants Benda, besides his familiarity with both Europe and the American West, is that he has imagination and has been willing to work with her to get precisely the effects she wanted. My conjecture, which I will go into below, is that there was still another reason, which she doesn't mention.

What Cather wanted was very different from what Houghton Mifflin initially wanted. The publisher proposed illustrating the book with a frontispiece (wc to Greenslet, 24 November 1917). Cather was determined not to have so conventional a decoration and one that would necessarily have generalized. Not only did she prefer that the drawings be attached narratively to specific moments or ideas in the text, as the Benda drawings are, but she was intent on having a series of drawings that would give the impression of the minimalist line techniques of woodcuts. Her correspondence with editors Greenslet and Scaife is striking in its revelation of just how emphatic her determination was and the extent to which visual design was a part of her creative act of authorship. She conceived the appearance of the book while she was still conceiving, or at any rate executing, the verbal text. Mignon comments that as early as 13 March 1917, "even before she had completed a first draft" of the novel, Cather was "thinking as a designer might about how to present her work" (483). In Jean Schwind's words, she "acted as artistic director of the project" (53). At various points in the correspondence she specified the kind of paper that should be used for the illustrations, their sizing, their placement in the text, and even their placement on the page (wc to Miss [Helen] Bishop, Secretary to F. Greenslet, "Saturday," 2 February 1918).

Cather justified her determination not to have a conventional frontispiece in conjunction with explaining why she wanted Benda (wc to R. L. Scaife, 1 December 1917). She had seen his pen-and-ink drawings in Jacob Riis's 1909 book The Old Town. (We might note that The Old Town is a book that evokes a lost but nostalgically remembered European setting—a congenial theme as Cather thought about My Ántonia.) It is significant that in referring to Benda's work in the Riis book Cather specified the drawings. She did not use the more general term "illustrations" because in fact most of the illustrations (both a frontispiece and full-page glossies scattered through the volume) are not pen-and-ink drawings at all, but charcoal halftones. These were Benda's usual kind of work. But Cather indicated explicitly that they were what she did not want. She told Scaife that she considered Benda's halftones stilted (wc to R. L. Scaife, 7 April 1917). In addition to the full-page illustrations for Riis's book, however, Benda had done a number of simpler, more open pen-and-ink head-and-tail pieces. Even these are more filled up with details than the drawings he would do for Ántonia, as we can see from his headpiece to chapter 4, "Christmas Sheaf" (78, see fig. 2) and his mid-chapter ornament from chapter 2, "Fanö Women"(21, see fig. 3). Yet we can see how she might have discerned in such drawings the potential for achieving what she had in mind, through simplifying and "un-cluttering" them even further.

Benda in fact captured in these spare drawings much of the essence of Cather's spare style. They have the visual equivalence of her selective focus on a few details set against a far prospect with an emptied middle ground—that quality of isolated detail that Welty designated as the elimination of the middle ground. Benda captured these qualities not only because he read the text in typescript, and as a capable professional was able to vary his style accordingly, but because Cather worked closely with him on his conceptualization of the drawings. Indeed, as I have pointed out, she established for him the kind of illustrations she wanted by first trying to draw them herself. Having tried to make her own head-and-tail pieces, she told Greenslet, she wanted an artist who would emulate her efforts (wc to Greenslet, 18 October 1917). She was in control. A little over a month later she reported that Benda was indeed seeking to capture her precise intentions (wc to Greenslet, 24 November 1917).

There are eight drawings in all. Originally there were to have been twelve, but Houghton Mifflin's skimpy production budget would not pay for more (wc to Greenslet, 24 November 1917). This would seem to account for their concentration in the early parts of the text.

The illustrations are familiar to most readers of My Ántonia, but will bear reviewing in order to emphasize certain features. As Cather herself said, they capture the tone of the novel admirably.

Drawing 1 comes in the first chapter, Jim Burden's narration of his train trip to Nebraska. We see, much as Jim would have seen, an immigrant family waiting among their bundles on what we assume, from the textual context, to be a train platform (see fig. 4). These are, of course, the Shimerdas arriving in Nebraska. The man's downward gaze and the darkness of the drawing, quite unlike the others in the series, speak of discouragement. The girl whose bright eyes will be celebrated gazes out beyond the reader. Central emphasis is on the woman's cradling grasp of a treasured possession. Benda's practiced technique is greatly in evidence here both in mood and in composition.

Drawing 2 shows Mr. Shimerda again, tall and lanky, still with bowed head suggestive of discouragement. Ántonia and Jim have spied her father out hunting, and Ántonia has confided to Jim that he is unhappy in the new country (see fig. 5). Despite conveying discouragement, this picture strikes the outdoor note that will characterize all the rest. For the first time we gain a visual impression of the vastness of the prairie and especially the spaciousness of its sky. Scattered curving lines indicate the prairie grass, and the sinking sun sends its long beams up into the sky, disappearing into blank page.

Drawing 3 is equally narrative in import, echoing the incident of the dried mushrooms given to Grandmother Burden by Mrs. Shimerda. It hints at far-off places, with a woman gathering mushrooms in the old country (see fig. 6). The woman's figure is generalized, with perhaps the clearest details being her rolled up sleeve, conveying the idea of physical work, and a cluster of mushrooms clearly seen in the foreground. There seems to be quiet and isolation all around.

Drawing 4 shows the hired man bringing home the Christmas tree (see fig. 7). With notable minimalism, the drawing indicates the empty countryside, the narrow trail, and a few weeds. The big, absolutely empty sky is indicated by blank paper.

Drawing 5 shows another big sky, an effect Cather sought to emphasize by having the illustrations lowered on the page so as to create a sense of sunlight and air at the top (wc to Miss Bishop, "Saturday," 2 February 1918, see fig. 8). This time summer thunderheads are indicated. Once again there is emptiness all around, with a strong central focus on Ántonia herself, the plow, the horses, and the heavy horse collar.

Drawing 6 is reminiscent of drawing 2, with its sunrays (see fig. 9). In this case, it is the sinking sun that will magnify the plow on the horizon. We see companionable young people, a head scarf implying immigrant identity, one sunflower plant, and empty prairie all around. This drawing demonstrates particularly well the idea of the vacant middle distance, with nothing intervening between its depictions of horizon and close-up details.

Drawing 7 shows another big summer sky with the merest indication of cumulus clouds (see fig. 10). The rows of Lena's knitting are clearly seen, along with her two knitting needles, her bare feet, and the line of a nipple inside her tight bodice— clear focus indeed! Cather gloated over this drawing that Lena was fairly bursting out of her clothes (wc to Greenslet, 7 March 1918).

Drawing 8, the last in the series, starkly shows Ántonia struggling through the snow into the wind (see fig. 11). The dark tones of coat, hat, and boots, and the bent position of her head, are reminiscent of the first picture, of the Shimerdas waiting on the train platform. A single line outlines the top of the cloud, closing in the top of the picture in contrast to those in which either the clear sky or the hinted shape of cumuli opens the top. Again Benda captures the emptiness of the prairie, which he emphasizes by isolating a few strong details: snow in the air, tracks, the whip in the hand. It is another masterful example of minimalist design executed with line techniques reminiscent of woodcuts.

We have accounted for Cather's selection of W. T. Benda as her illustrator by citing several factors: his familiarity with both the Old World and the West, her prior acquaintance with him (i.e., a reason of convenience), her admiration of some (but not all) of his work in Jacob Riis's The Old Town, and the fact that he was willing to work with her to catch her conception of the drawings. But where did she get that conception? Here my essay becomes frankly conjectural—offering, however, a conjecture supported by both biographical evidence and visual comparison. I believe that Cather was seeking to emulate the illustrations to Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (1903), done by E. Boyd Smith.

The Austin-Cather connection has been recognized for some time. It is well documented that they knew each other personally, and connections between their work have been demonstrated by several critics. For the most part, it is The Song of the Lark and Austin's A Woman of Genius that have been linked, though in fact the connections extend much further, reaching both forward and considerably backward. To my knowledge, no one has suggested any connection of Cather's work to The Land of Little Rain, or even any indication that she was aware of the book. Yet it is quite clear that Cather was familiar with Austin and her writings long before she wrote My Ántonia. David Stouck has identified a likely borrowing by Cather even before 1900, in the 1893 story "A Son of the Celestial." The two were personally acquainted by at least 1910, and in 1917 specifically, the year when Cather was corresponding with Greenslet and Scaife about the Benda illustrations, her awareness of Austin remained sufficiently keen to prompt a brief comment on Austin's newly published novel The Ford in a letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.

Considering the mass of evidence that Cather was aware of Austin as early as the 1890s and that she remained both personally and professionally conversant with her up until Austin's death in 1934, it seems overwhelmingly likely that she knew The Land of Little Rain, the book that launched Austin's career and is usually regarded as her finest work. Probably she would have been aware of its serialization in Atlantic Monthly. Cather was keenly aware of periodical literature and more than once during her years as editor at McClure's advised correspondents to send their manuscripts to Atlantic Monthly. When she did, her clearly specified reasons show that she had more than a reputational acquaintance with that prestigious magazine. The publisher of Austin's series of sketches in book form, in 1903, was Houghton Mifflin, which in less than a decade would also be Cather's publisher and whose acquisitions editor, Ferris Greenslet, would be an acquaintance even sooner. The archive of correspondence between Cather and Greenslet reveals that they at times discussed Austin. There was ample and varied opportunity, then, for her to be acquainted with Austin's book and perhaps with behind-thescenes information about its production history.

Perhaps when Cather looked through Riis's The Old Town— which we know she had seen at least by December 1917 but probably much earlier, perhaps even drawing on it early in the work on My Ántonia for the atmosphere of remembered European origins—Benda's pen-and-ink drawings there reminded her of Smith's in The Land of Little Rain. As we have noted, these were only the head-and-tail pieces and a few small inserts; the fullpage illustrations in Riis's book were the halftones she disliked. And in fact Benda's drawings in My Ántonia more closely resemble Smith's pen-and-ink drawings in Austin's book than they do Benda's own earlier work.

Design is a significant element in The Land of Little Rain. Visual elements, by which I mean primarily the illustrations but also layout, might well be called, as Schwind calls the Benda illustrations of My Ántonia, a "silent supplement" to the text. Unlike its magazine version, the book was set with abundant white space and was adorned with pen-and-ink drawings, most but not all of them narrative in nature, that is, directly linked to the text. E. Boyd Smith, the artist who did the drawings, was a well-established and prolific illustrator and would later do the illustrations for Austin's The Flock and The Ford as well.

