The Neuroscience of Epiphany in Lucy Gayheart

Lucy Gayheart, of Willa Cather’s eponymous 1935 novel, has disappointed many readers. Cather claimed she tired of Lucy’s character before finishing the book, and she wrote to E. K. Brown on 7 October 1946 that she felt the story “picks up after all the Gayhearts are safe in the family burial lot” (Selected Letters 667). Hermione Lee finds Lucy’s aspirations “fragile and escapist” (338), Janis P. Stout laments Lucy’s “abject hero worship” and “failure to be an artist in her own right” (271), and Susan J. Rosowski frames the narrative elements in Lucy Gayheart as “silly” and “too conventional,” emphasizing Lucy’s “blindness and dependency” on womb-like enclosures, which smother her imagination and cause her to retreat from, rather than reach toward, potential moments of illumination and expansion (“Cather’s Female Landscapes” 240). David Porter similarly positions Lucy Gayheart at the end of an arc that rose with Cather’s early heroines, who mirrored her own irrepressible talent, and sank with the frustrated artists of her later years, who “reflected the cruel diminishments Cather was experiencing in her own life” (“From Song of the Lark” 165). And Joseph Urgo concludes that “Cather makes it impossible to read anything less than disappointment out of the character. By all standards Lucy Gayheart is a limited young woman, not the stuff into which inspiration is embodied” (125).

How could it be that so many of Cather’s musical friends, including the discerning Hambourgs, regarded Lucy Gayheart as Cather’s finest work (Complete Letters #1281), when literary scholars have so overwhelmingly concluded the opposite? Even more generous views of the novel seem to cede Urgo’s point that Lucy is constitutionally incapable of experiencing creative awakening. Although David Stouck lauds the book for its philosophical depth, he emphasizes mortality as a universal condition that Clement Sebastian, Lucy Gayheart, and Harry Gordon all struggle against. Just as the story is driven by “images of life’s irreversible flow,” he suggests, the narrative works against Cather’s more common motif of the exceptional individual: the creative genius or savant (Stouck 221). Clement Sebastian is such a figure, but he is less defined by success than he is by sorrow, grief, and middle age. Even his performances, Stouck writes, are those of “a man at journey’s end, from [whose] perspective all of life’s movement is seen as a hurrying forward to death” (219). Stouck anticipates Richard Millington’s critique of the “hieratic view of the artist” that has steered many scholars toward “a rhetoric of diminishment” as they lament Lucy’s failures (30). Millington explains that because Lucy never pretends to aspire to greatness as a performer, only to the rich experience of art known to the listener, viewer, or reader, Lucy Gayheart is less “a book about creativity” than it is “a book about responsiveness” (30).

Although my own view of Lucy Gayheart aligns more squarely with Stouck’s and Millington’s, I mean to challenge Urgo’s claim that Lucy just isn’t built for real inspiration. Epiphany is the hallmark of the great artist in Cather’s other works, the chief quality that readers have found wanting in Lucy’s character. Yet Lucy’s struggle against her own flawed perception reveals one of Cather’s most nuanced portrayals of creative thought. In the end Lucy does experience epiphany, but her cognitive setbacks are just as instructive: not as signs of deficiency in Lucy’s creative faculties but as necessary impasses without which illumination might not break through.

I remain mindful in examining Lucy’s struggle of the distinctions between empirical science and literary fiction. Even so, Cather’s precision in animating her characters’ inner lives makes her work not only amenable to scientific analysis but potentially predictive of future discoveries about the creative mind. Approached in this way, literature is a close companion of cognitive science: an artistic simulation of established neuroscience and a source of testable hypotheses about imagination and reasoning that might also guide future research.

Epiphany or Pseudo-Insight?

