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In Willa Cather Living (1953), Edith Lewis accounts for the
gestation of Shadows on the Rock (1931) in a single image,
that of Cather gazing meditatively from a window in the Chateau Frontenac upon the
town of Quebec below: "But from the first moment that she looked down from the
windows of the Frontenac on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of
Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was
overwhelmed by the flood of memory, recognition, surmise it called up; by the
sense of its extraordinarily French character, isolated and kept intact through
hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent"(153-54).
Set atop the rocky eminence of Cap Diamant, controlling the St. Lawrence by virtue
of its geographical position, Quebec became the first permanent French settlement
in the New World. Writing of it in Shadows on the Rock,
Cather has Euclid Auclair see Quebec as "this rock-set town [which was] like
nothing so much as one of those little artificial mountains which were made in the
churches at home to present a theatric scene of the Nativity; cardboard mountains,
broken up into cliffs and ledges and hollows to accommodate groups of figures on
their way to the manger; angels and shepherds and horsemen and camels, set on
peaks, sheltered in grottoes,clustered about the base" (4-5). Thus Quebec harkens
his memory back to an Old World association that diminishes the naturalness and
beauty of the place. For her part, his daughter Cécile sees Quebec as her
home: she loves "being on the river" (195) and runs "up the hill with a light
heart" (54), her identity wedded to the Cap Diamant and the town of Quebec,
herself a "woman for Canada" (42). Quebec's ultimate permanence and its people's
cultural transformation came at some price—after a turbulent colonial
history followed by over 150 years of serene neglect at the hands of first the
British colonial authorities and then English-speaking Canada, Cather saw it for
the first time. To her, Quebec physically announced its own
gestation—the signs of Brittany and Normandy transported to the New
World caught her imagination.
Though a lifelong Francophile, Cather did not see Quebec until 1928, when at the age of 54 she traveled along with Lewis to the city on her way to summer at Grand Manan, New Brunswick. While they were there Lewis fell ill with flu, leaving Cather with several days to explore the old town on her own. She was ripe for the place in many ways: her father, with whom she had been exceptionally close, had died earlier that year; her mother was declining and, she knew, had not many years left. Given such concerns, and a sharpened sense of her own aging, Cather gazed down upon Quebec from the height of Cap Diamant; in Gary Brienzo's words, her eyes "came to rest upon Quebec as an emblem of stability, tradition, and peace" (50).
Exploring the city, Cather found in it a history and physicality that confirmed
the continuity between European culture and New World conditions—it
seemed to her a miraculous gift. What Cather saw led her to research the
historical underpinnings of Quebec, though in this instance her library was
initially the reading room of the Chateau Frontenac. There she found the histories
of Francis Parkman—what David Levin has called "history as romantic
art"—and, equally important, The Jesuit
Relations. These volumes, which Cather probably saw in the form of Reuben
Gold Thwaites's massive 73-volume limited edition, are more precisely entitled The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and
Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791
(1896-1901). The Canadian historian W.J. Eccles has called them "the most
important single source for the history of Canada during the period of company
government" (40; that is, before 1663, when a Royal Colony was established in New
France). The volumes related to the early history of the town of Quebec had a
powerful impact upon Cather, providing another window upon the pattern that was
under her eyes.
The story of Cather's composition of Shadows on the Rock
has been told elsewhere (see Woodress and Skaggs). Neither is it appropriate here
to trace her various sources. Yet, looking at the novel today, one is struck by
what resulted from Cather's gaze. As she asserted, the view from atop Cap Diamant
left long shadows indeed. Shadows on the Rock makes the
isolation and vulnerability of Quebec very clear: clinging to the shore of the St.
Lawrence, rising above the river to command the heights, protected to the rear by
the St. Charles River, even after 80 years of established settlement the town was
still a frail French presence in North America. By taking up the Relations—and by taking from that work—Cather
extended her gaze from the town into the vast interior country. For trader and
missionary alike, Quebec was the center of civilization for New France, but its
reach extended West into Cather's own Missouri River basin. This was, she asserts
emphatically, New France—an Old World culture slowly transforming itself
into a New World phenomenon. So Cécile becomes mother to "the Canadians
of the future" (278).
The information Cather gleaned from the Relations provides
instructive examples of her process of composition. Cather used this material in
two ways, primarily. First, she took exact details from the Relations as the basis for her characterization of Bishop Saint-Vallier,
Laval's young replacement (64: 121, 123, 147); indeed, Cather lifts the friction
between the two men from the pages of volume 64, and she creates as a kind of
counterpoint a moving scene in which the younger man's hubris is transformed,
after years away in France, into serene humility. Most striking, however, is her
appropriation of the story of the martyrdom of Father Noël Chabanel.
Although she creates a fictional character, Father Hector Saint-Cyr, to narrate
the incident, she draws her details "without alteration" from the Relations accounts (Bloom 81; see Jesuit
Relations 35: 147ff., 40: 35ff.; Cather, Shadows
150-55). As Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom noted some time ago, Cather thereby
"makes the historically accurate point that [Chabanel's] heroism was eclipsed by
the fame of his fellow missionaries, Fathers Jogues, Lalemant, and Brebeuf."
Temperamentally ill-suited to be a missionary, repulsed by the behavior of the
Natives, unable to learn the Natives' language despite years of effort and
previous successes with European languages, Chabanel experienced a Canadian life
of "unrelieved horror"; he emerges in Shadows on the Rock
as a martyr "of spiritual and intellectual endurance, not for personal
satisfaction but for the exultation of God" (Bloom and Bloom 81).
What Cather created in Shadows on the Rock conforms to the
confrontation documented in the Relations. Though intended
as propaganda and often tinged with the lurid attractions of the exotic, the Relations also record the meeting of two worlds, two
cultures, two ways of seeing and being. The "Voyage into Substance"—the
phrase is Barbara Maria Stafford's—they depict may be seen at every
conceivable level: factual, theological, geographical, anthropological, and
literary, among others.
For her part, and on her own, Cather undertook to dramatize this "meeting" in her
fiction. That is what the essays gathered here elaborate: hers was an imagination
open to nuance—of various sorts—that could then be delicately
situated within the pages of her novels. Disarming in its apparent simplicity,
that art renders as perhaps its great subject precisely that meeting of two
worlds, both embodied in Cather's own inner being: the intellectual and cultural
inheritances of Europe meeting the "great fact" of the settlement of New World,
whether in Quebec, Nebraska, New Mexico, or Virginia. Ever given to tracing the
myriad implications of these confrontations, Cather put it best when she wrote to
Wilbur Cross just after the publication of Shadows on the Rock that "And really, a
new society begins with the salad dressing more than with the destruction of
Indian villages. Those people brought a kind of French culture there and somehow
kept it alive on that rock, sheltered it and tended it and on occasion died for
it, as if it really were a sacred fire—and all this temperately and
shrewdly, with emotion always tempered by good sense" (On
Writing 16).
Many of the essays appearing here were presented, in earlier versions, at the
Sixth International Willa Cather Seminar held in Quebec City in June 1995.
Sponsored by St. Lawrence University,Trent University, the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational
Foundation, the seminar brought 130 people to Quebec City for a week of discovery
not unlike Cather's own in 1928. There seminarians also gazed down from Cap
Diamant, held sessions in Bishop Lavel's seminary, and discovered Quebec perhaps
as Cather did—seeing the city, "Kebec," as she refers to it in Shadows, not as France but rather as Canada: "Ah, yes, the
Canadians of the future—the true Canadians" (Shadows 278). And by meeting there in late June—the seminar began
amid celebrations of St. Jean Baptiste (Quebec's Fête Nationale, its
"national" day) and ended to the muted festivities of Canada Day, scarcely evident
as a celebration these days in francophone Canada—we
late-twentieth-century seminarians felt the power that the province of Quebec
today invests in its pursuit of sovereignty, an urge borne of its French identity
in North America, that identity formed first when shadows were initially cast
before French eyes from the height of Cap Diamant above the town below. As we
witnessed, Cather's Quebec stands there today as it did when she first saw in the
city below a correlative for her imaginings over Old World culture transformed
into New, "as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent."
[Crossing borders brings one closer to] one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity.
E. K. Brown, Cather's first biographer and a Canadian, observed that even before
she began Shadows on the Rock "Willa Cather had been in
Canada much more than most American writers" (204). More famously, Hemingway and
Faulkner spent time in their youth in Canada—Hemingway as an employee of
the Toronto Star newspaper, and Faulkner in a period of
service with the Royal Air Force in Canada— but Cather's connections to
Canada extended over a lifetime. Current criticism highlights Cather as a
traveler, a border crosser. Joseph Urgo, in Willa Cather and the
Myth of American Migration,argues persuasively that Cather's fiction is
inordinately preoccupied with travel, that displacement, exile, and transformation
are the psychic condition and meaning of her art. And in discussions of sexuality
and subversion, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler have explored the
transitivity of Cather's imagination, the crossing of gender and sexual borders in
her writing and in her personal life. Here, in the light of her Canadian writings
and experience, I will ask specifically what it meant for Cather to cross a
national boundary, considering the idea of "border" as it has been theorized in
contemporary criticism—as a trope of difference,whether of gender,
ethnicity, race, or culture.
In Border Traffic: Strategies of Contemporary Women
Writers, Maggie Humm posits that feminist fictions deliberately choose to
describe the kinds and experiences of women that exist beyond the borders of
traditional literary representation—the experiences, for example, of
witches, Creoles, lesbians,and so on (2). In this light we might say at once that
Cather reveals a radical feminist dimension, a border-crossing instinct, for she
chose as heroines women who are outside conventional stereotypes: women, like Thea
Kronborg and Lucy Gayheart, who are artists; women who are old, like Gabrielle
Longstreet, Mrs. Harris, and Sapphira Colbert; the female child, Cécile
Auclair; and immigrant women, like Ántonia Cuzak, who labored on farms
and as domestics. Most striking is the gallery of immigrant women in Cather's
fiction, for in their stories (Ántonia as an unwed mother, Marie Shabata
as an adulteress, the Danish laundry girls, and the three Bohemian Marys as women
of easy virtue) Cather merges foreignness or ethnicity with transgressive
behavior.
Ethnicity was in fact the subject of Cather's first story, "Peter," and in her
subsequent portrayal of the diverse ethnic makeup of the pioneer Midwest, Canada
figures in the inclusion of French-speaking settlers who had come to Nebraska from
Quebec. Cather was herself aware of French-Canadians from the time she was a child
newly arrived in Nebraska. In Catherton precinct of Webster County there were
French-Canadian settlers who built a small frame Catholic church called St. Ann's.
The church was the center of their community. In O
Pioneers! Cather gives a vivid account of transplanted French-Canadian
culture in the story of Amédée Chevalier, the Sainte-Agnes
church fair, and the confirmation service. Although Cather refers to her settlers
simply as "French," she leaves no doubt about their Canadian origins in the
passage where Emil Bergson says teasingly to Amédée's wife that
her baby looks like it might have had an Indian ancestor.
Amédée's mother, we are told, "had been touched on a sore point,
and she let out a stream of fiery
Whether Cather had childhood experience of Canadians beyond her neighbors in
Catherton precinct, we cannot say. However, as a young book reviewer she exhibited
some knowledge of Canadian literature and the debates about Canadian culture at
the end of the nineteenth century. She cites Seth Low,then president of Columbia
University, as having said there is no literature in Canada because there is no
national life, but she refutes that statement in a discussion of Gilbert Parker's
The Seats of the Mighty: A Romance of Old Quebec (1896),
claiming that "a generation of young men . . . are making the most of Canada's
literary possibilities" (World and Parish [WP] 355). Among
those young men she would have included Bliss Carman, Charles G. D. Roberts, and
mistakenly, American-born Richard Hovey, all of whose work she reviewed
positively. She praised these three poets for their fresh treatment of nature as a
literary theme and heaped special praise on Roberts' verse: it is "wonderfully
beautiful," she wrote, "rich in expression and redolent of wood life and field
life, of Canadian forests and meadows" (WP 886). But as Merrill Skaggs has
observed, what is especially interesting in her review of Parker's Quebec romance
is her citing of Low's remark that Canadian culture was like a plant whose roots
drew nourishment from the other side of the Atlantic but lost most of it under the
sea. As Skaggs puts it, we have formulated here a question—something
like, "How does a transplant like Quebec find the cultural sustenance to
survive?"—a question that will become a central theme in Cather's Quebec
novel written more than 30 years later (127).
Cather did have close professional contact with at least one Canadian when she was
working for S. S. McClure in New York. Georgine Milmine, who collected the
materials for the biography of Mary Baker Eddy, was a newspaper woman originally
from Canada. Unfortunately we have no significant knowledge about Milmine, nor do
we know anything about the relations between the two women. We only know that they
did work in close conjunction for a time in preparing the McClure's articles for book publication, for as Kevin Synnott verified,
both of their handwritings are on the manuscript (Stouck xxvii).
Cather first imagined Canada as a geographical setting when she wrote her first
novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912). Much of the story's
significant action takes place along the rivers of Quebec where the engineer hero,
Bartley Alexander, has built two bridges. It was near the site of his first
project, a suspension bridge over a wild river, that he met his future wife,
Winifred, a Canadian woman described as very proud and a little hard. While in
Quebec, Alexander also takes great pleasure in the company of Winifred's aunt
Eleanor, who likes to talk army and politics. These are not sentimental portraits
of women; they suggest Cather's view of English Canadians as shrewd, practical,
and British colonial in character. Alexander's Bridge
reaches its tragic climax when the cantilever bridge being built at a place named
Moorlock crashes into the river, taking the engineer and many of the workmen to
their deaths. Cather based the incident on an actual event that happened near
Quebec City: on 29 August 1907 a bridge being built to span the St. Lawrence River
collapsed and more than 80 men were killed, including the chief engineer, who had
gone out on the bridge just before it broke apart. The principal designing
engineer was an American, Theodore Cooper of New York, who had not been on the
site during the bridge's ill-fated construction (see Hinz; E. K. Brown 157-59;
Slote xv-xvi). The Canadian backdrop for the story might easily be dismissed as of
little consequence—a conventional setting for an engineering feat that
conquers the wilderness—but this is a novel persistently about crossing
geographical,political, and sexual borders. The hero travels not only repeatedly
to Canada but to England, where he conducts a protracted affair with a woman he
had known in his youth. In the story's moral order Alexander's border crossings
are sexual transgressions, and his death takes place because he has broken all
bounds.
The only other mention of Canada in Cather's early fiction is the brief vignette
of Tiny Soderball in the Yukon in My Ántonia.
Historically, this is a fairly conventional use of Canada as a wilderness setting
where adventurers try their luck, but imaginatively Tiny's story belongs with
those of a group of women in Cather's fiction who choose unconventional lives.
Instead of marrying a Black Hawk boy and settling down to raise a family, Tiny is
persuaded by a "roving promotor" to leave for Seattle and manage a lodging house
for sailors there. The narrator makes it clear that the business is not likely
reputable ("all sailors' boardinghouses were alike")but that Tiny's interest is in
making money. This she continues to do when she hears of gold being discovered in
the far north. After helping to found Dawson City during the Klondike gold rush,
Tiny goes off "into the wilds"(301), where she lives on a claim and eventually
realizes a considerable fortune from trading and selling claims on percentages.
She winds up in San Francisco, a wealthy woman, but she has lost her zest for
living. The Canadian north, like so many other non-American destinations in
Cather's fiction (I think here of Germany for Thea Kronborg, France for Claude
Wheeler), is a place beyond the border where characters are able to come closer to
their inmost identity and integrity. Significantly in this light, when Cather
actually came to know Canada from first hand experience, she did not continue to
view it as a place of testing or adventure but saw it as a locus at the very
center of her pastoral imagination.
As far as we know, Cather herself did not actually cross the physical border in to
Canada until after her close friend Isabelle McClung was married and living in
Toronto. Isabelle married Jan Hambourg, a concert violinist of Russian Jewish and
English background who was known in both Europe and North America for his skilled
and sensitive performances. Jan frequently gave concerts with his brothers Boris,
a cellist, and Mark, also a violinist. With their father, a musical scholar, they
taught music much of the year from the family home in Toronto. Cather made two
lengthy visits that we know of while Jan and Isabelle were living in Toronto: in
1919 she spent June and July in the city, and in 1921 she stayed nearly five
months, from April until late August. On both occasions she was working on One of Ours, finishing the novel during her second visit. It
was on this second visit that she read the account of Lyra Garber Anderson's death
in a clipping that had been forwarded to her and the idea for A
Lost Lady came to her. James Woodress tells us that Sinclair Lewis was in
the city at this time and that he praised her work highly, telling his audience of
her whereabouts; accordingly she was reluctantly swept up in a round of social
events for a couple of weeks. However, and perhaps this is what is most important
here, Toronto on the whole served as a retreat from the attention of friends,
business associates, and well-wishers and provided her a space for uninterrupted
work. (Incidentally,Cather would have traveled to the city on the TH&B
rail service, passing through the small city of Hamilton on Lake Ontario, which
may have suggested the name of the setting for The Professor's
House, with its protagonist of French-Canadian ancestry.)
In 1922 the Hambourgs moved permanently to Europe, but that year Cather was again
in Canada, this time making her first trip to Grand Manan Island. According to
Marion Marsh Brown and Ruth Crone (information verified by Helen Cather
Southwick), Cather first learned of the island from a librarian at the New York
Public Library who told Cather the remote fishing island in the Bay of Fundy was
"probably the quietest place in the world" (6-7). Cather decided to investigate,
and after leaving Bread Loaf in Vermont, in early August 1922 she took a train to
New Brunswick via Montreal. She rented a cottage for a month from Sarah Jacobus, a
woman from New York City who ran a small resort at Whale Cove. She wrote to a
friend of her pleasure in the quiet and remoteness of the island, where mail only
came three times a week on a little steamer from the Canadian shore. For the next
18 years she and Edith Lewis returned almost every summer. In September 1926 they
bought a piece of land in a spruce wood near Whale Cove and employed two
carpenters from North Head to build a Cape Cod-style cottage; it was completed
when they arrived for the summer of 1928. Above the living room was a large attic,
which Cather chose for her study; from the window she could look out over the
cliffs and the sea. Grand Manan was the one place in the world where she felt she
could work without interruption, and all of her books from A
Lost Lady to Sapphira and the Slave Girl were
composed in part on the island. If Toronto seemed to provide Cather with a retreat
from her public,Grand Manan served this function even more so. On that foggy
island in the Atlantic, writes E. K. Brown, Cather felt "securely hemmed in from
the world" (203) and at a considerable remove from all mundane things. After she
had to leave her Bank Street apartment in New York, during which time the family
home in Nebraska was also broken up, Grand Manan, writes Lewis, "seemed the only
foothold left on earth" (153), not just a retreat but a refuge from an uncaring
and rapidly changing world.
In Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner reminds his readers that
when Americans are aware of Canada at all, it is most often as a border, a margin,
an end to things American (3). But perhaps Cather came to view Canada as an
alternate American tradition. It is interesting to know that Gather belonged to
the Grand Manan Historical Association, a rather striking piece of information
about someone who was not a joiner, who in the 1930's zealously guarded her
privacy. (Proof exists in the society's membership list printed in The Grand Manan Historian 5: 72.) I was told by Kathleen
Buckley that Cather was persuaded on occasion to attend society meetings by her
friend, Doctor MacCauley. Early Grand Manan history focuses on the lives of a
group of United Empire Loyalists—New Englanders chiefly—who
fought on the royalist side and after the Revolutionary War took refuge in what
remained of Britain's empire to the north. The Loyalists had sought to preserve an
ideal of order and justice stemming from the British monarchy and they saw Canada
providing a sanctuary line. Perhaps the Cather who wrote One of
Ours and The Professor's House, profoundly
disillusioned with the materialism of contemporary American life, also came to see
English Canada as providing a sanctuary line, a still-pastoral alternative to
America's increasingly urban, technology-dominated culture. Certainly by the late
1920s there is evidence in her fiction that her political sympathies were
conservative, and perhaps she felt a strong attraction to living for part of the
year within the British Empire.
Her feelings about Canada grew even stronger and more focused once she came to
know Quebec. It was because she traveled almost every summer to Grand Manan that
she discovered the subject for her one novel set wholly in Canada. She was on her
way to the island in June 1928 by a roundabout way when she first saw Quebec City.
Lewis came down with the flu during their stopover, and they wound up staying at
the Chateau Frontenac for 10 days. Cather was immediately attracted to the city
and its environs. Lewis describes the imaginative excitement Cather felt: "from
the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the Frontenac on the
pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not
merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memory,
recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinarily French
character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle,
on this great un-French continent" (153-54). Cather explored the city alone,
visiting the Ursuline Convent, the Laval Seminary, the Church of Notre Dame des
Victoires, and the marketplace in the Lower Town. When Lewis was well enough they
made an excursion to the Ile d'Orleans. All the while Cather was reading Canadian
histories from the hotel library. In 1929 Cather again traveled to Grand Manan by
way of Quebec City, and that summer she began to write Shadows
on the Rock, returning to Quebec in November and again at New Year's to
get a feeling for the city in the dead of winter. She made a fifth visit to Quebec
on her return from a trip to France in 1930— "the slow progress up the
St. Lawrence," writes Lewis, "between woods on fire with October, was its
climax—a dream of joy"(160). It had not been her intention, but she
stayed several days and this last visit, according to Lewis, brought her closest
to her story. She finished writing Shadows on the Rock in
the winter of 1930-31.
In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua writes that
crossing borders brings one closer to "one's shifting and multiple identity and
integrity" (preface). Visiting Toronto and traveling to Grand Manan, Cather
crossed a political border that translated for her into a physical retreat, but
when she came to know Quebec City she crossed a border, I believe, that led to the
psychological heart of her artistic and spiritual being. This is not to say that
she came to identify herself as French-Canadian or Catholic. On the contrary, in
her letter about Shadows on the Rock to Governor Wilbur
Cross she says explicitly that she encountered in Quebec a "feeling about life and
human fate that I could not accept, wholly," something pious and resigned. She
further marks her distance from French-Canadian life when she says of her novel,
"It's very hard for an American to catch that rhythm—it's sound like us"
("On Shadows" 15,17). But it was a feeling about life,
persisting from another age, that she could not help but admire, and through her
gift of sympathy she captured the Canadian spirit of place and the Catholic vision
of a world informed and regulated by spiritual rites.
Benjamin George, in his essay on Cather as a "Canadian" writer, claims that"she
came to hold a close affinity with Canadian ideals and attitudes, pointedly
different from those of her own national ethos" (249). He develops his thesis by
quoting Northrop Frye, who has characterized Canadians as hampered by a "garrison
mentality," referring thereby to an inward-looking, negative aspect of Canadian
culture concerned to hold the threatening wilderness at bay, a colonial fear of
the unknown (225). Cather quickly recreates the beleaguered condition of early
Canadian life in her novel: outside of the city of 2,000 was the forest, and
"[t]he forest was suffocation, annihilation; there European man was quickly
swallowed up in silence, distance, mould, black mud, and the stinging swarms of
insect life that bred in it" (Shadows 7). But Russell Brown
has more recently suggested a positive aspect to this garrison consciousness when
he urges that we see it as an aspect of a larger human desire for sanctuary and
for safe borders(Borderlines 32). In such a statement we
recognize one of Cather's strongest themes in Shadows on the
Rock, where Canada is "a possible refuge, an escape from the evils one
suffered at home" (31), when envisioned by the French apothecary, where even
children are consciously aware of "the goodness of shelter" (66). When she is ill
in bed, Cécile mentally roams about the town, always aware of "the
never-ending, merciless forest beyond." The lives of her friends, the roofs and
spires of the town, the crooked streets all "seemed to her like layers and layers
of shelter, with this one flickering, shadowy room at the core"(157-58). There is
no desire at the imaginative center of this text to repudiate or escape from the
garrison but rather there is a need to nurture and augment it, to keep alive and
shelter that bit of French culture on the rock. As Cather recreates it,
seventeenth-century Quebec was not a colony determined to create a new society but
one determined to preserve an old one; it was not the Puritan "city upon a Hill"
for all eyes to see (John Winthrop's words) but a Catholic preserve for the Holy
Family and a vision of heaven.
The Canadian/American border has produced theories of culture that turn on such
binaries as northern/southern, colonialism/republicanism, individualism/socialism.
One of the strongest of these binaries is that of stasis/movement. Where American
critics like Janis Stout and Joseph Urgo have interpreted themes of flight,exile,
and the open road as expressive of their country's originary and defining
experience, Canadian critics, again like Russell Brown, have pointed to the
writings of the Loyalists and their themes of homesickness and longing to return
home as founding imaginative expressions. The idea of "home," suggests Brown,
serves to order Canadian narratives just as the idea of the "road" so often
organizes American writings ("Road Home" 27). E. K. Brown attributed much of the
emotional power in Shadows on the Rock to Cather's memories
of her home in Nebraska and her relationship with her father—for when
the author was a child the Cather family had been uprooted and had started life
over in conditions as harsh as those in Quebec (217-18). The controlling emotion
in the hook experienced by Cécile is a kind of homesickness, a clinging
to what is known and secure in the face of threatened upheaval and departure. This
emotion is dramatized poignantly in Cécile's visit with the Harnois
family on the Ile d'Orleans (their rough menage contrasts sharply with the
Auclairs' passion for cleanliness and order) and reaches an acute pitch at the end
of book 5, "The Ships from France," when Cécile believes she must soon
leave Quebec, the only home she has ever known. There is also a political
dimension to this nostalgia for the past, for it focuses on the imperial order
that has created the colony and on a veneration of the old religious and political
leaders, Laval and Frontenac, who have helped nurture and sustain it. It is
expressed on an intimate level in Cécile's relation to her dying mother.
"As long as she lived," we are told, "[Madame Auclair] tried to make the new life
as much as possible like the old. . . . her chief care was to train her little
daughter so that she would be able to carry on this life and this order after she
was gone" (23). Madame Auclair believed firmly that the French were the most
civilized people in Europe and "[s]he wanted to believe that when she herself was
lying in this rude Canadian earth, life would go on almost unchanged in this room"
(25). In writing about Canada, Cather plumbed the most conservative depths of her
being, which from a postcolonial perspective seem marooned in another age. Urgo,
however, has argued persuasively that even in creating this world so far removed
from the present Cather reveals that great changes take place with each generation
(Cécile, for instance, abandons her loyalty to the Old World for the New)
and that identities, cultures, and cosmologies are all "shadows" that pass over
the rock with time (97-111).
The attraction to home that is so powerful in this novel has conservative
manifestations in mode and genre. A narrative of the road is most likely to be
written in the romance mode and in the genre of adventure fiction, whereas a story
of home is likely to be a pastoral, the affirmation of a retreat, a safe place
where life remains simplified and seems not to change. Ann Romines has
demonstrated the primacy of the domestic in Cather's fiction, but in this light a
distinction can be drawn between Shadows on the Rock and
her other narratives; in novels like My Ántonia or
One of Ours the domestic theme is circumscribed by the
larger ones of adventure and exile that take the protagonist away from home. There
is no adventurer figure of parallel importance to Jim Burden or Claude Wheeler to
undercut the primacy of the domestic theme in Shadows on the
Rock; there is only the fear that Cécile experiences of being
removed from home and that, in fact, never takes place.
We know since Bakhtin that the novel is most characteristically dialogical, but in
Shadows on the Rock we do not hear the contesting voices
of the age in Bakhtin's sense of dialogue; we have only a very muted sense of
social and political changes taking place. Cather recognized in her letter to
Cross that what she was trying to do was not very novelistic—it was more
like music, like a song rather than a story. Moreover, in direct contrast to
Bakhtin's understanding of the novel, she was determined not to "mix kinds," ("On Shadows" 16; italics in original)
so that her narrative (again in her own words) is about something narrow, "lacking
in robustness and full of pious resignation" (15). As an instance, when
Cécile's nostalgia is strongest—during her visit to the family
on Ile d'Orleans—the language retains the stiff and formal character
that Cather thought best suited her remote subject. Cécile feels
uncomfortable around the rough country girls and their talk, but we never hear the
girls speak; rather, we are told that "(w)hen they showed her the pigs and geese
and tame rabbits, they kept telling her about peculiarities of animal behavior
which she thought it better taste to ignore. They called things by very
unattractive names, too" (190). We don't hear the actual words from that
intersection of "high" and "low" cultures; the dialogue is translated into a
monologue, preserving the character of something remembered and politely
rephrased. The speaker of the text and the characters instead formulate their
thoughts in the maxims and aphorisms of the past. We are reminded, for example,
that the Latin poets insisted that those who died in the land of their fathers
were blessed (263); and in another such generalization we are told that men
trained at court all become a little crafty (258). By muting the actual voices of
the age in favor of received wisdom, Cather has created a pastoral that attempts
to exclude time and change—and perhaps a peculiarly Canadian form of
pastoral whereby the security of the garrison has primacy over nature,whether it
be a rural retreat or the wilderness.
If Cather, in crossing the border into Canada, was attracted to an older political
order and a way of life less marked by the modernism and materialism of
twentieth-century American culture, her attraction to seventeenth-century Quebec
was especially rooted in the idea of a way of life that had seemed to survive
almost unchanged for three centuries. In Shadows on the
Rock Cather is deeply preoccupied with humankind's mortal and corruptible
nature—the foregrounding in the text of diseases, injury, and death has
led John J. Murphy to describe the novel as a "compendium of pain"
(31)—but at the same time human suffering is seen as providentially
ordered because in the Catholic context it provides the sufferer with a
purgatorial passage leading from innate depravity to promised redemption. This
vision knows no political or geographical boundaries. The members of the religious
orders who helped establish the city did not experience borders. When they crossed
the Atlantic, they carried their family with them: "they brought to Canada the
Holy Family, the saints and martyrs, the glorious company of the Apostles, the
heavenly host. . . . They had no hours of nostalgia, for they were quite as near
the realities of their lives in Quebec as in Dieppe or Tours. They were still in
their accustomed place in the world of the mind . . . and they had the same
well-ordered universe about them" (97). While Quebec is "entirely cut off from
Europe" (3), it is experienced as spiritually complete in itself. For
Cécile, in the high altar of Notre Dame de la Victoire, resembling a
feudal castle, there is an image of the kingdom of heaven—like Quebec,
"strong and unassailable" (65). The city, as Murphy observes, is repeatedly
represented as a holy place: Auclair reflects at the outset of the narrative that
the rock-set town is like a theatrical setting for the Nativity (5); in a
snow-fall "the whole rock looked like one great white church, above the frozen
river" (136); and in a particularly fine passage we are told that in the early
sunlight of a summer morning "the rock of Kebec stood gleaming above the river
like an altar with many candles, or like a holy city in an old legend, shriven,
sinless, washed in gold" (169). In such images Cather communicated what she
experienced as the spiritual integrity of Quebec, a feeling about life based on a
medieval cosmology that transcended borders of every kind.
In the closing years of her writing career Canada remained significant to the play
of Cather's imagination. The epilogue to Sapphira and the Slave
Girl, a novel about racial boundaries, brings the escaped slave girl,
Nancy, to Virginia for a visit after 25 years of living in Montreal. Canada again
is envisioned as a refuge, a very real sanctuary line, and this final section of
the novel is constructed artfully around the contrast between life in a northern
English colony and the post-Civil War Southern state. The post-Civil War
generation, we are told, is "gayer and more carefree . . .perhaps because they had
fewer traditions to live up to. The war had done away with many of the old
distinctions. The young couples were poor and extravagent and jolly" (277). Nancy
has been part of a very different social order and has decidedly changed from
living in Montreal; she dresses elegantly and expensively, and she has lost her
Southern speaking habits, pronouncing each syllable of a word distinctly, and
using phrases of deference like "by your leave" (286). She works for a Madam and
Colonel Kenwood, who are in England for the spring, and is married to the
Kenwoods'' gardener, who is half Scotch and half native Indian. Nancy's success,
her alleged superiority to the other former slaves in the Colbert household, is
predicated on her place in a world that still has traditions and makes
distinctions.
In "Before Breakfast," the second to last story she completed, Cather created her only fictional portrait of Grand Manan. In this story a Boston stockbroker, Henry Grenfell, has a cabin on a little island in the North Atlantic, where his business correspondence is never forwarded to him. If Canada had come to represent a place where things did not change, where old traditions continued, that comforting sense of time is exploded when Cather's protagonist is confronted by geological time and the brevity of human existence. Cather was here no doubt incorporating something of her own experience, for not far from her cottage was Ashburton Head, a rock face rising straight up from the beach and known locally as the "Seven Days Work," because in its layers of rock seven different periods of geological time are in striking evidence. Cather wrote of Quebec that there was a feeling about human life and fate there she could not wholly accept—a feeling of "pious resignation." I would argue that in "Before Breakfast" she accepts in a very positive way the message of the rock and the shadows cas ton it so briefly. Henry Grenfell, confronted with the brevity and insignificance of life at every turn, thinks to himself as he is about to put in his eyedrops, "Why patch up? What was the use . . . of anything" (148). But the sight of a young woman swimming out to an old sliver of rock in the frigid Atlantic waters precipitates in him a reaffirmation for living, and the story ends good-humoredly with an image of a frog making a leap in the evolutionary process, crossing a border.
Cather herself physically completed her journeying in Canada. Her longstanding interest in the country propelled her in the summer of 1941 to return from visiting her brother in California via the Canadian West. Lewis recounts that they went from San Francisco to Victoria, British Columbia, which, she says, "[Cather] had always wanted to see" (191)—perhaps, I would speculate, because Victoria was reputed to have preserved the English character of its origins in much the way Quebec City had remained so French. They stopped for several weeks at the Empress Hotel, where Cather spent most of her time reading in the spacious hotel garden, and then returned east on the Canadian Pacific Railway. The trip across the Canadian prairie apparently was not very comfortable or enjoyable, for the car in which they rode had been 20 years out of service and was only being used again because of the war. But in making that trip, Cather in her lifetime saw all the regions of the Dominion. It was the last earthly border she would cross.
Edith Lewis tells us that Shadows on the Rock grew out
of intense experience of place, an overwhelming "flood of memory, recognition,
surmise "called up by Cather's visit to the city of Quebec, her "discovery of
France on this continent" (151-53). I propose in this essay that we need also
to situate this novel— and, indeed, Cather's fiction more
generally—in a more abstract location: a place I will call the
"anthropological," an imaginative terrain delimited by a crucial development in
American intellectual history,the emergence, in the early twentieth century, of
a new understanding of culture as a category of human experience. In the
reading of Shadows on the Rock I offer here, I hope to
begin to support with a specific case three larger claims about Cather's work:
that her love for place and her interest in the past came to intellectual and
artistic fruition as an interest in culture, as that term was being newly
understood; that such an understanding of culture—more centrally than
gender, psychology, or nostalgia—gives her work its definitive shape;
and that we might best understand Cather's distinctive version of modernism by
thinking about it as a cultural or intellectual historian might: not as a
collection of compositional techniques or ideas about art but as a set of
intellectual, moral, and emotional commitments and attitudes that find
expression as aesthetic strategies. Here is my path toward that goal: first, a brief
account of this new version of anthropology and a listening for its echoes in
Cather's fiction; second, an examination of anthropological affinities in Shadows on the Rock; and finally, an exploration of the
curious modernity of some of the figures and stories in this ostensibly
antiquarian book.
In the first three decades of this century, a group of related ideas that came
to be called "cultural relativism" emerged in the work of the anthropologist
Franz Boas and his students at Columbia University and became widely
influential among American academics and intellectuals. There are two crucial conceptual
elements to this new science of anthropology, and together they compose a
powerful challenge to Victorian habits of mind. First, the concept of "culture"
is broken free from its static and honorific association with the refined arts
that signify genteel cultural authority. Rather than representing what
"civilized" European nations have and "primitive" people lack, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) Boas demonstrates
the capacity of putatively savage people to think abstractly, to discriminate
aesthetically, and to inhibit impulse, while featuring the irrational customs,
prejudices, rituals, and taboos characteristic of genteel Europeans and
Americans (Singal 19).
Such pointed comparisons helped dismantle the narrative of cultural, class, and
racial superiority dear to embattled late-nineteenth century elites—a
narrative (so voluble, for instance, in Conrad's Heart of
Darkness) that imagines human history as a progress, feebly and
belatedly imitated by the lesser races, toward the Dial essay on "genuine" and "spurious" cultures, with its
contrasting figures of the "telephone girl" and the American Indian spear
fisherman and its analysis of the spiritual hunger characteristic of
twentieth-century consumer culture(234).
The work of Boas and his disciples, then, moved in two significant directions. First, in its demonstration that culture, not heredity, most significantly shapes human behavior, it struck the first crucial blow in the scientific counter attack against the pseudoscientific racial theory so powerful at that time. Second—and here is where the illuminating affinity to Cather's fiction lies—it identified "culture" as the central arena of human meaning-making, suggesting new kinds of interest in daily life, more capacious notions of imaginativeness, more pointed criticisms of orthodox American culture.
Several features of this new anthropological work also seem particularly
characteristic of Cather's fiction and find their echoes, too, in Shadows on the Rock. First, as Lewis Perry has observed,
the work of Boas and his followers is marked by a delight in the particularity
and diversity of human meaning-making (321). Thus, for Benedict, human
societies, including one's own, become, from the anthropologist's perspective,
visible as joint acts of imagination, even the "institutions" of modern culture
emerging as "the epic of his own people, written not in rime but in stone and
currency and merchant marines and city colleges" (648-49). Second, whether
explicitly or implicitly, this kind of work is animated and energized by
comparison—but not by canned comparisons that simply demonstrate the
presumed superiority of the "civilized." Perry cites Boas's observation that
anthropology "opens to us the possibility of judging our own culture
objectively" (322); Benedict writes that "What we give up, in accepting [the
anthropologist's]view, is a dogged attachment to absolutes; what we gain is a
sense of the intriguing variety of possible forms of behavior, and of the
social function that is served by these communal patternings. We become
culture-conscious" (648).
The pattern of moral judgment implicit here—a refraining from a
stereotyped form of judgment so as to see, followed by a use of that comparison
to make visible and to interrogate the conditions of one's own life in
culture—seems to me exactly that distinctively and characteristically
produced by Cather's fiction, which might also be said—as I will try
to demonstrate below—to aim, through a recasting of the novel's
characteristic forms of behavior, at the creation of a "culture-conscious"
reader. I plan to use this account of the new anthropology heuristically,
arguing for an illuminating affinity of thought between its conceptual
principles and the interests and commitments of Cather's fiction rather than a
literal influence. My point is not that she was a thoroughgoing cultural
relativist but that her work is animated by—and can best be
understood through—the kind of perspectives the new science made
available. Still, there is every reason to believe that anyone as actively
engaged in New York intellectual life as Cather was during the early decades of
this century would have encountered the new perspective I have been describing.
As some of my citations have already indicated, Boas's ideas made their way
swiftly and forcefully into the intellectual culture of the time, especially
through the efforts of several of Boas's students who made the new
anthropological perspective, with its witty lampooning of customary cultural
hierarchies, available in widely read magazines and who wrote strikingly
popular "crossover" books, like Margaret Mead's Coming of Age
in Samoa (1928). Despite Elizabeth Sergeant's claim that Cather did "very little reading" in
anthropology, her experience of growing up in Nebraska, with its striking mix
of ethnic communities, might be said to have furnished a rich field for the
kind of pointed cultural comparisons that delighted Boas's students. She might
have been alerted to Boas's work when, during her editorship, McClure's published an extensive account (with a portrait of the
scientist) of his studies of immigrant skull sizes, an important early attack
on theories of racial determinism. Perhaps an informal interest in the
imaginative life of distinctive communities was heightened or made
self-conscious by following her friend Louise Pound's work on Nebraska folklore
and folk music.
Still, what matters to this essay is the way an "anthropological" perspective
may have shaped Cather's work as a writer, so the crucial testimony to Cather's
possession of this kind of interest in culture and its making will need to be
found in the work itself. Although Shadows on the Rock
will serve as my central case, one might discern some striking anthropological
affinities in Cather's writing generally. Consider, for instance, the
"comparative" shape of so much of Cather's fiction. I am thinking here of the
tendency, beginning with the early novels, to create occasions for cultural
comparison—as in the attention to the Mexican celebrations in The Song of the Lark and the "Catholic fair" of O Pioneers! Or, with more thematic centrality: the
contrast between the immigrant-sponsored culture of storytelling and the
played-out Victorianism of Black Hawk in My
Ántonia, and the interjection of Tom Outland and his story of the
discovery of Anasazi culture into the refined life of The
Professor's House. (I would suggest that, with Death
Comes to the Archbishop and Sapphira and the Slave
Girl, as with Shadows on the Rock, the
comparisons do not cease but become implicit, the whole novel given over to the
comparative case and history's archive functioning as a kind of field work for
Cather).
The strongest "extramural" evidence for the affinity I am suggesting probably
comes from two pieces of nonfictional writing. Passages of either piece might
well have been extracted from one of the popular anthropological essays I have
been citing. The first is Cather's extraordinary essay on Nebraska for The Nation (1923), in which, turning the cultural tables,
she contrasts the "cosmopolitanism" of the immigrant prairie towns with the
"pale proprieties, the insincere, conventional optimism of our [American]art
and thought" and laments, in a manner reminiscent of Sapir's criticisms of
modern American life, the substitution of a culture of buying for a culture of
making (237-38).
The second piece will take us all but into the text of Shadows on the the Rock itself. I am referring to Cather's well-known
letter to Wilbur Cross thanking him for an acute review of her book. One hears
in the following passages, as in Benedict's writing, an emphasis on culture as
an act of imagination, a making: "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." Or, a little further on: "An orderly little French household that
went on trying to live decently, just as ants begin to rebuild when you kick
their house down, interests me more than Indian raids or the wild life in the
forests. . . . And really, a new society begins with the salad dressing more
than with the destruction of Indian villages. Those people brought a kind of
French culture there and somehow kept it alive on that rock." (On Writing 16). One sees demonstrated here that Cather
adopts an anthropological view of meaning, in which objects are indeed symbolic
of cultural values (the "salad dressing"), but not by symbolizing something
other than themselves. One witnesses Cather putting careful cultural
observation to its characteristically Boasian uses—the criticism, via
comparison, of a complacent present, and the celebration of daily life as an
act of creation.
I arrive, at last, at the text proper of Shadows on the
Rock and at the central question my essay raises. Does this account of
the""anthropological" quality of Cather's imaginative enterprise help us see
Shadows on the Rock differently and more clearly?
What kind of book does this become, as we foreground its interest in culture?
Exploring as it does the apparently homogenous culture of seventeenth-century
Quebec, Shadows on the Rock might seem an unlikely
candidate for the demonstration of Cather's anthropological interests or for a
new description of her modernism. Its very unlikeliness, of course, makes it a
good test for the claims I have been forecasting, and I must now ask how well
the set of issues and interests I have been calling anthropological—a
focus on the culture of a community and on distinctive cultural locations
within a community; an emphasis on the process through which things and
experiences become meaningful; a sense that character is
defined or determined not psychologically but through a complex negotiation
between person and cultural system—"fit" the actual contours of the
work?
Consider first the local "texture" of the novel. Shadows on
the Rock is the reverse of "démeublé": it is a book
full of things and of the practices of everyday life. But the things and
behaviors described in Shadows on the Rock, like the
salad dressing of Cather's letter to Cross, are there not as the props of a
materialistic realism but as the
In Shadows on the Rock, this is to say, Cather has
performed the novel's most basic work—that of representing a
world—in a way we might call anthropological, aiming not simply at
the imaginative accuracy of the realist or the historical novelist but drawing
our attention to the meaning-life of objects, to the way they function within
the field of meanings that this particular community composes. As its alertness
to the cultural life of objects begins to indicate, the "form" of Shadows on the Rock—the stance toward
experience enacted by the range of compositional choices Cather has
made—is permeated, in ways both apparent and deep, by the
anthropological perspective. Such a perspective seems also to determine which
kinds of events make their way into the book in the first place. Late in book 3
of the novel Cécile gets a cold. For an interlude of several pages, we
find out how her father treats the illness (a mustard bath for her feet and
sassafras tea), what they chat about, what goes through her mind as she rests
(characteristically, her mind turns toward cultural geography, as she imagines
first the "merciless forest," then the town itself with its "layers and layers
of shelter, with this one flickering, shadowy room at the core"[157-58]).
Cécile isn't very sick: she doesn't die, or nearly die, or experience
a fever-powered epiphany. What is of interest here—and what, by
implication, defines or constitutes the interesting—is dailiness
itself, the specific and intensely local practices that make up everyday life.
One of the central pleasures of this text—and certainly the chief
labor of its composition—is the delightfully specific simulation of
daily life in Quebec.
Cécile's cold, this is to say, is not important for the effects it
produces but for the opportunity for observation it presents.
Immediately following this episode, we witness one of the text's most powerful moments, Blinker's tormented confession that he was one of the king's torturers. Unlike the account of Cécile's cold, this episode is intensely dramatic. Its content is horrifying, and it yields a significant ending, Blinker's cure and transfiguration through confession: "Auclair watched with amazement the twisted face he saw every day . . . now become altogether strange; it brought to his mind terrible weather-worn stone faces on the churches at home" (162-63). The two episodes, Cécile's cold and Blinker's self-revelation, are hardly equivalent in impact, but what seems characteristic of the book is their juxtaposition, with its implication that both events are significant and that they need not be ranked or measured against one another.
A similarly capacious sense of the meaningful governs a juxtaposition of moments earlier in the novel. In book 2, the narrator celebrates the imaginativeness that makes the Ursulines immune to the vicissitudes of emigration: "They were still in their accustomed place in the world of the mind (which for each of us is the only world), and they had the same well-ordered universe about them" (97). A few pages later Cécile experiences an epiphany while sledding: "A feeling came over her that there would never be anything better in the world for her than this; to be pulling Jacques on her sled, with the tender, burning sky before her"(104). Here, too, the juxtaposition draws our attention to the distinctive ways meaning is shaped in a particular place by particular kinds of people. The nuns in the convent and the child with the sled possess equal authority and intensity as meaning-makers.
What might be called the "protocol" of Shadows on the
Rock—its way of deciding which experiences enter its
borders—comes, as the novel unfolds, to define a stance toward
experience: it invites us to witness free-standing instances of meaning's
emergence, rather than to discern episodes sculpting themselves toward the
on
them. Their family life, that is, provides the vantage point from which we
watch the communal life of Quebec unfold; we are interested in them, but our
interest in them becomes our way into the life of the town, just as an
anthropologist might arrange to live with a particular family in hopes of
immersing herself in communal life. Tellingly, the events that complete the
Auclair story—Euclide's acceptance of life in Canada,
Cécile's marriage—are exiled to an "epilogue," as though to
mark them as
I am arguing, then, that Shadows on the Rock is
interested in experience in the way the new anthropology
was interested in experience and that Cather composes and organizes her
representation of that experience in ways that have distinct affinities with
the concepts and strategies of this new "science of custom." Like its
deployment of events, the book's presentation of character seems governed more
by the interests of the cultural analyst than by those of the traditional
novelist. What we find out about people in the book is not the full drama of
their consciousnesses, not the intensity of their psychological conflicts. What
we see, quite consistently, is their cultural location, their way of making
meaning. Thus we know little about how Auclair felt about his
wife—but a good deal about his stance toward experience and the shape
of his world; his imaginative geography, where the presence of the forest is
felt as an animate otherness surrounding the fragile town; his interesting
combination of rationalist skepticism and feudal loyalty, expressed in his
curiosity about whether behavior is determined by "blood" or more unpredictably
given by circumstance. Thus the book's portrayal of Count Frontenac emphasizes
the production of his cultural presence: "His carriage was his unconscious idea
of himself,— it was an armour he put on when he took off his
night-cap in the morning, and he wore it all day, at early mass, at his desk,
on the march, at the Council, at his dinner-table. Even his enemies relied upon
his strength"(239). Espousals of belief or value are consistently juxtaposed to
a different character's articulation of a countering skepticism, as though to
suggest that, even in a culture so apparently unified as seventeenth-century
Quebec, meaning is in process, composed of competing and changing perspectives.
Thus the account of the miraculous appearance of the angels to Jeanne Le Ber is
answered by Pierre Charron's demystifying narrative of her descent into
obsession, while Father Saint-Cyr's tribute to the devotion of the missionaries
provokes Auclair to wonder about the waste of human talent occasioned by such
"misplaced heroism" (155). In turn, Auclair's expression of deep loyalty to his
patron occasions a more sophisticated response—"a smile in which
there was both contempt and kindness" 242)—in Count Frontenac
himself.
Another formal feature of the text—the narrator that Cather calls
forth to present this material—seems similarly designed to express
the values and perspectives I have been calling anthropological. The most
notable feature of this narrative voice is its reticence, which one senses as
the presence of a coherent set of "refrainings." Mostly the voice operates as
an ideally positioned observer, witnessing events and transposing conversations
but refraining from commentary and explanation and making no claim to the kind
of full access to consciousness possessed by, say, the Jamesian narrator. It is
placed in this community but is not of it. Cather's
narrator might thus be said to enact the unbiased attentiveness that is the
anthropologist's goal, but this voice is not simply neutral or photographic.
Rather, its attention is drawn, as I have suggested above, to moments at which
the community's ongoing work of constructing its meaning can be observed, and
when it is lured toward commentary the subject is consistently the creation of
significance—as when the narrator notes that on All Souls' Day
Cécile "was not sorrowful, though she supposed she was" (94), implying
that it is the imaginative intensity of the day, not its doctrine, that has
captured her attention. And the beliefs of the characters are simply
stated,never explained away or demystified. Like a good anthropologist, this is
to say, the narrator is more interested in the making of values than their
validity; she does not pretend to be in the possession of a superior
understanding of or a more direct access to the truth. Indeed, the narrator
from time to time simply becomes a conduit for the communal perspective, taking
over for Cécile the telling of the story of Catherine de
Saint-Augustin (40-41), leaving—curiously—untranslated the
life of Saint Edmond that Cécile reads to Jacques, giving voice to the
sentiments of the town in a tribute to the ships that bring supplies from
France (207-09).
Yet this mostly restrained narrative voice does occasionally break into
strikingly lyric or "literary" expressiveness. But what provokes the leap into
a different figurative register (what seems, that is, to govern the book's
deployment of its energies of figuration) is the celebration of the making of
culture itself. Thus the narrator completes the admiring description of the
nuns' powerfully composed imaginative universe with an allusion to The Aeneid ("Inferretque deos
Latio" [Shadows 98]), as though to pay tribute to
their achievement as preservers of meaning, and with the following prophecy
about the meaning-life of Quebec: "Its history will shine with bright
incidents, slight, perhaps, but precious, as in life itself, where the great
matters are often as worthless as astronomical distances, and the trifles dear
as the heart's blood" (98). The miracle of Jeanne Le Ber is said to bring
pleasure "as if the recluse herself had sent to all those families whom she did
not know some living beauty, a blooming rose-tree, or a shapely fruit-tree in
fruit"; in the same passage "the people" are said to receive miracles not as
evidence or proof but as "the actual flowering of desire" (136-37).
Cécile's emerging experience of cultural identity, which is rendered
in her relation to landscape, calls forth from the narrator a style we might
call the anthropological sublime. At the end of an afternoon of sledding,
witnessing the early evening sky ("the western sky . . . was now throbbing with
fiery vapors, like rapids of clouds"), Cécile feels with new force her
identity as a Canadian: "A feeling came over her that there would never be
anything better in the world for her than this.... On a foreign shore. . . ,
would not her heart break for just this? For this rock and this winter, this
feeling of being in one's own place, for the soft content of pulling Jacques up
Holy Family Hill into paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coining
up from the deep sea" (103-04). In ways both subtle and apparent, then, Cather
has made her narrator enact the kinds of attentiveness, interests, attitudes,
and enthusiasms that arise from construing "culture" as one's central object of
interest.
My essential claim will now be clear. In Shadows on the
Rock—and, I would suggest, throughout her
fiction—Cather has recast the novel in the image of anthropology. I
do not know, of course, whether Cather actually derived this repertoire of
interests and representational strategies from the new anthropology or whether
she discovered it independently. But in any case, I think that the
"anthropological" affinities of Shadows on the Rock, as
we think still more about them, help us to see something crucial about Cather's
enterprise: that this set of interests and compositional tactics amounts to a
reconception of the nature of meaning. The making of a culture is discovered as
a new kind of subject for the novelist, and just as Boasian anthropology
brought with it freedom from the hierarchies of Victorian culture, so Cather's
invention of the anthropological novel delivers freedom, both formal and
thematic, from the habits of Victorian fiction. The freedom I have in mind
might be thought of as an escape from allegory. The juxtaposed episodes I began
with, Cécile's cold and Blinker's confession, occur in book 3 of the
novel, "The Long Winter." That book, as one reexamines it, turns out to have a
distinct thematic shape. It begins with the full onset of the Quebec winter and
ends with the return of the Auclairs' swallow, the harbinger of spring.
Moreover, this book is full of illnesses—Bishop Saint-Vallier's
psychological unsoundness; Antoine Frichette's rupture; Noel Chabanel's nearly
ceaseless vomiting—which giveway to Blinker's cure and
Cécile's convalescence. Its crucial feature,though, is that these
allegorical materials do not become an allegory: they do not indicate, finally,
a "deeper" level of meaning to which actual experience conforms or refers.
Rather, the meanings of these episodes remain independent, resisting the
pressure toward allegory suggested by their thematic affinity: they may reveal
moral truths, but they do not compose a narrative of moral truth. Even the
muted, character-based allegories of realist fiction—maturation,
character development, the emergence of nameable wisdom—capture
little of the book's energy and interest. The subject of Shadows on the Rock is not the revelation of Meaning but the making of
meanings, and the book is best understood not as a nostalgic evocation of a
lost stability of meaning but as a modernist meditation upon its
construction.
I have been arguing that in Shadows on the Rock Cather
has recast the novels so that it might make culture its central subject, most
strikingly by substituting a collection of culturally revealing "moments" for
the overarching "plot" that has traditionally governed the novel. Yet this book is not
without its prominent narratives. I want now to look closely at two such
stories for the light each sheds on the enterprise of Shadows
on the Rock—to ask how thinking through what each of these
episodes is "about" might help us understand more fully what Cather's novel is
up to.
My first story might be called a narrative of belief, an instance of the book's
treatment of Catholicism. Throughout the book, it seems to me, Cather is
interested in Catholicism not as a believer or as an Anglo-Catholic
fellow-traveler but as a cultural observer. She attends, that is, not to its
truth (though, like a good anthropologist, she will not question it) but to its
operation, for the clerics who are its most intense devotees, as a kind of
"mini-culture," a set of strategies for the production of cogent and intense
meanings. On a winter evening Father Hector Saint-Cyr tells the story of
Noël Chabanel's vow. This least successful of missionaries, unsuited
in all respects to the life he has undertaken, conquers his intense desire to
return to France by making a vow of perpetual stability in the Huron missions.
Father Hector, drawn powerfully to the comforts of domesticity and the
pleasures of the library, reveals, to Auclair's intense disappointment, that he
has imitated Chabanel's vow. Although this story might be taken as a tribute to
the heroic discipline of the missionary priests or simply as a striking
historical incident, several features of its presentation send us in a
different interpretive direction. First, though Father Hector tells the story
with utter sincerity, its elements—particularly the portrayal of
Chabanel's struggles—make available quite a different view of his
saintliness. Unable to learn the language, feeling no love for the Hurons, and
intensely disgusted by their daily life,the fragile Father Chabanel seems to
spend much more time vomiting than effecting conversions. The futility of
Chabanel's career is only emphasized by Saint-Cyr's curious tribute to his
sacrifice ("many gave all, but few had so much to give" [1531), which measures
Chabanel's action entirely by what he gave
Of the many narratives Shadows on the Rock puts before
us, the one with the greatest claim to centrality is that of Cécile's
coming of age—a narrative, we might notice, particularly interesting
to anthropologists, since it focuses on the way in which a cultural identity is
fully achieved or marked. I want to examine what I take to be the crucial episode in
Cécile's story, the visit she makes to the Ile d'Orleans with Pierre
Charron, together with the effect of that visit upon her when she returns home.
Cécile's much-anticipated journey to that intriguing and beautiful
place seems to end in disappointment, for she finds herself so sickened by the
grubbiness of her hosts that Pierre agrees to take her back to Quebec. This is
not a moment that appeals to one's egalitarian sentiments, and
Cécile's fastidiousness might seem to imply an endorsement of the very
genteel, hierarchical taste that Boas's work takes apart. But this is taste
anthropologically understood, as an expression of cultural affiliation: what
Cécile experiences—viscerally, like Noël
Chabanel—is her distinct cultural "locatedness." And this moment
leads, upon her return, to what Susan J. Rosowski rightly calls an "epiphany"
(182). As she prepares the evening meal, she feels older, no longer a little
girl: "She was accustomed to think that she did all these things so carefully
to please her father, and to carry out her mother's wishes. Now she realized
that she did them for herself, quite as much. . . . 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 flavor, the
special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life" (198). An epiphany,
yes, but I want to add: a distinctly Boasian epiphany, consisting of the
extraordinary, "protoanthropological" recognition that we Shadows on
the Rock—the interest that, in the absence of plot, holds the
book together—is precisely that defined by Cécile's
revelation: the making, as a work of art is made, of the meanings that
constitute a culture, a "climate within a climate."
While I hope to have demonstrated that the communal manufacture of
meanings—the essential work of cultures, as Boas understood
it—is also the central subject of Shadows on the
Rock, I have perhaps not fully described what I take to be the nature
of the book's designs upon the present. With its interest in Catholic ritual,
in the quaint and lovely customs and artifacts of a long-gone way of life, Shadows on the Rock might well be seen as an instance of
what the cultural historian Jackson Lears has described as "anti-modernism,"
the tendency of embattled late-Victorian elites to criticize but more deeply to
seek refuge from an unwelcoming modernity by evoking the richly meaningful life
of past cultures. Does this book, I want to ask, look forward and around as
well as back? Does it produce the yield of its implicit comparison, teaching
us, as Boas suggested his anthropological work might, to see and judge our
modern or postmodern lives?
It will be no surprise that I think that the answer is yes—in part
because the very emphasis on the making of meaning that I have been tracking
implicitly locates us as participants in a particular culture with its own
limitations and possibilities: we measure and evaluate the trajectory of our
lives, perhaps, as we witness Cécile discover the trajectory of her
own. But I think we might derive a fuller answer from Cécile herself.
It is one of the tenets of Boas's anthropology that culture—though
not without complexity or the possibility for change—determines
behavior by defining its meaning; it is, I suppose, one of the tenets of
intellectual modernism that no culture can any longer produce the authority or
meaning sufficient to command our unselfconscious affiliation to it. To see the
determinedness of other cultures, then, is potentially and paradoxically to
evade the determinism of one's own. Cécile cuts a curious figure in
criticism of Shadows on the Rock, appearing there, for
instance, both as a "prig" and as the secularized avatar of the Blessed
Virgin. Here is
my Cécile: in the realization I have described, that moment where she,
in effect, chooses her affiliation to her city's culture because she sees so
clearly that culture is a making—and in the implication that emerges
from the moment of Cécile's anthropological epiphany, that one might
choose badly or well, that one's life will be made by the cultural affiliation
one discovers or invents—Cécile emerges not as
I close with a glimpse of Cécile in action: Mother Juschereau has just
retold the story of Marie the sinner's miraculous appearance to Mother
Catherine, and she is about to deliver the requisite moral when she is
interrupted by Cécile: "N'expliquez pas, cere Mere,
je vous supplie!"And as she looks into her young listener's face,
Mother Juschereau sees something that leads her to abandon, once again, her
hopes of Cécile's vocation: "admiration and rapture she found in the
girl's face, but it was not the rapture of self-abnegation. It was something
very different,—almost the glow of worldly pleasure" (39-40).
