Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Willa Cather (1873-1947), novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist,

and journalist, is among the top-ranking American novelists of the first half of

the 20th century and is commonly rated as one of the three most outstanding

women writers of the period, the other two being Edith Wharton and Ellen

Glasgow. Her distinctive claim to remembrance is that she recreated the

Midwestern prairies in many of her works, capturing and mirroring, in novel

after novel, the pioneer spirit of the frontier. Her Nebraskan novels, for

example, celebrate the frontier settlers and represent a faithful rendering of

their way of life.

With twelve novels, n o fewer than sixty two short-stories and a large

collection of non-fiction to her credit, Willa Cather is indeed a major novelist

and each of her works represents an experiment in creativity. A writer who is

both simple and complex at the same time, Cather is not a fashionable

American writer despite the fact that she is one of the most written about

writers in America. But writers of her depth and complexity cannot but come

to their own, only that the vagaries of literary fame might delay their

rehabilitation. Leon Edel makes a prophecy regarding her popularity in the

coming age: "I'm going to put myself out on a limb, but I think the time will

come when she'll be ranked above ~ e m i n ~ w a ~ . " '

Cather seems most delighted and is at her best in depicting characters

of strength and heroism. In O P i o n e d a n d ~ ~ h t o n i a s h e extols the heroic

qualities of the first generation immigrants-Bohemians, Poles, Germans,

Swedes, R u s s i a n 4 0 broke the ground in Nebraska and had the inner

vision to see the future of the new land. One of Ours and A Lost Lady show

the way in which the second generation betrayed the hopes of the first, and

wistfully look back upon the earlier era. In The Song of the Lark and 7he

hofess0rS House Cather again glorifies the qualities of strength and

endurance in man's s h g g l e with nature or in the efforts to lead a successful

life in contemporary Midwestern and Southwestern America. In Death Comes

for the Archbishop she writes about the 18th century French missionaries in

the Southwest and in Shadows on the Rock about the 17th centuly settlers in

Quebec. again celebrating the pioneer spirit.

Though regarded as a local colourist, Cather is far too universal to be

labelled a regonal writer. The purity of her prose, her aesthetic and m o d

concerns and her essentially cosmic vision are unmistakable attributes of the

mainstream writer. As John J. Murphy says,

She transcends her native context by making it a symbolic

background for universal aspirations-her characters, at their

memorable moments, transcend themselves. The local

background. whether Midwestern, Southwestern, Southern, or

Canadian. accompanies artistic and religious endeavours which

blend into the noble purpose of making civilization.'

Like all true artists she drew inspiration from her own life experience.

Some major events in Cather's life like the great shift from Virginia to

Nebraska, her life in Pittsburgh and New York as a journalist, her European

tours, and her encounter with Sarah Ome Jewett and Mrs. James T. Fields

had been singularly significant in deciding the tenor of her literaty career. All

her writings-both amateurish and professional-were to lead to and end in

her fruitful making of fiction which placed her in the front rank of major

American writers of fiction.

Cather found herself in an entirely new world when at the age of ten

the Cather family shifted from the green Virginian valleys to the grey

Nebraskan plans in 1883. An unsettlingly jolting experience, the move from

the easy, comfortable and refined life of Virginia into the crude, rugged and

precarious life on a ranch near Red Cloud in Nebraska was none too pleasant

to her. She was in rwolt against this change throughout her university life

and during the first phase of her journalistic career, but later she started to

look back upon the prairies with love and nostalgia. How important this was

can be seen from the following comment by one of her biographers:

The removal horn an old, lush, settled counhy to a virtual

wilderness was undoubtedly the determinative went of Willa

Cather's life; occurring when the child was entering puberty and

most sensitive to change, the uprooting from the green valley of

her grandparents' home in Virginia, and the casting out upon a

limitless wild prairie, opened her sensibility to primordial images

and relationships that were to be the most powerful forces in her

art:'

