The twentieth-century phenomenon of the icon celebrity has a fundamental relationship to the photographic image. The invention of the camera led to the increasing presence of the visual image in American culture. As Catharine R. Stimpson contends in her foreword to Brenda Silver's Virginia Woolf: Icon, the twentieth-century icon "is unthinkable without the presence of the camera." Photography, she explains, "accelerates and reaffirms the process of iconization and celebrity making" through modern modes of mass production (xii). Consider the images of Albert Einstein sitting at his desk with his tousled white hair, Marilyn Monroe standing above the subway grate, or Madonna in her cone-shaped bustier. These images have become infamous portraits, functioning as visual shorthand for each personality in particular and the cultural era each represents in general.

While we recognize the powerful role the iconic figure plays within our culture to create powerful signifiers of ideas, attitudes, historical frameworks, and personal identities, how does one go about becoming an icon? In the case of Willa Cather, her image is documented through her legacy of photographic portraits and her selection of artists Leon Bakst and Nikolai Fechin to paint her portraits. In each of these cases, Cather collaborated with other artists to shape her public image. In the case of the Bakst portrait, she wrote in a letter that after the disappointing result of the portrait, she had resolved to work with other artists only if she could have complete control over the final result. The fireplace, she explained, was the place for images that did not please her (Cather to Duncan M. Vinsonhaler, 13 January 1924). Cather's frank talk about her public image allows us insights into how she managed her career in the increasingly celebrity-driven literary marketplace. Even in the face of her disappointment with Bakst's portrait, Cather followed her own advice and became more careful in her management of her public image. Like other celebrity actors, sports figures, and artists, Cather acknowledged the degree to which celebrity had become a series of collaborations with other artists and celebrity-driven mechanisms. She collaborated throughout her career in a variety of ways, most centrally by working closely with the publicity department at her publishing houses (Houghton and then Knopf), sending out photographs for magazine and newspaper profiles, and joining forces with key image makers within her contemporary celebrity culture. In this essay I place Cather within the context of one such collaboration with top celebrity photographer Edward Steichen, arguing that his 1927 Vanity Fair portrait of Cather was a key moment in defining Cather's iconic status within American culture. Embedded in this argument is the notion that Cather's literary celebrity was established within a larger cultural machine that had, in many ways, already begun to mechanize the creation of celebrities—or at least exploited celebrity through new, sophisticated marketing strategies. Although Cather did much to obfuscate her relationship to that celebrity machinery through her persona, which seemed antagonistic to modernization, my study reveals her shrewd ability to fit that persona into her contemporary celebrity culture. To follow the lines of this argument, I will take a historical approach to link the development of celebrity culture within the technological development of modern image making. In so doing I hope to place Cather's image in context to reveal the importance of Steichen's image and the specific ways in which photographic images of celebrities were created to "speak" in specific ways to viewers. I then turn to a discussion of the celebrity-driven magazine Vanity Fair and the role Steichen had in turning the magazine into a celebrity-making tool through his iconic images of famous writers, actors, and sports figures. Finally, my analysis concludes with a discussion of Cather's public persona, her western image, and the relationships among her clothing, sexuality, and identity as a western writer.

Willa Cather came of age in the formative period of modern American celebrity culture. Cultural historian Neil Harris calls the period between 1885 and 1910 the "iconographical revolution," a time when photographs became deeply entrenched in American print, advertising, business, and personal life (199). As Guy Reynolds has noted, "Technologies were changing what 'writing' and being 'a writer' might mean . . . photography and recording equipment would mean that writers would now be more than their words, would have an image and a spoken voice" (4). The introduction of Kodak's box camera, for example, brought picture taking and the consumption of image to a new, personal level. With a simple and effective design, Kodak advertised its new camera to the masses: "Anybody can use the Kodak. Press the button—we do the rest" (Collins 56). Further, the increasing refinement of halftone printing processes beginning in the 1880s meant that magazines and newspapers could cheaply mass-produce photographic-quality images. During her editorial years at McClure's, Cather would have had control in positioning photographs and other images with text—a value she understood well because the magazine touted its visual appeal. When ghost-writing S. S. McClure's autobiography, she included his reflection that "[t]he development of photo-engraving made such a publication [as McClure's] more than possible" (Autobiography 207). Magazine historian David Reed notes from his study of McClure's that photographs played a "prominent role" in the development of the magazine's visual look, since nearly half of the illustrations were in photographic form (49).

Among many early pioneers of American photography, Matthew Brady brought the budding field into the realm of public spectacle. Brady's high-profile celebrity portrait studio capitalized on the public's curiosity about photography by exploiting its even greater curiosity about, as Brady termed them, "illustrious figures." Brady photographed such prominent men and women as Abraham Lincoln, General Robert E. Lee, Jenny Lind, Thomas Cole, Clara Barton, Jefferson Davis, Walt Whitman, and P. T. Barnum ("Matthew Brady's Portraits"). The public flocked to Brady's galleries, paying admission to gaze at images of public figures whose appearances were, aside from engraved portraits in books and newspapers, wholly unknown to them unless they had been lucky enough to see them in person on the street or stage. Brady's celebrity pictures had a larger cultural effect than merely enabling him to profit from the public's desire to see famous faces. Leo Braudy, in his extensive study of fame, suggests that Brady's portraits brought about a shift in the "emotional intimacy" between public figures and their audiences; that is, Brady's photographs were suggestive of the underlying humanity of his subjects.

The larger entertainment world quickly took advantage of the promise Brady demonstrated in capturing the public's curiosity of public figures. Specifically, photography played a key role in propelling actors and actresses into new, unprecedented states of fame. When Jenny Lind, a relatively unknown singer in the United States, toured American cities under the management of P. T. Barnum beginning in 1851, she had her photograph taken in virtually every city she visited and quickly became one of the best-known personalities in the country (Taft 81). Photography allowed for the relatively inexpensive dissemination of actors' and actresses' images through cartes de visite (small picture calling cards) as well as regular picture postcards. By manipulating this new medium, Sarah Bernhardt, one of Cather's favorite stars, significantly changed how the public interacted with famous theatrical actors. Bernhardt, according to Heather McPherson, was part of a "new paradigm of the modern mass-media star" who used photography to "simulate and recreate the visual and emotional dynamics of her performance"; and as a "genius" of publicity, she made sure that newspapers in Europe, England, and the United States carried full-page picture stories related to her every role (78).

During the time of this graphic revolution, Cather was a university student in Lincoln working on her degree and supplementing her income by reviewing touring theatrical productions. In these reviews, Cather distinguished herself by noting the developing role of the star in relation to art; that is, while the stage magazines of the age were full of publicity and gossip, Cather was most interested in those actresses to whom "truth is necessary and all important" (World and Parish 209). Cather lauds actress Mary Anderson in one review, for example, when she turns her back on "fame and flattery," the "most intoxicating of all successes" (World and Parish 202). Cather's reviews during these years demonstrate a sustained interest in the negotiation between the public stage and the private life of the artist. They also show a young woman fascinated by the ways in which celebrity figures threw themselves into the spotlight. In another review, Cather notes her disapproval of "methods of advertising" such as recommending "complexion soap" or having an "agent distribute [an actress's] pictures and press notices" (World and Parish 213). While Cather shows an early preference for those actresses who shy away from self-advertising, she nevertheless paid attention to these facets of her culture.

As American photographers, illustrious figures, and actresses were shaping new cultural modes of celebrity, so too were writers placing themselves within celebrity culture. No figure in American literature represents this shift from the older, genteel model of the writer and the new, image-driven construction of the American author better than Walt Whitman. In the early 1850s, as he made his transition from journalism to the literary world, Whitman brought with him his previous experience in newspapers and printing, in which he would have seen firsthand the "vastly" expanding role of advertising in American culture (Newbury 160). One of the most effective ways Whitman chose to disseminate his public self was by publishing illustrations of himself in his books. Since, as Whitman states in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, "the great poet is the equable man," the visual illustration of himself as "one of the roughs" (50) simultaneously served to illustrate his aesthetic principles and increase his public recognition. So the image of Whitman with an open collar, posing casually with his hand on his hip, was, according to Ed Folsom, "in sharp contrast to the expected iconography of poets' portraits, portraits that conventionally emphasized formality and the face instead of this rough informality, where we see arms, legs, and body" (140). Folsom further notes that Whitman's use of his image in Leaves of Grass had a "highly influential" effect on "the way most American poets portrayed themselves on their book jackets and frontispieces" (135). Kenneth Price recognizes that Whitman "set a new precedent for how a literary project could be advanced through photography, demonstrating photography's power to contribute to celebrity status" (39). The crucial aspect Whitman brought to modern understandings of celebrity authorship is the visual connection between the construction of his appearance and the construction of his poetic project. Text and image work recursively to construct the author's persona, and the public dissemination of the writer's image also guides the public's expectation of that literary project—it necessarily commits the writer to a particular channel of literary output. By incorporating Whitman's poem into the title of her second novel, O Pioneers!, Cather placed her literary project in Whitman's tradition. She further aligned herself, as we will see, through her 1927 Steichen portrait to Whitman's 1855 iconic frontispiece.

While duties such as buying fiction and poetry, writing the personality-driven Mary Baker G. Eddy series, and managing the magazine's content at McClure's gave Cather the critical experience to manage her own image, when she began her professional writing career she had to build a persona to sell to the public. Her correspondence with her editors at Houghton Mifflin reveals her sensitivity to the crucial role of photographs in book publicity. She often complained that her photographs were not sent out to newspapers and magazines to be published with reviews (Cather to Ferris Greenslet, 20 January 1920); she bemoaned the practice of publishing images of authors at all; she explained that seeing the picture of the author of a book she had meant to read made her decide otherwise, for she found the woman ugly (Cather to Van Tuyll, 24 May [1915]). Some in the public might hold the same prejudice against her, Cather wrote, but authors were different from performers, and while it was important for actresses and singers to be beautiful, authors could not (and should not, judging by the looks of most authors) depend on looks to sell their books (Cather to Van Tuyll, 24 May [1915]). The distinctions Cather made here between publicity and book design were ones she implemented: her picture never appeared on her dust jackets or frontispieces. However, she did approve photographs for use in those materials less connected to her actual work, such as sales booklets, posters, and other promotional materials.

Along with her correspondence, Cather's writing during the mid-1910s documents her concerns over issues of publicity in an image-driven market. In her 1916 short story "The Diamond Mine," written between the publication of The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia, Cather tells the story of a diva deeply concerned with her image. Cather opens her story with the diva, Cressida Garnet, surrounded by "young men with cameras." She stands "good-naturedly posing for them" because "she was too much an American not to believe in publicity." We further are told that she believed "All advertising was good. If it was good for breakfast foods, it was good for a prima donna,—especially for a prima donna who would never be any younger and who had just announced her intention of marrying a fourth time" (67). Cather's larger-than-life representation of her heroine in this story highlights her awareness of the ways in which artists were increasingly flattened into pure product—art and advertising threatened to become one and the same.

The pressure for artists like Cather and her fictional character Cressida Garnet to become public personalities was fueled, in part, by the emergence of the motion picture industry. The "movie star" became a new phenomenon that tied magazines, Hollywood, and advertising together, giving rise to a public personality much different from that of the nineteenth century; that is, these stars could generate significant public interest and fascination not so much by what they did but by the sheer fact of who they were (Susman 223). Richard Schickel argues that the movie celebrity forever altered the expectations the public had toward all public persons: politicians, writers, artists, intellectuals, and even scientists became "performers so that they may become celebrities so that in turn they may exert genuine influence on the general public" (9). This transformation of the public figure into celebrity figure resulted in two competing realities: on the one hand, there was the individual's everyday common life; on the other, there was the life one lived through newspapers and magazines, by which celebrities could be "as familiar to us, in some ways, as our friends and neighbors." The celebrity-as-familiar dominated "enormous amounts" of the public's "psychic energy and attention," even though the closest the average person would ever come to knowing these celebrities was in a halftone photographic image—literally, ink on paper (8).

Celebrity culture formulated itself most powerfully in the pages of popular magazines, and no magazine between the world wars better expressed that celebrity culture than Vanity Fair, a gem in publisher Condé Nast's crown, which included best-selling Vogue and, later, Home and Garden. Vanity Fair was founded in 1914 as a competitor to H. L. Mencken's Smart Set, and Vogue's success allowed Condé Nast to make Vanity Fair a "slick" magazine that incorporated all the costly elements that the financially rocky Smart Set was unable to give its readers: high-quality paper, graphic design, and a plethora of images. Editor Frank Crowninshield had bought Vanity Fair (then a small New York "peekaboo" magazine) in 1913 with a short-lived intention to reincarnate it into a Vogue-like fashion magazine. In 1914, however, he decided that he wanted Vanity Fair to be a magazine "read by people you meet at lunches and dinners" covering "the things people talk about at parties—the arts, sports, theatre, humor, and so forth" (qtd. in Douglas 96). Crowninshield's main strategy for setting the magazine apart from its competitors was to publish stories by European and American avant-garde writers and artists. In particular, Vanity Fair printed some of the first images of Picasso and Matisse, ran poems by Dorothy Parker, and published articles by Robert Benchley. According to magazine historian George Douglas, Vanity Fair "was as appealing to the eye as it was to the tastes of its intended readers . . . it always had substance and it always had guts" (94). With style and substance, Vanity Fair attracted the attention of New York's rich, educated elite, and while it never attained mass-market appeal (circulation hovered below 100,000), the high advertising rates Vanity Fair charged its select advertisers gave Condé Nast a profitable income.

The magazine hit its stride after World War I, when its identity folded perfectly into the mood of the Jazz Age's appetite for style, entertainment, and refinement. Readers of Vanity Fair are said to have conspicuously read the magazine in public and placed copies of the magazine on coffee tables before parties. The magazine's popularity suggests how it so masterfully captured the spirit of the postwar era—witty, playful, experimental, and rich. As John Russell says in his introduction to Vanity Fair: Photographs of an Age, "Vanity Fair was not in the business of aesthetics. It was in the business of getting people talked about" (xvii). Those talked about included the obvious group of Hollywood and Broadway celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson, but also included a surprisingly eclectic group of personalities including scientists, professional tennis players, golfers, boxers, conductors, composers, writers, critics, and even dog breeders. This construction of celebrity within Vanity Fair intermixed full-page portraits of well-known Hollywood and Broadway stars with the less well recognized, putting a glamorous face to writers, intellectuals, and composers while at the same time giving an intellectual flair to the Hollywood celebrity.

Vanity Fair, I suggest, defined celebrity in much more inclusive and even intellectual terms than did other popular magazines of its time. Crowninshield told his readers they were "people of discrimination, clever, and full of a wide and varied culture," and so he assumed that such readers would naturally be interested in the people he and his friends were interested in, from the stage actor to writer to sportswoman (qtd. in Russell xii). One could be a celebrity outside the narrow definition of the "movie star" in the magazine, which invited readers to place themselves imaginatively into celebrity culture through their consumption of the magazine.

A key aspect to the popularity of Vanity Fair stemmed from its use of photography. Crowninshield's belief that fine fashion photography could be elevated to an art form had helped Vogue become one of the most popular fashion magazines of the time, and he had similar revolutionary plans for photography in Vanity Fair. Hiring portrait artists such as Edward Steichen and Man Ray, relative unknowns in the world of high art, Crowninshield gave these photographers "privacy, discretion, unstressed commitment," and paid Steichen (at least) an annual salary of $35,000 (Russell x).

Steichen had been in the art world for more than twenty years by the time he signed onto Vanity Fair. Only six years younger than Cather, by the early 1900s he had become became involved with Alfred Stieglitz's circle as a founding member of "291" and Photo-Secession galleries. During World War I, Steichen helped develop aerial photography, and during this period he also began evaluating his aesthetics. Moving from the early photographic style of soft-focus pictorialism, Steichen's work with aerial photography began to pique his interest in sharp lines and clean detail—the fundamental aesthetic qualities he used to transform portrait photography. By the early 1920s Steichen had attained fame for avant-garde work, yet, according to Joanna Steichen, his "photography brought Steichen more fame than income" (xx). That all changed in 1923 when Steichen accepted his position with Vanity Fair and Vogue. His high Condé Nast salary raised eyebrows among Stieglitz's crowd, who saw Steichen's venture into commercial photography as selling out on their quest to improve the stature of photography in the art world. But according to Joanna Steichen, he believed in "the photograph's potential as a medium for mass communication," viewing his work with magazines as an artistic and aesthetic challenge to raise the everyday, pedestrian magazine photo into an artistic object (xx). No doubt Steichen's knowledge of mass communication directly led to his ability to produce what we now recognize as iconic photographs of his subjects.

A critical aspect of Vanity Fair's attractiveness to both literary and visual artists of the period was its ability to feature new, emerging artists and promote their name recognition within the art world in particular and in highbrow culture in general. This was certainly the case for Cather, who first appeared in a 1922 Vanity Fair article titled "American Novelists Who Have Set Art above Popularity: A Group of Authors Who Have Consistently Stood Out against Philistia." This group included Theodore Dreiser ("among the most extraordinary phenomena of American letters"), James Branch Cabell ("quite unlike anything else in American fiction"), Edith Wharton ("The greatest living American novelist"), Sherwood Anderson ("Foremost among those who are using the novel as a means of criticizing American civilization"), and Cather ("My Ántonia is the best novel ever written by an American woman writer") (Cleveland and Bradlee 58). The magazine's title for this page suggests some critical tensions with its own view of celebrity culture, as it highlights the fact that this group of authors put "Art above Popularity" even though the magazine itself gravitated around celebrity culture. Perhaps the key here is the magazine's reference to the "Philistia," or the lowbrow common reader who did not read Vanity Fair and thereby confirmed the intellectual superiority of those who did. Yet no matter how Vanity Fair positioned these writers to its readers, the fact remains that this first mention in Vanity Fair marked Cather's entrée into the developing celebrity culture of the 1920s. Cather fits into the larger celebrity model Philip Fisher has outlined, in which writers need to place themselves into "a high cultural form of celebrity" while at the same time maintaining "a personal hold on [their] audience" (156). This becomes, then, a balancing act of sorts as authors maintain a dual hold on highbrow and middlebrow audiences.

Although Cather had been a well-known and best-selling writer since her Pulitzer Prize award in 1923, her inclusion into celebrity culture came to fruition in 1927 when her portrait by Steichen was featured in Vanity Fair. A Cather letter reveals that she had dinner plans with Steichen in February 1927, presumably before or just after the sitting (Cather to Mary Virginia Auld, 19 February 1927). Steichen and Cather shared common interests, and his work, which included portraits of Cather's early heroes Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, must have fascinated her. There is little documentation detailing Cather's participation in and reaction to the Vanity Fair issue, although what we do have suggests that she was proud of the picture. Blanche Knopf, who worked closely with Cather throughout the 1920s, was so impressed with it she sent a telegram to Cather in Wyoming, writing, "have just seen steichen photograph in vanity fair simply superb don't you think would like to use it too if they permit and you approve with my love" (17 June 1927). Cather replied that by contract the photo belonged to Condé Nast, and so it could not be used for publicity (19 June 1927).