One of the French translators of Willa Cather, Marc Chenetier, once remarked
playfully that he found translating Cather's work relatively easy because her
language was almost like French to begin with. In saying so he was modestly
putting aside his talent for rendering Cather's work faithfully in his beautiful
translations but he also captured an essential characteristic of Cather's style,
one that I wish to analyze here. Keeping in mind that Cather taught Latin, read
French literature (both past and contemporary) in French, and had a French cook who hardly spoke
English, read the beginning of the chapter entitled "Hidden Water" in An hour later, as darkness came over the sand-hills, the young Bishop was
seated at supper in the mother-house of this Mexican
settlement—which, he learned, was appropriately called From the moment he entered this room with its thick white-washed adobe
walls, Father Latour had felt a kind of peace about it. In its bareness and
simplicity there was something comely, as there was about the serious girl
who had placed their food before them and who now stood in the shadows
against the wall, her eager eyes fixed upon his face. He found himself very
much at home with the four dark-headed men who sat beside him in the
candle-light. Their manners were gentle, their voices low and agreeable.
When he said grace before meat, the men had knelt on the floor beside the
table. (Death Comes for the Archbishop:
Agua Secreta, Hidden Water. At the table with him were
his host, an old man called Benito, the oldest son, and two grandsons. The
old man was a widower, and his daughter, Josepha, the girl who had run to
meet the Bishop at the stream, was his housekeeper. Their supper was a pot
of frijoles cooked with meat, bread and goat's milk, fresh cheese and ripe
apples.Later Novels 290)
This beginning refers to the Spanish culture rather than to the French one. It is therefore foreign to an American reader as well as to Latour and introduces a series of linguistic displacements from English to Latinate languages. As a former teacher of Latin, Cather was well-equipped to be aware of the common root the French and Spanish languages share. In choosing to place the setting in a Spanish settlement first, she has the readers discover the American countryside through the eyes of some Spanish settlers, as they are themselves observed by a Frenchman, and her language reflects the Latinate perception of the world.
The English translation of the Spanish "Agua Secreta" comes after the original
expression because it conveys only a vague idea of the place. The Latin etymology
is
From the prologue in Death Comes for the Archbishop, we
know that the choice of a language is crucial, as is the fluency in any foreign
language, for missionaries. When the cardinals meet in Rome, the language they use
conveys a different orientation from their previous use of Latin as a spoken
language, "The language spoken was French—the time had already gone by
when Cardinals could conveniently discuss contemporary matters in Latin" (Later Novels 278). And in the course of the novel, even if
the priests learn Spanish and English, they remain French in their outlook on the
world around them. Here, I will attempt to trace the remnants of French that can
sometimes be heard in the English the narrator uses to convey another vision of
the New World.
Cather, needless to say, did not write in faulty English nor in a form of English
that may sound odd to a native speaker. On the contrary, she plays the crafty game
of writing in perfectly correct English that still manages to "sound" French or
Latinate. In the passage quoted above, Spanish compensates for the lack of
differentiation between genders in English. Indeed, just as the young woman does
not sit down at table with the men, gender roles are clearly marked linguistically
by the masculine "o" ending of the name "Benito" and the feminine "a" of
"Josepha." The same gender marker can be found in the name of the place, Agua
Secreta, whereas the gender difference disappears in the English translation of
"water"—where the"-er" ending is the same, independently of gender, in
such words as "daughter," "housekeeper," and "widower." However, the masculine
ending in "o" seems to be disseminated in the assonances in "o" that surround the
masculine crowd in the family, "his h
In this old village the past has been preserved without the slightest change, enshrined as a religion, set out of time and transmitted by the elders in an act of memory. There are "old men trying to remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren" (294). What matters here is that their faith has been transmitted in the forms it had before the French Revolution: "Benito did not know what year his grandfather had settled here.. . . 'But it was soon after the time when the French killed their king. My grandfather had heard talk of that before he left home, and used to tell us boys about it when he was an old man' " (291). The connection with the Old Regime in France is made through storytelling. And reading the passage as if the story told here had something to do with French prose, we will notice how closely its rhythm resembles that of classical seventeenth-century French prose.
Indeed, the style of the passage seems to be an invitation to mark the rhythm of
the sentences as in French poetry or prose, in which every syllable is a unit
independent of any stresses, while taking into account punctuation marks such as
the comma. It sounds as if Cather flattened out the stresses of the English
language the better to emphasize the syllabic and syntactic rhythm of her prose.
In "A Chance Meeting" (published in Not Under Forty
[1936]), as Cather remembers her meeting with Flaubert's niece, she is as
sensitive to the rhythm of Flaubert's sentence as his niece is (and this proves
that she read his work in French): "When I happened to speak of the splendid final
sentence of Hérodias, where the fall of the
syllables is so suggestive of the hurrying footsteps of John's disciples, carrying
away with them their prophet's severed head, she repeated that sentence softly,
'Stories
823-24).
Her commas often take all the importance of a caesura in French verse, for
example, in binary sentences: "From the moment he entered this room with its thick
whitewashed adobe walls, Father Latour had felt a kind of peace about it." The
sentence makes this peace heard in the stability in the sequence of the one- or
two-syllable words in the sentence. Several sentences present a similar structure:
"Their manners were gentle, their voices low and agreeable. When he said grace
before meat, the men had knelt on the floor beside the table." There are six
syllables in the first half of the first sentence and twelve in the second half of
the second sentence. This rhythm is not lost in the French translation since the
sentence almost becomes an alexandrine (a twelve-syllable line, with the caesura
usually after the sixth): "La Mort 40). And the following sentence in translation is an
alexandrine,with the caesura in the middle: "
The priest enjoys reading his favorite authors again and again—Madame de
Sévigné, Pascal, and St. Augustine, whose Confessions were widely read in the seventeenth century (and later) in
translation by Arnauld d'Andilly (1649-71). "Bernard read aloud to him the rest of
the morning; St. Augustine, or the letters of Madame de Sévigné,
or his favorite Pascal" (444). The common point shared by these three authors is
that they profess an ideal simplification of style and narrative truth. St.
Augustine states in the Confessions, "How his pride gave
him a disgust for the Scripture, because of the simplicity of its style" (trans.
d'Andilly 96). And St.
Augustine explains his first reaction when reading the Bible: "I was not able to
penetrate such sublime secrets, neither to belittle myself to appreciate its
elocution, which is simple and humble. . . . In my pride I scorned its simplicity,
and my eyes were not clear-sighted or piercing enough to discover its secret
beauty" (96). In the
course of his confessions, St. Augustine illustrates his conversion from an
oratory style to his search for biblical truth in a simple style devoid of pride.
In a similar way, although in a very different context, Madame de
Sévigné pays a compliment to her daughter on the style of her
letters: "Your words only serve the purpose of making yourself clear; and in this
noble simplicity, they are endowed with a power one can not resist"(74). As for Pascal, the clarity
and simplicity of his style are legendary for a philosopher. His writings on "The
Art of Persuasion" must have been on Cather's mind when she wrote, "The higher
processes of art are all processes of simplification" (Stories 836). Although strictly speaking it is unproven, it seems highly
probable that Cather had read more than just Les
Pensées by Pascal, as she draws a lot from his other works and,
in particular, from his texts relating his scientific discoveries. (Pascal proved the
existence of the vacuum in physics, and Cather uses his biography and personal
writings extensively to build up the Pascalian character, Tom Outland, in The Professor's House, for example (Palleau-Papin). In any
case, she was familiar with the seventeenth-century ideology and rhetoric of the
group called Port-Royal, in which Pascal was one of the most famous figures.) In
"Concerning the Art of Persuasion," Pascal writes: "The best books are those which
readers believe they could have written. Nature, which alone is good, is quite
familiar and common. Hence I do not doubt at all that these rules, being true,
must be simple, naive, and natural as they are. . .. I should like to call them
humble, common, familiar. These names suit them better" (211).
The simplicity of Cather's style is connected with her highly classical conception
of the French language, in which she sees an unencumbered lightness, as she
characterizes it in her expression "the light and elastic mesh of the French
tongue" (Death, 444). A process of narrative simplification
is certainly at work in the passage with which I began. The pastoral simplicity of
the meal is suggested in the predictability of the enumeration in pairs, "Their
supper was a pot of frijoles cooked with meat, bread and goat's milk, fresh cheese
and ripe apples" (290). The peaceful binary rhythm of this sentence echoes that of
the whole passage. And as far as the syntax goes, it is also highly simplified and
therefore in keeping with seventeenth-century French aesthetics.
In this passage Cather's unencumbered syntax makes it easier to compare the
English text to its French translation and reach certain conclusions regarding her
style. In most cases her syntax does not present any strictly English structure
that would be difficult to translate literally into French, using the same
grammatical framework. The paragraph quoted above, describing the settlement of
Agua Secreta, translates into the same groups of words of the same grammatical
function in French. To take but one example, the following sentence presents the
traditional structure of a subject, a verb, and complements, with the time and
place complements on either side of the subject-verb group and a relative clause
ending the sentence: "An hour later, as darkness came over the sand-hills, the
young Bishop was seated at supper in the mother-house of this Mexican
settlement—which, he learned, was appropriately called Agua Secreta, Hidden Water" (290). This grammatical structure is kept
word for word in the French translation: "Agua Secreta, I'Eau CachéeLa Mort 39).
Stretching the comparison, it sounds as if Cather avoided the most idiomatic
structures of the English language and conformed her expression to its French
equivalent, or the structures that both languages share. According to the
comparative linguist Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher, "the proportion of main,
independent or subordinate clauses is not the same in the two languages" (111).
She explains how "subordinate or adjunct elements" and relative clauses in French
are often "turned into main clauses" in English (113-14). Usually an English text
and its French translation present a difference in the order the adjunct elements
are placed regarding the main clause, whereas in Cather's case, the order is the
same because mainly postpositions and antepositions, which do not disturb the
sentence structure in either language, are used. Occasionally Cather will include a discreet
interpolated or incidental clause within a main clause, which is a process
slightly more common in French than in English; she will often use antepositions
and accumulate elements at the opening of the sentence, which is common in French
and tolerated in English; and finally, she will use postpositions, common in both
languages, in English in particular. "If in English postposition is generally
preferable to anteposition, on the other hand anteposition is preferable to
imbrication, which delays the introduction of the main clause but does not
dismantle it"(Guillemin-Flesher 125). In the sentence studied here, there are two
antepositions ("An hour later, / as darkness came over the sand-hills,"), two
postpositions ("which . . . was appropriately called Agua
Secreta, / Hidden Water"), and one brief imbrication, discreet enough not
to dismantle the sentence ("—which,
Reading Death Comes for the Archbishop or Shadows on the Rockcould be an exercise in sharpening our perception of
what Henry James calls"a faint shade of strangeness" in The
American: "Here and there Madame de Cintré's utterance had a
faint shade of strangeness, but at the end often minutes Newman found himself
waiting for these soft roughnesses. He enjoyed and he marveled to see that gross
thing, error, brought down to so fine a point" (124). It is hardly a coincidence
that this novel is mentioned, albeit in another context, in The
Professor's House. Cather plays with her mother tongue as if she had a new ear for it, sensitive
to all its shades and even strangenesses, as if she were transcribing it, rather
than translating, from another language. The philosopher and critic Gilles Deleuze
explains the genesis of one language from within another:
It is neither a case of bilinguism nor multilinguism. One may mix two languages,
going back and forth from one to the other, and yet either one will still be a
homogeneously balanced system and mix words only. But this is not how great
writers proceed. . . . They do not mix two languages, not even a minor and a major
language, even though many of them are part of a minority as a sign of their
vocation. Rather, what they do is invent a
One cannot say that Cather mixes both languages but she invents a transposition of English in the minor key of the classic French writers she mentions in her text. The French missionaries Cather's narrator often uses as focalisers transfer their cultural and linguistic heritage onto the country they discover. Deleuze believes that "what is exceptional in American literature is that its writers have the faculty of telling their own memories as those of a universal people made up of immigrants from all countries." Every American writer submits English to certain linguistic transformations that take one step further the process of "inventing a new universality (14, 93).
It is as if a "ghost" language (Deleuze 149) ran beneath Cather's English,
enabling her to convey another vision of the New World through the minor mode of
the French language, even for readers who do not speak any French, as Peter, in
Cather's story by the same name, understands the language of Sarah Bernhardt in
spite of the language barrier: "He did not know French, and could not understand a
word she said, but it seemed to him that she must be talking the music of Chopin"
(Collected Short Fiction 542). In the music of her
prose, Cather has brought English closer to the French rhythm and syntax to
transcribe a North American reality. When Vaillant says to Latour, "During your
absence I have found how particularly precious La Mort 110). Or
again, the following question is more familiar in French; the intonation and the
question mark alone can be enough to indicate a question form in an affirmative
sentence, as when Noël Pommier asks Jacques, in Shadows
on the Rock, "You will be very content with fine new shoes, my boy?" (Later Novels 514). The more correct interrogative form in
English would be, "Will you be happy with your new shoes, my boy?" In writing like
this, according to Deleuze's analysis, Willa Cather follows the tradition of the
great American writers who, like Melville in Moby
Dick,"invent a foreign language which runs through the English language, and
carries it along—it is the OUTLANDISH, or the Deterritorialized, the
language of the Whale" (93). And yet Cather's English, like Melville's, is
perfectly correct English but English taken to a limit defined by each author.
As for the vocabulary, Cather injects French words or passages into Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows
on the Rock in particular, thereby conveying a vision of the French
culture linguistically. For example, Latour says to Vaillant, apropos their
difficult transaction with Madame Olivares to get her to confess her age in
public, "I don't think I ever assisted at anything so cruel" (394). This seems to
be a word-for-word translation from the French "assister à," whereas the
usual English translation of this expression would be "I ever witnessed" or "saw"
or "attended"—all the more so that the English meaning of "assisting,"
although possible here (because Father Latour lends a hand to influence the lady),
is not as probable as the meaning of the French "assister." Another kind of
example can be found in Shadows on the Rock: "she made the
ménage for her father" (469). This phrase is translated directly, yet
partially, from the French "faire le ménage," instead of the more correct
"did the cleaning."
The narrator seems to be playing with the various meanings of a word, according to
the language in which it is understood. The word "citron," for example, as it is
used in the description of the glass fruits: "Between the tall silver candlesticks
stood a crystal bowl full of glowing fruits of coloured glass: purple figs,
yellow-green grapes with gold vine-leaves, apricots, nectarines, and a dark citron
stuck up endwise among the grapes"(501). The words "figs," "apricots," and
"nectarines" are very close to their equivalent in French, even in the spelling.
Under the effect of accumulation of French words this enumeration produces and in
the francophile context of the novel, in which many French words are not even
italicized, one may hesitate when coming across the word "citron." Does it have
the English meaning of "a yellow, thick-skinned fruit resembling a lime or lemon
but larger and less acid" (Webster's New Universal
Unabridged), or the French meaning of a lemon? The context hardly clarifies
this, as the Saracens who made the glass fruit were familiar with both the English
meaning and the French. Only its color could be an indication as to the right
meaning since the English citron may be darker than the lemon. The North American
meaning of the word sounds less probable here considering the eastern origin of
the fruit. And yet, in her other fictions Cather certainly means it to be the
North American melon that is the size of a large apple and dark green in color and
can be made into sweet pickle. Cather may not have known that citron melons were
exclusively North American and would not have been represented in glass fruits by
the Saracens. However,
beyond any possible mistake, the effect of this word in the enumeration of the
glass fruits is that of a linguistic flow between the different meanings, in which
the word seems to fluctuate from one language to another, giving a particular
depth to the linguistic sign. Cather invites the reader to decipher her slight
variations from a strict usage of the English language to grasp the new freedom
she breathes into her American expression.
Another passage in Shadows on the Rock presents a more
intricate switch from English into French. It begins with the description of
Jacques Gaux, who is "a chunky, rather clumsy little boy of six, unkept and
uncared for, dressed in a pair of old sailor's breeches, cut off in the leg for
him and making a great bulk of loose cloth about his thighs. His ragged jacket was
as much too tight as the trousers were too loose, and this gave him the figure of
a salt-shaker" (495). As far as the story goes, the old breeches that give him the
ridiculous "figure of a salt-shaker" probably come from the sailors who go to his
mother's house. And from a linguistic point of view, the very existence of the boy
is inscribed in his resemblance to a "salt-shaker," as the narrator immediately
makes clear in the rest of her description of Jacques's family: "Antoinette was
Canadian-born; her mother had been one of 'the King's Girls,' as they were called.
Thirty years ago King Louis had sent several hundred young Frenchwomen out to
Canada to marry the bachelors of the disbanded regiment of Carignan-
In the case of a minor character whose name is "Madame Renaude," Cather gives away
the pun immediately, explaining her nickname:"Renaude-le-liévre, she was
called, because she had a hare-lip, and a bristling black moustache as well"
(493). The two facts given as an explanation for her nickname draw our attention
on two elements: first, she is called a "liévre" or hare because of her
"hare-lip"; but the fact that the word "liévre" is always masculine in
French is not enough for the narrator, who adds a gender-oriented comment on the
woman's manly (or harely?) moustache, thereby pinpointing the perfect adequacy
between the name and the character, which the French language, with its use of
gendered nouns, renders more convincingly than a translation would. Similarly, the
narrator often gives French nicknames first, followed by their English
translation, to emphasize their unexpected but appropriate depiction of the
character, as in the case of "Shadows on the Rock: "They were
commonly called La Grenouille and L'Escargot, because, every summer, when the
ships from France began to come in, they stuck in their window two placards:
'FROGS,' 'SNAILS,' to attract the hungry sailors, whether they had those
delicacies on hand or not" (496); Cather also describes Joseph Vaillant as
"Blanchet" in Death Comes for the Archbishop: "His hair,
sunburned to the shade of dry hay, had originally been tow-colored; '
Another example of punning with French names remains hidden in the text,
unexplained by the narrator. In Shadows on the Rock, when
Cécile visits the Harnois family on the Ile d'Orléans, she
escapes to a beautiful meadow after her first sleepless night. "She felt she had
escaped for ever from the Harnois and their way of living" (586-87). "Harnois" was
the old French spelling of "harnais" (that is, a "harness") which prevailed until
the eighteenth century (just as the French were called "les François" or
"les Français" in modern spelling). Thus Cécile's feeling of
having escaped from the rigid harness of those rural people is emphasized in their
name.
Sometimes the French words depicting the geography of Quebec or of France contain discreet puns as well. For example, Pierre Charron comes from the Languedoc region in southern France, which is a sunny area, and this explains the classic pun in English between the words sun and son, applied to a French reality here, "For Charron, that evening, the apothecary brought up from his cellar some fiery Bordeaux, proper for a son of Languedoc, and the hours flew by" (576). Cather's narrator gives a clue in her use of the adjective "fiery," which draws our attention to the sun shining on this "son of Languedoc." Or elsewhere, the meaning of the French name "Beaupré" infiltrates the English sentence in which it is used: "On one shore stretched the dark forest, on the other the smiling, sunny fields that ran toward Beaupré" (582.). The name of "Beaupré"—or "beautiful meadow"—seems to be putting the fields under the obligation of being "smiling" and "sunny" under the happy eyes of Cécile and Pierre.
More generally speaking, passing from one language to another, from one signifier to another, entails a shift in the signified and another vision of the world. When Cécile tells Jacques about the life of Saint Edmond, she begins, "He was an English saint, and he became Archbishop of Cantorbéry. But he died in France, at the monastery of Pontigny" (518).The balance between the English nationality of the saint and his death in a French monastery is exemplified by the choice of languages in the expression "Archbishop of Cantorbéry." In this sentence in English, the English name "Canterbury" is given in its French adaptation in an interesting collusion of languages that sounds fairly illogical at first. In doing so, the narrator Cécile brings about a subtle reorientation of her speech and clearly endorses the French viewpoint, even though she expresses herself in English. This odd word "Cantorbéry" is here as a reminder that the original language in which the character would have expressed herself, had she had a life outside the text, would have been French.
The authorial voice makes this linguistic adjustment all the clearer when she has
Cécile read the story of Saint Edmond in French from the original text,
without giving any translation in the original edition of the novel. Cather seems to be
ready to drown the American reader who does not know French in this language, as
if immersion were her answer to cultural differences. And just as the French
hagiography appropriates the life of Saint Edmond, the overall narrator of Shadows on the Rock makes hers the(fictional) French origin
of the story she tells in English, while constantly reminding the readers that
this is only a translation or at best a transcription. The lengthy quotation
Cécile makes from the French version of the saint's life is given as
such, without any translation, with all the power and authority of an original
version reproduced in its entirety. The long quotation from the French is
reproduced in italics and is clearly delineated from the rest of the narration, as
if the narrator also wanted to mark a certain distance from this foreign text
grafted onto the body of the novel.
Shadows on the Rock is not, after all, a hagiographic story
even if many passages refer to the lives of saints as a background picture of the
times. It functions as a reminder that a given language conveys its particular
vision of life, religion, and its own construction of the world. It is no accident
if Cécile later repeats in her own speech a passage from the French she
has just read: "But I expect He is often near you and keeps you from harm, as He
said to Saint Edmond;
As the narrator sprinkles her text with many words in French, sometimes in
italics, sometimes not, she draws our attention to the French reality they define.
The French word "grille," for example, is mentioned many times to describe the
numerous railings that bar the view of many characters in Shadows on the Rock, signifying the many barriers of the
seventeenth-century French culture, as between the secular and the sacred world.
In the convent, grilles shelter the nuns from the rest of the world: "Their
voices, even when they spoke to one through the veiled grille, were pleasant and
inspiriting to hear" (526). There are also the grilles barring Jeanne Le Ber from
the profane world: "In the basement cubicle was the grille through which she spoke
to her confessor, and by means of which she was actually present at mass and
vespers, though unseen" (549). Or the grilles stand between well-to-do people and
other classes, when as a little boy, Auclair observes the town house of the Count
de Frontenac in Paris. "Every morning he looked out from his window on the same
stillness; the shuttered windows behind their iron grilles, the steps under the
porte-cochère green with moss" (474). The meaning of these "grilles"
become clearer on the following page. "Three young men were leaning out over the
grilles beating rugs, shaking carpets and wall-hangings into the air" (475). Here,
the "grilles" stand in front of the windows but do not fully bar them. Such
architectural elements are presented in French in Cather's text because the
various meanings of the word "grille" all convey the French reality of the time,
and yet it is easily understandable, as the word has passed into English.
Moreover, the names of people, places, and political and ecclesiastical functions all give the configuration of seventeenth-century France, which would seem "incomprehensible" to us were it not for the context in which Cather brings them to life, just as the French reality is beginning to be "incomprehensible" to the Canadian settlers. "Indeed, Auclair's chief service to his patron was not to administer drugs, but to listen occasionally, when the Governor felt lonely, to talk of places and persons,—talk which would have been incomprehensible to anyone else in Kebec" (614-15). While the Canadian settlers see in the mother superior of the convent only her ecclesiastical function, the narrator chooses to convey more information to the readers in parentheses, as Cécile Auclair herself would well have understood: "The Reverend Mother (Jeanne Franc Juschereau de la Ferté was her proud name) held rather advanced view son caring for the sick" (486). Her full name, given in parentheses, serves several purposes. First, it stresses her French filiation, even though she identifies with Canada, with the name "Franc" or "French" in old French. It also plays across languages on the word "Ferté" when it is described as a name full of "pride," or "fierté" in French. And finally, the ear of Cather's narrator is sensitive to the alliterative strength of the sound doublets in "j" with the words "Jeanne/Juschereau" and in "f" with"Franc/Ferté." The words seem to resonate their pride, as in alliterative poetry.
In her choice of subject matter in Death Comes for the
Archbishop as well as in Shadows on the Rock,
Cather chose to "deterritorialize" her use of English, to borrow the expression
Deleuze coined, especially in her mention of ship names in the last part of the
novel. The names are given in italics and signify the worldview of those who
baptized them, as well as the orientations of the narrator, in the way she
orchestrates their appearance in her text. The following ships are named,
sometimes several times: La Bonne Espérance(465),
La Gironde (495), La Licorne
(532), La Garonne (592), Les Deux
Frères, Le Profond (594), La Reine du Nord, Le Faucon (595), Le
Saint Antoine (603), Le Duc de Bretagne, Le Soleil
d'Afrique (608), La Vengeance (614), La Manon (634), and La Seine (635).
Several remarks can be made from such a list, which Cather drew from actual ship
names of the time. To begin with, the titles of nobility are here placed on the
same footing as common names such as "la manon" which is a standard name for a
woman and may connote loose behavior as well. Moreover, the names of southern
regions in France such as the Garonne or the Gironde seem to coincide with a
country defined more by the intensity of its sunlight than by a very precise
geographical concern, as the name "soleil d'Afrique" seems to indicate. This
latter name coincides with the southern opening at the end of the novel,which
begins with the theme of the parrot Captain Pondaven brought back from his
southern voyages and ends with the mention of the exotic seashells Jacques brings
to Auclair from his own voyages. The names of the ships recall the mapping of a
world that no longer exists as such but in a fragmented way, underlying the fact
that the French words of a foregone era have already become exotic for American
readers as well as French. Indeed, the names of the ships are moveable in time and
place, and their transfer into an American story of the 1930s displaces them as
strange importations and linguistic remnants having escaped all translation
attempts.
Cather "deterritorialized" her own language for the so-called French novels
because she saw in seventeenth-century French aesthetics something akin to her
own. Her characters may read Pascal because she found in this author some of the
principles she had formulated in her famous essay "The Novel
Démeublé," in which she used a French past participle to impart
her meaning in an English expression. We could finally read Pascal again, in
"Concerning the Art of Persuasion," keeping Cather in mind: "Nothing is more
common than good things; the only question is how to discern them; it is certain
that all of them are natural and within our reach and even known by every one. But
we do not know how to distinguish them. This is universal. It is not in things
extraordinary and strange that excellence of any kind is found. We reach up for
it, and we are further away; more often than not we must stoop. The best books are
those whose readers think they could have written them. Nature, which alone is
good, is familiar and common throughout" (446). Cather submits her use of English
to the restraint of a foreign language the better to impose an order on her
expression and to incorporate other cultural references in an American text. What
she wrote of Sarah Orne Jewett could be applied to herself and to her special ear
for the French language: "The 'sayings' of a community, its proverbs, are its
characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude
toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest
language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself
must be able to think and feel in that speech—it is a gift from heart to
heart" (Stories 852). Cather seems to have thought and felt
in this language, midway between French and English, in which her characters of
French background speak and feel, conveying a new, displaced, and incidental view
of their surroundings.
Cather's sensitivity to the French language and her conscious linguistic effort to
strain the limits of English and submit it to an encounter with a more Latinate
language are not wholly isolated if we consider some other modernist writers of
the time. The critical works of T. S. Eliot come to mind, in which he analyzed the
importance of Latin and the Romance languages in English and American literature.
We could apply his remark on Milton's use of Latin to Cather's use of French, when
he writes, "An acquaintance with Latin is necessary if we are to understand, and
to accept, the involutions of his sentence structure, and if we are to hear the
complete music of his verse" (149). In an essay on Ezra Pound, Eliot emphasizes
the importance of Pound's immersion (and fluency) in the Romance languages,
including French, and in particular the dialect of Southern France or
Provençal: "He was supersaturated in Provence; he had tramped over most
of the country; and the life of the courts where the Troubadours thronged was part
of his own life to him." He goes on to analyze the most Latinate work by Pound.
"His in Europe 171). And as for Eliot himself,
notwithstanding the influence of French on his English verse, he wrote several
poems in French, among which are the 1920 poems "Le Directeur," "Mélange
Adultère de Tout," "Lune de Mid," and "Dansle Restaurant."
In the literary context of her time, if some of Cather's later novels are steeped
in the French culture and language, her experimenting with a foreign expression
and worldview is yet part of the modernist experience of the 1920s and 1930s (and
continuing well into the 1940s and later with Pound's successive Cantos). Yet she played at "deterritorializing" her native tongue with
subtlety and did not write in a way that would make the novels incomprehensible to
someone with no knowledge of French; neither did she write in an obscure manner
that would necessitate an abundant use of footnotes to make her text
understandable. As always, her art is such that she either explains her allusions,
blends them invisibly into the flow of her own prose, or when she quotes French
words and sentences without translating them, manages to clarify the whole passage
in context. No matter how sophisticated her prose and intertextual references,
Cather is accessible at all levels of reading and immensely enjoyable in all
cases,whether we are trying to trace all the intricacies of her style or simply
reading her as a wonderful teller of tales.
Many reviewers and critics have seen Willa Cather's two novels of the 1930s as
competent works but at the same time as products of a waning talent, as clearly
less accomplished and less significant than her earlier fictions. In light of such
assertions, David Stouck's having declared Lucy
Gayheart(1935) Cather's "most complex novel philosophically" is particularly
interesting (214). I would assert that Shadows on the Rock,
published in 1931, stands with Lucy Gayheart in its
philosophical complexity and would argue that a key to understanding the
philosophical implications of Shadows on the Rock lies in
Cather's character Pierre Charron. If, as Susan J. Rosowski has said, Shadows on the Rock is a book in which Cather addresses
"modern themes of alienation, loss, despair, and annihilation" (176), it is also a
work in which Cather suggests a centuries-old response to these same fundamental
human problems.
James Woodress has called the half decade from early 1928 "the most stressful and discouraging period" of Cather's life (413). During this time Cather was trying to adjust to a new home in New York, to cope with her father's death, and to deal with her mother's debilitating stroke. "Life does beat us up sometimes," she wrote to Mary Jewett in May 1928, and "we must take our drubbing"; to Zona Gale she wrote in late 1929 that life "had been hitting her pretty hard" (Woodress 414, 420). Cather, however,was attempting to maintain a stoic courage in the face of these trials. Like Mrs. Harris in "Old Mrs. Harris," published in 1931, she realized,"Everything that's alive has got to suffer" (141).
It was during 1918 that Cather visited Quebec for the first time. Though she evidently had never before seriously considered writing about Quebec,the breakup of her family in conjunction with her visit to Quebec in the summer of 1928 clearly provided the inspiration for the story and the setting of her next book. Subsequent visits to Quebec enabled Cather to explore the city further and provided her the opportunity to do much of the research she deemed essential to her work.
The research Cather did was certainly conscientious. Edith Lewis notes that Cather was "always very painstaking about her facts—she intensely disliked being careless or inaccurate, and went to much trouble to verify them"(161). The historical Quebec material, unlike the Nebraska settings and characters, could not come out of Cather's own experiences and acquaintances; it had to be discovered. At the Chateau Frontenac, where Cather and Lewis stayed, Cather spent hours in the hotel's library reading Canadian history, most notably in the works of Francis Parkman (Lewis 154).The list of additional readings is lengthy and impressive (see Woodress431-32).
Curiously, previous Cather criticism has not explored the role of one of the most
important, and certainly one of the most obvious, of all of Cather's sources for
Shadows on the Rock, the sixteenth-century French
philosopher Pierre Charron. Many Cather scholars have recognized and studied her
use of actual historical personages in the novel. No previous criticism, however,
has recognized the French philosopher as the character's ancestor. E. K. Brown
noted many years ago that there were "well-to-do Charrons, traders in Montreal and
associates of Jacques Le Ber, the father of the recluse. "Declaring Cather's
Charron "an imaginary personage," Brown asserts, "it was doubtless because she had
come across their [the Montreal Charrons'] track that Willa Cather gave Pierre
their name" (185). While John March's A Reader's Companion
to the Fiction of Willa Cather, published in 1993, notes that there was an actual
Pierre Charron, that comment is followed by the statement that the fictional
Charron "bears no resemblance" to the actual person (145).
The actual Pierre Charron was born in Paris in 1541. As a canon in Bordeaux, Charron attained a considerable reputation for his remarkable eloquence, for which he was rewarded with appointment as chaplain to Margueret of Navarre, queen of France. In part because of his reputation as a speaker, Charron met Montaigne in 1589 and the two became close friends. Montaigne, in fact, died in Charron's arms and, as a token of his affection and esteem, bestowed on Charron his family coat of arms.
According to most twentieth-century histories of philosophy, Charron's friendship
with Montaigne has been at the same time both the source of his fame and the cause
of his lack of proper recognition. Especially throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Charron was often referred to as "I'herbier de Montaigne,"
the disciple of Montaigne, and his works were often regarded simply as derivative
of the more famous works of his more famous friend. Charron's two most important
works, Les Trois vérités (Treatise on the
three verities), published in 1594, and De la sagesse (Treatise on Wisdom), published in 1601, however, have in
last hundred years come to be seen as extremely important works of original
genius. In his History of Civilization in England, Henry
Thomas Buckle declared Charron's Treatise on Wisdom "in
some respects, even more formidable than Montaigne's [Essays]" (375). Eugene F.
Rice Jr., echoing the opinion of a number of contemporary commentators, has called
the work "the most important Renaissance treatise on wisdom" (178), and Charron's
major biographer, J. B. Sabri, declared it "the philosophical
Although neither Lewis nor others mention Cather's having read Charron's works as
background for Shadows on the Rock, Cather's use of the
name Pierre Charron suggests that she did know of the philosopher. (That she was
familiar with the works of Montaigne and Pascal has been known for quite some
time.) More importantly, a reading of the novel demonstrates that Cather almost
certainly not only knew of, but had read, Charron's Treatise on
Wisdom. Seeing
Shadows on the Rock in light of Charron's work enables
the reader to view the novel not simply as a nostalgic look at lost childhood and
broken family ties but also as a profound exploration of the human condition.
In A Treatise on Wisdom, Charron distinguishes three kinds
of wisdom—divine,worldly, and human—but his true subject, he
makes clear, is human wisdom. "Our book," Charron declares in his preface, "is
intended for daily life, and to form a man for the world, and instruct him in
human wisdom which is of law and reason" (xxiii). According to Charron, while
In the skeptical tradition, in which he is such an important figure, Charron
argues that one ultimately can know little of himself and adds that it is "great
folly" for one to think otherwise (63). We are born to search for truth, but the
only certainty is uncertainty (125). Charron's motto, "Je ne
sçay" ("I know not"), he believed, must be every being's motto,
even as we seek to "know." Human wisdom, that wisdom that one can use in a
practical way in day-to-day living, is attainable, however. Wisdom, Charron
contends, is a gift to be discovered, developed, and cultivated. One must keep
faith, accept what happens, and await revelation in order to better understand the
course of one's life. The wise being is one who acknowledges the limits to one's
knowing yet seeks and discovers those virtues—prudence,
justice,fortitude, and temperance—that are essential to rational, quiet
contentment.
In Shadows on the Rock rational, quiet contentment
certainly has been established in the household of Euclide Auclair, "the
philosopher apothecary of Quebec" (3). His late wife had entrusted to their young
daughter, Cécile, a sense of "our way"—notions about tradition,
propriety, and fine feeling—that Cécile has embraced with an
enthusiasm that belies her age. On her deathbed Madame Auclair had told
Cécile, "You will see that your father's whole happiness depends on order
and regularity, and you will come to feel a pride in it. Without order our lives
would be disgusting, like those of the poor savages" (24). Cécile's
preservation of order, cleanliness, and regularity in familial affairs has assumed
an almost ritualistic character. Dinner is the most important event of the day;
Euclide regards the evening meal as "the thing that kept him a civilized man and a
Frenchman" (16-17). The Auclairs always dine at six o'clock in the winter and at
seven o'clock in the summer, "as he used to do in Paris" (10). Each day, when he
returns from his errands, Euclide finds a fire burning in the fireplace and the
dining table "set with a white cloth, silver candlesticks, glasses, and two clear
decanters, one of red wine and one of white" (9). After dinner he retires to his
shop to post his ledger and then rejoins Cécile for several hours of
reading. They normally conclude the evening with a walk around the city,"nearly
always the same" (21). As Charron declares in his wide-ranging discussion of
social institutions, "There is nothing more beautiful than a house-hold well and
peaceably governed"(72).
Implicit in Cather's portrait of Cécile, a young girl living a very ordered and secure life, is Cather's sense of her own life as a mature woman who had come to know much about chaos, suffering, and despair. While Quebec under the rule of Count Frontenac had become a bastion of orderly and civilized activity in the midst of the Canadian wilderness, that wilderness was, nonetheless, always out there, formidable and in many cases frightening. In Cather's novel it is, in fact, one of several correlatives to uncertainty, fear, and dread.
One passage early in the novel is especially telling in this respect. After an initial description of the city of Quebec, Cather shifts her attention to that "black pine forest" that "stretched no living man knew how far. That was the dead, sealed world of the vegetable kingdom, an uncharted continent choked with interlocking trees, living, dead, half-dead, their roots in bogs and swamps, strangling each other in a slow agony that had lasted for centuries. The forest was suffocation, annihilation; there European man was quickly swallowed up in silence, distance, mould, black mud, and the stinging swarms of insect life that bred in it" (6-7). Cécile's later journey into the world outside Quebec, to visit the Harnois family, is a terribly disturbing experience, presented in archetypal terms. Her guide, Pierre Charron (here rather conveniently suggesting the mythical boatman Charon) takes Cécile across the river to the Ile d'Orléans. Though Cécile is awed by the physical beauty of the island, she is shocked by the crude dress and behavior of the Harnois children. "Uneasy and afraid of something," she spends a restless first night, unable to sleep (191).
The next morning Cécile slips away into the woods, climbs toward the
ridge in the middle of the island, and comes out on "a waving green hayfield with
a beautiful harp-shaped elm growing in the middle of it." She falls asleep under
that "symmetrical tree" and awakens a long while later, feeling "rested and
happy,—though unreal, as if she were someone else" (193). Her sense of
well being is short-lived, however, and as darkness approaches, "dread and
emptiness [awake] in Cécile's breast again, a chilling fear of night"
(194). Unable to endure the forest and the Harnois household any longer and
desperately homesick for Quebec, Cécile begs Pierre to take her home. On
the third day, then, she returns home, to the order, the neatness, and the
security of the Auclair household. In those three days young Cécile had
come to know all too well some of those shadows that threatened the rock of
Quebec, as Cather in those three years from 1928 to 1931 had come to know all too
well those shadows of displacement and death in her own life. In Charron's Treatise on Wisdom, Cather—herself feeling lost,
abandoned, and tormented—may well have sought and found some answers,
some source of healing.
As noted previously, Charron's basic assertion is that an individual cannot know
for certain the answers to any of the most essential human questions. An
individual, however, naturally seeks to discover truth. "We are born to search for
truth, but to possess it belongs to a higher power," Charron says. "Truth is not
his who thrusts himself into it, but his who strives to reach it" (21-22). (This
latter comment calls to mind Myra Henshawe's assertion that "in religion seeking
is finding" [Cather, My Mortal Enemy 94]). What an
individual On Wisdom 34). Charron no doubt would have
appreciated Cather's comment that Shadows on the Rock is a
book "full of pious resignation" (On Writing 16).
The philosopher's comments are particularly interesting given the role of the
noble woodsman in Cather's novel. An admiring Euclide Auclair reflects that he had
liked Charron from the first time he had met him: From his first
meeting with him, Auclair had loved this restless boy (he was a boy then) who
shot up and down the swift rivers of Canada in his canoe; who was now at
Niagara, now at the head of Lake Ontario, now at the Sault Saint Marie on his
way into the fathomless forbidding waters of Lake Superior. To both Auclair and
Madame Auclair, Pierre Charron had seemed the type they had come so far to
find; more than anyone else he realized the romantic picture of the free
Frenchman of the great forests which they had formed at home on the banks of
the Seine. He had the good manners of the Old World, the dash and daring of the
New. (171-72)
Pierre Charron is, however, much more than a dashing A Treatise on Wisdom.
Cather's character, in fact, is much like Charron's ideal man.
The philosopher Charron's great contribution to the development of Western
philosophy was his creation of a moral system independent of religion. As noted
previously, Charron's A Treatise on Wisdom does not concern
itself with that wisdom that is associated with or that is the result of
knowledge. Rather, his concern is with "human wisdom," or preude prudence, an habile et forte preud'hommie, a probitébien advisée, the 'excellence and perfection of
man as man'"(180).
Citing several ancient sources, Charron begins his treatise with the declaration
that "The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable of all
advice . . . is to study and learn how to know ourselves"(I). Charron continues,
however, that since any knowledge that an individual might gain, either through
the senses or through reason, is limited, humanity finally must await the
revelation of the Divine. Charron presents the wise man who, while he awaits
divine revelation, lives virtuously according to nature and a natural morality,
with his actions as the manifestations of his virtue. (In his glorification of the
man who lives a simple life according to nature, Charron here, of course,
anticipates Rousseau's "noble savage" by 150 years.) Cather's woodsman, "hero of
the fur trade and the coureurs de bois"(170), with "the good manners of the Old
World, the dash and daring of the New" (172), liked and trusted by the Indians,
admired by all for his courage, his loyalty, and his fairness, is the perfect
example of the philosopher's ideal natural man, who possesses preude prudente and an habile et forte
preud'hommie.
Moreover, in the context of Pierre Charron's comments in A
Treatise on Wisdom, Jeanne Le Ber's role in the novel is particularly
interesting. The story of Jeanne Le Ber, "the recluse of Montreal" (130), occupies
much of the middle section ("The Long Winter") of Shadows on the
Rock. Her "very unusual nature" had been evident from the time she was a
small child. Though, as the daughter of the richest merchant in Montreal, Jeanne
Le Ber had many suitors, she insisted that for her "the only real world lay within
convent walls" (132). She took a five-year vow of chastity at 17, renewed that
vow, and then after l0 years of "the absolute solitariness of the hermit's life"
in her parents' house (132), she "entombed" herself in a cell behind the altar of
the chapel of the Sisters of the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin, never again
to come forth.
Although one might admire Jeanne Le Ber's passionate vision, self-sacrifice,and dedication, her cold aloofness is powerfully emphasized in Cather's depiction. Under the exterior of "pleasing girlhood," one of her teachers had noted early on, was "something reserved and guarded" (130). Despite her parents' concern, then despair, Jeanne maintained her solitary life, refusing even to speak to them. Despite her dying mother's plea that she come to give her a farewell kiss, Jeanne does not, answering only that she is praying for her. While Cécile is intrigued by the tales of Jeanne, it is hard to imagine her finding this part of Jeanne's story admirable or inspiring.
Cather, in fact, makes it quite clear that what appeals to Cécile about
the legend of Jeanne Le Ber is the story of the angels' visit and the miracle of
the spinning wheel, "For long after the night when Cécile first heard of
the angels' visit to Mme. Le Ber, the story was a joy to her.. . . By many a
fireside the story of Jeanne's spinning-wheel was told and re-told with loving
exaggeration during that severe winter" (136). To young Cécile the story
of the angels' visit to Jeanne is "a joy." The story of Jeanne's life is not. The
story of the spinning wheel recounts a miracle, and Cécile tells it over
and over to little Jacques. And it is that story that is
repeated "by many a fireside" throughout Canada "with loving exaggeration" (136).
Finally Cather tells us, "The people have loved miracles for so many hundred
years, not as proof or evidence, but because they are the actual flowering of
desire. In them the vague worship and devotion of the
To Pierre Charron, however, the story of Jeanne Le Ber's life is disturbing and
painful. Although it might be argued that Pierre's reaction to Jeanne Le Ber's
choice of a solitary life is simply that of the rejected suitor, his despair over
Le Ber's life clearly has a more profound basis. To Pierre,that life, lived in
"resignation and despair" (183), has been wasted. Having seen and heard her from
his hiding place in the chapel, 20 years after she began her "entombment," Pierre
is overwhelmed by the sight of her "stone face" and the sound of her voice, "harsh
and hollow like an old crow's," "hoarse, hollow, with the sound of despair in it"
(180, 182). The story of Jeanne Le Ber may be inspiring to some, but it is
thematically fitting that it is the central narrative in that section of Shadows on the Rock titled "The Long Winter." If one seeks a
heroine in Cather's novel, one would better examine the life of Catherine de
Saint-Augustin, whose spiritual dedication was manifested in "a steady routine of
manual labor and administrative work," carried out while she "observed the full
discipline of her order"(42).
Perhaps a better understanding of Pierre's reaction to the life of Jeanne Le Ber
may be found by again examining the philosopher Charron's A
Treatise on Wisdom. Charron makes his position on the life of solitude
very clear. His book, he announces in his preface, "is intended for daily life,
and to form a man for the world" (xxiii). He is not writing for those who would
"flee the world and the company of men. But Charron aims at men committed to the
world. He wants to instruct them in the active virtues of public, private, and
business life, not turn them into monks, theologians, or professional
philosophers" (Rice 179). It is much harder to live one's life in the world,
subject to the world, Charron asserts, than it is to separate oneself and pass
one's life in solitude (On Wisdom 46-47). He cannot praise
a cloistered virtue. For any person living life in the world among others,
engaging in everyday activities, and attempting to sustain human relationships,
life presents difficulties and inevitably leads to disappointment and loss.
"Pleasure is not always unalloyed, and there is always something wanting," Charron
remarks in his comments on human misery, "grief is often entire and absolute, and
the greatest pleasures touch us not so nearly as the lightest sorrows" (57). Yet
one need not surrender to despair, for wisdom "is a mild and regular managing of
the soul," and wisdom ends in tranquillity (On Wisdom
198-99).
Pierre Charron's entry into Shadows on the Rock comes in
book 4, "Pierre Charron," after the section titled "The Long Winter." If the
winter, like the forest wilderness, represents hardship, uncertainty, and a kind
of spiritual as well as physical death, Pierre Charron's arrival in Quebec
coincides with a rebirth of hope and a new sense of life. The colony of Quebec,
under the civil order and authority of Count Frontenac and the religious order and
authority established by Bishop Laval, has endured, despite the cold, the
darkness, and the forest wilderness that surrounds it. Pierre arrives on the first
day of June, when "the quickening of all life and hope which had come to France in
May had reached the far North at last"(109). His arrival inspires in
Cécile a sense of well being, as does his reappearance in book 6, "The
Dying Count." At major crisis points in her life, Cécile turns to Pierre.
At the beginning of the "Pierre Charron"section, Cécile runs to Pierre's
embrace, throws her arms around him, and exclaims, "Oh, Pierre Charron, I am
delighted at you, Pierre Charron!"(170-71). And later, when Pierre, having heard
of the count's illness, returns to Quebec, Cécile again throws her arms
around him and cries,"Oh, Pierre, Pierre Charron!" "Never in all her life," Cather
writes, "had she felt so strong and so true, so real and so sure" (264). While his
physical strength and forest daring are presented in romantic style, thus making
him a fitting hero for the novel as well as for young Cécile, Pierre's
strength of character is also emphasized. His face, we are told, is "full of
experience and sagacity" (172).
In Shadows on the Rock, Cécile is in the process
of growing up. She had dealt with her mother's death and had continued the way of
life her mother had established in the New World. She lives through "the long
winter," and she "survives" the unpleasant visit to the Harnois family. Unlike
Pierre,who Shadows
on the Rock is read as a philosophical novel based on the writings of
Pierre's real-life namesake, however, Cécile's marriage to Pierre may be
seen to signify not only the culmination of a childhood infatuation but also a
realization of Cécile's maturity. Moreover, if through Cécile
Cather was "reinventing herself as a child"(Lee 301), Cécile's marriage
to Pierre may be seen to imply Cather's acceptance of a philosophical position
that provided comfort and wisdom during a crisis period in her life. Writing Shadows on the Rock, Cather wrote to Dorothy Canfield Fisher
in May 1931, "had been her only refuge for the past three years" (Woodress 423).
Like Cather, Cécile too had faced along winter after La
Bonne Espérance had disappeared. "A life without security,
without plans, without preparation for the future, had been terrible," both for
Cécile and for Cather (Shadows 252).
Although Euclide Auclair has been "indeed fortunate" to live out his life "where
nothing changed," Cather had not been so fortunate. She knew full well as she
wrote this novel what it meant to feel "entirely cut off"(Shadows 4) from the world she had left behind. In the character Pierre
Charron, Cather suggests a source of strength; in his namesake's healthy
skepticism she apparently found a guide, in his advocacy of stoic endurance,a
comfort. At the end of Shadows on the Rock Cécile
retires to her room after having prepared dinner for her father and Pierre. She
"turned to slumber," Cather says, "with the weight of doubt and loneliness melted
away." Her last thoughts "before she slips into forgetfulness" are of Pierre, "a
friend, devoted and fearless, here in the house with them, as if he were one of
themselves." "He had not a throne behind him," Cécile reflects, "not the
authority of a parchment and seal. But he had authority, and a power which came
from knowledge of the country and its people; from knowledge and a kind of
passion" (267-68). That is, his power came from knowledge and a kind of suffering.
In her book on Cather, Susie Thomas calls Shadows on the
Rock, "an aberration." "The narrowness of vision," she says, "is wholly
uncharacteristic" of Cather (166). Any narrowness of vision in Shadows on the Rock, I believe, is only apparent. The significance of
Cather's fictional Pierre Charron has long been ignored, but a reading of the
philosopher Pierre Charron's Treatise on Wisdom suggests
that Cather's character certainly is no mere romantic stereotype and that Shadows
on the Rock is much more than a mere sentimental remembrance of Cather's own
childhood. Charron's Treatise on Wisdom, it would seem,
informs much of a philosophical subtext in Shadows on the
Rock, and this novel, like Lucy Gayheart, does,
evidently, have a remarkable philosophical complexity.
For those who, like old Saint-Vallier, have been "uncertain, and puzzled, and in
the dark like ourselves" (Shadows 279), Charron's gently
skeptical stoic philosophy provides a practical guide for "daily life." In Shadows on the Rock, Pierre's face is said to be "full of
experience and sagacity," as is his namesake's famous treatise on wisdom. In a
letter to Elizabeth Vermorcken, written shortly after the novel's publication,
Cather complained about those readers who said that in Shadows
on the Rock they had been given chicken broth instead of roast beef. They
should have trusted her, Cather declared, to know what she was doing (Lee 293).
Cather was right, of course. They should have.
In her 1927 letter to Commonweal, written to explain how
she wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
indirectly offered a possible interpretation for the novel itself: "I used to wish
there were some written account of the old times when those churches were built;
but I soon felt that no record of them could be as real as they are themselves.
They are their own story, and it is foolish convention that we
must have everything interpreted for us in written language" (On Writing 6, emphasis mine). In Death
Comes for the Archbishop, Cather attempts to bring readers beyond"written
language," trying to create on the written page that which is usually intelligible
only with sound or sight. To teach us how to read beyond written language Cather
offers two models, one aural and one visual: the Angelus bell and the figure of
the southwestern mesa. The novel thus offers a pedagogy of interpretation: when we
understand the mesa and the bell as tropes with which to organize our
understanding of the novel, we arrive at new ways of reading Cather. She
deliberately does not provide us with means to "translate" her landscape into
meaning; we can only "divine"meaning—Cather's word for how we are to
understand the "inexplicable presence of the thing not named" (On Writing 41). When we try to name the thing, we limit the full range of
associations and reverberations; we do not hear the entire Angelus, and we do not
see the full scale of the mesa. The aural and visual landscapes of the novel teach
us to read; what we come to understand is that, in Death Comes
for the Archbishop, tropes and topos are one and the same.
The novel makes meaning in much the same way as does the tolling of the Angelus bell in the beginning of the novel: a series of echoing associations that come together to form a whole. The bell's notes are "Full, clear . . .each note floated through the air like a globe of silver" (43), but until the last note joins the first in the air, the Angelus itself is not complete. When Latour first hears the Angelus bell, almost in his sleep, he has the "pleasing delusion that he was in Rome" (42). As the bell continues to ring the nine strokes of the Angelus, its sound sends Latour on an inner journey: "Before the nine strokes were done Rome faded, and behind it he sensed something Eastern, with palm trees—Jerusalem perhaps, though he had never been there. . . . he cherished for a moment this sudden, pervasive sense of the East. Once before he had been carried out of the body thus to a place far away. It had happened on a street in New Orleans.... he [had been]overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped . . . into a garden in the south of France. . . . And now this silvery bell had carried him farther and faster than sound could travel" (43). The bell's sound sets up a series of reactions in Latour's mind, bringing him to places that he has not physically seen but that the sound allows him to imagine. He travels to the Old World, to places of origin: Jerusalem, the holy city; Rome (and thus by implication the Vatican); New Orleans, one of the first cities in the United States; and the south of France, Latour's boyhood home. Although Latour's thoughts are linear—from distant to recent past—they are triggered by the sound of the bell all at once and experienced synchronously. This synchronous experience of time becomes central to the novel; the novel works to represent time and space, history and tradition, in nonlinear ways.
The story of the bell's provenance continues the movement from past to present, from Europe to America: "the inscription [on the bell] is in Spanish. . . . it must have been brought up from Mexico City in an ox-cart .. . and the silver of the Spaniards was really Moorish, was it not.... The Spaniards knew nothing about working silver except as they learned it from the Moors. . . . The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors" (45). Thus the skill of"infidel" Europe becomes the artisanship of Catholic Spaniards, the trade of colonized Mexicans, and finally the art and craft of Native Americans, who are in effect being displaced by the carriers of the traditions they have embraced. The two French priests, Father Latour and his companion Father Vaillant, listen to their Spanish bell ringing the Catholic Angelus in an American territory occupied first by the Native Americans, then the Spanish, then by the French, and finally by Americans. The bell's provenance illustrates historical movement; the tradition of silversmithing becomes away of tracing patterns of Old World imperialism and yet also suggests that, in Cather's mind, aesthetic traditions continue regardless of who is in power.
Cather's descriptions of landscape—the New Mexican mesa
itself—provide the visual counterpart to the Angelus bell. The mesa
offers another trope that we can use to help us read beyond language. Father
Latour and Jacinto, riding through this landscape en route to Acoma, stop so that
Jacinto can show Latour where they are going, "The Bishop following with his eye
the straight, pointing Indian hand, saw, far away, two great mesas. . . . at this
distance [they] seemed close together, though they were really some miles apart"
(96). Mesas are perceptible only at a distance although distance can blur the
perception of depth. The distance alters our perspective on the subject to the
point that the distance—perspective—becomes the subject. And
because each layer of a mesa is a compression or distillation of the landscape at
a particular point in time, seeing the entire mesa allows us to see all the
different eras of history
The layers of the novel, which resemble the striations in a mesa, create a novel
structured to collapse seeming oppositions, such as pagan and Christian, Europe
and America, past and present, into one another. In order to see the full range of
these complexities, we need to learn to read the landscape. The mesa is the site
of that lesson. Each term of the opposition becomes a striation of the novel, and
by collapsing these seeming dialectics, Cather calls into question the idea that
any one history, any one set of experiences, can define America. The mesa like
structure of the novel incorporates Old World and New and finds the Old World
Latour's reactions to the mesa and to the sound of the bell are examples of how
the novel attempts to layer Old World and New, but Latour himself also offers an
example of the connection between old and new. Latour's name indicates the
presence of this layering: the aesthetic ideals of Walter Pater, whose final novel
was titled Gaston Latour (1888), about a Frenchman in the
Middle Ages. This in turn is eerily echoed by Cather's last, unfinished novel: a
story of two French boys from Avignon, set during the Middle Ages. Although Cather
seems to have quoted Pater directly only once, in her 1925 preface to Sarah Orne
Jewett's short stories, Bernice Slote suggests that Pater was one of those "great
essayists . . . whose beliefs and whose rich, incantatory, or elegant styles
certainly touched [Cather's]own" (36). Cather's early statement that "a novel
requires not one flash of understanding, but a clear, steady flame and oil in
one's flask beside" (qtd in Skaggs 11) resonates directly with what Pater wrote in
the conclusion to The Renaissance: "to burn always with
this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life" (Bloom
60). Pater's "hard gemlike flame"and Cather's "clear, steady flame" are clearly
similar fires. Pater's ideas pervade this novel to the extent that Latour becomes
a sort of Pater on horseback. So, for instance, when Latour says to Joseph
Vaillant that "I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my
affection for you" (50) it rephrases Pater's dictum that one should "know one's
own impression as it really is" (Bloom 17).
Latour's burning desire to build a cathedral worthy of the beautiful setting
echoes a Paterian comment that Cather made to Mariel Gere in an 1896 letter, to
the effect that there is no god but one god, and art is god's revealer. She said
that was her creed and indicated her commitment to it (August 4,1896, Cather
papers, University Archives/Special Collections Department, UNL Libraries). Latour
is the artist figure within the artistic creation of the novel. He is Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather
records specific incidents in the life of Latour and his friend, Father Vaillant,
but fleetingly, with large gaps of time and space between episodes. Ultimately,
however, the novel "fines itself down" to the moment of Latour's consciousness
before he dies: a refined moment, a precise moment, but composed of a flood of
memories. This refined moment in the flow is like one note heard in the midst of
many or like one striation of earth in the totality of a mesa.
Latour, like Pater, is interested in the beautiful more than the sensual; when his parishioners want to please him they give him "something good for the eye" (179). Latour is made uncomfortable by the physical, a distaste nowhere more clearly marked than in the cave scene about a third of the way through the novel. Latour and his guide, Jacinto, are caught in a snowstorm and take refuge in a cave Jacinto knows of. The cave is a "mouth-like opening. . . . two great stone lips, slightly parted and thrust outward"(127). From the beginning, the cave signifies a kind of appetite and physicality that will be distasteful to the priest.
The cave is a place sacred to the Pecos tribe's rituals, which is another reason
for Latour's discomfort—he is outside his parish, so to speak. Jacinto
tells him the cave is "used by [his] people," which suggests that somewhere in the
underground cavern (perhaps in the hole that Jacinto so carefully blocks off from
the priest) is the snake holy to his tribe. In the cave it is Jacinto, not the
priest, who tends the altar and sacred flame. Jacinto's religion is the New
World's own "Old World"; the European traditions represented by Latour seem
youthful in comparison. The cave is a labyrinth of holes, throatlike passages,
mouths, and caverns, suggesting that the French priest seems to be at the opposite
end of his Catholic church and its idea of heaven. It is not coincidence that the
chapter is titled "Snake Root"; Latour is at the
There is something primitive about the cave: the strong, devouring femaleness of the cavities and orifices directly contrasts with the icons of"dolorous Virgins" above ground. This cave is the first of two feminized enclosures within which Latour will encounter something he cannot name or control, something akin to the sublime. This powerful force resides in the cave below the Sangre de Cristo mountains, which adds to the sense that its sacredness antedates the blood of Christ under which it hides. The "pagan" lies under the Christian surface implying the presence of an earth goddess whom Latour senses but cannot name. There are also other resonances and other beliefs in this cave and as a result Latour feels quite ill.