Later in her life Cather was quite happy about this transplantation

which then appeared to her as a move from an unreal world to a world of

reality. Life on the plains made her aware of the great contrast between the

two places and awakened her into the auder, yet, more real life and to the

Inore enduring instincts and impulses. Edith Lewis, her companion for long

forty years and litemy executor. has recorded in WIIa Cather Living that

Cather, wen as a little girl, had felt something smothering in the polite, rigid,

social conventions of the Southern Society, something fictitious and unreal, so

that she viewed the move from Virginia into the Midwest America as

f~r tunate .~

The years spent in Virginia (1875 to 1883), and in Red Cloud (1883 to

1890) were the formative years in her life. She drew on the experiences of

these years in her novels in later years and they always remained a rich

treasure-house of raw materials for her fiction. What influenced her most

deeply in the new environment were the people, places, and the seasons. In

Virginia a fascinating world of the Negroes and the Whites was open to her,

and in Red Cloud the polyglot community of immigrants offered a still more

exciting world to the young imaginative brain of Cather. She walked and rode

along the plains, visited the old pioneer men and women and listened to their

unending tales, which fired her imagination. Her adventurous exploits with

her brothers in the Republican River and on the plains reveal the highly

remarkable. imaginative quality in her. E. K. Brown, who had been authorised

by Edith Lavls to write a biography of Cather, briefly describes how Cather

has recaptured the spirit of childish romance in one of her early stories "The

Treasure of Far Island" which was later modified as 'The Enchanted Bluff."

Brown adds.

The hdd the memory of river and isle had upon Willa Cather's

imagination as a place where her childhood was eternally

enshrined may be judged by the dedicatory lines she inscribed in

the first edition of her poems, to her brothers, in which she

remembered the "Odysseys of summer mornings" and "the stany

wonder-tales of nights in April . . . . " 5

Cather's models for her future stories were all to be had from either

Virginia or Red Cloud, mostly from Red Cloud. The people and the places

she came across figure prominently in her writing. The seasons, the climate,

the environment--all come alive in her fictional world, and play sometimes a

role as pivotal as her leading characters.

Cather's informal education enriched her mind giving her more than

she would have received from regular courses. Her matemal grandmother,

Mrs. Boak, who used to read 7he Bible and 73e RIMm S Aqgess to her,

filled her early childhood years with imagination and wisdom and

unknowingly laid the foundation for her future career oi creativity. She went

to school in Red Cloud, but her acquaintance with some elderly scholar

friends in the town proved to be more beneficial to her eager mind when they

opened the magic casement of the classics to her and made Virgil and

Shakespeare her life-long companions.

But wen while roaming along the plains like a cowboy, Cather had a

strong desire to break away from the conventional, monotonous life of a small

town like Red Cloud. Her first escape came in the form of her university

education in Ljncoln where she spent a useful and intellectually rewarding

time and gave evidence d the uniqueness, independence and originality of

her mind. During her sophomore year Prof. Ebenezer Hunt published one of

her university assignments on Carlyle in n e Nebraska State Journal without

her prior knowledge, it seems, and the first printed matter in her name was an

exciting experience for her. This factor probably made her turn away from her

earlier ambition of becoming a medical doctor and choose a literary career as

her profession. Later in her life Cather was to project into Jim Burden, the

narrator in My ~ntonia, her own experiences during her university days in

Lincoln.

Cather made her debut into the literary world as the editor of the two

campus literary magazines, 73e Lasso and The Hesperian. Her earlier essay

on Carlyle got reprinted in 73e Hesperian, and another essay "Shakespeare

and Hamletn appeared in the Journalafter a few months.

Cather wrote fiction also during that period and some of her stories

were published in various magazines. Though she disowned much of this

writing in her later life, her own remarks point to the artless beauty of her art.

In 1921 she told a journalist:

Back in the files of the college magazine, there were once several

of my perfectly honest but very dumsy attempts to give the story

of some of the Scandinavian and Bohemian settlers who lived not

far from my father's farm. In these sketches, I simply tried to tell

about the people, without much regard for style.6

'Peter' which is based on an actual incident-Francis Sadilek's

suicide-tells the story of the immigrants. The short s t o y appeared in

777e Mahqgany Tree when Cather was only eighteen. Peter Sadelack who has

been a second violinist in the great theatre at Prague is very homesick for

Bohemia and a misfit on the prairie. Antone. his son. though mean and

untrustworthy and miserly, is destined to prosper and he wants to sell his

father's violin which is of no practical use to him. Peter breaks his fiddle and

commits suicide. Antone takes the fiddle bow to the town to sell it even before

the funeral. The story has an ironical ending: "Antone was very thrifty, and a

better man than his father had been."7 The story is improvised in the

Shimerda story of M~ ~htonia.