In the Vanity Fair portrait, Cather is featured seated, as Steichen captured most of his writers. She sits as though the viewer is sitting across from her in an intimate discussion, her right hand resting on the armrest of her chair. Cather looks comfortable and self-assured. Titled "An American Pioneer—Willa Cather," the profile employs Cather's most popular and well-known subject matter, the pioneer West. While the title plays up Cather's public persona as a western writer, the subhead explains, "The Noted Novelist Has Just Completed Her New Work 'Death Comes for the Archbishop.'" This profile, then, extended Cather's western image toward her new subject matter, the Southwest.

Cather's image in the Steichen photograph corresponds to an image of Cather as a western writer, yet the picture showcases her in other critical ways as well. Her loose-fitting middy blouse and tie together with her gently rolled cuffs suggest an informal moment—as if we have just found the writer in the midst of her work. Like Whitman, whose illustrations and photographs communicated a general attitude that corresponded to his literary work, Cather visually communicates a sense of her "forthright" style. Cather, this photograph suggests, is not regal like Edith Wharton, nor is she so stylish and "fast" as the younger Jazz Age writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Through this informal, forthright style, the Cather we see in the pages of Vanity Fair corresponds to the larger literary project she was building. As she laid out her aesthetics in her 1922 essay "The Novel Démeublé": "Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there" informs "the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself" (48-49, 50). Cather believed that art "crowded with physical sensations is no less a catalogue than one crowded with furniture" (50). That there is no visible background or foreground in the picture suggests that Cather's artistic aesthetic informs Steichen's composition. The viewer, then, is given a sense of intimacy with the author because there is nothing intruding between the subject and the viewer. Rather than ridding herself of the pioneer image she had built in advertising and interviews, Cather deepened the iconic resonance of the middy blouse and tie to encompass the entire West. This expansion of place beyond region would not have surprised avid readers of Cather, since the Southwest setting is critical in novels as early as The Song of the Lark (1915) and as recent as The Professor's House (1925).

The text accompanying Cather's photograph adds another level of complexity to the portrait as it positions Cather well at the top of American literature. As "the heir apparent to Edith Wharton's lonely eminence among America's women novelists," Cather, as Vanity Fair saw her, should be regarded as a literary giant, not just as a regionalist. The text ties Cather's aesthetic to the Steichen image: "The depth and variety of her understanding is implicit in a swift, muscular style, wrought with an economy that discovers the inevitable word and the inevitable idea." Yet the magazine writer is also savvy enough to note that Cather's "utterly transparent and forthright" style "conceals in its overtones a vast and subtle interplay of ironical intelligence."

While the photograph generally plays with Cather as western writer, it also resists placing her into categories. Cather's image in this photograph blurs distinctions of feminine/masculine and urban/regional; as the writer of the Vanity Fair article concludes, Cather is "beyond the categories of literary schools or genres." This resistance to classification begs readers to ask, just who is the Willa Cather presented in this photograph? Patricia Johnson counters Joanna Steichen's argument that Steichen captured the "private character in the public faces he photographed" (89-90), arguing that Steichen was a "master of illusion" who "concentrated on the sitter's looks rather than character": "His images of celebrities are chiefly publicity photographs: they extract and polish the public persona much as his advertising photographs create an image for the product. Thus they shaped the sitter's public identity or synthesized an established image. Audiences could feel that by reading a celebrity's image they knew the person beneath the surface" (200-201).

This leads us to ask, how much does the Steichen portrait reflect a deeper sense of the author herself? As the anonymously written text accompanying the portrait notes, while Cather's prose "seems utterly transparent," it also "conceals." Arguably, so too does Steichen's photograph conceal, or perhaps better yet, signify, a host of possible meanings to the viewer. Specifically, I draw on emerging scholarship that places modern women artists in the tradition of the dandy figure. Susan Fillin-Yeh argues that twentieth-century female dandies "took up and deliberately altered that dandy's image inherited from the nineteenth century, refashioning it to their own needs and a new avant-garde art" (130). Fillin-Yeh points to such diverse modernist figures as Georgia O'Keeffe and Coco Chanel as "glimpses of female dandies" we can recognize "through a refocused lens of theory and history," and she suggests that these artists responded to the struggle "to assert individuality with what was still male avant-garde culture" (133). Female dandies of the 1920s challenged the tradition of the male dandy, who was "a creature perfect in externals and careless of anything below the surface, a man dedicated solely to his own perfection through a ritual of taste," who was the "epitome of selfish irresponsibility . . . free from all human commitments that conflict with taste: passions, moralities, ambitions, politics or occupations" (13). But as for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century male dandy, costume for the early-twentieth-century female dandy was also a source of sexual transgression, especially since male dandyism rejected traditional familial attachments such as marriage and children in favor of showing refinement through the cut of clothing (Moers 18).

Fillin-Yeh points to Greenwich Village as a critical space for early-twentieth-century female dandy figures in the United States. Specifically within the world of Greenwich Village, Cather's home for twenty years, women could seek "distance from bourgeois life and conventional politics" by further distancing themselves from the either/or binaries that had historically limited women's artistic careers (131). By playing with masculinity, women artists simultaneously usurped the guise of traditional male artistic power and exposed that guise as a performance, blurring the line between male and female and ultimately allowing women artists to find power through ambiguity. As with the traditional dandy figure clad in costume, women's take on dandyism continued to operate as a "'social hieroglyphic' that hides, even as it reveals, class and social status and our expectations about them" (2). Fillin-Yeh suggests that such "ambiguities encourage dandies," who are "constantly" and "irrepressibly" drawn to reinvent their appearance (2). Yet the dandy's particular power comes not from clothing alone but moreover from a mysterious sexual je ne sais quoi quality that resides in the figure him or herself. In the case of the female dandy, and unlike the apolitical male dandy, Fillin-Yeh suggests that the performance of masculinity asserts that "the better man is (also) a woman" (14).

The construction of the dandy figure is especially well suited to Cather, because she had long played with the gendered quality of her dress. Going by the ambiguous nickname "Willie," and even less ambiguously signing her name "William Cather, Jr." and "Wm. Cather, M.D.," Cather was, as biographer James Woodress suggests, stymied by her personal ambitions toward a professional career and the cultural limitations of late-nineteenth-century American culture that restricted women's professional opportunities (55-56). Photographs from the late 1880s and early 1890s suggest Cather's playful invention with self-image. Janis P. Stout notes that while photographs of Cather in the early 1890s do evoke a boyish appearance, her clothing nevertheless kept within women's contemporary fashion (Cather 20). The critical point here for this discussion is not whether Cather was cross-dressing but whether from a young age she showed an uncanny ability to experiment with her outward appearance. Even after Cather abandoned her overtly "mannish" style midway through her university years in Lincoln, her softened professional look nevertheless retained hints of the "mannish." Photographs reveal that Cather had a fondness for waist shirts, middy blouses, and a variety of tie styles, including the masculine straight tie. While Cather may have been participating with other female modernists in revising the dandy figure, as with the boyish cross-dressing of her youth, her fashion once again fell in line with contemporary women's fashion. So while the dandified figure Cather represents was subtle, it was, nevertheless, readily available to readers "in the know."

Those "in the know" readers of the Vanity Fair portrait, then, had access to an entirely different reading of this portrait. Perhaps it is this quality of layered meaning that powers the iconic potential of Steichen's Cather portrait. Those who read this photograph within the specific context of the modern dandy figure could read Cather as a specifically urban, New York writer; Cather's middy blouse and tie, which draw attention to aspects of masculine dress, may have offered suggestions about Cather's sexuality. Subtly, this one portrait communicates all of the aspects of Cather's professional and private life that scholars still wrestle with—her play between New York and Nebraska identities, her ambiguity between masculine and feminine, and her aesthetic qualities. The brilliance of the photographic image in this case is that the portrait suggests Cather but does not contain her.

Edward Steichen had the power to build celebrities into iconic figures, and Cather worked to build her post-1927 public image as a reflection of his Vanity Fair portrait. In 1933 and 1940 newspaper features on Cather, for example, she reappears in her middy blouse and tie, affirming the iconic image she created years before. While the Steichen photograph highlights the celebrity culture and image of the 1920s, the outdoorsy, snapshot style of the newspaper photographs presents the same Cather in nature. Regardless of Cather's changes in her subject matter (most notably in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock), her public appearance remained the same. The authors of both newspaper features pick up on Cather's well-known image as a writer of the prairie and tie her physical appearance to her literary style. For example, in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's 1933 essay on Cather the subhead reads, "Willa Cather Lived Her Books before She Wrote Them. Her Girlhood Was Spent on the Unfenced Prairie; She Knew the Trials and Triumphs of the Pioneer." In the New York Herald Tribune, Stephen Vincent and Rosemary Benet similarly describe Cather as a real, unaffected person, having "no ivory tower about" her, since "she is too hearty for that." They further describe her appearance as "Of medium height, with clear blue eyes, she gives an impression of great intellectual vitality and serenity combined, calm strength and lively independence" (ix). Cather's photographs along with the writers' descriptions of her in the newspaper profiles strongly suggest the degree to which her "middy blouse image" became iconic to her audience. After twenty-five years of maintaining a particular stylish image, Cather did not allow that image to overtake her writing, but used it to complement her writing.

American icons such as Whitman, Twain, and Chaplin reveal the degree to which dress empowers a particular image of a celebrity to the public, what Sarah Burns calls "key markers of the public self" (223). Although Cather never developed a costume as strict as Twain's post-1906 white suit ensemble, she did develop and maintain a visual look that the public could easily recognize after her break with McClure's. In doing so, Cather built her iconic image in a subtle, but nevertheless effective, visual manner through her white middy blouse with loose-fitting tie. The look, much in the tradition of Whitman, ties Cather to her middle- and working-class readers, since the look was popular, comfortable, and relaxed. Snapshot pictures reveal that this look was an expression of her everyday style.

Cather's public image was further complicated by Cather herself. During 1937 and 1938, Knopf was working with Cather on the Autograph Editions of her collected works. Unlike her other novels, each edition in this collection was personalized with a different Cather portrait in its frontispiece. During this time Cather carefully defined her image through her selection process. Notably, she chose not to use the Steichen photograph in the edition (Stout, Calendar no. 208). Perhaps the reason lies in her growing ambivalence toward celebrity culture at the end of her career. Much like the experience Hemingway would later face, Cather found the price of fame too high to let her work be compromised by Hollywood movies like the disastrous 1934 adaptation of A Lost Lady. Leonard J. Leff argues that Hemingway's participation in his celebrity culture eventually became a "cancer" that "devoured the private person within." The iconic Hemingway could "spark sales and make publisher and author wealthy" simply using his photographs "on reprints, magazine stories, and book club advertisements," but those results came at a high price to the man who wanted to be taken seriously as an artist (198-99). Unfortunately, the literary market that made Cather retreat from public life in the late 1930s was only a sign of growing pressures on writers to serve as larger-than-life personalities first and artists second.

Despite this later ambivalence, Cather was an iconic figure of her culture by the end of the 1930s. Carefully balancing her image with reviews to sell books, maintaining a "style" through her middy blouse and tie that echoed back to Whitman's 1855 portrait, and getting her photograph in Vanity Fair at a critical moment in her career, Cather demonstrated an ability to read her culture's dependency on image to sell books. Beyond her lifetime, images such as Steichen's Vanity Fair portrait have come to stand as powerful evocations of Cather and her West. The University of Nebraska, for example, continues to promote the university and recruit students through photographs taken from Steichen's photo shoot with Cather. In this way, photographs live with us. Celebrity promises a chance for mortal humans to live beyond their years, through cultural memory and history.

Scholarship on canon construction suggests that texts become literary icons in much the same way that symbols accrue meanings, that is, through association. If a canonical work is "authoritative in our culture" (Bloom 1), then an iconic work might be emblematic or representative of certain ideas in a generally recognized way. In the case of both canon formation and iconography, intertextuality, or the ability to tap into a recognized tradition while still making a unique contribution, would seem essential. Sometimes canonicity and iconography collapse into one, rendering a literary text (or an author) both an icon and the cornerstone of a canon. The Old Testament, for example, occupies such a place in our culture and literature. Harold Bloom establishes this centrality of the Old Testament to the canon of Western literature by describing it as "such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies" (4). Many writers since have both adopted and adapted the biblical tradition as part of their own journey to canonical and iconic status. While Willa Cather's literary corpus has by now earned an indisputable place in the canon of American literature, her status as an icon is only beginning to be systematically investigated. One step toward understanding Cather as cultural icon might involve beginning to explicate an iconography of Cather. Therefore it would seem that the powerful undercurrent of the Old Testament in Cather's texts, in terms of both content (particularly themes and motifs) and techniques (style and genres), would provide significant insights into Cather's emergent status as literary and cultural icon.

Explication of these undercurrents should not, however, be confused with engaging in the often fascinating but ultimately meaningless process of enumerating correspondences. A major flaw in such delineations is the necessity of establishing intentionality on the author's part (otherwise we are just talking about coincidence). As familiar as Cather was with the Old Testament, it is safe to assume that she did not have access to (or perhaps even interest in) a wealth of biblical criticism and traditional rabbinic scholarship. But positing influence does not require intentionality. The likelihood that consciously created parallels and unconscious similarities coexist in Cather's work does not detract from the importance of these Old Testament echoes. Quite the contrary, as Cather herself might point out. In fact, it seems plausible to argue that given Cather's knowledge of the Old Testament, the elements that recur throughout Cather's novels serve as another manifestation of "the thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper" (Not Under Forty 76).

Cather's knowledge of the Bible and its lifelong influence on her sensibilities have been well established: the Bible was among her earliest reading materials, and at least one prominent critic "can imagine her enjoying the sonorous phrases of the King James Bible" at her own funeral (Hoover 192). Furthermore, Cather habitually read from the Bible before writing, according to Malcolm Cowley, who speculates "that it did involve a touch of piety" (188) despite Cather's avowal that she was only interested in quality prose. The rhythms and devices of that prose certainly made their mark. And although, as Thornton Wilder reports, Cather "regretted that she had formed this habit, for the prose rhythms of 1611 were not those she was in search of" (qtd. in Cowley 188), her disclaimer should only serve to pique our interest, particularly since in other places she accepts this influence as a matter of course.

Cather's admiration for the Old Testament as a literary text with far-reaching canonical influence is apparent in her review of Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, in which she proclaims the ubiquitous character of the Old Testament for herself and her contemporaries: We have all been there before, even if we have never crossed salt water. . . . The Bible countries along the Mediterranean shore were very familiar to most of us in our childhood. Whether we were born in New Hampshire or Virginia or California, Palestine lay behind us. We took it in unconsciously and unthinkingly perhaps, but we could not escape it. It was all about us, in the pictures on the walls, in the songs we sang in Sunday school, in the "opening exercises" at day school, in the talk of the old people, wherever we lived. And it was in our language—fixed, indelibly. The effect of the King James translation of the Bible upon English prose has been repeated down through the generations, leaving its mark on the minds of all children who had any but the most sluggish emotional nature. . . . The Book of Genesis lies like a faded tapestry deep in the consciousness of almost every individual who is more than forty years of age. (Not Under Forty 101-2) Further, much of what Cather says about Mann's text could also be said of her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers! For example, Cather praises Mann's decision to write from the inside instead of using structure to produce distance. In O Pioneers! she dramatizes the universal through the particular by using Alexandra to show how "the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman" (64). Cather also praises Mann's "tempo, the deliberate, sustained pace" (Not Under Forty 99), which she finds particularly appropriate to his subject. When writing O Pioneers!, Cather similarly allowed the text itself to dictate its form. James Woodress explains that she "worked out a form that was loosely episodic and let the tale pace itself" (Life and Art 156); this ultimately produced, in Cather's words, "a slow-moving story" (Willa Cather on Writing 94). Ultimately, what Cather proves in O Pioneers! is precisely that which she credits Mann with knowing: "what we most love is not bizarre invention, but to have the old story brought home to us closer than ever before, enriched by all that the right man could draw from it and, by sympathetic insight, put into it" (Not Under Forty 119). Hence by adapting the content and cadences of the Old Testament to the story of Swedes in Nebraska, Cather creates a novel that reaches back to the foundation of Western literature (the Old Testament) while simultaneously setting its author on the path to the immortality of iconic status.

Critical examinations of Cather and the Bible thus far have generally fallen into two categories: explications of allusions and attempts to link biblical influence with spiritual or religious identification. Building on the groundwork laid by these former explorations, this article quickly moves beyond the parallels to early Genesis to considerations of some of the less-often-noted books of the Old Testament. Even more fundamentally, it probes the way the literary techniques by which the Bible conveys its message similarly operate in O Pioneers!, emphasizing embedded structures as well as content-level comparisons.

While biblical style and influence is apparent throughout Cather's canon, many critics have used words like "archetypal" (Butterworth) and "iconic" (Urgo 44) specifically in reference to O Pioneers! The text that Ferris Greenslet said would establish Cather as "a novelist of the first rank" (qtd. in Woodress, Life and Art 159), O Pioneers! initiates the sequence of Nebraska novels that in turn made Cather a Nebraskan icon. In both lay and academic circles, Cather is equated with Nebraska in an iconographic way that belies the facts—she was not born there, she spent very little of her adult life there, and she is not buried there. And yet Cather is not connected with New York City (where she lived for more than forty years), Virginia (her birthplace), New Hampshire (where she is buried), or the Southwest (a prominent setting in Song of the Lark, The Professor's House and Death Comes for the Archbishop) in the way that she and Nebraska have become identified with each other. "Willa Cather" brings to mind the image (or icon) of a plow magnified against the sun, not a pub in Greenwich Village or even a turquoise set in dull silver. While it is arguable that someone like Gertrude Stein became an icon as much for how she lived as for what she wrote (particularly early in her literary career when she had trouble finding a publisher), it would seem that the private and reserved Cather became a cultural icon primarily through her literature. Cather describes writing O Pioneers! as a sort of homecoming: "this was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way, on a fine morning when you felt like riding" (Willa Cather on Writing 92-93). She similarly places the idea of homecoming at the thematic center of the Old Testament, which she calls "that greatest record of the orphan soul trying to find its kin somewhere in the universe" (Not Under Forty 97).

Indeed, O Pioneers! serves as a foundational text in Cather's canon and one that sets the stage for Cather's use of the characters, devices, and worldview of the Old Testament in subsequent texts. As Granville Hicks observes, "O Pioneers! contains all the elements that, in varying proportions, were to enter into her later novels" (139). While critics have already laid essential groundwork by analyzing the role of Genesis in the text (esp. Creation and the Fall), an expanded overview of some of the Old Testament echoes and parallels can further elucidate the iconography of this novel and thereby help to situate Cather herself within an iconographic tradition. A careful look at structure, characterization, theme, motif, and genre in O Pioneers! reveals that the Old Testament is, to a large extent, that which "is felt upon the page without being specifically named there" (Not Under Forty 50).

