Americans’ Coming of Age: Willa Cather’s Female National Hero in The Song of the Lark

Culture and Cosmopolitanism: Brooks and Bourne’ Vision for a New America

While Cather was writing The Song of the Lark, a group of writers, social critics, and social scientists were debating ideas about nation, self, art, and culture in salons in Greenwich Village and on the pages of the small magazines, including The Dial, the Atlantic Monthly, and The Nation. The vision of the nation that Cather puts forward in the novel engages with many of these contemporary debates. As Susan Hegeman and Eric Aronoff have demonstrated, an interdisciplinary group of thinkers known collectively as the Young Americans, including Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Edward Sapir, Randolph Bourne, Ruth Benedict, and Waldo Frank, rejected the nineteenth-century notions of culture as a singular entity evolving toward the perfection of Western civilization and instead were thinking about cultures that are plural, synchronic, spatially bounded, and meaningful unto themselves. Two influential works, Van Wyck Brooks’s America’s Coming-of-Age (1915) and Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-national America” (1916), were published within a year of The Song of the Lark and share similar ideas about the role of the artist, the importance of friendship in community, and the diverse and cosmopolitan nature of the United States. Cather certainly knew of the Young Americans and would have been familiar with their writing. As Janis Stout demonstrates, Cather and Bourne had mutual friends, including the feminist anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons and the writer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant (“Modernist”). Brooks was a prominent voice in intellectual circles and was also “well acquainted” with Parsons (Aronoff 27). Bourne reviewed both The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia, and Cather, in a letter to her brother Roscoe on 5 January 1919, lamented the untimely death of “poor Bourne,” whom she lauded as “the ablest of our critics” (Complete Letters #2085).

In their respective America’s Coming-of-Age and “Trans-national America,” Brooks and Bourne critiqued the United States for its Victorian gentility, its self-interested devotion to moneymaking, its conformity and xenophobia. They depicted the United States as rootless and without a cultural center. Americans, they believed, were losing their connection to place and to ethnic traditions and melting into an aimless society of mass consumers without a usable past or native artistic tradition to define them. Brooks compared the nation to a “vast Sargasso sea—a prodigious welter of unconscious life, swept by ground-swells of half-conscious emotion” (164), and Bourne saw “detached fragments of peoples ... with leering cheapness, falseness of taste and spiritual outlook.” They lamented the divisions in American life, the separation between what Brooks called the “Highbrow,” or transcendent ideals disconnected with daily life, and the “Lowbrow,” or the “catchpenny realities” of practicality and self-interested moneymaking (7). Americans, they argued, should embark on a cultural renaissance. It must reject the social norms and competitive individualism that suffocate the spirit and separate the individual from the body, men from women, work from pleasure.

To do this, Brooks and Bourne believed that Americans should “delve more deeply into the very heart of their country’s traditions, retrieving and renewing those aspects of the national heritage that nourished the intuitive values of the soul rather than the cold calculation of commerce” (Blake 74). They argued that when Americans immerse themselves in the experience of everyday life and form friendships grounded in shared experience, common aesthetic appreciation, and vigorous intellectual exchange, they would root their consciousness and cultivate their personalities. They would then “breathe a larger air” and feel a “pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes” (Bourne, “Trans-national”). At times romantic and utopian, they employed the ideals of organic communities and mystical wholeness as well as essentialist notions of native cultures as remedies to the crisis of modernity. Yet, their views were characterized by what Casey Nelson Blake terms “aestheticist pragmatism” (6). For the Young Americans, such feeling and experience in community would not mystically transform the divided individual into a whole being but rather would cultivate the individual personality and confer the agency necessary for democratic participation and social action for the common good (Blake).

Experience, friendship, culture, community, personality, art—these are the building blocks for individual and national renewal. Although Brooks and Bourne, along with the Young Americans cohort of writers, have been critiqued as cultural nationalists, as Casey Nelson Blake and Susan Hegeman argue, their work, along with their publication The Seven Arts, was deeply committed to a broad, cosmopolitan vision of America (Blake 2; Hegeman 105). Brooks and Bourne in their works America’s Coming-of-Age and “Trans-national America” used these shared ideas to further develop their own arguments. In America’s Coming-of-Age, Brooks critiqued American culture through his analysis of the failings of American literature. He called for a new American writer who could throw off imitation and supposed refinement, integrate the “Highbrow” and “Lowbrow,” and make a new literature out of engagement with American life in an epic expression of the American spirit (44–105). In “Trans-national America” Bourne laid out his vision of the nation as a trans-nation, or a federation of cultures with distinctive languages, religions, and traditions living side by side in a “common American background” with a unique creative energy and a new cosmopolitan outlook.