We recall that Cather initially meant to have head-and-tail pieces and emphatically did not want a frontispiece (wc to Greenslet, 18 October 1917). The Smith illustrations of The Land of Little Rain are of two sorts, full-page line drawings and head-and- tail pieces. Choosing just one of many possible examples of the latter (from p. 15), we might note how it shows the operation of a precise eye, an eye having keen powers of observation (see fig. 12). In its precision, this drawing, like the other small drawings in The Land of Little Rain, stands as a correlative for Austin's prose in this book (though not all of her writing): precise, warm, and personal, tending to address the reader directly in the second person. It is a style that may remind us of Cather's in Ántonia.

It is Smith's full-page and most-of-page drawings, however, that are most strikingly comparable to the Benda illustrations of My Ántonia. The first is one of a single crow or raven sitting on a cow skull with empty desert space all around, a few wisps of dust devils, and a distant horizon indicated simply by a couple of lines (4, see fig. 13). Like the Benda drawings, this one is placed relatively low on the page, allowing it to open up into white space above—an indication of a big sky. A big sky characterizes, indeed, all of the larger drawings in Little Rain. Another good example is one of a vanishing row of fence posts with one bird in the sky and one bird catching a little shade in the foreground (10, see fig. 14). Notice, as well, the drawing showing the litter left in the land by people, a smoking campfire or perhaps cigarette, and a single disgusted-looking bird (38, see fig. 15). Here and in the one that follows, showing a "pocket hunter" camping for the night, with his campfire, two cooking implements, and two burros (53), there is no horizon line at all (see fig. 16). This is true bareness, a true minimalist style. I would stress, again, the big sky that is so evident in the Benda illustrations of My Ántonia.

In 1926, when she and Greenslet were contemplating a new edition of Ántonia (the edition in which the preface was reduced), Cather said that the Benda illustrations were one of the few instances she could think of in which pictures materially assisted the narrative (wc to Greenslet, 15 February 1926). That is, they were essentially a part of the text. Here, again from The Land of Little Rain, is a remarkable instance in which the line drawing is actually interwoven with the text (21), so that the two, picture and text, demonstrably assist each other (see fig. 17). The words printed on the page become a part of the landscape separating the coyote from the rising moon that he looks at apprehensively over his shoulder.

My conjecture that the original source of Cather's conception for the visual "'silent' supplement" to My Ántonia lay in the illustrations of Austin's The Land of Little Rain is based entirely on readerly and visual comparison, though bolstered by biographical evidence and a considerable archive establishing her intentions. Demonstrably, Cather and Austin experienced the natural world in much the same sorts of ways. They shared habits of hiking, close observation of plant life, and the use of notebooks to record their field observations. For all their differences as novelists, if we compare Cather's writing with Austin's in The Land of Little Rain, we see a similar minimalism of prose style at work, a style keenly focused on selected details, rendered in terse descriptive language. The two books are similar in their employment of illustrations of a precise, minimalist kind: pen-and-ink line drawings making notable use of empty space to isolate details and to suggest the West's big sky.

If my conjecture about the impact of Smith's drawings on Cather's vision for the illustrations of her own book is correct, the critical judgment of at least one art historian that Smith "had few followers and made no major impact on American illustration" (Best 28) may merit revision. Another implication is a further expansion of our understanding of the aesthetic sisterhood between Cather and Austin, as well as perhaps an increased estimate of the importance to Cather of visual experience itself. And perhaps, too, it would evoke a more thorough study of the Harold von Schmidt illustrations for the second edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop, which, as Mignon has established (520), were also developed with active involvement by Cather. It is a linkage, then, of considerable significance and one that I hope may yet be conclusively established through archival records not presently known. Not only does Smith's beautiful work in the drawings for The Land of Little Rain extend beyond itself into the work of Benda—transformed, for this project, from his usual heavily shaded style—but the combination of Smith's drawings and Austin's style is carried forward into the minimalist aesthetic that would characterize much of Cather's fiction and which she would formulate in "The Novel Démeublé." It was an aesthetic that, as the notes in her field guide to wildflowers demonstrate, derived in large measure from her own visual acuity, plus what might be called a highly developed eye-hand coordination: a precise writerly hand working in perfect coordination with a precise eye for detail.

My Ántonia is above all else a story of stories. It is a story of how we tell stories, and it is also a story of reading, of how we read the stories before us. On a grand scale, it tells the story of America's immigrants, the story of their settlement, their assimilation, their adaptation of colonial notions of the new frontier. More locally, My Ántonia tells the story of Midwest farming. Exploring agriculture both realistically and metaphorically, the novel tells the story of how certain kinds of "crops"—both vegetable and human—moved from east to west. In the novel's exploration of the interaction between the Midwestern landscape and the migrant and immigrant farmers who attempted to transplant their crops, it tells the story of how the land receives what is put into it and what harvests it yields to those attempting to work it. In its exploration of the interaction between the social landscape and those attempting to settle into it, the novel tells the story of how Americans received the tide of immigrants that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in this country.

In telling both stories, the novel suggests the possibility of a radical reconfiguration of the constructs of community characteristic of the time. Those constructs reflected a growing distrust of importation, a distrust represented in political nativism, and which culminated in the National Origins Act of 1924, which halted immigration from the Orient and restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In its complex pattern of stories set within small farming communities, Cather's novel argues against such social and political constructs by subverting and ultimately deconstructing the entire notion of nativism, thereby reshaping the reader's understanding of what constitutes a community.

Because the term nativism has necessarily social and political connotations, and because its parallel use in recent ecological restoration debates has gradually become just as politically charged, I want to look at this restructuring of the way we understand social communities in the way that ecologists look at paradigm shifts in plant community theory. In a dramatic example of the slippage between political and ecological nativism, Albert Seifert, a prominent German landscape architect, proposed in 1933 that Germany forbid the use of all non-native plants. In "Garden-Variety Xenophobia," a 1997 excerpt from his chapter "The Mania for Native Plants in Nazi Germany," published in the book Concrete Jungle, Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn points to Seifert's 1933 proposal to "ban all that until now has pleased the heart of a gardener: everything high-bred, overfed, conspicuous, foreign," as indication that the "native-plants ideology is highly political: its advocates sometimes connect the call for native plants with nationalistic and racist ideas about society." Pointing to legal attempts to "purify" the landscapes that were made into the '40s,Wolschke-Bulmahn traces German landscape architects' insistent identification of invasive plants with invaders, strangers, and competitors. German botanists used overt social analogies, comparing the fight against invasive plants to "the fight against Bolshevism," arguing that with one, "our entire occidental culture is at stake," while with the other, "the beauty of our home forest, is at stake" (21-22).

In such arguments, we need to recognize not simply the metaphorical possibilities of plants and the societies for which they might somehow "stand in," but, more significantly, native versus exotic growth as it represents individual and national ways of thinking about what constitutes community. We see, as well, that ideas such as "natural" versus "artificial" and "introduced" factor into our construction of community and are often used interchangeably with terms such as "native" and "exotic." In ecological theory, Nebraska ecologist Frederic Clements's long standing view of plant communities as naturally organized and integrated units, a theory that emphasized the "individualistic concept" of vegetation association units, gave way to Henry Gleason's understanding of plant communities as constructs of human thought. In exploring Cather's texts in light of these theories, I do not suggest that Cather had any expertise in ecological theory beyond her open admiration for Edith Clements's botanical guides, Flowers of Mountain and Plain and Rocky Mountain Wildflowers (the latter written in collaboration with her husband), nor do I suggest that she studied Frederic Clements's theories, or those of Gleason. Instead, I suggest that the urge to conflate plants with humans is not a simple exercise in anthropomorphism; instead, it represents significant ways of thinking about how humans exist in their environment. Specifically, in Cather's My Ántonia, with its deeply layered analysis of the way a "native" like Jim Burden can tell the story of an "exotic" like Ántonia Shimerda, the potentially pejorative link made between exotic plants and peoples opens the possibility of a new way to view a problem with which many readers have grappled for a long time and which feminist criticism has yet to comfortably resolve: that is, why did Cather insist on constructing Ántonia through a male narrator, one who seems to use her for his own nostalgic purposes? Understanding the paradigm shift in community that Gleason articulated is at the heart of the reader's ability to see Ántonia as more than the sentimentalized Earth Mother figure of Jim Burden's account.

We must first look at Jim as both a storyteller and reader, for his is perhaps the most important story contained in the novel. Discussions of My Ántonia often center on the novel's difficult narrative structure, difficult in that the novel's male narrator "owns" Ántonia's narrative, constructing her in what seem to be highly "masculinist" terms. The novel opens with a three-page introductory section in which the narrator describes a summer day when she ended up crossing Iowa with her childhood friend, Jim Burden, now in a clearly unhappy marriage. Jim mentions to the narrator that he has been writing a book about Ántonia, a girl whom they both knew, and months after the train ride, at the narrator's request, Jim brings her the completed manuscript. Jim's gesture upon handing the portfolio to her, the way he takes back his manuscript, frowns at it for a moment and then changes the title from Ántonia to My Ántonia, an act, the narrator observes, that "seemed to satisfy him," suggests exactly how we might interpret the subsequent novel, told in Jim's words, as no more than a now unhappy man's vision of the Bohemian girl with whom he shared his happy childhood. Such male-centered construction echoes, for many critics, the problem with much of America's literature about land. The American pastoral, as Annette Kolodny defined it, constructs the pioneer territory as "Eden, Paradise, the Golden Age, and the idyllic garden" all rolled into one. In literature, Kolodny argued, R. W. B. Lewis's American Adam was able to achieve "a resurrection of the lost state of innocence that the adult abandons when he joins the world of competitive selfassertion" because "at the deepest psychological level, the move to America was experienced as the daily reality of what has become its single dominating metaphor: regression from the cares of adult life and a return to the primal warmth of womb or breast in a feminine landscape" (6).

Thus, Cather's narrator, Jim Burden, who meets Ántonia when she is a young, non-English-speaking immigrant, teaches her to speak and read English, and explains to her how to behave like a lady, is seen by many as simply another American Adam, one whose name appropriately suggests his role. He sees not Ántonia herself, but simply a feminine territory, one which he occasionally perceives as enough of a wilderness to need taming, but which eventually becomes an idyllic, pastoral, Golden Age, the "primal warmth" of a feminine landscape.

Jim's construction of Ántonia is a relevant part of the novel, but not because of what it says about her. It is significant because of what it says about him, and the way he "reads" Ántonia, and because of what such a singularly constructed narrative says about storytelling as the art of constructing. Cather's own art of storytelling is important here, as Susan Rosowski has already successfully argued. Reading Cather's consistent subversions of storytelling traditions, Rosowski demonstrates in"Willa Cather's Subverted Endings and Gendered Time" that Cather's plots reject conventional ideas "of progress and mastery" thereby empowering "qualities traditionally restricted to women—feeling and, particularly, the capacity for love" (73). Cather's particular methodology—subverting the conventional romance plot while at the same time including familiar ingredients of it—allows her to free those very conventions from culturally imposed restrictions. Rosowski points to Niel Herbert, who, in A Lost Lady, continually attempts to impose his fictions upon Marian Forrester. His final abandonment of that attempt, a gesture he "tells" as one of resignation, is "another way in which Cather presented alternatives, [when] a character gives up the attempt to tell a story, or to order experience by linear time"(Rosowski 76). Rosowski thus allows readers to understand Niel's failure to maintain his rigid construction of Marian as a way to understand Marian's own resistance to the rigid cultural impositions that bound women.