Like the Pentateuch, O Pioneers! consists of five books, and like the book of Deuteronomy (literally a "second [telling of the] law"), "Alexandra" serves as a sort of reprise for the main action that takes place in the first four books. In addition, Cather utilizes the technique of envelope structure, prominent in the Psalms and much other biblical prose, defined by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode as "a formal organizing device frequently used by biblical writers in which the borders of a poetic or narrative unit are marked by repetition, at the end, of salient terms, phrases or clauses that appear at the beginning" (669). While it is significant that O Pioneers! begins and ends with Alexandra and Carl on the land, it is equally important that two of the main figures introduced at the beginning of the novel, Marie and Emil, are absent from the final scene, an illustration of another significant biblical pattern: repetition with a difference. This technique is also apparent in repeated references to the white mulberry tree, roses, ducks, and journeys (especially the comings and goings of Emil and Carl). Using repetition as a structuring device is a hallmark of Cather's modernism, and it is equally characteristic of biblical prose. Furthermore, Alter's assertion that in biblical narrative "there is never leisurely description for its own sake; scene setting is accomplished with the barest economy of means" (22) could be taken word-for-word from Cather's philosophy of the novel démeublé: "How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and . . . leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre" (Not Under Forty 51).

Finally, even the composite structure of O Pioneers! is consistent with the composition of much biblical prose. As Keen Butterworth explains, Cather wrote "Alexandra" and "The White Mulberry Tree" and then "realized [the two] could be merged . . . to make a novel." David Stouck elaborates that the process took place over a period of several months and that the poem in the beginning, "Prairie Spring"—itself further evidence of genre blending—was part of Cather's writing process as well (Historical Essay 284-85). Rather than viewing composite structure as a flaw, biblical critics such as Alter liken it to other composite art, for example, the construction of great cathedrals, in which the presence of multiple artists does not take away from the greatness of the whole (25). Thus in both composition and form, Cather's iconic first Nebraska novel reveals a kinship with the Old Testament; the characters of the Old Testament resonate within Cather's text as well.

Crazy Ivar has been read variously as a religious mystic (Rosowski, Voyage 50), an embodiment of discomfort with sexual difference (Lindemann 37), a latter-day representation of the biblical Noah (Murphy, "Comprehensive" 115), an "early monastic desert Christian" (Schubnell 41), and one of a series of literary "wise fools." In addition to these comparisons, Ivar's emphasis on holiness through separateness echoes the ways of the Levitical priests. At the same time, the "spells" that periodically come upon Ivar, making him unlike himself and causing Alexandra's brothers to fear for her safety, further suggest the madness of Saul, the ill-fated warrior-king whose hybrid religio-political position is reflected bodily in his mysterious malady (Rosenberg 128). An "old-time" person (O Pioneers! 91) out of place in the New World and displaced from his property by an inability to manage it effectively, Ivar also bears a distinct resemblance to Old Testament prophets such as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Joel, all post-Exilic prophets who personally experience displacement and alienation.

To begin with, Jeremiah offers a precedent for the difficulties Ivar encounters in the New World, time and again facing a hostile audience and living under the ongoing threat of imprisonment. When Jeremiah prophesies doom to the Israelites, they respond on several occasions by having him beaten and imprisoned (Jeremiah 20:2, 26:8). In Cather's novel, Lou and Oscar, who have neither honored Ivar's requests nor heeded his warnings, advise Alexandra to institutionalize Ivar herself before the neighbors complain and Ivar is "taken up by force" (95), a thinly veiled threat that Alexandra recognizes but refuses to be intimidated by.

In addition to sharing aspects of Jeremiah's fate, Ivar joins Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the practice of prophecy as performance, living, as well as speaking, his prophecies. While both Jeremiah and Ezekiel symbolically act out aspects of the nation's fate, Ezekiel in particular undergoes symbolic sufferings, including having to lie on his side for 430 days and eat coarse bread cooked on coals of animal dung in order to teach and heal his wayward people (Ezekiel 4:4-17). Ivar seems to have a similar approach to healing, as Oscar reports: "They say when horses have distemper he takes the medicine himself, then prays over the horses" (37). Carl confirms that when Ivar helped his family with a sick horse, "he kept patting her and groaning as if he had the pain himself" (36). Further, Ezekiel is frequently referred to in the biblical text as Ben Adam, variously translated as "Mortal," "Son of Man," or "Son of Earth." The third translation suggests a particular kinship with Ivar, who goes barefoot and "dislikes human habitations" (84). While Ezekiel is particularly known for his visions (e.g., the flaming chariot and the dead bones resurrected), Ivar believes that he is "despised . . . because I have visions" (88).

Although Ivar's visions alienate him from his neighbors, he reports that where he came from, he was not unusual: "At home, in the old country, there were many like me, who had been touched by God. . . . But here, if a man is different in his feet or in his head, they put him in the asylum" (88). Such was the case in biblical times as well, according to the Hebrew sages, who teach that there were many more prophets than the twenty or so recorded in the Old Testament, but that only those whose prophecies transcend their context and have relevance for later generations are recorded and passed on. Another biblical precedent for Ivar's attitudes and experiences comes from the book of Joel, which proclaims "a radical democratization of spiritual authority" (Marks 230): "After that, / I will pour out My spirit on all flesh; Your sons and daughters shall prophesy; / Your old men shall dream dreams, / and your young men shall see visions" (Joel 3:1). Also like Joel, Ivar accepts prophecy but not necessarily all of the aspects of law and ritual: "he had a peculiar religion of his own and could not get on with any of the denominations" (40). Hence, some of Ivar's difficulties spring from the disjuncture between the individualist approach he takes toward religion and the conformity insisted upon by most of his neighbors.

While Ivar shares Jeremiah's experiences, Ezekiel's media, and Joel's attitudes, another important similarity between Ivar and the post-Exilic prophets is the shift in the role that each takes on after tragedy strikes and the concomitant shift in the tone of his message: condemnation to comfort. Once the great temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed, the prophets cease prophesying doom for the Israelites and instead speak of return to the Promised Land, reunification of the tribes of Israel, renewal of the covenant between God and his people, and rebuilding of the sanctuary. Ivar shares this role, for after he discovers "sin and death for the young ones" (242), he serves as Alexandra's caretaker and comforter. He looks after both her physical well-being and her psychological needs, fetching her by wagon from the graveyard during a storm and using biblical tones as he urges Signa: "When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open. She will have a message from those who are gone, and that will bring her peace. Until then we must bear with her" (246-47). In fact, the need for rebuilding and moving on in the face of tragedy is just one important thematic echo of the Old Testament in O Pioneers !

While the book of Genesis gives us the Creation story, the Garden of Eden, and paradise lost, it also introduces thematic elements such as the wanderings and generations of the forefathers, the tension between continuity and crisis, the necessity of sacrifice, the ties of brotherhood, and the destructive capacity of jealousy; O Pioneers! resonates with these themes, as well. For example, in Cather's novel, Lou's and Oscar's fear that Alexandra's accumulated wealth will go outside the family prompts them to run off her only suitor. Even her suspicions of their plans—later confirmed by Carl himself—cannot prevent Carl from being driven away. Furthermore, we learn that Frank is "jealous about everything, his farm and his horses and his pretty wife" (111). The harm caused by jealously permeates the Pentateuch from Cain's murderous jealously of Abel to the envy that prompts Joseph's brothers to stage his death and sell him into bondage, and it wreaks havoc on Cather's Divide, as well.

Looking beyond Genesis, the book of Numbers presents the wilderness as a testing ground, a theme that finds analogue in "The Wild Land" of O Pioneers! Indeed, while the fourth book of the Pentateuch does begin with a census and contain many numbers, this is not an accurate translation from the Hebrew. Rather, Bamidbar translates as "In the Wilderness," a much more fitting name for the biblical book and a clear parallel to the testing ground of the prairie's "Wild Land." While wandering in the desert and relying on God to provide for them, some Israelites repeatedly grumble about leaving the ills of Egypt for another, less certain set of ills in the desert, saying, "Oh, why did we ever leave Egypt!" (Numbers 11:20). Such grumbling usually provokes rebuke from Moses and yet another sign of God's omnipotence. The wanderings are full of tests—no food here, no water there—but the most important test involves spying out the Promised Land, a test that all but two of the spies (Joshua and Caleb) fail. The spies report: "The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are men of great size . . . and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them" (Numbers 13:32-33). Hearing this account, the community directs its backlash to Moses and Aaron: "If only we had died in the land of Egypt . . . or if only we might die in this wilderness! Why is the Lord taking us to that land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be carried off! It would be better for us to go back to Egypt! . . . Let us head back for Egypt" (Numbers 14:2-4). Only Joshua and Caleb respond: "The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land. If the Lord is pleased with us, he will bring us into that land, a land that flows with milk and honey, and give it to us; only you must not rebel against the Lord" (Numbers 14:8-9). As a result of the spies' lack of faith, the entire wilderness generation, save Joshua and Caleb, is fated to die outside the Promised Land.

The Divide in O Pioneers! tests its inhabitants, as well. It has "its little joke," as Alexandra calmly remarks in retrospect, but while it was "pretend[ing] to be poor" (108), it required sacrifice and faith from the farmers, and Alexandra's belief in the land is gauged in precisely these terms. Like the Israelites who grumbled in the desert, the pioneers on Cather's Divide have second thoughts about coming "to the end of the earth" (23), first leaving the Old Country and then abandoning steady jobs in the city for the unknowns of the frontier. For example, when the Linstrums give up on the land and return to St. Louis, where Mr. Linstrum will return to his factory job, Lou tries to convince Alexandra that "everybody who can crawl out is going away" (57). While Lou and Oscar contend that "it's too high to farm up here," Alexandra insists that "the land itself will be worth more than all we can ever raise on it" (58). Having gone to spy out the river farms, Alexandra tells Emil, "we must have faith in the high land" (63), the land of their father, and she transmits this attitude to Lou and Oscar. And when Lou demands a sign, asking "how do you know that land is going to go up enough to pay the mortgages," Alexandra can only offer him faith: "I can't explain that, Lou. You'll have to take my word for it. I know, that's all" (66). Lou objects that Alexandra's idea "must be crazy or everybody would be doing it," but Alexandra realizes that "the right thing is usually just what everybody doesn't do" (67). Like the Israelites who have a special destiny, Cather's epic farmers must chart their own path, trust their fathers, and show faith during difficult times.

Looking beyond the themes of the Pentateuch, the book of Isaiah provides additional prototypes of farming and fecundity motifs and a miraculous journey, echoed in Alexandra's trip to the river farms. Butterworth notes that "the land which at first seemed flat and monotonous proved to furnish endless variations on the theme of fertility." In Isaiah, "The future emerges as a seed shooting forth and opens for itself a way upward" (Schokel 178). Isaiah further prophesies that "The arid desert shall be glad, the wilderness shall rejoice and shall blossom like a rose" (35:1), while in Nebraska, "under the long shaggy ridges, [Alexandra] felt the future stirring" (69). Similarly, Isaiah later reports that "Truly the Lord has comforted Zion, comforted all her ruins; He has made her wilderness like Eden, Her desert like the Garden of the Lord" (51:3). Sixteen years after the opening of Cather's novel, the once-poor Divide has been transformed into a new Eden of rich farmland: "there is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country" (74). Clearly, the motif of seasonal renewal in O Pioneers! extends well beyond that of initial Creation.

Moving from the Prophets to Ketuvim, or the other collected writings of the Old Testament, the book of Ecclesiastes, which reminds us "to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven" (3:1), also provides important thematic precedents for Cather's novel. Ecclesiastes stands out in the Old Testament for its basic secularity: the locus of authority is not God or tradition but individual experience. Indeed, its emphasis on realism, experimentation, and cyclical patterns suggests that everyone must struggle to find his or her own answers: try out, build up, destroy, and move on. The Hebrew sages explain that the paired lines that make up the famous third chapter do not fall into a predictable pattern—for example, stating the good and then the bad—because life itself has no order. Instead, Ecclesiastes offers a realistic outlook on life, suggesting that the key to happiness is not to avoid difficult times but to know how to handle them when they come. Furthermore, the cycles put things in perspective, reminding us that the pendulum will come back around. These are lessons that Alexandra learns firsthand. The opening words of Ecclesiastes, Hevel hevalim, have been variously translated as "vanity of vanities" or "utter futility," but they also connote that which is ephemeral or fleeting, suggesting that everything in this world is constantly changing and short-lived and that therefore we must make the most of our time here. Certainly Alexandra senses the basic ephemerality that forms the backbone of Ecclesiastes when she tells Carl, "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 land is "the great fact" (O Pioneers! 11) in Nebraska, in Cather's writing, and in the Old Testament. And once the pioneers learn to farm the land productively, it becomes, as Carl notes, a land of "milk and honey" (110). In O Pioneers! the land takes on a special status; as Butterworth observes, "the sacredness of landscape is evoked with spiritual intensity." Cather's novel chronicles the creation and ordering of the land, but it also records the conquering and settling of land, the focus of the biblical book of Joshua. Indeed, the book of Joshua is divided into two nearly equal sections: chapters 1-12 recount the conquering of the land, while chapters 13-22 focus on the Israelites' efforts to become a people in the land. Further, the promise of the land, preparation for entering the land, attaining and conquering the land, becoming a people in the land, and striving to retain and then to regain the land form the crux of the bulk of the Pentateuch and the Prophets (from Genesis to Malachi). Because the Promised Land is a special inheritance that God has set aside for his chosen people, the books of Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua contain numerous injunctions to the Israelites to separate themselves from the practices and beliefs of the nations who currently occupy it: "When the Lord your God has cut down before you the nations that you are about to enter and dispossess, and you have dispossessed them and settled in their land, beware of being lured into their ways after they have been wiped out before you! Do not inquire about their gods, saying 'How did those nations worship their gods? I too will follow those practices'" (Deuteronomy 12:29-30). Although Alexandra is willing to listen to college graduates, the land itself, and her own heart, her conservative brothers resist doing anything that might make them stand out: "they hated experiments and . . . disliked to do anything different from their neighbors" (47). Not surprisingly, it is to Alexandra that the "Genius of the Divide . . . bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before" (64).

Alexandra's success is not unmitigated, however. She links her success on the land with that of her "tended-hearted" boy (55), Emil, and she reflects: "Yes, . . . it had been worth while; both Emil and the country had become what she had hoped. Out of her father's children there was one who was fit to cope with the world, who had not been tied to the plow, and who had a personality apart from the soil. And that, she reflected, was what she had worked for. She felt well satisfied with her life" (191). It is at precisely this moment that the Nebraskan landscape exacts its toll. Alexandra's efforts toward continuity and freedom are cut off by Emil's death. The very best (Emil, Marie, and even Amedee) do not live to enjoy the land's fruits, seemingly singled out because they are the best, as Carl surmises: "he was the best there was, I suppose. They were both the best you had here" (271). In the Old Testament, Moses was a prophet like no other, as Deuteronomy relates: "never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses—whom the Lord singled out, face to face" (34:10). He sees God's face, leads his people out of Egypt, shepherds them through forty years of wandering in the desert, and brings them to the brink of the Jordan only to be condemned to die on the far side. And while Alexandra has a special relationship with the prairie, she cannot foresee or prevent the events that occur under the white mulberry tree, events that threaten to negate everything she has accomplished. Just as Moses is credited with delivering the tablets from Sinai and recording the Pentateuch but cannot make the crossing himself, Alexandra realizes that the story of the Divide is written "with the best we have" (272).

While what happens under "The White Mulberry Tree" contains elements of the Garden of Eden motif (Murphy, "Comprehensive" 113-17; Rosowski, Voyage 54) and draws on the Greek pastoral tradition (Rosowski, Voyage 54), this section of O Pioneers! also has important connections to the biblical pastoral, Song of Songs, a love poem that uses juxtaposition of images (especially red and white) to explore the tension between unity and disunity and the dual-edged nature of love. Narrative cannot be the point of "The White Mulberry Tree," as Elizabeth Janeway observes: the story itself is "ancient" and "often told" (xii). Along similar lines, Francis Landy argues that Song of Songs offers "no 'story' . . . , no truth, only a set of anecdotes, hovering between reality and dream, that exemplify the relationships of lovers" (316). Cather's novel and the biblical pastoral also share a prevalent image pattern: "the interplay of white and red evokes a powerful symbolic contrast (purity versus sexuality)" (Landy 309). This juxtaposition recurs throughout O Pioneers! whenever the mulberry tree and the orchard are mentioned: when Alexandra brings Carl to visit Marie, we are told that "wild roses were flaming in the tufts of bunchgrass along the fence," immediately followed by information about the "white mulberry tree" (124). When Emil agrees to mow the orchard for Marie, he finishes to find her "sitting under her white mulberry tree, the pailful of cherries beside her" (138). Finally, Ivar discovers "white mulberries . . . covered with dark stain" (240); this image is paralleled by a scene that tells the other half of the story: "two white butterflies from Frank's alfalfa field were fluttering in and out among the interlacing shadows . . . and in the long grass by the fence the last wild roses of the year opened their pink hearts to die" (241).

Thematically, the warning of Song of Songs, "For love is fierce as death, Passion is mighty as Sheol" (8:6), is embodied in Frank's jealous rage and the subsequent death of the lovers. Landy further reminds us that love "is the bond of a vital society" but can "also threaten . . . social order" (318). Lack of awareness of this potential threat to the social order is precisely what blinds Alexandra to theeloping passion between Emil and Marie: "she wondered at herself now, but she had never thought of danger in that direction. If Marie had been unmarried,—oh yes. Then she would have kept her eyes open. But the mere fact that she was Shabata's wife, for Alexandra, settled everything. . . . Now, Alexandra could in a measure realize that Marie was, after all Marie; not merely a 'married woman'" (253). Marie's heroic last act of dragging herself to her beloved, "his brows . . . drawn in a frown," and her "look of ineffable content" (241) suggest another central theme of Song of Songs, as Landy explains: "the disunity is also that of the lovers, whose work of integration can never be completed" (316). It is perhaps on the strength of the ideals of Song of Songs that Alexandra chooses to visit Frank and work to have him pardoned. For the biblical pastoral is ultimately a love story about relationships—between a lover and a beloved, between God and the Israelites, and between the sometimes contradictory impulses within a single human heart.

As perhaps the most enduring and influential text in Western literature, the Bible serves as a crucial foundation for Cather's work, and one that goes far beyond the interesting and important echoes of early Genesis to encompass structure, characterization, theme, motif, and genre across a number of biblical texts. Understanding how the various iconic elements of the Old Testament have been employed and transformed in O Pioneers! is an important first step that can only enhance our appreciation for Cather's literary accomplishments and their enduring qualities. Indeed, the Old Testament is a prime source of those "two or three human stories [that] go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before" (110).