After Jacinto lights the fire, however, Latour—and the
reader—encounter still other juxtapositions, other layers of meaning.
The fire relaxes the priest, warms him to the point that he becomes aware of "an
extraordinary vibration. . . . it hummed like a hive of bees, like a heavy roll of
distant drums" (129). Jacinto, also hearing the thrumming noise, leads the priest
through a tunnel. The two men go "along a tunnel . . . where the roof grew much
lower. . . . Jacinto knelt down over a fissure in the stone floor, like a crack in
china. . . . he put his ear on the opening. . . . Father Latour lay with his ear
to this crack for a long time" (129-30). We are not allowed to ignore the
continuous penetration, deepening, revelation—the two men go from a
low-roofed tunnel to a fissure, a crack, an opening, another crack. The priest and
the Indian are moving toward the innermost sancta
sanctorum. Finally, we are at the source of the vibration and Father Latour
realizes:"he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard
was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern.
The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood
moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing
noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with great majesty and power" (130).
The priest has encountered the creative imagination via British Romanticism and
Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1816). In Coleridge's poem, of course, the visionary
poet sees and hears:
Coleridge's underground river is also a "mighty fountain," and its tumult
causes Kubla Khan to hear "ancestral voices." What Cather gives us here is a site
of disjunction, an implicit confrontation between Old Worlds: the allusion to
Coleridge suggests the Old World of Europe, but the cave encloses one of the
"oldest voices of the earth." The force of the flood is such that both Latour's
Paterian Catholicism and Jacinto's Native American mysticism are humbled before
its ancient sound. The voice of the ancient river echoes the voice of the bell:
both sounds transport the priest, although the river terrifies him because he
cannot name what it is that he hears. Latour and Jacinto do not talk about what
they have heard—the priest's only response is "[i]t is terrible"
(130)—they simply return to sit by the fire.
Evelyn Hively suggests that this cave scene provides "one of the strongest points
of contrast in religions in the book" (158), but I would suggest that we are not
being asked to
This already complicated scene is further tangled by Jacinto's presence, which becomes another site of simultaneous meaning. The priest, thinking Jacinto asleep, moves closer to the hole Jacinto had walled up, wanting to examine it more closely. What he sees instead is Jacinto, transfixed by the "oldest voice," in a posture Christlike and mystical: "there against the wall was [Jacinto], standing on some invisible foothold, his arms outstretched against the rock, his body flattened against it, his ear ...listening; listening with supersensual ear, it seemed, and he looked to be supported against the rock by the intensity of his solicitude" (132). Jacinto is simultaneously the Romantic poet, the figure of Christ, and a Native American mystic. Jacinto can hear the voice of the sublime, even be supported by it—the "invisible foothold" —while his body is in the position of one who has been crucified. The cave is a place of Indian ritual, Romantic tropology, and now Christian typology. The phrase "he looked to be supported against the rock," which seems simple enough on the surface, in fact adds ambiguities. The phrase could imply that Jacinto is "looking for support" from the so-called rock of the church. However, it is also possible that he is asking the river for the strength to resist—"against"—the church.
Father Latour's vertigo, or what he thinks is vertigo, is caused by hearing the
underground river. But Cather creates a dizzying scene for the reader as well,
pushing us ever deeper into the cave, layering histories, typologies, and
mythologies, until we too, feel that it is unlike anything we have experienced.
Jacinto is the type of Christ, arms outstretched, supported by an intense
"solicitude," a curious word to use here because according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means both "care" and
"disquietude, uneasiness." But Jacinto is also the Spanish word for hyacinth
flower, which calls to mind the myth of Hyacinth and Apollo. Apollo loved
Hyacinth, but when a discus Apollo threw was blown off course by the jealous
Zephyr, the West Wind, the discus struck Hyacinth on the head and killed him. From
his lover's body Apollo created the hyacinth flower, giving his lover immortality
of a sort. The figure of Jacinto blends two stories of immortality and
transubstantiation, one Christian, the other pre-Christian and homoerotic.
The multiplicity created through the layers of meaning in Jacinto's name continues the layering we have seen in descriptions of the cave: it is a Gothic chamber and a devouring (feminine) mouth. The vibrations in the cave are pastoral, "like a hive of bees," and threatening, "like a heavy roll of distant drums." And although Father Latour is the priest, it is Jacinto who lights the purifying flame and leads the way to the source; Latour's ritual shave no meaning below the earth. The cave and Jacinto suggest the difficulty of deciphering what exactly is "Old World": the Old World of the Americas before the European settlers or the Old World of Europe. These layer simplicitly allow Cather to question whether terms such as "New World" and "Old World," "ancient" and "modern" can provide adequate definitions with which to interpret history. We have to move beyond such seemingly dichotomous relations into a mode of interpretation that does not privilege any one set of tropes over any other.
As we move out of the cave, histories appear before us like the striations in the mesas: the river flows "under ribs of antediluvian rock," and from this antediluvian space we move up and out, into the "tender morning"outside the cave's mouth. The morning landscape that greets the two men when they emerge from the cave is a "gleaming white world," covered with "virgin snow," a new world, a blank. The virgin snow appears to cancel out the ancient systems of belief: the European's Virgin obliterates the stone lips of Jacinto's cave. The branches outside the cave are "laden with soft, rose-coloured clouds of virgin snow" (132), an almost paradisiacal image: the pearly gates to the New World. The landscape and the description of the morning move us to a consideration of history and the movement from an Old World to a New, a shift that seems at first to be a straightforward linear progression. But the entire mesa, including the cave that supports it, is created from layers of Old World and New; the layers support and enable one another. Cather attempts to move us beyond written language in our apprehension of these layers of meaning: what happens in the cave happens through our raft of associations with the brief words she gives us. The language is the tip; it is not the whole. We comprehend the whole only when we cease to focus on singular, particular images.
Within the cave we begin to understand how the novel's layers complicate easy understandings of religion and history; the landscape outside the cave presents a visual correlation for that lesson. Latour's encounter with Sada, the Mexican slave, rewrites the cave scene in order to stress this visual lesson even as it presents another example of the complicated structures underlying the apparently simple surface of the novel. Their meeting, chronicled in the chapter called "December Night," begins with Father Latour's dark night of the soul and seems to be an overt paean to Catholicism and its salutatory powers. Once we see all the layers of this scene, however, we also see Latour's position as a Paterian observer and notice that what is at work in Latour's church is something much older than catholicism. What happens between Latour and Sada reinforces the importance of seeing the whole rather than focusing on the particular.
The encounter with Sada stresses sight, highlighting the importance of the visual over the verbal. The courtyard between Latour's house and the church is covered with snow, an etching in black and silver: "the court was white with snow, and the shadows of walls and buildings stood out sharply in the faint light" (212). This snow is different from the blizzard that obliterated the trail and forced Latour into the stone-lipped cave. Here in his own church-yard Latour is in control, able to observe. Unlike in the cave scene, no voices terrify him. There is almost no sound at all except for Sada's confession and prayers. The whole scene emphasizes the way light plays over surfaces: from the silhouette of the church tower against moonlit clouds and shadows on the snow to Latour's candle shining on Sada's "dark brown peon face" and the "red spark of the sanctuary lamp" in the pitch dark of the church (214).
Even Sada's prayers express themselves visually. Latour is moved by the belief he
On Writing 124). Both Sada and Latour experience this
"thrill," Sada by seeing the Lady Chapel, Latour by seeing Sada's belief.
The visible power of Sada's ecstasy allows Latour to share her emotion: "He was
able to feel, kneeling beside her, the preciousness of the things of the altar. .
. . he received the miracle in her heart into his own, saw through her eyes"
(217-18). Earlier Latour had said miracles "rest upon our perceptions being made
finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there
about us always" (50). Ironically, the miracle Latour experiences with Sada
involves him seeing "through her eyes" rather than his own. These moments of fine
perception, moments that imply a fleeting unity, are described in the conclusion
to The Renaissance, in which Pater talks about those
instants when we are able to distinguish from among a "flood of external objects"
and receive a "single sharp impression" (Bloom 59). Latour's "miracle" and Pater's
"single sharp impression" are similar, if not identical, moments of perception
that produce almost identical results.
Sada becomes the site of a Paterian miracle: what Latour sees in Sada helps him, as Pater says, to "gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded"(Bloom 61). This gathering up of sensation brings Latour to a moment of fullness, of being at one with what is outside himself: "the peace without[the church] seemed all at one with the peace in his soul" (219). This is a marked contrast to Latour's feeling at the beginning of the chapter, when"doubt .. . made him feel an alien. . . . his soul had become a barren field" (211). Even at the moment of fullness, however, there is what Pater calls a "vanishing away" (Bloom 60) in the description of "the line of black footprints [Latour's] departing visitor had left in the wet scurf of the snow" (219). The silvery beauty of the newly fallen snow is now "wet scurf"; the moment of seeming "all at one" vanishes into a line of departing footprints. The Paterian moment is fluid, not static:"those impressions of the individual mind . . . are in perpetual flight"(Bloom 60). Thus this entire scene becomes a kind of passion play about a moment of beauty moving us out of ourselves. We recognize and "fine down" an impression, but at the moment of fining down there is loss. Latour is joined with Sada and feels his inner peace merge with the peace of the external world. But the footsteps vanish, and the next chapter begins with the announcement of the death of Eusabio's son.
Latour comforts Sada by giving her not warm words but a "little silver medal, with a figure of the Virgin"—something to look at. He thinks this a good gift for Sada "for one who cannot read—or think—the Image, the physical form of Love!" (219, 220). He offers her not language but an image, something which her soul can "adore" (220). Sada's ability to gain comfort from an image reveals to Latour the limitations of his intellectual—verbal—faith, "his prayers were empty words and brought him no refreshment" (211). Vision seems more important than language, an idea that may explain the elision over the name Mary: the name is not as important to Sada as is the feeling she gets when she sees the altar in the Lady Chapel.
Latour sees the Lady Chapel only in terms of Catholicism, but Cather creates layers of meaning in this feminized enclosure as well, linking it to the stone-lipped cave in which Latour found such uncomfortable refuge. Cather's description of the spiritual presence in the Lady Chapel links the Virgin Mary with other, earlier goddesses who offer comfort to the wretched: Latour is able to "feel all it meant to [Sada] to know that there was a Kind Woman in Heaven.... [o]ld people, who have felt blows and toil and know the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness. Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer" (217). Latour's God is dismissed in lieu of this other divine force that can understand female pain. This is not only a rare expression of female solidarity on Cather's part but also a link between the Mariolatry of the Lady Chapel and the ancient snake-goddess in the cave.
The female divinity within the Lady Chapel finds further expression in the images of the transformative moonlight that bracket the scenes inside the chapel itself. When Latour wakes up in the night and decides to go to the church, he sees the "full moon ... [that] threw a pale phosphorescent luminousness over the heavens" (212). Afterward, as Sada slips off into the dark, "the full moon shone high in the blue vault, majestic, lonely, benign" (219). The moon, of course, has long been considered a female symbol and suggests again that Latour's religion should be seen in the context of older religions that have not been supplanted as much as they have been subsumed. Marina Warner, in her study of the Virgin Mary, places the Virgin in a context similar to what Cather does here. Warner suggests the possibility of a "chain of descent from Hippolyte [queen of the Amazons] to Diana to the Virgin. . . . that the Amazon queen venerated in Cappodocia was subsumed into the fertility goddess Diana of Ephesus, and that the memories of her emblem . . . survived in the city where the Virgin Mary was proclaimed" (280). Warner also points out that"Diana was associated with the moon . . . and the Virgin Mary is identified with the moon and the stars' influence as well as with the forces of fertility and generation" (225). It seems no accident that the title of the chapter that follows the scene between Latour and Sada is titled "Spring in the Navajo Country." We go from "Woman, divine" to spring: the power of the goddess is still at work.
The moon shining down on Latour as he looks down at Sada's vanishing footprints suggests an older religion, one that Latour would not or could not recognize. The image of the moon and the image on the medal Latour gives Sada are two incarnations of this "Woman, divine": the two virgins—Diana and Mary—watch over the priest and the suffering woman. These female divinities connect the ancient goddess with the Catholic icon with the stone-lipped cave's snake: the chapel becomes an extension of the cave. Just as Mary and her chapel support the church and the cave supports the mountains—recesses that strengthen—so too the "space" or gap in the text where the word Mary might appear supports the presence of Diana or any "Woman, divine."
The final paragraph of this section shifts from Latour alone, locking "his church," to the moon alone in the arched "blue vault" of the heavens and then back to Latour, looking at Sada's footsteps in the snow. Latour has his church, the moon has hers (the blue vault of the heavens), although what Latour may briefly sense but does not understand is that the Lady Chapel, the moon, and the cave are all connected. The rapid shifts in focus—from church to moon to Latour—are another manifestation of the novel's layers, again creating a deeper structure than at first seems apparent. As with the notes of the Angelus bell, this scene is not complete until the final note, sounded by the presence of the moon, has been heard or seen.
Cather's layering process moves us out of a dichotomized "either/or" reading of
the novel into a way of reading based on "both/and." Thus Jacinto embodies both
Christian and pre-Christian identities as well as that of the Romantic poet, Sada
worships at the altar of an ancient goddess who is also the Virgin Mary, and
Latour's cathedral is an edifice built from, and out of, a variety of traditions.
The cathedral is "worthy of a setting naturally beautiful" (175) and it will be
built in the style of the Midi Romanesque, which Latour says is "the right style
for this country" (243). After it is finished, the cathedral seems to be one with
the southwestern landscape; it is both southwestern and French, organic and
constructed: "the tawny church seemed to start directly out of those rose-coloured
hills. . . . the towers rose clear into the blue air while the body of the church
still lay against the mountain" (272). The description of the church on the
mountain is similar to Jacinto's position clinging to the wall of the
cave—both church and man unify seeming opposites. Pater seems to have
presciently described Latour's church in "Winckelmann," when he explains that
"Christian art was still dependent of pagan examples, building the shafts of pagan
temples into its churches" (Bloom 213). Although Latour may not have actually used
the shafts of pagan temples, his church is supported by the
cave wherein Jacinto's goddess-snake is enclosed.
Latour's cathedral becomes not a colonizer's monument but an example of what can happen when, as Pater described in his essay on Coleridge, "a mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the limitations of the particular, the individual, [and] attains a strange power of modifying and centralising what it receives from without, according to the pattern of an inward ideal"(Bloom 150). Latour's idea about what "his" cathedral should look like moves free from the particularities of convention and allows him to build a church that reminds him of something "nearer Clermont" in the Santa Fe hills that he describes as the color of "the dried blood of saints and martyrs preserved in old churches in Rome" (272). His inward ideals about the sacred and the beautiful guide him in designing his monument. Pater's idea seems an apt description, not just of what the cathedral represents within the text of the novel itself but of what the novel itself represents in terms of Cather's aesthetic project and as we will see, of what happens in Latour's mind before his death. The "particular" would seem to force a choice in interpretive modes but the "inward ideal" can be adapted to suggest a way of reading that allows multiples, takes us beyond the words on the page.
Before Latour dies, his caretakers think that "his mind was failing," but Latour
does not care about their opinion. They do not realize that his mind "was only
extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life" (290).
Latour ranges through time and space, drawing on all episodes of his life without
highlighting any one in particular:He observed also that there was
no longer any perspective to his memories. He remembered his winters with his
cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the
Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building
of his cathedral. He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had
already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness;
none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within
reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. (290)
None of Latour's history is
lost to him: it is all there, all comprehensible. He has "modified" and
"centralized" his past; it becomes what one reader called "the tower of
consciousness." Of
course, Latour's very name indicates his position: he is in
I would like to thank Janis Stout for her useful and insightful suggestions about this paper when I presented it at the Sixth International Willa Cather Seminar (1995), and I am grateful to Merrill Skaggs both for suggesting that the cave might be a "goddess cave" and for the reference to Evelyn Hively's book.
Willa Cather maintained a lifelong fascination with both real-life and fictional
heroes. Among her earliest readings were Homer, Shakespeare, Emerson, and
Carlyle—all writers whose subjects could be termed heroic. Clearly this
fascination with heroes was interwoven with her preference for romanticism. As
Bernice Slote observes in her introduction to The Kingdom of
Art, Cather "obviously liked these patterns of romance, whatever the story ..
. [because] romance exalts courage, honor, daring, love, and all the emotions she
considered ennobling; it also represents the creative, exploring truth of the
imagination" (63).
As Cather's art developed, her use of the "patterns of romance" changed rather
dramatically from a focus on the outer "heroic action" of romance in which the
"hero is the exemplum of courage, daring, and the strong passions that give life
purpose and strength" (Slote 63) to the "creative, exploring truth of the
imagination" to what Harold Bloom has called the "internalization of
quest-romance" (15). Her active male protagonists—Bartley Alexander, Jim
Burden, Tom Outland, and Archbishop Latour, for example—and her
proactive female protagonist Thea Kronborg embody the heroic quest archetype of
separation, initiation, and return described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (30). However, this powerful
paradigm proves inadequate to explain the heroic roles of the characters in Shadows on the Rock—especially the role of female
protagonist Cécile Auclair.
The traditional quest structure cannot elucidate the heroic ideal in Shadows on the Rock because this structure presupposes a
central action, and as many critics have observed—and even
complained—this novel has little or no plot and thus little or no
action. Instead of focusing on external action, Cather sets her novel in "the
internal arena," where, according to Dana A. Heller, the great romantic poets
found "the true drama of the quest"(5). Indeed, Carlyle declared in On Heroes and Hero-Worship, a book that Cather read in her
youth (Slote 42), "The hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the
true, divine and eternal, which exists always, unseen to most" (184). Even
Campbell emphasizes the inner quest, asserting that "The passage of the
mythological hero may be overground, incidentally; fundamentally it is
inward—into depths where ... long lost, forgotten powers are revivified,
to be made available for the transfiguration of the world"(29). Heller believes
that this romantic internalization of the quest "anticipates the feminization of
the form by creating a kind of heroism not determined by physical strength but by
intellectual and visionary endeavors"(5). The paradigm that best explains this
internal heroic quest is that of "the hero within" as discussed by Carol Pearson.
Like many feminists, Pearson recognizes that "The great books on the hero, such as
Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, assumed
either than the hero was male or that male heroism and female heroism were
essentially the same"(xx). In her study, Pearson found that "although on the
archetypal level the patterns of male and female heroism were quite similar, they
differed profoundly in detail, tone, and meaning from analogous stories about
men"(xx). However, Pearson also declares that many feminist theorists
"overemphasize differences" in male and female heroes and proposes to explore
"female and male journey patterns together" (xx). In The Hero
Within: Six Archetypes We Live By, Pearson expands the idea of the hero to
portray the lifetime heroic journey based on the "additive" but "not strictly
linear" (xxii) archetypal stages of the Innocent, the Orphan, the Martyr, the
Warrior, the Wanderer, and the Magician. Although some correlation exists between
Pearson's archetypes and the standard Jungian archetypes, such as the correlation
between her Magician and Jung's Wise Old Man or Wise Old Woman, her focus is quite
different from that of the classic psychologist. Defining Basic 289),
Jung focuses on the unconscious whereas Pearson explores "the archetypes active in
our Shadows on the Rock Cather, the artist, has filled out
with symbols and characters that are "the material of conscious experience" (
Jung, Aspects 107).
Many of the characters in Shadows on the Rock exist
primarily on the level of archetype, or shadow. As Susan J. Rosowski has observed,
the characters in Shadows on the Rock, like many of the
settings and incidents, "all have the reality of an idea for which capital letters
are appropriate: Cécile is Mother, Jacques is Child, the Rock is Loyalty,
and the wilderness beyond it Annihilation" (Voyage 187).
According to Pearson's archetypal paradigm, we may read the young Cécile
as the archetype of the Innocent, Jacques as that of the Orphan, Jeanne Le Ber as
the Martyr, Pierre Charron as the Wanderer, Count Frontenac as the Warrior, and
Euclide Auclair and Bishop Laval as Magicians—one secular and one
religious. In addition to providing the key to understanding how these characters
embody specific archetypes, Pearson's archetypes also explain the personal growth
that occurs within the protagonist Cécile Auclair and, to a lesser
degree, within other major characters in the novel.
James Woodress's complaint that "the dramatis personae of the novel tend to be
flat" and "two-dimensional" (430), justified by Merrill Skaggs as the appropriate
form for what she views as Cather's "miracle play" (After the
World 137), can also be explained by the concept of archetype, of the
primordial forms that become Cather's Shadows on the Rock
of Quebec. Along with the archetype of the Innocent, which will be discussed later
in the context of Cécile Auclair's growth, the archetype of the Orphan is
what Pearson calls a "preheroic" archetype. According to Pearson, "Life inevitably
will liberate Innocents from their illusions, but Orphans, more than any other
type, need help crossing the threshold and embarking upon their heroic journey"
(37).
The archetypal Orphan in Shadows on the Rock is Jacques, "a
chunky, rather clumsy little boy of six, unkept and uncared for, dressed in a pair
of old sailor's breeches" by his "irreclaimable" mother 'Toinette Gaux (49-50).
Even young Cécile notices that "This child never looked very well. He was
not thin,—rather chunky, on the contrary,—but there was no
color in his cheeks, or even in his lips. That, Cécile knew, was because
he wasn't properly nourished" (63). The help that Jacques needs to embark on his
own heroic journey comes not from his mother or his unknown father but from the
Quebec community—from Bishop Laval who, seeing in him the type of the
Christ Child, takes him home one cold night, feeds him, and ceremonially washes
his feet; from Count Frontenac, who provides the money for a pair of shoes to
protect his feet from the intense cold; and finally from the Auclairs, especially
from Cécile, who "had first noticed Jacques playing about the market
place, and begun to bring him home with her, wash his face, and give him a piece
of good bread to eat"—adopting him and caring for him as she had cared
for her sick mother (51-52).
Like most orphans, Jacques's primary fear is of abandonment, first of all by his
worthless mother and then by the "jolly Breton sailor who had played with him in
the summer and carved him a marvelous beaver" before sailing off on La Garonne (68). Through the love of Cécile and
other citizens of Quebec and through the religious instruction about the Holy
Family that Cécile gives him, however, Jacques begins to move beyond the
Orphan stage, to give love as well as to take it, when he gives his beaver to the
Christ Child in the Auclairs' crèche. Although we do not follow Jacques's
journey closely, we discover in the epilogue that he has become a sailor, a
Wanderer, but that between voyages he returns to the Auclair household and stays
in Cécile's old room, vacated upon her marriage. Just as
Cécile's engraved cup had once symbolized her home, so do Jacques's
shells and corals in Auclair's apothecary shop symbolize that Jacques is no longer
an Orphan.
Whereas an Orphan, such as Jacques, "seeks rescue from suffering, the Martyr
embraces it, believing it will bring redemption" (Pearson 98). Shadows on the Rock is filled with stories of martyrs but the most
dramatic martyr, perhaps even, as Skaggs asserts, the "most exceptional presence
in this novel is that of Jeanne Le Ber" ("A Good Girl" 35), the recluse who steals
"down the stair-way like a shadow on her way to mass" (132). Certainly Jeanne Le
Ber is the most problematic character in the novel. Wearing "a little haircloth
shirt next to her tender skin" (131) even as a child and ultimately sacrificing
marriage to her childhood friend Pierre Charron as well as her life with her own
family, Jeanne Le Ber embodies the Martyr's belief "that salvation must be earned
by suffering" (Pearson 101). Alone in her cell, Jeanne encounters both the
personal shadow of her own sins and the archetypal Shadow of Original Sin itself.
According to Jung himself—with whose works Cather may have been familiar
through her friendship with Jungian enthusiast Elizabeth Shepley Sargeant
(Sargeant 238-40), "The encounter with the dark half of the personality, or
'shadow,' ... is as important as that of sin in the Church" (Basic 462).
A question arises, however, about the motivation of a Martyr such as Jeanne Le
Ber. Is her sacrifice as useless as the embittered Pierre believes after, in
stolen meetings with her, he hears her "harsh and hollow" voice, "like an old
crow's" (180), and sees her "stone face" that "had been through every sorrow"
(182)? Is her sacrifice even self-serving and manipulative like that of the
pseudo-Martyr, such as the young Saint-Vallier? Certainly Cather—like
Pierre—must have asked these questions as she wrote Shadows on the Rock, for Jeanne Le Ber had to face some of the same
personal choices about life and family that Cather and her autobiographical
protagonist Thea Kronborg faced. Although Thea completed her opera tour instead of
returning to see her dying mother and Jeanne Le Ber sent the message "Tell her I
am praying for her, night and day" (133) instead of responding personally to her
mother's deathbed plea, Cather herself delayed work on Shadows
on the Rock to make two long visits to her own mother, who had suffered a
stroke while visiting Douglass Cather in Long Beach, California, after the death
of her husband (Woodress 417).
As Shadows on the Rock shows, however, Cather believed that
the mission of the spiritual traveler, whether in the realm of religion or art, is
vital not only to the traveler but also to the community in which he or she lives.
Thus a true Martyr like Jeanne Le Ber is, as Pearson observes, "not trying to
bargain to save self but believes that the sacrifice of the self will save others.
That is what the Christ story is about: sacrificing to save others" (103).
Significantly, Cather introduces Jeanne Le Ber's story with Blinker's report of
the "miracle at Montreal. The recluse has had a visit from the angels," he
continues, "the night after Epiphany.... That day she broke her spinning-wheel,
and in the night two angels came to her cell and mended it for her. She saw them"
(128). This miracle—brought about, we must assume, by Jeanne Le Ber's
vicariously enduring the suffering of all human beings just as Christ literally
bore their sins—brings the angels closer to all Quebec: "By many a
fireside the story of Jeanne Le Ber's spinning-wheel was told and re-told with
loving exaggeration during that severe winter. The word of her visit from the
angels went abroad over snow-burdened Canada to the remote parishes. Wherever it
went, it brought pleasure, as if the recluse herself had sent to all those
families whom she did not know some living beauty,—a blooming rose-tree,
or a shapely fruit-tree in fruit. Indeed, she sent them an incomparable gift"
(136-37).
Jeanne Le Ber's gift is imaged as a flower, the archetypal expression of the
feminine spirit as represented in classical myth by the spring reunion of
Persephone with Demeter and in Christianity by the rose symbolism of the Virgin
Mary. In The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and Christian
Theology, Ann Belford Ulanov declares: "In the highest expression of the
feminine spirit both heaviness and materiality are transcended, not to vanish into
abstraction but to be transformed. It is a process often symbolized by a flower.
The feminine spirit, like a blossom's scent, always remains attached to earthly
foundations as to something concrete and individual but also exquisite in beauty
and grace. The downward-going road of the feminine spirit is a road of the lowest
dung, of the commonest air and water, of the everyday soil of experience in which
one receives and achieves transformation" (189). Thus Jeanne Le Ber's intense
suffering and self-abasement, symbolized spatially by the lowest of her three
cells, from which she makes her confessions, sprout and grow into the flower of
the gift of faith that she distributes throughout Quebec in the form of the
"beautiful alter-cloths and vestments" she makes in her upper cell (134). But
Cather extends the image of the flower even further in this highly symbolic
passage: "The people have loved miracles for so many hundred years, not as proof
or evidence, but because they are the flowering of desire. In them the vague
worship and devotion of the simple-hearted assumes a form. From being a shapeless
longing, it becomes a beautiful image; a dumb rapture becomes a melody that can be
remembered and repeated; and the experience of the moment, which might have been a
lost ecstasy, is made an actual possession and can be bequeathed to another"
(137).
Through the imagery of this passage, Cather equates religion and art as she has so
often done before, most notably in her essay on Carlyle, in which she states that
art is a "more exacting master . . . even than Jehovah" (423), and in Professor
St. Peter's statement that "Art and religion (they are the same thing in the end,
of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had" (The Professor's House 69). The connection in the above passage from Shadows on the Rock, however, is not so much that of
sacrifice or fulfillment as that of desire—the process of spiritual
desire that creates a miracle in either religion or art. The archetypal longings,
the shadows of the moment, are transformed by art and religion into a miracle,
into permanent images and symbolic objects that embody archetypal truths. Like
Jung and Paul Tillich, Cather is—through Jeanne Le Ber—seeking
"a revitalized spiritual life through return to and reinterpretation of symbols"
(Ulanov 103-04). Thus the symbol of the lamp, like that of the flower, takes on a
dual meaning in Shadows on the Rock. For Jeanne Le Ber the
sanctuary lamp symbolizes the divine light that she wants to become to her
community: "watching that spot of light," she prays, "I will be that lamp; that
shall be my life" (131). For Cather, as for other romantic writers, the lamp is,
as explained by M. H. Abrams, a symbol of divine inspiration, "the divine Idea
beamed from God into the soul's mirror, thenceto be projected on the written page"
(44).
Contrary to Pierre Charron's belief, Jeanne Le Ber, like any true Martyr, does not intentionally pass her suffering along to others. "Heroes," as Pearson declares, "not only endure hardships, they maintain their love of life, their courage, and their capacity to care for others. No matter how much suffering they experience, they do not pass it on to others. They absorb it and declare: Suffering stops here" (103). Thus Jeanne Le Ber not only releases Pierre, telling him that he should marry, but she also prays "that God may preserve you from sudden death without repentance, and that we may meet in heaven" (179). Pierre acknowledges to Auclair that he has indeed been preserved from sudden death three times, but it is not until after his own journey as the archetypal Wanderer that Jeanne Le Ber's sacrifice becomes transformative for him, embodied in the transformed self of Cécile Auclair.
Pearson's assertion that "the Wanderer is exemplified by stories of the knight, the cowboy, and the explorer who set off alone to see the world" (51) seems a ready-made description of Pierre, whom Cather describes as "a slender man in buckskins, with a quick swinging step. . . . He was not a big fellow, this Pierre Charron, hero of the fur trade and the coureurs de bois, not above medium height, but quick as an otter and always sure of himself" (169-70). Even Euclide Auclair's description of Pierre is archetypal, for to Euclide and his wife, "Pierre Charron had seemed the type they had come so far to find; more than anyone else he realized the romantic picture of the free Frenchman of the great forests which they had formed at home on the bank of the Seine" (171-72).
Pierre's identity as a Wanderer may perhaps be best understood in relationship to the archetype of the Martyr. According to Pearson, "the Wanderer makes the radical assertion that life is not primarily suffering," that "it is an adventure" (51). Like most Wanderers, Pierre's wanderings are motivated by a pivotal, or "transformative, person or concept" (Pearson 65)—in Pierre's case, by his "disappointment" over Jeanne Le Ber's rejecting him as a lover and taking her initial vow as a recluse. Pearson says that "Wanderers identify a person, an institution, [or] a belief system as the cause of their misery, and then they can avoid or flee the cause" or the "captor" (65). Thus Pierre flees from the wasteland of his emotional life to the literal wasteland of the forest where he squanders half of his money on "drink and women and new guns" (173). On returning to Montreal, "his behaviour was always exemplary, out of respect to his mother" (173), but he is clearly an outsider and he, like many Wanderers, experiences spiritual doubt (Pearson 52). Bitter over the miracles associated with Jeanne Le Ber, he initially rejects all miracles, telling the Auclairs and Captain Pondaven, "Oh, you have nothing over us in the way of miracles! . . . Here we have them all the time. Every Friday the beaver is changed into a fish, so that good Catholics may eat him without sin" (224).
Paradoxically, however, the Wanderer's "movement into isolation and loneliness ultimately leads back to community" (Pearson 72). For Pierre, it is his friendship with the Auclairs and his growing feelings for Cécile that bring about his transformation. Hearing of the death of Count Frontenac, the Auclairs' protector, Pierre rushes back to be with them in their sorrow, and the crisis begins to bring out the other archetypes in his life. Finding that Euclide has been too busy during the count's illness to keep food in the house, Pierre takes charge, bringing in a deer he has shot and telling Cécile, "You attend to everything else, but by your leave I will cook the venison in my own way" (266). More important than the food, however, is the warm friendship and calm wisdom that he brings into the household. Cécile's "last thoughts before she sank into forgetfulness were of a friend, devoted and fearless, here in the house with them, as if he were one of themselves. He had not a throne behind him, like the Count. . . , not the authority of a parchment and seal. But he had authority, and a power which came from knowledge of the country and its people; from knowledge, and from a kind of passion. His daring and his pride seemed to her even more splendid than Count Frontenac's" (268). By the conclusion of book 6, Pierre the Wanderer has gained "the Warrior's ability to assert . . . [his] own wishes in the relationship, the Martyr's capacity to give and commit to others, and the Magician's knowledge that there is no scarcity, that we can have all the love we need as our birthright" (Pearson 73).
As suggested by Cécile's comparison, the dominant archetypes of Pierre
Charron and Count Frontenac are quite different. Whereas Pierre is initially a
Wanderer, the count is primarily a Warrior. According to Pearson, whereas the
Wanderer "identifies the dragon and flees," the Warrior "stays and fights" (74).
Certainly Count Frontenac was always a fighter—in real life as well as
in Cather's novel. Francis Parkman writes that Frontenac's "attitude towards
public enemies was always proud and peremptory, yet his courage was guided by so
clear a sagacity that he never was forced to recede from a position he had taken"
(436). Auclair remembers his first sight of Frontenac in a soldier's uniform, a
literal Warrior, and even in his old age in Shadows on the
Rock he "still walked, rode, struck, as vigorously as ever, and only two
years ago he had gone hundreds of miles into the wilderness on one of the hardest
Indian campaigns of his life" (57). Frontenac is indeed one of the archetypal
Warriors who, as Pearson says, "change their worlds by asserting their will and
their image of a better world upon them" and who "take strong action to protect us
all" (76, 82). "When the King had sent him out here nine years ago" Cather writes:
"it had been to save Canada—nothingless. The fur trade was completely
demoralized, and the Iroquois were murdering French colonists in the very
outskirts of Montreal. The Count had accomplished his task. He had chastised the
Indians, restored peace and order, secured the safety of trade" (237, 238). In
addition to being the military savior of all of Quebec, the count was also the
special protector of the Auclair family. "Since I was six years old," Euclide
tells Cécile after Frontenac's death, "the Count has been my protector,
and he was my father's before me" (261).
Even in defeat and in the ultimate battle with old age and approaching death, the count is a true Warrior. As he watches his patron standing "lost in reflection, Auclair thought he seemed more like a man revolving plans for a new struggle with fortune than one looking back upon a life of brilliant failures. The Count had the bearing of a fencer when he takes up the foil; from his shoulders to his heels there was intention and direction. His carriage was his unconscious idea of himself,—it was an armor he put on when he took off his night-cap in the morning, and he wore it all day, at early mass, at his desk, on the march, at the Council, at his dinner-table. Even his enemies relied upon his strength" (239). Although we don't actually see the inner development of the count, at his death we see the results of that development. According to Pearson, Warriors in the higher levels of their development "learn to be more subtle and politic," and ultimately they "give over control of the outcome and assert themselves as part of the dance of life" (97). Before his death Frontenac develops a deep respect for his old enemy Bishop Laval, and on his deathbed the "Count raised his eyebrows haughtily, as if to demand why his privacy was thus invaded. He looked from one face to another; in those faces he read something. He saw the nuns upon their knees, praying. He seemed to realize his new position in the world and what was now required of him. The challenge left his face,—a dignified calm succeeded it" (262). Like the Magician, this old Warrior has discovered that "at a deeper level, force does not work" (118). Like the Magician also, Frontenac has found a new "discipline [that] operates in a context of humility and a certain positive fatalism... . Magicians know," Pearson says,"that they are not the center of the universe; yet that knowledge does not distress them" (118).
Although both Pierre Charron and Count Frontenac—and later Cécile and Bishop Saint-Vallier—reach the level of the Magician, the characters for whom the Magician archetype is dominant are Euclide Auclair and Bishop Laval. As a "philosopher apothecary" (3), Auclair is both physician and scholar. Although he is religious, his wisdom derives from secular sources rather than divine ones. Thus he believes that while "sacred relics are all very well" for working miracles, these miracles are not performed "through the digestive tract," and if Mother de Saint-Augustin "had given her heretic a little more ground bone, she might have killed him" (126). Mild, thoughtful, studious, and creative, with a mind that is "free" (32), he rejects "modern" methods of treatment suggested by Bishop Saint-Vallier: the "cauterization of the arm, to draw the inflammation" away from Bishop Laval's "enlarged and congested veins" in his leg as well as the practice of bleeding for Count Frontenac (119, 257). Striving, like Pearson's Magician, "to live in harmony with the supernatural and natural worlds" and in "wholeness and balance within" (119), Auclair relies on practical and natural remedies, "tisanes and herb-teas and poultices, which at least could do no harm. He advised them [his patients] about their diet; reduced the surfeit of the rich and prescribed goat's milk for the poorly nourished"(29), and is preparing a herbarium, a "collection of medicinal Canadian plants" to take back to France (226). Moreover, he consciously avoids the Magician's temptation to misuse his power (Pearson 147), speaking out against the French fad of drinking viper broth and telling Cécile, "Medicine is a dark science" (212).
Whereas Euclide Auclair is a secular Magician, old Bishop Laval is a true
spiritual Magician who is "able to inspire hope in others" that "it is possible to
have a peaceful, humane, just, and caring world" because he himself has "learned
to be peaceful, caring, and respectful of others"(Pearson 150). Laval himself
lives in "naked poverty," having given all his "silver plate and velvet and linen
. . . little by little, to needy parishes, to needy persons" (73). Laval's most
meaningful experience as a Magician occurs one cold night when he finds the orphan
Jacques crying outside Bishop Saint-Vallier's palace. Taking Jacques home, Laval
ceremonially bathes the child's feet, musing: "This was not an accident, he felt.
Why had he found, on the steps of that costly episcopal residence built in scorn
of him and his devotion to poverty, a male child, half-clad and crying in the
merciless cold? Why had this reminder of his Infant Savior been just there, under
that house which he never passed without bitterness, which was like a thorn in his
flesh?" (75). From this experience, the Magician in Laval realizes "that we are
not life's victims; we are part of the unfolding of God" (Pearson 117). Reviewing
his life after this experience, he sees that it falls into: "two even periods. The
first thirty-six years had been given to purely personal religion, to bringing his
mind and will into subjection to his spiritual guides. The last thirty-six years
had been spent in bringing the minds and wills of other people into subjection to
his own,—since he had but one will, and that was the supremacy of the
Church in Canada" (75). Having passed through both the Martyr and Warrior
archetypes on his way to that of the Magician, then, Laval learns not only the
Magician's lesson "that it is only in giving . . . [one's] unique gift to the
universe that true happiness and satisfaction can be found" (Pearson 118) but also
his own personal lesson that "it was time to return to that rapt and mystical
devotion of his earlier life" (Shadows 75).
Each of the characters discussed thus far—Jacques, Jeanne Le Ber, Pierre
Charron, Count Frontenac, Euclide Auclair, and Bishop Laval—has a
When we are first introduced to Cécile Auclair, we hear only "a child's voice, singing" and then see "a little girl of twelve, beginning to grow tall, wearing a short skirt and a sailor's jersey, with her brown hair shingled like a boy's" (9). Like the archetypal Innocent, she "lives in an unfallen world, a green Eden where life is sweet and all one's needs are met in an atmosphere of care and love" (Pearson 25)—in Cécile's case, the care and love not only of her father, Euclide Auclair, but also the entire community of Quebec. Indeed, Pearson declares that the "closest ordinary equivalents to this experience [of the Innocent] occur in early childhood"(25). Both Cécile's archetypal innocence and her growth away from this innocence is shown later in the novel when, just having been told by her father than there are "men in France this day who doubt the existence ofGod," she looks up at him in bewilderment and asks, "Are there such men, Father?" (154). Along with the archetype of the Innocent but secondary to it, Cécile experiences the archetype of the Orphan. When the novel begins, her mother has been dead for two years, and 12-year-old Cécile keeps house and prepares dinner for her father. Mother Juschereau observes that "for an orphan girl, and one so intelligent [as Cécile], there would certainly have been a career among the Hospitalières" but that Cécile "certainly has no vocation" for it (39). By symbolically adopting Jacques, Cécile moves into the Martyr archetype, in which she chooses: "to give the gift of one's life for the giving's sake, knowing that life itself is its own reward and remembering that all the little deaths, the losses, in our lives always have brought with them transformation and new life, that actual deaths are not final but merely a more dramatic passage through into the unknown" (Pearson 115). Like the Virgin Mary and her son, the true archetypal Martyr, Cécile—by loving and caring for a prostitute's son—is "giving up rigid ideas about what the world should be and loving what it is" (Pearson 113). Thus Cécile's life is truly "a story of transformations," transformations that, Rosowski believes, project her symbolically toward sainthood ("Magnificat" 68). The transformative love of the Virgin Mary would be, in Pearson's paradigm, most closely associated with the Magician archetype toward which Cécile is moving. While Cécile is in the Martyr stage, then, she looks forward to the Magician archetype and even reverts to the Orphan archetype when she feels a "chilling fear of the night" in the dirty and disordered Harnois household (194).
Because of Cécile's devotion to housekeeping and domestic ritual, the
house metaphor that Pearson uses to explain such variations in the primary order
of the archetypes as experienced in the typical female journey is especially
appropriate for Shadows on the Rock. Pearson explains that
"encountering these archetypes is a bit like redecorating a house. We begin by
moving into a house furnished in part by attitudes, beliefs, and habits passed on
to us by our families and by our culture. Some people never make the house their
own and so do not develop a distinct identity or style. Those who do take their
journeys and . . . furnish their own houses do so at different paces and in
different orders" (16). Whereas "some people do one room at a time, finish that,
and go on to the next," Cécile is more like those who "do a bit in each
room" because some of her psychological rooms—especially those of the
Innocent and the Orphan—cannot be finished until she has more fully
developed the Martyr archetype and encountered the archetypes of the Warrior and
the Wanderer (Pearson 16).
In general, Ann Romines is correct when she implies that the "separation/return
pattern so characteristic of Western storytelling" is absent from Shadows on the Rock, for the overall structure of the novel
is, like the rock of Quebec, static rather than progressive ("After the Christmas
Tree" 80). However, the central scene in the novel, the one in which
Cécile and Pierre go on an "excursion" to visit the Harnois family on the
Ile d'Orléans (184), does follow the separation, initiation, return
pattern characteristic of the Warrior's journey. With the eye of the domestic
artist, Cécile sees the island from the "highpoints of Quebec . . . as if
it had been arranged to please the eye,—full of folds and wrinkles like
a crumpled table-cloth" (184). On her actual journey Pierre is her physical guide
but her mother is her psychological and spiritual guide, for Cécile packs
her things in her mother's valise (185) and that night, sitting up alone to avoid
sleeping in the dirty bed with the unwashed Harnois girls, she "thought a great
deal about her mother," about "how her mother had always made everything at home
beautiful, just as here everything about cooking, eating, sleeping, living, seemed
repulsive" (192). On the Ile d'Orléans, Cécile experiences the
archetypal fall from innocence. Symbolically, after her early return to her own
home she does not "feel like a little girl, doing what she had been taught to do"
and realizes that she performs her household tasks "for herself, quite as much" as
"to please her father, and to carry out her mother's wishes" (196-97). Like the
archetypal Warrior of the hero quest, Cécile has been reborn—a
rebirth that is symbolized by the fire that she herself makes to prepare not just
dinner but life itself. Cécile has indeed experienced the quest of the
Warrior but, unlike the typical masculine Warrior, she has completed her quest as
much by, as Romines observes of one of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's characters,
"literally and metaphorically 'going in'—into a house and housekeeping"
("The Hermit's Parish" 148)—as by going out into the world.
After this rebirth experience, Cécile begins a period of symbolic
wandering during which she and her father await the ships on which Auclair and the
count plan to return to France. The ship brings her an elegant blue dress and a
gold brooch—the dress suggesting her new womanhood and the colors
suggesting what Rosowski has called "the apotheosis of a French girl into a
Canadian Holy Mother" (Voyage 184). Viewing this new self
in a mirror would, as Pearson suggests, show how the "world outside" mirrors the
"world inside" (134), but "Cécile had no looking-glass upstairs" and, for
awhile, she rejects the roles symbolized by these clothes that one might wear "to
mass or to a wedding" (214), perhaps even her own. Instead she maintains her
childhood relationship by wearing one of her new jerseys to the dinner Pierre has
planned for her and her father. After Pierre returns to the forest,
Cécile watches miserably as her father makes preparations for their
return to France: "The spirit of peace, that acceptance of fate, which used to
dwell in the pharmacy on Mountain Hill, had left it and come abroad to dwell in
the orchards and gardens, in the little stony streets where the leaves blew about.
Day after day Cécile had walked about those streets trying to capture
that lost content and take it home again. She felt almost as if she no longer had
a home; often wished she could follow the squirrels into their holes and hide away
with them for the winter" (229). Vicariously she even wanders with Pierre, the
great Wanderer himself, wishing that she and Jacques "could govery far up the
river in Pierre Charron's canoe, and then off into the forests to the Huron
country, and find the very places where the martyrs died" (234).
The images of the "spiral" and the "sacred fire," both of which are introduced
even before Cécile herself, symbolize Cécile's spiritual and
psychological growth into the Magician archetype. According to Pearson, the
three-dimensional spiral symbolizes the individual's growth toward wholeness, in
which it is "possible to move forward while frequently circling back" (13). This
spiritual movement is suggested macrocosmically by the "winding stair-way
connecting the two halves of Quebec" over which Cécile travels (9), and
microcosmically by the three-tiered cell within which Jeanne Le Ber experiences
her inner journey. As discussed by Rosowski and Romines, fire is also a major
symbol in Shadows on the Rock. Rosowski calls fire "the
agent of transmutation" that "casts shadows that people a bare rock with figures
of legend" (Voyage 184), whereas Romines emphasizes the
role of fire in maintaining domestic ritual and order (Home
159). Moreover, in both classical and Christian religions, fire also symbolizes
purification and spiritualization. Demeter attempted to make the child Demophoon
immortal by burning away his mortality, and according to one nonbiblical source,
Christ once said, "Whoever is near to me is near to the fire" (Ulanov 182-83).
This symbol of fire, then, suggests two qualities of the Magician archetype as experienced by Cécile. First, Romines's emphasis on domestic ritual suggests the artistic and creative aspect of the Magician who, as Pearson says, cannot exist "without ordering and arranging life" (116-17). Cécile is always concerned with domestic order; at the beginning of the novel she focuses on maintaining the order established by her mother, whereas later she creates her own order. Second, the transformative quality of fire suggests the fuller psychological and spiritual transformation of Cécile that is implied by her marriage to Pierre Charron in the epilogue. On one level, Cécile's marriage confirms her identity as a true Canadian. When she was a child, Pierre told her, "You and I are Canadians, monkey. We were born here" (174). She had been deeply disturbed by the thought of leaving Canada to return to France, and now she has become the mother of "the Canadians of the future" (278). On another level this marriage becomes a type of the holy marriage of the Virgin Mary. Combining Jungian psychology with Christian theology, Ulanov equates divine and human love or marriage, declaring that "the two loves are inseparable and that a fully developed human being is fully devoted to God. One sees, then, that the full expression of one's individuality is part of a full surrender to the divine. The full experience of human sexual love—in its literal and symbolic range of meanings—is the intimate experience of the Incarnate Word"(292). Euclide's affirmation that "Heaven has blessed her with children"(278) clearly connects Cécile and her union with that of the Virgin Mary. Whereas Mary bore a child who became the spiritual Savior of the world, Cécile bears young Canadians who will become "the Canadians of the future,—the true Canadians" (278). The narrative distancing of Cécile in the epilogue also suggests not only that Cécile has become a legend herself, like Jeanne Le Ber, but also that, like the Virgin Mary, she has experienced the apotheosis of the hero, has truly become a Canadian shadow or spirit.
Although Cécile is the emotional center of the novel, she is not the only
character to undergo a major change. The most dramatic transformation occurs in
Bishop Saint-Vallier, whose journey follows the typical male pattern of Orphan,
Warrior, Wanderer, Martyr, and Magician (Pearson 8). Bishop Saint-Vallier's early
journey is truncated, however, and he reaches the level of Magician only through
forced wanderings and intense suffering. When we are first introduced to Bishop
Saint-Vallier, he is like a proud but lonely Orphan who uses his "pain as a
vehicle for manipulation" to "avoid fully confronting . . . rage and feelings of
powerlessness" (Pearson 42) and who seeks attention by reorganizing and changing
things "for the sake of change, to make a fine gesture" (Shadows 122.). He is also a pseudo-Martyr who "won all hearts by his
splendid charities" but whose piety is "too conspicuous" and a pseudo-Warrior full
of "arrogance and . . . rash impracticality" (124) who nevertheless tries
unsuccessfully to impose his will on Laval, Frontenac, and Auclair (122,123,124).
Self-righteously—and ironically, considering his own elaborate palace,
Saint-Vallier claims that the dying Count "has agreat deal to put right with
Heaven. He has used his authority and his influence here for worldly ends, rather
than to strengthen the kingdom of God" (255-56). Fifteen years after Frontenac's
death and 13 years after his own departure, Saint-Vallier returns to Quebec a
broken but transformed man. The "wandering Bishop" (270), as Cather calls him, has
experienced both a lengthy imprisonment in England and a long detention in France
that have humbled him immeasurably. Instead of returning to his gaudy palace, the
bishop now plans to live in two small rooms in the Hopital Géneral and
serve as chaplain there. The bishop also asks about Cécile and exhibits
his new Magician status, his "transformation," by the "warm and friendly silence"
(279), the sense of community, that he now shares with Auclair.
The hero's relationship with community is an important concept in most heroic paradigms. The return of both Saint-Vallier described by Cather earlier as being "as changeable and fickle as a woman" (123)—and Cécile to the Rock of Quebec parallels Marilyn Sanders Mobley's description of "the return at the end of the female quest" that "is not a resignation to limitation or failure but a heroic expression of the desire to remain connected to the people and place of her cultural roots. . . , an act of triumph, or self-affirmation and communal celebration" (29). Campbell declares that the hero must return to "the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds" (193). And Pearson observes that "The reward for the hero's inevitably solitary journey, then, is community—community with the self, with other people, and with the natural and spiritual worlds. At the end of the journey, the hero feels and is at home in the world" (153). Indeed, Saint-Vallier now feels more at home in his bare quarters with his duties of chaplain than he had in the prisons and courts of Europe or even in his own bishop's palace, and Cécile—though narratively removed from us—feels at home in her adopted country of Canada.
The sense of community that results at the end of the hero's solitary journey is
also related to the archetypal role of the artist. According to Pearson, the
"archetype of the Magician teaches us about creation" (116). As a creative
Magician "ordering and arranging life" (116-17), Cécile is herself the
prototype of the artist. Moreover, as Mary Ruth Ryder suggests, in telling the
story of the old count (262), of the adventurer who, like Aeneas, has carried "his
gods with him into a remote and savage country"(Shadows
98), Euclide Auclair is also a type of the epic poet Virgil. Most importantly,
however, in the Carlylean sense, as Patricia Lee Yongue has suggested (62), Cather
herself becomes the Hero as Poet or Man of Letters as she tells the epic story of
Shadows on the Rock. Whereas Carlyle denigrated the
symbols of the Catholic Church (142-45), however, Cather uses the symbols of the
Church—the Martyr, the Rock, the Virgin Mary, the Holy
Mother—to give body and experience to the shadows of the mythic and
historical past, thus transforming unconscious archetypes into conscious art. The
"romantic glow" (67) of Cather's mind that Governor Wilbur Cross detected in his
review of Shadows on the Rock thus derives from the
creative lamp within, from the divine romantic vision of Cather as Poet or, to
paraphrase Carlyle, Woman of Letters (181). It is with this blinding light that
Willa Cather casts her heroic shadows on the Rock.
The portrait of a great artist, as it finally emerges, must come, I think, from many sources and from many minds.
It is a paradox of the practice of literary studies that as postmodernism has weaned us from earlier ideas of the author as great originator, as hero, as priest, as godlike creator and taught us instead that the figure of the author is a function of the text, a figure we help to invent as we read, we have all become even more interested in writing and reading about authors. Literary biography is alive and well even though critical attention has centered on literary texts rather than the makers of those texts. I think the answer to this paradox lies in what Michel Foucault says about the author as a human subject. Foucault, while agreeing with the viewpoint that the author is none of the romantic notions I have listed and that any writer, like any other human subject, is the result of ideological shaping in a particular society, nevertheless warns in "What Is an Author?" that "the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its systems of dependencies" (137).
That is what I intend to do here, to use some of the memoirs and biographies of
Willa Cather's life to speculate about what "system of dependencies" made her the
author she was, able to "intervene" in cultural discourse to create a body of work
unparalleled in her time and place. In doing so I reject notions that we can fully
read a writer's work by simply reading her texts, no matter how sophisticated a
set of critical tools we bring to those texts. If an author is a location where
language, ideology, and an individual lived life meet, then it is always important
to understand the linguistic, social, historical, familial, personal, and
ideological contexts that enclosed the human subject who found writing such an
essential act of self-definition. We carry on this biographical project in order
to enrich our readings of the texts, but in making this broad search through the
writer's life and times I think it is also important to remember that we bring
ourselves, as human subjects shaped in our times, to the biographical and critical
act. In Mapping Our Selves I have proposed that when we
seek the figure of the author of works that we care for, we are engaged also in an
act of self-construction, an act in which "I am tracing the pattern of the life of
my own arteries of action, my own veins of response, searching for correspondence
and difference, delighting indiscovery of the self [as well as] the other" (27).
Therefore, in constructing the figure of Cather, I intend to be as honest as I can
about my own agendas concerning the construction of female subjects in general.
In terms of salient facts, all the biographies and memoirs about Cather tell the
same story: born in Virginia in 1873, the first child of a fairly well-off farming
family, Cather moved with her family at nine years of age to Nebraska, spent a
year on a farm on what is called "The Divide" before moving to the small pioneer
town of Red Cloud, where she spent her teen years, followed by four years at the
University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Her early adult life was lived as a magazine
editor and school teacher, first in Pittsburgh, then in New York at McClure's Magazine. In her late thirties she was able to
begin to devote herself full time to writing, while moving between New York,
Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and later Grand Manan, New Brunswick. Trips back to
Nebraska and to the Southwest were frequent and often of some duration. The
biographies and memoirs also agree on the importance of a number of people who
influenced her life, from her parents and siblings in her close-knit family
through her many male mentors and employers and friends, as well as a series of
female mentors and intimate female friends. But there the agreement ends. Although
making careful use of often similar documentary material available to them at the
time of writing, each memoirist, each biographer, constructs his or her own idea
of the artist that is Willa Cather.
Since it would be too time consuming to go through each text comparing it to the others in detail, I have chosen two portions of Cather's life for comparison, to show how each biographer reveals his or her agendas of subjectivity through the handling of these two times. The two points for comparison are the phenomenon of Cather's concerted effort to dress like a boy, indeed to name herself William in her teens, and the incident of her brief but intense friendship with Louise Pound while at university. My choice of these incidents, while having the very practical benefit of their being time-limited events, happening at key moments in the early life of the artist and also referred to by all the biographers, are also chosen because of my own interest in the way writers deal with gender, especially how women play with and redefine issues of gender in order to enter into their art. By gender I do not mean simply biological sex or sexual orientation but a lifelong process involving these two categories plus many societal dictates and personal choices that make our gendering an evolving and ongoing life process. For me, consideration of gender is at least as important as the consideration of Cather's political and ideological commitments, her choice of mentors, her career history, or the growth of her aesthetic as a writer. Indeed, gender grounds and interweaves these contexts.
I find various versions of Cather in the five biographies I have chosen as my illustrations. The first biography, published in 1953, is by the Canadian scholar E. K. Brown, who died at an early age while he was still writing the text. His colleague and friend, Leon Edel, took up the task of completing the book from Brown's notes. Like the cover photograph on the 1987 reprint edition, the Cather Brown wishes to portray seems to be a kindly, intelligent lady school teacher who through the cultivation of her writing craft and an imaginative identification with the West, where she had spent her formative years, achieves great literature. In many ways Brown's biography has the effect of normalizing the sometimes amazing woman called Willa Cather, while extolling the kindly, literary craftsperson called Willa Cather.
Possibly this is the elderly Cather he knew, since there was an exchange of letters between them after he sent her a copy of an academic essay he had written about her work. She gently disagreed with his emphasis on place as a defining feature in a writer's life, but as James Woodress comments in his foreword to Brown's book the correspondence indicates a "remarkable" event in Cather's life. Not only does Cather exempt Brown from the "short shrift" she usually gave professors but she goes on "to reminisce about her life and work in a manner utterly uncharacteristic of her letters to persons she had never met" (vii). The two planned to meet, but Cather died before that could happen. Perhaps Cather, who worked hard at avoiding unorchestrated public images, including destroying much of her correspondence in later years, had found the biographer she wanted, one who took great pains with his cogent readings of her texts but, as Brown's biography indicates, knew when to draw the line in the revelation and especially the interpretation of the private life of the writer.
Brown only briefly mentions Cather's boyish attire and connects it with her other
forms of rebellion against what he names "the conventionalism of Red Cloud . . . a
network of caution, evasion and negation" (47). Thus it is not Cather who is
strange. Indeed, the "young girl who dressed like a boy, preferred the
conversation of unusual older men . . . who was reputed to hold dangerous opinions
about religion as well as to enjoy cutting up animals" (48) must escape the town
to the atmosphere of the university where Brown finds her much more at home. In
order to construct a Cather who is much more at home in Lincoln than Red Cloud, he
emphasizes her intellectual development at college, her beginnings as a writer,
and quite rightly too, since Cather did not waste a moment of learning time at
Lincoln. However, she did start university at exactly the age most of us do,
eighteen, and almost certainly experienced gender as well as intellectual
development. The friendship with Louise Pound is handled in a half-sentence by
Brown: "Among her principal friends were Louise and Olivia Pound, the sisters of
Roscoe and daughters of Judge Stephen M. Pound" (104). Thus Louise is placed
safely in the company of her sister and both of them validated by their important
male relatives. As Woodress points out, Brown was very dependent on Cather's
longtime companion Edith Lewis for his information, and Lewis, as Woodress
maintains in his foreword, wanted the kind of book that "touch[ed] on only such
facts in [the] personal life as have to do directly with the work" (Lewis qtd. in
Brown x). Indeed, it is in his handling of the works that Brown is strongest; his
readings show a studied carefulness with text and an associative insight with
metaphor and symbol that are compelling readings. As a critic writing at the
height of New Criticism, the idea of locating the authors "systems of
dependencies" would not be comfortable for Brown. To his eyes her "function" as
author and her "intervention" in discourse were unproblematically those of a
skilled artisan forging place and people into a great new literature of the North
American West. Brown's subtitle, A Critical Biography, is
well chosen since it is the critic's skill as a close reader that is most
prominent in this text.
Phyllis Robinson's Willa: The Life of Willa Cather (1983)
wants a Cather we can warm up to, as is indicated by the use of her first name as
the main title and, accordingly, by her practice of calling her subject In the same
way that Willa created a Nebraska and a Red Cloud that she could live with, she
also created an identity of her own that satisfied her, one that was strong,
independent, essentially masculine. According to one story, she cut her hair
short because her mother was ill and couldn't comb her long curls, then decided
that it suited her and wore it that way until she was halfway through college.