Niel's failure and the subversive role it plays in the novel serve as significant clues to understanding his predecessor, Jim Burden. Along with his desire to construct stories in traditionally masculine, linear time, Jim shares with Niel Herbert a superficial desire to master the classics and an inability to either accept or wholly reject women who break the boundaries of conventional feminine construction. Both men represent a kind of limited thinking that Cather's novels suggest was prevalent in her own social order. In both, we see that the traditionally masculinist ordering of society simply will not fully encompass the complexities of the real world. Read in this light, Jim Burden's construction of Ántonia must be seen as both unacceptable and unavoidable. That is, as a young man trained to accept the masculinist ideology of his day, Jim would, even as he was in the process of growing up with her, "tell the story" of Ántonia in conventional terms. We, as readers, must be able to see that his story is too confining. His straining to make Ántonia fit into the story with which he is most familiar must be read in larger terms, then, as the conservative social attempt to "tell the story" of how women and minorities should behave in the new world.

The best way to accomplish such a reading is to begin with Jim, the frustrated Latin scholar who, alone in his room one night, believes he has found the answer to life when he is taught, by one of his professors, the third book of Virgil's The Georgics. "Optima dies . . . prima fugit," Jim sighs, believing at that moment that Virgil has explained it all. But Jim does not fully understand the Latin he is reading in college. To see the extent of his miscomprehension, we must see My Ántonia not simply as a novel that includes a reference or makes an allusion to some Roman farming poetry by Virgil. For many years, critics noted Cather's familiarity with classical literature and brought in biographical material indicating Cather's early exposure to classical mythology and her later study of Latin at the Lincoln Latin School and the University of Nebraska. But not until quite recently have studies of Cather's work begun to indicate that there exists more than allusions or even mythological themes, especially in My Ántonia. "The single novel by Cather in which Virgil clearly informs the whole," Theodore Ziolkowski writes in Virgil and the Moderns, "is the one usually regarded as her masterpiece, My Ántonia" (150). Ziolkowski goes on to argue that in the novel, Cather makes an "elegiac laudes Americae and a Virgilian appeal for the preservation of agrarian values in the face of the encroaching industrialization that was everywhere evident in the United States" (150).

Ziolkowski's analysis of the role of The Georgics in My Ántonia points to the seasonal movement of both texts and the novel's evocation of Virgil's thesis in book 1, "labor omnia vicit / imporbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas" (Toil conquered all / obdurate toil, and unrelenting need). But, somehow, Ziolkowski can acknowledge that "Cather wants us to understand Virgil's works, and especially The Georgics, as the lens through which Burden organizes the material of his own experience into recognizable patterns" (152) without acknowledging the difficulty that lens poses for readers seeking an autonomous identity for Ántonia herself. Indeed, Ziolkowski never seems to see a difference between Ántonia and Jim's Ántonia, concluding his section on Cather with the claim that "For Cather, in sum, Ántonia represents the agrarian values that she imposed romantically on the Nebraskan landscape of her youth and whose loss she began to lament in the years followingWorldWar I, when modernization, with the ills accompanying its benefits, swept across America. And Virgil is the poet whose works epitomize the values of that idealized, traditional America" (112).

But it is not Cather reading Virgil. It is Jim Burden who, in organizing the material of his boyhood into his own opus, uses Virgil as a lens. One of the most significant and often overlooked factors in Jim's reading of Virgil is the fact that it is filtered through his instructor, Gaston Cleric, who by Jim's admission "narrowly missed being a great poet," because "his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication" (260). Cleric has introduced Jim to the traditional and masculine "world of ideas," and Jim's willingness to let "everything else [fade] for a time," indicates the extent to which Cleric leads him and reads for him. Indeed, one of Jim's most vivid memories is of Cleric's explanation of "Dante's veneration for Virgil." Cleric went through canto after canto of the "Comedia," repeating the discourse between Dante and his "sweet teacher," while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who spoke for Dante: "I was famous on earth with the name which endures longest and honours most. The seeds of my ardour were the sparks from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the 'Aeneid,' mother to me and nurse to me in poetry." (261-62)

It is through this multilayered approach that Jim Burden comes to Virgil: Cleric, translating Dante, who is at that point speaking through Statius. Released from centuries of purgation to complete his climb toward heaven, Statius acts as a guide for Dante, whose heaven is Beatrice. Thus, in the passage above, we find all the elements in place for Jim's misreading of Virgil—and Ántonia; he associates fame on earth with the epic poetic tradition, particularly with a poetics of feminine idealization, the conversion of a woman into a divine property. Given Jim's instruction, it's not surprising that he reads Virgil similarly and that he would, ultimately, attempt to do the same with Ántonia.

In the next chapter, Jim is reading the third book of The Georgics, focusing on line 66, "optima dies . . . prima fugit," or what he terms Virgil's "melancholy reflection that, in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee" (263). Significantly, Jim reads this line out of context and links it immediately with the opening lines of book 3. In doing so, he literally reads over the contextual meaning and superimposes onto Virgil's lines his own understanding of melancholy, one that is strikingly similar to Cleric's own story. In the 56 lines that separate the quote about the brief span of mortals' lives and Virgil's claims that he will be the first to bring the muse into his country, Virgil makes several poetic shifts, from his opening rumination on the state of Roman poetry, to his prediction that Caesar will be the greatest of all rulers, to his acknowledgment that the subject at hand is, after all, animal husbandry. It is at that point, while he is explaining the most appropriate age at which to mate a heifer, that he suddenly and without preparation makes the observation that for wretched mortals the best days of life are the first to flee; diseases come on, and sad old age, and the harshness of implacable death. The suddenness of the shift is further enhanced by the phrase miseris mortalibus, a construction alternately read as a dative case or ablative absolute. In either case, the grammar allows the meaning to "hang" there, provided with only a suggestive context by the sentence before it. That sentence claims that the farmer can provide himself with generation upon generation by breeding his stock carefully, making sure that the female is the right age and stature, and that the bulls are young and lusty. But in the sentence after,Virgil moves on to the bland observation that the farmer will always have some beasts he needs to exchange and encourages him to do it swiftly. The bookended observations—the young, lusty breeders, which promise generations of cattle, juxtaposed against those who need to be replaced—may be ironic, or may, more seriously, emphasize the brevity not of existence as a universal, poetic concept, but of useful existence—usefulness that Virgil has defined through metaphors of marriage, through an invocation of Lucina, the goddess of childbirth, and through his detailed description of the best years in a cow's life for breeding.

Jim sees none of this, ironically, for despite his upbringing on a farm, he knows nothing of what Hamlet called "country matters." Jim's grandparents left the realities of farm life to the hired hands, just as the townspeople leave the sexual realities of courtship to "The Hired Girls," not the town girls. Jim is one of the vanishing breed of American men that characterizes so much of modernist literature. Like Quentin and Benjy Compson, like Jake Barnes, Jim has no procreative powers but words. Thus, he reads Virgil's line as homage to the immortalizing potential of poetry, the only generation he will ever breed.

Turning back to the early line, "Primus ego in patriam mecum . . . deducam Musas," Jim remembers that Cleric had translated the context of patria to mean "the little rural neighborhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little 'country'" (264). Jim goes on to reflect on Cleric's idea that when Virgil was dying, facing the "bitter fact that he was to leave the 'Aeneid' unfinished . . . then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the 'Georgic,' where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, 'I was the first to bring the Muse into my country'" (264).

Ignoring for the moment that Cleric reinvents Virgil's meaning for the sake of romance, a romance that leaves his young students "conscious that we had been brushed by the wing of a great feeling," we need to look at Cleric's claim that Virgil was not boasting, for by all accounts he was, but probably not in a way that Jim Burden would understand. Jim has been thoroughly taken up by Cleric's Byronic vision of Virgil, a dying man humbly grateful that he will be immortalized by his singular act of bringing poetry home, in the same way that Jim Burden believes that his "creation" of Ántonia, his construction of her as an idealized, idyllic, and isolated example of how beautiful the prairie once was, will immortalize him. His biased reading reflects not only his instructor's melancholy interpretation but Jim's own hope of immortalizing himself, in misconceived Virgilian terms, through his homage to patria, the text titled Ántonia, which he hands over to his traveling companion, takes back, changes, appropriately, to My Ántonia, and then, ostensibly "with the thankfulness of a good man," thinks to himself, "'I was the first to bring the Muse into my country'" (264).

But The Georgics are not generally read as a single poet's swan song. They are a political conversation. The poem moves from book 1, which presents the problem of colonization and argues that the energy and ambition of an expanding nation threatens, potentially, to spread chaos, to book 2, which explores momentarily the idea that such energy might be contained in the rustic life, which represents contemplation, to book 3, which acknowledges that the very Golden Age quality that characterizes book 2 indicates the impossibility of that solution and that then goes on to suggest that the Romans will move beyond their own frontiers. In that movement, Gary Miles suggests, Virgil is claiming that "now rather than spreading chaos, they will reduce the entire world to order by bringing it under the single coherent command of their own nation and its unequaled leaders" (166). Finally, book 4, in its exploration of bees and retelling of the Orphic myth, confirms book 3 by acknowledging that the essential nature of a colony is to expand. Thus, the poem ends with an admonishment to keep one's eyes forward at the same time that it acknowledges the mistake of not learning from the past.

In such a detailed explication of Jim's reading of Virgil, I have hoped to show that the issue is not, as many have argued, whether or not Jim is an unreliable narrator. The novel insists on him as such, emphasizing his uninformed and superficial reading of a text on which he bases his vision of writing; and he is a writer. We are made to see he is unable to read correctly either Virgil or Ántonia. The issue, then, is what we are to make of Jim's patently biased reading, why it has been constructed into our understanding of the novel.

Certainly, the notion of a constructed identity is central to this novel. Biographical links to what we now call social constructionism suggest that Cather was acutely aware of the problems for the individual when social categories served as a means for others to perceive an individual's identity.