Such stories recur throughout Cather's canon; in subsequent texts she will use the elements that she establishes centrally in O Pioneers! in iconographic ways, reassembling them to create new variations on familiar themes. As Merrill Skaggs explains, Cather "relied from the beginning through the end of her career on a repertory of trusted devices to get her to her desired new goals" (12). Thus, it would seem possible and indeed essential to systematically explore an iconography of Cather, highlighting other such broadly based biblical techniques as type-scenes, leitwort, and sequence-of-action repetitions across Cather's corpus. Through tapping into an iconographic biblical tradition and creating her own literary iconography, Cather lays the groundwork for becoming a cultural icon herself, fulfilling her own oft-quoted pronouncement: "every artist makes himself born" (Song of the Lark 153). Cather's journey and our investigation begin with the Old Testament echoes in O Pioneers !

Matthew Arnold judged Wordsworth and Byron "first and pre-eminent in actual performance, a glorious pair, among the English poets of this century. . . . When the year 1900 is turned," he added, "and our nation comes to recount her poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, the first names with her will be these" ("Byron" 236-37). Arnold's influential preface to Poetry of Byron (1881) helped create icons, literary figures who would become touchstones for future generations. For Arnold, Wordsworth and Byron operated as emotional shorthand: the reflective Wordsworth contrasting with the tempestuous Byron. By creating characters who are by turns Wordsworthian and Byronic in My Ántonia and Lucy Gayheart, Willa Cather engaged in a dialogue with the British icons who preceded her.

My Ántonia exemplifies this engagement, for Cather portrays Jim Burden as a man who has closed his Byron and opened his Wordsworth. My Ántonia celebrates Wordsworth's values as expressed in "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," though the theme of nature never betraying the heart that loved her is colored, curiously enough, by allusions to Byron's "When We Two Parted." In Lucy Gayheart, Cather turned to the theme of Byronic pessimism, and this particular lyric, in earnest. She showed just what can happen when someone gives way to Byronic passions without the sustaining influence of the land (Clement Sebastian) and what can happen when he does not (Harry Gordon). My Ántonia ends on a note of Wordsworthian hope, with Jim Burden exalted by the picture of Ántonia that revives again, much as Wordsworth drew sustenance from the "wild eyes" of his sister, Dorothy. Lucy Gayheart ends with the heroine's drowning and Harry Gordon's meditation on the meaning of her death and his own, quite passionless, life. For Jim Burden and for Lucy Gayheart, as for many in the nineteenth century, Byronism is both an inspiration and a disease. If the Wordsworthian impulse is centrifugal, inclined toward nostos (home-bound), the Byronic is centripetal, marked by nomadic wandering. Lucy Gayheart summarizes these twin impulses as she contemplates the Byronic influence of Clement Sebastian on her life: "she had lost it as one can lose a ravishing melody, remembering the mood of it, the kind of joy it gave but unable to recall precisely the air itself," Cather's narrator notes. "If only one could lose one's life and one's body and be nothing but one's desire; if the rest could melt away and that could float with the gulls, out yonder where the blue and green were changing!" (103). Cather's characters express a similar wish to cast off restrictions on their artistic vision, an allegory, perhaps, for Cather's own literary career in which she achieved iconic status, in part, by rejecting American forms of parochialism.

In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" (126). Five years had passed since he first visited the Wye valley in 1793, and "Tintern Abbey" begins by recording this fact: "Five years have passed; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters!" (ll. 1-2). Wordsworth contrasts chronological time (clock time) with felt time. In the year 1793 (five years before 1798), he stood with his sister and Annette Vallon in Calais, having visited France shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution. England declared war on France in February 1793, and in January of that month Louis XVI was beheaded. So important is the passage of time for Wordsworth that he includes the date of July 13, 1798, in the very title of the poem, using the word "again" ("Once again / . . . again repose") in order to chart his mental development from what he once was to what he now is, to what he will one day become. Specifically, Wordsworth charts his movement from a childish experience of nature, to adolescence, to adult-hood (ll. 66-88). Through Dorothy's eyes, the speaker learns to look on nature . . . not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. (ll. 89-93) The barometer of Wordsworth's changes is his sister, Dorothy, the unseen presence who inspires the poem itself. The poet clearly prefers the loyalty of nature ("Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her"), which he finds exemplified in Dorothy, to the fickleness of the French Revolution (July 14, 1789), to which he indirectly alludes (Johnston 13).

In her introduction to My Ántonia, Cather depicts a special understanding between reader and listener, one fused by the landscape they shared and by their sensitivity to Nature (x). Wordsworth depends upon Dorothy to maintain his relationship to nature and his better self. Jim Burden lives imaginatively as long as Ántonia is alive in his mind. The land becomes "more dear both for itself and for thy sake," the Wordsworthian speaker says.

As writers, both Jim Burden and Wordsworth consider women as muses, forces that connect them to the earth. Part of this connection is linguistic; it helps to explain the simple, unadorned language one finds in Wordsworth and Cather. Like the narrator of My Ántonia, Wordsworth lived in a time that threatened to "blunt the discriminating powers of the mind . . . unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor" ("Preface" 128). Cather's narrator in My Ántonia notes how Jim's marriage has been unfortunate; his wife does not appreciate his "quiet tastes" any more than Wordsworth's audience was prepared to appreciate "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey." Just as Wordsworth attacked the "sickly and stupid German Tragedies" that pandered to a vulgar taste created by "the encreasing accumulation of men in cities" ("Preface" 128) such as London, Burden's wife patronizes a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas and mediocre ability" in New York (x). Wordsworth's purpose, by contrast, was to "adopt the very language of men" ("Preface" 130); to include "no personifications of abstract ideas" (130) such as appear in the poetry of Pope; to avoid artificial diction and allegorical language such as appears in the poetry of Thomas Gray; to deny any "essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition" (134). These are very much akin to Burden's simple tastes, scorned by his urban and sophisticated wife, and form another "kind of freemasonry" (x). The public for both Cather and Wordsworth is led astray by the "gaudiness and inane phraseology" (Wordsworth, "Advertisement" 116) of modern writers, by the assault on the senses that is characteristic of urban life.

In My Ántonia, the heroine speaks a language of the heart not unlike the diction Wordsworth defended in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Jim is attracted to Tony because her language is as striking and vivid as her personality. She conveys an emotional and physical warmth that contrasts strikingly with his mother's patronizing attitude toward the Shimerdas. Tony slipped under his arm. "It is very cold on the floor, and this is warm like the badger hole. I like for sleep there," she insisted eagerly. . . . As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and brought out a bag made of bed-ticking. . . . At sight of it, the crazy boy began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent, even among the other odors of that cave. She measured a teacup full, tied it up in a bit of sacking, and presented it ceremoniously to grandmother. "For cook," she announced. "Little now; be very much when cook," spreading out her hands as if to indicate that the pint would swell to a gallon. (73, 75) Cather takes up the mantle that Wordsworth threw down for this passage, which includes its own idiot boy "smack[ing] his lips." At the same time, the passage points out Grandmother Burden's spiritual limitations, the way in which a decorous language keeps her from conveying the spiritual warmth Ántonia exudes. "All the way home, Grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good Christian people could forget they were their brothers' keepers" (75-76), she says rather too piously.

Cather's obvious respect for the Shimerdas, immigrants from Bohemia, plays itself out as a competition between two countries, even two types of bread ("I prefer our bread to yours, myself" [75]), and ultimately two forms of Christianity (Protestant and Catholic). One might even argue that the novel is about two ways of speaking. As Wordsworth wrote, in a preface meant to explain his own aesthetic purpose in including such poems as "The Idiot Boy" and "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" in a single collection: "Low and rustic life was chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity; are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language" ("Preface" 124). Cather was as committed as Wordsworth to conveying "feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions" ("Preface" 124). In recalling Ántonia, Jim Burden speaks the "emphatic" ("Preface" 124) language of the heart, for the "introduction" presents his manuscript as a continuation of a conversation he has on a "burning day when we were crossing Iowa" (xi). Throughout his text, Jim Burden succeeds in recapturing his heroine through an attention to the language of everyday life.

As Cather continues her introduction, pictorial metaphors like those employed by Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey" emphasize the theme of recollection that is such an important part of his novel. "I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, and had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him," the frame narrator notes. "He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her" (xi-xii). Wordsworth's reliance on pictorial metaphors in "Tintern Abbey"—the picture in the mind that revives again—recalls Burden's gift: "He made me see her again" (xii). Burden fulfills Wordsworth's dictum that poetry is the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility" ("Preface" 126), for he writes Ántonia's history long after his most passionate feelings for her have subsided, giving the manuscript to a friend.

At the very moment when Cather is most Wordsworthian, she inevitably alludes to Byron. In the introduction, her narrator notes that Jim "had found her again after long years," recalling Byron's lyric "When We Two Parted" ("If I should meet thee / After long years"). Cather then repeats this grace note two more times at key points in the novel, to heighten the dramatic encounter between her central characters and provide both pathos and historic, even poetic, gravitas.

The next afternoon I walked over to the Shimerdas' . . . Ántonia was shocking wheat . . . I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way off.

She stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears. (310)

In Cather's novel, animosities and sexual jealousy are kept at a lower temperature than in Byron's letters to Lady Melbourne describing these relationships. The next meeting between Ántonia and Burden, more than twenty years later, reflects Cather's method of mixing recollection and erotic passion, for it strikes both Wordsworthian and Byronic notes, though the former predominate (321). The echo of a romantic, Byronic moment, "It always is [a shock] to meet people after long years," competes with the Wordsworthian tone of this passage. Burden sees "the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well" (321). Wordsworth was interested in the courage it takes to face life with fortitude: many of his figures—the Old Cumberland Beggar, the leech gatherer in "Resolution and Independence," Michael—become heroes or heroines because of their endurance. For Cather, raising a large family requires a heroism (as she suggests in Song of the Lark) tantamount to those acts rewarded by nations in paintings by Delacroix or pensions granted to war heroes. My Ántonia is emphatically not a story of the boy getting the girl "after long years," of becoming disappointed with her or sharing in her shame. Rather, it is about a boy attaining the "philosophic mind" to appreciate Ántonia's human dignity (her "grizzled" hair) despite all the hardship she has been through and to accept her unconventionality in the best Byronic, Wordsworthian, and romantic spirit.

What Jim Burden values in Ántonia is precisely her capacity to bring pictures before the mind, a quality Wordsworth attributes to his sister, Dorothy. Both Dorothy and Ántonia serve as an amanuensis: an inspirational force that helped the poet visualize nature in his mind's eye. Wordsworth wrote that "Tintern Abbey" has not been "As is a landscape to a blind man's eye" (l. 25); "Ántonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade, that grew stronger with time," Jim Burden writes of her after this final encounter (342). In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer: Ántonia kicking her bare legs against the sides of my pony when we came home in triumph with our snake; Ántonia in her black shawl and fur cap, as she stood by her father's grave in the snowstorm; Ántonia coming in with her work-team along the evening sky-line. She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. (342) What could be more Wordsworthian than this final phrase? After all, Wordsworth wrote that his task in such poems as "Tintern Abbey" was to show the extraordinary in the ordinary ("whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way" ["Preface" 124]). Cather's portrait of Ántonia with her hand on a crab tree encourages the reader to revisit the Eden myth: there is no fall now, but only a solitary reaper who "makes you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting" (342). Both Burden and Wordsworth celebrate their own countries, their own land, and the women who inhabit them. They write their prose poems and their lyrics for these women. Lena Lingard's laughter "gave a favourable interpretation to everything," Burden writes of his Norwegian lover. An image of the beautiful, alliteratively named Lena Lingard floats before him on the page like a picture, and underneath it stood the mournful line from Virgil's Georgics that so moved Samuel Johnson and which serves as epigraph to My Ántonia: "Optima dies . . . Prima fugit," "the best days are the first to flee" (iii). It is worth thinking about how Wordsworth's poem, Cather's novel, and W. T. Benda's illustrations create pictures in the mind that "revive again." Which are the most precious? Which are the first to flee? And which ones, ultimately, will we remember?

But My Ántonia was not the last novel in which Cather posed such questions or attempted to reconcile Wordsworth and Byron through allusions to their verse. Lucy Gayheart's very name recalls Wordsworth's Lucy poems and the blithe possibilities of rural life. Leaving the town of Haverford, Nebraska, is Lucy's undoing and her fulfillment, for in Chicago she meets the great egotist Clement Sebastian, whose strange marriage and curiously intimate relationship with his lame piano player, James Mockford, recalls both Byron's satiric wit and his disability. Mockford's disability, after all, is precisely Byron's: a club foot, dragged "across the stage" (30) with due melodrama. Critics have noted that Sebastian feeds like a vampire on Lucy's youth (Rosowski 225): as such he recalls Dr. Polidori, Byron's physician, who wrote a sketch inspired by that famous night in Switzerland when Mary Shelley began Frankenstein. Polidori's "The Vampyre" was attributed, falsely, to Byron, and so the war of egos that ensued (Marchand, Biography 2: 787), with Byron denying his authorship, sets the stage for Mockford's uncomfortable rivalry with Sebastian and Lucy's mistrust of him (39).

Thrown in for good measure is Giuseppe, the Italian footman, who recalls Byron's adventure in Italy and the Italian circle that would soon surround him in Geneva and Pisa, near the Bay of Spezia where Shelley drowned.

Cather's allusions to Byron as icon work in at least two ways. The first is literary, through direct references to Byron's lyric "When We Two Parted"; the second is biographical, with references to Shelley's near-drowning, Byron's funeral cortege, and other incidental features of Byron's life: his Scottishness (which is compared to Gordon's), his friendship with Larry MacGowan (which resembles Byron's with Leigh Hunt), his homoerotic friendships with young men and boys like Mockford, MacGowan, and Marius, the adopted son he acquires (all of which recall Don Juan's adoption of Leila and Byron's infatuations with John Edleston, Robert Rushton, Lukas Chalandritsanos, and others). Cather juxtaposes these allusions to Byron's life with Wordsworth's Lucy poems (which explore another Lucy's death) and with the acts of recollection by Harry Gordon, who merges Byronic and Wordsworthian voices by behaving like Byron but recollecting Lucy in Wordsworthian fashion.

I will begin with the allusions to "When We Two Parted." As in My Ántonia, they are repeated at least three times. The first occurs when Lucy hears Clement sing. Shortly after her first meeting with Byron in 1812, Caroline Lamb described "That beautiful pale face" as her "fate" (Marchand, Biography 1: 331) and summed up Byron as "mad—bad—and dangerous to know" (328). Lucy senses a similar danger when she encounters Clement Sebastian:

Sebastian walked to the front of the stage in the half-darkness and began to sing an old setting of Byron's When We Two Parted; a sad, simple old air which required little from the singer, yet probably no one who heard it that night will ever forget it.

Lucy had come home and up the stairs into this room, tired and frightened, with a feeling that some protecting barrier was gone—a window had been broken that let in the cold and darkness of the night. Sitting here in her cloak, shivering, she had whispered over and over the words of that last song: When we two parted, In silence and tears, Half broken-hearted, To sever for years, Pale grew thy cheek and cold, Colder thy kiss; Surely that hour foretold Sorrow to this. It was as if that song were to have some effect upon her own life. She tried to forget it, but it was inescapable. It was with her, like an evil omen. (32)

In a striking transition ("Lucy had come home . . ."), Cather switches the reader from the present tense to Lucy's recollection of the event, as if to combine the Wordsworthian retrospective glance with the adrenaline rush of her heroine's first encounter with a great artist. The poem, cast as a Wordsworthian backward glance, is also an evil Byronic omen predicting the future. (One aspect of this omen is that it is Mockford, not Sebastian, who has the pale, though not beautiful, face.)

The second incident occurs when Sebastian and Lucy part as Sebastian prepares for his continental tour. Sebastian's thoughts are despairing ("It was a parting between two who would never meet again" [126]), and Lucy slowly realizes their love is doomed. "Lucy knew what he was thinking. She felt a kind of hopeless despair in the embrace that tightened about her. As they passed a lamppost she looked up, and in the flash of light she saw his face. Oh, then it came back to her! The night he sang When We Two Parted and she knew he had done something to her life. Presentiments like that one were not meaningless; they came out of the future. Surely that hour foretold sorrow to this. They were going to lose something. They were both clinging to it and to each other, but they must lose it" (117). In what amounts to an explication of Byron's poem, Cather stresses key phrases to depict Lucy's and Sebastian's anguish: he notes their "parting between two," and she casts her mind into the future. "Lucy felt the old terror coming back; to sever for years" (128). With her sense of "presentiment," Lucy has become "theatrical" (154), as her sister Pauline later regrets: she has caught the Byronic disease, even as her life unfolds in the tripartite time scheme that recalls Wordsworth's description of his life in "Tintern Abbey."

The final allusion to "When We Two Parted" occurs when Harry (Clement's double) abandons Lucy and "share[s] in her shame" by refusing to show her any kindness after Clement's death. When Harry avoids picking up Lucy in his sled during a winter storm, in one of many petty acts—she shouts his name in reproof: "'Harry!' Indignation, amazement, authority, as if she wouldn't allow him to do anything so shameful" (221). The word "shameful" recalls the diction of Byron's lyric, "share in its shame" (and reminds the reader of Larry Donovan's mistreatment of Ántonia in their mock marriage).

If Cather was interested in Byron's "When We Two Parted," as these playful allusions suggest, she was also interested in the male psychology that made such self-serving lyricism possible (evident, perhaps, in Clement and Lucy's willingness to conflate singing a musical setting for Byron's poem with being Byron). In the climax of her novel she rewrites Shelley's boating accident (especially Byron's narration of it) to expose the dangers of Byronic egotism. "The story of Shelley's agitation is true," Byron wrote to John Murray on 15 May 1819, I can't tell what seized him—for he don't want courage. He was once with me in a Gale of Wind in a small boat right under the rocks between Meillerie & St. Gingo—we were five in the boat—a servant—two boatmen—& ourselves. The Sail was mismanaged & the boat was filling fast—he can't swim.—I stripped off my coat—made him strip off his—& take hold of an oar—telling him that I thought (being myself an expert swimmer) I could save him if he would not struggle when I took hold of him. (Letters and Journals 11: 220; my emphasis) Cather's novel replays this scene. Mockford could not swim and was apparently terrified; he had locked his arms about Sebastian's neck. Wiertz thought Sebastian would be able to control a man so much slighter, so he swam toward the boats coming out from shore. . . . Mockford must have fastened himself to his com panion with a strangle-hold and dragged him down. The bodies had not yet been recovered. (138; my emphasis) In a mock inversion of Shelley's relationship to Byron, Mockford clings to life relentlessly, drowning Sebastian in the process. Shelley's romantic selflessness has given way to Mockford's sordid self-interest.