The bildungsroman is an appropriate genre for a fictional engagement with the ideas of the Young Americans at this moment of national soul searching and rapid social change, not only because Brooks uses a metaphor of human development in the very title of his work, America’s Coming-of-Age, but also because the genre can have a performative element, helping to give form to the collective experience of the nation not yet fully imagined (Boes 41–42). However, the Young Americans would never have considered a woman as the hero of their American cultural renaissance. To these writers, women were teachers of genteel Victorian culture, caretakers of the private realm, and sentimental consumers—all forces they rebelled against. Instead, in their early works they favored an American art characterized by a rugged manliness and called for a male writer who would act with virility, “impressionability,” and “gusto” (Brooks 93). Through the power of personality and a robust artistic expression, they imagined this strong, masculine writer would overcome divisions in order to construct a usable past and define the new American spirit.[2]

Thus, Brooks and Bourne develop a radical critique of the alienation of modern American society, its conservative piety, and its nativist views and suggest a path for cultural renewal through a new artistic voice (Brooks) and a cosmopolitan union of ethnic cultures (Bourne). In The Song of the Lark, Cather takes up similar ideas, yet, perhaps even more radically, she imagines a woman, Thea Kronborg, as the artist of epic proportions. In the novel, Thea achieves the independent identity and narrative closure that has eluded other female protagonists, and she does so through her individual will to defy social norms and doggedly pursue her art and also through her friendships and experiences with otherness in plural communities of the American West. Thea matures into a woman of personality alongside a cosmopolitan nation and is able to embody the spirit of the nation through her artistic expression. The Song of the Lark is both Cather’s genre-bending depiction of a woman’s artistic development and an assertion of her own performative vision of the American nation at this contested moment of national identity.

Emplotting a Nation

The Song of the Lark traces Thea’s personal journey, from her adolescence and artistic awakening in Colorado, to her early professional training as a young woman in Chicago, and finally to her success as an opera diva in New York, a journey that mirrors the developing nation. The first third of novel depicts Thea’s childhood in Moonstone, Colorado, a small town that, like Thea herself, is still taking shape. Life in Moonstone moves at a slow pace. The town is unfinished, newly delineating itself from the surrounding high desert sand dunes where Thea prefers to roam. The long street between the town and the train depot, for example, cuts through a “considerable stretch of rough open country staked out in lots not built up at all” (41). Most of Moonstone’s Euro-American residents have no linguistic or cultural connections to the countries of origin of the ancestors. Instead, they fashion themselves as assimilated, middle-class Americans. Thea never feels that she fully fits in among Moonstone residents, most of whom are defined by their social hierarchies and lack of aesthetic appreciation.

At seventeen, Thea leaves behind the languid days of her childhood and moves to Chicago to begin her training in earnest. The settings shift from country roads and family homes to city streets and apartment buildings, and the pace of the novel quickens to match the pace of this “big, rich, appetent Western city” (215). Thea moves to Chicago in the 1890s, when the city was newly rebuilt and modernized after the great fire of 1873 and was maturing into civic existence. Thea too begins to mature. She leaves behind her “queer country clothes” and gets “used to living in the body of a young woman” (284). As Michelle Moore notes, Chicago at the time was beginning to attend to the “higher life” of art, yet the city’s understanding of art was “overwhelmingly utilitarian” (95). Thea initiates her professional training here and broadens her artistic education at the symphony and the Art Institute. Yet she mostly encounters people without aesthetic appreciation, concerned with the utilitarian goals of “[m]oney and office and success” (294) rather than art and ideas.

The third and final site of development in the novel is New York City immediately before Thea leaves to study in Germany and then ten years later, when she returns to the city as an opera diva in full possession of her artistic greatness. The New York sections are mainly set in grand hotels and fashionable restaurants, in Thea’s house, which was “as impersonal as the Waldorf, and quite as large” (450), and in the Metropolitan Opera House. Thea has reached the pinnacle of her career: she is a great American artist living among the grand buildings and public spaces of a city with a fully refined aesthetic appreciation. Thus, Thea’s journey to become a mature artist parallels the industrial, civic, and aesthetic development of the modern, urban nation.

Thea’s development, however, is at odds with the familiar story of mobility and American progress moving from east to west. In The Song of the Lark, traditions, ideas, and modes of artistic expression begin in the American West.[3] Thea moves eastward, carrying with her the accumulation of her experiences in western landscapes and communities that she then synthesizes into her uniquely American artistic expression. People and ideas also move along south/north routes in the novel. Thea’s friend Juan Tellamantez migrated north from Mexico and often heads south, disappearing for months at a time. Another friend, Ray, “had drifted, a homeless boy, over the border” (57), and midway through the novel Thea too travels south through Mexico. In fact, the Colorado region seems much more connected to Mexico than to the eastern United States in the novel. The landscape is depicted using words like arroyo and piñón, offering signs that the region was a part of Mexico just four decades before the novel opens.[4] At one point Dr. Archie receives a letter from Thea at his house in Denver, and he “sat with astonishment” (382) at the New York postmark. Dr. Archie “had known that Thea was in Mexico, travelling with some Chicago people, but New York, to a Denver man, seems much farther away than Mexico City” (382). In this novel of national becoming, Cather re-maps the nation to depict multidirectional poles of influence and highways of work and travel beyond the more commonly imagined, unidirectional movement of people and ideas from the eastern center to the western periphery.