Epiphany might seem to mark an impassable boundary between literature and science, but much depends on how that apex of creative thought is defined. The proverbial “Aha!” moment could accompany a range of subjective experiences that each individual interprets differently. Neuroscientists John Kounios and Mark Beeman, coauthors of The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain, suggest that the mere strangeness of an idea can make it seem more novel than it really is: “Perhaps the feeling of suddenness is an illusion, a misinterpretation of the emotion that accompanies an unforeseen result. If an unexpected idea comes to mind, it might feel sudden not because the idea entered awareness abruptly, but because the idea wasn’t what you bargained for” (57).[1] Kounios and Beeman prefer the phrases “creative insight” or “sudden insight” to epiphany, perhaps to distinguish their inquiry from religious experience and also to emphasize that the cognitive breakthroughs they recognize are objectively reliable: solutions to a problem rather than mere bursts of feeling. Even so, I intend to use epiphany and sudden insight interchangeably. Lucy’s breakthrough near the novel’s end might not be objectively measurable in the way brain scans are, but Cather presents Lucy’s epiphany as the solution to a cognitive problem, a sudden realization that permanently transforms her understanding. In that sense, Lucy’s arc as a character is a faithful enough representation of Kounios and Beeman’s work in neuroscience to warrant examination of Lucy’s awakening as deeply analogous to, if not wholly interchangeable with, the cognitive event that they describe as sudden insight.

While some neuroscientists regard epiphany as “pseudo-insight” or “analytic thinking garnished with emotion” (61), Kounios and Beeman claim to have proven that insight can be reached instantaneously, “in a single bound” (62), rather than by piecemeal analysis. In one study of remote associates problems, Kounios and Beeman surveyed participants about which of their answers came from analysis or creative insight. Remote associates problems present a cluster of three words that can each form a compound or familiar phrase with a fourth word. For instance, “pine, tree, and crab” can all be paired with “apple.” This answer can be found through analytical elimination or by sudden insight, and nearly all of the participants in the study had solved some problems by analysis and others by spontaneous insight (67–68). By measuring brain activity throughout the experiment with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalograms (EEG), Kounios and Beeman discovered that both methods revealed dramatically different brain behavior at the moment of epiphany from when an analytical solution was reached. Epiphany manifested in the EEG as “a sudden burst of high-frequency EEG activity known as ‘gamma waves’” and in the fMRI as “a corresponding increase in blood flow ... in a part of the brain’s right temporal lobe called the ‘anterior superior temporal gyrus,’ an area that is involved in making connections between distantly related ideas, as in jokes and metaphors” (70). As a result, Kounios and Beeman claim to have discovered the “neural signature of the aha moment: a burst of activity in the brain’s right hemisphere,” which they characterize as the literal “spark of insight” (71).

While Kounios and Beeman might be the first neuroscientists to capture the physical moment of epiphany, their work dovetails with older models of creativity. For instance, as early as 1926, in The Art of Thought, Graham Wallas proposed four stages of creative thought: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. However, Anna Abraham notes that four of Wallas’s stages describe conscious thought, whereas cognitive science now shows that “most aspects of information processing are unconscious insofar as we have no voluntary access to or awareness of the workings of these operations” (63). Furthermore, none of Wallas’s stages of creative awakening has been empirically verified (63). A more recent heuristic for cognitive creativity is the Geneplore model, proposed by Ronald A. Finke, Thomas B. Ward, and Steven M. Smith in 1992. The Geneplore model proposes three creative phases, which Abraham describes as follows:

The first phase is a generative one in which “preinventive” or internal precursor structures are produced. These preinventive ideas can be generated either in an open-ended exploratory manner or triggered by goal-directed inquiry. Depending on the task context and requirements, they can be simple or complex, conceptually focused or relatively ambiguous. This generative phase is followed by an explorative phase where the generated structures are evaluated in terms of their usefulness and feasibility. The generate-and-explore cycle repeats until a satisfying solution is reached in the form of a creative idea, which needs to be optimal given the product constraints on hand. (65)

Just as Wallas’s stages are difficult to test empirically, so the Geneplore phases resist tangible measurement. Abraham concludes that both models ignore the “essentially spontaneous nature of creative thinking where the generation of an idea is rapidly, immediately, and involuntarily accompanied by the evaluation of the idea” (67).