Cather's own experiment with transcending social identity began in 1888, when, according to Sharon O'Brien, "the fourteenyear- old Cather decided to become the hero of her own life story when she created the masculine persona she sustained for the next four years. Employing the transforming power of dress and disguise, she distinguished herself from other Red Cloud girls by cropping her hair, donning boyish clothes, and naming herself 'William Cather, Jr'" (96). O'Brien's description of Cather's experiment with identity comes in a chapter titled "Enter William Cather," with the appropriate epigraph, "I like to be like a man," from My Ántonia. The quote indicates the limitations Cather understood in gender constructions. The notion of being "like a man" is, for Ántonia, the notion of being meaningful in the world. When her father's suicide leaves her family facing potential economic ruin, Ántonia, who previously indicated some concern over how pleasing she was to Jim, can no longer be bothered with his opinion of her. "I can work like mans now," she tells him when he suggests she enroll in school with him. "School all right for little boys. I help make this land one good farm" (123). And, the following season, when she has gone to work for Jim's grandmother, she indicates her preference for outdoor work, telling Jim "I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man" (138).

Inherent to the construction in both Cather's performance as William and Ántonia's appropriation of masculinity is the admission that men and women are defined by social attitudes. As O'Brien suggests in the following passage, appropriating the male standard is, essentially, accepting it as well: In adopting a male persona Cather was being rebellious, theatrical, and bold, but she was not being particularly creative. To construct this alternate self she could only tap a cultural inventory of roles and selves; understandably, she was trapped by her contemporaries' polarization of gender traits and roles, the same dichotomy that [Louisa May] Alcott evinces when she referred to her adventurous self as her "boy's spirit." Other nineteenth-century women who donned male dress similarly were unable to transcend Victorian sex roles. Desiring the autonomy and freedom that it seemed only men possessed, such women decided to cross rather than to blur gender boundaries. (100) But Cather did differ from writers such as George Sand. O'Brien locates the difference in small "feminine" touches of apparel, which she reads as signs of gender transformation in the photographs Cather posed for during her years as William. "The ribbon, the ruffled blouse, and the scarf suggest the girl's desire to redefine rather than to reject female identity, to find a way to express the human possibilities her society divided between male and female" (O'Brien 101).

Nowhere are those possibilities more thoroughly opened to redefinition than in the prairie women of Cather's novel. In Alexandra Bergson and in Ántonia Shimerda, Cather created the literary equivalent of the ribbons and scarves in her portraits. In the harsh environment of a Nebraska farm, new definitions of meaningful work posed the opportunity for new definitions of meaningfulness, definitions that transcended the limitations of gender imposed by society. After exploring such possibilities in the life of Alexandra Bergson, Cather seems to have decided that she could most fully realize the complexities of social constraints in the story of Ántonia Shimerda, whose cultural ties, appearance, and accented English give her the kind of "exotic" status that allowed Cather to explore constructions of gender, class, and ethnicity, and to pose the possibility for transcendence of all three. In Ántonia, Cather analyzed on the grandest scale the issue of identity. Arguing openly against the notion of a natural system by which people might be grouped, Cather subverted the American notion of community by refusing to acknowledge identity as defined by one's gender, one's nationality, or one's social position. In doing so, she shifted the paradigm by which Americans knew community, for, in effect, she robbed them of their means of identifying it. Instead, Cather opens the possibility that one constructs one's own identity through the community into which one plants oneself. In My Ántonia, the practice of agriculture serves as the literal and metaphorical means by which one can establish oneself at a place and begin to construct a community-based identity.

My Ántonia opens in "summer, [the] season of intense heat," when the narrator is "crossing Iowa on the same train" as Jim Burden. "While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things."

The passage goes on to indicate that the narrator and Jim share the experience of a childhood lived heavily in response to agriculture: We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the colour and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and grey as a sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry. The "freemasonry" to which the narrator refers at the end of the passage suggests both the general definition of the word, "a natural sympathy and understanding among persons with like experiences," and the practices associated with the guild of Freemasons, a society founded to recognize the skilled itinerant mason who was free to move from town to town without restraint by local guilds. Thus, the opening passage is critical. It works to establish the heavy influence of the land on those who live in response to it, an influence that associates them in a way that others, who do not share the experience, cannot understand, and it suggests the possibility that an identity constructed in that way functions beyond the place at which it is established. The itinerant nature of the Freemason, and Cather's insistence on using the term, argues for membership in a community whose boundaries are not rigidly defined by place, but whose identity comes from place. This flexible notion of place-based community is the central principle of My Ántonia, for it explains how immigrants and migrants, the two protagonists of the novel, as represented by Jim and Ántonia, are able to establish a sense of identity. The novel refuses to accept the principle of a closed community system, one which is inherent to the place; instead, it acknowledges the ongoing reconfiguration of community in a country where all the inhabitants were at one point immigrants and where, as Joseph Urgo argues in Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration, "migration is paradoxically the keystone of American existence, and migrants gather paradoxes as they move from one 'permanent' residence to the next" (13).

Cather's understanding that "those who have not moved are the exceptional ones" (12) informs her understanding of community boundaries as shifting. Subsequently, the ability to "switch behavior according to context," is, in Cather, "a habit of mind crucial for anyone who possessed the culture Cather projects" (Urgo 68). Keeping out the "exotics" is impossible because American communities are made up of different levels of exotics. Political nativism, a popular response to the influx of immigrants at the time, is also impossible in this paradigm, for all communities become constructed. Thus, while it is obvious that some people settled in America before others, the notion that any people inherently "belong" to a place—the notion that we use to construct meaningful communities—no longer exists. The biotic equivalent of this argument comes at the novel's end, when Jim has returned to Black Hawk after visiting Ántonia and her family. He finds himself disappointed with town and left at loose ends. He takes "a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks" (370). Out there, he feels "at home again." But the land he sees is not as it was in "early times," for Jim's view encompasses both native and exotic plants, the weeds and agricultural crops that make the place seem home to him. "To the south I could see the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold colour, I remembered so well. Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle-paths the plumes of goldenrod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold threads in it" (370).

In the plant world, the edges have blurred. As Michael Barbour writes in "Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties," "prior to the 1950s nature was simplistic and deterministic; after the 1950s nature became complex, fuzzy edged, and probabilistic" (233). Barbour's essay explains the paradigm shift that occurred in ecological thinking when Henry Gleason challenged Frederick Clements's definition of biotic interdependency: "Clements argued that groups of species living together in a given habitat were highly organized into natural, integrated units called communities. Gleason countered that such communities were only constructs of human thought and that in reality the distribution and behavior of every species were unbounded by imagined holistic bonds to all the surrounding species" (234). In terms which could so easily apply to Cather's own view of human communities as constructed, rather than inherent, Barbour explains the major shift in thinking that occurred. Describing the Clementsian landscape as one that looks like a "simple, harmonious patchwork pattern," Barbour explains that "the central tenet of the association-unit paradigm is that plant communities are objective reality. That is, plant species are organized into natural, recognizable units of vegetation called formations, association, or communities, and these entities are steady-state balance points in nature that exhibit stability and constancy over time" (236). Gleason's theory of vegetation, which he published in 1917 and again in 1926 and 1939, argues that "formations and associations are not real, natural units; they are merely artifacts and human constructs or abstractions" (237). Instead of groups of species that "rise and fall in abundance synchronously across the landscape," Gleason theorized that "each species spreads out as an independent entity, individualistically distributed according to its own genetic, physiological, and life-cycle characteristics and according to its way of relating both to the physical environment and to other species" (237).

The "revolution" that Barbour cites as occurring by 1960, when "the majority of ecologists had shifted their opinion of the community from Clements's view to Gleason's" (234) was already underway in My Ántonia. Gleason's argument that plants group according to their way "of relating both to the physical environment and to other species" is Cather's argument about people. The novel's many stories tell us that one's perspective— the means by which we perceive what is before us—changes with each teller of the same story, just as each person reading the story will read something new or different in that story with each reading. Jim's closing reading of the land and its diversity of plants argues for an acknowledgment that configuration, and reconfiguration, of community lies in the eye, so to speak, of the beholder. At the core of that perspective is "the stretched drying cornfield," the crop so much a part of both Cather's agricultural novels, O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. Farming, which requires the farmer to read a landscape and visualize a story on it, serves for Cather as a literal means to establish identity while at the same time it serves, as it did in Virgil's Georgics, as a metaphor for a new vision of the land, a vision that relies on new formations of community, formations based on transplanting and cross-breeding. Farming serves as the perfect metaphor to explain how the intersection of people and place contains both stasis and change, past and future. The farmer's understanding of the land includes an awareness of what the land has "traditionally" been able to grow and a vision of what it will grow in the future. Thus, the farmer must see the land as it was, is, and may be.

Cather's successful farmers have that vision. Alexandra Bergson, the successful farmer of O Pioneers! whose father bequeaths the management of the farm not to her brothers, but to her, understands that her life is "all made up of weather and crops and cows" (131). She tells Carl Linstrum that "the land did it . . . it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still" (116); but Alexandra has aggressively pursued innovative planting methods, planted new types of crops, and bought new land. "A pioneer should have an imagination," she knows, "should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves" (48). Even Jim Burden's grandfather has a forward-looking vision that marks him as a successful farmer: Jim notes that "it took a clear, meditative eye like my grandfather's to foresee that they would enlarge and multiply until they would be, not the Shimerdas' cornfields, or Mr. Bushy's, but the world's cornfields; that their yield would be one of the great economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia, which underlie all the activities of men, in peace or war" (137). The difference between Alexandra's vision and Jim's grandfather's is the difference between O Pioneers! and My Ántonia; his vision represents an understanding that farming is a process of changing the way we look at, and understand, the land. The new understanding of agri-political boundaries, the enlargement of the local cornfields into "the world's cornfields," is parallel to the new understanding of social boundaries for which My Ántonia argues. Nebraska's "crop" of dwellers is also the world's, and its "yield" provides us with a way to read and understand Ántonia herself. Her life as a farmer has established her ability to produce and to reproduce. If her agricultural crops represent a new understanding of farming, her children, American citizens who speak the "mother tongue" of two mother countries, will challenge the notion of community even more than she was able to do.

The argument in My Ántonia that one's identity is constructed by the community into which one plants oneself, comes to fruition in Ántonia herself, the character who does the best "job" of establishing herself at a place and beginning to construct identity in relation to that place. Throughout the novel, Ántonia has been learning to farm successfully. The fact that Jim, who cares little for farming, does not emphasize or admire her skills, does not mean she is without them. When Jim asks Ántonia if she would like to go to school with him, she tells him, "School all right for little boys. I help make this land one good farm" (123). In a later conversation with Jim about the pregnant and unwed Ántonia's return home,Widow Steavens says, "The next time I saw Ántonia [she] was out in the fields ploughing corn" (314). According to the widow, even while pregnant, Ántonia harvested, threshed, and herded cattle so well that her family did not hire a man to help out on the farm. Barely twenty-four when Jim first returns to see her, Ántonia already knows her identity. She tells Jim that in the city, "I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly." And twenty years later, when Jim returns, the facts of Ántonia's abilities speak for themselves. Her farmhouse is "set back on a swell of land," next to which is a barn and "an ash grove, and cattle yards in front that sloped down to the highroad." (329). Teeming with life—ducks, cats, but mostly with children— Ántonia's farm is thriving because she is a successful farmer, a woman who has spent her whole life learning the process of agriculture and can now successfully grow and farm. Although Jim frequently wanted what he would define as "more" for Ántonia, her "special mission" is fulfilled in Nebraska. At the novel's end, Ántonia tells Jim, "I belong on a farm. I'm never lonesome here like I used to be in town. You remember what sad spells I used to have, when I didn't know what was the matter with me? I've never had them out here" (343). Significantly, Ántonia, the "exotic" who has come from another country, has more successfully established herself than any of the Burdens.