From Division Toward Wholeness

While these three sites of increasing maturity—Moonstone, Chicago, and New York—mirror Thea’s personal development, it is not in and through these spaces that Thea grows into an artist and a woman. In fact, these settings are more frequently obstacles to Thea’s development. Much as Brooks and Bourne do in their writings, the novel depicts urban sites as materialistic, impersonal, and emotionally draining. According to these writers, the city accentuates the divisions in American life: between pioneer acquisitiveness and puritan strictures, as well as between urban and wild, men and women, popular culture and high art. Thea too feels divided and unfulfilled in these spaces. Yet in the natural spaces and plural cultures of the West, she finds other ways of being in the world. As a young girl in Moonstone, Thea often steps off the sidewalk and ventures outside the socially ordered town center. She enters into the high desert landscape that to her feels “young and fresh and kindly” (243). Thea finds inspiration in the beauty of the natural world, for the “absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a wider range” (243). On the edge of town, Thea encounters communities of Germans and Mexicans who feel deep social prejudices in town but who, she romantically imagines, are “given another chance” in this landscape (243). She finds what Bourne would call a “federation of cultures” speaking their own languages and practicing their own traditions (“Trans-national”).

Tobias Boes, in his study of the history of the bildungsroman, argues that in the genre “the life of the protagonist will always resist fulfillment in institutional structures” (7) as well as “nationalism’s expectation for closure” (3). According to Boes, this resistance appears in anachronistic moments in the text when the narrative leaves “behind a merely sequential model of history and forge[s] links between the vernacular realities of different peoples—their ‘thick sense of time’ with all its contradictory rituals and practices” (34). Boes calls these moments “cosmopolitan remainders” (3). In Cather’s bildungsroman, there are many such asynchronous moments in which Thea forges links with vernacular rituals and practices. In fact, in The Song of the Lark these interruptions to the forward-moving structure occur so frequently and have such an impact on the narrative development that it is difficult to view them simply as remainders. Thea is profoundly influenced by her experiences in liminal communities outside of the urban settings where aesthetic appreciation and artistic production is a part of everyday life. Here, Thea develops her artistic genius in ways that would not otherwise have been possible amid the gendered norms and expectations in urban America.

Friends from Childhood

From an early age, Thea knows she is different from everyone around her. She feels this difference as an amorphous and undefined twoness that must be guarded and kept secret. She has a greater aesthetic sensibility, an openness to new people and ideas, and an eye toward greatness incomprehensible to the people of her small town. Yet her twoness seems also more foundational, more central to her identity. Critics have compellingly argued that it is a coded reference to her sexual or gender identity that must be kept hidden from the strictly heterosexual norms of Moonstone. Her art, then, becomes a means to express her full identity. Thea does not spend time with girls her age and instead befriends four men who are at least ten years older: Dr. Archie, Wunsch, Spanish Johnny, and Ray.[5] The first section of the novel, “Friends from Childhood,” is named for these men, who are all progressives, idealists, and freethinkers. They are also misfits and outsiders. They see in Thea someone striving to be different, someone who reflects their own strivings. They offer her not only camaraderie and acceptance that she does not find among her peers but also the guidance and encouragement to follow a path to overcome divisions and achieve full self-expression.

Dr. Archie, the town physician, is an atheist, a romantic, and an intellectual in a town of small-minded people, and he has the “uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind” (94). Thea’s music teacher, Wunsch, is a German immigrant and talented musician who struggles with alcoholism and is treated with disdain by the teetotaling townspeople. Juan Tellamantez, called Spanish Johnny, is a Mexican painter, a decorator, and a mandolin player who teaches Thea songs with Spanish lyrics. Spanish Johnny is an outsider not only because he is Mexican but also because he has a tendency to get drunk and disappear for months at a time. Ray Kennedy is an “aggressive idealist, a freethinker, and, like most railroad men, deeply sentimental” (51). His difference comes from leaving home as a young man and traveling through the West and Mexico. What Thea likes the most about Ray is his “love for Mexico and the Mexicans” (57). Ray can “speak Spanish fluently, and the sunny warmth of that tongue kept him from being quite as hard as his chin, or as narrow as his popular science” (57). This unlikely quartet become the foundational figures in Thea’s early life. Thea, for her part, is never disconcerted by their varying degrees of outsider status in Moonstone. In fact, it seems also to be what draws her to them. The fifth friend is Fred Ottenburg, the son of an established and wealthy German-American family in the beer-brewing industry that maintains its linguistic and cultural connections to Germany, who introduces Thea to patrons and supporters in Chicago and saves her from the city by inviting her to his ranch in Arizona. Fred becomes her friend and lover, her financier, and, in the epilogue, her husband. As she grows into a great artist, these men become supporting characters to her central narrative.