In contrast to the Wallas and Geneplore models, Kounios and Beeman propose a theory of cognitive awakening that is grounded in empirical data. They chart a mental path to epiphany from immersion in a conceptual problem to a cognitive impasse, which requires diversion to yield insight. This heuristic was inspired, in part, by their ostensible discovery of an “alpha brain blink,” a slower frequency of brain waves that they liken to a car idling in park, which occurs immediately before creative insight (84). One hallmark of this brain blink is a brief reduction in visual stimulus, which “allows one’s attention to find the new idea and jolt it into consciousness” (86). Our bodies seem to instinctively understand this process, since we often look away from a person or the thing we are contemplating, or close our eyes, when we are trying to think. Just as the brain can automatically diminish visual activity to make room for creative thought, we can consciously restrict sensory perception to increase the likelihood of creative insights. Kounios and Beeman explain that epiphanies in the shower could be the result of “white noise” from the water, which mutes other sounds. Warm water can also diminish the sense of touch by blurring distinctions between internal and external temperature, and visual impressions might be blurry, if one’s eyes are open at all. Fading our awareness of sound, touch, and sight can “cut off the environment, focus ... thoughts inwardly, and [yield] an insight” (87). While extreme measures for inducing epiphany, such as Jonathan Franzen’s rumored method of writing “in the dark while wearing earplugs, earmuffs, and a blindfold” (Kounios and Beeman 88), are not necessarily more effective, some dulling of the senses seems to push creative ideation forward. As I will show presently, the causal link between diminished sensory stimulus and epiphany offers a novel explanation of Lucy’s delayed response to an opera performance while grieving the death of her artistic mentor and emotional paramour, Clement Sebastian.

Kounios and Beeman argue that the single second separating the alpha blink from epiphany is not enough time for the brain to generate the idea de nouveau, hence “the solution must already be ready and waiting—unconsciously—when the blink enables you to find it” (87). What distinguishes Kounios and Beeman from their precursors, in addition to their rigorous empirical testing, is their sense of struggle as a necessary precursor to spontaneous discovery. Even if the “Aha!” moment feels involuntary, its suddenness is the result of a cognitive roadblock, which requires turning away from the problem for a time and either consciously or accidentally reducing external stimuli so the idea, which has been “lurking just below the threshold of awareness, ready to emerge,” can finally burst into consciousness (131). Urgo’s claim that Lucy Gayheart lacks the constitution for real inspiration suggests that she also lacks the ability to struggle purposefully toward insight. David Porter says it more directly: “Lucy comes across as compliant, complacent, and even a bit spineless” (“From Song of the Lark” 158). A closer reading of Lucy Gayheart shows that Lucy’s immersion in the conceptual problem that her epiphany resolves was lifelong, intensified by Sebastian’s death but not wholly defined by her relationship to him.

As much potential as Kounios and Beeman’s work offers for a fresh understanding of Lucy Gayheart, I remain mindful of nuances that their framework cannot wholly explain. For instance, they recognize that thought and feeling are intertwined; this is why the experience of sudden insight is joyful (27), but it can also mean that too positive or negative a mood might distort one’s perception of meaning (148). While Kounios and Beeman feel that they understand the ideal conditions under which epiphany might occur, they recognize that sudden insight requires a constellation of coordinated thoughts, feelings, memories, and behaviors, which are all highly individualized and necessarily mysterious (102, 150). What scholars have previously found more satisfying in the creative awakenings of Cather’s other artistic characters, compared to Lucy Gayheart’s more muddled development, is the very wholeness and simplicity that make the Wallas and Geneplore models unreliable explanations of creativity. Epiphany, as Kounios and Beeman understand it, requires a prolonged period of frustration, even failure, to produce sudden insight. According to this view, Cather may reveal more about creative awakening through the distractions and indirections that delay Lucy’s epiphany than she does in other characters’ more straightforward and ostensibly inevitable breakthroughs.