Ántonia is certainly a fertile woman, but that fertility does not constrict her to the kind of representative "Earth Mother" so much of American Western literature constructs—that is, not unless we allow our reading of her to be limited to Jim Burden's reading of her. As an American hero, he is ambivalent about much of what is "American" in his life, and strong arguments have been made for reading his interpretation of Ántonia in exactly the kind of worrisome terms that feminist criticism outlines when it suggests the psychoanalytic process by which pioneers came to terms with their need to conquer and colonize a wilderness they wanted to be nurtured by while simultaneously raping.

Jim's is indeed a masculinist reading of Ántonia. He is throughout the novel unable to see her fertility as a strength or her strength as an asset. As a boy he was nearly obsessed with delimiting her; in town, her insistence on an open sensuality, evidenced by her love of dancing, rankles him in the way that Marian Forrester's open sexuality and refusal to stay within the limits of ladylike behavior grates at Niel Herbert. Both men spend years trying to fit either woman into the context of the manuscript of their own lives. And it is precisely their inability to do that that makes it such a huge mistake for readers to see Ántonia only as Jim does (or Marian only as Niel does), for such a reading ignores, in Jim's case, the novel's clear indications that we are to understand the limitations of Jim's reading of Ántonia. Readers are meant to see how poorly skilled Jim is as a reader of literature, of people, and also of the time in which he lives, a time marked by shifting social boundaries and new means of constructing identity. Understanding Ántonia through our understanding of Jim Burden's limitations is the only way to fully appreciate the complexity of My Ántonia, a novel rich with social analysis and optimism for a new understanding of the term American.

The organization of space represents the meeting point between the writer and her environment. One of the things that Cather's writing teaches us is that space, especially "natural" space, is always mediated, always shaped. Even if humankind has not yet worked on the landscape (in terms of agriculture or landscaping or settlement), the imagination has already shaped that environment by means of the symbolic language brought to that space. Indeed, as we have understood since Henry Nash Smith published Virgin Land in 1950, the discovery and making of America represents perhaps the most extreme example of this process, as Europeans projected an interlocked array of Utopian concepts and constructs onto the "empty" space of the New World.

Cather's own framing of nature was informed by some very specific, historically particular ideas. These ideas constituted a distinctive, American theory of space, and the human being in its environment, emergent at the start of the last century. Here, Cather takes her place alongside figures such as Gertrude Stein, William James, and Frank Lloyd Wright. My intention is to position Cather in this context, a context forged out of a comparison with other American modernists and, specifically, with the pragmatism of James. Ronald Berman's 1997 book, The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's World of Ideas, suggested a context for Fitzgerald in the "public philosophy" of William James and his followers (Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, Randolph Bourne, John Dewey). If we want to think about Cather and the "ecopoetics" of her writing, we need to position her alongside some of these thinkers in order to understand what was specific to her culture and its historical moment. For Cather's fiction is often concerned with the representation of the psychological processes of the self as it connects with and interacts with environment; Cather emerges as a kind of Midwestern pragmatist, and a distant sister of Gertrude Stein.

The modernity of Cather's environmental imagination is illustrated by a comparison between her fictionalization of American spaces and Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural formation of space. Wright, above all other modernists, is the major artist in the rearticulation of American space at the turn of the century.He was also, of course, a Midwesterner with a similar background to Cather: born a little earlier (1867), into a family who had moved west, and also educated (though not with anything like Cather's success) at a land grant college, the University of Wisconsin. There are, I believe, some striking analogies and affinities betweenWright and Cather: although literary historians have not always noted the connection between the two, architectural historians certainly have. Robert Twombly, for one, cites Wright's attack on turn-of-the-century Chicago houses—"they lied about everything,"Wright spat—and backs up this quotation with comments from Ole Rolvaag, Sinclair Lewis, and Cather.He notes the mockery of the Forrester house in A Lost Lady (Twombly 60- 61): "It was encircled by porches, too narrow for modern notions of comfort," Cather writes, "supported by the fussy, fragile pillars of that time, when every honest stick of timber was tortured by the turning-lathe into something hideous" (8). Put the Forrester house alongside the Marsellus house in The Professor's House and you have a veryWright-like attack on the importation of fussy, pseudo-European houses into the Midwestern environment. Take, also, Father Latour's comment on the ruin of Santa Fe, a comment underpinned by a sense of regionalist architecture: In the old days it had an individuality, a style of its own; a tawny adobe town with a few green trees, set in a half-circle of carnelian-coloured hills; that and no more. But the year 1880 had begun a period of incongruous American building. Now, half the plaza square was still adobe, and half was flimsy wooden buildings with double porches, scroll-work and jack-straw posts and banisters painted white. Father Latour said the wooden houses which had so distressed him in Ohio, had followed him. All this was quite wrong for the Cathedral he had been so many years in building. (270-71)

Is there another novelist who has characters suffer aesthetic "distress" in the face of unpleasant architecture? Cather's satire on domestic style seems to emerge from a position very close to Wright's. For both Cather and Wright, "fit" (a kind of spatial symbiosis between the man-made and the natural) constitutes the regionalist style. What one takes away from Wright's theoretical writing is a recurrent emphasis on the interdependence of the built and the natural, the human-made and the found. Thus, in a section from The Living City, "Architecture and Acreage Together Are Landscape" (a wonderful phrase that could stand as an epigraph to Cather's Western novels), Wright states: Architectural features of any democratic ground plan for human freedom rise naturally by, and from, topography. This means that buildings would all take on, in endless variety, the nature and character of the ground on which they would stand and, thus inspired, become component parts. Wherever possible all buildings would be integral parts— organic features of the ground—according to place and purpose.(143) And in his Autobiography Wright extends this argument to a more general defence of the "indigenous": "Indigenous growth is the essential province of all true Culture" (336).

Where, in Cather's work, do we find the representation of Wright's organic architecture? One place would be in the Native American settlements of the Southwest (also admired by Wright). Cather represents these dwellings as architecturally at one with their surroundings, as "organic features of the ground." Intriguingly, Tom Outland first praises the Cliff City precisely on grounds of design: "I felt that only a strong and aspiring people would have built it, and a people with a feeling for design" (203- 04). Another form of favored dwelling is the human-made space with an apparently ramshackle, deliberately "primitive" organicism that keeps it closely integrated into the landscape: Ivar's sod hut in O Pioneers!, the Shimerdas' dugout, Ántonia's fruit cave, Tom's shelter on the mesa (where the grass grows right up to the door, creating a seamless connection with the terrain). All of these dwellings accept the constraints of the environment and find an aesthetic emerging from the necessities of the landscape. As Father Duchene tells Tom, in a phrase that could come from a Wright essay, "Convenience often dictates very sound design" (219).

These places represent an anticipation of Wright's maxim, "Architecture and acreage together are landscape"; and they also mark Cather's integration into a tradition of American environmental writing—the Thoreauvian tradition with its emphasis on frugality, simplicity, and ecology. In fact, in the case of Ivar's hut, the correspondence with Thoreau seems explicit when Cather positions the hut next to a pond. One might read the passage as, effectively, a description of Walden Pond transplanted West and then stamped with an organic sense of space derived from Frank Lloyd Wright. Cather celebrates total symbiosis between the human and the natural: "But for the piece of rusty stovepipe sticking up through the sod, you could have walked over the roof of Ivar's dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human habitation. Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank, without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done" (39-40). The fusion of Alexandra's body with the soil at the end of the novel has been prefigured here, with Ivar's house. Both passages celebrate an ecstatic intermingling between self and nature, an interpenetration that quite obviously has its roots in transcendentalism but here finds a home far from New England.

A taxonomy of Cather's prairie dwellings illustrates the affinities with Frank Lloyd Wright: the writer or architect creates regionalist spaces and places harmonized with local environments. Wright's The Living City called for houses, "each sympathetically built out of materials native to the Time, the Place, and the Man" (132). It is in this sense that an architectural polemicist such as Reyner Banham writes of "Frank Lloyd Wright as Environmentalist." The human spaces of Cather's prairie novels tend to be low-lying if not subterranean. They merge or fuse with the land. They make radical use of natural resources: wood or the earth itself. They are very much of their own kind and not overly indebted to European models. Outside the Cather house there tends to be a space where the natural and the human-made overlap and coalesce. A further important correspondence is that when Wright thought favorably about tall buildings (he usually fulminated against the skyscraper urbanism of New York), he called for them to be set in "small green-parks of their own, in the countryside" (The Living City 133). In other words, he advocated a kind of rural skyscraper or ecological megastructure— the great structure positioned in a pastoral setting. Cather also tried to "green" such colossal buildings by blending them into the landscape: hence the Cliff City of The Professor's House or the cathedral at the end of Death Comes for the Archbishop. These vast constructions merge and blend with their setting. As Latour's architect says, in a phrase one can imagine Frank Lloyd Wright using, "Either a building is a part of a place, or it is not. Once the kinship is there, time will only make it stronger" (272).

A typical example of Cather's space making occurs when Jim Burden visits Ántonia's farm at the end of the novel. Her house is steeply roofed but low-lying: "The roof was so steep that the eaves were not much above the forest of tall hollyhocks, now brown and in seed. Through July, Ántonia said, the house was buried in them" (328). This whole passage is filled with images of verdant, overgrowing foliage, and of human spaces that seem to be within or underneath this growth. Three of the children creep through a hole in the hedge "known only to themselves and hid under the low-branching mulberry bushes" (329). Then Ántonia and Jim settle down in the orchard: "It was surrounded by a triple enclosure; the wire fence, then the hedge of thorny locusts, then the mulberry hedge which kept out the hot winds of summer and held fast to the protecting snows of winter. The hedges were so tall that we could see nothing but the blue sky above them, neither the barn roof nor the windmill" (330-31). For a writer with a noted antipathy to Freud, Cather seems to have created some astonishingly symbolic spaces—as critics from Leon Edel to Ellen Moers have noted. Here, the womblike space emphasizes that sense of "return to beginnings" that dominates the end of the novel. Jim's unconscious reiteration of one of Ántonia's first English phrases, "blue sky" (25), confirms a sense of return, of cycles, of closure.