"Lou, the Prophet," another immigrant stoy, appeared in the

Hesperian. The stoy depicts the tragic story of a Dane who is destroyed by

the untamed prairie.

Three more short-stories, "A Tale of the White Pyramid," "A Son of the

Celestial," and "The Clemency of the Couri" were published in 73e Hesperian

during 1892 and 1893, and the last of these deals with Serge, the Russian

immigrant's destruction by the frontier. In most of her ear:,^ stories Cather

handles the themes of failure, despair and madness on the Divide.

There was financial depression in the small town of Red Cloud during

her student days. Many people were adversely affected, and the Cather

family proved n o exception. Cather started writing columns regularly for the

Nebraska State Journal and it helped her relieve her family of its financial

difficulties.

Cather gave local colour sketches through the columns of the Journal.

From 1893 for two years Cather's weekly columns of "The Passing Show"

produced origrnal theatrical criticism, often scathing, but which won her the

name "that meatax young girl."8

Cather's reputation as a journalist spread so wide that upon graduation

from the University of Nebraska in 1895 she was offered a part-time job in the

weekly Lincoln Courier. She resided in Red Cloud and Lincoln writing for

both the Journaland the Courier. Her hometown was too small in scope for a

writer of her potentiality and her stoy "On the Divide," which was published

in the OverlandMonthlyand which won her first recognition by a magazine of

national circulation, reflects her disenchantment with the prairie town.

In 1896 she joined the Home Monthly, a small and new Pittsburgh

magazine, as a full-time assistant editor, and there began a series of writing

mostly non-literaty and journalistic. Her stories which were printed in the

Home Monthly show her changed attitude towards Nebraska. In "Tommy,

the Unsentimental,'' which is set in Nebraska, Cather begins to see something

good and beautiful about the wild frontier.

After one year she moved to the Leader as assistant telegraph editor,

whose duties involved much exhaustive writing on the theatre, musical

concerts, books. etc. Cather's intense work as a journalist during this period

reduced the production of her creative writing which consisted of a few stories

published in the Lbrary. '"c Hermannson's Soul" accepted by a national

magazine, Cosmopolitan, tells another immigrant stoy on the Divide. On the

whole, she was secure, and happy and contented enough during her

journalistic career.

Cather could establish contacts with many artists and musicians and

lit- figures during this period. Her remarkable meeting with Isabelle

McClung, who was to be her best friend and companion and the most

influential figure in her life, took place in 1898. Her desire for pursuing

creative writing grew more intense and it was facilitated richly by Isabelle. She

got freedom and solitude for working peacefully. After an interlude of

freelance writing in Washington and New York, she came back to F'ittsburgh.

From 1901 to 1906 she worked as a teacher in the Centml High School and

Allegheny High School in Pittsburgh.

Her European tour in company with Isabelle in 1902 gave her the

feeling that Nebraska was only a microcosm of the world at large, and it

improved her perspective of this little prairie state. Back in Pittsburgh she was

motivated by a strong desire to create something more solid and tangible than

her short stories and articles, and this led to the publication of a collection of

her verses under the title April Twilights in 1903. Cather had occasionally

been writing poems since her college days, and though they are not great

pieces of literary merit, they do foreshadow her basic concerns in her mature

writing. If she had taken the less travelled-by road of poetry, she would have

been a notable poet of prairie life and she would have brought her themes to

a sharper focus. However. she did not; she shifted herself into the world of

short stories and novels, instead. Her poetry unfolds an Arcadia, a resplendent

mythical landscape, which is the heaven and haven of Greek gods and

goddesses, presided over by Apollo who gives light and splendour to the

world at large.