While many scholars have defined Lucy Gayheart by her failures, some have noted how her struggles parallel more triumphant characters, such as Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark. For instance, David Porter acknowledges frustration as fundamental to Thea’s emergence as an artist, noting that her “compound of persistence and vision” allows her to outlast her professional and existential setbacks (“From Song of the Lark” 150–51). Likewise, Porter notes how Thea experiences “sudden revelation” in her craft as a performer after prolonged feelings of futility (151). Porter even tracks similar language in Cather’s descriptions of Thea’s epiphany about art in Panther Canyon and Lucy’s epiphany about her future after hearing The Bohemian Girl, noting that in each case Cather describes the idea as “flashing” into her young character’s mind (161). However, like many others, Porter consistently presents Lucy’s very nature, not just her story, as the opposite of Thea’s, suggesting that Lucy Gayheart serves to “highlight qualities that Thea possesses—and that Lucy lacks” (160). While my purpose here is less to contrast The Song of the Lark with Lucy Gayheart than to examine Lucy’s cognitive arc on its own merits, I see Thea’s and Lucy’s cognitive struggles as more similar than different. Cather’s own physical and mental decline in the years separating the two novels might well have influenced her emphasis on struggle in Lucy’s character, but the design of Lucy Gayheart also suggests a more mature understanding of the creative mind. That is, ideas emerge from recursive experience in Lucy Gayheart rather than developing along linear timelines. Lucy does not need a change in scenery to break through her creative frustrations so much as a subtle shift in her attention and her physical disposition. To ignore these nuances risks not only misreading Cather’s narrative but misrepresenting the human mind.

Failed Epiphany or Cognitive Impasse?

Many studies of Lucy Gayheart cite Lucy’s failed epiphany in the second chapter of book I, after she has been skating with Harry Gordon, as evidence that she lacks the creative intelligence of a real artist. The moment, which I will hereafter describe as the star scene, initially seems to have all of the hallmarks of awakening. Lucy feels “drowsy and dreamy” beneath Harry’s robes and “glad to be warm” on the sleigh ride home (13). Lucy’s indolent state and expansive surroundings are the very conditions that predispose Thea Kronborg to her iconic epiphany in The Song of the Lark. Thea spends much of a summer resting in Panther Canyon, where she discovers the ruins of an Anasazi village and imagines a kinship between herself and the women who carried water in earthen jars from the river to their cliffside dwellings. One morning while bathing, Thea is surprised by a vision of art as a vessel for life; just as the Anasazi women caught the rushing water in their jars, so she hopes as a singer to catch the elusive stream of life in her throat (Song 334–35). For a moment, Cather’s scene in Lucy Gayheart seems to move toward the same kind of creative insight:

The sleigh was such a tiny moving spot on that still white country settling into shadow and silence. Suddenly Lucy started and struggled under the tight blankets. In the darkening sky she had seen the first star come out; it brought her heart into her throat. That point of silver light spoke to her like a signal, released another kind of life and feeling which did not belong here. It overpowered her. With a mere thought she had reached that star and it had answered, recognition had flashed between. Something knew, then, in the unknowing waste: something had always known, forever! That joy of saluting what is far above one was an eternal thing, not merely something that had happened to her ignorance and her foolish heart. (13)

Not only is Lucy’s momentary vision vague (defined by three “somethings” in the space of two sentences), it is also undercut by doubt; the intensity of thought seems uncharacteristic of her, the unlikely fruit of “ignorance” and a “foolish heart.” Soon enough, Lucy’s insight falters: “The flash of understanding lasted but a moment. Then everything was confused again. Lucy shut her eyes and leaned on Harry’s shoulder to escape from what she had gone so far to snatch. It was too bright and too sharp. It hurt, and made one feel small and lost” (14).

Epiphany is characterized by suddenness, but the lack of focus and staying power in Lucy’s vision also seem to mark this scene as a cognitive failure. For a moment she feels reassured by the star, and just as quickly the idea leaves her feeling diminished. For Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Lucy’s retreat from the star ensures “that [she] will come to no good end” (156). Susan Rosowski contrasts the scenes from The Song of the Lark and Lucy Gayheart to highlight Lucy’s defects of character. Whereas Thea participates in a “creative union” in Panther Canyon, straining toward the ideas that emerge out of the landscape, Rosowski sees Lucy withdrawing from her vision and “den[ying] the active receptivity necessary for art” (“Cather’s Female Landscapes” 236, 240). In another comparative study of Thea and Lucy, Isabel Caruso rehearses Cather’s putative view that “the true artist [Thea] possesses the will and desire first hand, ... and this desire must be present in sufficient intensity to withstand any challenge to the creation and bringing forth of an artist” (8). David Porter’s conclusion that “Lucy Gayheart falls short of the heights and depths of both artistic ambition and human passion” (On the Divide 272) similarly hinges on Lucy’s inability to seize what she thought she saw in the evening star. In fact, the “fugitive gleam” of a “briefly brilliant sunset sky” is, by Porter’s lights, the defining motif in Lucy’s story (“From The Song of the Lark” 163). Whatever insight might flare up in Lucy is, by these measures, destined to fade.