She had the bluff and hearty manners of a boy and tried to dress as boyishly as
possible and do the things that boys do. She liked to go barefoot and fish and
canoe with her brothers on the Republican River, or hunt for buried treasure
with them on the little island near the mouth of Indian Creek. (31)
Robinson leaves us with the impression that all of this is mere healthy
tomboyishness, chosen and shaped artfully by the budding writer, certainly not a
jarring rebellion that might have shocked family, friends, and townsfolk and
certainly not undertaken in conditions of stress or unhappiness.
Although Robinson calls the relationship with Louise Pound a "serious romantic attachment" and is forthright about the fact that Cather seemed "obsessed" and "infatuated" with Pound for two years, she suggests, through her descriptions of Pound—her intelligence, her beauty, her athletic accomplishments—that everyone was in love with her: "A fellow student, who knew both Willa and Louise, described Louise Pound in later years when she was teaching at the university and had become a world authority on folk literature, as having had a hold upon the imagination that was hypnotic"(59). Robinson does assert the importance of the relationship to Cather's youthful definitions of herself: "losing Louise caused Willa the most intense suffering she had ever known. In despair, she vowed to herself to bemore cautious and less impetuous in her affections in the future" (61). However, Robinson also argues that the "openness with which Willa talked about her feelings for Louise suggests that most people did not regard their friendship as perverse or as anything but a not uncommon college 'crush.'" She speculates that the principal effects of this event were to warn Cather off "the idea of loving women in any but a romantic sense" and to begin a life time habit of forming the "intimate relationships in her life . . . exclusively with women" (62).
Robinson exposes a number of the "systems of dependencies" of Cather's youth that
would later mark her function as a producer of texts but she does so in order to
normalize them or to show them as moderated by later life. Indeed, many
biographers, while often emphasizing male difference and idiosyncrasy as proof of
talent, seem to want to show that female subjects, no matter how talented, fit
into our commonplace ideals of a good woman. While Robinson is the first
biographer to suggest that the Pound episode is a marker event in the formation of
the artist, she does not perform that necessary act of
In fact, Robinson seems to accept one of Cather's estimations of her own psychology and artistic life as trouble free and rather incidental. Robinson quotes Cather's letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher after Fisher had written a rather lionizing piece lauding Cather as a "Daughter of the Frontier" and theorizing that the "one real subject of all her books . . . is the effect of a new country . . . on people transplanted to it from the old traditions of a stable, complex civilization" (Robinson 272). Cather wrote back, thanking Fisher for the compliments but disagreeing. Robinson summarizes the letter: "Willa had her own ideas, and she wrote to Dorothy that the common denominator of her books was escape. She had always fled the less agreeable for the more agreeable, she said, and she had never made a sacrifice to art"(272). Although the artist should be taken seriously when she expresses opinions regarding her life and work, biographers need not take them as the only authority on the subject. Indeed, their words should be treated with the same hermeneutic subtlety as other sources. In fact, "escape" is an intriguing symbol for understanding the life and work of this illusive woman, and it needs to be read as more symbolically complex than perhaps Cather meant Fisher to understand it or than Robinson understands it in her turn. As well, in estimating an author we should not underestimate the effect of gendering on women's ideas of themselves as artists. It has certainly been very acceptable for women to make light of their talents and skills, pretending they do it all for their own pleasure, to amuse themselves, and if others should take pleasure in their work, well then, all the better. At any rate, statements by authors concerning their own lives and art need to be viewed in the same critical light as others' assessments, with an awareness of personal bias, motivation, and cultural context.
Whereas the Brown text is an able critique of the writer's achievement that largely leaves out the woman, Robinson's is an absorbing narrative of the woman that in many ways leaves out many of the difficulties, challenges, and achievements of the writing. This is consistent with a biographical problem in the treatment of female subjects that Alison Booth explores in "Biographical Criticism and the 'Great' Woman of Letters." Examining the treatment of both George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Booth states: "biographical criticism of women writers, obeying dichotomous conventions, assumes that behind the great creative mind must be a woman who suffers, and, conversely, that the more the woman comes forward in the work. . . , the less great the work" (90). This cultural dichotomy forces biographers to choose between "ambitious" and "erotic" plots for women. If women are to be great writers they must be defined as ambitious for their work, as "the imperial masculine self" is (98). If they are to be defined as women then they are eroticized (or domesticated), made more "womanly," but unfortunately such a figure is "incompatible with greatness" (98).
The publication, in 1987, of James Woodress's Willa Cather: A
Literary Life indicates the degree to which the choice of the "ambitious"
plot can elevate the writer while denying her full humanity. Woodress is the
beneficiary of his own previous book on Cather as well as Bernice Slote's lifetime
of work on the biographical detail of Cather's life. He is warmly appreciative of
his subject and her many accomplishments and talents without making any attempt to
hide her faults. (It was Woodress who shocked my sensibilities as an
ex-high-school teacher by relating that Cather sometimes "humiliated students
whose ineptitude irritated her by reading their compositions aloud in class"
[154]. She was the kind of teacher who was absolutely devoted to the brilliant
student and intolerant of those who did not learn quickly.) Woodress's revelation
of Cather's elitism fits with the kind of Cather he is constructing. It is, as his
subtitle indicates, the "literary life" that concerns him, the way in which the
life experiences are shaped to the purposes of a higher goal, literature, that
matters to him. Woodress sees the artist as the crafter of herself, as master of
her "systems of dependencies," as fully conscious intervener in language, the
purposeful builder of a career, of masterworks. As he asserts in his preface: "The
person who moves through these pages is an extraordinarily gifted woman. From her
Virginia childhood and Nebraska adolescence she made her way through the world
with energy and dedication. She went from college journalism to professional
journalism, then to magazine writing and editing, pushing steadily towards her
artistic objective. . . . It is the task of the biographer . . . to search among
the shards to discover the abandoned designs and crudities later perfected" (xvi).
From Woodress, then, we receive the sense of an artist as an architect of the
self, purposeful from the start. Even if in later life that artist attempts to
break the ties with her youthful self, the self is like a treasured ruin of an
ancient building for Woodress, "shards" and "abandoned designs" waiting to be
pieced together by the literary archeologist. The cover picture on the paperback
edition of his biography indicates this aesthetic of biography. The mood of the
portrait supports the intelligent, confident, even exacting purposefulness that
Woodress's Cather displays. In fact, what Woodress makes of Cather is a kind of
Cather heroine, larger than life, above us mere mortals. She is human, of course,
but in grand ways that attract and win us.
His handling of the two exemplary incidents I have chosen are predicated on his
firmly stated premise regarding Cather and the gender issue: "To state the matter
simply, Cather was married to her art and sublimated her sexual impulses to her
work. Throughout her life she gave art her highest priority, preferring her work
to society, to family, to friends. Few people, of course could follow such a
program rigorously, and Cather recognized her obligations to others" (A Literary Life 125). Woodress admits the extreme degree of
Cather's teenage "show-off tomboy" ways and notes that they must have made her
conspicuous in Red Cloud. He also admits that Cather did not just bob her hair as
young women would a generation later but "cut it shorter than most boys," signed
her name William Cather Jr. or Wm. Cather, M. D., and "wore boys' clothes, a
derby, and carried a cane." He also speculates that "such a child must have taken
her knocks from the local busybodies" (A Literary Life 55).
However, for Woodress this is simply Cather's way of defying "Victorian norms of
behavior for adolescent girls. Her goal in life was to become a surgeon, but that
option was not open to girls, or so she must have thought, living in a little
prairie town. As a result she refused to be a girl, adopted male values and
attitudes and continued the tomboy life she led in her prepubescent years" (A Literary Life 55-56). Once again it is Cather's purposeful
and very practical actions taken in the furtherance of a goal that are
foregrounded. Woodress justifies his analysis of this stage of Cather's life in
terms of her early construction of a masculine young protagonist in her story
"Tommy, the Unsentimental." Just as the neophyte writer Cather reads no
psychological significance into Tommy's gendering, neither does Woodress into
Cather's. For Woodress, speculations about sexual orientation are of "considerable
interest," but since "available data gives no objective answers" he sidelines
these issues for issues closer to the portrait of the artist as master artisan
that he is building. While not averse to speculating on other aspects of Cather's
early life and to proposing a purposefulness in career matters that some facts of
Cather's life may deny, he is adverse to speculation, analysis, and theorization
about her gendering.
Although Woodress gives a detailed account of the Pound incident, he prefaces his
narration with this framing remark: "To call this a lesbian relationship, as some
critics have done, is to give it undue importance. Pound did not return the
affection with anything like the fervor with which it was given. She had many
admirers of both sexes, was not inclined to focus her attention on any one
individual." Woodress subsumes the "infatuation" into what he calls "a tempestuous
psychological experience during this period. [Cather] confessed to Fisher years
later that during her youth she was mixed up, tormented; those were years of
frenzy, she said" (A Literary Life 85). Importantly,
Woodress's characterization of the period of the Pound relationship takes the
emphasis off issues of gender and puts it onto issues of the development of the
uniqueness of the individual functioning as a writer unencumbered by dependencies.
The curious way in which the relationship ended, when Cather published a wounding
lampoon of Pound's brother Roscoe, is not interpreted as the vengeful act of a
rejected lover or even a woman "frenzied" by unfair gender expectations but as
part of Cather's general and often unwise outspokenness, part of her early
"crudities" that would later be melded into the courage to speak the truth that is
part of art. Woodress concludes that "Cather was a long time learning tact and
discretion" (A Literary Life 87).
The adoption of the "ambitious" plot as a yoke for the impressive body of evidence
Woodress compiles leaves his biography in the ironic situation of allowing the
reader to counter Woodress's arguments with Woodress's own evidence. For example,
even though he insists on a Cather who is devoted to art, merely paying attention
to others because she "recognized her obligations" (A Literary
Life 124), his detailed chronology of her life shows that much of her time
and imagination were involved in promoting very rich relationships, especially
family relationships, often going out of her way, inconveniencing her art, in the
short run at least, to further her relational life. For example, Woodress records
without comment or interpretation that after the death of her parents Cather
organized a family reunion, reshingled and opened the family house in Red Cloud
(closed for the four previous years), and got everyone to come back for a
successful celebration of their continuation as a family (A
Literary Life 436).
Another result of adopting the "ambitious" plot is the appearance of a feature in
Woodress's subjectivity agenda that is endemic in traditional biography: the
degendering of the subject. I don't mean the desexualization or the
deeroticization of the subject, although these may accompany degendering. I refer
to the way in which many traditional literary biographies do not take gendering as
seriously as they take categories such as race, class, religion, ethnicity,
nationality, historical period, aesthetic training, or any number of contexts in
which the literary artist can be considered. And this is true of male gendering as
well as female gendering. A biography that is as detailed as Woodress's on its
subject is Richard Ellman's James Joyce. As with Woodress's
biography of Cather the model of the artist is that of a god above the fray. One
has to read Brenda Maddox's Nora, the biography of Joyce's
wife, to get a hint of the complex male gendering that both enlivened and tortured
this talented man. It may be the wish of a writer to be portrayed as a distant,
disembodied small god but it is not necessarily the job of biographers to paint
the artist in the tones the artist would wish.
Certainly the author of Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice
did not paint Cather as the artist would have wished. Published in the same year
as Woodress's text, Sharon O'Brien's biography is self-conscious about exposing
the biographical aesthetic that informs the work: In this book I
do not intend to represent my subject's core, essential self, a futile project
since the self is always changing, always in a process of self-creation. But
some patterns can be discerned. . . . Willa Cather was creating rather than
discovering a self by drawing on the cultural fictions available to her: the
romantic story of self-discovery and the American story of self-transformation.
So I use the romantic notion of the unique, essential self to explain Cather's
literary and personal development because, in her social and historical
environment, she used that belief to fashion the first half of her life.(7)
O'Brien is just as open about her intention to treat Cather as a gendered subject,
in O'Brien's view a lesbian gendered subject: "I did not refer to her as a lesbian
in the early drafts of the manuscript. But when I came across Cather's love
letters to Louise Pound, written during her college years, I changed my mind. This
important correspondence persuaded me that 'lesbian' did in fact capture Cather's
self-definition and that my biography should consider the impact on the creative
process of her need both to conceal and to reveal her experience of desire" (6).
Concealing and revealing are at the center of O'Brien's concept of Cather, as
shown in her choice of cover picture. This photograph was taken of Cather in 1910
when she was still the managing editor of McClure's
Magazine. It presents a very concealing face and dress, opposed by a
flamboyant hat, hinting at something quite different than the bland face of the
successful editor.
Instead of devoting a page or two to the Cather-as-boy phenomenon, O'Brien names
it cross-dressing (thus bringing the weight of feminist criticism on that subject
to her argument) and devotes an entire chapter to the youthful gendering. She also
includes six pictures of Cather in her boy phase. The chapter "Enter William
Cather" uses an artist-as-performer approach, observing that Cather had a number
of pictures taken by a professional photographer while in her boy's costumes and
notes that there is often a sign of the feminine in her costume "a scarf, a
ruffle, a ribbon" (The Emerging Voice 96). O'Brien reads
both the deliberateness of having her portrait taken and the deconstructive
feminine costume touches as conscious performance of gender experimentation. To
illustrate to what degree Cather was breaking the rules of her contemporary
milieu, O'Brien uses newspaper advertisements and social pages of the time to find
Red Cloud standards of femininity and quotes local historian Elmer Thomas saying,
"I remember Willa Cather most for her masculine habits and dress... . This
characteristic in those days was far more noticeable because it was very seldom
that women appeared dressed other than in strict feminine attire. . . . [she] even
boasted that she preferred the masculine garb . . . [the] masculine sex. . .. To
me she was never attractive . . . and I remember her mostly for her boyish makeup
and the serious stare with which she met you. It was as if she said, 'stay your
distance buddy, I have your number.' Enough. I did" (The
Emerging Voice 97). O'Brien points out that even in 1973 when she visited
Red Cloud, she was told that Cather "had been a 'hermapherdite' who 'wore men's
shoes—had'em made special'" (The Emerging Voice
97).
O'Brien theorizes on the possible sources of Cather's gendering. She takes up
Adrienne Rich's idea of the mother-daughter relationship as the great unwritten
story of our culture, using Nancy Chodorow's theory of the more complex nature of
the separation from the mother that is the girl-child's route to maturity and
connects this theorizing to the female characterizations in Cather's texts.
O'Brien asserts that although Chodorow is correct in saying that the daughter's
turn to her father in her identity role, "is both an attack on her mother and an
expression of love for her," (The Emerging Voice 103), "as
long as Cather devalued women, she devalued herself; as long as she devalued
herself, she could not commit herself fully to writing. In reconciling the
seemingly contradictory identities 'woman' and 'writer,' she would ultimately
challenge and revise social definitions of gender" (The Emerging
Voice III). For O'Brien this struggle is the most important "system of
dependency" in the development of the author function in Cather. The author cannot
intervene meaningfully in discourse until she reconciles her contradictory
definitions of femaleness.
This is the process O'Brien traces as the "emerging voice," of her subtitle, and
the Pound affair is an important part of that tracing. In the chapter "Divine
Femininity and Unnatural Love" she summarizes the letters to Pound and letters to
Mariel Gere in which Cather's worries about her relationship with Pound. As well,
O'Brien examines the context of attitudes toward female friendships at this time:
"Whereas earlier in the century women's friendships were consistent with their
dependent status, the affection between women who were declaring their
equality—or even more unsettling, their similarity—to men
threatened the social, moral, and sexual order. The creation of a category of
'deviance' then served as a means of social control as well as of
boundary-setting" (The Emerging Voice 133). O'Brien posits
an important social change happening at the historical moment of Cather's love for
Pound. Formerly, when women were seen as nonerotic creatures, their friendships
were safe; under these new conditions such friendships were not to be condoned. A
teacher of Cather's had called love between women "unnatural" and Cather's
discussion of this in one of her letters to Pound is the evidence that encourages
O'Brien to identify Cather as lesbian: "When Cather told Pound that it was unfair
that feminine friendship should be unnatural, she nonetheless agreed with Miss De
Pue [her teacher] that it was, she betrayed a self-conscious awareness shared by
her community, that women's friendship constituted a special category not
sanctioned by the dominant culture" (The Emerging Voice
132).
For O'Brien, this knowledge of the nonsanctioned nature of the friendship supports
her argument that Cather has knowledge of her own lesbianism and marks the Pound
affair as the beginning of her search for a way to have a voice in a repressive
society. O'Brien proposes that midway through college Cather shed her male
costuming because "at the end of her Lincoln years Cather was ready to abandon
overt signs of male identification since they had served their major function,
aiding the adolescent girl's separation from her mother and her rejection of the
feminine role" (The Emerging Voice 140). O'Brien disagrees
with critics who see male identification as continuing for Cather because of her
choice of male narrators and male personae. She sees these choices as in part a
necessary concealment for a lesbian and in part Cather's strategy for confronting
"erotically compelling women" who represent "the daughter/writer's psychological
need to place the barrier of gender between herself and erotically powerful
maternal presences" (The Emerging Voice 139). O'Brien
traces the gendering of Willa Cather up to the publication of O
Pioneers! and Song of the Lark, arguing that
through her relationships with maternal surrogates, loving women who gave her
emotional and physical spaces to write, Cather comes to discover her voice as a
woman writer. O'Brien's readings of the stories and novels cannily bring together
her theory of Cather's gendering with Cather's literary production, offering
ananalysis of O Pioneers! that posits the artful joining of
Cather's masculine and feminine self-definitions in the voice of the mature
writer.
On the one hand, in my effort to shift from an exploration of the writer's "dependencies"—her "function" and "intervention" in art—to an exploration that appreciates gender as an underlying factor, I am very much indebted to O'Brien. On the other hand, I have a lingering dissatisfaction with O'Brien's work. Part of it has to do with the naming of Cather as "lesbian." Some epistemological problems arise with this naming. First, for people unaware of the debate going on in feminism concerning the meaning of that word and its rich history, the word can be limiting, positing that the need to hide one's desire for same-sex relationships programs the art. But more importantly, I find that once we name the gendering process by any name that we, in ordinary discourse, associate primarily with a sexual orientation—heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian—we tend to leave out what I consider the most important aspects of the gendering process, the way in which our personal desires are shaped, interact with, and confront a whole ideology of gender that is not simply about sexual orientation but about roles, power, politics, social order, and the aesthetics of cultural production. Gendering, as a lifelong process we are all involved in, is much bigger than our decisions to repress or follow our sexual desires for one sex or another as partners in our lovemaking. I am not suggesting that O'Brien neglects these factors. I am proposing that her biography, by ending where it does, fairly early in Cather's life story, tends to emphasize sexual orientation as the only important aspect of the gendering process.
O'Brien herself expresses interesting opinions about her biographical efforts. In her autobiographical article, "Feminist Biography as Shaped Narrative," she says that "knowing what I do now, I might have chosen to end my biography with some intimations of the darkness that was awaiting Cather after her literary emergence, providing a more muted ending than I did. . .. But such an ending was not consistent with the story of artistic emergence I then wanted to tell" (266). As well as her desire for shaping a happy—indeed, a victorious ending for Cather—O'Brien also confesses, in "My Willa Cather: How Writing Her Story Shaped My Own," that her positioning of her own subjectivity as "power-less daughter" with a fear that "powerful, self-involved" women would leave her "feeling annihilated" (3) was also a factor in her decision. Not only does the biography suggest, by ending at the moment of "emergence" of voice, that a resolution of the gender issues has been reached but also, by avoiding the years when Cather's power drive sometimes had eccentric and negative expressions, O'Brien's gender theory cannot approach the life of a woman of high achievement past the youthful stages, past the happy endings of breaking into the male-dominated world of public language. As a result, O'Brien's Cather, shown as successfully separated from her mother and matured through relationships with women mentors and friends, seems less a gendered person at the end of the biography and thus, by more traditional masculinist standards, a better writer. O'Brien concludes that gender is less central to the later novels.
Here I part ways with O'Brien. I would contend that gender—whether you
are heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, celibate, impotent, merely bored, or obsessed
with your sex life—gender, as opposed to sexual practice, because it is
a socially produced factor interacting with the daily experience of living in a
body, is always important no matter what your age. O'Brien ends her book with the
words "the disclosure of a woman writer's power" (The Emerging
Voice 448), and I believe that it is exactly when a woman takes up power,
any kind of power, that gender conditioning becomes most problematic. Far from
having arrived at a comfortable place in gender with her first successful novels,
Cather's increasingly complex gendering is just beginning. Even though her sexual
life may seem absent or at least settled by middle age, the ways in which she is
defined as woman and writer are just beginning to come to the fore. I think there
is much still to discover about the gendering of Cather in the second half of her
life, discoveries that will help explain that "darkness" in the midst of public
success that O'Brien notes in Cather's life, a darkness that plagues the life of
any woman who takes up power in the public world.
I also think more biographical projects are necessary because, with the
publication of O'Brien's and Woodress's contrasting biographies, Cather is
starting to become the kind of cultural figure that Virginia Woolf is in England:
the woman whose life and writing allow prismatic access to a particular cultural
era. As a cultural figure she embodies salient features of her times and helps us
characterize the age in which she lived. In characterizing that period we
ultimately are seeking a way of knowing our own selves as products of these times
of great change that have preceded our own. This possibility underlies Hermione
Lee's argument in Willa Cather: Double Lives. In this first major
British biography of Cather, Lee proposes to show that Cather is part of a larger
"project to take over a male tradition of writing" (13) that involves writers such
as Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and
Gertrude Stein. Her cover picture of Cather (on the American edition) reflects the
large role she sees for Cather: it is a substantial, older Cather, suitably
androgynous and strong looking under her unisex hat and enclosed by the natural
space that O'Brien sees as essential to her part in the feminist project. Cather's
function as writer in this feminist project is a critical one, "to appropriate the
dominant male critique of female weakness and emotionalism" (Lee 13) and to
"intervene . . . in a masculine language of epic pastoral" (5), a task Cather is
perfectly situated to undertake as an American, a Westerner, and a successful
professional woman and writer. Lee sees Cather as redefining the human
relationship to space, by managing to stage the continuing "fracture" in the
"American imagination between romance and realism, space and confinement,
pioneering energy and elegiac memorialization" (12). She insists that Cather's
ability to do this has "everything to do with her sexual alienation from
conventional femininity" and is "emotionally defined by her deep feeling for one
woman and her lasting companionship with another" (10). So although Lee avoids
naming lesbian identity, she does insist on the gendering of her subject as a
vital ingredient in the "project" in which she places her. Given this, it may seem
surprising that Lee gives the boy phase short shrift, easily explaining it as "the
symptoms of a furious resistance to parochial narrowness and the genteel
conventions dictated by her mother"(38). Her judgment on the Pound relationship is
equally swift, "Even if the whole Louise episode makes rather silly reading . . .
it reveals for us . . . a touching mixture of bravado and anxiety about her
sexuality"(42).
I find that this short shrift given to gendering is symptomatic of the arms-length distance Lee keeps from Cather's life as a girl growing up in Nebraska and her life as an American (not a British) woman throughout her text. I get the impression that Lee would prefer to move Cather to Europe with the other expatriates and that she often sees Cather's middle-class upbringing in Nebraska as entirely a negative feature to be shed by Cather. Lee observes at the end of the chapter called "Home": "Her re-vision of Nebraska was to be a struggle between sentiment and revulsion. Her return home would fill her each time with the old fear of never escaping and a recognition that this was the place which would always 'get' her" (44). Despite the fact that it is a welcome turn in Cather biographical representation to see a critic begin to place Cather in terms of both American and European literary histories as well as in a feminist enlargement of those histories, I think it is wise for biographers from outside the American context to investigate their own attitudes toward America when writing about American subjects. I think Lee's experience of Red Cloud, which she recounts in the introductory chapter, "Journeys," is an important statement of her relationship to her biographical subject. After deploring everything from Red Cloud's redneck attitudes to the eating habits of Nebraskans (she seemed to have met a very narrow range of them) she concludes, "I couldn't help feeling the extraordinary contrast between the immense landscape and the little, claustrophobic, provincial town, or noticing, even at a glance, the signs of cultural assimilation and stagnation Cather had anticipated" (3). Biographers coming from outside America to consider the life and work of this quintessentially American figure need to investigate their own national and cultural agendas concerning such subjects as margin and center and the class values that construct aesthetic values. In my own case, as a Canadian, I try to keep in mind how Canadians' experiences of space, western settlement, and national myth making have differed from those of our American neighbors, and I think British scholars will need to examine their attitudes toward high and low culture and the way in which America blurs boundaries in this regard. Critics like Lee also need to give special attention to the way English identity is especially informed by an intense and very specific class consciousness. Although America is not a classless society, class works quite differently in America than in England, and some of those rural stereotypes she found in the "Prairie Pizza" in Red Cloud may not be, in fact, as easily placed as she seems to think. However, I hasten to add that it is Lee's self-revelation in "Journeys," like O'Brien's in her articles on biographical process, that allow me as reader to better understand the biographer's construction of subjectivity. This treatment of the self of the biographer is welcome to the critic wishing to theorize the relationship of biographical subject and biographer, a necessary practice in a time when we no longer believe in the definitive biography.
Although, I hope, there will be future biographical projects on Cather, ones that make use of the now solid foundation of research that has been established, no biography can ever accomplish the special intimacy that a well-written personal memoir does. Even though I agree with O'Brien and other feminist biographers that a relationship exists between biographer and subject, that literary relationship cannot replace an actual relationship. The personal memoir, unlike biography, is always based on a relationship with the subject, and through detailed descriptions—not only the physical appearance, manner, dress, voice, and gesture of the other but also the quotidian details of conversation; the physical settings of meetings in homes, gardens, restaurants, and libraries; the telling of shared jokes, favorite sayings, and pet peeves; the narration of disagreements over everything from summer vacations to socialism—the memoirist embodies the subject for the reader. Biographers need to heed these details in making their dramatic reconstructions of their subjects and in heeding them they also need to acknowledge their debt to them.
I will quote at length from two memoirs of Cather, Edith Lewis's and Elizabeth
Sergeant's, to illustrate what I mean by embodiment of the subject. Both
reconstruct their first meetings with Cather. Lewis met Cather in the home of
another admirable western woman, Sarah Harris: I had been silent, a fascinated spectator, while Willa Cather and Sarah
Harris carried on their duel of words; but when I got up to go, Willa Cather
accompanied me to the door, and there she stood and talked with me for
fifteen or twenty minutes, giving me her whole attention. She talked to me
as if we were fellow-students, both pursuing the same vocation [Harris had
published Lewis's college themes] . . . Willa Cather asked me how many hours a day I worked, and what I found the
best time of the day for writing; what I liked best to write about. I do not
think it was tact, or that she was trying to put me at ease. She had always
a warm, eager, spontaneous interest in people. It was impossible for her to
make a perfunctory approach to anyone; she wanted at once to get beneath the
surface, to find out what they were really like.(xii-xiii)Willa Cather and
Sarah Harris were having a spirited discussion about something,—I
have no idea what—and after I was introduced, they paid no attention
to me, but continued their conversation. Willa Cather, a rather slim figure, in
a gray and white striped cotton dress, was sitting very upright in a
straight-backed chair. She had curling chestnut-brown hair, done high on her
head, a fair skin; but the feature one noticed particularly was her eyes. They
were dark blue eyes, with dark lashes; and I know no way of describing them,
except to say that they were the eyes of genius. . . . Willa Cather's eyes were
like a direct communication of her spirit. The whole of herself was in her
look, in that transparently clear, level, unshrinking gaze that seemed to know
everything there was to be known about both herself and you. (xi-xii)
Lewis
does not stop at the physical description but goes on to describe Cather as an
interactive person:
In Sergeant's account Cather is framed by her career accomplishments, as the
managing editor of Then as the elevator insisted on coming to a full stop, she gave me a little
push, a sort of pat and cried effervescently, as the door slammed: "To our next meeting!" It was as if I had had a cup of champagne. (41)McClure's (I have excerpted considerably
as it is a long description): "Her eyes were sailor-blue, her cheeks were rosy,
her hair was red-brown, parted in the middle like a child's. As she shook hands, I
felt the freshness and brusqueness, too, of an ocean breeze. Her boyish,
enthusiastic manner was disarming, and as she led me through the jostle of the
outer office, I was affected by the resonance of her Western voice, and by the
informality of her clothes—it was as if she rebelled against urban
conformities." Once they are in Cather's office, where she is to look at
Sergeant's writing, the breezy tomboy is gone: "Watching her with a beginner's
tremor I felt the impact of something beneath her editorial mask: crude oil, red
earth, elemental strength and resoluteness. Her sheer energy was alarming to a shy
New Englander. . . . Nebraska had been mere geography to me till I met this tense
dynamic person, with her homespun brilliance. Now I wanted to know where she ended
and Nebraska began." Cather examines the manuscript and after some political
sparring that is to become typical of their relationship, she judges it worthy of
revision, introduces Sergeant to her chief, McClure, and officially becomes
Sergeant's editor. Then, unlike a typical magazine editor, she accompanies
Sergeant down in the elevator, in the same way as she escorted Lewis to the door,
making a literary friend of her as she goes: "'There are only three or four people
in the whole world with whom I can talk about books,' Willa Cather said to me with
a confiding look and that hesitation in her voice which I already associated with
emotion. . . . Flaubert, Balzac, Tolstoy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne
Jewett—we were deep in them in two seconds, so deep that when the
elevator stopped Miss Cather motioned it imperiously on its way" (33-40).
Personally, I like this image of Cather and Sergeant riding up and down in an
elevator, making literary critique:
As I read the ways that these women embody the charismatic Cather they knew, I was brought closer to the Cather that had been forming in my head while I read the biographies but that could not embody itself until I read these memoirs. An insistent set of related questions kept popping into my head: What was it like to raise a child as precocious and charismatic as Cather? What was it like to be in the same family, to be her grandparent, her sibling, her niece? What was it like to parent a child who was at once so insistently individualistic and at the same time so terribly needy of intimate relationships? What was it like to have a child who could equally charm anybody in town she wanted as a friend or shock the entire county with her goings on? How do you raise such a child so as to keep her safe while not perverting or destroying her special qualities? I realize that these are maternal or parental questions and I willingly admit that they stem from my own subject position as a family person, which makes me put myself in the place of her parents, her siblings, her extended family, and the townspeople of Red Cloud, the whole village that they say it takes to raise a child.
Many biographers take quite a stereotypical attitude toward the artist's family: it is either a site marking early influences to be shaken off as soon as possible in order to become the self-defining individual artist or it is seen merely as a passive vehicle of the ideological interpolation of the child. However, Cather was an artist—and I think the facts of her life bear this out—who was integrally and interactively involved with her family all of her life; that relational bedrock, more than any necessary separation from early influence, helped make her art possible. I offer a few family facts that I find biographers have not yet fully considered: Cather was her parents' first and only child for four long years. They thought her so special that when she went to college not only did they finance her (not a typical act for parents of a girl in that time) but they also locked up her room and despite the crowded household no other child was allowed to use it. Cather not only spent her childhood in intimate play with her brothers but actually went on holidays with them, at their enthusiastic instigation, when she was a middle aged woman. Cather's mother, the strong-willed imperious beauty noted by all biographers, was also the kind of mother who, when it was pointed out to her that young Willa was wasting the music teacher's time by asking questions about topics unrelated to music, is said to have retorted that the teacher had better come twice a week instead of once. Cather's relationship with her mother continued to be one in which her mother held great authority. For example, knowing how the heat depressed her daughter and made her cranky, her mother had to tell her, when she was old enough to know better, to please delay her annual summer trip home, she would be wise to come after the weather cooled a little (that was the year she and Lewis found Grand Manan). Cather was a special person to all her family members. Even her nieces remember fondly the pleasures of unpacking their aunt's wonderful, expensive clothing and shoes when she came on her many visits home. And in her old age Cather not only yearned to be with her extended family as often as possible and managed it as often as she could but she also took on a whole surrogate family, the Menuhins.
My reading of Cather's life and works convinces me that Cather remained her mother's child all her life. This does not mean she remained childish, as a Freudian separation analysis would read adult mother-attachment. Rather, her continuing intense bonding with her mother allowed her to be childlike in ways that creative people, especially creative women, must be. The fluid and vulnerable ego boundaries that result from such a bond can make life difficult at times, can cause many self-protective, eccentric behaviors but they also allow that necessary ability for the creative person wishing to express an art based on a relational universe: the ability—in a very dramatic and intensely physical, emotional, and psychological way—to become the other. The way that Cather, in her art, takes on the guise of so many very different others is a sign of that ongoing relational bond with the personal mother. As critics and biographers we need to entertain the idea that the dominance of the mother (and mother surrogates) in the psychic life of her offspring to the point that even as an adult the child never quite believes in her own separate existence, may well be a mark not of a failure to achieve maturity but of the achievement of a maturity based on the imaginative ability to put oneself intensely in the place of the other.
Therefore, when I analyze those two dramatic times in Cather's early life, I see
in the cross-dressing a creative person able to enter so fully into the role of
the other that she adopts costume, manner, attitude, and a full embodiment of the
other. Her actions do not surprise me; I am surprised only by the wisdom of the
parents who tolerated and permitted it. The intensity of her love for Pound
indicates the degree to which she was intensely involved with the figure who is
each person's first love, the mother. The negative side of this "system of
dependency" has been theorized by many biographers of many artists; however, the
positive and ongoing nature of the bond, the ways in which it enables the artist's
function, her intervention in discourse, has not been considered. I find that
Cather's ability to
As well, because Cather was an unmarried woman, I think biographers have
overlooked how much she was a family person and how central a fuller understanding
of that family life is to a richer reading of her fiction. Just as we need new
insights into the nuances of gendering we also need to connect those insights to a
more nuanced view of family. In putting Cather more completely back into her
family we should not seek to give her any of the stereotypical familial roles in
which unmarried women are cast by popular psychology: for example, as victim of
unimaginative maternal conventionality or as unproblematically daddy's favorite
girl or as selfless maiden aunt. So I would like to propose that future
biographers begin to look at Cather as a family person and at Cather's family in a
new way. To indicate one of the first directions that investigation might take, I
think an extension of O'Brien's work on the mother-daughter relationship would be
a good place to start. Chodorow has said that "daughters never abandon the intense
preoedipal attachment to their mothers" (qtd. in O'Brien, The
Emerging Voice 104) and Lewis records that "Willa Cather always said she
was more like her mother than like any other member of the family" (7). For me, as
for a number of feminist theorists, this relationship is the central "system of
dependency" that forms the author function and builds and shapes the power to
intervene in discourse. Bernice Slote has observed that "Willa Cather's
imaginative world was one of subtle human relationships in settings of
extraordinary physical reality" (ix). I propose that the most subtle relationship
and the most extraordinary physical reality of Cather's life, both in her early
development and in later life, were those with her mother followed very quickly by
her grandmothers. Some of the exploration of the early effect of the
mother-daughter bond has been done. However, in terms of the effects of the bond
in Cather's later life—with all the illnesses and deaths, the
bittersweet results of fame, as well as the considerable literary output and the
central importance to her of female intimates—the subject has hardly
been touched.
A Life Saved Up to Double Lives, the American edition subtly changes the
way we read the text. I try to read it with both namings in mind.
In a 1938 letter describing how she wrote Just before I began the book I had seen, in Paris, an exhibition of old and
modern Dutch paintings. In many of them the scene presented was a
living-room warmly furnished, or a kitchen full of food and coppers. But in
most of the interiors, whether drawing-room or kitchen, there was a square
window, open, through which one saw the masts of ships, or a stretch of
grey. The feeling of the sea that one got through those square windows was
remarkable, and gave me a sense of the fleets of Dutch ships that ply
quietly on all the waters of the globe—to Java, etc. In my book I tried to make Professor St. Peter's house rather overcrowded
and stuffy with new things; American proprieties, clothes, furs, petty
ambitions, quivering jealousies—until one got rather stifled. Then
I wanted to open the square window and let in the fresh air that blew off
the Blue Mesa, and the fine disregard of trivialities which was in Tom
Outland's face and in his behaviour. ("On The Professor's
House, Willa Cather points to what seems to be an unlikely source of
inspiration for her novel. Tracing her depiction of the Blue Mesa to the image of the sea in Dutch
paintings, her account implicitly associates Tom Outland's southwestern adventures
with colonial trade:
Cather's reference to Java, a Dutch colony until 1945, turns a glimpse of the
sea in a painting into a synecdoche for European imperialism. Moving from Dutch
trading ships to Outland's exploration of the Blue Mesa, her account both
describes and enacts the rewriting of imperialism as an American adventure story.
In the course of the passage, the square windows that give the paintings an
exhilarating "feeling of the sea" become the structural "window" of "Tom Outland's
Story," which lets "fresh air" into the Professor's domestic life. By replacing
the sea with the Blue Mesa, the passage transforms the foreign into the familiar
and turns the expansionist gaze inward, toward an imaginatively reopened,
mythologically innocent continental frontier.The Professor's
House" 31-32)
With its allusion to Dutch colonialism, the letter invites its readers to consider
The Professor's House in the context of empire. The
novel's apparently imperial origins reveal an aspect of Cather's fiction that
scholars have only recently begun to examine. Joseph Urgo's 1995 study,Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration, and Guy
Reynolds' 1996 work, Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race,
Empire, both take as a central premise the notion that Cather's writing is
"about empire" (Reynolds 46). For Reynolds her novels "fictionalize the transfer
of European empires to America, and the subsequent growth of an American empire"
(46); for Urgo her writing "confront[s] the poetic potential of a transnational,
American empire in the process of formation" (131-32). The presence of empire
throughout Cather's fiction is undeniable, but its treatment is less
straightforward than these statements suggest. In Cather's writing imperial
narratives coexist with a tendency to efface the United States's twentieth-century
global role. The trajectory of her literary career displaces the American empire
ever farther from its contemporary moment and setting, from the
late-nineteenth-century settlement of the frontier to mid-nineteenth-century
French missionary work in the Southwest to the seventeenth-century colonization of
Quebec. Rather than focus on the relationship between the United States and the
world beyond its borders, she retreats inward and backward to the settlement of
the American West and the colonization of the New World. Her works transform the
American empire into a thing of the past, while her emphasis on continental
expansion keeps the United Stares figuratively at home. Far from implying Cather's
detachment from political issues, however, this ambivalent treatment of
imperialism reveals her embeddedness in them. She is not alone in her strategies
of effacement and retreat: as Urgo points out, most Americans "do not talk about
their empire" (132). Cather's writing participates in modern American life by
exploring not simply the fact of U.S. imperialism but also the national
unwillingness to talk about it.
The treatment of continental expansion in Cather's works is perhaps the most
striking example of her simultaneous acknowledgement and suppression of empire.
Although she does not explicitly use the term Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough
Riders of the World, as a "[y]oung, sturdy, . . . remarkable specimen of
manly beauty"(7). He plays the conventional pioneering role of the scout, who
carries "in his pocket the secrets [of] old trails and stones and water-courses"
(235) when he leads the Professor through the Southwest on horseback. Moreover,
Tom's domestication of the mesa recalls the settlement of the frontier. When he
builds a log cabin on the mesa top, he invokes what Richard White has called "the
chief icon of the nineteenth-century frontier, if not of American culture itself"
(19).
By depicting Outland as a frontiersman, Cather invokes a myth of unblemished
American heroism: the popular notion that the West was "settled," rather than
"conquered" (Grossman I), has long defined it as a
Since the late eighteenth century Americans have maintained a careful distinction
between their "settlement" of the frontier and the invasiveness of European
imperialism. As Patricia Limerick points out, this distinction still enables many
Americans to imagine expansion with a clear conscience: "The term 'frontier' blurs
the fact of conquest and throws a veil over the similarities between the story of
American westward expansion and the planetary story of the expansion of European
empires. Whatever meanings historians give the term, in popular culture it carries
a persistently happy affect, a tone of adventure, heroism, and even fun very much
in contrast with the tough, complicated, and sometimes bloody and brutal realities
of conquest" (75). Rather than exposing the frontier's "brutal realities," the
shift in Cather's letter from Dutch colonialism to Tom Outland's adventures on the
Blue Mesa serves to empty the former of its associations with violence. The
description of ships sailing "quietly" and the casual allusion to "Java, etc."
make imperialism seem harmless and unintentional. At the same time, both the
letter and the novel it describes perpetuate the notion that U.S. expansion is, by
definition, continental: the antidote to the crowdedness of Dutch interiors may be
the sea, but the antidote to "American proprieties" is the Blue Mesa. Although it
implies that the exploration of the mesa is analogous to Dutch colonial trade, the
letter manages to elide the real similarities that existed between European
imperialism and twentieth-century American expansion. By 1925, when The Professor's House was published, the continental
frontier had been officially closed for over three decades, and the United States
was emerging as a world power. Nonetheless, Cather ignored the United States's
growing involvement in Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of Asia and kept
her novelistic focus on the American West.
This reversion to the mythology of continental expansion is not unique to Cather's
work. According to David Wrobel, frontier narratives were quite common during the
early decades of the postfrontier, postwar era: "During the 1920s there was a vast
outpouring of writing on the American frontier, fueled in part by the publication
of Frederick Jackson Turner's collection of essays, The Frontier
in American History (October 1920). . . . The image of the frontier, it
seems, provided a kind of solace for some in the uncertain postwar years"(98). What sets The Professor's House apart from its contemporaries,
however, is the fact that it calls attention to its own gesture of bringing
expansionism back home: Cather reduces her frontier narrative to a 70-page
interlude within an otherwise domestic novel. Set at the turn of the century, "Tom
Outland's Story" is carefully disassociated from the contemporary moment depicted
in the other two sections. As a result, rather than simply displacing expansion from far-off lands to the
North American continent, the novel takes the inward displacement of expansion as
its subject. Like the Dutch paintings Cather describes in her letter, in which a
window frame surrounds a view of the sea and situates it within a domestic
interior, The Professor's House encloses its frontier
narrative within the novel's tripartite structure. The framing of "Tom Outland's
Story" locates continental expansion firmly inside the home: it keeps Outland,
whose name itself suggests expansionism, safely inland.
Cather's unusual choice for an epigraph—a quotation from within the
novel itself—alerts the reader to the fact that the novel is, in many
ways, about its own structure. The line is from Louie Marsellus's recollection of
the bracelet Rosamond was wearing when they first met, a bracelet Tom Outland had
given her: "A turquoise set in silver, wasn't it? . . . Yes, a turquoise set in
dull silver" (90). For James Schroeter, "[t]he point is that Book II is the
'turquoise' and Books I and III are the 'dull silver.' The whole novel, in other
words, is constructed like the Indian bracelet" (370). By suggesting that The Professor's House recreates, in written form, one of the
Native American artifacts Outland takes from the mesa, Schroeter aligns Cather's
point of view with that of Outland himself. His formulation implies that Cather
participates in, and thus endorses, Outland's romanticization and appropriation of
Native American culture: "as those familiar with the values running all though
Willa Cather's fiction will recognize, . . . the half-forgotten Indian bracelet
represents true beauty, while the overvalued gold necklace [given to Rosamond by
Marsellus] represents the false" (Schroeter 370). At first glance the epigraph
seems to invite Schroeter's reading. The reference to turquoise foreshadows
Cather's description of the mesa as a "blue, feature-less lump" (170), and the
image of this blue stone framed by silver does indeed evoke the tripartite
structure of the book. Nevertheless, as I argue below, the novel's treatment of
its "turquoise" centerpiece, its portrait of Outland's frontier adventures, is far
from uncritical. Moreover, Schroeter's assertion that the narrative simply rejects
Marsellus's false materialism in favor of Outland's authenticity overlooks the
fact that, by opening the novel with Marsellus's words, Cather hints at his
unavoidable centrality. By invoking Marsellus's memory of Outland's gift, the
epigraph underscores his replacement of Outland as Rosamond's husband. The
irrepressible engineer, with his international connections and his money-making
talent, supersedes the cowboy explorer of the Blue Mesa. Marsellus becomes a
figure for the United States's shift from continental to overseas expansion, a
rare acknowledgment in Cather's writing of American empire in its
twentieth-century form. By giving his words such prominence in the epigraph, the
novel implies the futility of resisting the nation's new, global role. As its
language struggles to contain an empire that has already moved beyond U.S.
borders, The Professor's House ends up depicting its own
failure to preserve the myth of innocent expansion.
When she described the intended effect of The Professor's
House in 1938, Cather chose to ignore the problem of Louie Marsellus and
highlighted instead the ease with which a sea voyage to Java could become an
adventure in an American desert landscape. If her fiction could not forestall the
United States's shift to overseas expansion, it could at least figuratively
domesticate the older, European, version of empire. In The
Professor's House European imperialism finds its way into the United
States in the form of several British characters, who look to Americans for
lessons in expansion. Transplanted to the New World, the British are rendered
innocuous and even foolish. Sir Edgar Spilling, for example, finds it necessary to
travel to the American Midwest for information about a European empire (25-26).
Whereas Sir Edgar is merely ridiculous, another British character, Henry, is "a
pitiful wreck of an old man" (175), reduced to working as Tom and Roddy's cook and
housekeeper on the mesa. The frontier domesticates (and ultimately kills) this
"castaway Englishman" (175), whose many years at sea associate him with
nineteenth-century British novels of imperial adventure.
If Henry's character seems to have sprung from the pages of imperialist
literature, that literature itself provides Tom with his reading material. Like
many other Cather characters, including Alexandra Bergson in O
Pioneers! and Jim Burden in My Ántonia,
Tom carries the idea of European empire into the American West in the form of
books. As he discovers and explores the mesa, he reads classical epics and British
adventure novels: "I'd brought my Caesar along, and had promised Father Duchene to
read a hundred lines a day. . . . We had Robinson Crusoe
with us, and Roddy's favorite book, Gulliver's Travels,
which he never tired of" (167). Later, when Tom settles down on the mesa to spend
a summer alone there, he reads Virgil's Aeneid, and his
impressions of this foundational myth of empire-building ultimately blend with his
memories of the mesa itself: "When I look into the Aeneid
now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that:
blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little
clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their
midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage—behind it a dark grotto,
in its depths a crystal spring" (228 ). While Tom's vision transports the world of
the Aeneid to the landscape of the American Southwest, it
also encloses the mesa itself within a book. The double image that he sees
transforms the mesa into a work of art.
By figuring Old World imperialism as the stuff of literature, The Professor's House renders it safe and familiar; with the simple turn
of a page these narratives' "undiscovered" destinations may be revisited again and
again. When he runs out of new books, for example, Tom begins to memorize passages
of Virgil. Moreover, because the rereading of adventure tales accompanies his own
exploits on the mesa, the exploits themselves seem to repeat earlier acts of
discovery. For the reader of The Professor's House the
history of the Blue Mesa itself reinforces this sense of repetition. Although Tom
and Roddy long to be "the first men" (166) to reach the top of the Blue Mesa,
their exploration of this supposedly uncharted territory proceeds along a
"well-worn path" (195). The realization that they are not "first," however, only
enhances the excitement of their adventure. In Tom's words, "To people off alone,
as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labor and
care in the soil of an empty country" (173). His remark is telling: despite the
"evidences of human labor and care," the country remains "empty." Imaginatively
restored to emptiness, the American Southwest becomes a territory to be
rediscovered time and again. Tom's own efforts at "tidying up the ruins to wait another hundred years,
maybe, for the right explorer" (227) transform expansion into an activity that can
be repeated infinitely within the same geographical space.
Many critics have noted that Cather's writing of "Tom Outland's Story" was itself
a return to well-charted territory. Cather had visited Mesa Verde a decade before
the publication of After a long stretch of hard climbing young Wetherill happened to glance up
at the great cliffs above him, and there, thru a veil of lightly falling
snow, he saw practically as it stands today and as it had stood for 800
years before, the cliff palace—not a cliff dwelling, but a cliff
village . . . lying in a natural archway let back into the cliff. (Rosowski
and Slote 84) I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it, on that first
morning, through a veil of lightly falling snow. Far up above me, a thousand
feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little
city of stone, asleep. (The Professor's House and described her
own adventure in a 1916 newspaper article (the article itself was unknown to
scholars until Susan J. Rosowski and Bernice Slote "discovered" and republished it
in 1984). The 1916 article captures Cather's own experience of following a
"well-worn path": "The journey to the Mesa Verde . . . is now a very easy one, and
the railway runs within thirty miles of the mesa. . . .[You take] a friendly train
with invariably friendly passengers and a conductor who has been on that run for
fourteen years and who can give you all sorts of helpful information" (Rosowski
and Slote 82). Rosowski and Slote observe that "Tom Outland's Story" repeats the
very language of Cather's article: "The 1916 essay is 'Tom Outland's Story' in
embryo: it contains the essential themes, techniques, and even images of the later
story—and indeed, of the novel" (Rosowski and Slote 91). In Cather's
descriptions, Tom's first glimpse of the Cliff City echoes that of his historical
precursor:
Ironically, Tom's first encounter with the "little city of stone" is an act
of repetition. He and Richard Wetherill, who "discovered" the Mesa Verde Cliff
Palace in 1888, see the same cliff dwellings from the same angle, through an
identical veil of "lightly falling snow." The snow itself restores the ruins to
blankness, preparing them, perhaps, for the next "discovery."The Professor's House
179)
Tom's exploration of the deserted Cliff City reenacts not only the journey of the
cliff dwellers themselves and of the white explorers who followed them but also
the exploits of characters in Cather's earlier fiction. Harrell notes that, "as an
idea for fiction the discovery episode predates the rest of 'Tom Outland's Story.'
. . . The proof lies in the number of times Cather used the scene in other stories
before working it out to her satisfaction—or nearly so, at
least—in 'Tom Outland's Story'" (85). Tom and Roddy's fictional
precursors include Margie and Douglass, the two adult protagonists of "The
Treasure of Far Island" (1902), who consider themselves the "original discoverers
and claimants" of an island where they played as children (265). Margie's
recollection of lying on a sandbar by a driftwood fire and devising "the conquest
of the world" (273) prefigures the analogous scene in "The Enchanted Bluff"
(1909), the most direct precursor to "Tom Outland's Story" (see Harrell 87-88). In
"The Enchanted Bluff" several boys sit around a campfire on a sandbar island,
planning their exploration of a 900-foot-tall rock in the middle of the New Mexico
desert. Like the Blue Mesa, the bluff is the site of a deserted, ancient Indian
village, frozen in time and suspended in the middle of a vast, empty desert
landscape. Both the scene of children planning their conquests and the bluff with
its Indian village continue to appear throughout Cather's later, better-known
fiction. In Alexander's Bridge (1912), for example, Bartley
Alexander looks out of his train window and sees a group of boys sitting around a
campfire. In The Song of the Lark (1915) Thea Kronborg
secludes herself in ancient southwestern cliff dwellings. The enchanted bluff
itself makes another appearance in Death Comes for the
Archbishop, when the archbishop encounters it while riding through the
desert plains of the Southwest. Thus, when Tom discovers the Indian village atop
the Blue Mesa, avid readers of Cather's fiction may experience an uncanny feeling
of familiarity: the mesa already seems like home because we have been there so
many times before. Expansion has become an endlessly repeated and seemingly safe
return to origins rather than a potentially dangerous journey into the unknown. It
is fitting, then, that when Tom revisits the Cliff City after his trip to
Washington he behaves like "home-sick children when they come home" (217).
In The Professor's House, as in Cather's earlier writings,
the supposed innocence of boyhood serves as a figure for the familiar, for the
imaginary home to which the professor, in his withdrawal from the world, returns.
At first it is Tom Outland who brings the Professor a "second youth" (234), but
even after Tom's death St. Peter is able to revisit an earlier version of himself:
"Tom Outland had not come back again through the garden door (as he had so often
done in dreams!), but another boy had: the boy the Professor had long ago left
behind him in Kansas, in the Solomon Valley—the original, unmodified
Godfrey St. Peter" (239). Cather's earlier writings, however, often treat boyhood
as the object of unfulfilled longings. The inaccessible mesa in "The Enchanted
Bluff," for example, represents a moment of childhood that can never be recovered.
According to the boy who tells the story, the Indian children were left on the
bluff to starve after the massacre of their parents. The coda to "The Enchanted
Bluff," in which the protagonists grow older without ever finding the village and
its abandoned children, embodies the irretrievable quality of childhood itself.
If "The Enchanted Bluff" depicts an unrealized fantasy, "Tom Outland'sStory" asks what happens when the boys actually reach the Indian village. In part the narrative preserves the innocent overtones of the adventure by keeping its protagonist frozen in youth, like the children at the top of the bluff. Despite Outland's ability to bring the fantasy to fruition, his own life remains unfinished. He dies in the war and thus remains, in the Professor's memory, forever a "tramp boy" (233). Outland avoids the indignities of adult life that would have debased St. Peter's image of him: "What change would have come in his blue eye, in his fine long hand with the backspringing thumb, which had never handled things that were not the symbols of ideas? A hand like that, had he lived, must have been put to other uses. . . . It would have had to write thousands of useless letters, frame thousands of false excuses. It would have had to "manage" a great deal of money, to be the instrument of a woman who would grow always more exacting. He had escaped all that" (237).
In the Professor's mind at least, Tom's boyhood self lives on, untainted by the superficiality and petty deceptions that St. Peter associates with materialism. Similarly, the mesa remains frozen in its original, pristine state, as though it, too, were the object of only imaginary explorations. Although it has been "discovered" repeatedly, it appears untouched. Tom declares that he "had never breathed in anything that tasted so pure as the air in that valley" (178), and when he drinks from a spring he remarks, "I've never anywhere tasted water like it; as cold as ice, and so pure"(187). As for the village itself, "everything seemed open and clean. . . .[T]here was little rubbish or disorder. . . . Inside the little rooms water jars and bowls stood about unbroken, and yucca-fibre mats were on the floors." (186). The emphasis on order and cleanliness in these descriptions is striking, especially since it marks a dramatic departure from historical accounts of the actual Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, accounts that Cather consulted before writing "Tom Outland's Story." Harrell describes the filth and dilapidation of the dwellings prior to excavation: "the remnants of rooms and towers poked through piles of rubble, every step raised dust centuries old, and the only water around was unfit to drink" (213). By effacing the changes wrought by time and weather, Cather's fictional description makes the mesa new again and ready for "discovery."
Cather adds to this sense of renewal by revising an anecdote about a female mummy
unearthed during the excavation of Mesa Verde. One historical account describes
the well-preserved corpse of a woman, which the explorers decide to call "She,"
after the title character of H. Rider Haggard's romantic adventure novel. A tale
of three Englishmen and their fantastic journey into southern Africa, The Professor's House obscures the literary allusion
to imperialist adventure and substitutes instead an allusion to biblical origins.
The change marks another figurative return home, a return to the mother of
humankind. With the presence of Eve amid its already paradisaical beauty and
purity, the mesa becomes a prelapsarian Eden.
The unspoiled qualities of the mesa make it an ideal source of the "fresh air" that "Tom Outland's Story" supposedly blows into the Professor's domestic life. Nevertheless, there are several hints that the Cliff City is not as Edenic as it appears to be. The apparent purity of Tom's motives, implied by his self-righteous claim that he "never thought of selling" the artifacts of the cliff dwellings and his refusal to touch the money Roddy earns by doing so (219-20), is undermined by his insistence on keeping "an account" of the artifacts in a "merchant's ledger" (189). Outland also admits that he "hoped we'd be paid for our work, and maybe get a bonus of some kind, for our discovery" (219). In Rosowski's words, "Outland appreciated the beauty and dignity of Cliff City; at the same time, he was a modern version of the 'brutal invaders' who ravaged the ancient tribe" (133). Tom's surprisingly cruel rejection of Roddy causes even Tom himself to be "frightened at [his] own heartlessness" (228-29). Perhaps the most blatant violation of Edenic purity is the horrifying murder that led to "Mother Eve's" demise: "there was a great wound in her side, the ribs stuck out through the dried flesh. Her mouth was open as if she were screaming, and her face, through all those years, had kept a look of terrible agony"(192). Father Duchene emphasizes the desecration when he surmises that "Mother Eve" had been punished by a jealous husband for committing adultery (201).
Materialism, ambition, jealousy: these are supposed to be the predicaments of the Professor's domestic life, which, according to Cather's 1938 letter, the "fresh air" of "Tom Outland's Story" was intended to alleviate. But the air that blows off the Blue Mesa is not much fresher than the air in St.Peter's house. The square window does not provide relief because the Professor and Outland are finally not that different from one another. It is difficult to separate Tom's voice from the Professor's, since the first-person narrative of "Tom Outland's Story" is actually a retelling, after Tom's death, of a story Tom told the professor years ago. Like Outland, St. Peter is simultaneously antimaterialist and implicated in materialism. He spends his career resisting the "new commercialism" in education (120), and he expresses his distaste for money throughout the novel. The Professor's disgust over a shopping trip he takes with his daughter Rosamond leads him to remark peevishly, "Let's omit the verb 'to buy' in all forms for a time" (134). Just as Outland asserts that "he must never on any account owe any material advantage to his friends" (151), St. Peter insists that "there can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. . . ; my friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue"(50). The Professor thus participates in the attempt to purify Outland by disassociating their relationship from financial concerns. Despite St. Peter's supposed antimaterialism, however, he admits that he and his wife "could not have been happy if Lillian had not inherited a small income from her father" (233), and he is "terribly selfish about personal pleasures"(17), from wine to luxury hotels to fine linen napkins.
In addition to the inconsistency of their respective antimaterialisms, Tom and the Professor share a tendency to withdraw from the rest of humanity. After Roddy leaves, Tom has the best summer of his life all alone on the mesa; he is so self-absorbed that, he later admits, "I'd forget all about Blake without knowing it" (228). Similarly, the Professor thinks "of eternal solitude with gratefulness" (248) and resolves that "[h]e could not live with his family again" (250). Even their places of retreat resemble one another: like the Professor's study, which is located "under the slope of the mansard roof" and has a "low ceiling" (7), the Cliff City has "a long, low, twilight space that got gradually lower toward the back until the rim rock met the floor of the cavern, exactly like the sloping roof of an attic"(186). Secluded in these claustrophobic spaces, both Tom and St. Peter are portrayed as rather self-righteous isolationists who deny their relationship to the world around them.
The actual effect of "Tom Outland's Story" is thus strangely at odds with Cather's letter. Her description links Outland's adventures to a seemingly innocuous vision of expansion, one that would be confined within U.S. borders but would simultaneously provide a liberating sense of unrestricted space, like the "feeling of the sea" in Dutch paintings. Cather's letter achieves this vision by simplifying the novel's imagery, by reducing the window to a source of fresh air. Like the paintings she describes, the Professor's study has a "single square window" (7) that encloses the outside world within its frame while allowing just enough life-giving air to enter the room: "[T]he window must be left open—otherwise, with the ceiling so low, the air would speedily become unfit to breathe" (17). Yet, although it is an important source of air, the Professor's window also represents the threat of death: "If the stove were turned down, and the window left open a little way, a sudden gust of wind would blow the wretched things out altogether, and a deeply absorbed man might be asphyxiated before he knew it" (17). When the stove does blow out at the end of the novel, the gas fumes nearly kill the Professor. Paradoxically, it is the open window itself that renders the Professor's world literally "stifling."