The West does not appear frequently in her poems and the West in her

poems is not the Red Cloud of Cather. One of her poems the 'Prairie Spring"

serves as an index. a motif-poem, to the novel 0 Pioneers! capturing the

gloom of the landscape with its 'long, empty roads,' 'sullen fires of sunset,'

and 'eternal, unresponsive sky,' and the picturesque fight between the youth

and the environment.'

Cather's poems can be classified as pastoral, romantic and elegiac, and

echoes of Virgil and Housman can be heard in them. Her tmnscendent belief

in the high, pure truth, which is a recurrent theme in her novels and short

stories, is already found in her poems. Further, they tentatively deal with the

theme of the search for an Arcadia, which finds fuller and more mature

expression in her fictional works. The gloom at the vanishing of this Arcadia,

which her novels voice also can be detected in her poems, though in a far less

developed form.

In her introduction to April Twilights Bernice Slote writes:

Some of these poems have particular interest in the whole of

Cather's writing: perhaps more than most artists she worked a

single, intricate design in which elements changed names and

language and form but always remained a part of the body.

Nothing in Cather's work is unrelated to the whole. In the poems

(as in the first stories, some of which she also rejected), we find the

early sketches, the first motifs, the suggested design of her major

work. 10

Again in 1903. Cather brought out a collection of short stories. 7he

Troll Garden, which deals with the theme of the artists and is written in a

Jamesian style. Of the seven stories "The Sculptor's Funeral," "Paul's Case,"

and "A Wagner Matinee" are far superior to the other four and they were

reprinted in her later collections. The stories give us the "image of the world

of art and culture as a troll garden, magical but potentially corrupting.""

"The Sculptor's Funeral" handles the impossibility of ahstic fulfilment

in a practical-minded, materialistic society. The sculptor is misunderstood and

deprecated by all except Jim Laird, the lawyer, and Steavens, the sculptor's

student. The artst in the sculptor is underestimated by the little Kansas town

where the townsmen had upheld successful materialists as their models when

the boys were young. Even the sculptor's mother does not understand him

though his father seems to possess a better understanding of his son.

"Paul's Case" is the story of a sensitive Pittsburgh boy who is thwarted

in his romantic illusions. "A Wagner Matinee" tells the story of an old frontier

woman w h s e brief Boston visit fills her mind with nostalgic memories of the

refined and artistic life in the city, and who breaks down when she faces the

reality of going back to the rugged and crude kind of life of the frontier.

Elizabeth Sergeant comments on the three stories in her Willa Cather: A

Memoir

Passion inspired them-passion for the free expressive life,

.. especially the life of the arts, hatred for the limitations of a I

mediocre setting, a culture still young and unshaped, imposed on

sensitive human beings. The theme of the three stories was the

same: the struggle of the individual of unique gifts with an

unfavourable environment.12

The stories in 7he Troll Garden, as a critic has put it,

deal primarily with the struggles of artists in culturally

impoverished environments. The environment is the Nebraskan

prairie and the madness, failure, and frustration depicted in this

collection reveal the mixture of fascination and fear with which

Cather still contemplated Midwestern life.13

The publication of the two books brought her to the notice of

S. S. Mc Clure. the brilliant, enthusiastic publisher of America's fastest growing

magazine of that time. The meeting between the illushious publisher and the

author of 7he Trol/ Garden resulted in Cather's appointment as the Managing

Editor at the McClure's in New York aty.

A hectic period followed her joining the McClures and from 1905 to

1911 she continued there. The number of trips she conducted on business,

and the contacts with prominent figures during her period in the McClure's

were to exert a great effect on her mental and intellectual framework. Some of

her stories appeared in the magazine and she even became the ghost-writer of

Mc Clure's autobiography.

1908 witnessed the most influential meeting in Cather's literary life.

Her meeting with Sarah Ome Jewett and Mrs. James T. Fields marked a

turning point in her career. Cather received a long letter which contained

warnings and apprehensions of her editorial work damaging her artistic

career. Jewett wrote:

Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your

audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life and write

from that to the world that holds offices, and all society . . . in

short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness

that all humanity goes to make up.14

Jewett was dissatisfied with the stories Cather had been writing since she had

gone to the McClure's. Jaoett's words continued to haunt her through the

writing of "Alexandm" and "The Bohemian Girl," and "The Enchanted Bluff"

seems to be written in the vein recommended by Jewett. At the completion of

her first nwe l Nexander's Bndw in 1912 she left the McClures for good.