The Kounios/Beeman model for creative insight suggests that many readers of the star scene mistake a cognitive impasse for artistic failure. Even though the second chapter of book I gives us our first direct glimpse of Lucy, as she is skating with Harry Gordon and then riding home with him, Cather’s introduction of her character is misleading because it omits so much context. That is, Lucy occupies a transitional cognitive stage when she imagines the star signaling to her. Just three months have passed since she first heard Clement Sebastian perform in Chicago, the most profound experience that she had ever known. Lucy has not yet become Sebastian’s accompanist or fallen in love with him when we see her in chapter 2; by all measures, she is still immersed in her conceptual problem, perhaps still trying to define it. Lucy’s failure to experience a sustained epiphany is unsurprising at this stage, not evidence of creative deficiency.

Lucy herself seems to understand that she is in the midst of transformation during the star scene. Restored to her Chicago apartment soon after, Lucy muses: “Out there in Haverford she had scarcely been herself at all; she had been trying to feel and behave like someone she no longer was; as children go on playing the old games to please their elders, after they have ceased to be children at heart” (29–30). Lucy implies that she is maturing, even if Haverford is not yet ready to see her as an adult, but Rosowski reads these changes in a sinister light, characterizing Sebastian as a predatory figure who entrances Lucy (Voyage Perilous 225). Lee similarly sees Sebastian exerting psychic control over Lucy by having “penetrated and taken her over” (343). According to such reasoning, Lucy loses autonomy over even her innermost thoughts and must be deluding herself if she thinks Sebastian is contributing to her personal growth. In fact, Deborah Carlin describes Lucy’s development as an “elaborate and even ironic ... self-deception” (132). If this is so, we must also distrust Lucy’s awakening near the novel’s end, when she renews her pursuit of beauty and delight. However, if we dispute that Lucy wholly surrenders her faculties to Sebastian’s influence and instead accepts her self-awareness as emerging (but still only partially realized), the stages that Kounios and Beeman outline as precursors to insight offer a more affirming view of Lucy’s development.

Lucy's Path to Epiphany

The beginning of Lucy’s path to insight is not revealed until the very moment of her awakening near the novel’s end, so I must work against Cather’s narrative structure to trace Lucy’s cognitive arc. An unusual moment embedded in Lucy’s epiphany undercuts much of what the story has led us to believe about Lucy’s fundamental nature and carries us back in time, long before she had heard Sebastian sing, long before she had even had any thought of leaving Haverford. After a performance of The Bohemian Girl leaves Lucy trembling with inspiration, she recognizes the feeling as familiar: “Every nerve was quivering with a long-forgotten restlessness. How often she had run out on a spring morning, into the orchard, down the street, in pursuit of something she could not see, but knew! It was there, in the breeze, in the sun; it hid behind the blooming apple boughs, raced before her through the neighbours’ gardens, but she could never catch up with it” (194). No one else in the novel seems to understand this about Lucy, that she has always been pursuing a real idea rather than simply flitting about. The collective voice of Haverford in the first chapter compares Lucy to “a bird flying home” (5) and mistakes her energy for an “irrepressible light-heartedness” (6). But Lucy understands her younger self to have been seeking the source of her desire, not fleeing from it. Lucy’s “long-forgotten restlessness” marks the immersion stage that Kounios and Beeman identify as the beginning of creative thought. Lucy knows that her sensory knowledge of wind, sun, and apple blossoms is not enough; this physical beauty contains meaning that she cannot yet grasp but that she passionately hopes to understand.