The view from the Professor's window contributes to this stifling quality.
According to Cather's letter, the window that looks out over the sea in the Dutch
paintings becomes, in her novel, a structural window that looks inland, at the
Blue Mesa. In The Professor's House St. Peter's window
overlooks Lake Michigan, which the narrator describes as an "inland sea"(20).
Surrounded by land, the lake gives the illusion of far-off horizons while
remaining safely inside the North American continent. This fantasy of overseas
expansion at home foreshadows the depiction of the Blue Mesa and its setting: the
mesa is surrounded by a "sea of rabbit brush" (172), and the Cliff City faces "an
ocean of clear air" (191). The "inland sea" of Lake Michigan provides the Professor, who revels in the
sight of its "innocent blue" (21), with a feeling of boyhood adventure that is
free from associations with trade and colonialism. He underscores the lake's
innocence by explicitly linking it to his own boyhood: "When he remembered his
childhood, he remembered blue water" (20). Relying on the lake as an escape from
the boredom of everyday life, he compares it to "an opendoor that nobody could
shut" and imagines that "[t]he land and all its dreariness could never close in on
you. You had only to look at the lake,and you knew you would soon be free. It was
. . . not a thing thought about, but a part of consciousness itself" (20). Here
again, however, the novel calls into question the possibility of unrestricted
"inland" space. By internalizing the image of the sea, by turning it into a
metaphor for Lake Michigan and his own consciousness, St. Peter has made escape
impossible. Ultimately he associates the sea with the imprisoning forces of his
own life: "The university, his new house, his old house, everything around him,
seemed insupportable, as the boat on which he is imprisoned seems to a sea-sick
man" (131). Once a potential source of freedom, the sea becomes a site of
imprisonment, just as the open window that provides fresh air almost leads to the
Professor's suffocation. Expansive images, in other words, turn into their
opposite in this text; their expansiveness cannot be sustained once they are
brought "inland." Even the Professor's final realization that he is "outward
bound" (257) with Augusta suggests not only that he is journeying outward but also
that he is tied to her, like a prisoner. By questioning its own effort to apply
figures of overseas imperialism to continental expansion—figures like an
open window, fresh air, and the sea—the novel warns that American
expansionist energies can no longer be satisfied at home.
If figures of expansion are suffocating when brought "inland," the figure of home
itself can be fatal. The fate of the domestically inclined cliff dwellers calls
into question the novel's privileging of the familiar and its emphasis on
repetition and return, both of which make continental expansion seem more
desirable than overseas expansion. Linking domesticity with extinction, Father
Duchene speculates that, because the cliff dwellers stopped "roving" and settled
permanently on the mesa, "they possibly declined in the arts of war . . . [and]
were probably wiped out, utterly exterminated, by some roving Indian tribe without
culture or domestic virtues" (198). The Professor underscores the connection
between home and death at the end of the novel, when he recalls Longfellow's
translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem, entitled "Grave":
In the Professor's mind at least, home has become a coffin.
As the novel uncovers the deeper implications of its own imagery, the characters'
names betray hidden sides of their personalities. Unable to sustain the illusion
of the frontier's openness, the text's language is barely able to suppress the
international scope of twentieth-century American expansion. Tom Outland's name,
for example, is an Anglicized version of the German Ausland, or "foreign country." The embodiment of continental expansion, this
seemingly all-American cowboy has an implicit element of foreignness in him, a
connection to the world beyond American shores. Similarly, the Professor has an
allusion to empire hidden in his name. Originally christened "Napoleon Godfrey St.
Peter" in deference to a grandfather who had fought in the Grande Armée,
he "abbreviated his name in Kansas, and even his daughters didn't know what it had
been originally" (143). Despite the Professor's secrecy, the legacy of European
imperialism comes back to haunt him when his own daughter, whom he accompanies on
a shopping trip, behaves "like Napoleon looting the Italian palaces" (135).
The precariousness of the novel's figurative language reflects the difficulty of
figuring an expansionism that is contained and yet liberating, derived from
European imperialism and yet distinct from it. By calling attention to its own
difficulties, The Professor's House enables a critique of
the internalizing quality of Cather's fiction more generally. Janis P. Stout notes
that the "story of journeys combined with a clinging to home" is a "pervasive
pattern in [Cather's] novels" (2o6), and Eudora Welty identifies this "clinging to
home" with a tendency to move from the universal to the particular: "[I]t was
[Cather's] accomplishment to bring her gaze from that wide horizon, across the
stretches of both space and time, to the intimacy and immediacy of the lives of a
handful of human beings" (68). For many critics the concern with home and the
individual in Cather's works reaches its ultimate expression as a withdrawal into
the mind. In the words of Hermione Lee, Cather is both "an original, adventurous
explorer . . . energetically making her mark on an 'undiscovered continent'" and
"a historian [who] . . .translates her landscapes, and the figures in them, into
landscapes of the mind" (1). By portraying the writer as a pioneer, Lee engages in
the very process that she describes. Like Cather, she moves expansion from the
continental frontier to the realm of the imagination.
Lee's description of Cather as a "historian" links Cather to the Professor himself. In addition to his focus on the past, St. Peter's increasingly reclusive behavior makes him an ideal figure for Cather's project of internalizing expansionism. The similarities between the Professor's "internal quest" (Rosowski 130) and Cather's own strategy of internalization compel the novel's readers to examine her strategy critically. During the course of the novel St. Peter's inwardness becomes an almost fatal obsession. His cramped study provides an enclosure within the already confined space of his home, and he regards his desk as a further retreat, "a hole one could creep into" (141). To the Professor even a trip downstairs becomes a dangerous voyage: "On that perilous journey down through the human house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper" (18). Like the mental landscape of Cather's frontier, the Professor's study becomes almost indistinguishable from his mind, the most inward space of all. According to Rosowski, "[t]he upper recess of an abandoned house is the only inhabited portion of a structure now empty and dead; similarly, a narrow intellectualism is all that is left of St. Peter's own life" (131). Merrill Maguire Skaggs makes the connection between study and mind even more explicit: "All the living being done here anymore takes place in the 'dark den' of the third-floor attic study the Professor still works in; that is, what life he has left occurs in the upper story, in his head" (75). As St. Peter gradually withdraws from the world around him, retreating into his study and his mind with Outland's diary, his absorption in memories of the youth's adventures becomes so complete that the distinction between them and his own boyhood nearly collapses.
The Professor's internalization of Outland's adventures represents a continuation
of his life's work, an eight-volume history entitled The Spanish
Adventurers in North America. Although his research takes him to Spain,
the American Southwest, Mexico, and France, he completes the writing itself in his
study. As the narrator recounts, "the notes and the records and the ideas always
came back to this room. It was here they were digested and sorted, and woven into
their proper place in his history" (16). With its references to digesting and
sorting, this description defines the Professor's scholarly project as one of
absorbing and imposing order on the Spaniards' imperialism. The figure of weaving
in turn, associates his work with the production of art: "Just as, when Queen
Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux,—working her
chronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes,—alongside the big pattern
of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds
and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters
of his history were interwoven with personal memories"(85). By interweaving the
"dramatic action" of military exploits with a "playful" pattern, Queen Mathilde
makes her narrative of violence seem harmless. Similarly, by bringing history into
the home, by weaving together ideas of empire with "personal memories," the
Professor transforms the conquest of the New World into a tale of "adventurers."
The Professor's adherence to a fixed "design" (89) for his book highlights the
aesthetic aspect of his project and links him to the artistically inclined cliff
dwellers, whom Tom describes as "a people with a feeling for design" (182).
Like the weaving of violent deeds into a tapestry or the framing of the sea in a
Dutch painting, the arrangement of flowers in the St. Peters' drawing-room defines
aestheticization as a process of interiorizing and ordering: "There was, in the
room, as [the Professor] looked through the window, a rich, intense effect of
autumn, something that presented October much more sharply and sweetly to him than
the coloured maples and the aster-bordered paths by which he had come home. It
struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just
as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious
and bold, which selected and placed—it was that which made the
difference. In Nature there is no selection" (61). The Professor's preference for
cut flowers over those in their natural environment reflects his desire to control
the world outside the drawing-room. Displaced from outside to inside, the flowers
become even more beautiful, just as the stones from the Blue Mesa become "princely
gifts" (103) when Tom brings them into The Professor's
House. The unknown hand that "selected and placed" the flowers in the above
passage recalls Cather's own "fastidious and bold" selection of an expansionist
narrative from the annals of history (the nineteenth-century "discovery" of Mesa
Verde) and her deliberate placement of it in the middle of her book.
Given the Professor's delight with the effects of interiorization, it is not surprising that his own garden seems more like an indoor space than an outdoor one: "There was not a blade of grass; it was a tidy half-acre of glistening gravel and glistening shrubs and bright flowers . . . and in the middle two symmetrical, round-topped linden-trees" (6). With its emphasis on tidiness, polish, and symmetry the garden is a model of discipline and control. The imposition of order is excessive, as if the Professor were afraid that his "tidy half-acre" might slip back into its natural state at any time. St. Peter's repeated conquest of his own backyard functions as a substitute for travel abroad: "In the spring, when homesickness for other lands and the fret of things unaccomplished awoke, he worked off his discontent here" (6). His half-acre allows expansionist energies that might otherwise be directed overseas to be channeled inward. As a popular symbol of America, the garden, like the mesa, alludes to the frontier, itself a mythological "Garden of Eden far removed from the evils of the Old World" (Wrobel 5, 4). Despite its Edenic associations, however, the garden's rigid precision has ominous overtones. As a figure for the frontier, it does not seem far enough removed from the "evils" of the Old World. In fact, it is more European than American: the Professor, we are told, "had succeeded in making a French garden in Hamilton" (6). Transplanting the American Eden from France, the Professor reenacts the imperial conquest of the New World: he ultimately gets "the upper hand" of his "bit of ground" (6).
Although the Professor struggles valiantly to transplant a European garden to his tightly controlled, walled-in yard, he would prefer to "cultivate" Louie Marsellus, the embodiment of overseas expansion, as a distant "stranger in the town" (64). Unlike the flowers, the garden, and even Tom Outland, whom he succeeds as Rosamond's husband, Marsellus is not easily contained or domesticated. With "acquaintances . . . from the Soudan to Alaska" (27) and an ability to converse easily about "conditions in the Orient" (26), he is a far cry from the conventional American pioneer. His commercialization of Outland's scientific legacy—a revolutionary type of airplane engine—makes him a participant in the United States's effort to "colonize space" (Douglas 434, 454). In addition to being ambitious and internationally connected, Louie is also Jewish, a fact that enables the novel to use anti-Semitic stereotypes in its ambivalent critique of American globalism. The narrator points to Louie's ethnicity by observing that "[t]here was nothing Semitic about his countenance except his nose—that took the lead" (32). Later in the novel Kitty remarks defensively, "Does [Rosamond] think nobody else calls him a Jew? Does she think it's a secret?" (70). Drawing on the centuries-old stereotypes of the wandering Jew, who belongs to no particular country, and the greedy money lender, who grows rich without producing anything, Cather appropriates the Jew as a symbol of global, economic expansion. In her study of the perception of Jews in nineteenth-century America, Louise Mayo notes that, for people who lived in rural, agrarian areas (like the Nebraska prairie), "Jews were aliens, not part of the 'producing classes,' often 'detested' middlemen. While the Jewish banker, unlike the storekeeper, was beyond the immediate experience of the average American, he learned about that evil figure from Greenback leaders who warned of international Jewish banking houses" (128). Cather alludes to the stereotype of the unproductive Jew when she establishes a contrast between Tom Outland, who is creative but earns no profit from his creativity, and Marsellus, who, in Schroeter's words, "has no creative genius whatever, but knows how to make money"(371). As a chemical engineer, Marsellus is identified with an unavoidable future that is fast replacing the old frontier lifestyle. Schroeter asserts that, for Cather, "the engineer was the new man. He and his machinery were pulling us relentlessly away from the past and into the future. And so she merged Jew and engineer in one" (372).
Given the Professor's resistance to the future, his tendency to withdraw from the world, and his self-proclaimed antimaterialism, his aversion to Marsellus is not surprising. St. Peter thinks of his son-in-law as "unusual and exotic" and resists adopting "anyone so foreign into the family circle" (64). The Professor's discomfort, according to Walter Benn Michaels, stems from a nativist pluralism in which the Jew was regarded as an unassimilable racial Other. Michaels asserts that American identity was reimagined at the beginning of the twentieth century as an ethnic inheritance from the Indian, a legacy that was "something more than and different from the American citizenship that so many aliens had so easily achieved" (374). According to this nativist view, Tom Outland, who claims the cliff dwellers as his "ancestors" (219), is the appropriate son-in-law for the Professor, while his replacement by Marsellus "compromises the family" (Michaels 378). Michaels attributes the exclusionary racialization of American identity to American anti-imperialism, which used the resistance to "burdening the United States with . . . 'fresh millions of foreign negroes'" as one of its chief arguments against the colonization of the Philippines (386-87 n.1). Although I agree that "anti-imperialism promoted racial identity to an essential element of American citizenship" (Michaels 366-67), I do not read Cather's novel as unequivocally anti-imperialist. By the 1920s American imperialism no longer took the form of outright territorial acquisition; in place of colonization was a more insidious process of economic, political, technological, and cultural expansion. In this context Marsellus is less a representative of the unassimilable Other than a figure for the United States's own global role. Moreover, the novel's view of Marsellus is more balanced than the Professor's. Whereas the Professor is withdrawn from his family and inconsiderate of others' feelings, Marsellus is sociable, generous, and kind. Ultimately, St. Peter (and perhaps the novel as well) ends up liking the energetic entrepreneur in spite of himself. "Vanquished" by Marsellus's generosity and charm, he exclaims, "Louie, you are magnanimous and magnificent!" (149). Like so many other images in this text, that of the greedy, intrusive Jew loses its original associations and turns into its opposite.
The Professor's House depicts the futility of St. Peter's
resistance to his Jewish son-in-law by suggesting that Louie is not really
"foreign" at all, that he actually fits quite easily into the Professor's world.
Both Rosamond and Mrs. St. Peter quickly accept him, and he seems genuinely
interested in the Professor's books and lectures. Moreover, when Mrs. Crane
insultingly calls Marsellus an "adventurer" (119) the term links him both to Tom
Outland and to the Professor's Spanish adventurers. St. Peter recalls how his
daughters regarded Tom's childhood as "a gay adventure they would gladly have
shared" (105), one that they found more exciting than all their "adventure
books"(112). The Professor himself, although withdrawn from the outside world, is
nonetheless closely associated with the Spanish "adventurers" about whom he
writes. He is "commonly said to look like a Spaniard" (4), and his eyebrows look
"like military moustaches" (5). Marsellus, then, shares a legacy of adventure that
St. Peter claims for both Tom and himself. Like the figure of the Jew, the term
"adventure" changes in the course of the narrative, losing its original
association with American continental expansion (in the form of the Spanish
conquest and Tom's exploration of the mesa) and becoming associated instead with
the United States's global economic development. The progression from Tom
Outland's frontier exploits to Marsellus's life of overseas travel and economic
success seems inevitable. When St. Peter allows Outland into his family circle,
Marsellus is not far behind.
Two years before the 1925 publication of The Professor's
House, in her article "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle," Cather
announced that "[i]n Nebraska, as in so many other States, we must face the fact
that the splendid story of the pioneers is finished, and that no new story worthy
to take its place has yet begun" (238). There was a "new story," of course, a
story to which Cather herself tentatively alluded in her ambivalent portrait of
Louie Marsellus. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few oblique references, her fictional writing
after The Professor's House does not return to the subject
of twentieth-century U.S. expansion. Her later expansionist novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows
on the Rock, are set in the nineteenth and seventeenth centuries,
respectively, and depict Europeans converting and colonizing the New World. These
works pickup where the frontier novels leave off: they, too, celebrate American
expansion by depicting it in its mythologically untainted, continental form. By
1938, when Cather gave her account of The Professor's House
and characterized "Tom Outland's Story" as an American, landbound version of a
European sea voyage to the colonies, she was able to overlook the complicating
presence of Louie Marsellus, the symbol of twentieth-century globalism. In her
writing at least, American expansion had come home to stay.
One of our first jobs in editing a particular work of Cather's for the Willa
Cather Scholarly Edition is to assemble individual copies from as many editions
and impressions as we can find. We look for the potentially relevant forms of the
text that could contain changes made by the author. This usually means finding
copies issued during the author's lifetime. For example, in the course of
preparing Death Comes for the Archbishop for editing we
have collected the serial publication in the periodical Forum, collated copies of the first issue of the first edition, checked
impressions of the Canadian edition, identified copies of the second and third
printing of the first edition in order to confirm the correction of errors we know
were introduced in earlier printings, and located copies of the illustrated
edition, the Armed Services Edition, and the Autograph Edition. We rarely see a
copy of a work that Cather herself owned, however, so when we were assembling
copies of Death Comes for the Archbishop and Robert Kurth
showed us his copy of this book in the 1930 illustrated English edition, a copy
that Cather had owned, we were immediately interested.
The copy we saw was from the second English edition of 1930, comprising sheets of
the 1929 American second edition with an altered title page imprint, bound in
England. In this copy we found a number of signs of Cather's ownership that
transform the forematter of this copy of the book into a personal scrapbook. The
questions that struck us immediately were—what meaning did these signs
have? and then, more generally, why did Cather seem to be so closely attached to
this particular edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop?
Answers to these questions are necessarily provisional since there is little external material to throw light on Cather's intentions; we must begin by looking at the evidence itself and make what inferences we can. For the first question, about meaning, the evidence consists of the above-mentioned signs of Cather's ownership. The first sign is her signature on the front end paper and her parenthetical phrase below it "(personal copy)," both of which receive contextual significance from having been written on Harold von Schmidt's beautiful double-page end-paper illustration, in light brown, of a desert scene. Cather wrote her name right in the middle of a beautiful cumulus cloud in the artist's landscape of the Southwest.
As we turn the end paper over, we find a folded letter pasted onto the back. Unfolded, the letter holds a snapshot of Kit Carson (figure 1). The letter is to Cather from Agnes Thompson of Lawrence, Kansas, dated 31 January 1928:
This would have been a double pleasure for Cather: a photo to remind her of her
portrait of Kit Carson in Death Comes for the Archbishop
and a letter from a grateful and obviously satisfied reader.
On the blank recto preceding the limitation page, Cather pasted a colored
block-print of an adobe church. The presence of this print indicates Cather's
attachment to the novel's southwestern setting. The half-title page that follows
contains a drawing by von Schmidt, whose three drawings accompanied the
publication in Forum magazine.
But the contents page holds a bigger surprise, more intimate even than the others:
Cather pasted on this page a photograph of herself on horseback in a gravel-bed
stream (figure 2). By doing this she placed herself imaginatively in the scene
and, symbolically, as a character along with the two priests, Padre Martinez, and
Dona Isabella in the southwestern landscape of her own narrative. This
identification is deepened markedly in the next signs of her ownership: on facing
pages 16 and 17, following the prologue, Cather pasted photographs of herself,
again on horseback, this time different views in the same sage-brushed
southwestern scenery. Her photograph, on the half-title page ("The Vicar
Apostolic") and at the advent of Father Latour's journey, places her prominently
in symbolic alignment with him (figure 3). These photos are an outward sign of her
inward spiritual kinship with him. Now the second question becomes central: why
did she place these significant signs of attachment in this
printing and not in one of the first edition?
One answer to this question we can immediately discard. The 1930 Heinemann edition
of Death Comes for the Archbishop was made up of sheets of
the 1929 American edition (trade issue), so the Heinemann Commonweal magazine describing her emotional involvement in the writing
of the book ("On Death"). There she describes the Old World
connections of Death Comes for the Archbishop that underlie
her attraction to the priests: their natural values. The Hans Holbein woodcut, the Pierre Puvis
de Chavannes murals, the Jean-George Vibert painting, and the French priest
Machebeuf's letters—all point to a world Cather valued, one in which
innocence, authenticity, earnest faith, and natural values found important places
and one that contrasted sharply with the world she lived in.
In the Commonweal letter Cather described the happiness she
experienced in the writing of her narrative: "Writing this book .. . was like a
happy vacation from life, a return to childhood, to early memories. . . . As a
human being, I had the pleasure of paying an old debt of gratitude to the valiant
men whose life and work had given me so many hours of pleasant reflection in
far-away places where certain unavoidable accidents and physical discomforts gave
me a feeling of close kinship with them" ("On Death"
11-12). Seen in this way, the process of composition was for her a form of
communion with a moral order she missed in her own milieu.
Neither differences in the text nor changes in Cather's feeling about her book
explain her personal attachment to this particular edition. Another and better
answer to the question of why Cather was so attracted to the illustrated printing
lies in the
Knopf selected Elmer Adler to design the illustrated edition. Adler was a
sophisticated designer whose considerable taste and skill is evident throughout
the book. He made several
significant contributions to the edition, the first of which was his selection of
typefaces. Knowing that an English type designer, Stanley Morison, had cut a
series of facsimile typefaces from Renaissance forms for the monotype machine in
the early twenties, Adler saw that these matches of one designer's Death Comes for the
Archbishop. Robert Bringhurst has described Poliphilus and Blado as the Monotype Corporation's copy, made in 1923, of a roman font cut
in Venice in 1499 by Francisco Griffo. It was an early experiment in the
resuscitation of Renaissance designs, and the Monotype draftsmen copied the
actual letterpress impression, including much of the ink squash, instead of
paring back the printed forms to intuit what the punch cutter had carved. The
result is a rough, somewhat rumpled yet charming face, like a Renaissance
aristocrat, unshaven and in stockinged feet, caught between the bedroom and the
bath. . . . The italic companion to Poliphilus is based not on one of Griffo's
own superb italics but on a font designed by Ludovico degli Arrighe about
1526.(182)
Bringhurst describes Renaissance letter forms as having "a modulated stroke (the
width varies with direction) and a
In the illustrated edition one can see, in addition to the humanist axis of the individual letter forms, the additional and unusual features of the Poliphilus typeface. There are ligatures—several "st" (lines 7, 8, 9), "ct" (line 9), "fl" (line 8), and "fi" (line 4)—and two canted hyphens (lines 1and 8). The Poliphilus letter forms themselves, with these features, give an antique, rural, and decidedly handwritten look to the text.
The second of these design differences between the first edition and the
illustrated edition is the page design. A sample page of Poliphilus also shows the
relation of the typeblock (that part of the page occupied by text) to the page on
which it is set: the typeblock is almost as
Bringhurst thinks that this long line and wide column are "a sign, generally
speaking, that the emphasis is on the writing instead of the reading, and that
writing is seen as an instrument of power, not an instrument of freedom" (145).
About a tall column of type (one longer than Adler's choice for the page design of
Death Comes for the Archbishop), Bringhurst observes
that it is "a symbol of fluency, a sign that the typographer does not expect the
reader to have to puzzle out the words. . . . A little more width [in the column,
or typeblock] not only gives the text more presence; it implies that it might be
worth savoring, quoting and reading again" (147). This I believe is exactly the
effect of Adler's choice of a wide and short column of
typeblock—emphasis on the writing rather than on the reading: Adler
means for the reader to take care, perhaps even to deliberate, when reading
Cather's narrative.
The third difference between a copy of the first edition and one of the
illustrated is the way in which the illustrations were incorporated into the text.
This incorporation occurred in two ways: the placement of the 10 full-page
drawings as introductions to the 10 parts of the book, and the placement of the 48
smaller drawings
The overall book design (typefaces, illustrations, squarish page size, heavy paper
with uncut pages) produces an old-fashioned look, a printing that has the
distinctive handmade look of having been crafted at a country press. It is
significant that in 1934, as Knopf and Cather were consulting about the design for
Lucy Gayheart, she revealed to him that she had wanted
Death Comes for the Archbishop to look like it had been
printed on a country press, an impression she did not want Lucy
Gayheart to have (Knopf). Certainly the 1930 English illustrated edition
of Death Comes for the Archbishop (like the 1929 American
edition from which it is derived) resembles more closely a book printed on a
country press than does the first edition. And this leads us directly to the most obvious
difference between the first and second editions, the illustrations.
Von Schmidt, as Polly Duryea describes him, was a "San Francisco illustrator,
painter, and lithographer who portrayed subjects of the Old West, . . . 'Dutch'
Von Schmidt served as President of the New York Society of Illustrators and the
Westport Artists during his career. Von Schmidt illustrated for the Saturday Evening Post for 20 years." (293). Chosen by the
editors of Forum magazine to provide drawings for the
serial appearance of Death Comes for the Archbishop, von
Schmidt made three of them, two large ones featuring the archbishop and one
tailpiece of the cathedral, all three appearing throughout the text as head-and
tailpieces for each of the six installments of the narrative.
Knopf in his memoirs did observe that, as they were preparing this edition, the
artist "was extremely slow in delivering and did not keep to promised dates." Von
Schmidt answered Adler's call for 58 cuts with line and wash drawings of varying
size—many considerably larger than the resulting cuts; this may account
for the delay. In any case, we learn of von Schmidt's collaboration with Cather on
this book as he describes his working approach: I worked for two
years on these sixty-odd drawings for Willa Cather's beautifully written story
of old New Mexico. She had insisted with her publisher that I do the
illustrations, and my dealings were all with her directly. I made pencil
roughs, and we talked over the approach to take. We disagreed on some things,
but I felt that her characters were so well realized in words that it would be
a mistake for me to depict them too and possibly confuse the reader whose
interpretations of her words might be different from mine. So I did the
pictures as decorations that would set the background for the story and help
the audience get to know the old New Mexico as she knew it and as I knew it.
About six years later, I got a letter from her thanking me for insisting on
doing it the way I wanted. (Reed 206-07)
Thus the two drawings of the archbishop in
the book—the drawing of him praying before the cruciform tree that
preceeds book I and the headpiece to section I of book 9 showing him in his
garden—each show him subordinated to a larger natural setting.
Von Schmidt's decision to do the pictures as "decorations" was, I think,
especially appropriate to Cather's own style of legend, which she saw as
"absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment. . . . In the Golden Legend, "she
wrote in the Commonweal letter, "the martyrdoms of the
saints are no more dwelt upon than are the trivial incidents of their lives; it is
though all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience,
were of about the same importance" ("On Death" 9). Von
Schmidt's drawings, especially the head- and tailpieces, present scenes of
everyday human life in the Old West and measure this life against vast scenes of
natural beauty and power; they convey the ever present sense of religious devotion
underlying the priests' lives and work. His drawings frequently evoke the setting
of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes's fresco murals of the daily life of St. Genevieve in
the Parthenon, which contributed to Cather's sense of the shape of the story:
everyday life lived in earnest faith.
But Von Schmidt's work is important for a reason other than simple evocation: many
of his drawings provide a new context for
Another example of this graphic signifying is the heavily illustrated book 9 with
its 12 inked drawings. These 12 drawings, along with the other design elements,
set up what McGann has called "a reading field and set of interpretive
possibilities" that are quite
A final example of the influence of these illustrations in creating a new way of
reading the text is the group of remaining illustrations in book 9 and their
These cuts parallel Latour's review of his life and the value of it. They show a vast mountain-plain scene, deer on the plains, the two priests and Magdalena, a train crossing the plain, horses and a dog around a hacienda, an antelope roundup, a scene of a valley among the mountains, a woman looking out over a herd in the desert, two priests and a nun around Latour's bed, and a view of the cathedral. One of the last images Latour recalls is that of Canyon de Chelly (one of Cather's fondest memories of the Southwest): crops were growing, "sheep were grazing under the magnificent cottonwoods and drinking at the streams of sweet water; it was like an Indian Garden of Eden" (339). This was not nostalgia: "He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible"(313). He had shaped the old New Mexico as best he could to his own pastoral dream.
From studying the placement of these drawings in the text, one can infer the presence of the designer, measuring out the text in typeblocks for each page and anticipating the need for illustrations of a certain size to fill the typeblock space. For example, section I of book I, "The Cruciform Tree," has a drawing at its close on mid-page 28. This tailpiece—a shepherd boy with goats—serves both to close section I and to open section 2, "Hidden Water." Similarly, the text for book I ends on page 58 and calls for a drawing of a certain measure: a drawing of a priest (possibly Latour) looking out over an expanse toward Santa Fe fills out exactly the typeblock space of 3½ inches x 4⅜ inches. From this evidence we may also infer the necessary collaboration of Adler, von Schmidt, and Cather in the design of the book—all plans of course carried out, as Hellman reports, most carefully by Alfred A. Knopf (Bennett 65-6).
These four differences between the first and the illustrated edition—the typefaces, the page design, the book design, and the illustrations—all join to produce the effect Cather had wished: that it look like it had been printed on a country press. And all these effects together led her to prefer the illustrated over the first edition.
Although we have seen too few of Cather's personal copies of her works to
generalize, it seems likely that she had a particular attachment to Death Comes for the Archbishop, an attachment based on her
love for and identification with its southwestern setting and the values espoused
by its central characters. In any case, we have argued that she had a special
sense of identification with the illustrated edition. Adler's design—the
antique typefaces, atypical page size, stubby typeblock, and unusual
margins—together with von Schmidt's illustrations and Adler's placement
of them, led her to personalize a copy of this edition rather than one of the
first Knopf edition.
In Adler, Cather found a designer who could emphasize the text of the book as an expression of both religious faith and natural values. In von Schmidt Cather found an artist who readily adopted a method appropriate to her own style of legend: in his illustrations he set the old New Mexico before the reader, balancing realism with idealization in describing the everyday events of human life. He subordinated these events to both the natural scene and a higher reality—the power of faith in the priests' lives that Cather measured out in the text. The result of their collaboration led to an edition that Cather agreed might be reprinted instead of the first Knopf edition and one with which she could identify because it allowed her the optimum opportunity to align her intellectual and emotional life with those of her priests. Adler's design emphasized the permanence and stability of the past; von Schmidt's illustrations presented the eternal values reflected in the characters of Fathers Latour and Valliant against the majesty and sweep of the southwestern landscape, subordinating the events of their lives to that landscape and to the higher reality above and beyond it. The drawings and the design of the illustrated edition seem, for Cather personally, to have realized more fully her artistic intentions for the work. Designer, illustrator, and author transform her narrative, in the illustrated edition, into a golden legend of the West. And in this particular copy of it, Cather reveals her own desire to be part of that legend.
I wish to acknowledge my friend and colleague Frederick Link for his suggestions in transforming a paper given at the 1995 Quebec Cather Conference into this article.
Sidney R. Jacobs, vice-president of production at Alfred A. Knopf, described
Adler as "proprietor of the Pynson Printers, co-editor of The Colophon, collector of rare volumes, lecturer at Princeton
University, and founder of La Casa del Libro in San Juan."
Adler designed eight Borzoi books for Knopf:
(Jacobs's description and the book list appear in his chapter
"Alfred and Designers" in Bennett 287-88.)April Twilights by Willa Cather (1923)The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi (1925)From an Old House by Joseph Hergesheimer
(1926)A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne
(1926)The Works of Stephen Crane edited by Wilson
Follett, 12 vols. (1927)Trivial Breath by Elinor Wylie (1928)The Three Black Pennys by Joseph
Hergesheimer (1930)Quatrains for My Daughter by Elizabeth H.
Morrow (1932)
Lawrance Thompson reports that Adler was awarded a gold medal by the American Institute of Graphic Arts for his work as "publisher, printer,editor, collector and teacher." (20)
Thirty years ago, in a book entitled World War I and the
American Novel, Stanley Cooperman established an interpretation of
American First World War literature that has dominated critical discussion ever
since: focusing on writers such as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E. E.
Cummings, William March, and Thomas Boyd, Cooperman concluded that the American
literary legacy of the First World War was unparalleled in its expression of
disgust, disillusionment, horror, and contempt. This outpouring of revulsion
toward the war stemmed, Cooperman explained, from two sources: first, the
messianic, propaganda-inspired zeal with which Americans hurled themselves into
the war to end all war; and second, the highly impersonal, arbitrary style of
warfare that these would-be crusaders actually encountered in France. For
Cooperman, the enduring literature of the war portrayed the disillusioning
collision between the two—between American idealism and the realities of
a conflict dominated by applied technology: machine guns, poison gas, and
long-range artillery (which accounted for 75 percent of all American casualties in
the Meuse-Argonne battle [Cooperman 63-64]).Conditioned to regard themselves as
chivalrous exemplars of American manhood and frontier traditions, and pledged to
the romanticized heroism of their Civil War precursors (á la Stephen
Crane's Red Badge of Courage), the so-called doughboys
found themselves in an upside-down war, one in which their individual skills as
riflemen meant nothing and in which death came roulette-style, carried by
high-explosive projectiles (fired by an invisible enemy miles away) that
dismembered, eviscerated, or atomized their victims. As a further affront to
innocent American expectations, such combat, it was found, could drive men insane,
pounding them into shell-shock or suicide. According to the literary record,
Cooperman insisted, the Great Crusade had been the Great Sham: duped by
propagandists, fed into a poorly led, poorly trained army, and then simply herded
across no man's land, those soldiers fortunate enough to survive the killing
fields in France returned to the United States stripped of any idealism or
innocence.
Not surprisingly Willa Cather's novel of the Great War, One of
Ours (1922), did not fare very well in Cooperman's analysis: the story of
Claude Wheeler, a thwarted romantic who discovers in war the "something splendid"
previously lacking in his life as a Nebraska farmer, hardly fits into the pattern
of disenchantment that Cooperman located at the heart of American First World War
literature. Thus, while noting Cather's presumably unintentional coupling of
Claude's sexual frustration with his zest for combat, Cooperman dismissed the
novel as sentimental and ignorant; unlike the eyewitnesses, who presumably knew
better, Cather, who wrote of the war secondhand, simply perpetuated wartime
propaganda, her "forever fresh faced, ruddy, and preferably Nordic" (Cooperman 31)
young soldiers bearing little resemblance to the brutish cannon fodder of John Dos
Passos's Three Soldiers or Thomas Boyd's Through the Wheat. Cooperman conceded the effectiveness of the Nebraska
chapters; once the action shifts to France, however, One of
Ours "falls back upon the stereotypes of war rhetoric, the picture of
clean-cut American boys marching to save the world" (30). Nor was it possible,
Cooperman claimed, to read this distasteful element of the novel ironically.
Contrasting Dos Passos' social realism with Cather's alleged fantasies, Cooperman
concluded, "where the naiveté of Three Soldiers
represents dramatic irony, the naiveté in One of
Ours represents Miss Cather herself" (33).
As Cather studies exploded in the 1980s, critics aspiring to resuscitate the novel
offered counterthrusts to Cooperman's arguments by rejecting the notion that One of Ours is free from dramatic irony and by redefining
the work as a character study rather than a war novel. In 1987 James Woodress,
Cather's foremost biographer, claimed that the harsh response the novel provoked
in several reviewers (most notably H. L. Mencken) stemmed from inattentive
reading: such reviewers "did not read the novel carefully to see that Cather had
no illusions about the war" and "simply ignored the fact that the novel is told
mostly from Claude's point of view" (326). At about the same time another
influential Cather scholar, Susan J. Rosowski, approached the novel in terms of
Claude Wheeler's "willed blindness," noting constant ironic discrepancies between
the protagonist's enthusiasm and the often horrific scenes that confront him in
the trenches. For Woodress and Rosowski both, One of Ours
was a book not about the Great War but about Claude's limited perceptions of his
Quixotic experiences, which reach their climax in his mock-heroic journey "over
there." "The truth of the war," wrote Rosowski, "lay in a boy's experiences of it,
and this boy was young, naive, and romantic. . . . Most certainly his views were
shaped by convention; that is the point" (109).
I open this essay with such a lengthy summary of positions put forward by other
critics in order to illustrate the two highly polarized readings that One of Ours tends to elicit—one dismissive of the
text's apparent endorsement of patriotic clap-trap, the other resolutely committed
to exposing an ironic subtext. Indeed, in surveying criticism from the 1990s one
sees that opinion on the novel remains as starkly divided as the opposing trenches
on the Western Front. Among the naysayers, for example, we find Hermione Lee, who
considers One of Ours "a painful and unsatisfactory book"
(179), due largely to its unsuccessful mythologizing of the Great War, and Guy
Reynolds, who contends that after loading the novel with a number of shockingly
gory scenes, Cather then seemingly felt entitled to "present the idealistic glory
of war without apology" (121). In contrast, Merrill Maguire Skaggs emphatically
asserts that "the central fact about One of Ours that one
must see in order to read it intelligently at all is that the book is bathed and
saturated in irony" (40). Clearly, as Cather critics, we have not yet agreed
whether this troublesome novel is One of Ours or not;
despite Skaggs's enviable confidence, there are still plenty of readers who would
eject it from the Cather canon as a hopelessly dated period piece, one whose
portrayal of personal liberation through war (if read without the expectation of
irony) is entirely offensive.
In what follows I have tried to occupy a critical no man's land, if you will,
between these two positions and, by situating the novel within a hitherto
unfamiliar context, to offer a reading that stands as an alternative to both. Thus
my analysis represents an effort to understand Cather's text not by placing it in
relationship to other, now more "acceptable" war novels (such as Ernest
Hemingway's Farewell to Arms or Three
Soldiers), nor by approaching its more disturbing and problematic
statements as One of Ours
and America in the early 1920s, paying particular attention to Cather's adoption
of a specific and culturally pervasive pattern of imagery. I essentially agree
with the novel's detractors that One of Ours attempts to
fit American participation in the Great War into a consoling mythic structure,
that it represents more (or, for those who dislike the book, decidedly
My claim that One of Ours is very much a novel Three Soldiers (Lee 169), and the sheer level of intensive,
highly personal engagement displayed by the writer as she worked on the novel from
1918 until 1922—a period, we should recall, during which Cather studied
G. P. Cather's wartime letters to his mother, interviewed numerous soldiers,
consulted a New Hampshire doctor's diary for details on troop ship epidemics,
journeyed to her cousin's original grave site in France, and in short, did
everything she could to understand what the war must have been like for a
sensitive, inarticulate midwesterner. The novel's reception further suggests its
interaction with myths of the American war experience. In particular, it seems
doubtful that the hundreds of admiring letters that Cather received from former
servicemen in 1922 commended the book as a dissection of a particular American
type or as an alleged satire of martial idealism. On the contrary, the book presumably appealed to many
veterans precisely because it depicted a young American's love affair with France,
as well as his sense of contributing to a noble and personally enriching cause. If
Cather truly meant for the book to be wholly removed from the category of war
fiction or to be read as a work of sustained irony, then the citation on the 1923
Pulitzer Prize awarded to One of Ours missed the point as
well: "For the American novel published during the year which shall best present
the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American
manners and manhood" (Schorer 452).
So, if American participation in World War I is one of the central subjects in the
text, does the novel celebrate the Great Crusade as Cooperman claimed? The answer
is yes and no. The disparity between Cooperman's interpretation of One of Ours and Woodress's and Rosowski's suggests to me
that the novel is itself deeply conflicted on the subject of the Great War, hardly
a surprising conclusion once we consider that in the 1920s American attitudes
toward the conflict were seldom clear-cut or uniform. True, a considerable number
of servicemen turned novelists (such as Dos Passos and Boyd) did their best to
demolish the myth of the Great Crusade—and as we will see, One of Ours contains plenty of scenes that rival these
eyewitness authors in gruesome details. Yet affirmations of the myth also
appeared, as thousands of veterans, many of whom had experienced the war at its
worst, flocked to the newly founded American Legion, an organization devoted to
celebrating American participation in the Great War, and as communities across the
United States entered a commemoration craze so prolific that even today its legacy
is ubiquitous. By the late 1920s the Kansas City metropolitan area, for example,
could boast of its own miniature Arc de Triomphe (the Rosedale War Memorial, which
overlooks Rainbow Boulevard, itself named after the famous 42nd "Rainbow"
Division), a highway dedicated to the 35th Division (Harry S. Truman's outfit),
the inevitable Pershing Boulevard (what city in America is without one?),
and—to top it all off—the massive Liberty Memorial, a shrine
to the 400 Kansas Citians killed in France, complete with twin museum chambers and
a 217-foot observation tower. These domestic reminders of the doughboys'
sacrifices and glory were paralleled abroad by the efforts of the American Battle
Monuments Commission (chaired by Pershing himself), whose colossal shrines still
loom over the long-forgotten battlefields of the Marne, St. Mihiel, and
Meuse-Argonne regions in France.
A memorializing effort of particular significance to One of
Ours occurred in 1921 when the body of G. P. Cather, Willa's cousin and the
model (in many respects) for Claude Wheeler, was disinterred from a war cemetery
in France and returned to his hometown of Bladen, Nebraska. As far as I know,
Cather did not witness the subsequent ceremony—the Bladen Examiner would almost certainly have commented on her presence if
she had—but the episode illustrates the way in which the tendrils of
military ritual and myth-making worked their way into the nation's collective
consciousness and into the very soil of the Nebraska Catherland. As the first
Nebraska officer killed in the Great War and a posthumous recipient of the
Distinguished Service Cross, the deceased attracted all the ritual and fanfare
that the American Legion and the citizens of Bladen could muster. Attended by more
than 2,000 people, including former members of G.P. Cather's company, the burial
ceremony featured a program in the Bladen Opera House, where the flag-draped
casket was displayed beside the hero's eleven military medals, and culminated in a
procession to the East Lawn Cemetery featuring "eight flower girls uniformed as
red cross nurses" and a "hearse drawn by two white horses" ("Impressive Military
Funeral"). The granite memorial subsequently erected in G. P. Cather's memory
still stands, its bronze plaque bearing a likeness (considered accurate by those
who knew him) of the uniformed officer. Though the American Battle Monuments
Commission offered ample consolation for Americans affluent enough to visit the
former Western Front, the reburial of American soldiers in their
homeland—a gesture that sought literally to reincorporate the dead into
the culturally and geographically familiar, thus evading any problematic realities
"over there"—occurred in hundreds of communities across the nation and
reached its symbolic culmination, also in 1921, with the interment of the Unknown
Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.
Rather than reverting to "war rhetoric," then, Cather's novel actually utilized
what I will call an iconography of remembrance, a collection of images and
metaphors that runs throughout these acts of commemoration and that was embraced
by thousands, if not millions, of Americans in the 1920s in order to make sense of
a bewildering and costly national experience, one that claimed twice as many
American lives as the Vietnam War. The presence of this iconography in One of Ours is hardly surprising when we consider that the
book is, in a sense, a
One motif linking the novel to such artifacts is Cather's emphasis on eastward
movement—or, if you will, manifest destiny in reverse. Indeed, One of Ours might have been called "The Journey Eastward."
Cather opens the novel, suggestively, at sunrise and sends her protagonist (whose
childhood bedroom naturally faces the east) first to Lincoln, where he awakens to
the artistic richness of Europe, then to France, where he dies defending a sense
of culture and sophistication all but forbidden on the practical American plains.
Moreover, the titles of the final three books create a triptych that conveys the
theme of eastward flight: "Sunrise on the Prairie," "The Voyage of the Anchises,"
and "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On."
As these titles suggest, One of Ours offers a new myth of
American destiny and places this destiny in a new direction—not west, on
the frontier, but east, in the Old World. As Joseph Urgo writes, the novel
"situates itself on a liminal moment in American history . . . when the nation
made its turn away from hemispheric isolation toward involvement in a major
European war"(145)—and, I would add, away from the preoccupation with
the now-vanished frontier toward the notion of the New World triumphantly rescuing
the Old. Early in the novel, as the sun sets behind Denver Claude sees "the statue
of Kit Carson on horseback pointing westward," but the era of endless
possibilities closer to the Pacific has now, literally, entered its twilight:
"there was no West, in that sense, anymore" (100). More than any of Cather's other
novels, One of Ours signals the death of the American
frontier and all its attendant mythology. Mechanization and intolerant,
evangelical Protestantism (the ironically satanic, spark-emitting auto-mobile that
Claude's wife, Enid, drives to and from her temperance meetings unites the two)
have taken over the prairie where Claude's father once encountered Indians and
buffalo. And, in place of the vibrant, ethnically diverse setting presented in O Pioneers! or My Ántonia,
with its rich blend of first-generation immigrants and frontier free-spirits, the
first half of Cather's war novel confronts us with an increasingly
consumer-oriented and homogenized American Midwest, a place of cultural
conformity, big business, and the emergence of everything associated with the
appropriately constrictive term "Bible belt." Like James Joyce's Stephen
Dedalus—or, for that matter, Tom Outland, the similarly thwarted young
American in Cather's The Professor's House—Claude
ultimately flies eastward from a suffocating homeland, and again like Dedalus, he
seeks the destiny promised by his name: in Nebraska, Claude realizes, people
pronounce his name as if he were a clod of dirt; only in France will the Gallic
beauty and romantic potential of his title be understood.
Though this notion of war as the means of delivery from an oppressive,
frontierless America is understandably absent in patriotic memorials, which
typically portray the Great Crusade as an extension of domestic virtues abroad,
the imagery of triumphant eastward motion is virtually universal—and not
only in monuments constructed by Americans. Perhaps its most spectacular and
stirring incarnation appears in the French shrine to the Lafayette Escadrille, a
squadron of American aviators who served with the Allies prior to the American
declaration of war. Located near Paris, the shrine features a series of enormous
stained-glass windows that depict an American eagle, outlined in biplanes,
crossing the Atlantic, soaring above Mont-Saint-Michel, and driving eastward
toward the enemy in the skies above Chateau-Thierry and Hartmannswillerkopf. The
motif was also embraced by an organization whose memorializing efforts were of
particular significance to the Cather family, namely the Society of the First
Division, the regular army division with which G. P. Cather served until his death
at the battle of Cantigny. Founded in 1919 by former field officers, the society
sponsored reunions, supervised the construction of divisional monuments in France,
and ultimately recorded the exploits of the "Big Red One" in an elegantly
formatted book, the History of the First Division during the
World War (1922). Here, as in the Lafayette Escadrille shrine, images of
eastward movement abound: we see troopships resolutely pitted against the stormy
Atlantic and, in one particularly evocative pen-and-ink drawing, a Gallic rooster
encircled by the sunrise with an American flag waving in the background. Another
illustration, entitled the "The Chosen Corp," depicts an army of phantoms (like
the Angels of Mons) marching ever onward in the clouds above a French cemetery
(figure 1). Even the dead, it would seem, moved east—despite the fact
that American soldiers quickly adopted the British expression "gone west" as a
euphemism for phrases like "blown up" or "machine-gunned."
In addition to this relentless emphasis on eastward movement, One of Ours shares with the commemorative gestures of its day a distinct
variety of medievalism. Given the belief, widely held in the 1920s, that America
had "come to the rescue" of civilized Europe and defeated a nation of barbarians
who disregarded the rules of limited warfare, it is not surprising that chivalric
motifs pervade the iconography of remembrance. For example, the United States
Victory Medal, awarded to every American participant in the Great War, displays on
its face the image of Civilization, a winged, Valkyrie-like Amazon armed with a
sword. Likewise, the official certificate given to veterans wounded overseas
depicts the robed figure of Columbia knighting a kneeling soldier whose steel
helmet (adopted, ironically, to deflect such thoroughly modern projectiles as
high-power bullets and shrapnel) gives him a conveniently medieval appearance. The
rhetoric of the document matches the flamboyance of its visual image. Its caption
reads, "Columbia bestows to her son the Accolade of the New Chivalry of Humanity."
In the same vein, an illustration from the History of the 77th
Division, the New York unit that included the famous "Lost Battalion,"
captures the so-called Spirit of the Argonne in the form of a Yankee Colossus who,
outfitted with sword, helmet, and shield, bears down on diminutive Huns (figure
2).
In One of Ours Claude Wheeler first imbibes the romance of
the Middle Ages and receives his first impressions of the country for which he
will give his life through the legend of Joan of Arc. As a child Claude discovers
an old picture of the Maid of Orleans dressed in her armor and learns the
"essential facts" of her story, appropriately enough, from his mother, who
subsequently parallels the medieval heroine by combining militancy with saintly
faith when the Germans invade Belgium. Later, after momentarily escaping from
Temple College to study European history at the University of Nebraska, Claude
writes a thesis examining the Maid's testimony during her trial. Significantly,
the project becomes "for a time . . . the most important thing in his life" (53).
Throughout Claude's adolescence and early adulthood Joan of Arc stands literally
at the center of his conception of France, a deeply romantic vision that Cather
renders through a string of phrases linked by ellipses: "about [Joan of Arc's]
figure there gathered a luminous cloud, like dust, with soldiers in it . . . the
banners with lilies .. . a great church . . . cities with walls" (54). Joan of
Arc's story also demonstrates, at least to Cather's protagonist, that "ideals were
not archaic things, beautiful and impotent; they were real sources of power among
men" (339). As he prepares his thesis, Claude suddenly marvels at the way in which
"a character could perpetuate itself . . . by a picture, a word, a phrase" and "be
born over and over again in the minds of children" (54).
Characters in Cather's fiction often experience such visionary moments or
epiphanies—as Jim Burden does throughout My
Ántonia—while constructing mythologies that bestow a
sense of order and meaning to their lives. Yet Joan of Arc is an icon whose
significance extends far beyond Claude's individual history and the parameters of
Cather's text. In fact, the Maid of Orleans played a significant role in the way
grieving Americans looked back on the Great War, embodying both the spirit of
France for which the doughboys fought, and in many cases sacrificed themselves,
and the virtues of the chaste Christian soldier, a creature that the YMCA (whose
somewhat less than popular field canteens and wholesome entertainments the
American army heartily endorsed) had tried its best to manufacture in France. Once
again, if we open the History of the First Division during the
World War, we see that Cather's text shares an iconography that must have
appealed to nostalgic veterans and bereaved family members alike. The
frontispiece, for example, portrays an American soldier on horseback flanked by
medieval nobility, including Richard the Lion-Hearted (whose tomb several of
Cather's soldiers visit in Rouen); to the soldier's right, hovering near his
divisional banner and leading him forward with an inverted sword, is Joan of Arc
(figure 3). Another painting, entitled "The Gold Star" (a reference to the ribbon
pin that signified participation in a battle), also illustrates this frothy
mixture of medievalism, martial regalia, and the militant Christianity associated
with the French saint: here, beside the profile of a helmeted youth, a crucifix
appears—superimposed on a medieval broadsword (figure 4).
Like the stained-glass windows of the Lafayette Escadrille shrine, these paintings
capture, at least for me, the spirit of Claude's war experience, as related by a
narrator whose viewpoint often seems inseparable from the
protagonist's—or at the very least extremely difficult to distinguish.
Through their heraldry and evocations of medieval heroes (and heroine), they place
the American soldier triumphantly within the traditions of Europe; in the same
way, Claude discovers a sense of belonging, of connection, in the Old World that
culminates in his idyllic afternoon with Mme Olive. The antithesis of Claude's
born-again wife, who leaves him in order to join her missionary sister in China,
Mme. Olive is also a modern Joan of Arc, still elegant and cultivated but
exhausted by war. Claude's rapport with her is almost instantaneous. He becomes
"almost lost to himself in the feeling of being completely understood, of being no
longer a stranger" and concludes that "[t]wo people could hardly give each other
more if they were together for years" (316). Appropriately, it is shortly after
this profound encounter that Claude contemplates the inscription on the graves of
unknown French soldiers ("Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France") and realizes the
depth of his own devotion to France: "A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking.
Most of the boys who fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were
too young. They died and took their secret with them,—what they were and
might have been. The name that stood was La France. How
much that name had come to mean to him, since he first saw a shoulder of land bulk
up in the dawn from the deck of the
By examining monuments and divisional histories I have argued that One of Ours, while shaped by Cather's unique imagination,
also reflects a then-popular effort to establish a consoling mythology of the
Great War. Yet any consideration of imagery in One of Ours
would be incomplete without acknowledging that the narrative sometimes lurches out
of control and momentarily accommodates an ironic, even nihilistic, vision of the
Great Crusade, the very thing that the iconography of remembrance sought to
dispel. Perhaps the best example of this instability occurs when Claude and
several fellow officers bathe in a shell hole. The scene opens innocently enough,
as yet another display of the indomitable good humor (and inevitable good looks)
that Cooperman found so offensive in Cather's crusaders. But then Claude retrieves
a grisly relic from the bottom of the makeshift swimming hole—a German
helmet "coated with rust and full of slime." The men scramble out as "big sleepy
bubbles" rise to the surface. Claude has unwittingly "opened a graveyard" (296).
Instances of the grotesque or the macabre are not unusual in Cather's fiction; one
thinks of the bizarre vignette in My Ántonia in
which a mysterious tramp hurls himself into a thresher or of Pavel and Peter,
renowned throughout their native Russia as "the men who had fed the bride to the
wolves" (40). Yet the bathing scene in One of Ours is more
sinister than these seemingly arbitrary instances of horror: as if lifted from one
of Siegfried Sassoon's wartime shock poems or the pages of All
Quiet on the Western Front, the episode ominously juxtaposes the naked
physiques of young soldiers with corpses; war, we see, is a matter of turning healthy young men
into bloated cadavers at the bottom of a muddy hole. And Claude's own body, though
killed Hollywood-style with a bullet through the heart, will ultimately undergo
the same corruption.
As if to curtail such terrible implications, Cather ends the scene on a strained note of humor as Claude and his companions erect a sign that facetiously designates the shell hole "a Private Beach" (296). In other places, however, the horror of the Great War enters the text with such force that the mythic structure collapses entirely. When Claude and Sergeant Hicks encounter a 16-year-old English soldier, for example, they receive a chilling lesson in the realities of modern, industrialized warfare. The boy calmly describes how his Pals Battalion was massacred at the Somme: "We couldn't even get to the wire. . . . We went over [the top] a thousand, and we came back seventeen" (204). And finally, as Claude broods over the graves of the unknown soldiers, absorbed in his bittersweet contemplation of La France, the more down-to-earth Sergeant Hicks points to the absurdity of the war in a moving (albeit implausible) speech that seems to come from a different novel: "Somehow, Lieutenant, 'mort' seems deader than 'dead.' It has a coffinish sound. And over there they're all 'tod,' and it's all the same damned silly thing. Look at them set out here, black and white, like a checkerboard. The next question is, who put 'em here, and what's the use of it?" (319). As these disturbing and incongruous scenes suggest, there were clearly moments when Cather doubted the reassurance offered by her own iconography.
Unlike Skaggs and other advocates of the ironic reading, however, I do not see
these breakdowns in Cather's mythology as evidence of a sophisticated subtext that
runs throughout the book; rather, they demonstrate the strain to which the notion
of the Great Crusade was subjected as it attempted to explain a complex and, in
many ways, puzzling episode in the nation's history. As Reynolds points out,
"[t]he unevenness of the text, the technical failures and clashing discourses,
testify to Cather's difficulties in gauging the true 'national significance' of
the war" (123). Yet such problems were not simply Cather's; they pervade the
cluttered, overly insistent imagery of American First World War memorials as well
as the tortured, quasi-Masonic symbolism contained in the unit histories that
sought to justify and to explain their "rolls of honor." Cather's difficulty in
determining the "national significance" of the war is, I believe, what stands at
the very heart of One of Ours (hence the polarized readings
that the novel attracts), and it is what most ties the text to its cultural
milieu. Therefore, in closing, I would like to suggest something of the
troublesome ambiguity that surrounded the American experience of the Great War, an
ambiguity that Cather perhaps sought to dispel through myth but only succeeded in
recreating.
In the eyes of France, Great Britain and Canada (whose combined casualties in the Great War numbered more than 6 million) the lavishness of American war memorials, both at home and abroad, must have seemed disproportionate to the United States's actual achievements. After entering the conflict in its fifth act and suffering only a fraction of the casualties inflicted their allies, the Yanks apparently wanted more than their fair share of credit. When examined more closely, however, the memorials' gigantism and allegorical excess express not boastfulness but uncertainty, an uncertainty that has its origins in the contradictory realities of America's Great Crusade. Indeed, almost everything about American participation in World War I defied assimilation into a tidy master narrative. Although 1 million American soldiers fought in the six-week battle of the Meuse-Argonne and endured a poison gas-filled hell equal in misery to the very worst campaigns of World War II, their contribution to the Allied victory in November 1918 remained questionable, even dubious. One historian, in fact, has described Pershing's exhausted army as "reaching the end of its tether" by the time of the Armistice (Cooke 251). For the real "Spirit of the Argonne" one need only peruse period photographs that depict 10-mile-long traffic jams leading to the battlefield or consult the often hair-raising statistics tucked away at the back of unit histories: for example, by the end of its five-day stint in this terrible battle the 139th Infantry, a regiment of Kansas National Guardsmen, could assemble only 58 percent of its enlisted men and 53 percent of its officers (Kenamore 48); the rest were either dead, wounded, or "missing" (a category that included "stragglers from the lines," men who had basically run for their lives). Equally revealing is the fact that G. P. Cather's First Division, the longest serving in the Allied Expeditionary Force (AEF), received more than 30,000 replacements during its year and a half in France. Since a division at full strength contained approximately 27,000 men, this figure says volumes about the typical doughboy's chances, once in battle, of avoiding illness, shellshock, wounding, or death.
Yet despite the grim odds faced by Americans unfortunate enough to experience combat, the war seemed, in many ways, anticlimactic. Only a quarter of the 4 million men inducted into the U.S. Army in 1917 and 1918 ever heard a hostile shot. Only 2 million ever reached France. And then there was disease (principally influenza), which, to the consternation of those wishing to view the war dead as evidence of American martial ferocity, claimed roughly the same number of lives (about 55,000) as German bullets and shells (Stallings 375-81). Nor did the immediate aftermath of the Great War fail to shroud the event in contradiction and ambiguity. Woodrow Wilson's humiliating concessions at Versailles, where Allied statesmen made the Second World War inevitable, followed by the refusal of the American Congress to support the League of Nations, called into question whether the world would ever be made safe for democracy. In addition, while the nation spent millions on war memorials men disabled during the conflict received little if anything from the newly created Veterans Bureau, an organization so corrupt that its exposure during Senate hearings in 1923 was second only to the Teapot Dome scandal in outrageous revelations (see Severo and Milford 247-63).
Thus, with their penchant for abstraction, idealistic rhetoric, and baroque,
symbol-laden imagery, American war memorials and unit histories represented not
mindless jingoism but a sincere, perhaps even desperate, effort to impose meaning
upon a perplexing set of incongruities. In this sense they protest too much, their
very excesses exposing the void they seek to conceal. Cather also struggled to
interpret an event that affected her intimately. Most notably, the war had rained
destruction upon France, a nation she deeply loved, and claimed the life of her
Nebraska cousin, whose restlessness and fear of stagnation while living on the
Plains, she came to discover, partially resembled her own. Cather's anxieties
while researching and writing One of Ours, an act of
compulsion carried out over four years, reveal the insistent demands that the war
made upon her imagination: she knew that her best work involved the remembrance of
things One of Ours, a work of considerable immediacy, anyway. By
the same token, she recognized the seemingly insurmountable difficulties faced by
a noncombatant in describing modern warfare, but nevertheless she made the
attempt. Put another way, for Cather, like millions of Americans, the Great War
simply One of Ours became a war
memorial in words akin to those created in granite or stained glass. But Cather
was too complex of an artist not to leave some cracks in Claude's monument.