But what is also important is the emphasis on privacy; an organic architecture creates enclosed and intensely turned-in spaces amidst the vastness of the prairies. As with other Cather protagonists, most notably St. Peter, the need to create an environment of privacy is a fundamental dynamic for Ántonia. Why, indeed, does Ántonia take Jim into a space with a "triple enclosure," if they are in the middle of nowhere? The answer is that, as for many Cather characters, Ántonia's sense of environment is strongly linked to a need for sheltered privacy. The novel began with a very private, enclosed space—the train compartment where Burden and the narrator first talk. It ends with a similar kind of exchange between Burden and Ántonia, as they talk in an enclosed space fashioned from natural materials. In both cases, the openness of the prairie landscape produces an equal and opposite human reaction, as characters seek out inward-looking, private, womblike places.

A common reaction to Wright's houses is to find them unexpectedly low, enclosed, and sometimes even claustrophobic; his houses were designed to offer a great deal of privacy. Robert Twombly suggests that the prairie house "appealed to an apprehensive upper middle class by emphasizing in literal and symbolic ways the security, shelter, privacy, family, mutuality and other values it found increasingly important" (Twombly, "Saving the Family" 59). Those houses designed for the suburbs, such as the Robie house, were fashioned so that those inside could find space where they would not be seen from the street. Wright, acutely conscious of the extremes of the Midwestern weather, created houses resistant to the harshness of winter snow or summer heat; but in so doing, the Wright house, though harmonized with the outer environment, also fostered an intense domesticity. Cather's houses are not as class-specific asWright's, but they share a sense of the inward and the sheltered. For Cather andWright, the connection between environment and privacy seems to have had the force of an equation: in creating an organic space, in Wright's words, "native to the Time, the Place," one also fashioned an intensely private realm.

A significant strand in Cather's critical writing privileged the "natural," as she drew comparisons between her work's compositional strategy and the open landscapes of the prairies. Cather's letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant (22 April 1913) answered complaints about the novel's shape: "She agreed with Sergeant's one criticism that the book had no skeleton but defended it on grounds that the country she was writing about had no skeleton either. There were no rocks or ridges; its black soil ran through one's fingers. It was all soft, and somehow that influenced the mood and the very structure of the novel" (Woodress 155).

When Cather compared O Pioneers! to the "all soft" landscape of the prairies, she articulated a form of organic modernism. This organic theory privileges the natural and the apparently shapeless over the clearer forms and narrative shapes championed by one of her masters, Henry James. Cather's 1913 letter might be read as a revision of James's 1907 preface to the New York edition of The Portrait of a Lady. There, James had also used the image of soil nurturing the work of fiction. But for James, "soil" correlated with the novelist's individual creativity: "the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs" (7). James then went on to his celebrated discussion of the "house of fiction," with its million windows looking down on the "human scene" (8). James uses the "house of fiction" as a trope to emphasize form, shape, and architectural structure; he was impatient with the apparent formlessness of the English novel and wanted to forge an Anglo-American aesthetic with the French novel's exactitude. Nowhere does Cather reveal more her struggle with James's influence and her final overthrow of "the master" than here. For James, "soil" had a very solipsistic connotation; it corresponded with the artist's "sensibility." But Cather uses "soil" in a folk-cultural, regionalist sense (I cannot dare to think what James would have made of the analogy with the prairies). Although the late James was moving toward greater narrative fluidity, he would surely have rejected the environmental determinism and proud provincialism of Cather's argument— her sense that regional geography generates literary form.

Cather's reasoning might be termed "organic modernism." The environment of Nebraska is used as an analog for novelistic form; landscape might even create form. I have argued elsewhere that Cather, for a writer of westward settlement, had a remarkably non-anthropocentric model of the interconnections between the human and the natural: she could envisage landscape acting upon the human, rather than the more familiar model, which tended to reverse this process (Reynolds 52-54). Cather emphasizes, too, a kind of formlessness: "It was all soft." In an interview with John Chapin Mosher, Cather had said of the immigrant and pluralist communities of Nebraska that the "hard molds of American provincialism" might be broken up in the Midwest (94); we might extend this argument to the "hard molds" of narrative architecture. For Cather and Wright both believed that in the Midwest the "hard molds" of received form (architectural and narrative) would be broken up and remade. And so, using this environmental logic, a new language of flow, organicism, and flexibility entered their aesthetic lexicon.

The popular image of Cather tends to see her as a rather homely writer; and much recent criticism has sought to accept homeliness or domesticity by seeing these features as inherently marked by a distinctive female culture. Critics then read Cather as a sophisticated modifier of an American female tradition of the home and the domestic. In this respect, Judith Fryer's work on Cather and space deepens the approach of 1970s feminists by means of a critical reading that redeems the female cultures of the late nineteenth century. This Cather emerges out of the late Victorian female, spatial culture of Sarah Orne Jewett. There is the same emphasis on the domestic, and particularly on a womanly domesticity at the center of a rich sentimental culture.

This is a powerful argument about Cather's spaces. But what if Cather's work also marked out a radically new, modernistic conception of space? What if her Midwestern environments, rather than being rooted in a familiar cultural site (homemaking, pioneering, the female world of American space making), were in fact more akin to the spatializing tactics of radical modernists— artists working in literature but also in architecture and painting? We have already seen affinities between Cather and Wright; and it is clear that Cather's narrative experimentation used the example of the prairie space to move away from received notions of realism. Pursuing this line a little further, one notes how Cather uses the environments of theWest and Southwest to move toward a kind of abstraction in her work.

Most contemporary travelers first see the American prairies from the air, and from this perspective the landscape has a curiously abstract pattern: huge blocks of colour, arranged as if by some gigantic artist obsessed by geometry. The clean edges and abstract forms of the fields, seen from the air, make the telling point that this is in many ways one of the most unnatural landscapes in the world. The settlement of the prairies quickly turned an unshaped landscape into a place so sculpted and formed by the processes of modern agriculture that it attained a strange disembodiment. The Midwest is akin to the Dutch landscapes celebrated by the abstract painter Piet Mondrian (an artist who eventually moved to New York and immersed himself in American modernity). Mondrian's jazzy, colorful abstracts are often seen as being "produced" by the landscape of Holland—a flat, essentially man-made, intensively farmed landscape of grids and lines and squares. Similarly, Cather found in the shaping of the Western environment a form of abstraction that became part of her modernistic space making. So the most triumphant passages in Cather's prairie novels are not just about the interaction of the human and the earthly (as at the end of O Pioneers!), but are also about the creation of these strangely abstract, painterly shapes within the land. When Alexandra Bergson begins to create her farmstead, the space around the house has a formalistic, neatly symmetrical pattern. Settlement is the creation of "order," expressed through symmetry: "When you go out of the house into the flower garden, there you feel again the order and fine arrangement manifest all over the great farm; in the fencing and hedging, in the windbreaks and sheds, in the symmetrical pasture ponds, planted with scrub willows to give shade to the cattle in fly-time. There is even a white row of beehives in the orchard, under the walnut trees" (81).

One senses Cather's eye picking out the geometry latent within the landscape, the patterns of fencing and hedging, the lines and rows of the garden. Such patterns are both created and natural; and if fashioned by Alexandra, they quickly seem to become part of an established landscape. This is one reason why the Divide is so central a term in Cather's reading of environment: the Divide is both latent within the land, but it also becomes part of the way in which we use land. It is natural and man-made. And a "divide" is also a line or a boundary. Reading Cather's descriptions of landscape one constantly senses this interest in lines, grids, boundaries: lines inherent in the land or imposed by man, but all tending toward abstract geometry. Thus Cather maps the prairie in terms of lines emerging out of plains; and she envisages the Washington of The Professor's House as a place of stifling boundaries and divisions.

If this is one way in which Cather's picturing of landscape seems modernist, then another way is the contrasting technique whereby landscape is dissolved into color, losing shape and determinacy. This is the abstraction that marks her descriptions of the Southwest in The Professor's House. Tom's ecstatic encounter with the mesa is exactly of this kind: the detail of landscape merges into a wash of different shades: The grey sage-brush and the blue-grey rock around me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed flame-color with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern. In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light. When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the pińons along the edge of the top ledges. The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water. (250)

On first reading, the paragraph seems to be a rare case of poor writing by Cather. Why does every object have to carry an epithet? Isn't the passage overinsistent, repetitive, overwritten? But we know that she revised exhaustively, and the reader has to trust her as she creates a very strange effect in this passage. Cather, it seems to me, tries to achieve an impressionism by dissolving detail into color. Actual objects within the landscape are simply overwhelmed by this colorful cascade. And color itself eventually stands for a whole way of being: "Troubles enough came afterward, but there was that summer, high and blue, a life in itself." (253). The passage is, of course, painterly, a word-picture, but it is painterly in a contemporary way, as environment is registered in terms of dominant color as much as by shape. Cather almost becomes a writerly counterpart to Cézanne or even, in her most fervent synthesis of mood and color, Mark Rothko's prose forebear. Note, too, the lovely effect at the end of the paragraph, where the textures are simply washed away into clearness, as golds and reds and blues give way to reflected stars, "like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water": a form of metaphysical conceit, where clearness drops into clearness.

Daniel Singal, in a suggestive essay on American modernism, has sought to give a specific picture of this cultural formation by emphasising the national rather than the international features of modernism in the United States. He stresses its philosophical roots in the pragmatism of John Dewey and William James. In particular, he contends that James brought forward a concern with psychological process and with varied emotional and mental states of being. Singal isolates modernism's "Jamesian stream" which "centers its interest on the individual consciousness, celebrates spontaneity, authenticity, and the probing of new realms of personal experience" (17-18). Jamesian modernism bears on Cather, especially in the "new realms of personal experience" that feature so heavily in passages about the interplay of consciousness and environment. She had read William James as a young woman, and one commentator has described her as a "devoted disciple" of his work in the 1890s (Seibel 202). Scholars have noted specific connections between Cather's work and James's Varieties of Religious Experience; her interest in James's friend and mentor Henri Bergson has also been charted by Tom Quirk. But the broader relevance of Jamesian psychology to Willa Cather remains unremarked.