Thea’s friends help her to understand her twoness. They introduce her to art, ideas, and ideologies that she otherwise would not have encountered in her small town. Wunsch teaches her about beauty and truthfulness in art, something he calls desire, and he plants the seed for her to train in Germany. Dr. Archie introduces her to books and ideas, Spanish Johnny teaches her new types of music, and Ray and Fred show her the world beyond Moonstone and Chicago. This group of men offer her a community of shared aesthetic values and an exchange of ideas that help buoy her in her development into an independent woman and an artist. In fact, her childhood friendships in plural communities anticipate an idea that Bourne will explore in his essay “Trans-national America” the following year, that is, the “good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community” (97).

Thea engages most meaningfully with these friends and mentors who shape her aesthetic education and support her artistic journey in settings outside of town: in the natural landscape or in small communities of Germans and Mexicans. Her early musical training with Herr Wunsch takes place in the home of the Kohlers, German immigrants who keep to themselves and are looked down upon by the townspeople. Thea is one of only a few outsiders who has ever walked through Mrs. Kohler’s extensive garden, a verdant oasis of fruit trees and exotic flowers, and into their home. Thea finds another refuge from the town life in the Mexican community, which has “neat little yards with tamarisk hedges and flowers and walks bordered with shells or white washed stones” (46). Thea seeks out the Mexicans as she does the Kohlers. Although the townspeople feel “a grave social discrimination against the Mexicans” (167), Thea likes to sing with them because they are “kind to their families and have good manners” (262) and because she believes “[t]hey’re a talented people” (264). These communities, with their unfamiliar gardens and architectural styles, not only look and feel different, they also sound different. German and Spanish words, phrases, song titles, and lyrics are left untranslated, and the narrative stresses the heavily accented English of several characters. Wunsch, for example, insists that “it is necessary to know well the German language” (83). And Spanish Johnny tells Thea that as a young girl “you take the air and you sing it just-a beauti-ful” (252). Cather transcribes the unconventional word order and uses dashes to highlight the accented pronunciations in order to emphasize the characters’ difference.

Cather’s novel thus depicts the American West as a region defined by immigrant communities that defy the notion of the American melting pot and assume differing attitudes toward assimilation. By walking beyond the edge of the town and immersing herself in these different languages and immigrant cultures, Thea learns about forms of music, art, and community that she would have never experienced within the geographic and social boundaries of her small town, and she begins to translate herself in the world in new ways. Thea learns some German from her teacher Wunsch, and she “knows enough Spanish for” singing (251) from her time spent in the Mexican community. She also comes to appreciate her own foreignness. She says, “I used to be ashamed of being a Swede, but I’m not any more. Swedes are kind of common, but I think it’s better to be something” (93). Thea too rejects assimilation and begins to develop her own identity.

In fact, the two most significant moments in the narrative of Thea’s artistic development occur not in the music studios or performance halls of Moonstone, Chicago, or New York but during a danza in the Mexican town outside Moonstone and among the ruins of the cliff-dwelling peoples in Panther Canyon, Arizona.[6] These sites are not, as some critics have suggested, just quaint backdrops for a novel set in the Southwest or convenient locations to add local color but instead are two mirrored, asynchronous moments that are nonetheless catalysts in the narrative of individual and national becoming. In these two settings, Thea engages with an idealized and, to different degrees, imagined community and encounters new models of ethics and artistic production that inspire her. In these sites, she further overcomes her sense of twoness. She experiences an embodiment that allows her to craft a unified personality as an artist and a woman.

Wholeness in Community: The Mexican Danza

After her first year of study in Chicago, Thea returns to Moonstone for the summer and accepts an invitation from Spanish Johnny to a dance in the Mexican town. When Thea steps off the Moonstone sidewalk and onto the sandy path to go to the dance, time slows down. The descriptions lengthen and become more vivid. It was a “soft, rosy evening. The sand hills were lavender. The sun had gone down a glowing copper disk, and the fleecy clouds in the east were a burning rose-colour, flecked with gold” (254). The velvety lavender, copper, rose, and gold colors of the landscape contrast with the muted and highly ordered town she leaves behind. When she arrives, she finds the dance to be unlike those she is used to attending at the Firemen’s Hall in Moonstone, where the country auctioneer called out the square dances and the “boys played rough jokes and thought it smart to be clumsy and to run into each other on the floor.” Instead, the “Mexican dance was soft and quiet,” and there was an “atmosphere of ease and friendly pleasure in the low, dimly lit room” (255). The “men were graceful and courteous” (255), and the girls wore dresses and had flowers in their hair. There is a “kind of natural harmony about their movements, their greetings, their low conversations, their smiles” (255–56). Sarah Clere finds Cather’s depiction of the Mexican town to be “anachronistic and quaint” (157). While the romantic depiction of the Mexican community is asynchronous, that is, out of time with the forward-moving pace of the narration, it is not inconsequential in the narrative development. It is not a glimpse of the past frozen in time but rather a present-day, alternate social order clearly juxtaposed to the normative life in Moonstone. It is a community that offers artistic inspiration and one possible model through which to reimagine the developing American nation.