This essay is based on a paper that I delivered as the after-luncheon address at the 1997 Midwestern meeting of the Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society, held in Red Cloud, Nebraska. I wish to thank Kris Bair for her kind invitation to speak and the members of the audience for their patience (during what proved to be a rather lengthy presentation) and encouragement. I am also indebted to James Barloon, Marilyn Coffey, and Robert Rook, all of whom scoured the manuscript for blunders and, as usual, offered invaluable suggestions.
Malaise casts its shadow over much of Willa Cather's fiction, but the somber
presence of disease is most strikingly, indeed unremittingly, central to her
novel of old Quebec, Shadows on the Rock. Disease in
diverse, sometimes grotesque forms grounds this work. From the dignity of Count
Frontenac's last illness through the mundaneness of Frichette's hernia to the
bizarreness of Blinker's afflictions, Cather's characters are to some extent
defined by the diseases they present, are identifiable by their conditions, are
patients. Most importantly, they require the professional attentions of Euclide
Auclair, the apothecary, whose professional burden it is to somehow lighten
such afflictions by practicing his "dark science" (Shadows 212). And, although disease and dying never abate in Cather's old
Quebec, although Auclair's professional ministrations are far from universally
successful, although the season always seems to be the dead of winter (in spite
of Cather's occasional mention that summer does occur), and although everyone
seems to move in the marginal light of sunsets or candles, which merely
intensifies the shadows surrounding them, Cather yet persuades us that she is
depicting Quebec's golden age. What sort of sense can we make of this
combination of medicalizing focus and romantic nostalgia we find in Shadows on the Rock?
A pattern begins to emerge when we consider the disease-shadowed world of old
Quebec in relation to the rest of Cather's work. Turning to the summarizing
"Kronborg" section of The Song of the Lark, we find Dr.
Archie asking Thea if she had been "in love" with Nordquist, a singer with whom
she'd worked. She replies: "I don't think I know just what that expression
means. I've never been able to find out. I think I was in love with you when I
was little, but not with anyone since then. There are a great many ways of
caring for people. It's not, after all, a simple state, like measles or
tonsillitis" (381). Dr. Archie, who wants to hear that Thea has a happy, normal
personal life outside her work, asks his question "hopefully": her answer is
one he neither hopes for nor expects. Thea's negative simile for love is rather
startling. Love, she implies, differs from conditions of ill health like
measles and tonsillitis not in its basic state or nature but merely in its
degree of complexity. Thea resists a conventionally positive definition of
romantic or sexual love: within her epistemological uncertainty ("I don't think
I know just what that expression means") she suggests that being in love is a
diseased state that is at once more serious, more complex, less comprehensible
(and more potentially threatening) than "simple" childhood maladies such as
measles and tonsillitis.
Thea's negative simile that connects romantic love with the destructive power
of disease seems related to Blanche Gelfant's contention that in Cather's work
"whenever sex [or love or romantic involvement] enters the real world . . . it
becomes destructive, leading almost axiomatically to death" (96). Gelfant's
assessment of Cather's treatment of sex in her texts concurs with Elizabeth
Hampsten's findings that women between 1880 and 1910 "wrote about sexuality,
disease, and death as though they expected to slide by degrees from one to the
other" (102). However, Thea's comment about love seems less an acknowledgment
of the negative trend of this medical
Disease, doctors, and patients tend to predominate in Cather's writings. As we
have seen, Euclide Auclair and his interactions with people as patients in need
of treatment frame the story in Shadows on the Rock. The Song of the Lark begins with the words "Dr. Howard
Archie"; his presence, too, frames the story, in this case the story of the
rise to fame of his favorite patient, Thea. As the above excerpt suggests, he
continually provides occasion for Thea to reveal diagnostically significant
glimpses of her inner life. But every story of Cather's, it seems, is
susceptible to description in terms of its medical focus. "Neighbour Rosicky"
makes use of this same framing strategy: Dr. Burleigh is introduced in his
diagnostic role in this short story's first line. Reduced to a mere "Dr. Ed" by
the end of the story, this physician nonetheless has the last word on his
patient's life and death. Both "A Death in the Desert" and "On the Gull's Road"
focus on women who are patients, cases: outstandingly beautiful, gifted, and
doomed by disease to early death, these characters are presented to the reader,
if not by doctors, then by diagnostic and evaluative male voices (Collected Short Fiction). Sapphira and
the Slave Girl and My Mortal Enemy foreground
two famously impatient sufferers of untreatable disease. Alexandra in O Pioneers! begins to demonstrate her powers only upon
her father's sickness and death. Jim Burden arrives in the world of his
Ántonia only because his parents have sickened and died. We could
describe The Professor's House as a house of sickness,
of utter "dis-ease," for Godfrey St. Peter, for his family, even for the
structure of the house itself. The story of that lost lady Marian Forrester is
framed and motivated by medicalized events: Marian meets the Captain, her
husband, when she breaks her legs in a hiking accident; the Captain's stroke
and ultimate death increase her "dis-ease" with her world; her desperate
strategies for coping with such medically induced difficulties both elucidate
and distort Niel's image of her; Niel, the narrator, can enter the magic circle
of Marian's world only by experiencing his own medicalized event (a broken
limb). And, now recognized as Cather's first extensive piece of writing, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian
Science, in particular revolves around medical (or antimedical) issues
of disease, healing, and health. The extent of this (incomplete) list of
Cather's medically implicated texts may indicate the centrality of Cather's use
of disease tropes. The question is, what sort of use does she make of such
tropes, such medicalized naming of so much of human experience as "disease"?
It seems clear from the extent of the foregoing incomplete catalog of the
disease-doctor-patient nexus in Cather's work that a medicalizing,
science-based model of human existence in some way determines many of the
choices Cather makes in constructing her stories, in her choices of act, scene,
agent, agency, or purpose that determine her narrative. Cather seems very
concerned with what sickness is, what health is, how these binary states are
mediated and by whom (or by what). What is not clear, especially at first
glance, is why Cather, to whose romanticism Bernice Slote and Susan J. Rosowski
attest (Rosowski ix), should find this medico-scientific model, with its
necessary corporeal materialism, both attractive and useful. Romanticism, as
Rosowski indicates, is fundamentally "in reaction against dehumanizing
implications of the scientific world view" and characterized by a privileging
of the individual imagination that can synthesize and "create meaning in an
alien or meaningless material world"(x). Surely her use of the trope of the
diseased human organism as a mechanism that is broken and may be repaired or
discarded (as Cather does mostly explicitly in "Paul's Case," where she asserts
that, as the train hits the protagonist, "the picture-making mechanism was
crushed" [Collected Short Fiction 261]) does not
participate in the conventions of romanticism.
Critics, if they agree on nothing else about Cather, generally concur that
Cather's attitudes toward her subject matter are hard to pin down and seemingly
contradictory. Deborah Lambert speaks of Cather's "inconsistencies and
contradictions" (119) of attitude that seem to pervade what Judith Fetterley in
turn calls Cather's "remarkably powerful and remarkably contradictory" texts
(43). And these troublesome contradictions, such as Cather's apparent
oscillation between antifeminism and feminism, between medico-scientific and
romantic stances, are nowhere more apparent than in her treatment of "sex roles
and sexuality" (Lambert 119)—the diseaselike "love" that Thea's
medicalizing epistemological uncertainty draws our attention to. However, I
suggest that Cather's ambivalences and inconsistencies, rather than unraveling
into inexplicable strands of contradiction, may instead form the warp and woof
of both her life and her texts. Seemingly opposing threads, woven together, may
fabricate a whole cloth, a coherent attitude. I want, then, to examine the
possibility that Cather's model of human existence, although expressed in
medico-scientific imagery, is in specific reaction against medico-scientificism
with its particular authoritative and normalizing naming functions. And I will
argue that Cather's equation of what Gelfant calls sex in the "real world" (96)
(that is, heterosexual experience in the "real" world) with death or illness
reflects what, on the authority of Jane Rule's 1975 pronouncement in Lesbian Images, I will presume to call Cather's lesbian
viewpoint. I am suggesting that her antimedico-scientific bias is connected
with the medico-scientific establishment's naming of lesbianism as disease or
dysfunction. Her unwillingness to portray heterosexual unions "in the real
world" as positively healthy may be of a piece with her resistance to such
naming as well. That is, Cather's romantic resistance to the medico-scientific
model of human existence and interaction, in conjunction with her putative
sexual orientation, suggests the disparate threads—biographical,
historical, literary—that can be teased out of her texts and woven
together to make a pattern that coheres. And this pattern can then be taken out
of the shadows of negative namings and considered in the light.
In two hundred years doctors will rule the world. Science reigns already. It reigns in the shade, maybe—but it reigns. And all science must culminate at last in the science of healing—not the weak, but the strong. Mankind wants to live—to live.
Cather demonstrated an early familiarity with and predisposition toward science and medicine by presenting herself to the world as "William Cather, MD," her self-created adolescent identity and aspiration. Cather persisted as "William Cather, MD," for four years, beginning at the age of 14 (O'Brien 96). During that time she enthusiastically dissected various dogs and cats in Red Cloud in the interest of scientific experimentation, engaged in "toad-slicing," and "pursued her vocation seriously, making house calls with the two Red Cloud physicians, and on one occasion, giving chloroform while one of them amputated a boy's leg" (Lambert 120).
It is important to distinguish among the several related but distinct threads
of the young Cather's medico-scientific enthusiasm. Science and medicine
clearly appealed to Cather for their own sakes. She was drawn to the challenge
of exercising her mind with the rigors of such study, hence the M.D. part of
her adolescent identity. And in her graduation speech she strongly endorsed
science and scientific experimentation, citing science as "the hope of our age"
(O'Brien 113). However, in that same speech, as O'Brien indicates, Cather
"placed herself in a tradition of experimenters who became respected
authorities" (113). It is this thread of desire for recognition, authoritative
status, and the right to name, to define, as well as to investigate that I am
suggesting inspired Cather to assert herself as Doctor "William." Doctors,
scientists, were and are figures of some authority in society; they are
empowered to name, to diagnose, and prescribe for the diseased condition of
humanity. And doctors who indeed rescue the diseased from suffering and death
wield great and arguably desirable power through what the older and more
disenchanted Cather was to call their "dark science" (Shadows 212).
A connecting thread of romanticism runs through Cather's early medico-scientific enthusiasm as well. The appeal of the doctor figure for Cather, O'Brien suggests, was furthered by the presence of an important doctor in her home life. O'Brien reports that "a serious illness during which [Virginia Cather, Willa's mother] became attached to Dr. McKeeby immediately preceded the daughter's medical apprenticeship" (91). Dr. McKeeby, in a manner both heroic and dramatic, "achieved the patient's confidence along with her recovery" in what was called a "miraculous" cure; he transacted this cure in the best romantic tradition, wherein a powerful individual pits his imagination and resources against worthy opposition (91). Dr. McKeeby's success as a healer, with its manifestation of individual and imaginative transforming power, would have appealed to Cather's romanticism and inspired her emulation as strongly as would its medico-scientific aspects.
But in Cather's day doctors, those powerful namers, rescuers, transformers,
were male. "What man in his right mind would ever [even?] marry a female
doctor?" O'Brien quotes from the Webster County Argus
(99). In patriarchal Red Cloud such female unmarriageability was a "fate worse
than death" and was envisioned as sufficient threat of fit punishment to keep
in line such females as might transgressively aspire to be doctors. Although
Cather did not aspire to marriage, she did aspire. So Cather's interest in
science and medicine, which she coupled with an assumed male identity (and thus
at least temporarily neatly side-stepped the marriage issue), may also be seen
as her bid for greater power, greater authority than was willingly or easily
accorded to women in her day. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg asserts that the doctor's
"would-be scientific views reflected and helped shape social definitions of the
appropriate bounds of woman's role and identity" (qtd. in O'Brien 92): Cather's
assumed male identity, and indeed her early medico-scientific interests, are
connected to her desire to be on the authoritative side of that (male)
doctor-(female) patient equation. Cather was opting for the male-gendered
freedom to be the namer, not the named, and not primarily indulging a desire to
cross gender boundaries. This is not to deny or diminish the importance of
lesbianism but to make clear that such a sexual preference operates in a
different arena from career choice and from desire for social power. Given her
ambition and ability, even without a predilection toward her own sex, Cather
might easily have preferred to be male, to be accorded male rights and
privileges. Regardless of which aspect of the medico-scientific figure of the
doctor that we believe most attracted Cather in her adolescence, however, it
seems clear that the practice of medical science in her "Doctor William" days
represented to her a site of power—one ultimately unavailable to her
because of her gender, whatever costume she might affect and one that she
finally abandoned.
When she went to college, Cather returned at least superficially to the conformity of her female "Willa" identity. I could argue that she transferred her early skill with the scalpel to the written dissections of the human condition that give her work—perhaps especially her work on Mary Baker Eddy—the almost surgically incisive quality of a case study of abnormal psychology. And I could further suggest that her experimental interest reemerged as an interest in experimenting with literary form, with genre. But to suggest that she merely outgrew, transcended, or transferred her adolescent infatuation with medical science does not satisfactorily resolve the contradiction, the split between science and romanticism, that perplexes Cather's readers. Why, for example, if Cather was seduced by the medico-scientific world-view, combining as it did power and authority with "the hope of the future," are the doctors with which she so plentifully supplies her texts presented as ineffectual?
Illness expands by means of two hypotheses. The first is thatevery form of social deviation can be considered an illness.Thus, if criminal behavior can be considered an illness, then criminals are not to be condemned or punished but to be understood . . . treated, cured. The second is that every illness can be considered psychologically. Illness is interpreted as, basically, a psychological event, and people are encouraged to believe that they get sick because they (unconsciously) want to, and that they can cure themselves by themobilization of the will;that they can choose not to die of the disease. These two hypotheses are complementary. As the first seems to relieve guilt, the second reinstates it. Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing blame on the "ill."
Carl von Westphal, Lillian Faderman asserts, began the process of medicalizing
lesbianism in 1869 with his psychological study of the case of a young woman
who was both a tomboy and attracted to women. With the publication of his work
lesbianism entered the canon of medically named diseases. Inspired by
Westphal's work, Richard von Krafft-Ebing confirmed this "lesbian morbidity" in
his Psychopathia Sexualis. Lesbianism was a disease, he
announced, a condition in need of rectifying, caused by "cerebral anomalies":
lesbianism was "a functional sign of degeneration," simultaneously inheritable
and pathological (Faderman 241). Havelock Ellis, in 1897, popularized this
naming and medicalizing of the "disease" of lesbianism in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, a book that
Faderman asserts enshrined and popularized these stereotypes of "lesbian
morbidity" in the medical canon (241). Cather—a well-read,
quick-minded woman with scientific and medical interests—could hardly
have been unaware of this development in scientific thought or of the ways in
which such scientific diagnosing medicalized, marginalized, and disapproved of
her own sexual preference. She could hardly have failed to be much disturbed by
this development. From the defiantly public "William Cather, MD," phases,
Cather moved toward a more conventional sexual persona—or at least a
more femininely attired one. But the medicalization of lesbianism defined
Cather, as she must have been well aware, as diseased, no matter what her overt
behavior might have been. If deviation from social norms must be considered an
illness, a dysfunction to be cured, Cather and all lesbians must be defined as
patients, however much they might resist that role. If such a deviational
illness was considered, as Sontag suggests (57), primarily a problem, a defect
of the deviant will (the patient could recover if she would correctly mobilize
her will), then naming lesbianism as disease also blames lesbians for willfully
engaging in such social deviation, such ill health. Medicalizing lesbianism in
fact makes sure that the individuals thus defined as sick, as patients, are
excluded from naming functions: sick people by definition may not be objective
about naming their own condition or anything else. Clearly, lesbians, by
definition, must be defying what Smith-Rosenberg describes as the power of
doctors to define and shape women's roles and identities under the guise of
describing what is healthy, undiseased. And such defiance is written into every
mention that Cather makes of doctors in her texts.
Euclide Auclair, the apothecary of old Quebec, although central to the story of
Quebec's golden age in Shadows on the Rock, is generally
unable to cure illness. Granted, Auclair's desire to cure is impeded by the
novel's being set in the seventeenth century, prior to the medico-scientific
advances that the young Cather praised. But in spite of this distinction,
Cather shows this medical practitioner, struggling with disease as do all
Cather's doctors, with the best that is available to him according to his own
lights and likewise losing the battle: the dynamics (and the results) are no
different from those experienced or achieved by nineteenth- or
twentieth-century doctors. Auclair's wife dies of a cough that he is powerless
to cure (10). He arrives too late at the convent to treat Mother Juschereau's
sprained ankle, which has mended regardless (34). He can do nothing for
Frontenac, his patron who is dying, except to keep him company and promise to
do what is necessary to send Frontenac's heart back to France upon his death.
"We will have no more remedies. The machine is worn out, certainly, but if we
let it alone it may go a little longer" Frontenac insists (249), suggesting he
no longer has the strength to withstand the dangerous ineptitudes of medicine.
Auclair himself deplores most remedies: "He was strongly opposed to
indiscriminate blood-letting. . . . [Auclair's] opposition to the practice lost
him many of his patrons" (29, 30). And he further resists dispensing other
remedies much in demand in his part of the seventeenth century, like viper
broth and unicorn horn (212, 213). In fact, his stock in trade leans heavily to
preserved figs, apricots, and cherries and candied lemon and orange rind:
treats, not medicine. His most successful intervention, reminiscent of Dr.
Archie sewing up the flax-poultice for Thea, is to make a truss for a
Dr. Archie in The Song of the Lark seems at first glance
a powerful figure, physically, socially, and medically. Certainly he is a
sympathetic figure. But, Cather insists, in spite of his "massive shoulders"
and his socially prominent position in Moonstone, he is only "a
distinguished-looking man, for that part of the world"—a figure who
only seems large or distinguished, for lack of a sophisticated standard of
comparison (3). Such undercutting, which Cather begins on the first page of
this novel through the use of this geographical limiter, may start with Dr.
Archie's appearance but slices much deeper. Dr. Archie's medical endeavors are
also apparently only good enough "for that part of the world." (And can the
implication here be that the medical model, as well, is only a partial good, at
best?) Our first glimpse of Dr. Archie as a doctor is when he attends Thea's
mother at the birth of her seventh child. The birth, unproblematic, takes place
offstage; Cather does not report that Dr. Archie need do more than observe the
process. After the birth he observes that Thea, neglected in the fuss
surrounding the birth, is ill with pneumonia. Again, besides observing and
naming the condition, he does little to assist, beyond the rather effeminate
sewing of Thea into a flax poultice, a nurturing (what Granny would have done),
not a scientific gesture. Cather makes it clear that it was Thea's remarkable
constitution, not the doctor's ministrations, that pulled her through. Dr.
Archie, in Thea's company,observes and names the diseases and social
discomforts of Spanish Johnny and of Professor Wunsch; he does not or cannot
"cure" them, make them conform to the norms of Moonstone. More dramatically,
Dr. Archie can only look on and diagnose doom for Ray after his train accident.
As well, Dr. Archie can only observe and evaluate Thea's potential in a very
generalized way: "There was something very different about her" (9), a
difference he unscientifically intuits that makes her "worth the whole litter"
(8). While Dr. Archie is proven correct in his intuition of Thea's
worth—Thea succeeds against the odds—he can do little for
her. He is perhaps most effective after he gives up his medical practice and
devotes himself to making money speculating in mines; his newly achieved wealth
allows him to lend Thea the money that at once frees her from dependence on
Fred and allows her to pursue her studies abroad.
Nor are other doctors in Cather's work more able to cure their patients'
diseases. In Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Sapphira's
dropsy is untreatable by doctors. Even old Jezebel, on her own death bed, finds
the energy to comment with some disgust on medical ineffectualness: "Oh, Missy,
cain't dem doctors in Winchester do nothin' fur you? What's dey good
fur,anyways?" (87). What, indeed? When word reaches Sapphira that her
granddaughters are ill with diphtheria, she deprecates the attending doctor's
ability even to name, to diagnose the problem, much less treat it: "Brush! Why
the man's an ignoramus! It may be measles, for all he knows"(254). She's right
about Brush's incapacity, of course. Dr. Brush's regime of
treatment—starvation, dehydration, and punitive throat
swabbing—kills off the majority of his diphtheria patients. Mary, the
granddaughter who survives, does so by finding and drinking an unattended and
prohibited bowl of chicken broth. She can achieve this only because the medical
proxy whose job was to prevent her from drinking anything is "remiss" and
passively watches while she drinks it. The "scientific method" of the "good"
doctor Clavanger (opposite number to the inept Brush) is to do nothing
interventive or even "medical": he chats pleasantly with his patients and gives
them glasses of water. And Betty, Sapphira's other granddaughter, dies in spite
of this enlightened attendance.
Godfrey St. Peter, of The Professor's House, whom
Augusta addresses as doctor, participates in Cather's celebration of
ineffectual doctors on both sides of the equation: he is a doctor (of history,
a designation that, if not medical, still puts him in the ranks of authorized
namers, diagnosticians) and he is a patient. At the end of his summer of
withdrawal from his family and from his previous life, after a profound series
of inner transformations, and after a premonition that his life is nearly over,
he rather prosaically decides to see a doctor. Dr. Dudley, as his name
predicts, is, in spite of performing "tests of the most searching kind" on St.
Peter, a diagnostic dud. He sends St. Peter on his way, saying "There's nothing
the matter with you. Follow your inclination" (144). As St. Peter is indeed
feeling nonmaterial, not to say incorporeal, this inclination leads him to his
old study where the malfunctioning stove "coincidentally" all but satisfies his
suicidal impulse.
Dr. Ed Burleigh, in "Neighbour Rosicky," appears, at least, to be accurate in
his diagnosis of his patient Rosicky's problem. Rosicky is indeed deemed to be
ill—(is Cather flagging this admission by inserting the word
Cather relates, with sarcastic relish, "Doctor" Mary Baker Eddy's transformation from a demanding, neurotic invalid to the leader of amedico-religious movement—Christian Science—whose exceedingly unscientific tenets include the denial of the existence of disease, indeed the denial of matter itself. Cather relates that "Eddy asserted that there is no matter and that we have no senses" (179), making disease and cure both imaginary functions of our equally illusory brains. She further reports Eddy saying that "the fruit of the tree which Eve gave to Adam was .. . 'a medical work, perhaps'" (191). The pattern that I have been unfolding in Cather's treatment of doctors and their general effectiveness might seem to suggest that Cather and Eddy could agree about the medical-text-as-apple-of-temptation analogy. However, Eddy and Christian Science are as rigorously prescriptive about naming and as ineffective at actually healing patients as are all the other doctors that Cather writes about. Eddy and her "science," which blames the patient for entertaining erring, disease-inducing ideas, receive disdainful treatment at Cather's hands. Cather relates the story of a family in Des Moines who became devout converts to Christian Science—and whose two small children died as a result of Christian Science "treatment" (that is to say nontreatment) when they became ill. Cather includes a plaintive letter from the distraught parents:"Why this termination?" they implored (323-25), death being another thing in which Eddy proscribed belief. By including such plaintive examples of the fallacy of this view, Cather firmly opposes the view that disease is illusory.
Cather's presentation of doctors and their "dark science" reads like a casebook that obsessively documents medico-scientific malpractice. And Cather's presentation of heterosexual "love" as diseased, disturbing, and frequently fatal competes with and counters Krafft-Ebing's documentation of instances of lesbian degeneracy and indeed could be seen to parallel that text.
Nothing more deeply engrosses a man than his burdens. . . . And so the poet may come to have a "vested interest" in his handicaps; these handicaps may become an integral part of his method; and in so far as his style grows out of a disease, his loyalty to it may reinforce the disease. And it bears again upon the subject of "symbolic action," with the poet's burdens symbolic of his style, and his style symbolic of his burdens.
I have suggested that Cather's work is marked by her resistance to the
medico-scientific apparatus. Medical science, with its self-authorizing naming
functions, operates against the worldview of romanticism, in which Cather
clearly participated. Her resistance to the naming function—which is
also the function that gives the namers control over the named—is
comprehensible, too, as resistance to the recent medicalization of lesbianism,
which I believe was a central feature of Cather's own life. The burden of being
so named, so diagnosed as Other and disempowered, because diseased, by the
medico-scientific world seems likely, as Burke implies, to condition the
choices of subject and presentation in such an artist's work. Thus the symbolic
action of Cather's presentation of heterosexual "love" as diseased, as
universally flawed, is to redress that balance, to turn the carpet and show the
pattern of diseased heterosexuality that comes through on the other side.
Cather's characters seem indeed to all be "cases": "Paul's Case" is simply a
more overtly medicalized presentation. Paul, as Judith Butler reminds us, is of
course susceptible to a medicalizing interpretation of his own sexuality
(162-66): Cather is not saying the pattern is untroubled on either side of the
carpet. Love, in some sense, does equal death: no mortality (or life) without
sex. Certainly in My Ántonia,
Ántonia's father dies of the ramifications of ill-advised heterosexual
love, while Ántonia frequently pays the price of heterosexuality
through societal disapproval. Her dancing, her employment by Wick Cutter, her
relationship with the disappearing Donovan, all put her on the wrong side of
Black Hawk ideas of heterosexual health—for what we might call
"practicing without a license." In this novel, too, Pavel and Peter demonstrate
a "cure" for a life-threatening situation (the attack on the sleighs by a wolf
pack) occasioned by an ill-advised marriage celebration: they jettison the
originating, heterosexual cause of the problem, the bride and groom, and effect
an at least temporary get-away cure. And in O Pioneers!
Amadée, after his effusive praise of the married state and the joys of
reproduction, is killed off promptly and ironically enough because he ignores
his appendicitis in favor of enhancing his family's wealth by making the most
of the new machinery. Marie and Emile die of consummated heterosexuality.
Cautionary tales, all. A few more extensive examples will elucidate.
Dr. Archie's marital situation illustrates Cather's stance toward the disease
of romantic, heterosexual love and its victims. Mrs. Archie, née Belle
White, whom he married while he was in a disordered state of blind,
heterosexual infatuation, presents many symptoms of such illness and indeed
symbolizes Dr. Archie's, and indeed all of Moonstone's, marital disease. On
their wedding day "his besotted confidence, his sober, radiant face, his
gentle, protecting arm, made [her relatives] uncomfortable. Well, they were
glad that he was going West at once, to fulfill his doom where they would not
be onlookers. Anyhow, they consoled themselves, they had got Belle off their
hands" (Song 31).
Belle is afflicted with manifest heterosexuality—we are presented with her successful seduction of her husband—and, further, presents many secondary symptoms of the worst of female heterosexuality. She is pathologically frugal, her housekeeping is obsessive, and indeed she dies of obsessive cleaning when, in cautiously scrubbing with gasoline, which explodes, she incinerates herself and the marital home as well.
Belle's symptomology and behavior, if distressing, do not surprise Dr.Archie:
"In his work he saw pretty deeply into marital relations in Moonstone, and he
could honestly say that there were not many of his friends whom he envied. . .
. 'hanging and wiving go by destiny.' If wiving went badly with a
man—and it did oftener than not—then he must do the best he
could to keep up appearances and help the tradition of domestic happiness
along"(Song 76).
In an interesting redefinition of "romantic," Cather diagnoses Archie's
heterosexual disease as exacerbated by romance: as a patient, "thed etermining
factor about Dr. Archie was that he was romantic. He had married Belle White
because he was romantic—too romantic." (76). Wiving does not govery
well for anyone in The Song of the Lark. Fred's first
wife, who causes him to succumb to a disastrous bout of marriage through her
infectious heterosexuality, makes their lives a misery. Dr. Archie has the last
(medical) word about her: "a woman with general paresis should be legally dead"
(380).
In Sapphira and the Slave Girl Sapphira's condition of
diseased heterosexuality is more complex (than measles? than tonsillitis?).
Because she is immobilized by dropsy, her only, and arguably diseased, outlet
is to manipulate individuals around her, to control their behavior. When she
wrongly believes that her husband is sexually interested in her slave, Nancy,
her response is indeed both sick and heterosexual. She creates a situation that
would have ensured, if it had persisted, that Nancy would be raped by her
husband's nephew, the nephew an unwitting but mindlessly enthusiastic and
manipulable proxy for both Sapphira's husband's putative desires and her own
revenge. Heterosexual experience thus is figured not only as disease but as a
means of revenge, of punishment.
In "Neighbour Rosicky" it may seem at first glance that—exceptionally—heterosexuality, "wiving," has gone well for him. And indeed the image of Mary and her ever-present pan of kolache would seem to epitomize heterosexual bliss, or at least blissful comestibility. But the relationship of Rosicky's son Rudolph and daughter-in-law Polly is more heterosexually problematic. In some respects Rosicky's demise (of his heart) is a sacrificial gesture, symbolically both a response to and a cure for Polly and Rudolph's disease. Caring for Rosicky after his heart attack causes Polly to become resigned both to country life and to her husband: "It had been like an awakening to her" (67). But the enterprise of effecting this cure of heterosexual disease is indeed too much for Rosicky—he dies—and the reader might well wonder if the disease of Polly and Rudolph, like the thistles that Rosicky is weeding out when his heart attack strikes, could not easily return.
Heterosexuality is clearly implicated in Katherine's death in the desert. Her
obsession with Adriance Hilgarde, who regards her as, at best, a friend, has
replaced, displaced, her career in music. With her career, her real life,
removed by this heterosexual obsession, Katherine can only die, fittingly, of
consumption—that operatically ennobled disease of heroines who
nevertheless fail in the love and power game. She is consumed, to the last
degree, to her dying words—"Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear" ("A Death
in the Desert," Collected Short Fiction 217). Even the
narrator is consumed by this surplus of heterosexuality represented by
Adriance: he is Adriance's brother and resembles him to the degree that people
he comes in contact with (but particularly women) consistently mistake him for
his famous brother. Indeed, Everett, the narrator, seems to be in unsuccessful
flight from this erosion of identity that such constant misidentification
reinforces.
Like Neighbour Rosicky, Alexandra Ebbling's problem is said to be her
heart:"She had a bad heart valve . . . and was said to be in a serious
way,"reports the ship's doctor ("Gulls' Road," Collected
Short Fiction 82). But clearly heterosexuality and the position of
women in her day exacerbates or conditions this problem. The narrator of "On
the Gulls' Road" tell us that she married Lars Ebbling as her only escape from
Finmark; her heart problems develop subsequently (in response to his
heterosexual philanderings?). When her heart becomes further implicated in a
shipboard romance with the narrator, she is too ill as well as too married to
do more than acknowledge the experience and return to Finmark to die.
In My Mortal Enemy, Myra's diseased heterosexuality
takes the form of another blind, ill-advised, romantic marriage, like the
Shimerdas', like Fred's, like Dr. Archie's. She marries Oswald on the strength
of this heterosexual love and, disinherited by her uncle, finds over time that
it is not enough to live on or for. Similar to Mr. Shimerda's situation,
poverty becomes a major and distressing symptom. But most importantly,
heterosexual jealousy, combined with a very unromantic disillusioning about the
nature of her partner and his inability to be who she had imagined him to be,
become more symptomatically significant. Her disintegrating illusions about the
relationship are metonymic with her disintegrating body under the sway of an
incurable disease. She dies, of her marriage, of her disease, revisioning her
former beloved, her erstwhile heterosexuality, her illusions as metonymic with
her disease itself; she dies with the question hanging in the air "Why must I
die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?"(95).
And heterosexuality is inimical to old Quebec's golden age of "twilight and
miracles" (50). In Shadows on the Rock Euclide Auclair,
though married, is not a sexual being—he is widowed. Cécile,
whom we are told marries the dashing Pierre, does so between the count's death
and the epilogue, offstage, her future sexuality all but excluded from the
foregrounded image of the prepubescent Cécile. The only actively
sexual being in this novel is Jacques's mother, the prostitute 'Toinette, La
Grenouille. Her subhuman frog-nature, combined with her absolute ineptitude as
a mother, is symptomatic of further disease, in no way celebratory of
heterosexuality. Her condition, rather, causes suffering to her son, Jacques,
and unease to her community in general.
Caroline Miller's groundbreaking article "Genre as Social Action" builds on and
explicitly alludes to Burke's discussion of symbolic action (23). Miller
contends that every choice of mode of expression (which ultimately conditions
what can be expressed) is an action that has social and political consequences.
So while Burke suggests that the burden, the illness of an artist is
symbolically central to what she expresses and influences her choices about
what to express, I, with Miller, want to add to Burke's concept an active
social and political dimension. Cather confides to her readers that she is most
interested in being the writer of implication, of the "thing not named" (On Writing 41). Perhaps the key thread that, once pulled,
will unite Cather's seemingly oxymoronic strands of romantic, antiscientific
but doctor-patient-disease fixated texts is this. If Cather's obsessing and
inspiring burden is the stigmatizing, medico-scientific naming of lesbianism as
disease, then unnaming must be her action in response. Cather, by presenting
virtually all human interaction in the frame of disease, is engaged in a kind
of unnaming: if all is disease, the human condition, the human challenge, is
this uneasy mortality, and no one kind of human expression within it is less
diseased than another. Issues of sexual preference may be part of this
uneasiness, but she implies, the problem is more complex, more profound than
recent medical science has the capacity to comprehend or authority to describe
or proscribe. And perhaps the social action most endorsed by Cather is implied
in Thea's words, with which I began: "There are a great many ways of caring for
people" (Song 381). Cather privileges nurturing, nursing
over all medico-scientific activity: Dr. Archie is at his best sewing a
flax-poultice, Dr. Auclair making a truss and furthermore making his patients
comfortable with their infirmities, which become no infirmities at all but
simple variations in the texture of humanity.
And if there is no god of wine, there is no love, no Aphrodite either, nor other pleasure left to men.
Toward the end of The Professor's House, in the summer of
1921, Professor St.
Peter's family physician compliments him on his gourmet cooking and his private
stock of appropriate drink: "I wish you'd ask me to dine with you some night. Any
of that sherry left?" To which St. Peter replies: "A little. I use it
plentifully." His consumption is not at all disconcerting to Dr.Dudley: "I'll bet
you do! But why did you think there was something wrong with you?" (268). What
really matters in the two men's talk is their tacit disapproval of the scarcity of
imported wines in the early years of Prohibition, a time when America finds itself "split in two,
socially," according to St. Peter's son-in-law Scott McGregor. "It's not hard on
me, I can drink [illegal yet easily available] hard liquor," he tells Louis
Marsellus, St. Peter's other son-in-law. "But you and the Professor like wine and
fancy stuff" (108). Critics of Cather's fiction seem to have overlooked the
topical and consequential role of wine in St. Peter's life, while her biographers
have paid little or no attention to her pleasure in good wine and inevitable
displeasure with the 18th Amendment, the National Prohibition or Volstead Act, whose repressive
implications undoubtedly contributed to her sense that "the world broke in two in
1922" (Not Under Forty v). My essay examines the
significance of Prohibition and wine as part of the psychological, mythic, and
autobiographical complexities of TheProfessor's House.
Since the novel is Cather's "most personal" one in the mind of Edith Lewis (137),
someone who should know what is prohibited to say in such matters, it is
reasonable to begin by sampling some of the wine in Cather's house.
In one of the travel letters she wrote for the Nebraska State
Journal during her European tour with Isabelle McClung in 1902, Cather
expresses her epicurean delight in a dinner in Avignon, with its "ten courses,
each better than the last, with wines that made us sad because we knew we would
never taste their like again" (qtd. in Curtin 936). This unambiguous reference
connects with Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant's wistful recollection of Cather's view
of meals as "one of life's serious pleasures," during which"[c]onversation must
never divert one from the quality of the food on the plate and the wine in the
glass" (51). On the same subject, Lewis recalls the "many dinner-parties" she and
Cather gave in New York after moving to their spacious Bank Street apartment in
1912 (88). Although Lewis does not mention wine in this context, its presence is
understood from her later reference to "the jolly Italian wine-dealer . . . from
whom we bought supplies" during "the Bank Street years" at the edge of Greenwich
Village (177, 178). In a
comparable way, Professor St. Peter, who lives and teaches in a small town on Lake
Michigan, would buy wines from an Italian importer in nearby Chicago (176).
Such purchases, however, were difficult to make after Prohibition went into effect
in January 1920, so Cather implied in a quirkily pointed way in an interview for
the Omaha Daily News of 29 October 1921: "Miss Cather
denied living in Greenwich Village. 'The village doesn't exist,' she said. `How
could it in these times when the last cellar is empty?' " (Bohlke 31). Apparently
not everyone's private stock was as generous as that of St.Peter, who, by "a lucky
accident," had laid in "a dozen dozens" (98) of bottles of sherry before 1920.
That is to say, Cather's comments about Greenwich Village and empty cellars should
not be taken at face value because of their ironic edge, which must have been
sharpened by the occasion for the interview, namely her speech to the Omaha Fine
Arts Society and her being the guest of honor at a dinner sponsored by the League
of Women Voters (Bohlke 31). In other words, Cather found herself in a somewhat
uncomfortable situation; she was being celebrated and at the same time cornered in
a context that can be seen to reflect, at least implicitly, some of the results of
long crusading by the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon
League (Clark 71-99). Although Cather does not appear to be on record as a voice
against Prohibition, her cultural predisposition is evident in her dislike of
reformers (Sergeant 92-93), in her need for privacy (Woodress xiv, 141, 475)and
during her Omaha visit, in her sarcastic reference to Nebraska as being
"particularly blessed with legislation that restricts personal liberty"(Bohlke
149). It makes sense to read this comment as a veiled allusion to the fact that
Nebraska had been the 36th state to ratify the 18th Amendment, which thereby
became the law of the land (Root xi). Furthermore, Cather had once condemned the
Temperance fanatic Carry Nation in an editorial column for being "a woman with a
passion of violence and bitter speech" (qtd. in Curtin 851), without, however,
mentioning her notorious "hatchetation" of saloons that was much in the news at
that time (see Clark 81). More than likely, Cather had always wanted to stay
publicly aloof from the Temperance debate, as if sharing the view of the narrator
in The Professor's House, for whom Prohibition used to be
"unthinkable" (98).
When Cather began work on the novel in the fall of 1923, total Prohibition had already become rethinkable here and there as, for instance, in New York's decision to repeal the state law necessary to enforce the Volstead Act (Clark 167). The need for such public rethinking would have been more than obvious to Cather during her stay in France earlier that year; her signing a letter to H. L. Mencken with "Prohibitionally yours" (qtd. in Woodress 339) speaks for itself, particularly in light of Mencken's well-known praise for alcoholic sustenance (Sinclair 92-98). On a more personal level, Cather's long visit with Isabelle McClung and her husband Jan Hambourg in their house near Paris would have brought back some bittersweet memories of losing her friend Isabelle through marriage in 1916 and, as Woodress suggests (277), of having herself arranged the couple's wedding reception at a New York establishment called Sherry's. It may seem capricious to associate Sherry's with St.Peter's sherry, yet such verbal juggling, according to Merrill Maguire Skaggs, is characteristic of Cather as a"self-conscious . . . manipulator of her texts and subtexts" who leaves little room for "unrelated details in [her] fiction" (187). In other words, her old and new impressions of Isabelle, her recursive experience of the absence of alcoholic prohibition in France, and the now somehow prohibitive presence of her once closest companion as Mrs. Hambourg may at least partly account for St. Peter's stoic resignation at the end of the novel to his having "never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry" (282).
Given the sense of inevitability and the painful intensity with which Cather
experienced her need for psychological independence from Isabelle (Stout209-10;
O'Brien 240), the word
Sherry, however, is also considerably stronger than red or white wine;
consequently, St. Peter's telling Dr. Dudley "I use it plentifully" ought to raise
questions about his consumption of alcohol in response to the various forces of
deconstruction he has had to face at his university, in his marriage, and in his
increasingly dispirited private self. Yet so-called alcohol dependency and alcohol
abuse are surely not the issue here. While "plentifully" more than likely serves
as an acerbic allusion to Prohibition, the choice of "use" indicates the wine's
utilitarian nature to him as a symbol of physical, spiritual, and scholarly
pleasure. The fact that sherry, though not one of the ardent spirits, should be an
effective agent to raise St. Peter's spirit temporarily is thus the result less of
alcohol as such than of the venerable history and elevated image of wine; it
serves him as a buffer against the veneration of commercial and utilitarian values
in his family and at his university, values he perceives as insidious threats to
humane culture. Ironically, Thorstein Veblen's related concept of "conspicuous
consumption"(60, 64) fits St. Peter's epicurean inclinations as well as it does,
for instance, his daughter, Rosamond's, buying sprees. Indeed, his conspicuous
taste for imported vintages could easily conjure up notions of European decadence
and defiance of middle America's traditionally puritanical values, especially because
Cather's professor of European history keeps some of his sherry in his study,
where he had written his unconventional but internationally acclaimed The Spanish Adventurers in North America (98).
There is one description of his enjoying his wine there in connection with a lunch
his wife had packed, complete with "one of her best dinner napkins "because of his
dislike of "ugly linen" (102). In terms of lunch, this scene seems rather full for
a man who at one point told his wife that "[t]oo much is certainly worse than too
little—of anything" (154). The occasion had been Rosamond's grand
purchase of furnishings for her new house. Yet St. Peter's after thought about too much "of
anything" inevitably turns one's attention to his lunch decorum and fondness for
gourmet meals and wines in general, as if such matters of taste were prerequisites
for his work, in accordance with Nietzsche's dictum that, "for any sort of
aesthetic activity or percepti on to exist, a certain physiological precondition
is indispensable:
Being low in energy is precisely what St. Peter comes to admit to Dr. Dudley; so
low indeed that he does not even mention his feeling close to death (269). There
is, however, no convincing evidence to suggest that alcohol has become for him a
depressant rather than a pleasant stimulant. The social reality of Prohibition
would of course have contributed to his malaise. Thus his final perception of
America as "a Prohibition country" reflects his resignation to the Volstead Act as
such and to its potential subtext: the prohibition of living one's life
deliberately, of pursuing one's ideas and ideals regardless of whether they
question or subvert the collective ideal of habitual sobriety and godliness,
culture and commerce in Middle America. Indeed, St. Peter was once almost relieved
of his professorship for lacking in accountability appropriate to a university
increasingly governed by the applied rather than liberal arts and sciences (55,
58, 140). Above all, though, outward Prohibition forces him to deal inwardly with
his having let himself become a creature of "habit"(59,167) in his work and in his
reliance on wine as an indicator of his
"Pleasant is solitude among manageable things. And among manageable things, the most manageable for me are words," says George Santayana ("Idler" 4). St. Peter's opting for solitude—his study and French garden at the old house and his own beach on Lake Michigan—reveal how prohibitively unmanageable words have become for him. In his private life, his family's letters from France "certainly deserved more than one reading" but rarely received it (270); in his professional life as a man of letters, words have become increasingly difficult for him to arrange, as they touch creativity, art, and religion. It is as if the sherry he keeps in his study can no longer moderately temper his scholarly notions that religion and art "are the same thing, in the end" (69) and that "even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin" (68).
One can't speak of coincidence when Cather has St. Peter express these thoughts in
a class held on "an intense September noon—warm, windy, golden, with the
smell of ripe grapes and drying vines in the air, and the lake rolling blue on the
horizon" (67). During his student years in France, St. Peter would refer to Lake
Michigan,"the inland sea of his childhood" (29), as "altogether different" from
the Channel and the Mediterranean: "I don't know, il est
toujours plus naif"(31). Although the native grapevines on its shores are
also more
With this in mind, the lunch scene already mentioned deserves another look, not
least because it occurs just three months after the memorable September noon
above, on Christmas Day, an occasion likely to test St. Peter's habitual
withdrawal into his study: "He peered with interest into the basket his wife had
given him—a wicker bag, it was really, that he had once bought full of
strawberries at Gibraltar. Chicken sandwiches with lettuce leaves, red California
grapes, and two shapely, long-necked russet pears" (102). His"peering with
interest" reaches beyond the food, back to his first impulse to do research in
Spain, a notion that had come to him on one of his vacations in France with his
then-young family and had been the beginning of his falling out of love with his
wife, his Hawthornean birthmark as a scholar, as it were. His wife's lunch
presence, meanwhile, through her deliberate choice and "thoughtful" (102)
preparation of the basket, could also not have gone unnoticed by St. Peter, given
the associative alertness of his mind. Gibraltar would be a suitable backdrop for
the self-pitying despair with which he had wounded his wife a few days earlier by
telling her, "We should have been picturesquely ship-wrecked together when we were
young" (94). Yet that notion, seen in conjunction with the wicker basket, also
suggests a wish for rebirth. On the one hand, the textual emphasis on the basket
alludes to the floating cradles in patriarchal myth or legend; on the other hand, it
points to baskets as harvest-related symbols sacred to goddess figures such as
Isis and as related symbols of the birth-giving body (Walker, Dictionary 119-20). The implications for St. Peter are obvious. Though
literally "a formidable swimmer" (39), he finds himself spiritually and
emotionally far adrift, as if his "inland sea" has proven no less enticing but
more confusing as a maternal symbol than the Mediterranean itself.
The actual lunch in the basket addresses a specifically marital subtext to St.
Peter's dilemma. The memory of the luscious berries of yore, with their sensuous
connotations of his former infatuation with his wife, jars with the loveless state
of his marriage and with his present perception of the food: "shapely" but more
maternally than sexually suggestive fruit from the pear tree, sacred to Hera,
mother of the gods in Greek mythology; grapes, sacred to Dionysus (Bacchus), the
god of wine and women in Euripides' Bacchae; and sandwiched pieces of meat that,
whether it comes from a hen, a capon, or a cock, derives its name from the
latter. To digest
his wife's silent commentary on their marriage through her "thoughtful" lunch for
him, he may have taken more than one glass of his ritual cheer; I say this because
of one direct reference elsewhere to his having a cocktail as an antidote for
emotional pain (155). At the same time, the grapes in his lunch, by being vinifera
hybrids from California rather than wild, native ones from near Lake Michigan,
serve as a reminder of the growing unavailability of wine as well as his seemingly
concomitant unavailability as a husband and general inability to love or to
create. He appears to have fallen victim, as Eric Thurin has argued (270), to his
epicurean predilections, which have undermined even his Emersonian faith in the
equation of art and religion. Ironically, St. Peter's longstanding and almost
religious fondness for wine has become a habit that may still allow for his
seeming contemplation of awater-into-wine miracle to deal with Prohibition but can
no longer redress the apparent prohibition in his marriage of the mystical
association of water with Aphrodite and wine with Dionysus (cf. Walker, Encyclopedia 1066, 236). He had been confusing the physical
and social sides of marriage with the, in alchemical terms, Encyclopedia 466), addresses "the development of [one's] soul" and "a
deeper understanding of God" (Wehr 41, 44): in short, the process called
This process has been troubling St. Peter due to his tendency of"consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb 'to love'—in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets. When he met Lillian, it reached its maturity. From that time [on] .. . existence had been a catching at handholds" (264), among which good wine and food have been more reliable ones to him than love, spirituality, and religion. His gradual recognition of the fateful unruliness of love and his consequential self-prohibition of conjugal love (12, 34, 35) coincide with his increasing sense of loss of the language of the heart, soul, and spirit, of love, wisdom, and creativity, language in which grammar suitable only to the intellect does not succeed. Yet despite St. Peter's long habit of "marital escape" (Grumbach 333), it is too simplistic to conclude, as Thomas Strychacz does, that "St. Peter's creativity depends upon the absence of female and familial ties" (53). After all, he has remained very much drawn to the symbolic presence of the female and the feminine, particularly in the solitudes of his study and his beach on Lake Michigan. Whether in the confines of culture or the freedom of nature, St. Peter tends to find himself caught in Dionysian undercurrents.
In his Humanization of Willa Cather: Classicism in an American
Classic, Erik Thurin speaks authoritatively of Cather's "Dionysian and
Aphroditean impulse" as part of the "subtle, often hidden, patterns of symbol and
myth" in her work in general (90). Although the sherry in The
Professor's House and its apparent connection to Euripides' play about
Dionysus receive no attention, Thurin does explain the veiled allusion to the Bacchae in St.Peter's pointed reference to his wife about
Euripides' fate as an old man allegedly hiding from women in "a cave by the sea"
(The Professor's House 156). Given the obvious analogy
between that cave and his own study-sanctuary with its view of Lake Michigan, what
St. Peter does not mention is Euripides' being found out and killed, similar to
Pentheus, by frenzied women (Thurin 275). Yet, unlike Euripides' young king who
rejects Dionysus out of fear, Cather's middle-aged professor has long been
welcoming him naively, so it seems, as the god of wine, while increasingly
questioning him as the god of women. In an unexpected development, official
Prohibition seems to have brought home to him the relevance of Dionysus' words to
Pentheus: "You do not know the limits of your strength. You do not know who you
are"(Euripides 565). Through the androgynous figure of Dionysus, "the effeminate
stranger" (556), Euripides can here be said to address the importance of
individuation, while implicitly warning against both fear of and unduly physical
emphasis on sexuality concerning the roles of men and women in this archetypal
process. Indeed, Dionysus's stated mission in the drama is to redeem the
reputation of his mother from slander going back to her pregnancy with him. He
spares only Teiresias, who regards the chasteness of a woman's "character and
nature" (555) as not threatened by Dionysus and calls Pentheus a "raving fool"
(557) for taking mere gossip about women's sexual wildness as sufficient cause to
condemn Dionysus's divinity as fraud and to outlaw, as it were, the psychological
reality of his mystery.
Although St. Peter has never feared sex, he has come to amplify and thereby reject
his wife's sexual side. As a diminutive of Kingdom
of Art 414). It is therefore perhaps tempting but difficult to accept
Doris Grumbach's argument that St. Peter's fondness for the forms is evidence of
his "misogynist, tired and privately cynical mind" (333), when he clearly appears
still drawn to the sexual and supra-sexual aspects of woman as indispensable to
his Dionysian quest for self. That is why even his keeping bottles of sherry in
the chest under "the bust," the same sherry he enjoys in a carefully polished
glass with the lunch mentioned earlier, is less a private yonic joke than a way of
acknowledging the danger of trivializing wine and sexuality at the expense of
their symbolic connotations and interconnectedness in the Dionysian myth to which
Cather refers by way of St. Peter's familiarity with the Bacchae. This very late
play by Euripides, as William Arrowsmith has put it, "constantly recedes before
one's grasp, advancing, not retreating, steadily into deeper chaos and larger
order" (530).
Similar to Euripides, whose escape to his womblike cave by the sea ironically
takes him into the ancient symbolic world of the Triple Goddess, St. Peter
complements his withdrawals into his study with retreats to his beach on his
"inland sea," as if hearing Aphrodite's mermaids singing might solve his implicit
puzzlement about Dionysus's Maenads in the Bacchae. On his "little triangle
of sand" there are "seven shaggy pine-trees" (70). The triangle is a conventional
yonic symbol as well as a sign of the triple nature of the Goddess as
virgin-mother-crone (Walker, Encyclopedia 1016). The
evergreens, not surprisingly, are suggestive of Dionysus's sacred tree, the pine,
whose cones, like the one on Dionysus's thyrsus, are of traditional phallic
significance (Walker, Dictionary 31). Indeed, the frequent
symbolic association in mythology of the pine cone with the lotus flower and the
symbolic interchangeability of lotus and lily (Walker, Dictionary 469, 428) serve to underline both Lillian's absence on the
beach and, during her trip to France, St. Peter's "novel mental dissipation,
"namely, to be able to "lie on his [beach] for hours" with his eyes fixed on the
pines (263). On one occasion Cather has him vicariously "drink up the sun" by
watching the trees do so (263); on another, he is as if intoxicated by "their ripe
yellow cones, dripping with gum and clustering on the pointed tips like a mass of
golden bees in swarming time" (270). The Dionysian image of Dictionary 415). In other
words, St. Peter's eyes are fixed on the pines while his mind's eye, in its
suggestively Dionysian state of "dissipation," sees Pentheus spying on the Maenads
from his hidden perch high in an evergreen tree just before being discovered and
torn to pieces by them.
"Ever-increasing fatigue" (271) of body and spirit, the psychosomatic consequence
of St. Peter's self-reflective reading of the Bacchae on
his beach, reaches its lowest point, his near-suicide, shortly after his
witnessing a storm from his study window: "Great orange and purple clouds were
blowing up from the lake, and the pine-trees over about the Physics laboratory
were blacker than cypresses and looked contracted, as if they were awaiting
something. The rain broke and it turned cold" (275). The storm puts an end to the
smell of ripe grapes in the air and to the spell of Dionysian myth as symbolized
above all by the pine trees to which Cather has drawn attention about a dozen
times before the storm scene. The ones on campus, by being close to the physics
building where Tom Outland, St.Peter's former protégé, used to
do his research, complement the ones on the beach. On the one hand, they remind
one of the question of sexual preference in the Professor's attempts at
conjugating "to love," especially in conjunction with Cather's own questions with
regard to Isabelle McClung's marriage (Grumbach 338). On the other hand, their
proximity to the physics laboratory points to the dilemma of traditionally male
science's laboring to decode and control nature. By analogy, St. Peter shares in
the dilemma to the degree that his study under the roof is his arts and religion
laboratory with its own connection to
What the French garden, the study, and the laboratory share with the beach is, I suggest, their connectedness to the psychological reality of the Eternal Femine. In "experimental physical terms," says Santayana, Goethe's Eternal Feminine may be defined as "a tempting passivity in matter, obedient in all directions to an infinitely plastic will," which serves as the basis of America's "trust in work and experiment" ("Americanism" 42). St. Peter's trust in his creativity, however, comes to a halt in his protracted experience of the far from passive energy of the Eternal Feminine in his psychological and mythological experiments on himself, his "falling out of love" with his wife, with society, and with himself. While the National Prohibition Act may thus have saved him from trying to postpone his need for introspection by escaping into wine, it has, from a Jungian perspective, also forced St. Peter to realize that the real source of his despair is his dryness of spirit and soul. His crisis is a religious one that, by the mid-1930s, Jung would consider typical of "the more intelligent and cultured [individuals] who, finding a return to the Church impossible, come up against archetypal material . . . which can no longer be mastered by a narrowly personalistic psychology" (33). In his inadvertent Dionysian/Euripidean adventures into the archetypal world of the unconscious, St. Peter has, as it were, come upon ripe, wild grapes beyond the reach of his hand, his head, and as Cather suggests, his heart: "This is really a story of 'letting go with the heart,'" she says in a fly leaf note in her presentation copy of the novel for Robert Frost (Sergeant 215).
P. D. Charles, who found the source of Cather's quotation to be in the last line of Frost's poem "Wild Grapes," accepts Cather's selection as evidence that the novel's main theme is "the death of love" (71). Frost's poem, however, may serve as a not so pessimistic subtext for the novel: his wise-woman speaker appears to reject the possibility that "let[ting] go with the heart" is an advanced "step in knowledge"; it would not have given her the weight she lacked as a little girl to hold on to a tree-bound vine of wild grapes for the picking rather than being carried aloft by it (Frost 126, 125). Similarly, she implies, her present weight in symbolic grapes of knowledge and wisdom as a woman would become trifling again, should she "need learn to let go with the heart" (126). Her counterpart in the novel is the sewing woman.
Augusta Appelhoff is "a reliable, methodical spinster" but "not destitute of fun"
(16, 23). Being a Catholic, she serves as an ironic reminder to St.Peter of his
mother's Methodism having displaced his father's Roman Catholicism; moreover, as a
German Cathotic, she would also be against Prohibition (Jensen 73, 76). Her implicit affinity
with the Professor in this respect appears to be more than superficial. Since her
last name can be transliterated as Dictionary
487). Cather encodes Augusta's mythic connections further by way of her first
name's allusion to Juno Augusta, the great goddess of prepatriarchal Roman
mythology (Walker, Encyclopedia 79). Underneath the sewing woman's "plain,
solid face" (23) as a spinster and seamstress, there is the virgin and mother side
of the not always ominous Crone or Atropos aspect of the Triple Goddess (Walker,
Encyclopedia 187). This conclusion would be far-fetched,
were it not for a number of innocuous pieces of evidence to the contrary: Augusta
is "needed" whenever a death occurs in families she works for (280); and in St.
Peter's case, she is very much needed when she chances on his nearly asphyxiated
body in his study. While he has been ready for a renewal of life in daydreamlike
regressions to his "primitive" or "original self"(265, 267), he lacks a mother to
sober his mind, so to speak, from his Dionysian and Euripidean misadventures with
the phenomena of the feminine; not his "strong-willed Methodist mother" (30),
whose prohibition of wine and myth would have gone without saying, but Augusta,
reassuringly "seasoned and sound and on the solid earth" (281) and able to help
him find his bearing again. Augusta Appelhoff, I suggest, is a somewhat quixotic
example of Cather's trying "to come to value the feminine and seek to reconnect
with matriarchal sources" (Donovan 156). Although Augusta's high regard of the
Virgin Mary is part of her Catholicism, it does not obliterate the connections of
Mary, seen as, for example, "the Mystical Rose" (99), to the Great Goddess of
matriarchal mythology. In this context, even the "archaic' forms'" (31) belonging
to Augusta and guarded by St. Peter in his study, the silent witnesses, as it
were, to his near-suicide, have turned into archetypal figures for him. Their
power lies outside the safety of his solitude as well as outside both the
mediating influence of his sherry and the constraints of national Prohibition.
It is the latter, above all, that provided a social context for Cather to explore
the prohibition of wild grapes of archetypal psychology and myth. Naturally, her
still fermenting novel avoids any explicit final resolutions other than "At least,
[St. Peter] felt the ground under his feet. He thought he knew where he was, and
that he could face with fortitude the [returning family] and the future" (283). In
private life, of course, Cather, a once-upon-a-time Baptist, joined the
Episcopalian Church (with its close liturgical ties to the Catholic Church) late
in 1922, whereas St. Peter appears only curious about Catholicism; she also
thought about the possibilities of psychoanalysis, according to Sergeant (238),
who herself had become a student of the psychology of C. G. Jung in the 1920s. Yet
Cather also needed to feel her feet on the ground in places of relative solitude
such as the Canadian island of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy, where she would
spend most of her summers from 1922 to 1940, where, says Lewis, good wines were
relatively easy to come by (137, 193), and where the crescendo of the Jazz Age was easy to
filter out temporarily, especially in 1925 when not only The
Professor's House but also The Great Gatsby was
published.
Given the autobiographical subtext of The Professor's
House, including the fact that the novel was partly written on Grand Manan
(Lewis 137), it is reasonable to see Cather give a complimentary nod to St.
Peter's newfound "fortitude," one of the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" (Jeffrey 307).