Why allude to this historical event, recounted by Edward Trelawny and others, in such an obvious manner? The implication, I think, is that Cather hopes to make a point about Byron's career. Byron and Byronism could affect lives even in remote villages like Haverford, Nebraska. This could happen through brief exposure to icons, a man singing a musical setting of Byron's poem, or an aged singer demonstrating her commitment to excellence and inspiring Lucy to return to Chicago to pursue a musical career (178). Cather deliberately explores the image of Byron as icon by comparing Lucy's father, Jacob Gayheart, to "an old daguerreotype of a minor German poet" (6). If Jacob has something of the poet in him, it is not surprising that Lucy would be inspired by a poet like Byron, whose image was so connected with his fame (through portraits by George Sanders [Byron and Robert Rushton], Thomas Phillips [Byron in Albanian Dress], Richard Westall, and George Henry Harlow and busts by Lorenzo Bartolini, Bertel Thorvaldsen, and others [see Peach]). Lucy's exposure to Byronism is through the ear rather than the eye (Clement, after all, is described as "oval" [29]), but her susceptibility to icons is repeatedly shown through her frequent viewings of Clement Sebastian in Byronic postures of brooding (31, 54-55). At the same time, Cather's novel exposes Byronic conduct as dangerously egoistic. Clement's somewhat ungracious refusal to give Mockford equal billing as an accompanist (and Mockford's effrontery in asking for it) well illustrates what one might call the Byronic disease. Clement keeps Mockford in a subordinate position, sometimes ostentatiously so, which is ultimately destructive to both artists. Many people who surround Clement become stunted (Giuseppe, Mockford, Lucy, Clement's wife) because of Sebastian's tendency to use people to arrange his gloves, interpret his moods, and restore his youth. And this too was part of Cather's engagement with Byron's iconic status, her subtle critique of Byronic egotism.

If Cather replays the near-drowning of Shelley through the deaths of Mockford and Sebastian, she alludes to another well-known incident in Byron's life: his dramatic funeral train in England, when his body was transported back to England from Messolonghi, Greece. Byron's casket surprised Caroline Lamb in a similar way: "as I was slowly driving up the hill here, Lord Byron's Hearse was at that moment passing under these very walls, and rested at Welwyn" (Marchand, Biography 3: 1261). In Cather's novel, the man, not the woman, observes the cortege. "Why had he been compelled to drive in that procession?" Harry asks himself as he recollects Lucy's death. "He couldn't pass it,—not after he had stopped and asked what was the matter" (183). Lucy's funeral is described in part 2 and repeated, through Harry's Wordsworthian reminiscence, in part 3. Cather plays with subject and object, showing Gordon as both brooding Byronic hero and Wordsworthian recollector, as both Byron and Caroline Lamb! In this way she turns Byronic behavior back on itself, forcing Harry to redeem, and overcome, his previously selfish conduct. Paul Douglass's biography of Caroline Lamb shows how prescient Cather was in her portrait of Lucy Gayheart. Byronism was an infection (Douglass calls it "erotomania") that Caroline Lamb could never overcome. By focusing on the funeral cortege, Cather explores the late-nineteenth-century view, popularized in part by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Lady Byron Vindicated, that Byronism was morally destructive. Cather's 1935 novel reflects, and adds nuance to, the critique of Byronism that led to the decline of his reputation, his iconic status, in the first half of the twentieth century.

Where Wordsworthian heroes like Jim Burden believe that feelings deepen with time (for they become spiritualized), Byron suggests the opposite (and Clement echoes the sentiment), because both value erotic over spiritual passion. This becomes clear in their response to the death of friends. When Clement hears of Larry MacGowan's death (77), he reviews his life in Wordsworthian fashion: "He had missed the deepest of all companionships, a relation with the earth itself, with a countryside and a people" (78). If the narrator of "Tintern Abbey" imagines, like Jim Burden, a life sustained by a particular landscape, Clement is forced to confront his own itinerant lifestyle and the toll this has exacted on friendships, such as Wordsworth enjoys with his sister, Dorothy. "Friendships?" Clement queries himself. "Larry was the man he had cared for most. Among women? There was little for sweet reflection in that chapter" (78).

Unlike Burden, who remains content with the philosophic mind that he brings to Ántonia, Clement actually seeks out the empathy of a young girl, Lucy. "Did you happen to notice in the morning paper that Larry MacGowan died yesterday in a sanatorium in Savoy?" he asks Lucy. "Years ago if I had seen that thing in brutal type, I would have lain down and cried like a boy. Things happen to our friendships; that's the worst about living. Young people can't know what it means" (83). Byron wrote in similar terms about the death of John Edleston in a letter to Francis Hodgson on 10 October 1811: "I heard of a death the other day that shocked me more than any of the preceding, . . . yet I had not a tear left for an event which five years ago would have bowed me to the dust" (MacCarthy 145). Larry hiked with Sebastian in the Sullanches (as Hobhouse hiked with Byron in the Simplon pass) and appears to be jealous of Clement's wife when he visits them at their home in Chantilly (70). Having lost Larry, Clement tries to turn Lucy into him. "He had sometimes thought of her as rather boyish, because she was so square" (80). By reinventing her as a boy (he "thought of her as rather boyish" [my emphasis]), Clement learns to trust Lucy (though others, such as Fairy Blair, describe her as ridiculously feminine, all curls and coquettishness). His comfort with men, including the French basso who cheers him enthusiastically during one of his concerts, reminds us that Clement has been surrounded by male admirers, even as his estranged wife stays abroad in France. Paul Auerbach, who imagines a conventional life for Lucy with a husband like Harry, considers Clement exceptional—not only in his talent, perhaps, but in his bisexuality.

Clement Sebastian's marriage distances him from Larry Donovan, as surely as his infatuation with Lucy Gayheart compromises his intimate relationship with James Mockford. The air from Twelfth Night which Sebastian uses to tease Lucy reinforces this theme of a "concealed love" that dare not speak its name: is it Sebastian's love for Lucy? Or Sebastian's love for other boys and men? Perhaps both, as in the complications that attend Shakespeare's drama. For Byron, as for Clement, enjoyment and passion are the thing. This is the epigraph, after all, of Don Juan, also taken from Twelfth Night. "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?—Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' the mouth, too!" (CPW 5: 6). Byron's—and Clement's—allusions to secret pleasures, captured in Clement's patronizing treatment of Lucy, recalls Byron's taunting of the rather "square" Annabella Milbanke with his exploits with young boys in the East.

If Clement tries to turn Lucy into Larry, he also casts her into roles that recall specific incidents in Byron's life. "Perhaps you will dream that we are both twenty, and are taking a walking trip in the French Alps. And I shall call to you at daybreak from my balcony!" (72). This sentence, almost out of place in Lucy Gayheart, recalls details of Leigh Hunt's visit to Byron in Italy. "I was generally at my writing when he came down, and either acknowledged his presence by getting up and saying something from the window," Hunt later remembered, "or he called out 'Leontius!' and came halting up to the window with some joke, or other challenge to conversation" (Marchand, Portrait 381). These three details are striking, but no more so than the cumulative effect of their being placed, side by side, near other Byronic passages. For example, Marius (whose name recalls the hero of Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean) comes to live with Clement Sebastian, but his wife objects; he then loses a portion of affection for his wife because of her coldheartedness. Similarly, Annabella Milbanke became cold toward Byron because of his homosexual liaisons with boys in the East, exposed (apparently) by the jilted Caroline Lamb. His Harrow friendships, even the Sanders portrait of him with Robert Rushton, who accompanied him in 1809 and 1816, recall Clement's close friendship with Marius. In the same way that Clement visits the boy and misses him, funding his education, Byron made his will over to the boys he fell in love with, providing an education for Robert Rushton (Marchand, Biography 1: 286), an annuity of 7,000 pounds to Nicolas Giraud (1: 286), and a posthumous gift to Lukas Chalandritsanos (3: 1227). For Sebastian and Byron, these passionate friendships with boys interfere with their monogamous marriages.

Like My Ántonia, Cather's novel moves away from Byronic emotion to Wordsworthian recollection, modifying one mood by making reference to another. As Harry Gordon strives to make a fitting "recollection" of Lucy, he is struck by his own lack of imagination, the very qualities that make Wordsworth's and Cather's Lucy "gay." Cather suggests the inadequacy of his cement rendering of Lucy's light footprint by implicitly comparing it to the footprints in the snow described in Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray; or, Solitude." In Wordsworth's poem, Lucy's father asks his child to "light / Your mother through the snow" (CPW 1: 392, ll. 15-16). The deaths of both heroines take place at dusk on a snowy night; the footsteps of both heroines disappear, though Harry Gordon clumsily, uncomfortably (for Milton Chase) preserves Lucy Gayheart's. In the same way that the search party gets as far as a broken bridge where Lucy's footsteps end (she has put on her skates here), Lucy's footprints disappear precisely where her mother tries to find them. Not blither is the mountain roe: With many a wanton stroke Her feet disperse the powdery snow, That rises up like smoke. The storm came on before its time: She wandered up and down; And many a hill did Lucy climb: But never reached the town. (392, ll. 25-32) A search party is sent out when the mother spied "The print of Lucy's feet" (392, l. 44). They lead down a "steep hill's edge / They tracked . . . / them on, nor ever lost; / And to the bridge they came" (392-93, ll. 45-52). These footmarks, which recall "She Dwelt among Untrodden Ways," are a literal act of disappearance. They followed from the snowy bank Those footmarks, one by one, Into the middle of the plank; And further there were none! (393, ll. 53-56) The resemblance to the search party that is sent out after Lucy's disappearance is striking.

In My Ántonia and Lucy Gayheart, men almost obliterate women in the very act of trying to love them. Ántonia survives in Jim Burden's memory as an ideal because Jim never possesses her. He avoids doing so, in part, because he learns the danger of Byronic passion through Wick Cutter, who almost seduces him in a scene worthy of Don Juan, mistaking him for Ántonia; Jim's humiliation teaches him that love should elevate, not debase. Harry Gordon's efforts to possess Lucy are similarly doomed, and his penance in Haverford partly teaches him this Wordsworthian lesson. Although he tries to preserve her footsteps in cement, the cement is a poor substitute for the original, who becomes, like Wordsworth's heroine, pure spirit, rolled around with rocks, and stones, and trees.

The best days are the first to flee in "Tintern Abbey" as in "When We Two Parted," in My Ántonia and in Lucy Gayheart. Art's provenance is to remember this fact, sometimes in tranquility, more often in tears. But there are at least two ways of recollecting emotion in tranquility. By contrasting Wordsworth's and Byron's centripetal and centrifugal treatment of passion in their major works, Cather enters into a conversation with these writers. She does not slavishly depend upon them, as Emerson perhaps mistakenly feared an American writer might. Instead, My Ántonia and Lucy Gayheart perform an important assessment of icons not unlike that which Mill undertook at a debating society in 1827, when he considered "the immoral tendencies of Byron's poetry, with [Sterling] Roebuck upholding Byron" (1: 153). In 1829, Mill again "discussed for two evenings [with Roebuck] the comparative merits of Byron and Wordsworth, propounding and illustrating by long recitations our respective theories of poetry" (153).

Enough of a romantic to take her subject from the soil of Nebraska, Cather also engaged in a conversation with British culture, comparing the moral tendencies of Wordsworth's and Byron's verse as Arnold and Mill had before her. In doing so she showed how Lord Byron and Percy Shelley were relevant to American fiction, that these figures could influence even a young girl on the Nebraska plains. Some of Cather's heroes brood and regret (Harry Gordon); others become meditative about their loss of the visionary gleam (Jim Burden). Both show the limits of Wordsworthian complacency or Byronic egotism, contrasting unfavorably with women like Ántonia and Lucy, who (at their best moments) face life squarely, despite setbacks. Jim Burden and Ántonia, Harry Gordon and Lucy Gayheart do not always achieve the excellence after which they aspire, but they do salute it "from afar" (Lucy Gayheart 12; Arnold, "Function" 285). In this sense, they, like the novelist who created them, become icons who form "the best title to esteem with posterity" (Arnold, "Function" 285).

Jim Burden's question to an Ántonia who does not recognize him after two decades—"Have I changed so much?" (322)—has had an unintended significance over the past thirty-five years, during which Jim has gone from a quiet, romantic memoir writer to the virtual villain of My Ántonia: unreliable, immature, repressed and repressive. Such characterizations hinder recognition of Cather's intertextual structuring of book 5 of My Ántonia. Through allusions to the Odyssey, Jim's return to Ántonia is placed within mythic contexts of return, suggesting heroic stature even while delineating modernity. Through allusions to "Rip Van Winkle," both in its original form by Washington Irving and its dramatic form by Joseph Jefferson, Jim's return marks a profound change of era. Jim emerges as a restless Odyssean traveler living without despair in an America that has failed its great cultural opportunity.

In Cather's modernist aesthetic, to be "absolutely true" to a subject means much more than providing an accurate account of what happened. It can mean connecting to heroic patterns as well as to a figure from popular culture who resonates as something prototypically American and lost, a genial spirit of another time. Every novel's form cannot help but be unique. Thus, My Ántonia is "the other side of the rug, the pattern that is supposed not to count in a story. In it there is no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle for success. I knew I'd ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern. I just used it the way I thought absolutely true" (Cather, Interview 77). Readers have sometimes resisted the way Cather made the story or a character rather than resisted the "usual fictional pattern." In My Ántonia there is a sense of loss, of something missed, some potential not grasped. While much commentary on Jim Burden in effect locates this disappointment in the lack of romance between Jim and Ántonia, an intertextual reading of the novel finds it in the lost potential of the immigrant contribution to American culture. Unlike the sense of distant loss in many romantic and modernist works, this loss is as close and palpable as the feeling at a performance of Jefferson's immensely popular Rip Van Winkle.

In "Cuzak's Boys," Jim Burden writes about himself with less distance than in the rest of the novel, that is, as a man writing about a man rather than the boy he once was, precisely at the time Cather invites readers to consider him in terms of others as remote as Odysseus and Rip Van Winkle. This modernist approach is heightened by Jim's presumed awareness of Odyssean overtones to his return, so that readers participate, in a sense, in the writing and imagining. In the first section of this article I establish Cather's allusive invitations, with particular emphasis on Jefferson's Rip Van Winkle. In the second part I read "Cuzak's Boys" in terms of the allusions by comparing and contrasting Jim, Odysseus, and Rip in detail. In the third section I argue that the epilogue to Cather's final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, uses the same source material as Jim's return in My Ántonia, suggesting a consideration of the children's point of view to separate the adult Jim from the boyish icon Ántonia's family has made him.

From the first sentence of book 5 of My Ántonia, Cather places Jim's return in the Odyssean tradition, thus making explicit the motif of return in earlier parts of the novel: "I told Ántonia I would come back, but life intervened, and it was twenty years before I kept my promise" (317). Cather's many fictional returners come back at widely varying times; given the Odyssey's ubiquity and cultural resonance and Cather's conspicuous allusiveness, especially to classical literature, Cather's choice of twenty years for this man returning home to a woman emphasizes the Homeric connection. Cather reinforces the allusion four paragraphs later, when Jim sees two boys bent over a dead dog, an unexpected event upon arrival that parallels the Odyssey's dead dog, Argus. Cather fascinatingly invites readers to experience Jim's text as a narrative aware, to some extent, of its own Odyssean resonances. Jim narrative openly discusses classical literature, noting in particular his penchant for transposing classical characters and settings to people and places he knows (254).

In book 5 Cather also invites readers to consider less overt allusions to a mythic character than those to the Odyssey. In book 3 Jim and Lena see the play Rip Van Winkle; in the final chapter of book 5, after Jim has left the Cuzak farm and returned to town, he sees "strange children" (357), the very phrase Rip uses in Irving's story for his own return to town (36), and like Rip he visits his favorite inn. "Rip Van Winkle" itself so resonates with the Odyssey that Joyce, for instance, writing at the same time Cather was writing My Ántonia, uses it several times in Ulysses. Intertextual in its very origin, Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" is based on Johan Otmar's "Peter Klaus," a German story with strong folk and mythic elements; its own pronounced echoes of the Odyssey include a return home after twenty years, a dog incident upon arrival, and reunion with a family member. "Rip Van Winkle" was translated into German (one is tempted to say "back into German") in 1819, the year of its appearance, and four more times by 1826. By the time My Ántonia was published, a full decade before "talkies," "Rip Van Winkle" had been made into no fewer than eighteen films.

As Cather well knew, "Rip Van Winkle" gained its prominence in American popular culture through performance onstage. The play Jim and Lena see starred Joseph Jefferson, probably the best-known, -admired, and -loved American actor of the second half of the nineteenth century, who played Rip almost exclusively for more than forty years, first in London and then in thousands of performances all over the United States. Small towns closed school on the days Rip was performed. Rip Van Winkle emerged as a play almost immediately after publication of Irving's story. Using a script written and successively modified by the actors Frederick Yates, James Hackett, and Charles Burke and then revamped once again by the playwright Dion Boucicault, Jefferson made it his own, tuning it to his own voice, theatrical tastes, and view of the world. It follows the main points of Irving's story but adds melodramatic complications about a villain, married to Rip's wife, Gretchen, who plots the destruction of Meenie, the loyal daughter Rip loves. Although Jefferson says in his Autobiography that he wanted to avoid making it a "temperance play" (336)—in the play's final gesture Rip breaks his pledge once again—it has a strong temperance tension all too familiar to Cather during the time of My Ántonia's composition. The misogyny of Irving's story is toned down, and the father-daughter reunion is given full-blown emphasis: when Rip sobs "Somebody knows me now! Somebody knows me now!" (313), audiences sobbed too, and critics, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, spoke of Lear (Johnson, "Jefferson's Rip" 20).

In her 1896 review for the Pittsburgh Leader, the young Willa Cather focused instead on the "weirdly poetic" expressionist scene in the mountains as well as on Jefferson himself. Jefferson shared her enthusiasm for the mountain scene because, like Rip's often-addressed dog that never appears, it kept the play away from the insidious tendency toward realistic staging in American drama. He turned down countless suggestions for realistic elaborations because "so unreal a theme could not have been interwoven with all this realism without marring the play" (Autobiography 338). Cather's quite similar views of realism, in their best-known expression, match Jefferson's in more than substance; beginning by saying "the property man" has been busy on the novel's pages, and ending by wishing for a room "as bare as the stage of a Greek theater," "The Novel Démeublé" takes its operating analogies from the stage (43, 51). As an inveterate theatergoer and professional reviewer, Cather judged the "gentle," evenly tempered, poetically romantic Jefferson "one of the noblest geniuses of our time" and his Rip "a character perhaps the greatest which the American stage has yet produced" ("An Open Letter" 684-85). Although Cather made these strong pronouncements some twenty years before composing My Ántonia, they strengthen the invitation to consider Jim in terms of Rip Van Winkle.