What, then, would Cather have found in the William James she read in the 1890s, and how did this encounter affect the way her environmental imagination was formed? James, when he broke through to national prominence, popularized the "new psychology." Cather would have found a fascination with the interplay between body and sensation; an interest in the subconscious or preconscious mind; speculation about the "will" and how we marshal the will to forge an active moral life. James was famously obsessed by energy and how we command or focus our energies. Ronald Berman, writing about his influence on Fitzgerald, summarizes these theories as "contemporary ideas of nervous energy, anxiety, and their moral effects" (142). What particularly interests me about Cather as an environmental writer is how often the self that interacts with the environment is very much the new self emerging from James's writings about psychology. She might have come across these ideas in the essays that brought James to a wider readership, for instance the essays he wrote for Scribner's Magazine in the 1880s and 1890s. "What the Will Effects" (1888) and "The Hidden Self" (1890) seem uncannily close, in their analysis of consciousness, to Cather's explorations of selfhood. These essays analyzed the interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness, and the opposition between voluntary and involuntary action. For the apprentice writer at the turn of a new century, Jamesian psychology now offered a bracing, radical introduction to wholly new ways of configuring personality. In particular (and here the influence of James on Cather's creation of figures such as TomOutland or Thea Kronborg is evident), he rooted psychological process in the body and its reactions. He argued that "all our activity belongs at bottom to the type of reflex action, and that all our consciousness accompanies a chain of events of which the first was an incoming current in some sensory nerve, and of which the last will be a discharge into some muscle, blood-vessel, or gland" ("What the Will Effects" 217). Psychology as bodily process.

William James's followers explored this dynamic in the fields of psychology and moral philosophy. James's emphasis on the will led to his disciples using "will," and a supposed failure of will, as tools to examine contemporary culture. Walter Lippmann's popular 1914 study, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, called for a restitution of will to the American character. At the same time as Lippmann was developing James's ideas along the lines of a cultural critique, Cather embarked on a series of novels that fictionalized the Jamesian dialectic between "drift and mastery." The rhythm of life, as seen in her fiction, is that adumbrated in James's essays. Characters move from cycles of torpor, daydream, reverie, and anxiety into a kind of energized, determined action. A typical Cather character commits himself or herself to mastery. Thus, the mastery of engineering skill and scholarship in The Professor's House; mastery of the voice and art in The Song of the Lark; mastery of the land and the making of a farm (My Ántonia and O Pioneers!). Protagonists from Alexandra Bergson through to Latour master their subject, finally. But the foreground of these texts is often taken up with a characteristically Catheresque meditation on "drift": on nervous anxiety, loss of control, reverie, dream, or nostalgia. Cather's defense of My Ántonia was that it was a means to explore the "other side of the rug, the pattern that is supposed not to count in a story" (Interview with Flora Merrill 77). This comment is a defense of novelistic form. But for Cather, the "other side" also had a general, metaphoric significance, and when she wrote about the self and its response to nature, the "other side" seems to correspond to a Jamesian or Lippmann-like idea of "drift." Cather was fascinated by the ordinary, moment-by-moment experience of being in the Western landscape. Although the novels explore, on one level, mastery over landscape (a suggestion given most notably in the invocation of Whitman in O Pioneers!), line by line and paragraph by paragraph Cather is fascinated by a quotidian, anti-heroic interplay between self and environment. Gertrude Stein says in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that, "the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting" than the abnormal (92). One way to link Cather and Stein is to think of them as female writers who defended the ordinary and "normal" experiences of everyday life as being "complicated and interesting." For Cather, this meant a poeticizing of the everyday experiences of simply being in the West and the Southwest (a maneuver absolutely in accord with pragmatism's desire to enrich and poeticize everyday experience).

At its most heightened, indeed ecstatic, Cather's nature writing envisages a harmony between drift and mastery. The ancient landscapes of the Southwest produce, above all, states of consciousness that balance the drive to master the environment and the desire to drift through the natural world. The Cather protagonist achieves self-mastery, even as (s)he is acted upon and shaped by environment; action is both transitive and intransitive, switching ceaselessly between meditation and mastery. One such moment occurs in The Song of the Lark, in the Panther Cańon episode, where Thea moves from doing nothing to violent activity: "She was thinking of nothing at all. Her mind, like her body, was full of warmth, lassitude, physical content" gives way to "Thea sprang to her feet as if she had been thrown up from the rock by volcanic action" (398-99). Cather figures her protagonist as if she were molten rock. And the climax of TomOutland's time on the mesa is all to do with this sense of synthesis, of yoking together opposites as one moves through landscape. Outland is curiously passive (he lies down on a rock and spends much of his time contemplating in almost Buddhist quietness), but he is also very active (he studies and creates a liveable space in the wilderness). He alternates between being an actor or a "doer," and being a recipient (a creature acted upon by environment). Human activity and the natural scene achieve a state of perfect balance, as when Outland imagines the page of the book superimposed on the landscape behind: "I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that" (252). This image echoes the image of the plowshare against the sun in My Ántonia: the man-made object caught iconically against a natural scene, with both the human and the natural brought into a spectacular synchronicity.

Outland finally represents an idealized dissolution of the boundaries between the physical and the mental, and between the spiritual and instrumental. Connections between Cather's fictional exploration of the self-in-environment andWilliam James's work are absolutely explicit at such points, since the resolution of the Cartesian split between mind and body also obsessed the philosopher. "Tom Outland's Story" almost reads like a prose poem written in reply to "What theWill Effects" or "The Hidden Self," as Cather creates a supple idiom to entwine landscape description with analysis of those elusive, barely conscious states of mind described by James: I remember those things, because, in a sense, that was the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all—the first night that all of me was there. This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole. It all came together in my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you begin to see where they are leading. Something had happened in me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession. The excitement of my first discovery was a very pale feeling compared to this one. (250-51) The central sentence of this passage ("It was possession.") rests at the heart of Cather's environmental imagination, precisely because it is so perfect and crystalline in its ambiguity. Who is doing the possessing? Outland or the environment? Both, in a sense, "possess" the other. Outland sees the landscape "whole," and as a descendant of a whole array of romantic viewers of the sublime, from Wordsworth to Thoreau, he takes possession of landscape by seeing it. But at the same time, Outland is possessed himself by landscape, as he imagines himself as a vessel filled by light (a curiously feminine image to apply to the American male pioneer): "I was full to the brim, and needed dark and sleep" (251-52). The ambiguity here encapsulates the paradox of an "environmental imagination," since an "environmental imagination" is at once an imagination of the environment and an imagination formed or created by the environment. Cather worked repeatedly toward this doubled state, finding a heightened, mystical state-of-being when we are both formed by and in mastery of the environment.

In 1925 Willa Cather honored Gertrude Hall, the author of an unexceptional and occasionally florid layman's guide to the operas of RichardWagner, by contributing a brief introduction to the re-publication of Hall's book, The Wagnerian Romances. In this essay, Cather briefly describes the difficulty of capturing the power of an operatic scene in narrative form. "I had to attempt it once, in the course of a novel, and I paid Miss Hall the highest compliment one writer can pay another; I stole from her (Preface 64-65).

This is a rather cryptic remark, though it has not always been read as such. Cather never tells us which novel contains her act of theft from Miss Hall, though the usual assumption is that it must be from The Song of the Lark. It is, perhaps, the performance of Lohengrin in which Thea Kronborg is revealed as the prairie girl once and forever transfigured by art, or the capstone scene in which she sings the role of Sieglinde from DieWalk4re. Indeed, in his biography of Cather, James Woodress paraphrases the essay in a way that simply assumes this passage refers to The Song of the Lark, although Cather never mentions the novel in her introduction, nor does she say that she was translating a particular operatic scene as a scene within a novel (Woodress 358). She says instead that she had to translate "the feeling of an operatic scene . . . in the course of the novel" (Preface 64), which leaves open several possibilities, including the enticing one that she may have crafted whole novels that are imaginative translations of operatic material. Given the date of Cather's introduction to The Wagnerian Romances—1925—it's not a given that she's referring to the ten-year-old The Song of the Lark, the novel in which she makes the most extensive reference to Wagner's music dramas. No less Wagnerian in its inspiration is the Pulitzer Prize—winning One of Ours (1922), a book that would have been fresh in her mind when she wrote her preface to Hall's book.

Cather's brief essay on Wagner says nothing about how her characters hear Wagner, or what Wagner's music represents in her fiction. But it offers insight into how she herself may have heard Wagner and, perhaps, enough evidence to speculate that, outside of the musical performances depicted in her fiction, she had an encounter with aspects of Wagnerism—worked out in a novel—that would influence her writing and world-view at a profound level.

Cather's access to the music of Wagner was extraordinary, especially given that through much of her lifetime, recording was inadequate to the acoustic demands of the composer's scores. The years at the very end of the nineteenth century were a boom period for Wagner's music in America. In February 1898, when Cather spent a week in New York City attending the opera and theater, the Metropolitan Opera had productions of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, all running the same month (Annals 82-83). These productions were star-studded: Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Lillian Nordica, Jean and Edouard de Reszke, and Anton Von Rooy all sang in New York that February, all legendary singers even at the time. The company performed in Pittsburgh during Cather's years there. Her reviews suggest an immediate and total capitulation to the music.

Wagner's music is rather idiosyncratically linked in Cather's mind to geographies of open space. Cather says of Hall's book, "I first came upon this book when I was staying in a thinly peopled part of the Southwest, far enough from the Metropolitan Opera House" (Preface 61). In the course of listening to music over a lifetime, strange and entirely personal associations are inevitable. That she came upon Hall's book in the Southwest is of course an accident of biography; but the connection ofWagner to landscape in the introduction to Hall's book is not exceptional for Cather. In her 1913 profile of theWagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, she describes what seems almost a rupture in the confined, artificial space of the opera house, a fissure created by Fremstad's singing that returns the listener to a wild and natural space: "She is not praying or looking into herself; she is looking off at the mountains and the springtime. From the audience one seems to see the ranges of the Pyrenees, to feel suddenly and sharply the beauty of the physical world ("Singers" 47). Even when Cather drops a casual reference to Wagner, as she does when describing Carlyle as full of "Wagnerian flashes and thunders and tempests," it is in expansively, even violently naturalistic terms (Kingdom 222).

The music of Wagner, which broke with traditional phrase lengths, neatly limited repetitive structures, and many of the precedents of classical tonality, suggested boundlessness to many listeners besides Cather. Wagner's music was embraced, or assailed, for its "endless" melody and for an engulfing chromaticism that was widely considered sexually provocative. But this boundlessness is philosophical, or emotional; for Cather,Wagnerian boundlessness isn't just metaphorical but articulated in both geographical and architectural terms of place. The most notable example is the short story, "A Wagner Matinee," in which the composer's music paradoxically converts the confined space of the opera house into a place of infinite emotional possibility and renders the open space of Nebraska a place of claustrophobic confinement (Stories 495-96).