As a privileged outsider, Thea finds a place where she can explore her artistic desire outside of the social constraints and gender norms of both cultures. Young girls from Moonstone do not go alone to the Mexican town, and even though the “Mexican women of the poorer class do not sing like the men” (260), Thea sings with the men in Spanish late into the night. Her difference, which Janis Stout demonstrates is marked by frequent references to her whiteness (“Brown and White”), allows her to disregard social norms. Through her art, however, Thea experiences connection. She “had never before sung for a really musical people, and this was the first time she had ever felt the response that such a people can give” (258). They recognize her artistry, applaud her skill, and encourage her to perform in Mexico City. When she sings, she feels the audience “turned themselves and all they had over to her. For the moment, they cared about nothing in the world but what she was doing. Their faces confronted her—open, eager, unprotected. She felt as if all these warm-blooded people had debouched into her” (258). They debouched into her, that is, flowed through narrow straits into something wide, like rivers into the sea. She embodies her audience, and they become one. To twenty-first-century readers this certainly sounds like an odd “appropriation of Mexican music and of otherness, a figurative acquisition of their very selves” (Clere 158). Yet Thea does not take something from Mexican culture—a rhythm, a song, a stylistic technique—and pass it off as her own. Instead, Cather describes a moment of aesthetic connection and transcendence between artist and audience. Thea opens herself to them and reveals her secret artistic desire, and they in turn offer her something she has never had before: communal approval, encouragement, and aesthetic appreciation.

What Thea does take from this experience is a sense of herself as an artist and of her own agency and determination. When she returns from the danza, the dream-like quality of the narration ends. Her family is furious. Her sister tells Thea that “[e]verybody at Sunday School was talking about you going over there and singing with the Mexicans all night, when you won’t sing for the church” (264). Thea defends her choices. She says, “I like to sing over there. [...] I’ll sing for them any time they ask me to. They know something about what I’m doing” (264). This experience allows her to see again with fresh eyes her own difference from the town and from her own family. It becomes a threshold moment in Thea’s development, for in this moment she decides to leave her childhood home, determined never to return.

Physicality and Personality in Panther Canyon

After another year of study in Chicago, Thea again feels discouraged, riddled with self-doubt, and overwrought with the fast pace of the city. Frayed and frustrated, she spends the summer on an Arizona ranch owned by her friend and love interest from Chicago, Fred Ottenburg. The property includes centuries-old cliff dwellings of the Sinagua, a part of the Pueblo nation. This section stands out for its unique setting and also for the quality of the narration and the impact it has on Thea’s future. Just as in the journey to the Mexican danza, the forward movement of the novel is interrupted as Thea enters into the canyon that is out of place and time from her life in Chicago. The tone is hushed and mythical; the descriptions of the landscape are detailed and drawn out. With this dramatic shift in setting and change in narrative texture, it is of little surprise that this section has received significant critical attention as the mystical and modernist center of the novel. Like Thea’s experience at the dance, her time in Panther Canyon is a threshold moment in the text where Thea makes decisions that change the direction of her life.

Released from the social expectations and norms of behavior of the big city and the pressures of training, Thea feels as though the “personality of which she was so tired seemed to let go of her” and she is “getting back to the earliest sources of gladness that she could remember” (326). The landscape moves her. She again opens herself to the physical experience of this place with its deep, womb-like canyons and nurturing spaces that Ellen Moers calls the “most thoroughly elaborated female landscape in literature” (258). Here Thea attunes herself to her own body and becomes a receptacle for everything around her—the heat, the stones, and the sounds of the cicadas (330). Alone on the mesa, she imagines herself in communion with the Sinagua women of the past, a community of women unlike any she has known, for her life has been shaped by male friendships. She begins to embody the spirits of the women through the landscape (332–33), and a sort of imagined conversation develops: “[C]ertain feelings were transmitted to her, suggestions that were simple, insistent, and monotonous, like the beating of Indian drums. They were not expressible in words, but seemed rather to translate themselves into attitudes of the body” (333). Critics have noted that she begins to “play Indian” as she imagines the women who traveled the worn paths before her and finds herself trying to walk as they did with “the weight of an Indian baby hanging to her back as she climbed” (332). In the shards of women’s pottery that she finds, Thea recognizes their artistic expression (336) and equates their art to her own voice. She realizes that, in “singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath” (335), and this helps her to see connection between her voice and her body (338). In Panther Canyon, Thea experiences creativity as embodiment rather than as rote training, emulation, or forceful self-assertion (Conrad 292). She also comes to see how, despite the “inevitable hardness of human life” (509), the Indigenous women were still able to realize their artistic desire and create something beautiful and enduring. This model of resolve and perseverance is what Thea has been lacking and what she achieves by seeing herself as part of a tradition of women artists.