Although Prohibition has forced him to confront the limitations of his epicurean
habits, the tone of Cather's conclusion—"he The Professor's House this is evident not only in the
sherry motif and in "the usual Prohibition lament" that comes with "the cocktails"
before dinner(107) but also in St. Peter's lectures that are said to go against
the Methodist affiliation of his university at Hamilton (70); even the possible
location of the town may have a dry edge to it. Although Woodress puts Hamilton on
the east shore of Lake Michigan (367), some of the textual evidence favors the
Illinois side since the university—it is not called a
college—is only a half-hour train ride from Chicago (153). This would
suggest Northwestern University, which was founded by Methodists in Evanston, a
town that was dry before, during, and after Prohibition; moreover, "Saint" Frances
Willard, the founder of the WCTU, had been dean of women as well as professor of
aesthetics at Northwestern (Illinois 325, 330-31). These
impression points from the Midwest add proof to a reading of The
Professor's House as an anti-Prohibition novel with complex Dionysian
undercurrents and, unlike the Bacchae, not without wry
humor about the allegedly "simple gift of wine, the gladness of the grape"
(Euripides 559).
In Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration,
Wayne Koestenbaum asserts that "gay criticism can illuminate Wordsworth as well as
Wilde" (5). Such methodology likewise informs the work of Willa Cather. Although
"Paul's Case" is the story most often selected as Cather's representative gay
fiction, it is also the story that signals the end of her apprenticeship, thus
drawing attention to the correlation between homosexuality and the development of
her art. But if "Paul's Case" signifies Cather's personal and artistic growth,
what works mark her subsequent development and what role does homosexuality play
in that maturation? A gay reading of Death Comes for the
Archbishop provides a lens through which to examine these questions.
By the 1920s Cather's indirect articulation of homosexuality had shifted to an
intense exploration of male friendship. In her novels of this period—One of Ours (1922), The Professor's
House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop
(1927)—her protagonists all experience emotional intimacy with other
men, and these friendships create compelling models of human happiness. Although
male friendship and homosexuality are not synonymous, Cather would certainly know
that descriptions of emotional intimacy between men would encourage homosexual
interpretations of her work. Consequently, when she celebrates male friendship she
implicitly acknowledges its connotations as well.
Although most readers feel that Death Comes for the
Archbishop is a deeply religious book, few recognize the contribution
homosexuality makes to its spiritual mood. As she does in One of
Ours and The Professor's House, Cather again
depicts male friendship in a largely male environment; however, the religious
background of Death Comes for the Archbishop brings to the
text a narrative dimension missing in her earlier fiction. Describing the novel's
genesis, Cather writes, "The longer I stayed in the Southwest, the more I felt
that the story of the Catholic Church in that country was the most interesting of
all its stories" (On Writing 5). The way Cather tells that
particular story makes Death Comes for the Archbishop the
most intriguing of her male-centered fiction.
Discussions of the novel inevitably echo the language of friendship. Merrill
Maguire Skaggs observes that in Death Comes for the
Archbishop, "Cather recovers her faith in friendship" (19). Cather herself
speaks of Jean Baptiste Lamy, the first bishop of New Mexico and the prototype for
her main character, as "a sort of invisible personal friend" (On
Writing 7). Extending this analogy, Hermione Lee writes that "Cather
always had a sense of loss and regret after finishing a book, as though parting
company forever from a close friend" (289). And in an analysis of Cather's
evocative style, Susan J. Rosowski argues that "As much as the friendship between
Latour and Vaillant, the narrator establishes the happy mood of the book: he takes
the reader with him as a companion on a journey of storytelling" (169).
The stories Cather tells in Death Comes for the Archbishop
are profoundly religious. Simple stories become parables of faith, and minor
details assume spiritual significance. Although such stories often erode the
novel's erotic texture, it is here that Cather's treatment of homosexuality
reveals the nature of her achievement. Linking homosexuality with the early
history of the Catholic Church, John Boswell states that "There is in fact a
considerable body of evidence to suggest that homosexual relations were especially
associated with the clergy" (Christianity 187). "Even
popes," he adds, "were not above such accusations, and in some areas the mere fact
of having taken orders seems to have rendered one liable to the suspicion of being
a 'sodomite'" (Christianity 217-18). Given this historical context, the very
subject of Cather's novel intimates homosexuality. Cather indirectly supports this
affiliation by identifying the formal sources of her narrative design: the saints'
lives and the religious murals of Puvis de Chavannes (On
Writing 9). The combined effect of these influences makes Death Comes for the Archbishop "feel like a medieval legend" (Lee 271), a
feeling implicitly heightened by the suggestion of homosexuality in the text.
Returning to the recent past for her story and recalling a more distant past in
its narration, Cather does more than tell the story of the Catholic Church in the
Southwest, and her utilization of the historical novel underscores this
complexity. Connecting the historical genre with homosexuality, Ian Young explains
that "Tales set in eras when homosexual relationships were more accepted or less
suspect than in the present have provided a variety of authors with opportunities
for treating homosexual attachments matter-of-factly or even idealistically. A
historical setting can enable readers—and writers!—to overcome
what resistance they may have toward homosexuality in a contemporary context"
(158). Cather's combination of history and narrative thus provides a setting
congenial to her friendship theme and a form conducive to its telling. Comparing
Death Comes for the Archbishop with the partisan tone of
the book that inspired it, William J. Howlett's Life of Bishop
Machebeuf (1908), Lee writes that "Nothing could be further from Cather's
impartial, apolitical tone. Her appropriation of this, the latest of her male
authorities, is all in the direction of suggestiveness and evocation, away from
propaganda and orthodoxy" (267). Sexual ambiguity creates such an elusive text and
ultimately helps Cather make Howlett's story her own.
An early scene illustrates Cather's suggestive style. Awakened in Santa Fe by the morning Angelus, Bishop Latour is imaginatively inspired by its silvery tone: "Full, clear, with something bland and suave, each note floated through the air like a globe of silver. Before the nine strokes were done Rome faded, and behind it he sensed something Eastern, with palm trees,—Jerusalem, perhaps, though he had never been there. Keeping his eyes closed, he cherished for a moment this sudden, pervasive sense of the East"(43). Just as the fourteenth-century Spanish bell reveals its oriental craftsmanship, so too does it evoke the novel's narrative method; as it sounds its exotic notes to Latour's discerning ears, it likewise presents to the reader the possibility of erotic overtones in Cather's text.
This scene also announces Cather's most pervasive strategy, that of interweaving
disparate elements: earth and sky, history and fiction, sexuality and spirituality
are blended together, as are the gold and silver of the Spanish bell. Among the
most perfectly fused elements in Death Comes for the
Archbishop are art and religion. Cather articulates her artistic principles
in "The Novel Démeublé": "Whatever is felt upon the page without
being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is
the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the
ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, 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" (50). Throughout the text these ideals are indistinguishable
from those of religious faith. Latour's definition of miracles illustrates this
narrative fusion: "The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon
faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but
upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and
our ears hear what is there about us always" (50). Whether in the form of
miracles, memories, or heightened moments of perception, intangible impressions
abound in Death Comes for the Archbishop, further blending
art and religion, feeling and faith.
Homosexuality adds another element to Cather's narrative interplay and exists in
Death Comes for the Archbishop as perhaps the most
provocative presence of "the thing not named." John J. Murphy observes that the Acoma legend of Fray
Baltazar "is a compendium of most of the excesses of the native clergy" (263),
including "political intrigue, gambling, hoarding money and siring children"
(259). Scattered details in the text imply other transgressions. In the prologue,
set in Rome, the dinner guests of Cardinal de Allande describe the New World
clergy as "dissolute" (8), and in Santa Fe "lewd" children are chastised for
"speak[ing] filth against the priests"(216). Kit Carson admits to his early
thinking that all priests were "rascals" and nuns "bad women" and adds that "A
good many of the native priests here bear out that story" (76). In his personal
letters Father Machebeuf admonishes the native clergy as "scandalous beyond
description" (Howlett 164) and registers disgust at the "atrocious accusations and
insulting reflections" (Howlett 193) charged by rival priests against himself and
Bishop Lamy. Providing a broader historical outline, Boswell states that "Many
pagan writers objected to Christianity precisely because of what they claimed was
sexual looseness on the part of its adherents, and much Christian apologetic was
aimed at defending Christians against the common belief that they were given to
every form of sexual indulgence—including homosexual acts. This belief
seems to have been at least partly rooted in fact" (Christianity 131).
Such "facts" are missing in Death Comes for the Archbishop,
and Cather's omission draws attention to a curious gap between church history and
the novel's historical perspective. In curbing the native priests' "sensual
disturbance[s]" (145), the text reprimands every indulgence except homosexuality.
Indeed, while "Carnal commerce" (106) with women is frequently mentioned, nothing
is specifically said of homosexual relations; although they are vaguely implied,
they remain categorically unnamed and undenounced.
What is the significance of Cather's silence? Is she being evasive or merely
exercising delicacy and restraint? Or is her discretion another "strategy of
reticence"? The answer
lies, I believe, in Cather's sexual aesthetics, her evocation of homosexuality to
suggest "the thing not named." To disparage homosexuality would disparage her art
and, more importantly, diminish the emotional relationship at the center of Death Comes for the Archbishop. As if to avoid this
contradiction, Cather spiritualizes the friendship between Latour and Vaillant,
and their relationship, like their vocation, assumes a vow of intimacy without
sexuality. Celibacy, however, does more than circumvent physiology; it transcends
the physical and becomes Cather's paradigm for spiritual love.
Although Cather creates a "deliberately chaste book" (Lee 285), she simultaneously
encodes an ambiguously erotic text. Spiritual friendship itself is foregrounded in
a theology that combines religious feelings with physical affection. Tradition is
very much a part of Latour's "imaginative intelligence" (Bloom and Bloom 210), and
Death Comes for the Archbishop values the inherited
rituals of cooking, craftsmanship, and Catholicism. Boswell describes another
heritage that is also part of the novel's inclusiveness: "It is indeed too often
overlooked that just as there was a pagan ascetic and antierotic tradition, so was
there a Christian tradition of tolerant and positive attitudes toward love and
eroticism" (Christianity 163). Cather's "mixed theology"
(31) hints at this duality, as when Latour and Martinez argue over clerical
celibacy. Here Cather discreetly opens their debate to include intense friendships
between priests, perhaps what Martinez means when he refers to "French fashions"
(148). Of Cather's background in theology her friend Edith Lewis writes that "all
her life she had been profoundly interested in Catholicism—especially in
the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, of the time of Abelard and St. Bernard. She
had read widely on the subject long before she came to write the Archbishop" (147). Although Cather specifically mentions St. Augustine
and his prohibitive doctrines, the narrative indirectly summons more tolerant
Christian thinkers, such as St. Anselm of Bec, later archbishop of Canterbury, and
St. Aelred of Rievaulx, the Bernard of the North, perhaps the most influential
writers in the medieval tradition of passionate friendship.
Cather transmutes this theological tradition into literature. As she was
interested in the daily life of such a man as Lamy, so too do the lives of men
such as Anselm and Aelred inform her narrative. Although Anselm was the first "in
his generation [who] groped for words to express the intensity of his feelings for
his friends" (Southern 34), it is Aelred's views, found in treatises such as Spiritual Friendship and The Mirror of
Charity, that expand the similarities between Cather's text and the lives
of the saints. Aelred emphasizes affection as a means of approaching divine love
and finds in friendship a correlation between physical and spiritual experience.
It was Aelred, Boswell writes, "who gave love between those of the same gender its
most profound and lasting expressions in a Christian context" (Christianity 221).
Aelred announces his central theme in the opening of Spiritual
Friendship: "Here we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, is in our
midst" (51). Echoing St. John, he stresses that "he that abides in friendship,
abides in God, and God in him" (66). Like St. Aelred, Cather is interested in
approaching divine love and posits friendship as a path toward its realization.
The search for the ideal friend in One of Ours leads to the
idealized friendship in Death Comes for the Archbishop, a
relationship that fictionally renders Aelred's teaching that "God is Friendship"
(65).
As friendship was an essential part of religious life for men like Anselm and Aelred, Cather builds her narrative around male friendship and its spiritual ideals. Latour and Vaillant, Eusabio and Latour, Vaillant and Revardy, Lucero and Martinez, Latour and Bernard, Antonio Olivares and Manuel Chavez fortify the text with the strength of their affections. The latter's story sounds the tone of Cather's narration. As a youth Manuel Chavez was left for dead while on an Indian raiding party. Pierced by arrows, "one shaft clear through his body" (185), and suffering from hunger and thirst, Chavez walked two days and nights before finding food and water, finally collapsing "under two noble oak trees" (186). As a prosperous rancher the elegantly handsome Chavez boasts his aristocratic lineage from two Castilian knights who liberated the city of Chavez from the Moors in the twelfth century. The ancestral knights evoke the medieval friendship of Amis and Amile, and their liberation of Chavez echoes the liberation of Athens by Harmodius and Aristogeiton. The arrows add a religious aura to Chavez's history, recalling the crucifixion of Christ and the suffering of St. Sebastian, the sacrificial saint of gay iconology.
Cather's stories of male friendship depict the intermingled emotional, spiritual,
and erotic relationships of her characters. The narrative style of a legend
accommodates this inherent fluidity: "In The Golden Legend
the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt upon than are the trivial incidents
of their lives; it is as though all human experiences, measured against one
supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance. The essence of
such writing is not to hold the note, not to use an incident for all there is in
it—but to touch and pass on" (On Writing 9). The
unaccented style of a legend merely suggests and then moves on, as the Indians
move across their country, in unhurried narrative flight. "In this kind of
writing," Cather continues, "the mood is the thing" (On
Writing 10), and the mood of Death Comes for the
Archbishop is one of "extraordinary personal devotion" (289).
Religion engenders Cather's text, and in a crude frontier society it maintains a link between men and their humanity. The gift of Christianity is its sympathy, and Cather's protagonists respond to the humanizing influences of Catholicism. Her principal male characters either resemble biblical patriarchs or recall the apostles of Christ. Rather than emasculating them, their religious feelings, however feminine, broaden their masculinity. Although later "misguided" (293), Kit Carson is compassionate throughout much of the narrative, Eusabio is respectful and courteous, Luzon is generous, and even the young murderer about to hang is gentle and tender-hearted, spending his last hours in solicitous devotion to St. Santiago. As has often been remarked, Latour is Cather's quintessential hero: "delicate and distinguished, chivalric, aesthetic, sympathetic (especially to the Indians, for whom Howlett has no time at all), nostalgic for France, in love with order and tradition, patient to the point of passivity, vulnerable, self-doubting, and in need of Vaillant's support"(Lee 268). His "broad sympathies" (Brown 264) and "attitude of acceptance" (Rosowski 163) make him the perfect embodiment of Cather's imagination as well as the ideal expression of her art.
Details of Latour and Vaillant's friendship intensify Cather's sexual aesthetics.
Physical affection and spiritual ardor are perfectly joined, as their love for one
another is identical to their love of the Catholic Church. When they were boys at
school, Latour chose the "homely" Vaillant to be his friend, thus beginning a
life-long companionship. As Aelred teaches in Spiritual
Friendship, the progression of friendship through selection, testing, and
acceptance imitates religious training; faith and friendship intermingle, as
choosing a friend mirrors knowing God. In dramatizing Vaillant's struggle to break
the ties of blood and country and become a missionary priest, Cather conflates
spiritual and emotional crises by placing a "higher trust" in faith and friendship
alike (204). Latour and Vaillant's departure from their native Auvergne has all
the anguish and excitement of a romantic elopement, and their friendship is as
suggestive of a marriage as is the relationship between Christ and St. John.
Vaillant's signet ring, later worn by Latour, signifies their deep emotional
commitment to each other and to God.
In one sense Cather's story of the Catholic Church follows the historical and
cultural shift from Hellenism to Christianity. As Mary Ruth Ryder points out, by
the time she wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop "Cather
would increasingly describe human struggles in religious terms, never abandoning
the allusions from classical myth which were such an integral part of her thought,
but subordinating those images to a larger dimension of Christian allegory" (248).
In addition, Death Comes for the Archbishop demonstrates
Cather's artistic interest in Catholicism and its connection with her aesthetics.
"It can be argued," writes Brian Reade, "that the Roman Church had greater
attractions than any Protestant Church for the homosexual—both male and
female—in that its theology and teaching were not based on empirical
studies of the Bible" (8). The notion of divine love especially appealed to
Cather's imagination and, as Rosowski observes, was "the most important single
idea she took from Catholicism" (164).
As Cather's gift of sympathy reflects her experience of divine love, homosexuality
reflects its imaginative possibilities. Without a central female character and
with its emphasis on Mariology and the Virgin birth, Death Comes
for the Archbishop appears to be a sexless narrative, or at least a text
in which sexuality seems carefully contained. However, Cather places a parallel
emphasis on Christ, and as Thomas M. Casey notes, Cather's Christology "needs to
be understood if we are to make sense of certain sections of the narrative" (25).
Evoking an image of Mary as "a goddess who should yet be a woman" (257), the text
also envisions a humanized Christ: Latour feels the "Presence" of Christ when he
is alone in his study (256); and throughout Death Comes for the
Archbishop the closeness of a divine companion is a component of spiritual
friendship.
A Christ-centered narrative can contain significant homosexual implications. "To
embrace the faith is to be embraced by Jesus," and in the context of the Aesthetic
Movement, for example, Victorian writers such as Gerald Manley Hopkins found in
Catholicism a means to release sublimated desire (Woods 47). While Gregory Woods argues that "the theme
of Christ's homosexuality is periodically recurrent" (46), Boswell explains why
this is so: Sexuality appears to have been largely a matter of
indifference to Jesus. . . . He pronounced no condemnations of sexuality among
the unmarried and said nothing which bore any relation to homosexuality. The
only sexual issue of importance to Jesus appears to have been fidelity: he did
not mention the procreation or rearing of children in connection with marriage
but only its permanence, and he prohibited divorce except in cases of
infidelity. He was apparently celibate himself, and the only persons with whom
the Gospels suggest he had any special relationship were men, especially Saint
John, who carefully describes himself throughout his gospel as the disciple
whom Jesus loved. (
Whereas gay
feelings are conducive to this kind of love, the sexual ambiguities in Cather's
text evince a similar sensibility, reminiscent of both Christ and his followers
and other biblical stories of same-sex relationships.
Christianity 114-15).
Spiritual friendship sets the tone for all else in Death Comes
for the Archbishop. Rosowski writes that "the friendship of the two
priests is one of great love, the major example of the mood that unifies the
narrative and the miracles that run through it" (163). Everything, including
eroticism, is seemingly subsumed by spiritual devotion. In a narrative strategy
akin to the ritual of transubstantiation, passion is transformed into pity, and
sexual energy is transmuted into spiritual desire. Just as Latour sees the
spiritual beauty of Vaillant, they both see the inner beauty of those around them,
such as Jacinto's fine manners and Magdalena's radiance. The landscape itself
evokes a "religious silence" (151). Conspicuously missing in this text is the
purely physical beauty of a Julio, Cather's young Mexican guide and inspiration
for much of the sensuality associated with the Southwest in her earlier
fiction. Nor is there
a physical male image of such evocative power as that of Tom Outland in The Professor's House or the English boy in One of Ours, a luminous youth with "cheeks like pink apples,
yellow curls above his forehead, long, soft lashes" (320). El Greco's portrait of
an effeminate "St. Francis in meditation" (Death 12) comes
closest to these earlier examples of masculine beauty. Yet while sexuality and
spirituality are equally rendered in that androgynous portrait, its erotic
attraction is diminished by its spiritual appeal.
Other details continue this pattern. Lucero's boastful joke ridiculing Martinez's
declining vitality underscores the elimination of sexuality from the text: "'You
see how it is,' Padre Lucero would say to the young men at a wedding party, 'my
way is better than old José Martinez's. His nose and chin are getting to
be close neighbours now, and a petticoat is not much good to him any more. But I
can still rise upright at the sight of a dollar. With a new piece of money in my
hand I am happier than ever; and what can he do with a pretty girl but regret?'"
(161). Cather's unruly horses in One of Ours, Pompey and
Satan, become affectionate mules in Death Comes for the
Archbishop, symbols of Latour and Vaillant's emotional intimacy. Even the
Spanish names heard throughout the text defuse sexuality with their spiritual
lull: Contento, Angelica, Tranquilino.
Cather reinforces her relaxed narrative manner by describing her experience of
writing the novel as "a happy vacation from life" (On
Writing 11). An early scene sets this rhythm in motion. As Latour rides into
Santa Fe for the first time, the narrator observes that "The long main street
began at the church, the town seemed to flow from it like a stream from a
spring"(22). Subsequent images sustain this mood, as everywhere the text
emphasizes release: underground water breaks through the desert's floor, old Sada
is released from spiritual bondage, Magdalena is saved from a brutal marriage,
images of keys abound, cities are liberated, and animals are set free. Near the
end of the novel the abolition of slavery and the return of exiled Navajos to
their traditional homeland reemphasize Cather's pattern of spiritual freedom. A
perpetual flowering, such as that associated with Arroyo Hondo and the Canyon de
Chelly, intensifies the novel's renunciation of sex by providing a spiritual
refuge, "an Indian Garden of Eden" (297).
Even as it renounces sex, Cather's text avows a sexual impulse; while one is
sublimated, the other is set free. The rhythm of the novel is both spiritual and
physical, its language simultaneously chaste and erotic, spontaneous and
controlled. Yet while a flexible idiom combines sexuality and storytelling (the
text begins with climax and ends in release), Cather's "primary ecstasy" remains a
flowering of spiritual desire (Sergeant 229). Always traveling, a physical and
spiritual voyager, Latour is frequently presented waking up in the early morning,
the physical counterpart to the awakening of the spirit. Cather's central metaphor
for spiritual freedom is death itself, the release from life, "a dramatic climax,
a moment when the soul made its entrance into the next world, passing in full
consciousness through a lowly door to an unimaginable scene" (170). The dramatic
conclusion of Death Comes for the Archbishop is a climax
not only of Latour's life but also of the images of release shaping the narrative:
"Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the
pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and
released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into
the morning, into the morning!" (276). Throughout this description physical signs
communicate spiritual growth. As in Cather's most provocative passages elsewhere,
an indeterminate "something" again tantalizes a reader. The "something oriental"
(45) that Latour sensed in the Spanish bell anticipates the "something soft and
wild and free" in the exhilarating morning air; indeed, the "something that
whispered to the ear on the pillow" awakens the eroticism of the desert landscape.
Loretta Wasserman attributes Wallace Stevens's praise of Cather's style to her
mature handling of sexual themes (357); intimations of homosexuality reflect this
sophistication. While patterns of male friendship in Death Comes
for the Archbishop participate in the homosocial/homosexual continuum of
mainstream American literature, especially the western tradition of Owen Wister
and James Fenimore Cooper, underpinnings of "extraordinary personal devotion"
affiliate Cather's text with distinctly gay themes, from the Sacred Band of Thebes
to Whitman's "Calamus" poems. Connections with Walter Pater's homosexual critique
confirm the novel's place within this tradition. Although the names Marius (The Renaissance: "While
all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any
contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free
for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and
curious odourous, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend"
(237). Cather's "something soft and wild and free" echoes Pater's something
"exquisite," "strange," and "curious." Friendship is clearly implied, and that
friendship is just as clearly homoerotic; for both writers male friendship is the
"imaginative stimulus" (Pater, Marius 314) shaping their
art. That Pater
deleted the conclusion from the second edition of The
Renaissance suggests its erotic potential. As Reade points out, "It was
not much. But whatever it was, it was a significant gesture in the Victorian moral
continuum" (20).
Cather's allusion to Pater is also a significant gesture in her appropriation of
the homosexual literary tradition. In Death Comes for the
Archbishop the values she associates with male friendship attain the
spiritual truth Claude Wheeler glimpsed at the end of One of
Ours. By the end of the novel it is no longer the physical presence of his
friend and companion but memories of Vaillant and their life together that
strengthen Latour's fortitude. His deathbed reverie once again recalls the moment
in their native Auvergne when they anxiously awaited the "dilegence" for Paris to
carry them into the unknown. The earlier voyage resembles the one he is now
making, and the face of Vaillant figures in both. In Pater's conclusion, as in
Whitman's "When I Heard at the Close of the Day," the presence of the lover brings
forth the soul. While her predecessors see the lover literally, Cather
metaphorically extends their image. Unlike Godfrey St. Peter in The Professor's House, who relinquishes "something very precious" (282),
Latour connects with the lover and is released into something complete and great,
a redemptive trinity of art, religion, and friendship.
Pater's "face of one's friend" illuminates a recurring vision in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Always sensitive to the shape of things,
Latour is particularly sensitive to countenances, and although he does not seek
miracles or faces appearing from afar, he finds the miraculous everywhere. All
faces to him are revelatory; "to look closely is to understand" (Lee 276), and by
carefully reading either the face of old Sada or the cruciform tree, Latour
experiences the "mysteries" and "holy joy" of religion (217).
This pattern builds to a supreme moment near the end of the novel when Latour, upon entering Santa Fe for the last time, looks upon the "golden face" of his cathedral set within the embracing arms of the Sandia Mountains (271). As David and Mary-Ann Stouck write, "The Bishop of the novel's title finds ultimate peace in the building and contemplation of his cathedral, in which religion and art are perfectly conjoined" (294-95). For Latour, however, the cathedral and Father Joseph are also joined, as religious devotion mirrors dedication to one's friend. With its rising twin towers, the cathedral is as much a tribute to Vaillant as it is to the glory of God; a testament to art and religion, it is also the triumph of faith and friendship.
In Death Comes for the Archbishop eroticism dissolves into
spirituality in a process akin to the casting of the Spanish bell. Rather than
spoiling the Angelus, exoticism enriches its tone; homoeroticism similarly
enhances Cather's text. The mystery is that such a deeply religious book shows no
hostility toward homosexuality, and it is the nature of this assimilation that
helps make Death Comes for the Archbishop Cather's most
perfect fiction, perfect in its fusion of theme and technique. Acknowledging
Cather's achievement, E. K. Brown writes that "Her craftsmanship in language, her
sense of a true economy, her command of rhythms individual without being
eccentric, had never before reached such a delicate sureness"(257). Sexual
aesthetics are part of this narrative strength. After the novel was published and
widely read, many readers thought Cather herself was a Roman Catholic. Yet the
narrative's authenticity demonstrates more than a depth of religious feeling. As
James Woodress observes, "the novel was forged in the crucible of Cather's
imagination," out of which came a profound humanity, including a sensitivity
toward the friendship at the heart of her story (201).
Particular friendship is Cather's crowning metaphor for "particular sympathy"
(208). As Rosowski points out, "From the core friendship between Fathers Latour
and Vaillant, a joyful mood extends outward, in what appears to be indiscriminate
envelopment. . . . sympathy Spiritual
Friendship aptly descriptive of Cather's text: "The treatise that Aelred
wrote on friendship is the most beautiful example of the casting of an ancient
humanistic theme into a Christian mould" (35). Fusing a classical ideal with
Christian belief, Cather turns male friendship into a spiritual allegory, and like
the fragrance of incense from the piñon fire, it too gives Death Comes for the Archbishop the pervasive aura of a
perpetual religious service. Faith and friendship coalesce before us as the
miracle of God's love appears in the face of one's friend.
God made Man [sic] in His [sic] image, and then made Christ in Man's image. So, given that my lover is made in God's image, shall I not find in him a trace of divinity? And, if God is made in my lover's image, shall I not quicken with desire for Him?This kind of unflawed reasoning lies behind a great body of devotional poetry, most of it written by men, which is identical in its conventions to secular love poetry, and differs from it only in the name of the beloved: Jesus Christ." (42; [sic] in original)
Over a dish of steaming asparagus, swathed in a napkin to keep it hot, and a bottle of sparkling Asti, they talked and watched night fall in the garden. If the evening happened to be rainy or chilly, they sat inside and read Lucretius
Godfrey St. Peter's enigmatic withdrawal has elicited much of the critical
commentary upon The Professor's House. Two competing
schools of thought have developed in trying to explain it. Leon Edel, one of the
first and most influential commentators to tackle the withdrawal crux, inaugurated
what can be called the biographical hypothesis. According to Edel, in the novel, no objective
correlative exists to warrant the depression that he believes caused St. Peter's
withdrawal. Instead, the objective correlative can be traced to "Miss Cather's
inner problems, which did not permit her to resolve clearly the problems of the
character she had projected into her novel" (120). Thus, he deduces that St.
Peter's depression reflects the depression Cather herself experienced after the
unexpected marriage of Isabelle McClung. The other school of thought interprets
the problem of St. Peter's withdrawal nonbiographically. E. K. Brown, a key
proponent of the nonbiographical interpretation, believes that St. Peter's
retirement amounts to a "profound, unconscious preparation for death" (245), while
others argue that St. Peter's retirement constitutes either an escape from
society's competitive materialisms or a kind of religious/philosophical quest.
Although many of these interpretations offer persuasive explanations for aspects
of the withdrawal crux, St. Peter's retreat—whether rooted in
biographical or nonbiographical considerations—still remains enigmatic.
Moreover, none of these interpretations sufficiently accounts for Cather's
association of St. Peter's withdrawal with the two particular places—the
attic study and garden—to which he retires. Given their importance, it
behooves us to reexamine the specifics of these two settings: what uniquely suits
them for St. Peter's withdrawal? An answer to that question, I believe, emerges
from a series of often times overlooked allusions, suggestions, and figures of
speech. When compiled they coalesce into a recognizable framework of
associations—that is, a context in which to reevaluate St. Peter's
enigmatic withdrawal.
Cather's remarks in "On The Professor's House," in fact,
provide my reading strategy for interpreting these allusions, suggestions, and
figures of speech as such a context or "window" as she puts it: "In many of them
[the modern Dutch paintings], the scene presented was a living room warmly
furnished, or a kitchen full of food and coppers. But in most of the interiors,
whether drawing-room or kitchen, there was a square window, open, through which
one saw the masts of ships or a stretch of gray sea. . . . In my book I tried to
make Professor St. Peter's house rather overcrowded and stuffy with new things . .
.—until one got rather stifled. Then I wanted to open the square window
and let in the fresh air that blew off the Blue Mesa." (974). In other words, if
St.Peter's withdrawal represents the foregrounded scene and if the allusions,
suggestions, and figures of speech combine to form a context (or "window") by
which to reexamine it, then what does this "window" reveal?
I would like to suggest here that it recharacterizes St. Peter's withdrawal as an epicurean withdrawal to contemplative retirement. In order to advance this interpretation, I shall first compile the allusions, suggestions, and figures of speech and demonstrate that Cather portrays St. Peter's retirement to his attic study as a retirement into the mind, in accordance with traditional literary depictions of retirement into the mind as a retirement into an attic study. Second, I shall argue that Cather's figurative representation of this withdrawal descants on an ancient theme: the choice between active involvement in public life or withdrawal to a life of contemplative retirement. Writers have rendered contemplative retirement not only as a withdrawal into the mind but also as a withdrawal into the garden. Significantly, Cather presents St. Peter's garden retirement in just those terms—particularly epicurean retirement—and conceiving of St. Peter's retirement in this manner enables us to tease out his many other epicurean qualities. Ultimately, then, exploring the specifics of these two settings will illuminate the larger question of St. Peter's withdrawal to them.
The first clue to the epicurean nature of St. Peter's withdrawal emerges from the
way Cather specifically portrays St. Peter's retreat to his attic study as a
retirement to the mind. This portrayal correlates St. Peter's attic study and head
in terms of their physical position: the attic resides in the house as the head
rests on the body. In fact, the detailed description of the region of St. Peter's
head between the top of his ear and the crown exactly aligns his brain with the
attic study, stressing their relationship: "'The thing that really makes Papa
handsome is the modelling of his head between the top of his ear and his crown; it
is quite the best thing about him[,]' [Kathleen once remarked.] That part of his
head was high, polished, hard as bronze, and close-growing black hair threw off a
streak of light along the rounded ridge where the skull was fullest. The mould of
his head on the side was so individual and definite, so far from casual, that it
was more like a statue's head than a man's" (5). Cather reinforces the
correspondence by equating the mind and attic study in the allusion to the "two
spent swimmers" in Macbeth: "It was in those very years
that he was beginning his great work; when the desire to do it and the
difficulties attending such a project strove together in his mind like Macbeth's two spent swimmers" (The
Professor's House 16). This allusion invokes the scene from Macbeth act I, scene 2, where a messenger reports to King
Duncan that at one point in a recent battle, the two sides locked in a temporary
stalemate:
In The Professor's House, though, the antagonists have
been internalized to St. Peter's mind in a kind of psychomachia: St. Peter
temporarily paralyzes himself by vacillating between enthusiasm ("desire") and
hesitation ("difficulty"). The allusion, then, externalizes two internal
experiences as personifications, conflating St. Peter's mind and attic study as
the site of a simultaneously metaphorical and literal struggle.
Cather underscores this conflation of St. Peter's mind and attic study even more
explicitly in the following sentences that detail the progress of the eight-volume
history produced out of his struggle: "During the fifteen years he had been
working on his Spanish Adventurers in North America, this room had been his centre
of operations. There had been delightful excursions and digressions; . . . But the
notes and the records and the ideas always came back to this room" (16).
Obviously, Cather specifies the attic study as the place in the house where St.
Peter thinks; less obviously, though, the metaphors for this process of thinking
project the mental activity out of St. Peter's mind into the room itself, thereby
equating the room and mind. For the narrator points out that "it was here [that]
they [the notes, records, and ideas] were digested and sorted, and woven into
their proper place in his history" (16). However, these metaphors of digesting,
sorting, and weaving progressively displace the activity of thought from inside
the body ("digesting") to outside to the room itself ("weaving")—in fact
the very same room where Augusta also sews. The narrator additionally underscores
the relationship between St. Peter's historical synthesis and weaving by,
elsewhere, associating writing with the weaving of tapestry: "All the while he had
been working so fiercely at his eight big volumes, he was not insensible to the
domestic drama that went on beneath him. His mind had played delightedly with all
those incidents. Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now
shown at Bayeux,—working her chronicle of the deeds of knights and
heroes,—alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women
carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in
themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters of his history were interwoven
with personal memories" (85). This self-referentiality—the tapestry of
Mathilde weaving a tapestry—perhaps extends to St. Peter and Cather too,
as if through this "window" Cather were also, self-referentially, describing her
own artistic practice or, as Sharon O'Brien has suggested, externalizing "the
psychological state central to her creative process" (The
Emerging Voice 409).
Finally, Cather conflates the house and body most explicitly in the figure of
speech "the human house," the figure she selects to suggest St. Peter's
relationship with his dwelling: "sometimes he found that the oil-can in the closet
was empty; then, to get more, he would have had to go down through the house to
the cellar. . . . On that perilous journey down through the human house he might
lose his mood" (17-18). While in a literal sense "human house" indicates the part
of the house occupied by humanity from which St. Peter has withdrawn in order to
write his books, in a figurative sense "human house" combines the body and the
house, reminding us of the allegorical depictions of the house Pilgrim's Progress represents
the best example. According to Cather's biographers, Cather learned to read and
write from it, indeed, rereading it as many as eight times during one of her first
winters in Nebraska (Woodress, Her Life and Art 41; Lee
28). This work, so crucial to forming her imagination, repeatedly allegorizes the
body as a house. For example, when Christian (and later Christiana) visits the
House of the Interpreter, he learns that various rooms represent various aspects
of a person (for example, parlor corresponds to the heart [Bunyan 61]). Not unlike
St. Peter's house, the Palace Beautiful features a study where extensive
documentary records reside and histories are written (Bunyan 86-87). A more
detailed and explicit depiction of the allegorized mind/attic study appears in
another work Cather probably encountered in those anthologies of poetry in her
library: Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, which
allegorizes the body as the Castle of Alma, the soul (c.9.21-60). Beginning at the
castle walls (which represent the skin), Spenser leads Prince Arthur and Sir Guyon
through the gate (the mouth), past the outer defenses and guards (tongue and
teeth), into the hall (throat), through the kitchen (internal organs), by the
parlor (heart), up the stairs (spinal chord), and finally into the "stately
Turret," the head (2.9.44 ln. 8). This turret has three rooms, each representing
one of the three faculties of the mind (imagination, reason, and memory). A sage
presides over each room/faculty and advises Alma (the soul) accordingly. In
particular, the chamber of memory is for the sage Eumnestes ("Good Memory") who is
assisted by the boy Anamnestes ("Reminder"). Together they search the worm-eaten
scrolls, parchments, and records in Eumnestes' library, the allegorical
representation of Alma's memory. To connect this allegorical tradition to The Professor's House, I should point out that Shakespeare's
act I,to which we have already seen Cather allude, similarly characterizes memory
as "the warder of the brain" (1.7.66).
Given the pervasiveness of this allegory in works Cather undoubtedly read (and
that arguably influenced her), it should come as no surprise that Cather
allegorizes St. Peter's attic study and his mind in much the same fashion. We have
seen that Cather portrays St. Peter's head in terms of a stone edifice and places
the attic study in a location corresponding to the brain. In addition, St. Peter's
attic study particularly resembles allegorical attic-studies in terms of their
contents and function: all have a sage with a collection of papers from which each
weaves history. Perhaps
this interpretation can add to the host of significances Cather scholars have
already attributed to it. O'Brien, for example, demonstrates the ubiquity of the
attic study in Cather's life and works: Cather herself, during childhood, occupied
an attic bedroom that represented an important setting for fostering her
creativity and growth; the attic reappears throughout Cather's corpus (The Song of the Lark, "The Best Years"); it recalls the
sewing room in the McClung's house which served, for a time, as Cather's study;
and more generally, Cather always seemed to gravitate to the attic at the houses
where she resided (The Emerging Voice 84-86). The context I
am suggesting adds another wrinkle to these, substantiating Dorothy McFarland's
observation that the attic study is "the symbolic 'mind' of the house" (73).
The subtlety of Cather's allegorical depiction enacts Cather's dictum that a
modern novelist writes "by suggestion rather than by enumeration" ("The Novel
Démeublé" 836). Indeed, by opening a window onto a backgrounded
scene, Cather intimates "the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the
overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional
aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel"
("The Novel Démeublé" 837). What is the "inexplicable presence
of the thing not named"? In this case, I submit that one such presence is the
literary tradition underlying Cather's treatment of St. Peter's
withdrawal—in fact, the same tradition that broods over both this novel
and indeed Cather's entire literary career. Furthermore, because Cather selects both loci classici of contemplative retirement—the
study, as we have seen, and the garden, as we shall now see—as the sites
of St. Peter's saga, St. Peter's withdrawal resembles the ancient dilemma between
participating in public life or withdrawing to a private life of contemplation.
More specifically, reconsidering St. Peter's withdrawal with respect to the garden
topos reveals it as an epicurean form of garden retirement and teases out his
epicurean characteristics.
Let us consider St. Peter's garden. Like the attic study, it too has elicited valuable critical commentary. Thomas Strychacz, for example, believes it has a "wide mythic significance in the context of American culture": recalling numerous works of American literature, it evokes "the vision of the settler making a garden of a New World wilderness" (50). An ambiguous setting, though, it simultaneously "suggests a sterile imposition of order" (what with its absence of grass) as well as "foreign, Old World values" (51). Others agree that the garden is "out of place" (Harrell 195). David Harrell considers it "a virtual study in congruity. In a distant way it reflects the French-Canadian side of St. Peter's ancestry; but, like the Marselluses' Outland, it has 'no vestige of American feeling,' certainly no vestige of Hamilton feeling" (195). Hermione Lee adds that "the cultivation of his 'walled-in' French garden in an American city, like the cultivation of his intellect and sensibility in a material world, makes him something of a spiritual snob" (238).
I agree with these critics that St. Peter's garden is "out of place" in the sense
that it is not native American though I trace its origins back further than St.
Peter's French heritage. While I agree with Strychacz that St.Peter's garden has a
"wide mythic significance," I perceive that significance somewhat
differently—in a context even wider than Strychacz's. For millennia
writers have imagined the garden as one of the loci
classici of perfect repose. The Judeo-Christian tradition, for example,
represents the Garden of Eden as its earthly The
Professor's House [192, 83]). The Garden of Eden features two prominent
trees at its center: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge (Gen. 2:9). In the
luxuriant shade of such trees Adam enjoyed blissful serenity while fulfilling his
commission to tend the plants of the garden (Gen. 2:15). Hebrew and Christian
commentators often interpreted this enclosed garden (as well as the enclosed
garden of Solomon's Canticles) allegorically, viewing it as "a landscape of the
mind, a place in the topography of the soul" (Giamatti 81). Thus its cultivation
represents a cultivation of the mind.
In some important respects St. Peter's garden resembles an Edenic paradise, as Missy Kubitschuk has observed: "walls girdle St. Peter's garden, two prominent trees tower at its center, and St. Peter, like Adam (prior to Eve's creation), tends his plants in the garden's shady tranquillity" (15-16). Cather also characterizes St. Peter's gardening as an extension or mirror of his mental life. For typically in the summers the garden becomes his refuge, the place where he can withdraw from family relationships to live, like Adam prior to the creation of Eve, as a "bachelor again." As such, he leads an Adamic life of cultivating his mind while writing under the linden trees and conversing with Tom Outland. Finally, in the fall (when the novel's action occurs), he escapes to his garden to retreat from "the unpleasant effects of change," again retreating to renew his mind. Cather confirms the mind-garden relationship by having St. Peter carry a geranium blossom from the garden to his study in the novel's opening pages (7).
St. Peter's garden also has affinities with representations of the garden in
classical literature, which Cather studied extensively. Ancient Greeks and Romans conceived of the
garden as a pristine golden world that existed prior to the ravages of time and
change, a luxuriant setting where the teeming soil and tranquil shade produced a
blissful life of ease, rustic simplicity, and inner harmony such as St. Peter
tries to recover in his garden. Thus the garden of the golden age epitomized the
satisfaction and completeness of this life, the landscape mirroring "one's
interior state of soul" (Giamatti 43-44). However, after the passing of the
timeless golden age and the onset of ravaging time, retirement to the garden
represented an attempt to bring "one's environment into harmony with one's
standards and needs" (Giamatti 45), much as St. Peter attempts to "evade the
unpleasant effects of change" (The Professor's House 7) by
cultivating his plants—and by extension, his mind—in his
garden. Some classical writers, such as Virgil in his eclogues, imagined this
recovery of harmony in a retreat to the gardens of the pastoral world, which
embodied refuge from the activity of the city or court. Others envisioned this
recovery in the Garden of the Hesperides or the Elysian Fields.
These characteristics suit the classical garden for another kind of garden
retirement: epicurean withdrawal. Epicurus founded his school of philosophy in a
garden outside of Athens where he and his disciples lived alife of contemplative
retirement, earning the appropriate name of "philosophers of the garden." In this
garden Epicurus advocated a life of pleasure that consisted not of gross sensual
hedonism, as the term "epicurean" today mistakenly denotes, but rather of measured
austerity devoted to avoiding pain and attaining the pleasures of the mind. Such pleasures,
significantly, derived from contemplation in a life of retirement: "the immunity
which results from a quiet life and the retirement from the world" (Oates 36).
Contemplative retirement best occurs when one can withdraw from public affairs and
achieve ataraxia, "freedom from disturbance." Epicurus epitomizes this ideal in his famous maxim,
fragment 86:
Like Epicurus, St. Peter insulates himself in his garden retreat and attic study
so that he too may enjoy ataraxia. This context clarifies Harrell's observation
that St. Peter's garden "helps define his character" (195). Indeed Cather
foregrounds the extraordinary measures he takes to attain ataraxia, such as
regularly working late into the night four evenings a week, including Christmas
Day; routinely skipping family vacations; and most poignantly, composing a
"contract" forbidding his daughter Kathleen "not on any account to disturb him in
his study"—even when she was stung by a bee (4, 8,18, 82, 7, 73). As
extraordinary as these measures may be, Cather best portrays St. Peter's quest for
De rerum natura (On the
Nature of Things), the work that preserves the fullest surviving records
of epicurean doctrine and with which Cather was familiar. Lucretius depicts epicurean
imperturbability in terms of a person gazing out over water, undisturbed by
commotion: "Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to
gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation: not because any man's troubles
are a delectable joy, but because to perceive what ills you are free from yourself
is pleasant" (2.1.1-4). "[T]o perceive what ills you are free from yourself," to
revel in your own insulation—this epitomizes epicurean detachment.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this same image of detachment reappears throughout The Professor's House. Significantly, St. Peter experiences
precisely the kind of pleasure Lucretius describes when he peers out the windows
from his suite at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago and observes a snowstorm out
over the waters of Lake Michigan (The Professor's House
75). He similarly savors this pleasure during his last summer alone when he spends
day after day loafing at the lake, gazing out at the water (The
Professor's House 239, 241).
This imagery reinforces the imperturbability St. Peter seeks in his attic study: from there, St. Peter gazes out upon the waters of Lake Michigan and imbibes their rejuvenating influence: "There was one fine thing about this room. . . . From the window he could see, far away, just on the horizon, along, blue, hazy smear—Lake Michigan, the inland sea of his childhood. Whenever he was tired and dull, when the white pages before him remained blank or were full of scratched-out sentences, then he left his desk, took the train to a little station twelve miles away, and spent a day on the lake with his sail-boat" (20). Indeed, gazing out at the water affords St. Peter not only these discrete moments of inspiration but also the original insight he required for conceiving of his entire eight-volume history: he reflects that the "design of his book unfolded in the air above him" as he lay in the bottom of a boat, musing on the passing sights, while "skirting the south coast of Spain" (89).
Withdrawn from familial disturbances, St. Peter cultivates the epicurean life of
the mind not only by writing his eight-volume history but especially by developing
a friendship with Tom Outland. This friendship blossoms during the summer St.
Peter writes the third and fourth volumes of his history. While the family
vacationed in Colorado, St. Peter and Outland spent many afternoons together
swimming at the lake and still other evenings together reposing in the garden.
Cather stresses that St. Peter savors these golden days, this time of exquisite
epicurean pleasure, both sensually and intellectually: It was just
the sort of summer St. Peter liked, if he had to be in Hamilton at all. He was
his own cook, and had laid in a choice assortment of cheeses and light Italian
wines from a discriminating importer in Chicago. Every morning before he sat
down at his desk he took a walk to the market and had his pick of the fruits
and salads. He dined at eight o'clock. When he cooked a fine leg of lamb,
As Erik Thurin
observes, "there is no reason to believe that St. Peter reads
St. Peter's friendship with Outland redoubles with a significance heretofore unseen by critics when we consider that Epicurus and his disciple, Lucretius, both emphasized friendship as a key component of epicurean pleasure. Epicurus stresses its preeminence by asserting that "the noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship: of these the one is a mortal good, the other immortal" (Oates 44). In lines that could apply to St. Peter's devotion to Outland, Lucretius writes, "but still it is your merit, and the expected delight of pleasant friendship, that persuades me to undergo any labor, and entices me to spend the tranquil nights in wakefulness, seeking by what words and what poetry at last I may be able to display clear lights before your mind, whereby you may see into the heart of things" (1.1.140-45). St. Peter and Outland's friendship similarly occurs in a teacher-student relationship and blossoms during tranquil nights in the garden, the traditional site of epicurean instruction: "it was there he [St.Peter] and Tom Outland used to sit and talk half through the warm, soft nights" (7). Indeed, Outland's appearance precipitated St. Peter's best writing: "Just when the morning brightness of the world was wearing off for him, along came Outland and brought him a kind of second youth.... If the last four volumes of "The Spanish Adventurers" were more simple and inevitable than those that went before, it was largely because of Outland"(234). St. Peter's reminiscence for Outland throughout the novel descants upon Epicurus's theme: "sweet is the memory of a dead friend" (Oates 49).Thus it is not coincidental that St. Peter and Outland, two epicureans pursuing the epicurean ideal of friendship, should read together Epicurus's disciple, Lucretius.
St. Peter's other characteristics mark him as an epicure as well. These include his distaste for Kathleen's envy. He counsels her, "you must not, you cannot, be envious. It's self-destruction" (69). Epicurus similarly warns, "We must envy no one: for the good do not deserve envy and the bad, the more they prosper, the more they injure themselves" (Oates 43). Following Epicurus, St. Peter also disapproves of Rosamund's greed, which manifests itself in the "singularly haughty" expressions distorting her face when she storms from Kathleen's home and revolts against the prospects of giving charitable gifts to the Cranes and McGregors (67, 51,146-47). In words that could inform St. Peter's counsel to Rosamund, Epicurus writes, "the love of money, if unjustly gained, is impious, and, if justly, shameful; for it is unseemly to be merely parsimonious even with justice on one's side" (Oates 42).
More obviously, Cather red flags St. Peter's epicurean qualities by emphasizing
his antipathy to conventional religion, a characteristic that several have
remarked in connection with his name symbolism (Godfrey/God-free) but not in
connection with Epicurus. According to Lucretius, Epicurus defied religion at a time when most groaned
under its yoke: When man's life lay for all to see foully
groveling upon the ground, crushed beneath the weight of Religion, which
displayed her head in the regions of heaven, threatening mortals from on high
with horrible aspect, a man of Greece [i.e., Epicurus] was the first that dared
to uplift moral eyes against her, the first to make stand against her; for
neither fables of the gods could quell him, nor thunderbolts, nor heaven with
menacing roar, nay all the more they goaded the eager courage of his soul, so
that he should desire, first of all men, to shatter the confining bars of
nature's gates. Therefore the lively power of his mind prevailed, and forth he
marched far beyond the flaming walls of the heavens, as he traversed the
immeasurable universe in thought and imagination. (1.1.63-77)
As with
Epicurus, the strictures of conventional religion, if anything, provoke St.
Peter's defiance. He repeatedly slights the church; he conspicuously avoids
religious observance in general, not only working through Sundays and Christmas
without so much as a thought to their possible religious significance but also
eschewing church attendance—again inconspicuous contrast to Augusta and
Langtry, both of whom he intercepts on the way from and to service, respectively
(83, 8z, 42). Cather seems to foreground St. Peter's lack of (conventional)
religion by having Augusta display such surprise and shock upon discovering St.
Peter's ignorance of something so basic as the Magnificat (83). In addition he
utters blasphemies during lectures; he refers to his own apostasy (55-56,15); and
he even baits Christians, such as Augusta and his university students. More
subtly, St.Peter seems to seize every opportunity to portray Christians
unfavorably: not only does he point out that a nun, "flapp[ing] up like a black
crow," prevented him from innocently handing a bouquet of flowers to a schoolgirl
in Paris (88) but also, apparently because it "amused him very much," St. Peter
goes out of his way to compose a picture (one, significantly, "that had nothing to
do with the subject" that occasioned it) that depicts an Islamic defender of
Jerusalem sympathetically but a Christian crusader with "his square yellow head
haughtily erect, his unthoughtful brows fiercely frowning, his lips curled and his
fresh face full of arrogance" (59-60). Not only does St.Peter, then, conspicuously
lack—even defy—conventional religion (hence the pun on his
name, "God-free"), which in and of itself may suggest epicureanism, but in place
of that religion we find a code of behavior that replicates the code of Epicurus.
The dead giveaway to that code, of course, is St. Peter's pursuit of pleasure. We
have seen this pursuit in the kinds of dinners he prepares for himself and
Outland: the exquisite culinary delights, the ambience of dusk in a secluded
garden, the savoring of Lucretius, the matchless experience of mutual intellectual
stimulation. It appears everywhere else in The Professor's
House: from the experience at the opera to the stroll in Paris to even the
linen napkin Lillian includes with his lunch (76-78, 86-88, 85). In addition, St.
Peter's pleasures feature the unique mingling of austerity and indulgence that
make them particularly epicurean kinds of pleasure. He endures, for example, the
inconveniences of his attic—the cold, the dangerous gas stove, the
glaring lightbulb overhead—only because eschewing such necessities
allows him to have his "luxuries." Cather further qualifies St. Peter's hardships
by adding that St. Peter "was by no means an ascetic. He knew that he was terribly
selfish about personal pleasures, fought for them. If a thing gave him delight, he
got it, if he sold his shirt for it"(16-17). Selling a necessity to purchase a
luxury epitomizes the epicurean mixture of asceticism and indulgence. This
epicurean pursuit of pleasure also characterizes his intellectual life generally:
St. Peter reflects with pride that for over 30 years, he scrimped and saved his
time and energy by means of "eliminations and combinations so many and subtle that
it now made his head ache to think of them" in order that he might carry on "an
engrossing piece of creative work" (19). Thus whether in his garden, in his attic
study, or in his pursuit of pleasure, generally, St. Peter lives a particularly
epicurean life.
E. K. Brown observed over 40 years ago that "it is by a scrutiny of the approach to houses that the deepest meaning in the novel will disclose itself" (240). My scrutiny of the attic study and garden here, however, yields a less ambitious claim: Cather's choice of both the attic study and the garden as the sites of St. Peter's retreat suggests that she presents St. Peter's withdrawal as a twentieth-century pursuit of epicurean retirement. This proposition provides another context for Judith Fryer's description of St. Peter: "A product of his own time and place—America in the early 1920s—he is, like his contemporaries, expatriated intellectuals and imagined characters who people an increasingly alienated wasteland, out of touch" with "his world and ... his own nature" (304). Furthermore, explaining St. Peter's enigmatic withdrawal to the garden and attic study as a form of epicurean retirement both strengthens and gains strength from both the biographical and nonbiographical interpretations of the withdrawal crux we reviewed earlier. On the one hand, the literatures underpinning the tradition of epicurean retirement provide a genealogy for major dimensionsof the novel that critics have long acknowledged to exist in Cather's life and work generally but have not yet developed in association with this novel and the character of St. Peter specifically. On the other hand, epicurean retirement buttresses nonbiographical interpretations of St. Peter's withdrawal, providing a well-established tradition and symbology to corroborate the arguments of those who argue that St. Peter's retirement constitutes an escape from competitive materialisms or a kind of religious/philosophical quest.
Of all Willa Cather's characters, Godfrey St. Peter, the protagonist of The Professor's House, draws most often on literary sources
to express his feelings and perceptions. Embedded in his mind are passages from
plays and poems and fictional characters and scenes from novels and short stories
brought to the surface of consciousness at critical points in the novel. He quotes
from Shakespeare's Othello and Antony and
Cleopatra and Longfellow's translation of a Norse poem. He refers to the
knights of King Arthur, Medea, and Anatole France's Monsieur
Bergeret. He recalls a scene from Henry James's novel The American and the ordeal of Poe's narrator in "The Pit and the
Pendulum."
In the third and final section of the novel, St. Peter's retrospection suggests
yet another literary work that, although not named, may have contributed more to
the meaning and feeling of The Professor's House than any
other. Alone in his old house, after the family has gone to France for the summer,
St. Peter broods on Tom Outland's untimely death in the First World War and
wonders how Tom would have lived "once the trap of worldly success had been sprung
on him" (260). He imagines Tom forced "to write thousands of useless letters,
frame thousands of false excuses" and satisfy the demands of an ever more
ambitious and exacting wife. Out of the depths of his own weariness of spirit, St.
Peter concludes that Tom's death may have been a blessing, not a tragedy. In
dying, he "had escaped all that" (261).
The reader familiar with A. E. Housman's poetry will recall the most famous lyric
of A Shropshire Lad, "To an Athlete Dying Young." St. Peter
imagines Tom imprisoned by his fame, not forgotten like the athlete who triumphed
on "fields where glory does not stay," whose laurels "[wither] quicker than the
rose," who, if he lived, would
But like the athlete, Tom, in St. Peter's eyes, was fortunate to have died
young, one's memory of him unblighted.
Housman's name never appears in The Professor's House and
we will never know if Cather had his poetry in mind when she composed St. Peter's
reflections on the blessings of early death, but we have abundant evidence of
Cather's love of Housman's poetry. In 1897 Cather reviewed A
Shropshire Lad, one year after its first publication and long before the
book became well known in the United States. In her review Cather hailed Housman
as a poet "different from the poets of the time," his poetry unique in its
simplicity and musical and lyrical qualities (World and
Parish [WP] 1: 358). Three years later, in a review of the second American
edition of A Shropshire Lad, she praised the poems in
similar terms: "their quality is as unmistakable as it is rare" (WP2: 707). In
this short review she identified two characteristics that would become her own
dominant concerns as a novelist. She perceived the central paradox of A Shropshire Lad—to recapture in poetry the world
of home and childhood was to feel most deeply separated from it. She perceived in
the two groups of poems—"songs of Shropshire" and "songs of
exile"—a single plot "running through them all, binding them together."
For her, the poems were also models of economy: "a mood, a personality, a
lifetime" could be contained "in sixteen short lines" (WP 2: 707-08).
When Cather and her friend Isabelle McClung traveled to Europe in 1902 they made a
pilgrimage to Shrewsbury to see the country of A Shropshire
Lad, which Cather described in loving detail in a travel letter to the Nebraska State Journal (27 July 1902). The visit to Housman
in his lodgings at Highgate, however, was too painful to be recounted in a
newspaper letter. E. K. Brown and James Woodress have vividly described the
disillusioning realities: the dreary suburban London house where the two friends,
accompanied by Dorothy Canfield, called on Housman, his mistaking them at first
for the Canadian cousins he was expecting, his reluctance to talk of himself and
his poetry, his taking refuge in a long dialogue with Canfield about her research
on French drama, a conversation in which the others had no part.
This acutely disappointing event did not lessen Cather's worshipful response to
Housman's poetry. In a letter to Viola Roseboro' at McClure's, Cather declared herself to have been Housman's bond slave for the
past six years, since the first publication of A Shropshire
Lad (Woodress 158).
As several of her critics have shown, the influence of Housman pervades the poems
in her first book, April Twilights, published in 1903. The pastoral landscape of
Cather's poems, the Virgilian shepherds who merge into Housman's lads, the laments
for the early deaths of young men, the symbolic passage of the seasons in synch
with human mortality, the balladlike stanzas with their simple words and
repetitions—all speak to the dominant influence of Housman that Mildred
Bennett identifies: "From no other source could [Cather] have derived the style
and sentiments of some of the poems of April
Twilights"(125). Bernice Slote surmised that Cather in revising the
collection for a later edition removed the last stanza of "Lament for Marsyas"
because it echoed too closely "To an Athlete Dying Young" (xxxiv). The deleted
stanza contains these lines on the death of the young singer and shepherd Marsyas:
April Twilights 27-28)The Professor's House, published 22 years after April Twilights, is in no sense a derivative work. It
contains no conclusive marks of Housman's influence, such as fill the
poems—no herdsmen with their collies, no girls bound for the fair, no
Instead, the feeling of Housman's poems is distilled in the atmosphere of the
novel, in the "verbal mood" or the "overtone, which is too fine for the printing
press and comes through without it" (Cather, Not Under
Forty 50,137). But the "verbal mood" that Cather prized so highly is evoked
by the substance of the novel, which bears definable resemblances to Housman's
first volume, the 63 poems of A Shropshire Lad.
Most fundamental is the central importance in Cather's novel and A Shropshire Lad of two speakers—a youth and an older man. In
both works the young man is on the verge of the transforming, even fatal,
experiences of an adult life. In one of the Shropshire poems the youth is 20; in
another he is 22. Tom Outland was in his 20s when he walked into St. Peter's
garden. Pervading both works is the reflective, often elegiac mood of the older
man, past the heat and passion of youth, conscious of the transience of human
emotion and the waning of his own energies. In A Shropshire
Lad the older speaker directly addresses the youth as The Professor's House, set years after
Outland's death, the young man is a ghostly presence, alive only in St. Peter's
memory. Part 2, "Tom Outland's Story," is presented as St. Peter's recollection of
Tom's narration, itself a memory of past experience.