It's a mistake to assume that Cather listened exactly as her characters, or contemporaries, did. Thea Kronborg's first experience of Wagner's music is a lesson in mishearing. At a concert in Chicago, Wagner's music is preceded by Dvorák's New World symphony, a symphony trueWagnerites would have shunned for its stolid central European musical structure and its debt to the music of Brahms. Yet this is the music that Thea hears in scenic terms: "the grass-grown wagon trails, the far-away peaks of the snowy range, the wind and the eagles, that old man and the first telegraph message." Music from Wagner's Rheingold, to which she listens with a "dull, almost listless ear," however, leaves her "sunk in twilight; it was all going on in another world" (Song of the Lark 160). Thea is still a naďve listener; she hears the sublime in the wrong place. And to drive home the point, Cather has Thea get her Wagnerian operas slightly confused. Rheingold is not, as Thea believes, about "the strife between gods and men"; indeed, men do not appear in Wagner's mythological tetralogy until the second installment, Die Walküre.

The opera house is a very strange place to go if one is looking for an experience of the sublime in nature. Part of the charm of Hall's book for Cather may well be that it frees her from the opera house, from what would have been a rather flat, poorly lighted, and stylized depiction of place. But even if the appeal of Hall's book is that it allows Cather to respond toWagner in terms of purely imagined spaces or spaces of her own choosing, this is still an uncommon and quirky way to hear Wagner, especially at the time. It definitely sets Cather apart from the wider body of Wagnerian appreciation and from contemporaneous authors who takeWagnerian themes as inspiration for literary treatment. European writers who take up Wagner as a subject for fictional treatment—Thomas Mann most prominent among them—are concerned with the composer as a political figure, or a sociological problem, even as a psychological illness. For Mann, Wagner is an inspiring problem, a mix of primitive and premodern ideology with powerful music; in his fictional treatment ofWagnerian themes, especially the short story "Blood of the Volsungs," one senses the author wrestling primarily with Wagner's most unsavory sexual and racial ideas.

And then we have Cather, who responds viscerally to something that seems at first glance almost irrelevant to Wagner: the place where his dramas transpire. Yet there are real insights into Wagner's operas to be had from serious engagement with the composer's depiction of natural spaces. Never mind the rafts of Jungian and Freudian analyses; if we want to understand the motivations of Wagner's characters, we have to get them outof- doors. Parsifal's understanding of Christian charity and forgiveness is, in large part, an epiphany from the natural world, depicted in the Good Friday music; Siegfried's intimation that there is more to his life and destiny than confinement with an avaricious dwarf is an epiphany from the forest. Cather is the rare Wagner listener to be particularly alert to the power of these encounters.

In the same year that Cather wrote her introduction to Hall— and praised Hall for capturing the power of "particular rivers, particular mountains, even" (Preface 62)—the avant-garde German director and designer Adolph Appia produced the first two installments of the Ring cycle for the opera company of Basel: the stage design consisted entirely of platforms, steps, and curtains, all reference to an actual landscape entirely abstracted (Muller 516).

This was the direction of the Wagnerian Zeitgeist in 1925, toward a complete suppression of the scenic in favor of the intellectual and internal landscape; Cather is definitely heading against the wind. Indeed, the introduction to Hall's book also makes Cather seem naďvely unaware of the political and philosophical debates that surrounded Wagner's music. This certainly isn't true. From her criticism of the 1890s, it's clear that Cather had read, and apparently much disliked, Max Nordau's Degeneration, which contained some of the strongest and most cogent anti-Wagnerian pages since Nietzsche's The Case of Wagner. She also says, in the Wagner essay, that Hall's book is one "of only two books in English on the Wagnerian operas that are worthy of their subject" (60). The other book is George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite.

The bulk of Shaw's book elaborates a vast allegory of the Ring cycle, a socialist allegory so compelling that it continues to influence productions of the cycle to this day. One might imagine that its overt politicization of the cycle would have been anathema to Cather, but Shaw's commentary can be read not just in political and economic terms, but as a kind of meritocratic class struggle. And in those terms, it begins to seem almost Catheresque, especially given the Cather of 1922, the author who wrote One of Ours.

Shaw describes the characters in Wagner's Ring cycle, an elaborate epic depicting a mythological world in its final era, this way: "Really, of course, the dwarfs, giants, and gods are dramatizations of the three main orders of men: to wit, the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient, toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and the intellectual, more talented people who devise and administer states and churches" (Shaw 29). Among the supernumerary characters in Cather's novels, there's hardly one that doesn't fall neatly into or another of these categories.

There is also a fourth category in the Shavian analysis. "History," he writes, "shows us only one order higher than the highest of these: namely, the order of Heroes" (Shaw 29). Cather's attempt to explore this particular order in the creation of Claude Wheeler yielded what is often regarded as the weakest of her mature novels. If One of Ours is read only as a war novel, it's easy to dismiss. But if taken as an effort to "translate" her own experience of Wagner "in the course of a novel," we can turn away from chiding her, as Louis Auchincloss does, for not getting the battle scenes quite as right as Erich Maria Remarque did, and consider instead what role the war plays in her mélange of Wagnerian imagery (Auchincloss 107).

The connection of the novel to Wagner has been remarked on before, especially the link to the composer's final opera (Woodress 328; Song of the Lark xii). There are compelling reasons for this comparison: Like Wagner's Parsifal, Claude Wheeler is a holy fool, uncomprehending, inarticulate, only vaguely aware of his role as a redemptive hero. Auchincloss asks, "Why must she make Claude so sluggish, inert, dead?" (108). It's tempting to answer, because that's the wayWagner made him. Cather also flirted with overtly connecting the novel to Parsifal and considered naming the last section of the novel, "The Blameless Fool by Pity Enlightened," a reference to the Parsifal of act 3, the Parsifal who has already had his epiphany (Lee 178).

But there is far more than a Parsifal motif at play in this novel. Cather is cagey about making explicit reference toWagner or his characters, and when she does, they seem deliberately overdetermined: A character named Tannhäuser dies on the voyage to Europe, muttering a snatch of German that might be something Siegfried or Parsifal once said, "Meine arme mutter" (My poor mother). But through an accumulation of subtle references, some of them mediated by references to Shaw's interpretation of the Ring, Claude emerges more a Siegfried than a Parsifal, and his death becomes the central emotional effect that she is trying to translate into narrative form.

And at least one of her references seems almost comically in- flected to avoid the obvious problem of writing aWagnerian novel about the FirstWorldWar:Wagner was German and aggressively contemptuous of Cather's beloved France. And so Claude's first glimmer that there is a larger, more heroic world of action beyond the confines of Nebraska comes to him through the character of Joan of Arc: a French woman who dies just as Wagner's Brunnhilde dies, by immolation (One of Ours 53-54).

The creation of Claude is also carefully controlled to mute the worst aspects of Wagner's Siegfried—his impetuous amorality— into something more American and curiously nurturing, but no less driven to heroic action. This is, perhaps, the source of some of the odd and distracting contradictions in Claude's character.He is able to cast off some yokes—his mother's religion, for instance— but remains strangely passive in the face of his father's demands, no matter how senseless and humiliating. But Siegfried's emergence as a heroic figure comes only with the forging of a sword, to which Claude's enlistment is the obvious analog. And if Claude at his most revolutionary seems pallid in comparison to Siegfried, who directly and brutally attacks the powers that confine him, it's because Claude's revolutionary sentiments are expressed with Shavian decorum: "It was strange that in all the centuries the world had been going, the question of property had not been better adjusted. The people who had it were slaves to it, and the people who didn't have it were slaves to them" (68). This is the essence of Shaw's allegory of Wagner's Ring.

But it is in his death that Claude's life most diverges from the Parsifal motif, and it is his death for which Wagner's Ring cycle offers the most compelling explanatory power. Parsifal doesn't die, and he does, in fact, succeed in redeeming the community of Grail knights; Siegfried and Claude, however, both die and neither of them redeems a thing. The strange hollowness of Claude's death, usually accounted a failing on Cather's part, reflects closely the strange and pessimistic twist that Wagner's Ring cycle takes in its final installment, Gotterdämmerung. That twist—in which the vigorous young hero is literally knifed in the back and the Gods who once controlled the world will their own destruction—is typically attributed to Wagner's soured political beliefs, his rejection of youthful revolutionary ideals, and perhaps his growing interest in Schopenhauer's idea of the renunciation of will.

The year that One of Ours was published, 1922, is a watershed year for Cather, the year that the world seemed to break in two. Despite the Pulitzer Prize, the poor critical reception of the novel may contribute to her increasing pessimism; but One of Ours was already a deeply pessimistic novel, even before it met its fate with the critics. "One by one," Cather tells us of the returning veterans, "they die quietly by their own hand" (370). Cather's encounter with Wagner's pessimism, his almost casual dispatch of a hero he had spent three operas, and decades, gestating, seems to affect her own treatment of Claude. Through Shaw and Wagner, Cather may also be grappling with the ideas of Schopenhauer, in particular, his pessimism and the notion of the renunciation of will; like Wagner's Ring, One of Ours feels like a final outburst of heroic energy tempered by the author's own growing resignation about the ugliness of the world.

If One of Ours is indeed a translation of Wagner into narrative, it is a different kind of translation than The Song of the Lark. It is no mere interpolation of a Wagnerian scene into a story; there is none of Cather's exuberant hearing of landscape in the music. It is, instead, a Wagnerian world worked out in American terms. But in its working out, the power of Wagner as literary inspiration seems to have been either exhausted or internalized to such a degree that it would remain sub rosa in most of Cather's subsequent work. Wagner disappears from her novels after One of Ours, and when he recurs in her stories, such as the 1925 "Uncle Valentine," there is a marked valedictory tone. Indeed, "Uncle Valentine" is about the parceling away of the landscape—a landscape that is explicitly tied to the composer's Rheingold—and its Wagnerian title character meets an even more absurd death than Claude Wheeler (Stories 235, 246-47). The story was published the same year Cather wrote her introduction to Hall; perhaps with Hall's book to recall to her Wagner's music, she had taken what she needed from the composer and would move on to other landscapes, "far enough from the Metropolitan Opera."

"There are many ways of handling environment—most of them bad,"Willa Cather declared in her 1899 review of Frank Norris (Stories 922). Yet when used correctly, she added, environmental description can be "a positive and active force, stimulating the reader's imagination, giving him an actual command, a realizing sense of this world into which he is suddenly transplanted" (922). A quarter-century later, when Cather realized four versions of this world as she scrutinized four modes of knowing, she produced a tetralogy designed around environments. Her four works cohered like the four autonomous movements of Dvorák's American quartet—its rhythms half American, half European. To achieve a wide relevance, she focused on gender.

Starting with The Professor's House, Cather used environmental keys to denote every important thematic or characterizing element in her four varied worlds. And because Ralph Waldo Emerson had authoritatively described nature on this continent, as well as because she loved him, she played with and against riffs of Emersonian music throughout. What she sought was enduring definitions. First she trenchantly critiqued the abstracting, objectifying, linear-thinking, phallocentric culture of the West in The Professor's House<