Even as she imagines herself embodying the spirits of the Sinaguan women, Thea takes on more stereotypically masculine qualities. She is athletic, playful, and “unceasingly active” (353), hiking, exploring new sites, wrestling and competing with Fred in stone-throwing contests, and embracing the dangers of a lightning storm. She takes on a “muscular energy and audacity,—a kind of brilliancy of motion” (353) and “became freer and stronger under impulses” (360). Like Brooks and Bourne, Cather imagines that Thea’s experiences in beloved communities can free her from the social, sexual, and gender divisions of modern American culture. In communion with a community of spiritual and aesthetic richness, she can achieve agency to unify dualities, the feminine and the masculine, and to cultivate her personality. Away from social restrictions and prying eyes, she feels free to share a new intimacy with Fred and embraces her sexuality. This transformative experience allows her to reject moral guilt and gendered rules of sexual behavior and becomes another step in her process of artistic liberation. Fred notices that she has come in to her personality “that carried across big spaces and expanded among big things” (353). “Personality” is a term of particular import to the Young Americans at the turn of the century; they use it to mean something akin to character developed through self-reflection and engagement with others. Thea becomes more confident, more at home in her body, more feminist. She is less apologetic, and her voice acquires a richness and depth. Fred says that “[n]ow she has let herself be beautiful” (392).

Through these experiences, Thea is able to further unify the twoness, to unite her body and spirit and accept herself fully as an artist with full agency over her own life. She believes that “cliff dwellers had lengthened her past. She had older and higher obligations” (339). This realization helps her to accept the social consequences and make her artistic desire public. She decides she will not return to Chicago: “Thea at last made up her mind what she was going to try to do in the world, and that she was going to Germany to study without further loss of time” (338–39).

Feeling Culture: Encounters as Embodiment

A common critique of The Song of the Lark is that Cather sees the cliff dwellers in Panther Canyon as a noble civilization worthy of emulation but focuses only on past cultures and ignores the real, living Indigenous peoples. There is no doubt that the novel overlooks the colonial history that devastated the Pueblo people as well as the contemporary Indigenous cultures around Panther Canyon. Reading these two mirrored sequences together, however, reveals that it is not only the fixed ruins of the Sinagua people that give Thea artistic inspiration; it is also the living people of the Mexican community. It is not only the long past but also the very real present that inspires her and renews her artistic vision in a way that life in an American city can never do. It is therefore not simply nostalgia for an ancient culture or a lost way of life but rather contact and connection with otherness in its many forms that produces these effects.

Reading the depictions of idealized communities in the context of the larger progressive intellectual debates of the early twentieth century reveals the ways in which “the great, good places of Cather’s fiction emerge as part of a larger cultural pattern, namely the Utopian idealism of progressive America and its reforming drive to recreate the nation as an earthly Eden” (Reynolds 15). In both scenes, Thea enacts the modernist desire to escape from the pressures of civilization into what she experiences as more authentic or organic communities and become whole. In these mirrored sequences, Thea feels exhausted by her training, weighed down by expectations, and fed up with the people around her. She goes alone into nature to encounter another culture, one that is spatially set apart from modern, urban life. In stark contrast to her own communities in Moonstone and Chicago, she finds communities she views as dignified and graceful, living in harmony with nature and integrating aesthetics into everyday life. Narrative time slows down and becomes thick, and the landscape feels imbued with symbolic meaning. In these communities, she feels freed from the judgments and restraints of her own culture. She finds that she is able to “breathe a larger air” (Bourne, “Trans-national”). Her experiences are physical, spiritual, and intellectual and prompt her to a new sense of herself in the world.

As these two narrative sequences are untethered from narrative time, they exist outside of the teleology of individual and national development characteristic of the bildungsroman. Yet they are central to her development as an artist. At both the Mexican danza and in Panther Canyon, Thea finds not just an imagined mystical wholeness in community. More practically, she finds new models of artistic expression that show her a feasible way forward as an artist and lead her to make crucial decisions about her future. At the danza, she finds the appreciation and encouragement that she often lacks in the petty social world of Moonstone or the competitive environment of her training in Chicago. The women and men alike admire her artistry and encourage her to sing in Mexico City. In Panther Canyon, she marvels at the women artists who endure in their effort to craft beautiful pottery despite such difficult conditions. In both instances, it is not that she finds cultures that assign different, more liberal, roles to women; it is that she finds people who, despite their own obstacles, remain committed to their artistic expression. She is relieved of her self-doubt and learns that to succeed as an artist she must “demand things for herself” (511), lessons she could not have otherwise learned in the patriarchal, American city. What is more, she not only learns from these cultures, she embodies them in what Lindemann calls a “corporeal utopianism” as a part of broader artistic tradition (39). This physical experience of embodiment fills her up, makes her whole. Encounter becomes embodiment, experience integrates with aesthetics, and a new model for artistic life is revealed.