The way Cather structures book 5 of My Ántonia as a kind of coda, that is, part of the story yet not part of it, suggests reading its allusions as modernist nuance, there and not there, like Carroll's Cheshire cat. Jim's return forms a proportionately small part of the novel; "return" sections consume fully half of the Odyssey and Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," and two of five acts in Jefferson's play, but just one of five books—only about a tenth of the pages—of My Ántonia. The hero's return is integral to the story of the Odyssey and "Rip Van Winkle"; My Ántonia, because not dependent on plot in the ordinary sense, would make sense without book 5. Cather thus limits the iconography of Jim's return yet at the same time heightens awareness of its exceptional features.

The simplest way to follow the allusive invitations is to compare Jim, Odysseus, and Rip in terms of key elements. Disguise, for instance: Odysseus is consciously disguised; Rip does not realize he is; and Jim Burden is somewhere in between, in the modern condition of not being sure if he is disguised or not. Similarly, Jim's reasons for returning accentuate his modernity. Whereas Odysseus is driven by gods to reclaim what is his, and Rip has no reality outside his village, Jim has simply made a youthful promise he chooses to honor. The promise itself has no urgency. When Jim claims he will return someday, Ántonia responds "perhaps you will," adding, without irony, that it won't make much difference if he doesn't (314). Cather so undramatizes the promise that the reader learns about it only three paragraphs before he actually keeps it. By making Jim's return strictly a matter of choice, however grudgingly made, Cather also confers on it a kind of heroic quality. Irresolute about returning, Jim is often described as being "disillusioned," which, in one sense, he is, as he himself says: "In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones" (318). But the word "disillusioned" has negative connotations that do not fit Jim, who is not dispirited. He has straightforwardly stated the condition of the man returning, who would be of considerably less interest if he were illusion-ridden and unchanged. As Homer has Odysseus describe himself in book 15, he is "a man who's weathered many blows and wandered many miles" (332), and as Cather has Jim say, it takes some "courage" to return and risk losing cherished values (321). Jim arrives at the Cuzak farm "a little past midday" (319), a classic time for seeing clearly, without shadows or illusions, as in one of Jim's favorite boyhood books, Robinson Crusoe, when Crusoe finds the single footprint on the beach one day "about Noon." In spite of noon's clarity, Jim is unsure which farm is Ántonia's, an uncertainty paralleling Odysseus's confusion about his whereabouts when he awakes on Ithaca, and Rip's confusion about everything.

By placing a dead dog in the path of her returner, Cather participates in what has been, since Argus's happy death, a minor literary game, with players including Pope, Fielding, Byron, Joyce, and of course Irving. The suddenness of Jim's encounter with two boys "bending over a dead dog" (319) matches that of Odysseus's encounter with Argus in book 17, although in the Odyssey there has been some subtle preparation (Rose 215-30). Homer's dog is spectacularly loyal, representing a "natural" reaction superior to that of the humans who endanger the returned Odysseus. In Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," the dog, a seeming clone of Rip's Wolf, growls at him, a sign of the more Hobbesian world since the Yankee accession. In Jefferson's play, the dog, Schneider, is often addressed but, thanks to Jefferson's theatrical savvy, never actually appears onstage; when Rip returns, he brings up Schneider three times, saying, with characteristically jocular misogyny, "You call the dog Schneider. He'll know me better than my wife" (313).

Cather's dog is neither iconic nor burdened with meanings or even description, an approach emphasizing the reactions of characters and the dog's allusive function. Jim, who apparently had no dog when a child on his grandparents' farm, mentions no color, breed, size, age, condition, or name—just "dead dog." He notes the boys' concern—"this was evidently a sad afternoon for them" (319)—but does not bring up the dog when he speaks to them. He exhibits no sentimentality and indulges in no judgment, an adult approach mirroring that of Ántonia and her family. After listening to Jan's story, Ántonia tempers his sadness by suggesting a special burial space, a good example of Cather's insight into children and her scrupulous attention to detail in "Cuzak's Boys." She provides no name but takes care of the body, whereas when Homer's Argus dies he is never mentioned again.

By making the return of Jim more focused on "the woman" than is the return of Rip Van Winkle, who dreads seeing his wife, or even that of Odysseus, who seeks both wife and throne, Cather distinguishes the modernity of Jim's heroism: his return is voluntary, even gratuitous. As the maker of his return's meaning, he dreads the destructive potential of mutability: "I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it" (318). When Odysseus first sees Penelope, Homer describes her radiance and the lustful thoughts of the suitors for seventy-six lines before mentioning that Odysseus "glowed with joy" (18:282), a joy having more to do with her cunning, and hence constancy, than her beauty. In a "faltering voice" Irving's Rip Van Winkle asks his daughter, before he has revealed who he is, about Dame Van Winkle. The narrator comments, upon Rip's hearing she is dead, "There was a drop of comfort at least in this intelligence" (39). Jefferson, in his stage directions, has Rip react "with mixed emotions" (305) when he hears she is still alive, then saying (to a sure laugh) "Poor Derrick!" about the man she has married. When he actually sees Gretchen, he reacts to her aged appearance with another laugh line: "My, my! Is that my wife?" (308).

In contrast to Homer's epic tensions, Cather makes Jim's first sight of Ántonia "one of those quiet moments that clutch the heart, and take more courage than the noisy, excited passages in life" (321). Jim describes Ántonia as "battered but not diminished" (321). Instead of Irving's misogyny or Jefferson's conventional male levity about women's aging, Cather has Jim generalize beyond gender about the "shock" it always is "to meet people after long years" (321-22, my emphasis). "Battered" is a strong word Cather uses about people to capture something akin to the sublimity Romantics found in ruins, and of course Jim calls himself "battered" after Wick Cutter beats him (241). Cather shows that Ántonia has aged without being defined by that or losing her allure. Jim can present her as "battered," and show her often-prosaic ideas and conventional values, confident that her vitality will dominate. It is important to stress that he says the most romantic, mythologizing things about Ántonia in this section of the novel—she "had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade," "she still had that something which fires the imagination," and "she was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races" (342)—when he describes himself, reminiscent of Odysseus sleeping in the swineherd's hut or Rip sleeping in the woods, lying in a haymow, thinking while he falls asleep. Ántonia becomes Penelope, that is, the icon, most fully in the returning man's dreams.

The details of the actual moment of encounter are enhanced by the allusive power of Jim as Odyssean in the most positive sense, the "no name" searcher of customs and manners. At Ántonia's door Jim is acutely aware of the kind of seemingly adventitious details—white cats among the yellow pumpkins, a girl dropping her dish towel, the "calm and self-possessed" nature of the girl who asks him to sit down—that keen-eyed Odysseus always notes in a new place. The actual moment of reunion happens so quickly that Jim is awkwardly halfway between standing and sitting—Odysseus for once at a loss. Consciously or not, when he sees Ántonia's eyes he thinks in Homeric fashion, contrasting hers to all the thousands of eyes he has seen since last seeing them (320-21). Ántonia speaks to him without recognition, just as Penelope does not recognize Odysseus or as Rip's village does not recognize him: "My husband's not at home, sir" (322).

Jim's "Have I changed so much?" response has fascinating precursors in Cather's fiction and in My Ántonia that show how she reworked this dramatic kind of scene so that Ántonia's plain conventionality—a man she does not recognize must be there for her husband, not her—and the absence of eros actually intensify the impact. Cather's fiction shows a steady movement away from eros and passion for her returners as well as a steady increase in the amount of time they have been gone. In "The Treasure of Far Island" (1902), after a ten-year absence, Douglas Burnham says, "Tell me, is this Margie?" (270); Margie later claims that her wait has been "longer than the waiting of Penelope," and at story's end "the two had become as gods" (282). In "The Bohemian Girl" (1912), after twelve years Nils Ericson asks Clara Vavrika, with whom he runs away, "Aren't you at all surprised to see me?" (16), and his mother, "Don't you know me?" (7), the very question asked in O Pioneers! (1913) after sixteen years by the returning Carl Linstrum to the woman he eventually marries: "Don't you know me, Alexandra?" (99). Cather builds to the power of the reuniting scene in My Ántonia with a motif of surprise entrances in doorways, Ántonia playfully asking "You ain't forget about me, Jim?" (150) when she comes to the Harlings, Lena asking Ántonia "Don't you know me?" (155) when she comes to Black Hawk, and then making the question a statement in Lincoln, "I expect you hardly know me, Jim" (257). Cather's careful preparation for Jim's more-than-rhetorical "Have I changed so much?" emphasizes the extent to which personal identity, rather than eros or family or any other consideration, is at stake.

Like Homer, Cather shows the male returner rediscovering the unpredictable intensity of the woman. The joy of Ántonia's first response—expressed, significantly, to her daughters rather than to Jim—suddenly turns to alarm just as she catches Jim's hands: "What's happened? Is anybody dead?" This response is not in Jim's vision of the event any more than Odysseus's getting tricked by Penelope is, or Rip's not knowing the date. It is one of those small, never-cited details of My Ántonia—five words—that strikingly captures Ántonia's emotional, histrionic, even morbid imagination, just as Jim's short response reveals so much about their relationship; after patting her arm, he says, "No. I didn't come to a funeral this time" (322). This time: Jim has come back at least once before, for a funeral; while critics of Jim might point out that he did not seek to meet Ántonia then, it is perhaps more to the point that she apparently did not attend the funeral, presumably for one or both of his grandparents. The connection between Jim and Ántonia is marked by a kind of shorthand to which they have returned with ease: neutral, quick communication, above suspicions or blaming, right back to where they were the last time they were together, when Jim "felt rather than saw her smile" while she commented on his promise to return (314).

Cather uses the limited physical contact between Jim and Ántonia at the moment of reunion to epitomize their lifelong physical relationship, which she places between the extremes of Odysseus's eros and Rip's sexual loathing. Ántonia's reaching for Jim's hands rather than embracing him, feeling alarm at the moment of contact ("She had no sooner caught my hands than she looked alarmed" [322]), and ending contact entirely when she is most passionate all suggest exactly what Ántonia's indignant drawing of her face away from Jim when he kissed her more than two decades before suggests: that Ántonia is at least as much responsible for their nonsexual relationship as Jim. The critical focus on Jim's sexuality, as if that were all that mattered, discounts Ántonia's sexuality and identity. His nonsexualized approach to her contrasts with the Odyssean double standard and the anti-sexual angst of Rip Van Winkle, who in Irving's story is glad to hear his wife has died and in Jefferson's play is relieved she is married to someone else. For Rip, sex equals danger because women are allied with chthonic forces of fury. By contrasting Jim with Odysseus and Rip, and by going as far as describing Jim's teenage erotic dreams, Cather emphasizes that people cannot choose the objects of their sexual desire. Although Jim wants her to, Ántonia does not appeal to him sexually; Lena is the temptress of his dreams. For Cather, sexual attraction arises as randomly and uncontrollably as it does in Ovid, no matter whom one might care for or love.

A reader of critical discussions of My Ántonia could easily get the impression that it ends with a combination of Jim's hayloft mythologizing and its final paragraph. In between those, however, the chapters on Cuzak and Black Hawk, through allusions to the Odyssey and "Rip Van Winkle," intensify the novel's cultural critique of America at the time of World War I. Cather, like Homer, Irving, and Jefferson, implies a future by including depictions of the generation to follow the returner. The second chapter of "Cuzak's Boys" first contrasts and then links Jim and Cuzak. Jim, who is smoking in the orchard when Cuzak and his son arrive, notes that "Ántonia came running down from the house and hugged the two men as if they had been away for months" (345), a contrast to his own return after twenty years so obvious in its histrionic excess that he makes no comment. Unlike Cuzak, Jim has no desire to be the "the corrective" to Ántonia's "impulse" (347). Jim senses immediately that Cuzak reads him accurately—"his lively, quizzical eyes told me that he knew all about me" (345). Neither of them belongs on a farm. In My Ántonia Cather does not make settled agriculture the norm for humans any more than Homer or Irving does. Sharing chores with Ántonia's boys, Jim begins "to feel the loneliness of the farm-boy at evening, when the chores seem everlastingly the same, and the world so far away" (336). Jim and Cuzak are fellow Odyssean wanderers, restless, urban, inclined to play, and fundamentally different from the younger generation, represented by Ántonia's children.

The Odyssey's focus on Telemachus suggests that the generation following Odysseus will be strong, though not heroic on the Odyssean scale, and perhaps a little short on initiative. Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" offers a shiftless namesake of Rip but some hope for a curiously matriarchal future thanks to a responsible daughter; Rip will live with a daughter in both Irving's and Jefferson's versions. In My Ántonia childless Jim Burden is impressed with the children. Although Jim gives a delicate, perceptive picture of Ántonia's daughters, particularly the "calm and self-possessed" (321) Anna, who in effect runs this family event and appears to be indispensable, his emphasis is on Cuzak's boys. In a frank, physical way, Jim admires these boys possibly more than readers do; dutiful and positive, like Telemachus and Rip's daughter, they seem at best echoes of others, even as they have been named after others, though not, curiously, after Jim. When Ántonia lists who is named after whom, she does not seem self-conscious about the absence of a Jim; perhaps it is a kind of honor. Regardless, the future, as in Tennyson's "Ulysses," is in good but dull hands, a generational extension of what Jim earlier noted about the younger brothers and sisters of the "hired girls," who, despite such sacrifices and "advantages," "never seem to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated" as their less privileged siblings (192). In her 1923 Nation article "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle," Cather contrasts the generation from which she drew Ántonia, "rugged figures in the background which inspire respect, compel admiration" to their children, who focus mainly on consumption and "material comfort." Cather in effect explodes the fallacy of liberalism that history is progress (236-38).

Comparing Jim with Odysseus and Rip underscores how positive Cather makes him about his own future. Odysseus will travel again, probably without the earnestness of Victorian bravado in Tennyson's "Ulysses," but definitely away from home. Rip, on the other hand, will stay at home, finding what he can that is unchanging, turning away from the modern Yankee world toward the romantic ideal of village life, living as a kind of a superannuated child, supported by responsible members of the younger generation. Jim, having "the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is" (360), shows no desire to stay in this particular place, because it is the self, not a place, he has come home to. His future includes traveling for his job as well as "playing" with Cuzak's boys. He focuses on the sons both because his society allows few ways for him to play with young women and because the sons, trapped as they are by farming, will apparently need "play" more than the daughters. Jim will function as a liberator who knows the value of playing—that is, expansive human behavior wholly unconnected to work or gain—in an increasingly materialistic culture. When he is done with the sons, he has Cuzak, who, like himself (not to mention Rip Van Winkle), acts "as if he had just wakened up" (356), and whom he knows already understands the value, even the necessity, of play and nondirected wandering, at least for himself. Critics who claim that Jim rejects the present to "retreat into a second childhood" (Tellefsen 241) denigrate childhood, a rich time of playing, as well as Jim and the novel. Jim and Cuzak, adults from the generation who witnessed the age's heroic but now vanished transforming of nature, do not long for the past. They live very much in the present, Cuzak expanding the farm and Jim passionate about new ideas and schemes. They do not reject the present so much as delimit it and not overvalue it.

Cather's allusions to "Rip Van Winkle" are most obvious in the chapter ending My Ántonia, a Black Hawk visit Jim finds "disappointing." He sees "strange children," notices trees cut down, and experiences the very emblem of Rip's village day by sitting "under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his saloon" with Jelinek (357). Unlike Rip's Nicholas Vedder, Jelinek has survived and also managed to keep his tree, whereas in Rip's changed village, "instead of the great tree that used to shelter the quiet little Dutch inn of ore, there now was reared a tall naked pole" for the cultural symbol of the American flag (37). Jelinek's saloon—which even the "church people" admitted was "as respectable as a saloon can be" (210)—is not a typical American place, any more than Vedder's was, and with the mounting pressure of the WCTU at the time of Jim's narrative, it is not marked for survival. As in "Rip Van Winkle," transplanted European culture in My Ántonia is shown losing, chillingly, to a particularly narrow American culture.

The vestigial culture of Jelinek's notwithstanding, Jim has no desire to remain in Black Hawk. In the afternoon, escaping "the curious depression that hangs over little towns," he finds last traces of the native prairie and has "the good luck to stumble upon" other vestigial remains, "a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out to the north country" (358-59)—a narrative development that cannot help but raise the question, What has changed? In the Odyssey, Odysseus is back where he was, pursuing the heroic life on domestic terms, with humans still caught between the gods and nature. Homer seems to ask if the Trojan War accomplished anything for the Greeks besides a temporary reestablishment of the past. In "Rip Van Winkle," on the other hand, "the very character of the people had changed," from the archetypal "village" of "phlegm and drowsy tranquility" to the Yankee world, "busy, bustling, disputatious" (37). Irving in effect asks if America has lost the traditional world of villages nestled within the rhythms of nature.

My Ántonia's focus is on a very narrow part of America's epic history, not the ancient life of the Native Americans, only hinted at in town names and legends, or the "heroic" phases of exploration or of moving the indigenous peoples via warfare, but the first real settlers, opportunists who established what now might be called "infrastructure." It is fascinating that Cather always associated Joseph Jefferson, who spent his entire career playing a man who slept into another era, with the same transition period in America that My Ántonia portrays. In praising Jefferson's autobiography as "one of the most engaging and least pretentious works in the literature of the drama," for instance, she recalls his "early wanderings" on the Great Lakes, when its shores "were dotted with Indian villages," across the newly settled Illinois prairie, and then into Mexico behind the army, saying the new generation of actors, bounded by "between Broadway and Fifty-first Street," simply cannot have as rich an experience or imagination ("Open Letter" 683). In Cather's version of romanticism, different qualities flourish in different eras, just as distinct cultures invariably nurture some qualities while suppressing others. The vast creation of prairie infrastructure tantalized the imagination with possibilities for the new culture. Although the hope in My Ántonia is clearly for the new culture to be more European than Yankee, that is, one where more human qualities flourish, part of the novel's elegiac tone comes from the recognition that Yankee culture, with its Black Hawk repressions, has won.

Jim's question "Have I changed so much?" has another dimension not fully clear until Cather's last novel, whose epilogue, read intertextually as describing source material for "Cuzak's Boys," suggests viewing Jim's return from the children's perspective. Sapphira, like My Mortal Enemy, features a woman returning after twenty-five years for a reunion witnessed by girls disappointed with the returners' resemblance to the much-told stories of their exciting exits. While it is commonly asserted that with her last novel Cather returned for the first time since her literary apprenticeship to the Virginia material of her childhood, Sapphira's epilogue, in which Cather herself appears as a child, strikingly parallels the reunion scene in My Ántonia: a changed world, a "classy" forty-something returner, kitchen settings, reunited pairs talking extensively while being overheard by children, and the returner not matching the stories the children knew so well. The children in both novels thus see a "character" with a process of comparison/contrast not unlike the intertextual experience of readers matching Jim, Odysseus, and Rip Van Winkle.