Alexander's Bridge is set in Boston and London and gives the story of

an engineer who is tom between two loves-love for his wife and the woman

of his youthful romance. The collapse of the bridge is symbolic of the

breakdown in Alexander's life.

The same year, that is, in 1912, Cather went on a tour to Arizona,

which gave her a fresh insight into her own land, Nebraska and its people.

The Cliff-dwellers and their civil i t ion and the Walnut Canyon awakened her

into a world of new revelations, the emotions and feelings of which were later

recaptured in 7he Song of fie Lark. She found the novel Alexander's Bridge

superftcial and unnecessary. Her awn remarks on this novel appeared in her

collection of essays titled On Wri6'ng.

My first novel, Alexander's grids, was very like what painters call

a studio picture. It was the result of meeting some interesting

people in London. Like most young writers, I thought a book

should be made out of "interesting material," and at that time I

found the new more exciting than the familiar. The impressions I

tried to communicate on paper were genuine. but they were very

shallow.'"

She found that she did no real writing in Alexander's Bridge, and when she

got back to Pittsburgh after the European tour in 1913, she began to write a

book entirely for herself; a story about some Scandinavians and Bohemians

who had been her neighboun during her childhood in Nebraska. In "My First

Novels." she writes:

I found it a much more absorbing occupation than writing

Alexander's Bridge; a different process altogether. Here there was

no arranging or "inventing"; evelything was spontaneous and

took its own place, right or wrong. This was like taking a ride

through a familiar counm on a horse that knew the way, on a fine

morning when you felt like riding. The other was like riding in a

park, with some one not altogether congenial, to whom you had

to be talking all the time.16

The outcome of this kind of writing was 0 Pioneers! (1913) the materials of

which had teased her mind for years.'7 With this book Cather was actually

returning to the materials she had clumsily handled in the short stories of her

youth. She felt that in this she had finally "hit the home pasture"'8 and

discovered her own line of interest.

0 Pioneers!, the first of Cather's Nebraska novels tells an immigrant

story of the pioneers. This is one of her most important novels from the point

of view of character and environment and has been elaborately discussed in

this dissertation. Alexandra Bergson's epic struggle with the environment, and

the almost mystic relationship she forms with it are among the author's

important concerns in the novel.

In 1915 Cather published 7he Song of the Lark which gives a portrait

of a singer, Thea Kronborg, who escapes from the conventions and restrictions

of the small town of Moonstone and pursues her career as an artist in the big,

metropolitan city of New York. There comes a momentous occasion in her

life when a mystic encounter in the Panther Canyon and the ancient remains

in the Southwest give her an insight deep enough to resolve all her confusions

and doubts and to make her comprehend her true vocation.

With M~ ~ntonia (1918) Cather comes back to her favourite theme of

the pioneers Like Alexandra Bergson of 0 Ooneets! h t o n i a develops a

mystic relation with the land and she becomes the mother of races and a rich

mine of life to the narrator-character Jim Burden. Alexandra, Thea and

h t o n i a fom a trio of sfrong minded females for whom struggle is self-

discovery. In a period when the drawing room formed the proper setting of a

novel, and smart and clever people appeared as protagonists, Cather's novels

which smelt of the soil, and her heroes and heroines with ordinary

intelligence, but extraordinary sensitivity and intuition, captivated the attention

of the readers. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once wrote in a letter to

Ferris Greenstet that reading it ( M y htonia) made him feel proud to be an

American. "It is a poem made from nature . . . that being read establishes

itself as b e , and makes fhe reader love his country more."lg

A second collection of short stories titled Youth and the Brfght Medusa

appeared in 1920. The collection contains eight stories of which four are

reprints: and they all deal with art and artists who are pitted against a modem

philistine society. Don Hedgers in 'Coming Aphroditen and Cressida Garnet

in "The Diamond Mine" do not compromise their art in contrast to Eden

Bower and Blasius Bouchalka who make compromises for worldly comfort

and ease. "A Gold Slipper" and "Scandal" show soulless materialism

stahding in the way of artistic fulfilment. However, the predicament of the

artists in her new stories is not as gloomy as that of those in 7iSe Troll GGam'.