Both Outland and the unnamed youth in A Shropshire Lad are
protean figures who play many parts and live out destinies the older man will know
only through vicarious experience of the younger man's life. Housman's lad is
variously a soldier, an athlete, a lover, and a criminal about to be hanged. Tom
Outland has even more parts to play: he is a callboy, a cattle herder, an
explorer, an excavator, a university student, a storyteller, an inventor, and
finally a soldier. He is never a criminal, but he has lived outside the law among
tramps and outlaws in the Southwest.
Unlike Housman's speaker, who is a voice, a persona, without an identity, St.
Peter, as the protagonist of a novel, is enclosed in his "envelope of
circumstances"—to borrow Henry James's phrase. He has his profession,
his old and new houses, his attic study, his prize-winning eight-volume history,
Spanish Adventurers in North America, his wife and two
daughters and their husbands, his students, and his colleagues. But St.Peter's
reflections are often remarkably similar to those of Housman's persona.
Like the older speaker in Housman's poetry, who often merges with the youth as
with a younger self, St. Peter comes to feel himself divested of his social
worldly self, resolved into his most primitive self of childhood,"the original,
unmodified Godfrey St. Peter" (The Professor's House 263).
At the same time, both Housman's persona and Cather's protagonist cherish visions
of places real but idealized, sacred places that longing and nostalgia have
transformed into mythic worlds. Housman's poems are filled with place
names—London, Ludlow, Knighton, the Thames, the Severn—but
"Shropshire" is also a state of mind, timeless but irrecoverable except in memory.
Shropshire is "the land of lost content," "the far country" of "blue remembered
hills" and
Undoubtedly, Housman's poetry had prepared Cather to feel most deeply the
qualities of timeless pastoral in the actual countryside of
Shropshire—"the remoteness, the unchangedness and time-defying
stillness" (WP 2: 897).
Cather's words describing Shropshire, written more than 25 years before The Professor's House, apply equally well to one of the
sacred places in the novel—the city of the Blue Mesa as Tom Outland
first sees it: "a little city of stone, a sleep . . . as still as sculpture ...
looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity" (The
Professor's House 201). Tom's words suggest both the "little town" of
Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," its streets forever empty and silent and the
"stiller town" of Housman's poem, where the body of the athlete is borne. Like
Housman's "land of lost content," the Blue Mesa exists in the memory of St. Peter
and Tom Outland as a world frozen in time, preserved by death from change.
St. Peter's memory holds other sacred places—the blue water of Lake
Michigan, remembered as "the inland scene of his childhood" (The
Professor's House 29), the Paris of his student years, and the view of the
Spanish seacoast and its mountain ranges that inspired the plan of his
eight-volume history. In Chicago, when St. Peter and his wife went to the opera,
they heard Mignon, with its famous aria, "Connais-tu-le
pays," which expresses the gypsy girl's longing for the lost world of her
childhood.
For both Cather and Housman, longing for the sacred places of youth is
inseparable from the sense of emptiness and desolation suffered in the loss of a
beloved person. St. Peter's thoughts suggest the brooding melancholy of Housman's
lyrics most poignantly in the last part of the novel where heclings to memories of
Outland but knows they can no longer sustain him, when he feels that "he was
solitary and must always be so," when he feels in the sight of the "declining sun"
and the soft yellowing maple leaves the portents of his own death and imagines
himself in his coffin, earth returned to earth (The Professor's
House 265). Before Augusta saves him from death in his gas-filled attic
study, he might well have described himself in the words of Housman's speaker, who
muses upon himself "idle and alone," set apart from
Like Housman's speaker, St. Peter knows the despair of one
The persona of Housman's lyrics does not move beyond melancholy longing for
the irrecoverable. Nothing enters his world to dissipate the nostalgia that
becomes a longing for death. For weeks St. Peter drifts deathward but is saved by
the circumstances that almost take his life—the storm, the odor of gas,
and his collapse that brings his savior Augusta to his side.
St. Peter's loss of consciousness is like a rite of passage, moving him from one spiritual state to another. In effect, he moves from one poet's world to another, from the land of Shropshire to the pastoral world of Robert Frost. In feeling that "he had let something go . . . something very precious, that he could not consciously have relinquished," in accepting that he must learn "to live without delight" (282), St Peter recognizes the universal question that Frost expressed in "The Oven Bird":
The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing (150)
—a question well understood by Housman as well.
Cather saw Housman only once, and she never published an account of their meeting. When Mark Twain's nephew, Cyril Clemens, wrote to Cather seeking information about her visit for a biography of Housman, she adamantly refused to give him any details. But the visit had taken on a life of its own in the fertile imagination of Ford Madox Ford. When Cather learned that he had published an account representing her leading members of a Pittsburgh "Shropshire Lad Club" to Cambridge to present a gold wreath to Housman, she wrote again to Clemens to deny every part of the story. In her letter she indicated her intention eventually to write an essay giving the facts of the meeting. Ten years later (17 April 1947) she wrote to Dorothy Canfield Fisher asking her to recall the details of their visit more than 40 years previously. Her friend's reply arrived on 24 April 1947, the day of Cather's death (Robinson 110-11).
Cather's painful memory of her one meeting with Housman undoubtedly destroyed any youthful impulse to identify herself with the poet, separated from her by sex, nationality, culture, and age (Housman was 14 years older than Cather). But in many important ways their lives were similar. Like Housman, Cather never married but invested herself in passionate love of a friend of the same sex. The marriage of Isabelle McClung afflicted Cather with a sense of desolation and ruptured life, such as Housman suffered when Robert Moses married and left England. Cather's study of the classics created another bond with the poet, although unlike him (and St. Peter) she was not a scholar and a university professor.
Both Cather and Housman shunned publicity, refused offers to have their works anthologized, and guarded their privacy with unremitting determination. In the 1930s both writers were attacked by a new generation of critics who charged them with being sentimental escapists seeking refuge in the past from the problems of contemporary life. But the works of both writers continued to sell widely and remained popular with large numbers of readers.
Their affinities as artists are seen in their essays on literature: Housman's
"Swinburne" (1910) and "The Name and Nature of Poetry" (1933) and Cather's "The
Novel Démeublé" (1922). Both writers defined literary art in
terms of the effects upon the reader of intangible, ineffable qualities. In
Housman's words, the music of the greatest poets is addressed not to "the external
ear" but to "the inner chambers of the sense of hearing" (282). To Cather, the
highest values of all literary art inhered in "the overtone divined by the ear but
not heard by it" (Not Under Forty 50). Housman compared
poetry to a "secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir,
or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster" (370). For Cather, the
essence remains intangible, "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" (Not Under Forty 50). Housman's definition of the
function of poetry: "to transfuse emotion—not to transmit thought but to
set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the
writer" (352) is implicit in Cather's more provocative statement beginning
"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named
there—that, one might say, is created" (50). Housman connects the
vibration in the reader to the writer's feeling; Cather removes the writer,
locating the source of evocative power in the absence of words that creates "the
inexplicable presence of the thing not named" (50). But for both writers, art
achieved its highest effects by suggestion, not statement. The intensity of the
vibration or overtone or aura was in proportion to the economy of means, to "the
processes of simplification," in Cather's phrase (48-49). Housman looked to
classical literature as his model (265), Cather to modern painting (48), both
seeking the artistic values that, like their lands of lost content, were
timeless.
You had your searches, your uncertainties, And this is good to know—for us, I mean Who bear the brunt of our America And try to wrench her impulse into art.
As she made clear, Cather preferred to forget Alexander's
Bridge. In her essay "My First Novels (There Were Two)," written in 1931, she
locates her true beginning with O Pioneers! and dismisses
Alexander's Bridge as a "studio picture"—that
is, airless, not done on site—bearing the marks of a beginning writer
fascinated by "interesting material" and "clever people" (On
Writing 91, 93). But along the way she says something that qualifies her
disparagement: "The impressions I tried to communicate on paper were genuine, but
they were very shallow" (On Writing 91).
No one can deny shallowness: stilted dialogue, stagey settings (so many teas before cozy fires), Wilson's Poelike presentiments of a fatal flaw in Alexander, and of course the love-triangle plot. Wherein is the novel genuine? However hard to locate, a strain of something transcending the melodrama of the story has been sensed by a number of careful readers, beginning with Ferris Greenslet, Cather's Houghton Mifflin editor, who recommended it for publication, noting that he found "a spiritual sense of life" (qtd. in Woodress 216) in the manuscript. Edith Lewis, in her memoir, venturing a slight disagreement with her old friend, speaks of the novel's "gathering intensity and power," as though Cather's "true voice had broken through" (79). Among later commentators Bernice Slote, Susan J. Rosowski, and Elizabeth Ammons should be noted. Still, defining the elusive genuineness of the novel, its authenticity, remains a problem.
Cather herself seems to be considering the question of authorial genuineness in a letter of 1943 recalling how she came to write "Paul's Case." The story rose, she says, from her memory of a troubled boy in her Latin class and from her own feelings about the old New York Waldorf Astoria. She adds that most stories are made in this fashion, by a grafting of some figure with apart of "the writer's self" (letter to Mr. Phillipson). That phrase, "the writer's self," suggests an undercurrent of intensity, a nerve touched, that we respond to as authentic. Cather elsewhere asserted the centrality of her own involvement in what she wrote. For example, speaking at Bryn Mawr in 1927 she referred to "personal emotional experience" as the beginning ofevery "genuine imaginative production" ("Future of Art" 2).
What I hope to show is that some part of Cather is embedded in Alexander's Bridge and that—strangely—this part is
her feeling about her "interesting material," which she so belittles in "My First
Novels." In other words, what was engaging her emotional interest around 1911 was
the international scene and its "clever people." She indeed did think then, as she
put it in order to deny it, that "London is more engaging than . . . Gopher
Prairie" (On Writing 92).
Two biographical details may clarify this claim. The first is a passage from a
letter Cather wrote to E. K. Brown in 1946 in which she describes a defining
choice she faced at the time of writing Alexander's Bridge.
She recalls that she then had a chance to live in London, a move urged
particularly by two English friends, William Heinemann and William Archer, men she
characterizes as full of gayety and wit. She decided not to make the move, she
says, only after talking with Louis Brandeis, who praised O
Pioneers! when it came out in 1913. In other words, the plan lasted until
O Pioneers! was published and appreciated. Implausible
as it seems, an expatriate Cather was possible.
Lewis confirms that Cather wrote Alexander's Bridge while
troubled by indecision: "I seem to recall it as a period of uncertainty and
change. . .. I remember that we discussed once whether it would be worth while to
buy a new coffee pot, since the future seemed so uncertain" (74). Cather and Lewis
were then in a small and unsatisfactory apartment on Washington Place. They would
move to the comfort of Bank Street only after O Pioneers!
was ready for publication.
The second bit of biographical data—really just an image—comes
from a letter Cather wrote to Elizabeth Sergeant in August 1912 from Pittsburgh,
where she was staying at the McClungs' home and working on O
Pioneers! She reports that she and Isabelle are reading aloud the ninth
volume of Michelet—six volumes further on than in March.
How are these two pieces from her life related to the authorial self-inspiriting
Alexander's Bridge? All readers of the novel must agree
that when we step back, as it were, and ask what the novel describes we say that
it is an image of the agony of indecision, of a mind in torment from not being
able to find a resolution. It is, in fact, an image of a mind evermore stricken
with fear of finally choosing one path and thus eliminating forever what the path
not taken promises.
It is possible that in following Bartley's struggles Cather was drawing on the
insights of William James, whose "devoted disciple" she had been during her
Pittsburgh days (Seibel 202). In his Introduction to
Psychology, just out in 1890, and in the more popular Psychology: Briefer Course that followed two years later, James wrote
explicitly of the pain of indecision, about which he knew firsthand, having
himself been driven to a mental breakdown by the dilemma of having to choose
between a life given to art and one given to science and medicine. He speaks
movingly of "that peculiar feeling of inward unrest known as indecision" and of
the "desolation" of doubt leading to "a lonesome moral wilderness." It is such a
lonely and life-annihilating dilemma that is at the heart of Alexander's Bridge (James528, 534). Indeed, the peculiar misery of the story is that no
resolution is ever found. The hero undergoes no illumination, no rush of
self-knowledge. Bartley dies baffled, his irresolution underscored by the
reversals in his thinking in the last hours of his life. Significantly, these are
presented as failures of communication, writings that do not fully reflect the
writer's mind and never reach their intended audience. Bartley writes two letters
in his last hours, the first to Hilda, saying that he must give her up, which he
destroys when she appears in his New York rooms and he realizes that he cannot
live without her. The second is to Winifred, saying that he must leave her.
(Bartley's studio rooms, rented from a portrait painter, have large windows,
mirrors, and glassy framed pictures that reflect and distort, suggesting his
increasing disintegration.) The next morning on the train north he rejects this letter too. He cannot face
a life in cheap continental hotels even to be with Hilda. But the letter remains
in his pocket when he drowns under his collapsing bridge, but—yet again
"but"—it is so water-soaked as to be illegible and is never read (but is
misinterpreted by Winifred). The essential incoherence of Bartley's life remains.
It may be objected that I am equating what Cather depicts as a life-defining dilemma—Bartley's—with what is, after all, a mere geographical displacement and one that could be reversed. However, the London decision was fraught with implications that made it more than just a change of scene.
Why did London so attract Cather at this time? Part of the answer lies in the great turn her life had so recently taken professionally and socially. In just six or seven years she had moved from being an obscure high-school teacher to a personage welcome in the intellectual and art-centered circles of London. The names she mentions to Brown—Heinemann and Archer—were at the heart of the publishing and theater worlds. Through them and others she had met Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Edward Garnett, and Ford Madox Ford. She had encountered Swinburne in the British Museum (Tittle) and attended the funeral of Meredith (letter to Mrs. Seibel). Further, she had made her own mark in this company, as Sergeant perceived during a conversation shortly after they met in 1910: "she was soon telling me about an evening in a box at the new Irish players in London with William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory. I could see how much at home she felt in such brilliant company, I could divine how these great literary figures enjoyed the fine, free discriminations of a cultivated American mind; which intrigued them the more because expressing itself in a very un-English accent . . . a Nebraskan had the right 'American' tang" (60-61). In sum, Sergeant writes, "For her London, London of all cities" (59). And it seems clear that Heinemann and Archer were not just contacts but valued friends, especially Archer, who visited Cather in New York (Lewis 75). Interestingly for the reticent Cather, she spoke of Archer in an address she gave at Bowdoin College in 1925 in order to illustrate her point that an author should feel love (her word) for her characters. She recalled talking to the actor George Arliss about Archer and how all the details brought up revealed their affections for him (Staples).
The life such friends promised would have been enticing to any lover of art and
literature, particularly to one self-conscious about her prairie education, as
Cather called her small-town schooling, but doubly so for Cather in contrast to
the humiliations she had endured on her first trip to Europe in 1902. Mark
Madigan, tracing the troubled friendship of Cather and Dorothy Canfield Fisher,
makes clear how painful, how prolonged, was Cather's envy of Fisher's refined
learning and sophistication that made it possible for her to talk easily with
Cather's beloved Housman while Cather herself sat there tongue-tied. It took 20
years before Cather, her success now assured, could confess her bitterness to
Fisher. We may note that the Cather-Fisher correspondence reports a clear instance
of Cather using her own powerful emotions for her fiction. Writing One of Ours, Cather says, she built on her bitter memories
to convey Claude Wheeler's sense of being shutout from a promised land when he
talked with David Gerhardt who, like Fisher, carried his Europeanized education so
lightly (Madigan 126-27). But just a few years had brought a dazzling reversal. As
an editor at McClure's,Cather could now move with ease in
the Republic of Letters (the eighteenth-century phrase Edith Wharton uses in The House of Mirth to suggest the worldly fraternity of the
learned).
Of course London—that is, Europe—was the place to be for a
writer. James and Wharton were the obvious models, but different American writers
went too—Stephen Crane and, for a time, Robert Frost. Another wave of
modernist expatriates was waiting in the wings or already there, showing how
pervasive the pull was. In Europe was the good and free life, as Cather dramatizes
in "The Bohemian Girl," the story she wrote shortly after Alexander's Bridge. Clara and Nils run from the cultural wasteland of
Nebraska to Europe—to be exact, Bergen (a choice, it may be observed,
that considerably surprises anyone of Norwegian ancestry). And in the epilogue of
Alexander's Bridge we find that Professor Wilson, having
come into money, has left the West to live in London, as though London was his
natural home.
More to the point, the fabric of the novel conveys the glamour London had in
Cather's imagination. The London scenes are rendered with exactitude and detail,
whereas Boston remains somewhat misty. London streets and buildings and places are
named—Piccadilly, Bedford Square, Trafalgar Square, the Embankment, the
Houses of Parliament—as they "catch fire with the sunset"(Alexander's Bridge 35). When Bartley and Hilda return from
an excursion to Richmond they see London as "a distant gold-washed city," its
shadows changed by a "shining, pulsing, special atmosphere" (92). They see lines
before the pit entrances of the theaters, "short-coated boys, and girls in sailor
hats, all shivering and chatting gayly" (93).
Yet the attraction of London as a way of life was only part of its lure. Its more crucial significance is suggested by the picture of Cather and McClung reading Michelet's history, volume 9. This is the question of what kind of writer Cather wanted to be as she left full-time publishing to try to make it as a writer. (It should be emphasized that a move to London would not have entailed continuing as McClure's editor. In London she could readily do occasional freelance work, as she seemed to have been planning.) What kind of writing did she aspire to? The answer is the top level: that is, she wished to be a contender on the plane of high culture. What we know of Cather's reading, her habits, her passions, her friends—and we know quite a bit about these, early and late—reveal someone consumed, yes, by a desire to be a writer, an artist in the life-dedicating romantic style, but also by a twin ambition, that is, to know everything—all literature, music, art, languages, works of history and philosophy. She wanted, as Mallarmé put it, to be one who had read all the books or to use the phrase of Ezra Pound, who was already in Europe, Cather aspired, as did he, to "world citizenship."
This is an ambition, a distinction, the power of which is now hard to convey. The
desire to be, as the pallid phrase has it, "liberally educated" has lost its
pull—indeed, is under attack as "Eurocentric" (see, for example,
Elizabeth Ammons's essay in Cather Studies 3). But this
cultural ideal had a long history, perhaps especially among women writers and
thinkers, who, if they could not do a lot of things, could at least read books, as
we see in the lives of George Eliot, Margaret Fuller, Virginia Woolf—to
mention a few—and also Edith Wharton, a poor little rich girl who spent
hours reading in her father's library. The picture of Cather and her handsome
socialite friend determinedly pushing through Michelet's history says something
about this drive. Part
of the attraction of London, then, was that it represented the nature of the
writing she aspired to.
As a correlative, in reverse as it were, we may ask what kind of writing she did
The
Country of the Pointed Firs she says much in praise but reservedly. She
must have been thinking of her own very different fictional characters when she
noted,"Miss Jewett wrote of the people who grew out of the soil, . . . not about
exceptional individuals at war with their environment." And in an interview she
gave almost contemporaneously (1924) she said crisply of Jewett, "She was a very
uneven writer. A good portion of her work is not worth preserving... . She was a
voice. She spoke for a slight but influential section of the American people"
(Rasco 68). Here Cather reveals the very different scope she had set herself. For
her the sketch, the local scene, local color for its own sake, were not enough.
She was always angered by being placed with the regional realists.
And if she should choose to write about life in the West, life as she remembered
it, she had an audience to fear. "The Sculptor's Funeral" and "A Wagner Matinee,"
in which she had not disguised her fear of the empty land and her loathing for
small-town small-mindedness, had angered Nebraskans and offended her family. As
late as 1921 she told an interviewer about her hurt at the criticism: "the root
and branch kind of attack is hard to forget" (Hinman 48). Possibly Jewett, too,
was an inhibiting force. Despite her advice about truth-telling, she had not liked
the pessimism of Cather's early stories."The Enchanted Bluff," a poeticized blend of childhood
memory and nature writing, might have pointed a way out, but even here the
obliterating force of the prairie or a stifling small town threatens the boys. In
the story Cather wrote just before Alexander's Bridge,
pretty Nelly Deane is extinguished by the western town. It must have appeared
dauntingly difficult, perhaps impossible, to attain world citizenship by way of
Nebraska.
If only she could have it both ways, like Hartwell, the sculptor hero of her 1907 story "The Namesake": Hartwell lived all his life in Europe but nevertheless was always referred to as "the American." He succeeded as did no other artist in capturing in bronze "all the restless, teeming force of the adventurous wave still climbing westward in our own land" (139). Later, two successful novels behind her, Cather indulged herself in a more personal wish-fulfillment dream through Thea Kronborg, the ambitious girl from the West who achieves success abroad and returns to success at home, performing before all her western friends, even Spanish Johnny. Meanwhile, back home in Moonstone, Aunt Tillie basks in the pleasure of reading about Madame Kronborg's triumphs.
However, as we well know, Cather did not move to London. No doubt a mixture of powerful and difficult to articulate loyalties were tugging at her—loyalties to family, to the land, to language—making clear that here, inescapably, was her subject and here she must make her way. She pictures this relentless pull in the closing scene of "The Bohemian Girl." Eric, Nils's young brother, has started on his journey of escape to join Clara and Nils in Bergen, but in growing anguish of mind, and inevitably, he jumps from the eastbound train and takes the westbound back to Omaha, to mother, and to the farm.
The struggle that Cather is remembering—or endured in the course of
writing Alexander's Bridge—was between the
brilliant lights of London and the dim campfires of childhood, so memorably
invoked when Bartley looks from the train bearing him to his doomed bridge and
sees boys camped around a marsh fire. He remembers his western boyhood but cannot
connect the boy and the man, the western youth and the ambitious builder of the
world's bridges. That was the dilemma Cather faced: how to satisfy her
intellectual and worldly ambitions while remaining loyal to her western past.
Alexander's Bridge shows how it can be done: although Hilda
Burgoyne seldom appears in the list of Cather's strong women, she is, as Bartley
calls her,"powerful" (95). She represents the integration that so far had eluded
Cather. Hilda is independent, an increasingly successful actress, and an artist
who uses her past—her Irish country roots—to further her art.
She is a rememberer: she visits the Paris people she and Bartley had known in
their young romance, she lives in Bedford Square where her family had lived, she
visits the British museum, as she did as a child. Significantly, the art of the
Museum speaks to her—she senses the good wishes of the Egyptian princess
in the mummy room, whereas Bartley shudders at the dead art held in those walls
and at the coldness of the Elgin marbles.
Bartley's boyhood memories, in contrast to Hilda's, are scattered fragments—hunting jack rabbits with a favorite greyhound, remembering locoed horses in a corral (74, 102). Only once, on a park bench in London, could he "feel his own continuous identity—feel the boy he had been in the rough days of the old West" (39).
Alexander's Bridge exemplifies the root of Cather's
impasse: Living one's life with the British Museum as a neighbor was one thing,
living next to an endless cornfield quite another. Cather would go on to find
connectedness, to discover a way of bringing the muses of poetry and epic into her
empty land, but she would also remain keenly aware of the pains of
disconnectedness and of the dangers of half-buried memories and sudden
dislocations. St. Peter and Myra Henshawe are the obvious examples, but even in a
very late story, "Before Breakfast," a dark current of memory, a hinted betrayal
of an early self, undermines the equanimity of Henry Grenfell. Cather was more
right than we have sometimes supposed in asserting that she had two
beginnings.
At first glance, it would appear to require a leap of the imagination to associate that masterpiece of compression and understatement, Willa Cather's renowned story "Paul's Case," with the influence of that master of digression and "rich temperamental vulgarity" (James 147), Honoré de Balzac. Yet a leap of the imagination is precisely what is called for: influence, after all, sometimes manifests itself only subtly, borne of a susceptibility to a vital presence from one artist to another. Anyone who has come under Balzac's spell, as did Cather, who read his works as a young woman and who in 1902 made a pilgrimage to his tomb in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, would rejoice in evidence of a spiritual, and in this case professional, kinship honoring that "picture making mechanism" proper to the novelist's art (Cather 488).
Cather's story is distinctly her own, but on some level it seems to be a response to Balzac, her quite singular and very American response. It is not one prompted by anxiety. The authority of her writing suggests instead the delivery of a confident and decisive reply. Only someone who had fully taken the measure of the French writer's works could have so accurately and so succinctly aimed an answer. Within the story itself, Cather's implied conversation with Balzac opens a space not otherwise evident in the work's strict economy, the presence of a purposeful and loving debate with her predecessor's example. This argument, in turn, underlies much of the sense of inevitability that characterizes the story's unfolding and helps to direct our interpretation of it. Paul could not have come out of the pages of Balzac, which in part explains the cruel and unforgiving fate in store for him. Had he gone meekly home to Pittsburgh, his spiritual immobility might perhaps have symbolized a similar paralysis of Cather's own—one whose specter she might have feared but that, happily, did not occur.
"Paul's Case" calls to mind that of another schoolboy hero—Balzac's
Louis Lambert, a brilliant youth oppressed by mediocrity in all its guises, who
attends a school in Vendome, near Tours, run by the Oratorian fathers. Lambert, in
the novel bearing his name, is an unqualified genius whose Treatise on the Will is confiscated by the priests and probably sold to
the local grocer to wrap produce. Although indicting schools for their part in the
relentless, often unthinking, pressure to conform brought to bear upon young
spirits, neither Cather, whose teachers are "humiliated to have felt so vindictive
toward a mere boy" (470), nor even Balzac demonizes the teaching profession: "It
would be wrong to judge too harshly a poor schoolmaster, ill paid and consequently
not very shrewd, for sometimes being unjust or giving way to anger. Endlessly
spied upon by a multitude of mocking gazes and surrounded by snares, he
occasionally takes vengeance for his own mistakes on children too quick to notice
them" (Balzac 11: 611).Paul himself has sympathy for his English teacher, the one "leading the pack"
of tormentors at his hearing, even despite her thoughtless display of haughtiness
toward him that evening at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Hall: "He looked her over and
decided that she was not appropriately dressed and must be a fool to sit
downstairs in such togs. The tickets had probably been sent her out of kindness,
he reflected, as he put down a seat for her, and she had about as much right to
sit there as he had" (469, 471). There is something about both characters that
seem to provoke the rage and rejection heaped upon them. In Paul's case, it "lay
in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the boy's; in the contempt which they
all knew he felt for them, and which he seemingly made not the least effort to
conceal" (468). The narrator singles out Paul's eyes for description, and again
the "hysterical" quality is noted: "His eyes were remarkable for a certain
hysterical brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical
sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large, as
though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter about them
which that drug does not produce" (468). The suggestion of androgyny by
association with a kind of overwrought feminine disposition likewise adheres to
Louis Lambert, "of so nervous a constitution, often as subject to vapors as a
woman" (II: 612). Like Paul, he offends with his too expressive gaze: "Whenever he
was brutally wrenched from his thoughts by the 'You're not working!' of the
schoolmaster, he would often, unconsciously in the beginning, give him a look of
inexpressibly fierce contempt.... This look no doubt greatly upset the teacher,
who, wounded by this wordless epigram, wanted to make his student unlearn that
cutting gaze" (II: 612).
If the pupils are sensitive to the lack of prestige and refinement of their teachers, they are as capable of administering slights as of receiving them. The imprisonment of the young in the unimaginative world constructed by their elders is, however, the overwhelming impression left of school experience, and the penetrating gaze of these misfits threatens to expose the whole corrupt arrangement. In her portrayal of this confinement as experienced by Paul, Cather, following the example of Balzac, does not overlook the social and economic forces at work in education as an institution.
Like so many of Balzac's heroes, Lambert eventually leaves his provincial roots behind to settle in Paris. Paul similarly gravitates toward the cultural center of New York. The public spectacle of theater or musical performance plays a crucial role in their lives, one connected with the inaccessibility of an object of desire. At the Théâtre-François Lambert experiences sexual jealousy for the first time (II: 645). Paul watches the soprano soloist leave Carnegie Hallin the company of the conductor and wonders if "she were not an old sweetheart of his" (472). He is unable to approach her as she enters the hotel. His planned escapade in New York includes, as an integral component of the fantasy, an evening at the opera. But if Lambert desires another human being, Paul is willing an assimilation evident only to him: "He felt now that his surroundings explained him" (484).
A more unfortunate suggestion of influence appears in Cather's allusion to
anti-Semitic stereotypes, Balzac's example in his work at large perhaps being
harmful in its supply of stock images. In Louis Lambert he
draws on these in a benign way, inventing a Jewish ancestor for the young woman
with whom his hero will fall in love: "Louis noticed a young person whose position
forced her to remain within that group looked down upon by high society, although
her fortune was large enough to warrant the supposition that one day she might
marry into the aristocracy of the region... . Her features showed Jewish beauty in
the purest form: those oval lines, so expansive and virginal, have something of
the ideal about them and seem to express the delights of the Orient, the
unchanging blue of its skies, the splendors of its lands, and the fabulous riches
of its way of life" (II: 658-59). If Balzac, in this instance, identifies
prejudice for what it is—and he doesn't always do so— Cather
evokes the same themes of great wealth, exoticism, and misguided pretensions in
comments intended to be withering and ultimately gratuitous, addressed to the
enchantment theater holds for Paul: "It was very like the old stories that used to
float about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls, with
palms, and fountains, and soft lamps and richly appareled women who never saw the
disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled city,
enamoured of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple, his
wishing-carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual
sunshine" (478). Here the narrator's contempt for the character's illusions puts
her on the side of the gang of teachers, acting in accordance with the instincts
and ignorance of the crowd.
Yet another level of comparison between "Paul's Case" and Louis
Lambert involves the narrator's detachment from the central character,
achieved gradually in the work by Balzac and established at the outset by Cather.
To the extent that Paul and Louis Lambert represent immature and incomplete
versions of the authors' youthful selves or merely potential and refracted
versions of them (and this is not said to minimize the sophistication of the art
involved in creating them), the perspective adopted by the narrator in each work
comes to accentuate distance and perhaps to symbolize rejection. By way of
comparison one might evoke Flaubert's treatment of Félicité in
"A Simple Heart" ("Un Cœur simple"). The limitations of this provincial
servant, like Paul not an artist, do not seem to inspire a judgmental stance
although irony is inevitably present. Félicité is not damned.
Cather's impersonality is more Balzacian—that is to say, not at all
impartial and Darwinian on the social level. Failed geniuses and spineless
drifters do not deserve to survive. Louis Lambert lapses into madness and dies
young. Cather writes of Paul: "It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut
him out of the theater and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the
whole thing was virtually determined" (481).
Why suicide? Cather might have found a precedent in Balzac's The
Wild Ass's Skin (La Peau de chagrin), which opens
with what Raphaël de Valentin had intended as his last fling, a visit to
a gambling parlor, before drowning himself in the Seine. Those observing his
arrival do not fail to notice "the elegant shabbiness of his clothes. The young
man indeed had a frock coat showing good taste, but his tie was kept close to his
vest in too artful a manner to imagine that he owned linen to wear underneath"; at
the door he is obliged to leave his hat, "the brim of which . . . was peeling
slightly" (10: 62, 10: 58). We are reminded of Paul's first appearance before the
faculty: "His clothes were a trifle out-grown, and the tan velvet on the collar of
his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for all that there was something of the
dandy about him" (468). Raphaël gambles and loses his last Tancredi (10: 64). Paul, throughout his ordeal, similarly
maintains his composure: "He stood through it smiling, his pale lips parted over
his white teeth. . . . his set smile did not once desert him, and his only sign of
discomfort was the nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of
his overcoat. . . . When he was told that he could go, he bowed gracefully and
went out" (469). Hoping to be observed by his teachers, Paul "ran down the hill
whistling the Soldiers' Chorus from Faust" (470). An
attitude of defiance, self-containment, and an operatically expressed jauntiness
characterize the opening encounter with implacable fate, variously personified, in
both works of fiction.
Other resemblances deepen the Balzacian "feel" of Cather's story. Raphaël lost his mother when he was a child of 9 or 10 (10: 125); Paul can no longer remember his (473). In both cases it is a father preoccupied with financial matters who raises the child and whose stringency sows the seed for adolescent rebellion. Paul's father, "on principle, did not like to hear requests for money, whether much or little," although he is prosperous(476). Raphaël has not forgotten that his father "did not ever give me, before the age of twenty, all of ten francs, ten measly francs, to spend—an immense treasure the vainly hoped-for possession of which made me dream of ineffable delights" (10: 121). Paul takes carfare from his father, lying about his intentions (476); the young Raphaël takes a small amount of his father's money to go gambling and likewise dissembles (10: 123-24). Both have expensive tastes: Raphaël's way of life must change dramatically after his father's death despite his being "[a]ccustomed from my youth to attaching great value to the luxuries I was surrounded by" (10: 127); when Paul's money runs out and his father comes to New York in search of him,"stopping at some joint or other" (486), Paul knows his adventure must abruptly end. In their stories Cather and Balzac are acutely aware of the unromantic connection between luxuries and the money necessary to produce and enjoy them in a capitalist system. If Raphaël's most extravagant wishes are granted upon his possession of the wild ass's skin, the narrator accounts explicitly for payment of these by bestowing upon his hero an unanticipated inheritance (10: 208). Cather's Paul studies the Sunday newspaper to plan the ideal "entry into New York" (480) and steals from the firm where his father had sent him to work. What is luxury for Paul, art itself, is associated, ironically enough, with necessity for the artist. Paul is able to attend concerts at Carnegie Hall because he is an usher and he is welcome at the theater in part because his friend Charley Edwards "could not afford to employ a dresser, [and] often found him useful" (477). The actresses are "hard-working women, most of them supporting indolent husbands or brothers" (479).
Art for Paul is a form of "peculiar intoxication" (472). From music, he "needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own" (478). Cather's narrator remarks upon his susceptibility to "that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine ... which always blinded Paul to any possible defects," a sort of reaction to the "ugliness and commonness" of his surroundings (472, 473). (The "horrible yellow wall-paper" of his room is reminiscent of many a Balzacian mansard [473].)The pressure to conform is palpable, from the opening hearing before the faculty to the example of the young clerk held up before him by his father to the final moments when it seemed "the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever" (475-76, 485). The sordidness of industrial Pittsburgh is not so far removed from Raphaël's experience,which takes place "in Paris, on the quai Voltaire, in the nineteenth century, at a time and a location where magic surely ought to be impossible"(10: 79) or, as Raphaël himself exclaims, "in an era where everything can be explained, where the police would haul a new Messiah into court and refer his miracles to the Academy of Sciences, in a time when we believe only in the signatures of lawyers" (10: 237). Thwarting his early aspirations is the "leaden dome" (10: 121) of paternal influence. The talisman that measures Raphaël's days and his desires teaches him about the nature of life, but Paul's evenings out provide no antidote to illusion.
It is conspicuously the "picture making mechanism" (488) that Cather attacks and
destroys in Paul's suicide, and because of that specificity, along with the
matter-of-factness of the narration and the efficiency of his dispatch, his death
strikes one as almost vicious. What symbolic justice is there in making a
17-year-old character (Paul is some 5 to 10 years younger than most of Balzac's
young heroes) bear the weight of a tale of social and economic repression, in
which his case is convincingly argued indeed, only to ruthlessly eliminate him? In
doing so, Cather would seem to reject the dictum pronounced in The Wild Ass's Skin: "Every suicide is a poem sublimein melancholy" (10:
64). Perhaps a third work by Balzac, the well-known story "Sarrasine," can shed
some light on the nature of Cather's preoccupations. Although "Paul's Case" is
commonly read as being an expression of Cather's horror of mere Bohemianism, the
forcefulness of the ending implies that more is at stake than simply a
condemnation of Paul's lack of artistic vocation. Paul's escape from a
claustrophobic environment might not be, as a symbolic event, entirely negative.
In Balzac's tale a young man tries to impress a young marquise by recounting the long-ago scandal of the sculptor Sarrasine's love for an Italian singer known as "La Zambinella," who, to Sarrasine's horror, turned out to be a castrato protected by a vengeful cardinal. It is the story behind a portrait the young woman had admired the night before at a ball. The narrator also reveals that she had actually caught a glimpse there of the selfsame Zambinella, now an old man. This is surely a more complicated case than Paul's, but affinities between the two stories suggest that Cather's meditation on art takes Balzac into account—not necessarily with reference to this particular story, although it is representative—and perhaps comes to terms with what his example might have meant for her as she came into her own as a writer.
Much of the symbolic territory is familiar. After being expelled from a provincial school where he exasperated the Jesuit fathers, Sarrasine "sought in Paris a refuge from the threats of paternal malediction" (6:1058). His few nights out as an apprentice sculptor were spent at the Théâtrede la Comédie-Française, and the all-important scene where he first glimpses La Zambinella occurs at the Théâtre d'Argentina (6:1059). As in The Wild Ass's Skin, in which the narrator alludes to "orgies begun in wine and ending up in the Seine" (10: 59), Balzac's tale features scenes of feasts and orgies: Sarrasine "recognized the male and female singers from the theater, mingling with charming women, everyone ready for an artists' orgy, waiting only for him to begin" (6: 1065). Paul's "orgies of living" may, in Pittsburgh, have been confined to evenings at the theater but, in New York, the pleasures of fine dining at the hotel "all flooded Paul's dream with bewildering radiance. When the roseate tinge of his champagne was added—that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in his glass—Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all" (473, 483). The marquise listening to the narrator's tale in "Sarrasine" comes to exactly the same conclusion, though not admiringly: "Paris, she said, is a most hospitable place, welcoming everything, fortunes steeped in shame and fortunes steeped in blood. Crime and infamy find asylum and companionship there; virtue alone has no one to worship it" (6: 1075-76). Exactly what ensues after the beginning of Paul's brief "champagne friendship" (484) with the freshman from Yale is never stated, but such reticence would not ill serve the purposes of a writer acquainted with the predictably long, minutely described, and often sensational interludes of erotic interest one is apt to find in Balzac, assuming that the suggestion of such an association is implicit in Cather's ellipsis. In any event, the first part of Sarrasine's adventure in Rome follows an outline in some ways similar to Paul's in New York, each one having a different focus: "In a week, he lived a whole lifetime, in the mornings occupied in shaping the clay with which he succeeded in making a figure of La Zambinella, in spite of the veils, skirts, corsets, and bows that hid her from him. In the evenings, seated early in his loge, alone, reclining on a sofa, he created for himself, in the manner of a Turk drugged by opium, a sort of happiness as fertile and as fantastic as he wished" (6:1062-63). As for Paul: "Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in his loge at the Opera. . . . His dearest pleasures [at the hotel] were the grey winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his sense of power.... His golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he could" (484-85). It is on the eighth day that he reads the news of his absence in the Pittsburgh papers, but he comes to feel "that he had lived the sort of life he was meant to live" (485, 487). In the riches of the imagination, with their exotic tinge—one finds allusions to "the sultan's daughter in the tale of The Magic Lamp" (6: 1045) in Balzac, to "the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman" (471) in Cather—lie ideal pictures of happiness and beauty that will ultimately betray the soul and require its disillusionment. La Zambinella, despite appearances, is not a woman. Pittsburgh, despite Paul's intimations to the contrary ("He doubted the reality of his past" [483]), is not an illusion. Artist and esthete are bound to reality.
The artist Sarrasine studies "the blue veins that . . . gave undertones to the satin skin" of the face of La Zambinella, whom we meet at the beginning of the story as a "walking cadaver": "the years had so tightly stretched the fine, yellow skin on the bones of this face that everywhere it showed a multitude of wrinkles, resembling the ripples formed in water disturbed by a stone a child has thrown into it" (6:1061, 1055, 1052). It is the drawing teacher who studies Paul with equal attentiveness: "One warm afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing-board, and his master had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his sleep" (470). Both characters embody an uneasy mixture of youth and age, and both possess the capacity to hold an artist's interest. Of these two perpetual performers, the one refuses to sleep and the other cannot remain awake. Balzac's narrator, revealing the old man's secrets, conspires and betrays; Cather's narrator, neither conspiratorial nor particularly awed by an adolescent's moment of insufficiently thought through rebellion, betrays and abandons. A certain narrative logic is at work.
The author of "Paul's Case" knows the coming-of-age stories so common in Balzac, knows them so well that her story is like the visit to a familiar mansion, is able to locate the old, indispensable rooms and, thanks to the power of evocation, does not need to linger. Her younger, immature hero is looking for a way out; her laconic narrator, a model of efficiency, knows no self-doubt or inclination to tarry. The story's compression and hothouse atmosphere, in contradistinction to its model's expansiveness and sense of discovery, argue for its creator's assimilation of a tradition and need to move on. It is exactly the pioneering spirit that is absent from Cather's story, but the thirst for it—or, more precisely, for the form that will enable her to express this spirit and embody it in literary terms—is palpable in this masterly acknowledgment of her debt to the Europeans. Balzac alone is the great pioneer of the Balzacian novel, and his sense of exaltation is vivid and contagious. After him, the Balzacian novel is no longer a creative possibility. Cather understands his greatness and pays tribute to him, but her story's economy is more exclusive in nature than inclusive. "Paul's Case," as an early masterpiece, may well be a cornerstone but it is not yet the house that Cather built.
Paul's failure to survive is not simply the expression of the failure of the
character as an artist or a nonartist. The impact of the ending on one level has
little to do with the case of Paul per se, however finely observed his behavior.
Indeed, a moralistic reading of the story would be at odds with the tension and
resolve implicit in the narrative voice—ultimately, a sort of reduction.
The narrator lets us see the tragedy of misunderstanding and weakness on all sides
and makes us feel the relentless oppression of forces that would have us all fall
asleep at the drawing-board, including herself (hence the tension and resolve).
Balzac's inspiration is a source, a breathing-in, but even if Paul cannot draw
incessantly like the young Sarrasine, the expression of human vitality and worth
requires the ability to move responsively from within, to breathe out (6: 1057).
If "Paul's Case" is in some way a call paid to Balzac's European
That is why Paul and his "picture making mechanism" are crushed and thrown aside and the force of the rushing train, sole and contemporary equal to the depths and distances of the American landscape, cannot be denied. Paul falls back wordlessly "into the immense design of things," and in his dismissal there is an air of resolve. For Cather, there is more to be said than what the figure of Paul can allow to be said, more than "the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands" (488). The limits of the European imagination do not belong here, however necessary and beloved that imagination. Paul's case is ended. One can hear the train bound to this continent flying by and, prepared for the still difficult and triumphant journey, Willa Cather is already on board.
More than 70 years after Willa Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for literature, her novels and stories continue to attract a wide readership. A wave of research has examined the enduring appeal of Cather's works from different perspectives. These approaches often lead back to beginnings: the novels and stories about the immigrant peoples and their struggles against an untamed prairie that Cather knew as a child. Although Nebraska is the setting for many of Cather's writings, her portrayals of the foreign settlers on the lands opened by the railroads emphasize the cultural links between the Old World and the New. Cather's early interest in Europe is well known. Discussion has often centered on Cather's love of France and its ancient civilization (Woodress 160). Cather's interests, though, were far-ranging and included other cultures. References to Germany and its heritage in music and literature appear in many of her writings.
Cather's interest in German music has been widely recognized. In an apprentice
story, "The Prodigies," there is a reference to a Schubert serenade, played by the
father of the children. Wagner's music is also meaningful. The children have
received gifts from "Frau Cosima Wagner," a portrait of her husband and a book of
the Nibelungen trilogy. The boy, Hermann (the name evokes a heroic figure, a
chieftain who defeated the Romans at the Teutoburg Forest), says that he and his
sister liked reading the book, which was "full of fights and adventures," and he
supposes he will one day sing Wagnerian parts (Collected Short
Fiction 419).
Cather's attraction to Wagner is seen in the stories included in The Troll Garden (1905). As Richard Giannone observes, in "A Wagner
Matinee" the narrator's aunt is confronted with music that stirs a dormant desire
for the art she gave up (42), and in "The Garden Lodge" Cather makes a "Wagnerian
storm" serve as a symbol of Caroline's disaster: she becomes a Sieglinde and her
true twin, her Siegmund, is the financial titan Howard Noble, rather than the
tenor, Raymond d'Esquerré (39).
Music is featured prominently in Cather's 1915 novel The Song of
the Lark. In this book a girl from the Midwest, Thea Kronborg, attains the
height of success as a Wagnerian soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. Along the way
she preserves old friendships and meets several people of German origin who assist
her: Thea's music teacher, Fritz Wunsch; the Kohlers, a German family in
Moonstone; Mrs. Lorch, her landlady; and old Henry Biltmer, who introduces Thea to
the art of the ancient people. In this novel the German lyrics that young Thea
learns, the lines from Gluck's opera repeated by Wunsch, and the later
descriptions of Thea's Wagnerian roles show Cather's appreciation of the
centrality of music in German culture.
Cather's interest in German culture includes literature. She was attracted to Heinrich Heine early on and shared her enthusiasm for his poetry with her Pittsburgh friends the Seibels. She admired Goethe from her student days. In an 1894 article, Cather cited Goethe's maxim "The highest cannot be spoken," adding that actors are blessed who do not try (Slote 267). Cather, like Goethe, affirmed the ineffable nature of the highest art. Later in Cather's career her friend and biographer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant would write that Cather stands out as closer than any other writer of stature she knew "to living Goethe's dictum: We approach the world through art, and art is our link with it" (qtd. in Wasserman 4-5).
Cather knew Goethe's Faust, and in her drama criticism she
commented on American productions of Goethe's work, taking some actors to task for
their shabby interpretations of the roles (Slote 278-81). A reference to Goethe's
drama appears in Cather's 1932 story, "Old Mrs. Harris," as young Vicki Templeton
expresses the wish to one day be able to read the work, which she finds in the
library of her neighbors, the Rosens, in the original German (274-75). This desire
for knowledge, uttered by a young girl about to leave her family surroundings,
suggests a Faustian quest and an abrogation of the innocence associated with a
prairie town.
Cather assessed Goethe's criticism of Shakespeare. She did not agree that Hamlet
should be made a more dramatic role to be convincing (Slote 428-29). Though Cather
perceives this as Goethe's criticism, the comments on Shakespeare's play appear in
Goethe's classic Wilhelm Meister and are presented as the
views of the young protagonist during his association with a roving theater group.
A reference to the novel also appears in Cather's A Lost
Lady, as part of a summer reading list suggested to Niel Herbert by his uncle
(81). The novel, along with others that depict amorous adventures, suggests an
amoral lifestyle and the erring ways of a young man that lead to maturation and
acceptance. The novel suggests Niel's development and, simultaneously, recalls the
lapse in conventional morality represented by Marian Forrester.
A reference to Goethe also occurs in Cather's next novel, The
Professor's House, which appeared in 1925. When Professor St. Peter and
his wife, Lillian, attend the opera Mignon in Chicago, she
can scarcely believe that the tenor on the stage (in the role of Wilhelm, Mignon's
protector) looks like pictures of Goethe. Professor St. Peter agrees, adding that
he is also as tall as Goethe was (93-94).
A novel of Goethe's storm and stress period, The Sufferings of
Young Werther, caused a sensation across Europe and established Goethe as
a major writer. Though references to this epistolary novel are lacking in Cather's
writings, scenes and events in the work suggest parallels with Cather's 1925 story
"Uncle Valentine." In Cather's novella-length story, Valentine Ramsay, modeled
after her friend, the Pittsburgh composer Ethelbert Nevin, who died in 1901,
returns from Europe to the suburbs of an American city that resembles Pittsburgh.
At the turn of the century, the time of the story, the rustic environs were still
preserved from industrial expansion. It is here, at the family estate, that
Valentine spends a "golden year" writing the songs for which he is remembered.
Cather's Valentine and Goethe's figure Werther both show inclinations to wander.
Goethe's sensitive character has arrived at a German village and is in awe of the
natural surroundings, which he describes to a friend in a series of letters. He
has come to the locality, he reveals, to take care of an inheritance matter for
his mother. After a time he receives a position at a distant embassy, but his
temperament renders him unsuitable and here turns, dejected, to the rural setting.
In an introduction to Goethe's novel Victor Lange cites Thomas Mann's appraisal of
Werther as a "vagabond of feeling" (viii).
Similarly restless, Valentine Ramsay wanders across Europe. He goes to Bayreuth to
see Wagner's
When Cather's Valentine arrives home, he resumes a friendship with a neighbor, Charlotte Waterford. She is known as Aunt Charlotte to the principal narrator, Marjorie, a 16-year-old ward at that time. Charlotte is a maternal figure who appreciates Valentine's talent and recognizes that her own musical ability is limited. She plays the piano and protects him from burdensome contacts with visitors at a reception for him. Since Valentine's marriage has been tinged with scandal, he has become more interesting to the neighbors in the valley.
In giving names to her characters, Cather often suggests ethnic backgrounds and traits. The name Charlotte suggests the name of a Prussian queen and thus a nobleness that accrues to the image of Valentine's hospitable friend. In Goethe's novel the protagonist meets a woman with a shortened form of the name, Lone, and describes her charming simplicity. She soon becomes the focus of his turbulent emotions. Near the end of the novel he worships her at a distance, hearing about her endearing qualities from Albert, her husband, who thinks of him as a family friend.
The configuration of characters in Goethe's tale suggests a triangular pattern
proposed by René Girard in his study Deceit, Desire,
and the Novel. As Girard theorizes, novelistic literature often shows
arrangements consisting of a hero, a mediator, and an object of desire. When the
mediator desires or could possibly desire the object, he begets a second desire in
the hero. Thus the reader is confronted during the novel with competing desires.
All the while the mediator of the desire perceives the hero to be close to the
object and thus an obstacle. If this pattern is applied to Goethe's novel, it
becomes evident that Werther's desire is hindered by Albert's presence, as Lotte's
betrothed and later asher spouse. A silent rivalry emerges. As Werther sees it,
Albert holds the key to a blissful existence, a paradise from which he is
excluded. Albert, meanwhile, remains unaware and treats Werther kindly.
This pattern also suggests the relationships in Cather's "Uncle Valentine." In Cather's story the protagonist, a composer of romantic ballads, is referred to as a troubadour. He pursues a relationship with Charlotte Waterford based on their passion for music. Here the mediator is Charlotte's husband, Uncle Harry. And, since the main character is known to Charlotte's daughters as Uncle Valentine, a competition is suggested by the identical family titles. Valentine wants to spend as much time as possible with Charlotte. Harry, reminiscent of Lotte's husband, is a practical man with business interests. As Robert K. Miller points out, though, Valentine's usurpation of Charlotte's time produces an unhappy effect on Harry Waterford, and "Valentine Ramsay is capable of injuring the people among whom he lives" (136). Yet Harry, like Lotte's husband, goes on accepting the main character as a family friend, albeit unenthusiastically.
Charlotte is 10 years Valentine's senior. And, though Goethe's Lotte is a young woman, both characters oversee a number of children. Lotte has accepted the role of a mother to her younger siblings since her mother died. Werther, upon arriving, refers to a previous relationship with an older woman in a letter to his friend. Also of interest is that Cather's Janet Oglethorpe is described as older than her ex-spouse, Valentine. Both male protagonists, then, are attracted to older women, especially to women with family responsibilities. The stability of these women in familial relationships draws the self-absorbed, unattached figures in both narratives.
Early in Goethe's novel an opportunity for closer ties between Lotte and Werther is suggested. At a country-dance, to which Werther is invited, the acquaintances withdraw to an adjoining room to observe a retreating thunderstorm. As Werther describes the scene, "and the splendid rain was trickling down upon the land; the most refreshing fragrance rose up to us from the rich abundance of the warm atmosphere. She [Lotte] stood leaning on her elbows, with her gaze searching the countryside; she looked up to heaven and at me; I saw her eyes fill with tears, and she laid her hand on mine, saying, 'Klopstock!' I recalled at once the glorious ode she had in mind" (32). This spontaneous utterance suggests a shared appreciation of the German poet whose pietistic sentiments and awe of nature inspired a large following. Although Cather's story does not exhibit the intensity of feeling displayed in Goethe's storm and stress work, the main figure and his friend Charlotte share a love for music. On one occasion, while strolling through the hills near the Ramsay estate, Valentine and Charlotte witness a mist-shrouded moon rising above the river and exclaim in one breath, "The Rhinegold!" (25). The utterance affirms their shared passion for Wagner. It suggests a happier time when Damrosch was just introducing German music to America, as Valentine recalls with Charlotte (25).
Valentine's Uncle Roland, though, a specter-like figure at the Ramsay estate, has different remembrances. He had gone to Europe a prodigy and had later studied in Germany. At 28 his career ended without explanation. One story had it that "Wagner had hurt his feelings so cruelly he could never get over it." (23). So Roland remains a wrecked spirit prowling the darkened rooms of the Ramsay home. Occasionally he ventures out to attend a concert in the city, and then his "waxy, frozen face" can be seen in the audience (23). The deathlike visage suggests the defeated, ruined presence of the uncle whose name, ironically, recalls the hero of medieval romance.
Allusions to medieval romance and to royalty are scattered throughout Cather's "Uncle Valentine," evoking a chivalric past. Valentine's death occurs in Paris, at the entrance to the famous bridge, the Pont Royal. Unlike the kings of the past, though, Valentine dies before crossing it. At the beginning of Cather's story it is reported that Aunt Charlotte's music room has been remodeled in anticipation of Valentine's return. It is described as having a wooden interior and candlelight so that it resembles a chamber "such as the petty kings and grand dukes of old Germany had in their castles" (5). As a boy, it is also mentioned, Valentine had shown an attraction to Charlotte—he "had been her squire and had loved her devotedly." And, when Uncle Harry first came around as a suitor, "the spoiled neighbor boy was always hanging about and demanding attention" (6). The contest for Charlotte had already begun.
Both Goethe's Werther and Cather's Valentine are often seen among children who display a natural affection toward them. When Werther and Lotte take strolls they are accompanied by her younger siblings. Aunt Charlotte has a family of six girls, four daughters and two wards, who eagerly await Valentine's visits. They take walks with him and Charlotte through the hills and along the creeks of the nearby estate. At home they sing Valentine's songs while Charlotte accompanies them. Goethe's Lotte plays a minuet, entertaining Werther and her siblings.
At the conclusion of Goethe's storm and stress novel, the excesses of feelings lead to Werther's self-annihilation. Cather's Valentine does not succumb to extreme emotion, but on one occasion he gets drunk, after a chance encounter with his ex-wife Janet and her new husband, and is seen lying on the couch. As the narrator, Marjorie, reports, "He was deathly white, and his eyes were rolled up in his head" (37). Coming to his assistance, Charlotte kneels down beside him and covers him with her cloak, sending her ward for Uncle Harry as fast as she can go. The ghastly appearance shows Valentine's devastation after hearing that his ex-wife has purchased the neighboring estate. Valentine feels that she is out to deprive him even of the beautiful surroundings where he had roamed with Charlotte. He returns to Europe and at the age of 30 is struck down by one of the first trucks seen on the streets of Paris.
The characters Werther and Valentine are restless, self-indulgent beings, attracted to matriarchal figures with whom they are fond of strolling in rustic environs. Children are naturally drawn to them. They have, or attempt to establish, spiritual bonds with the matriarchal figures and their presence is a mild annoyance to the husbands, who are benevolent figures. Such parallels suggest a kinship between Goethe's storm and stress novel and Cather's 1925 story. Though Cather's story appeared at the height of her career, her familiarity with Goethe's narrative could have developed earlier.
A plausible source of Cather's familiarity with Goethe's work relates to her
interest in the opera. As a journalist, Cather contributed drama and music
criticism to newspapers in Lincoln. In the first column she sent back from
Pittsburgh in 1896, Cather reviewed the opera Eve by French
composer Jules Massenet (Curtin 377). In another review Cather discusses a concert
selection, Vision Fugitive, taken from Massenet's Hérodiade. This piece she finds "like all Massenet's
music . . . full of vague, delicious yearning" (Curtin 520). This comment hints at
Cather's awareness of Massenet's works, and one of these, the opera Werther, was based on Goethe's narrative. Werther was first performed in Europe and came to the United States in
1894, playing in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans. It achieved worldwide
popularity after Albert Carre's revival in Paris in 1903 and since then has been
performed 1,300 times in Paris alone (Sadie 1141). It seems likely that Cather,
who loved concerts, wrote music reviews early on, and had a passion for the opera,
would have been aware of Massenet's Werther.
Cather's awareness of Goethe's novel also remains plausible, for as Bernice Slate writes, in Cather's student days she was enthusiastic about French authors but also liked Heine and "knew something of Goethe" (38). Cather had recognized Goethe's stature in world literature as a young reporter and was influenced by his thoughts on art. During her career she referred to his works often. In a much discussed 1936 essay titled "Escapism," Cather refers to the exceptional figures in Western civilization, who are less valued by contemporary writers bent on causes. As Cather affirms about the past thinkers whom she admires, "their exceptionalness, oftener than not, comes not only from a superior endowment, but from a deeper purpose, and a willingness to pay the cost instead of being paid for it" (970). Cather's exceptions include "Goethe, Rousseau, Spinoza, Pascal, Shakespeare and Dante" (971). Thus, late in Cather's career, Goethe was securely enshrined in her pantheon of philosophers and literary geniuses.
The appearance of the story "Uncle Valentine" in 1925 prompts questions about the
prominence of Wagnerian motifs. Cather's interest in Wagner's music had been
documented in earlier stories and shown extensively in the 1915 novel The Song of the Lark. Later Cather focused on different
material: the immigrants' struggles on the Divide that she knew as a child in My Ántonia, the experience of war in One of Ours, and the loss of idealism at the end of the
pioneer era in A Lost Lady. Appearing in the same year as
"Uncle Valentine," Cather's The Professor's House describes
a college professor's deep crisis in a materialistic world and the loss of
conventional family relationships. In Cather's short fiction of this period Wagner
is not emphasized.
Loretta Wasserman, in her study of Cather's short stories, suggests a reason for the lateness of Cather's "Uncle Valentine." Wasserman comments on Charlotte and Valentine's walk in the hills and their uttering in one breath "The Rhinegold," adding that there was something in the two voices that awed even the little girls (49). She also mentions that Valentine plays the Rhine music and adds this information: "(Cather also wrote a preface for the republication of a book on Wagner's operas, so that his romantic themes would have been much on her mind)" (49).
That Cather was writing a preface to a new edition of Gertrude Hall's The Wagnerian Romances is significant. Cather had read the
book earlier on one of her trips to the Southwest, according to Woodress. And
Cather admits in her preface that she was so impressed by Hall's portrayal of the
Wagnerian scenes that she had to pay her the highest compliment one author could
extend to another—she stole from her (Woodress 358). Cather, then, knew
the book and used it as a guide for her literary work.
A further explanation for the references to Wagner might lie in his style of music. Wagner's music dramas recall a mythical Germanic past and this powerful, symphonic music contrasts with the ballads by Valentine Ramsay and their simpler, gentle themes. The Wagnerian motifs, though, are reminiscent of a happy time that Valentine eagerly recalls. Through this fictional character, then, Cather could also pay tribute to the memory of a friend, Ethelbert Nevin, whose songs appeared at a time when life still had its glorious moments of beauty and passion.