It takes several pages in Sapphira for child Cather to stop being a critic of the returner who did not match "the picture I had carried in my mind." In My Ántonia Jim realizes that Ántonia's children believe people from her childhood to be "remarkable" (339); thus it is hard for the children and Ántonia herself to imagine them outside that mythic time. Ántonia includes Jim in the term "you children," followed immediately by "these children"; while in the context understandable, it is still an astonishing thing to say to an adult. In the family mythology, Jim is ever a boy, which gives a subtle ironic impact to Ántonia's telling him "I can't believe it's you" (324). When, by asking how many children he has, she does try to consider him as an adult, she ends up getting "embarrassed" (325). With such expectations, no wonder neither Ántonia nor the children—with the fascinating possible exception of Leo—immediately recognize Jim. As a family icon, he has changed "so much."

Leo is the child most keenly aware of how much Jim has changed from the family myths. In this regard and others, Leo strongly resembles child Cather as characterized in Sapphira. They are ur-artists and critics, iconoclastic, irrepressible and emotionally autonomous. To the extent that we can also link Leo and Blind d'Arnault, whom he physically resembles, we can, a little, deracialize the portrayal of the black pianist: he and Leo, and implicitly child Cather, heroically exude urges and qualities the prevailing culture cannot succeed in suppressing, a lesson child Cather learns in reverse by studying Nancy, who has clearly flourished by leaving Virginia. So too, the demythologized Jim Burden suggests possibilities available only beyond Nebraska.

Despite giving children special insight in both My Ántonia and Sapphira, Cather does not privilege the child's point of view. The Wick Cutter story, for instance, delights Ántonia's children—"Hurrah! The murder!" (349)—in the same way the Pavel and Peter wolf story thrilled Ántonia and Jim, but Wick's plan to rape Ántonia is not among the children's stories. One of the most daring treatments of rape in American literature, not least because of Jim's reaction of disgust toward Ántonia and sex, it can be misunderstood because of the fallacy of the false present so frequent in commentary on Jim Burden. The fallacy of the false present involves ignoring the true "present" of the narrative at any given point, in which Jim writes and reflects on long past incidents, in favor of the actual time of the incidents. Many of the most negative responses to Jim build a case on his quite normal childhood behavior, such as his complaining that Ántonia sometimes takes a superior tone with him or his asking Ántonia "What did you jabber Bohunk for?" (44) after the close call with the snake. Ignoring the true narrative present can keep readers from viewing Jim the way Cather made him, as a man writing a document, not merely as a boy or an icon of family myth.

Has Jim Burden changed so much? He has aged, of course, and the world has changed, for the heroic cultural potential he and Ántonia experienced as children has been lost. Yet he has learned that the things lost are part of his very identity; they are present to him the way the connections with the Odyssey and "Rip Van Winkle" are present to readers of "Cuzak's Boys." Thanks to his reunion with Ántonia he has come "home" to himself, that is, to the old unrest he shares with Odysseus, to the need for play he shares with Rip, and to the child in himself. In that sense he is very much like the little girl in Sapphira and the Slave Girl who watched Nancy's return and then reimagined the experience in My Ántonia from the simultaneous perspective of adult returner and child witness. Cather's intertextual dexterity transforms being two things at once from modern indeterminacy to art.

In an early scene in Shadows on the Rock, Cécile Auclair has prevailed upon Mother Juschereau to tell her a story of the exemplary piety of her predecessor, Sister Catherine de Saint-Augustin. As the story comes to an end, Mother Juschereau is preparing to deliver the appropriate moral lesson when she is interrupted by a cry from her young listener: "N'expliquez pas, chčre Mčre, je vous en supplie!" ("Don't explain, dear Mother, I beg you!"). The nun takes this emphatic wish for delivery from interpretation as a sign that Cécile "certainly has no vocation" (39). I hope to use this plea to get at what Shadows shows us about the way Cather practiced hers. In my view, the book shares with its main character a resistance to interpretation, and it is in that resistance, I will be arguing, that this unobtrusive novel illuminates the ambitions and values that shape Cather's work.

"N'expliquez pas, cher Monsieur, je vous en supplie!": Of course, the first thing I am going to do is a little explication. But my goal will be to describe a feature of the experience of reading Shadows on the Rock, and to specify and explore the significance of what I take to be the book's dramatized resistance to our customary habits of attention (particularly if we are in the habit of being English professors). Let me begin with some polemical definitions, taken from Susan Sontag's famous 1964 essay, "Against Interpretation": Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don't you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C? . . . The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs "behind" the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. (5, 6-7)

My point about Shadows on the Rock—and I would suggest that it is representative of a strong strain or impulse within Cather's fiction as a whole—is that it seems to have been designed, as Cécile's cri de coeur hints, to resist the kind of interpretive, explanatory practice that Sontag describes. To read Shadows is to be forced by the text to throw away one's interpreter's shovel, to stifle one's inner Mike Wallace (ever on the lookout for the next stage-managed exposé), and to exchange that habit of mind for a form of responsiveness more descriptive and more observatory: a kind of witnessing. In the realm of character, for instance, what could be more fruitless than to psychoanalyze Cécile or Auclair? What could be more irrelevant than to posit on behalf of this novel's inhabitants elaborate schemes of self-recognition or maturation? Characters in this text do not develop in the manner of characters from traditional novels but instead on occasion make evident or transparent their natures, or come to see their own lives in a definitive or characteristic way. My point is not that readers want to treat the book's characters in the customary, explanatory way, but that the book, in its way of attending to its characters, pointedly disaffiliates itself from the "depth" model of character and from the interpretive procedures which that model customarily calls forth from its readers.

Similarly, if we think in terms of plot, the text's key moments or events are not revelatory transformations but quieter acts of heightened or illuminated witnessing: the observation of a particular quality of winter light, say, or the apprehension of a weight of meaning as it is gathered up by an object or a ritual. One of my favorite instances of such a moment of post- or anti-interpretive "taking in" is Cather's rendering of Jacques's regard for Cécile's cup: Much as Jacques loved chocolate . . . there was something he cared more about, something that gave him a kind of solemn satisfaction,—Cécile's cup. She had a silver cup with a handle; on the front was engraved a little wreath of roses, and inside that wreath was the name, Cécile, cut in the silver. Her Aunt Clothilde had given it to her when she was but a tiny baby, so it had been hers all her life. That was what seemed so wonderful to Jacques. His clothes had always belonged to somebody else before they were made over for him; he slept wherever there was room for him, sometimes with his mother, sometimes on a bench. He had never had anything of his own except his toy beaver,—and now he would have his shoes, made just for him. But to have a cup, with your name on it . . . even if you died, it would still be there, with your name. More than the shop with all the white jars and mysterious implements, more than the carpet and curtains and the red sofa, that cup fixed Cécile as born to security and privileges. . . . Cécile had suggested that he drink his chocolate from it, and she would use another. But he shook his head, unable to explain. That was not at all what her cup meant to him. Indeed, Cécile could not know what it meant to him; she was too fortunate. (86-88) Although the meaning of the cup has everything to do with eco-nomic privilege—with class, as it was manifest in seventeenth-century Quebec—such a restating of the already apparent would hardly qualify as an interpretive claim of any use or moment. Rather, one's attention is drawn to the process by which the cup accrues meaning for Jacques, situated as he is; that is what qualifies as a significant event within the plot-logic of Shadows on the Rock. This characteristic emphasis—not on the emergence of hidden, explanatory meanings but on the ways meanings are made—is also evident in the text's most dramatically clarifying moment (the climax, one would have to say, of its extremely low-key plot), as Cécile re-sees her own domestic world upon returning from her visit to the Île d'Orléans: "These coppers, big and little, these brooms and clouts and brushes, were tools; and with them one made, not shoes or cabinet-work, but life itself. One made a climate within a climate; one made the days,—the complexion, the special flavour, the special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life" (198).

This is not the whole story on meaning-making in Shadows. There are characters who have a different kind of presence in the novel, a different relation to meaning. I am thinking here of Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin, of the recluse Jeanne Le Ber, of Noël Chabanel, and Chabanel's later, intriguingly urbane imitator, Father St. Cyr—a group of characters I want to call "auto-icons." Unlike the book's other characters, members of this group have an extremely self-conscious relation to their own lives, each firmly in the grip of a teleological narrative of his or her own invention. They are, in a sense, people determined to become icons, to become interpretable in Sontag's sense as something other than, more than, themselves. They are, accordingly, associated with extreme, "hypernarrative" (and, intriguingly, performative) forms of language or action: writing in blood ("I will die in Canada"), the irrevocable vow ("I will be that lamp, that shall be my life," says Jeanne Le Ber), the sacred farce that composes Chabanel's career as the world's lamest missionary. There would be much to say about these figures, and I think the book's treatment of them is complex: contained in the bubble of their iconic self-conception, they nevertheless generate narratives that circulate pleasurably through the larger community. Still, one of their effects—their narrative function, I would argue—is to make evident by contrast, through their narrative extremity, their intense commitment to interpretability, the muted and reticent aesthetic of witnessing that is in effect all around them.

Toward the end of her essay, Sontag sets out to answer the two questions necessarily raised by her attack on the culture of interpretation: What kind of art might free the denizens of that culture from their depth-seeking habit of mind? And (in Sontag's own words) "What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today?" (12). The great mission of contemporary art, as Sontag saw it in 1964, is the evasion of interpretation. This project or purpose is relatively evident and easy to achieve in some art forms—abstract painting, avant-garde experiments that foreground form—but it is also possible, she hopes, in more ostensibly conventional artistic practice: "Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be . . . just what it is" (11). (Is there a better brief description of Cather's style?) Or, as she puts it a little later in the essay: "Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art . . . today" (13). Here is her reciprocal recommendation for those of us who write about art: "Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means" (14).

My point in citing Sontag's essay here is less to celebrate her work than to make a point about Cather's. In its "transparency," in its sustained and wittily dramatized resistance to the interpretive habits we bring to it, Shadows on the Rock is already "against" or "beyond" interpretation, making possible for us, through its refusal of our habits of attention, new forms of response and the new possibilities of feeling that attend them: "N'expliquez pas, cher lecteur, je vous en supplie!"

If I am right about the interpretation-resistant experience of reading that Cather creates and dramatizes in Shadows on the Rock, we are left with a question. What is the force of that accomplishment, that recasting of the novel and the attendant reshaping of our affective response to it? Why and how does this experience of redistributed interest, of a different kind of imaginative investment, matter? For Sontag, one must resist interpretation as a guard against some aspects of the experience of modern life, as part of an imaginative practice devoted to recovering sensory experience: "Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties" (13). We need interpretation-resistant art and criticism because "What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear, more, to feel more" (14).

For Cather, I think, the stakes of the redistribution of readerly emotion her works attempt are different, because, as an "early" modernist, her understanding of the historical pressures on life and on the novel is different from the "late" modernist Sontag's. The resistance to interpretation mounted in Cather's work is less a refuge from the modern than an espousal of it (though The Professor's House, with its rendering of a fully formed commodity culture, seems to be an exception to this claim). If Sontag's enemy is a content-saturated modern culture, Cather's enemy is the resilient power of American Victorianism: a resolutely interpretive culture and sponsor of the nineteenth-century novel, whose trajectories of plot and character, whose management and instruction of its readers' responses continue to be the energizing antagonists of Cather's fictive practice.

The cultural force of Cather's enterprise in Shadows can be felt by recalling the qualities of that predecessor culture. Here I will be following closely the work of the cultural historian Daniel Joseph Singal. In "Towards a Definition of American Modernism," Singal argues that we should think of modernism not as a collection of compositional techniques or avant-garde ideas about art but as a "full-fledged historical culture" (8)—a set of intellectual, moral, and emotional commitments and attitudes that do indeed find powerful expression in aesthetic strategies. If we do this kind of thinking, we see that "modernism" must be defined in relation to—against, really—what might be called "American Victorianism," its precursor culture, which was the dominant value system in America from the 1830s into the early twentieth century. Here is Singal's lucid description of it: At the core of this . . . culture stood a distinctive set of bedrock assumptions. These included a belief in a predictable universe presided over by a benevolent God and governed by immutable natural laws, a corresponding conviction that humankind was capable of arriving at a unified and fixed set of truths about all aspects of life, and an insistence on preserving absolute standards based on a radical dichotomy between that which was deemed "human" and that regarded as "animal." It was this moral dichotomy above all that constituted the deepest guiding principle of the Victorian outlook. On the "human" and "civilized" side of the dividing line stood everything that served to lift man above the beasts—education, refinement, manners, the arts, religion, and such domesticated emotions as loyalty and family love. The "animal" or "savage" realm, by contrast, contained those instincts and passions that constantly threatened self-control, and which therefore had to be repressed at all cost. (9) As Singal also points out, this dichotomizing habit of mind applied to people as well as values: "Victorians characterized societies as either civilized or savage, drew a firm line between what they considered superior and inferior classes, . . . divided races unambiguously into black and white," and placed the sexes in "separate spheres" based on a now-familiar set of supposedly "natural" characteristics (9-10).

In Singal's view, then, Victorian culture built its sense of stability upon a set of clear, simplifying oppositions. What I would add to Singal's description is this: the sense of the world just described is implemented and sustained by narratives, by the stories about life that put its interpretations of experience into force and proclaim their explanatory power. That is: this was a profoundly and characteristically allegorical culture, committed to grand narratives that reached both out into the social and political world and inward into the self. Such definitive Victorian allegories would include outward-turning story lines like "the march of progress," the benevolent triumph of the civilized, and the noble mission of educating the savage, as well as inward-focused story lines like the narratives of maturation, disciplined self-recognition, and interior enlightenment via difficult experience that are recognizable as the master plots of the Victorian novel. In emphasizing this Victorian commitment to a certain kind of big narrative, I do not want to deny that, in both England and America, this could be an admirably self-critical, self-challenging culture. There was no shortage of Victorian critics of Victorian hypocrisy, or Victorian exclusions, or Victorian injustices. Yet these challengers tend to share the sense of story line, of the allegorical shape belonging to experience, with the culture they criticize. They seek a more enlightened selfhood, a still more elevated cultural life, a more vigorous manhood or womanhood. This last point—that defenders and critics of the Victorian status quo share a sense of "the story," of the goals and end points of their culture's cherished narratives—enables us to see that a differently imagined American culture—an authentic modernism—will need not only to challenge Singal's dichotomies but to reinvent the very shape of its central narratives, its routes toward meaning.

And to see that, finally, is to see the importance and ambitiousness of the kind of radical recasting of narrative—which I tried to demonstrate in the first part of this essay—that Cather is unobtrusively accomplishing in Shadows on the Rock and in much of her other work. From a historical point of view, then, the great ambition and the great accomplishment of a book like Shadows is its radical act of refraining from the customary pleasures and procedures of the novel and its culture (what Sontag calls "interpretation") and the opportunity it hence affords us to feel differently our encounter with this text. Shadows on the Rock is a central book in Cather's oeuvre because it exemplifies the way her fiction aspires to the condition of uninterpretability: to bring its readers to a place where our customary habits of attention, our usual forms of feeling, and our orthodox life narratives might be discarded. Insofar as our own response to this novel and to Cather's fiction generally is "interpretive" in Sontag's sense—insofar as we address it allegorically, seeking out the deeper layers of explanatory meaning it resolutely withholds from us—we ourselves betray what is most interesting and refreshing about it.

When a writer reaches iconic status, we seek less to find a context through which we may comprehend the author (how and why should she be read?) and begin to contemplate the various contexts made available to us through the author's work. The iconic, in other words, is an intellectual force that shapes consciousness—or, in Cather's language, casts a shadow on our minds. As we scrutinize the words and the meanings, we find we cannot turn any away; and as we encounter new ways of receiving texts, we are not at liberty to refuse the implications they bring. On the contrary, the writer whom we acknowledge as iconic we also acknowledge as having, to an extent we seek to realize, produced the way we think.

Willa Cather possessed a hard-thinking and fierce secular humanism. One is awed by her habitual attraction, in her subject matter, to depictions of strong, enabling systems of belief—so much so that she is often thought to be a "believer." But she was not a believer in any particular theology or political program or cause. It was the phenomenon of belief that fired her imagination, whether manifest as patriotism, Catholicism, racial hierarchy, talent, ambition—whatever it was that moved people to something particularly fine. This fire turned her into what "Canadian of the future" Leonard Cohen calls, in another context, "Winter Lady": traveling from setting to setting seeking out the best that was ever desired, the finest manifestations of ideas that leave shadows on consciousness, and of shadows that result in the very finest of human things. One might see a Catherian spirit in Leonard Cohen's image: "Traveling lady stay awhile / Until the night is over / I'm just a station on your way / I know I'm not your lover."

Cather is a great American liberator, an author who truly understood the potential of American secular and humanistic pluralism to serve art and to advance the human condition by lifting it above the denominational. She wrote into it, out of it, and in 1931, at the very height of her career, structured it into a best-selling novel in the same year she received honorary degrees from Princeton and Berkeley and made the cover of Time magazine. The title of the novel, Shadows on the Rock, evokes Plato's cave, the chained beings who watch the shadows of reality on the cave wall and never know more than what is called "the visible region," and who pride themselves on being "the quickest to make out the shadows as they pass and best able to remember their customary precedences, sequences, and coexistences." Those who are dragged away from the shadows are able to contemplate the "true nature" of what "it is that provides the seasons and the courses of the year and presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some sort the cause of all these things that they had seen" (Book 7: 514-17). However, those who glimpse the eternities do not easily integrate back among the shadows.

According to this philosophical tableau, human beings are prisoners of their limited perception and their attenuated consciousness, and we are further demarcated by the senses through which we are compelled to experience and contemplate reality. What we normally consider to be the real are shadows of ultimate phenomena. Certain intellects, those able to free themselves from sense perception and transcend the shadowy world, those of philosophical capacity, are able to break free of the chains, called "systems of thought," and glimpse the true nature of what controls the visible region. These same people, as one would expect, find it difficult to take seriously the sensory world and may turn to investing themselves in philosophy or, in a subsequent civilization, literature. Millennia later, William James—whose influence on Cather Merrill Skaggs has established definitively—would make the same point in terms perhaps more accessible to domestic life in his civilization. According to James's image, "we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangents to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken" (144).

Recall Count Frontenac on his deathbed in Shadows on the Rock, in book 6, "The Dying Count": He would die here, in this room, and his spirit would go before God to be judged. He believed this, because he had been taught it in childhood, and because he knew there was something in himself and in other men that this world did not explain. Even the Indians had to make a story to account for something in their lives that did not come out of their appetites: conceptions of courage, duty, honour. The Indians had these, in their own fashion. These ideas came from some unknown source, and they were not the least part of life. (200-201) The Count is, in 1698, blasphemous; in 1931 (and still, in the early 2000s), he is one of Cather's spiritual pioneers. The Count knows that what he believes, the shadows trained on his mind—a shadow that has come into his consciousness and will not go out again, to paraphrase Cather—are the Christian God, the Trinity, and the Last Judgment. But he knows these beliefs to be the shadows of the real, "because he knew there was something in himself and in other men that this world did not explain," and that other civilizations had come into contact with the same shadows, in their fashion. William James completes his image this way: "So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog's and cat's ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own" (144). Precisely this is revealed to the dying count, whose experience is the culmination, such as it is, of Cather's novel of liberation. Just as there are many human languages to express the very same physical experiences, there exist numerous human religions, shadows of the "something . . . this world did not explain." Cautiously, James claimed that pragmatism could not prescribe a particular religion, "for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run" (144).