Twen6'eth Century fiferay Criticism records Cather's porbyal of the artists in

the book in these words: "The "bright Medusa" of the title refers to art-"life's

bright challengenand the stories portray artists who have chosen either to

use art to achieve wealth and popularity or to labor toward the fulfillment of

their t a ~ e n t s . " ~

Cather, whose indirect concern in her fiction has been a conflict

between idealism and artistic fulfilment on one side and cmss materialism and

philistinism on the other, is found in a trauma of disillusionment for a while.

The good cheer and the hopefulness of the Pittsburgh years have vanished for

ever. The notes of depression and disillusionment find expression in her

novels of the next phase, One of Ours, A A Lady, 7he Pmfesor's House,

and My Mortal fiemy. In a way, they represent the lost heroes and heroines

unlike Alexandra and h t o n i a in OPioneers!and ~ ~ h t o n i a .

One of Ours (1922), which was awarded the Pulilzer Prize, tells the

stoy of a Nebraska boy who is unable to find salvation in the land, and finds

it in the war, but that is only an illusion. The land having no mythic

significance does not have the picturesqueness and vigour of the prairies in

0 honeers! and My Ahtonia. Claude Wheeler, the hero of the novel, lacks

the vitality and determination of the female trio of the earlier novels.

In 1923 A Losf Lady was published and it depicts the sunset of the

pioneer in mournful tones. As in One of Ours the West has declined, and . Captain Forrester, the pioneer railroad man in the novel, is an invalid. The

great-hearted adventurers have given way to the commercial-minded ones.

Materialistic villains like Ivy Peters have the day and the Lady has last her

greatness and has fallen a victim in the trap of Ivy Peters. The fire of life the

Lady preserves in her is the only redeeming feature in the gloom of the novel.

"She had always the power of suggesting things much lovelier than herself, as

the perfume of a single flower may call up the whole sweetness of spring.""

me h f e w r r j House (1925) is a contrast between an old house where the

Professor has spent his struggling but happy years of study, and a new one

built with the money he got out of his book, one where he does not get any

happiness or solace. Through the 'square window' one sees the Cliff-dwelling,

Tom Outland's Cliff-city from where the refreshing air of the Blue Mesa blows

in promising salvation. The inset story of Tom Outland's discovery of the

Cliff-city of the ancient dwellers acts as a foil to the story of the Professor's

family life, and the fresh air of the Blue Mesa is in contrast to the stuffed air of

the Professor's house. Cather writes:

In my book I tried to make Professor St. Peter's house rather over

crowded 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

b e h a v i o ~ r . ~

My Mortal Enemy (1926) is the stoy of Myra, a wilful woman who is

disillusioned in her romantic elopement and marriage with Oswald Henshawe.

The deprivation of the rights of inheritance from her uncle and religion makes

her unhappy. and towards the end of the story she seeks refuge in the old

bond with religion. There is no land to provide the characters with a

sanduay, and no glorification of the West.

The disillusionment with the present made Cather look farther and

farther back into history for solace and reaffirmation of the enduring values

she had always craved for. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) is the

outcome of such a quest and also of her desire to do something "in the style of

legend."23 While she was fascinated by the staunch faith of the 18th centuy

Catholic priests, she was drawn to the Indians' harmony with nature as well.

Faith and Religion become a stronghold for the people who are otherwise

disillusioned. Cather, who had been fascinated by the stoy of the Church

724 - and the Spanish missionaries, is able to convey the 'hardihood of spirit in

the pioneer churchmen whose stoy is unfolded as a saga of New Mexico.

Shadows on the Rock (1931) is the stoy of the 17th century French

settlers in Quebec. Auclair, the Apothecary, and his family are the

representatives-in fad the best of the lot--of the French who, aliens in

Canada, bring their own civilition and a new order into the region. The

novel ends with an optimistic note of looking up to the children of Pierre

C h m n and Cecile who combine the freedom and endurance of the

Canadian wilderness and the French order and beauty as future citizens of

Quebec. Once again Faith and Religion act as a sanctuary and 'Rock' is the

symbol of the old, undying faith in people. Cather writes on the novel:

An orderly liffle 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.25

In 1932 Cather published Obscure Destinies, another book of short

stories which handle the theme of the West. "Neighbour Rosicky," "Old

Mrs. Harris," and 'Two Friends" are the three stories in the collection of which

the first two are remarkable for their multi-dimensional depiction of characters.