So much is contained in this moment: Lucy’s earliest conception of herself, the conceptual problem she understood herself to be grappling with from a young age, and the memory of Sebastian’s temporary resolution of that problem for her. As her awakening unfolds, Lucy recalls that Sebastian “had made the fugitive gleam an actual possession. With him she had learned that those flashes of promise could come true, that they could be the important things in one’s life. He [...] was, in his own person, the door and the way to that knowledge” (194). This was true at the recital where Lucy first heard Sebastian perform, when “[t]he dark beauty of the songs seemed to her a quality in the voice itself, as kindness can be in the touch of a hand. It was as simple as that—like light changing on the water” (32). From that first encounter, Lucy understood Sebastian as part of her awakening, a stepping stone to enlightenment rather than an obstacle to it.

Whereas Lucy’s initial reaction to Sebastian’s singing bears resemblance to the helplessness that Rosowski describes, Lucy herself does not recall Sebastian’s influence as suffocating or enervating during her own awakening. Her first encounter with Sebastian left Lucy “struggling with something she had never felt before. A new conception of art? It came closer than that. A new kind of personality? But it was much more. It was a discovery about life, a revelation of love as a tragic force, not a melting mood, of passion that drowns like black water” (33). Much has been made of this passage as ominous foreshadowing of Sebastian’s drowning, as well as of Lucy’s own eventual death by drowning, presumably fated by her association with him. But it is also possible to read Lucy’s reflection here as limited to the German songs Sebastian sang, when the performance conjured powerful aesthetic and emotional responses that dissolved the barriers between symbols and the things themselves. At the end of Der Doppelgänger, Sebastian left Lucy (and presumably many others in the audience) with the lingering perception of “moonlight, intense and calm, sleeping on old human houses; and somewhere a lonely black cloud in the night sky” (32). Such a spellbinding effect is what great performers seek, and feeling Schubert’s angst in the music is quite different from literally despairing of life.

Notably, Lucy’s prevailing attitude toward Sebastian during her own awakening is gratitude for introducing her to art as a consuming experience; “flowers and music and enchantment and love” are “all the things she had first known with [him]” (195). Participating in Sebastian’s conception of art gives Lucy the very confidence she lacked when she could not sustain her vision of the evening star, an early “flash of promise” that she was not yet ready to seize. Here I must quarrel gently with Janis Stout’s false dichotomy between Lucy “fixating on the star performer ... and return[ing] her vision to the distant star of art” (267). Lucy’s independent awakening is an outgrowth of Sebastian’s influence, not a liberation from it, which is to say that her memories are of a piece with her epiphany.

If Lucy’s original struggle was grasping meaning in the world (that incomprehensible energy racing before her in sun and wind and blooming trees), and if Sebastian brought that knowledge to her for a time, he was, while living, the best answer to her conceptual problem. For instance, Lucy found such fulfillment in Sebastian’s presence that she rendered the entire city of Chicago according to her feelings for him: “Lucy carried in her mind a very individual map of Chicago: a blur of smoke and wind and noise, with flashes of blue water, and certain clear outlines rising from the confusion; a high building on Michigan Avenue where Sebastian had his studio—the stretch of park where he sometimes walked in the afternoon—the Cathedral door out of which she had seen him come one morning—the concert hall where she first heard him sing” (27). Lucy’s Chicago is a “city of feeling [that] rose out of the city of fact like a definite composition,—beautiful because the rest was blotted out” (27). Sebastian’s death then intensifies Lucy’s original search for the “fugitive gleam” with the existential question of how to find meaning in her life without Sebastian in it: whether life is worth living without the knowledge she had possessed and then lost. Cather writes, “To have one’s heart frozen and one’s world destroyed in a moment—that was what it had meant. She could not draw a long breath or make a free movement in the world that was left. She could breathe only in the world she brought back through memory” (164). But this is a different problem from grieving a sweetheart: her impasse represents a mortal question for Lucy.

While Lucy’s months in Haverford after Sebastian’s death seem like a rudderless time, Kounios and Beeman explain that diversion from an impasse enables insight. Lucy feels “alien” in her own house, “tense” in her own bed, “on her guard against something that was trying to snatch away her beautiful memories, to make her believe they were illusions and had never been anything else” (164). She finds diversion primarily in the family apple orchard, the only place where “the hard place in her breast [would] grow soft” (166), perhaps because it is also a place that she remembers had sparked her creative desire long ago. The orchard is crucial for Lucy’s cognitive development because it is an optimal environment for defocused attention, which Anna Abraham identifies as a salient quality of highly creative people (57). Among the unpruned trees, Lucy has no task or obligation other than to “remember and think, and try to realize what had happened to her” (Cather, Lucy Gayheart 163).