A literary pragmatist, Cather was drawn to ideas that worked. Her two great "Catholic novels," Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, explore unlikely areas for human habitation, much less emigration—the arid, barren desert and the wintry, isolated cliff—remote areas transformed into destinations on the strength of a very particular theological technology. We might consider her career as that of an itinerant, missionary writer, traveling around North America (and, at her death, planning her next writing-stop in France) with her message: desire is truth, and attracted to its finest examples, such as: How Truth happened in Nebraska; How Truth happened in Taos; and, How Truth happened in Quebec. Truth happens wherever the desire for it is strong enough, wherever the language, the mode of thought, the religious practice, the ideological construction of reality (name your cave, in other words), wherever human effort is concentrated sufficiently to summon the appearance of the Virgin, the construction of a cathedral, or the planting of wheat fields that will feed the world. Janis Stout has argued that Cather's interest in religious experience was cultural; that is to say, Cather had "an essentially secular and skeptical cast of mind, a cast of mind keenly responsive to the aesthetic experience of religion and its moral and cultural associations" (26).

To borrow Leonard Cohen's image from 1967, the "stations on [Cather's] way" were myriad, as we know—and included virtually every major region of North America, as she seemed to commit herself to seeking out manifestations of what James calls the "live possibilities" of human beings: "if the complementary conditions come and add themselves, our ideals will become actual things" (137). I sense Cather's close pursuit in James's footsteps when he argues, "the only real reason I can think of why anything should ever come is that someone wishes it to be here. It is demanded. . . . This is the living reason, and compared with it material causes and logical necessities are spectral things" (138, emphasis in source). Seeking out these living reasons occupied Cather's literary life. What could enable people to live in dugouts and sod houses in an area known as "the great American desert" for its seeming inhabitable topography? How does an artist "tear [herself] loose" from the hole in the ground that awaits her and shoot herself out into the world of ideas and music? Why did so many young men march willingly, almost gleefully, to their deaths in the Great War? Why live past fifty-two, with the knowledge that age bestows? What was the truth that happened in Virginia before her life began, that enabled her kin to own and to systematically degrade other human beings? The "traveling lady" went to these places and situations, probing the shadows, writing what it was that demanded these things to come into being.

In a letter to the Saturday Review of Literature in October 1931, Cather wrote (in response to a favorable review of Shadows on the Rock written by Governor Wilbur Cross of Connecticut) to explain a few things about her novel. "To me the rock of Quebec is not only a stronghold on which many strange figures have for a little time cast a shadow in the sun; it is the curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite." She went on to describe the narrative as "more like an old song, incomplete but uncorrupted, than like a legend. The text was mainly anacoluthon" ("On Shadows" 15). Anacoluthon is a linguistic term to describe a sentence or construction lacking grammatical sequence; the Greek root, akolouthos, meaning "following," and the prefix, an, negating it; the term is literally translated from its Greek root as "not following" or "it does not follow." According to the OED, the word anacoluthon can be traced to the early eighteenth century, coming into use, curiously enough, only a few years after Cather's La Bonne Espérance left Quebec in 1697, severing an apothecary from the world and leaving him "on a grey rock in the Canadian wilderness" (Shadows 3-4).

In "Before Breakfast," Henry Grenfell is troubled by two things: the scientific study of his private rock-island and the intrusion of beauty upon his privacy. He works himself up fairly nihilistically: "Why patch up?" he says when he decides against his eye medication. "What was the use . . . of anything? Why tear a man loose from his little rock and shoot him into the eternities?" Cather's narrative advice follows: "All that stuff was inhuman. A man had his little hour, with heat and cold and a time-sense suited to his endurance. If you took that away from him you left him spineless, accidental, unrelated to anything" (148-49). Grenfell does not feel better until he realizes and then experiences a physical rejuvenation. He sees the planet Venus in the morning "serene, terrible, and splendid, looking in at him," and counters the night's nihilism with his sense of "immortal beauty . . . yes, but only when somebody saw it, he fiercely answered back!" (158). With this realization in mind he scurries over the rock-island. "He had always known this island . . . must once have been a naked rock," as the scientist-professor had told him. "But that fact had nothing to do with the green surface where men lived and trees lived" (161) and where, as he sees immediately, the scientist's pretty daughters shoot themselves off rocks in the morning. "People are really themselves only when they believe they are absolutely alone and unobserved" (164), Grenfell concludes, as he unobservedly observes the girl who dives unobserved (she believes) into the Atlantic, and (for Grenfell) into the eternities. And because he takes her shadow home to breakfast, his appetite is sharpened for more than just food.

Today, the idea of nonsequential telling is common—it is, as Terence Martin has pointed out, "a provocative (and thoroughly postmodern) trope." However, in 1931, when Cather published Shadows on the Rock, it was not. In Fowler and Fowler's The King's English (1931), anacoluthon is identified as "the most notorious of all" examples of "grammatical misdemeanors," all too common to writers. "The anacoluthon is a failure to follow on, an unconscious departure from the grammatical scheme with which a sentence was started, the getting switched off, imperceptibly to the writer, very noticeably to his readers, from one syntax track to another. There is little to be said on the matter." Today we are more likely to ask, What does not follow? Everything follows. The object is to pry oneself loose from the rock that threatens us with narrated nihilism ("What was the use of anything?") by finding what casts the shadow. Whereas Cather acknowledged the idea that the rock was "the utmost expression of human need," as she has it in Death Comes for the Archbishop (97), she saw also beyond this metaphor. In Sapphira and the Slave Girl we have "solid rock" that is in the process of being blasted away by "the destroying armament of modern road-building" (170); and in "Before Breakfast" it is modern science that suggests the artificiality of the rock, when the geologist tells Grenfell that "the island was interesting geo-logically because the two ends of the island belonged to different periods, yet the ice seemed to have brought them both down together" (147). If the rock has a history, if it was delivered by ice, if something predates it, then even (to get back to the metaphor) those things that we consider rock-fixed and eternal are in fact contingencies, and we are left "spineless, accidental, unrelated to anything," left, like Grenfell, "sitting in his bathrobe by his washstand, limp!" (761). A man sitting limp beside the washstand holds little promise for the survival of the species. Cather's exclamation point is emphatic, ironic, and outrageous.

Shooting out into the eternities juxtaposes two central Catherian ideas. One's experience of life is mainly and grammatically anacoluthon, in Cather's mind. The rock, which we cling to out of need for Stability and Truth, is the hypothesis on which we live our lives and believe our beliefs, "the green surface where men lived" ("Before Breakfast" 161), the rocks on which faith staged miracles and missionaries carried civilizations. But the rock is an illusion of permanence; it is, before all else, a metaphor, a grammar, an expression of need, not the need itself or the answer to the need. Permanence, the experience of eternities, is available only when one is "torn loose" from these rocks to which we cling—those few moments when the geologist's daughter floats between the rocks and Grenfell comes back to life.

Although Cather wrote from this fire throughout her career, it takes coherent shape as an idea in her mind in 1931, when, like many other authors at pinnacle, she felt the need to explain herself. In "My First Novels (There Were Two)," written in 1931 and published in The Colophon right after Shadows on the Rock, Cather disowned her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, because it was "made out of 'interesting material'" instead of what she knew, what was familiar to her own experience (91). Her second novel was O Pioneers!; it was a much better job, a quality Cather attributes to her familiarity with Nebraska despite its literary and geographical flatness. But in 1931, the year she claimed to value familiarity, she published Shadows on the Rock. Why write a novel about something she knew nothing about, researching Quebec because she found in it (to throw her words back at her) "interesting material" that was "more exciting than the familiar" (she made five research trips to Quebec between June 1928 and September 1930), and then write an essay for The Colophon disavowing that method of writing as "the wrong road" to take? ("My First Novels" 91, 96). Why declare in The Colophon essay that "too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar" (97) after writing a novel concentrating on what she called "the salad dressing" ("On Shadows" 16), a novel, James Woodress observes, that is filled with things (432) so much that it seems more about things than characters. Shadows on the Rock remains somewhat unheralded in Cather studies not only because we have not quite yet understood the full arc of the career but also because we continue to think she was mainly interested in "the country people and the nuns" for the substance of what they believed. We would do better to see how their households resembled, from the perspective of the eternities, the actions of "ants," as she explained to Governor Cross, ants that "begin to rebuild when you kick their house down" ("On Shadows" 16).

Also in this crucial year of 1931, Cather met Flaubert's niece, an event she later recounted in "A Chance Meeting," first published in 1933 and later reprinted in Not Under Forty (1936). She tells the niece that she does not want any manuscripts or letters of Flaubert's. "The things of her uncle that were valuable to me I already had, and had had for years" (33), Cather claims. Nonetheless, Mme Franklin-Grout sends Cather one of her uncle's letters, which is somehow removed, lost, or stolen from the envelope. "I wrote to her, quite truthfully, that her wish that I should have one of her uncle's letters meant a great deal more to me than the actual possession of it could mean" (41). Cather gave the same cast of mind to Cécile, who says of the Count's glass fruit that is to be hers one day: "it is quite enough to look at it; one would never forget it. It is much lovelier than real fruit" (Shadows 48). By way of describing the effect of a Flaubert's L'education sentimentale on her, Cather may have revealed her frame of mind in 1931: "It is something one has lived through, not a story one has read; less diverting than a story, perhaps, but more inevitable. One is 'left with it,' in the same way that one is left with a weak heart after certain illnesses. A shadow has come into one's consciousness that will not go out again" ("A Chance Meeting" 20). The irrelevance of things never seems far from Cather's sense of value.

Cather seems to have lived and thought in nonlinear patterns, where nothing necessarily follows, and so anything may follow. Her transcontinental and transoceanic travel habits, her life in hotels, inns, and cottages—these were manifestations of a restless, anacoluthonic intellect. Cather's, moreover, was one of the minds that produced the era we live in now, where we cling to the nonsequential as if it were true. Cather's mind contributes to the shadow of our present intellectual ecology. Shadows on the Rock is the pinnacle, where it all comes together in a novel about stillness—about the rare and oh-so-temporary experience of standing still. It took a while for Cather to write Nebraska out. It was always her rock. Like Grenfell, she got frantic for it and had to visit it or think about it a lot. But once she let it go, she shot out into the eternities and wrote herself into her most intellectually rigorous work. The world may have broke in two in 1922, but it was back as one in 1931.

The coming of shadows into one's consciousness is a recurring motif in Shadows on the Rock, the building of frames of mind, of faith and visions. Consider the two working women in the novel. Because, from another perspective, there is something metaphorically whorish about Cather's itinerant career, spending a night here and there, this pen for hire, dropping into Taos or Quebec and "doing" Catholicism, and "doing" Bohemian girls and "doing" midlife professors. I'm just a station on your way / I know I'm not your lover. It is remarkable how Cather slips whores into the world of faith and endurance in Shadows on the Rock. Then again, how could Cather miss the fact that there were two main institutions by which women could immigrate to Canada without being wives: as the objects of spiritual salvation, and as the objects of physical satiation; ministers to God or sailors.

Cather's main whore is 'Toinette, a whore descended from a whore, from a long line of whores. Her mother was "one of the worst" of the "several hundred" women sent to Canada by the king to marry the men of a French regiment that had subdued the Iroquois—she was not one of the good girls or the orphans. She was one of those whom Cather identifies as the truly bad girls. The whore-mother gives birth to 'Toinette, "as pretty and as worthless a girl as ever made eyes at the sailors in any seaport town." Antoinette, surely Ántonia's dark twin, falls in love, leaves her whorish ways for about as long as Ántonia leaves her good ways, has a child, and then "returned to her old ways, and her husband disappeared" (41). Antoinette opens a "sailors' lodging house," which takes its place among the institutions clinging to the rock, but down low, where she does a pretty good business for a woman surrounded by piety. The girls attract sailors by advertising "'frogs' and 'snails'" to the hungry sailors, whether they had these delicacies on hand or not, because, as Cather explains, 'Toinette is "still good to look at" (41). (And, if the sailors cannot eat "frogs and snails," they can have either frog or snail, which are also the nicknames of 'Toinette and her business partner, in another of Cather's forays into suggestive orality.) The whore-bird whom Antoinette conceives during her brief fall into grace is Jacques, whose angelic nature Cécile finds in need of shoes.

'Toinette may be a whore, but she is not unenlightened. When she hears that it was the Governor, not Auclair, who bought the shoes for Jacques, she transcends her station for an instant: "The Governor? Ah, that is different. The Governor is our protector, he owes us something. The King owes something to the children of those poor creatures, like my mother, whom he sent out here under false pretences" (71, emphasis added). 'Toinette and her son cast strong shadows on the minds of the saintly rock dwellers. Bishop Laval sees Jacques as "a sign that it was time to return to that rapt and mystical devotion of his early life." And for his part, the apothecary Auclair watches Jacques and wonders why it is a whore "should have a boy like that" (71).

The other berating whore in Shadows on the Rock is Marie, in the story Mother Juschereau tells Cécile. Marie is such a whore that she must first be introduced by Cather as a pécheresse; the English word for sinner is apparently not sinful enough to communicate the extent of Marie's whorishness. "She had been a sinner from her early youth," Cather translates, and continues, in an uncharacteristically tortured sentence, "and was so proof against all counsel that she continued her disorders until an advanced age." Apparently lacking the entrepreneurial spirit of 'Toinette, Marie is banished from her town; "she fell lower and lower, and at last hid herself in a solitary cave" where she "dragged out her shameful life, destitute and consumed by a loathsome disease." She died alone, but apparently not unobserved, because after her death someone came around, removed her from her cave, and threw her body into a ditch where it was "buried like that of some unclean animal" (30). In her "solitary cave," however, Marie, like one of Plato's unchained visionaries, manages to free herself and see the source of her shadowy existence in the appearance of the Virgin Mary. At this point the story ceases to be about Marie and becomes a shadow in the consciousness of Sister Catherine. "One day, while [Sister Catherine] was at prayer," we learn, Marie pays her a visit and chews her out: "You commend to God the souls of all those who die," says the whorish Marie. "I am the only one on whom you have no compassion" (31). Sister Catherine immediately makes amends and has masses said for Marie, who returns, a few days later, with news of her admission to heaven. The story makes Sister Catherine's career, because the shadow of Marie leads her to produce a reputation for "always dedicating herself to the impossible and always achieving it" (34).

And so it follows—does it not follow?—that the colony of Quebec was begun in whoredom, sustained by visions of whores visited upon its saints, and continued by bourgeois whores who accept assistance from the governor and raise respectable sons. To place these two whore stories in the context of Cather's controlling metaphor: when we enter the game of rock/shadows/ meaning, we commit to a "disorder" that shall continue "until an advanced age." And what is a whore but the shadow of those sexual and economic desires that inform our more sacred, domestic arrangements? "She used to wear her hair like you," we tell the Winter Lady. In the time of the novel, the term whore could be—and was—applied to entire communities that had become corrupt or idolatrous. That whorish Quebec, one might say. We are all, in this sense, descendants of whores, whether descended from an eventually secularized Quebec or as Yankee descendants of Puritan saints, on their errand into the wilderness.

Cather's liberationist consciousness moves us away from manifestations and back to origins. Whence the shadows on our minds? The "Winter Lady" who stays a while brings the news that belief and desire are human energies that can make the world a sacred or a whorish place. It is the sense of having been shot out into the eternities, of having been pried loose from the rock for a while, of recognizing the cave we call our sanctuary and knowing briefly that what we hold to most dearly are shad-ows cast by ineffable sources—or by the eternal sources of our own desires. Cather makes us almost believe we can see that.

Recall the soon-to-be-reformed whore, Tom Outland, right after he "requites faith and friendship" (The Professor's House 229) and feels pretty bad about it. He does not pursue his estranged friend, Roddy Blake, immediately. While Blake gets away, Tom lies down and watches the shadows come over the mesa at sundown. As the light fades, he thinks, "It all came together in my understanding," so that "the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion." Far from feeling that he had done something wrong in his rude treatment of Blake, Outland "wakened with the feeling that I had found everything, instead of having lost everything" (226-27). Blake had done him a great favor in selling off the things he had mistakenly valued, and now he can conjure the forces that produced those pots and vases. "I seemed to get the solar energy in some direct way," he muses. Tom Outland, in the final scene of his narrative, has been torn loose from his little rock and shot out into the eternities. "And that's what makes men happy," St. Peter lectures in The Professor's House, "believing in the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives" (55). But what makes humanists giddy is the knowledge that the mystery is no more than another shadow cast to keep them in chains. We believed this, because we had been taught it in childhood. It is very much like the days when Cécile "loved her town best": not when her view of things was plain, but when her vision of the physical world was obscured, when "The autumn fog was rolling in from the river" and "Everything else was blotted out by rolling vapours that were constantly changing in density and colour" (50)—liberating her, for the moment, from that God-haunted rock.

And in the end, we see the final liberation of Cécile—not into the convent, but into the wilderness; not within the shadowy world where nothing changes, but into the world of what Cather calls "the future," the ever-receding realm of human salvation. Nowhere to be found in the epilogue, Cécile has been liberated from this particular rock. She has been torn loose and shot out into the eternities, and, to invoke Plato again, no longer "required to contend with [the] perpetual prisoners in 'evaluating' these shadows" (517a)—prisoners such as Jean Le Ber, Bishop Laval, even her father, the rock-bound pharmacist—all terribly good people, but imprisoned nonetheless. Think of all the prisons in this novel—from Blinker's tales of torture to Saint-Vallier's captivity in England—and, of course, the prominence of the religious orders in Quebec. How human beings seem to love their cages! And what beauty is produced by an imprisoned soul. But not Cécile. She moved into "a commodious house in the Upper Town," her father explains, "beyond the Ursuline convent" and out of the novel in the arms of Pierre Charron, namesake of the famous sixteenth-century French skeptic. Jacques, the whore's son, has taken over Cécile's chamber and is filling the apothecary's shop with keepsakes—shells and corals. Meanwhile, Auclair recognizes in the Bishop "a man uncertain," in Cather's final invocation of her title, "a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves." But Jacques is not at home in the dark very much; he is a sailor and spends much of his life between the rocks, with visions, no doubt, of pretty girls, diving. We might hear the Canadian singing: "I'm just a station on your way / I know I'm not your lover" as he, like us, navigates within the shadows cast by his creator, Willa Cather.