Rmicky is a stoic character who has withstood many hardships, and

has worked hard on the fann. He is magnanimous enough to accept his

American daughter-in-law and even goes at length to let her have some

amusements. "Old Mrs. Harris," which is highly autobiographical, is a moving

story not simply of the old woman, but of her daughter and family. When the

story proceeds, we view the characters from various angles, and the characters

in their three-dimensional posture fascinate the readers. "Two Friendsn tells

the story of an intimate friendship which the authorial child used to uphold as

a model in the drab surroundings of a small town. Henry Seidel Canby has

made the following comment on these three new stories of the West:

Th~s is the West of Miss Cather's early novels. a country where

roads are ankle deep in summer dust, incredibly beautiful by

moonlight, a country where the corn will bum up in a single torrid

day. or it is the high sage brush plains of Colorado, familiar to us

before. It is a county where many people are mean and

commonplace, where there is liffle generosity of living: and into it

her imagination plunges deep for recollections of great souls that

make a contrast and a salvation.26

In 1935 Cather published a novel Lucy Gayheartwhich is Thea's story

in reverse. Lucy with all her talents cannot grow into a full-fledged singer,

because she lacks the determination, the firmness and the single-minded

devotion of her earlier counterpart. Sebastian, an Ottenburg as in Thea's

case, proves only a stumbling block in her career unlike in that of Thea. Her

death on the ice is symbolic of froze. i talent.

Cather's critical writings are collected in a book titled Not Under Fon'y

(1936) in wh~ch she maintained that "the book will have liffle interest for

people under forty years of age. The world broke in two in 1922 or

thereabouts, and the persons and prejudices recalled in these sketches slid

back, into yesterday's seven thousand years."27 Daiches blames her for being

too self-consciously old-fashioned in assuming such an attit~de.~'

Cather's reminiscences of Virginia led her to the creation of her last

novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) which deals with the theme of

slavery and its related questions. It is partly the story of a woman's jealousy

and spite and its final relief and partly an auakening into a world of reality

from a world of illusion and romanticism.

Cather's short stories span a period of fifty years, while her journalistic

and non-fictional writings cover the first twenty years of her publishing career.

As a journalist and a columnist, she had been writing criticism of professional

dramatic and musical productions and commentaries on books, writers. and

scenes about the town before she turned to fiction. Her Theoy of Art can be

pieced together from her many articles, letters and the two collections of

essays, Not Under Forty in 1936 and Wlla Cather on Writing in 1940. Many

of her articles and reviews collected under 7he Mngdom of Art: Wlla Gther S

first Hnuples and Cn'tical Statements and fie World and the Parish too

reveal the basic canons of her aesthetic theory. Though there are echoes of

writers like Henry James, Raubert and Whitman in her style of writing, Cather

belongs to no school, she imitates no writer.

Cather admired Sarah Orne Jewett for her individual voice and

instinctive preference for the everyday people, Stephen Crane for his realism,

Gertrude Hall for the emotional effect of her art and Katherine Mansfield for

her New Zealand stories. She appreciated the suggestive quality of the writing

of Tolstoy, Merimee and John Bunyan. She, however, deprecates Balzac for

his literalness. She preferred Hawthorne and Flaubert to D. H. Lawrence.

Character is more important to Cather than stoy. Often her stories lack

cohesion and an organised development of the plot. The development of the

character is what she is more interested in, and her characters are never flat,

but roun(! and three dimensional. She believed in spontaneous writing and

resorted to such writing in her fiction. Apparently disparate sections are

placed in her novels and what makes cohesion is the spirit of the whole.

Certain strands can be picked up from the apparently disorganised structure.

The lack of anangement in the plot does not hinder some of Cather's

favourite concerns getting into the lime light.

A well-knit plot is thus conspicuous by its absence in Cather's fiction.