Both sequences are also threshold moments, or points of no return, in the narrative. Once Thea goes to the danza, she refuses to live in the town of her childhood. She rejects the town’s desire for homogeneity, the townspeople’s racist attitudes, and their restrictions on female behavior. Once she goes to Panther Canyon, she refuses to return to Chicago with its restrictive sexual norms and assumptions that women must sacrifice themselves for others. What emerges from these threshold moments is a feminist narrative approach to the bildungsroman that resists the nationalist desire for fixed definitions, completeness, and closure and, as Deborah Lindsay Williams argues, instead introduces a “flexible, nuanced worldview that is not threatened by difference but is instead challenged by it, altered because of it: a cosmopolitan perspective” (160). More than just “remainders” here, these encounters with other cultures enable Thea to succeed in the bildungsroman where so many other female characters have not. The Song of the Lark subverts the conventional narrative logic of the bildungsroman, the novel of nation formation, by positioning the plural cultures of the American West, including Indigenous cultures decimated by colonialism, as central to Thea’s development and therefore to American artistic expression. In so doing, these sections reveal a more complex and inclusive understanding of national identity.

American Art and a Cosmopolitan Vision

For a female artist at the turn of the twentieth century, overcoming alienation from the modern world and finding a mystical wholeness are not enough to unleash artistic greatness. She not only needs to overcome her own twoness; she faces more practical obstacles. She cannot advance her goals in Moonstone, Chicago, and New York along with the nation because there are no structures in mainstream American cities to support the progressive development and ultimate success of a female artist. Thea must look outside the normative spaces of the nation for inspiration and representation. After her time in Arizona, Thea must leave the country. She has come to terms with her twoness by learning to express her artistic desire and locate it within a tradition of women’s art, and she also has come into her own body, its female and male gender expressions and sexual desire. Yet in the United States she cannot fulfill her desire. In her social views and her artistic vision, she has evolved faster than the nation itself. She needs first to go to Mexico, where she can be “exceptionally free” (363) from gossip and judgment to be with her lover outside of marriage. Then, she must travel to Germany for advanced training in opera that she cannot find in the United States. As a woman and an artist, Thea needs what the nation, still caught in relative adolescence, cannot offer her.

Yet as a bildungsroman, or the genre of nation-building, the narrative cannot go outside the nation. Cather recognized this when she removed the section she initially wrote about Thea in Germany, believing that the novel should stay focused on Moonstone.[7] So, two-thirds of the way through, the novel is left without a protagonist. In an awkward move, the narrative shifts to focus instead on two of Thea’s friends, Fred Ottenburg and Dr. Archie, in Denver and New York. They speculate about Thea and talk of Moonstone, filling in the gaps of her absence. Narrative space and time become untethered from the life of the protagonist, and the structure of the bildungsroman unravels temporarily. In his unsigned review of the novel in the New Republic, titled “Diminuendo,” Randolph Bourne puts forward a critique echoed by many subsequent readers and reviewers who feel unsatisfied by this narrative shift, finding that the section focused on Dr. Archie and Fred Ottenburg drags on too long and lacks the emotional power of the first two-thirds of the novel. Bourne, in fact, thought the novel should have ended when Thea leaves for Mexico. In her preface to the 1932 edition, Cather agreed that she should have “disregarded conventional design” (617–18) and finished the novel before Thea becomes successful.

While the section titled “Dr. Archie’s Venture” wanders away from the central premise of the novel, Thea’s travels abroad do align with the novel’s privileging of the cosmopolitan over the national. Randolph Bourne in “Trans-national America” argues that the cultures that make up America create points of access to the world beyond the nation. Similarly, in The Song of the Lark Thea’s experiences with German and Mexican immigrant communities that welcomed her, taught her about art and language, and gave her a broader world view create access points for her travels in Mexico and Germany. As Dr. Archie insists toward the end of the novel, Thea “was born a cosmopolitan, and I expect she learned a good deal from Johnny when she used to run away and go to Mexican Town” (408). Cather demonstrates how the many cultures in the United States create a broader transnational perspective and allow Americans to turn outward from small-town provincialism and to look beyond national borders toward an “intellectual internationalism” (Bourne, “Trans-national”).

From Thea to “Kronborg”: Personal and National Triumph

In the final book of the novel, titled “Kronborg,” Thea has returned to New York as a successful opera star performing at the Metropolitan Opera House. The Song of the Lark ends in a scene of triumph. Thea gives a virtuoso performance in Wagner’s Die Walküre with all of her living “friends of childhood” in the audience. In this final scene, Thea becomes fully visible, seen, and appreciated for all her talents. In full possession of her voice and her body, she reaches the height of artistic achievement. She claims her right to self-expression, her position as a female artist, and her place in the world. Cather’s bildungsroman rewrites “our national myth and placed female creativity at its center” (Rosowski, “Writing” 68).