Lucy also experiences diversion when she reluctantly accompanies her father to the performance of The Bohemian Girl mentioned earlier. She expects nothing from the opera and approaches it in a thoroughly defocused state, the ideal frame of mind for enabling insight. Kounios and Beeman explain why seemingly purposeless activities are crucial in cognitive diversion: “[F]ailing to solve a problem sensitizes you to things in the environment that may subsequently trigger an insight. ... Exposing yourself to a variety of experiences or thoughts—especially unusual ones—during a break will help you to dismiss these unproductive thoughts and increase your chances of encountering an insight trigger” (109). The opera is not one Lucy would have chosen to attend in Chicago; she recognizes it as old-fashioned, far afield of the music she rehearsed with Sebastian. Yet these very qualities prime Lucy for surprise and discovery.

Just as she was swept into Sebastian’s personality through his voice, Lucy is taken by a “sympathy, a tolerant understanding” for the soprano in the opera, despite the singer’s age and flaws as a vocalist. The woman’s voice “gave freshness to the foolish old words” of “‘I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls’” (191), prodding Lucy to contemplate the contrast between what the diva had lost—“youth, good looks, position, the high notes of her voice”—and the sweetness with which she sang (191–92). The singer rekindles the most vital part of Lucy’s nature, her “long-forgotten restlessness.” Whereas her earlier meditation on the evening star left Lucy feeling muddled and lost after a brief flash of emotion, the awakening sparked by The Bohemian Girl has more staying power: “A wild kind of excitement flared up in her. She felt she must run away tonight, by any train, back to a world that strove after excellence—the world out of which this woman must have fallen” (192).

As Kounios and Beeman caution, a surge of feeling does not qualify as insight. The crucial difference between bare ecstasy and joyful awakening is understanding the reason for one’s abrupt shift in mood (145). Lucy knows very well that she is homing in on an answer to her problem, even if it takes most of the next day to apprehend it fully: “The wandering singer had struck something in her that went on vibrating; something that was like a purpose forming, and she could not stop it. When she awoke in the morning, it was still there, beating like another heart” (192). After a busy morning of Christmas Eve errands, Pauline asks Lucy to rest before dinner. This respite from work, conversation, and other cognitive noise enables a lull akin to the brain blink that precedes insight. Lucy’s excitement is piqued, but her external influences have all slowed down: “[She] did not feel tired, she was throbbing with excitement, and with the feeling of wonder in the air” (194). Lucy raises the blinds, opens her window, and watches the snow, which simplifies the visual scene even as “[t]he daylight in her room grew greyer and darker” (194). Cather’s language describes the literal conditions under which insight is more likely to occur. Kounios and Beeman stress that “expansive surroundings” enhance creative thinking by encouraging remote association, whereas tight spaces constrict thought. Dimly lit spaces diminish visual detail, which encourages “generality, abstraction, and broad attention” (204–5). As her external sensations simplify, the vibrating idea Lucy has been living with since hearing the opera has space to assert itself.

In an instant, Lucy recalls the stages that have led her to the threshold of epiphany: her unsatisfied restlessness and the pursuit of meaning that she believed Sebastian had fulfilled with his presence and taken back with his death. These memories, combined with her recent excitement, allow her to see beyond her grief: “Tonight, through the soft twilight, everything in her was reaching outward, straining forward. She could think of nothing but crowded streets with life streaming up and down, windows full of roses and gardenias and violets—she wanted to hold them all in her hands, to bury her face in them” (195). Then comes Lucy’s epiphany:

Suddenly something flashed into her mind, so clear that it must have come from without, from the breathless quiet. What if— what if Life itself were the sweetheart? It was like a lover waiting for her in distant cities—across the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her. [...] Oh, now she knew! She must have it, she couldn’t run away from it. She must go back into the world and get all she could of everything that had made him what he was. Those splendours were still on earth, to be sought after and fought for. (195)