Even in Thea’s moment of personal triumph on a national stage, the last book of the novel repeatedly stresses that it was her childhood in the West that allowed her to achieve such great heights. While her training in Germany offered her a “new understanding,” Thea’s friend Fred Ottenburg believes that it was her childhood in Moonstone that kept her from “getting off the track” (406) and that it gives her voice a unique quality, like “inherited memory, like folk-music” (494). Thea also believes it was her “rich, romantic past” (506), her contact with the landscape and with the different cultures of her Colorado childhood that shape her artistic vision. She says “the light, the color, the feeling” of Moonstone are in everything she does (506). Thea is able to translate the cosmopolitan experiences of her childhood in the West into a uniquely American artistic expression. Thea thus becomes what Van Wyck Brooks insists has been missing from American literature: an artist “with a certain density, weight and richness” and a “deep, moving, shaking impact of personality” who can synthesize “every admirable characteristic of a people” and create artistic expression that defines and expresses American life (39).

Beyond the Personal to the National

Thea’s individual narrative desire is fulfilled in her triumphant performance at the close of the novel. Yet as a bildungsroman, the narrative still has some loose ends. It takes a curious epilogue to fully produce generic closure. The epilogue jumps in time and space to Moonstone in 1909. No longer the small prairie town Thea left two decades before, Moonstone has matured as well. The streets are “harder and firmer than they were twenty-five years ago” and “cultivation has modified the soil and the climate, as it modifies human life” (531). The people “are much smarter” and the children “all look like city children” (531–32). Thea has married Fred and is at the height of her career, living a cosmopolitan life. She travels the world with the Metropolitan Opera Company, earning a thousand dollars a night. Through her art, she “has given much noble pleasure to a world that needs all it can get” (534).[8] Yet with an odd storybook tone, the epilogue focuses not on Thea herself but on her impact. She has become a legendary figure in Moonstone. Her aunt Tillie, the last Kronborg in town, is consumed with Thea’s success. She is always telling stories about Thea and “lives in her niece’s triumphs” (534). The people in town also follow Thea’s accomplishments and share their memories of her. Her life takes on a mythic quality that brings them “real refreshment” (536). Her story has become their own.

The epilogue, then, becomes insurance that the novel will be read not only as a fictional account of one woman’s artistic achievement but also as the mythic tale of a national hero. Through the course of the novel, her life becomes a collective national story that mirrors the nation coming into being. At the novel’s opening, in 1881, the United States was a young nation whose borders, citizenry, and place in the world order were still up for debate. Thea moves from the “vague, easy-going world” (528) of the provincial West with its young, fresh landscape to her first real professional training as a young adult at seventeen in the “crush and scramble” of a big “western” city, Chicago, and finally to a “life of disciplined endeavor” (528) and the peak of aesthetic achievement at the opera house in metropolitan New York right around 1900, just as the nation is becoming industrialized and masses of people are moving from the farms into cities. In the epilogue, set in Moonstone in 1909, Tillie reads about Thea’s successes in the New York newspapers she has delivered to her Colorado home and keeps photographs of Thea and a phonograph recording of her performance. These are all technologies that have shaped the modern nation in the span of Thea’s life. Thea’s story becomes a performance of the nation revealing its shape in space and time.

As literary history shows, the female bildungsroman typically cannot achieve closure. There are too many obstacles that prohibit the protagonist from developing her full identity and expectations that impede her from expressing herself with agency. In The Song of the Lark, Cather takes what Boes identifies as small moments of resistance to nationalism’s drive toward closure in the modern European bildungsroman, what he calls “cosmopolitan remainders,” and instead situates the cosmopolitan at the center of the novel (3). If Thea’s individual development as an artist is a metaphor for national formation, then contact with otherness, the plural cultures of the West, including the German immigrants, the living Mexican culture, and the more distant Indigenous past play an important part in the shaping of the nation. Cather’s bildungsroman demonstrates that it is not in a singular national narrative but rather through a transnational one, operating in and through many different cultures, that a female protagonist can develop independence and agency.

Cather thus writes a successful female bildungsroman, an idealized yet nonetheless audacious act of writing a woman as the heroine and focal center of a cosmopolitan American nation. From her childhood in the West, Thea cultivates a rich personality and finds “a new song in that blue air that had never been sung in the world before” (243). Through friendships and experiences in diverse western communities and through courage, determination, and tireless training at home and abroad, she shapes this natural song into an aesthetic expression of the American nation. Through her body and the organ of her art, her physical voice, she synthesizes the rural and the urban, the West and the East, the “Highbrow” and the “Lowbrow,” the female and male, tradition and modernity into a fully realized aesthetic expression of American identity. Thea becomes the unifying force who creates an “underlying coherence” (Brooks 120) and an “epic expression” (Bourne, “Trans-national”) of the nation in the years just before the United States enters World War I, when such coherence still seemed possible.