Lucy’s breakthrough vindicates the sense of meaning she found, then lost, in the evening star. If she approaches the world as a sweetheart, rather than an “unknowing waste,” it will reciprocate, love her back. While David Porter sees Lucy’s fate as sealed by her association with fading sunsets, he affirms her awakening to the “evanescent sweetness of life and the need to seize life at once” (“From The Song of the Lark” 161). Yet this is no fleeting insight. Lucy discovers that the shift in her perspective is also the answer to her existential struggle to find meaning in a world without Sebastian in it. Instead of Chicago becoming the touchstone for Sebastian in her private landscape of the city, the love and perception Lucy knew through Sebastian become her touchstone for the world. Sebastian might linger as a metaphor, but Lucy is well positioned to fully realize her own desire as the thing itself. She has her answer.

Lucy’s untimely death soon after her awakening is perhaps her most disappointing act as a character. Deborah Carlin implies that Lucy’s drowning reflects Cather’s flawed vision for the novel: “Lucy Gayheart remains ... a failed attempt to revise what Cather complained was the chief failure of awakening novels, that is, the debilitating limitations of their female protagonists. Cather’s text does revise the kind of awakening its heroine will have, and then it blithely marches her off to a version of the suicide with which these novels end” (139). Skaggs more harshly concludes that, “as the subject of a morality play, [Lucy] exists to deserve her fate. The primary moral she conveys is the crucial importance of a woman’s self-consciously and energetically choosing the direction of her own life and then [being] willing to make her chosen life happen” (157). Others point to Lucy’s reaction to Der Doppelgänger as evidence of Sebastian’s sinister power over her. Lucy imagines that the song will “have some effect upon her own life” and feels that it haunts her “like an evil omen” (35). Her response prompts the narrator to reflect that Lucy is one of those people for whom “fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts—that and nothing more” (35). David Porter develops a compelling argument for the subtler overtones of fatalism in Schubert’s Die Winterreise, which Sebastian performs in the second concert that Lucy attends. The winter setting of the song cycle conjures a “barren, frozen world of loneliness, tragic memories, and failed hopes” (“From The Song of the Lark” 160), and one of the closing titles of the cycle is “Täuschung,” or “Delusion” (163). Such nuances, coupled with the narrator’s later observation that Lucy had been “lost by a song” (189), seem to foreshadow both Sebastian’s and Lucy’s deaths by drowning.

However, Cather’s conclusion offers a more unsettling suggestion, which is that by the novel’s end Lucy has effectively overcome the fate implied by those foreboding feelings and musical allusions or by the tropes of female awakening that precede Lucy Gayheart. The narrator suggests that Lucy was “very nearly saved” by The Bohemian Girl (189), which is not to say that the vision the opera left her with was insufficiently redemptive, only that Lucy’s time to live out her new vision was cut short. Fate is what happens to Lucy’s feelings in the final scene, when she returns to the river with her skates and the frozen ground and bitter wind persuade her to turn back. She hears Harry Gordon’s sleigh and hopes he will give her a lift. When he drives callously by, “[s]uch a storm of pain and anger boiled up in her that she felt strong enough to walk into the next county. Her blood was racing, and she was no longer conscious of the cold” (209). Lucy thinks skating will assert her independence, keep her from suffering Harry’s slights again, but her anger blinds her to the dangers: “She was not looking about her, she saw nothing—she would get away from this frozen country and these frozen people, go back to light and freedom such as they could never know” (209). Lucy’s death is tragic because she is finally on the outward path, resolved to pursue the things that give her life meaning: the love of art that her father also lived for and determined that she would have a chance at claiming. It happens to be winter. The river happens to have changed its banks. Harry happens to stoke Lucy’s anger at the very moment she has decided against going skating. None of these accidents discredits Lucy’s existential triumph, which I hope to have demonstrated as being a reliable representation of epiphany by both literary and scientific measures.

If Lucy’s death is an accident, rather than the result of what Stout sees as a “fatal deficiency” in her nature (270), then her epiphany retains its integrity. Lucy’s discovery not only solves her own conceptual problem, it makes her personal awakening universal: empowering to anyone caught in the throes of depression or grief, as well as instructive to anyone seeking insight into the creative mind. Embracing life itself as a lover—it is still a good vision to live by.