Hers are chronicles rather than stories. In fad character is the story for her in

many of her novels. During a discussion of artistic forms and techniques

Cather herself explained it. She leaned fonuard suddenly, took a Sicilian

apothecary jar filled with orange-brown flowers, and placed it alone on an

antique table. "I want my new heroine to be like this," she said, "like a m e

object in the middle of a table, which one may examine from all sides. I want

her to stand out--like this-because she is the s t ~ r y . " ~

Her characters pass through a series of phases and their evolution is

remarkable as it often takes place in the background of the landscapt:. What is

yet more remarkable is the harmony between the character and the

environment which can be traced in the novels 0 Pioneers!, M~ ~ntonia, 7he

hofessor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Conflicts are obvious in Cather's fiction. The conflict between

materialism and idealism is the undercurrent of almost all her works. Binary

oppositions like the old and the new, the pioneer and the philistine, city and

village, artist and society, natives and immigrants, natural and mechanic,

order and disorder, heroic and mediocre, materialism and spiritualism, fullness

and emptiness are noticed in all her writings.

Cather's fiction is noted for its essential moral content. Her preference

for the permanent and enduring values of life makes her an advocate of the

pioneer and the older generation who never made compromises for the sake

of material glory.

Cather cannot be classified as a modem writer, yet her fiction is written

in an entirely unconventional manner. Though she is a conselvative in the

treatment of the pioneer, she uses certain modem devices like the 'Dutch

Window' in 7he hofzssor's House, 'the Novel Derneubl8 in My Mortal

Enemy and the inset story in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Her affinity for

painting and sculpture is reflected in her use of certain techniques drawn from

these arts. Her Shadow on the Rock is highly pictorial and is regarded as a

series of tableaux.

Cather devoted all her life to the practice of art, and remained single as

it was her theory that "married nightingales never sing."30 She held quite

informal but original v i m regarding art and artists. She believed that art

meant simplificatton.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly

the whole of the higher artistic process: finding what conventions

of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the

spirit of the whole-so that all that one has suppressed and cut

away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in

type on the page.31

The spirit of the work should be retained through suggestion rather

than enumeration. Cather did not want to make the novel over-furnished as it

had always been made.

How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out

of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations

concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and

leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre or as that

house into which the gloty of Pentecost descended; leave the

scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little-for the

nursery tale, no less than the tragedy, is killed by tasteless

amplitude. The elder Dumas enunciated a great principle when

he said that to make a drama, a man needed one passion, and

four walls.32

Cather wrote in a simple, lucid style, highly poetical and evocative of

people and places. She is basically elegiac in tone and her fiction abounds in

the memory of bygone times.

In his discussion of the development of Cather, the stylist, Grant C.

Knight writes:

Those who admire writing which selects with a quick ear, which

eliminates all but the one unique word, which frowns upon

anything suggestive of superfluity, will approve of Willa Cather's

watchfulness, her conscious efforts to become a master. Those

who hope rather to find in a novel life itself, prodigal, sweet

painful, disordered and bemused, will regret the loss of the story

teller in the development of the stylist.33

In Cather's fictional career we can notice a shifting from the new

material to the familiar one. In fact, it was what Sarah Orne Jewett suggested

to her during their brief acquaintance. "You must know the world before you

can know the village.n34 From the world Cather tumed back to her village,

her parish-Nebraska and Nebraska became a window to the world at large.

Cather's friends and acquaintances say that she was more of a recluse

in later years. Many critics blame her for retreating into the past. But as long

as the past was a standard of measurement for Cather, the past and the

tradition fascinated her. She could hardly consider the present an entity

separated from the past. To her the present was a continuity of the past and

the progression into future.

Besides the Pulitzer Prize she won for her One of Oursin 1922, she was

awarded Howells medal for fiction by the Academy of the National Institute of

Arts and Letters in 1930 and Prix Femina Arnhcain for Shadows on the Rock

in 1933 and a gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944.

Death came for her finally on April 24 in 1947. It may be hard and

puzzling for the lit- historians to place Willa Cather in some stable position

or slot. Her critics have found it difficult to describe the uniqueness of Cather

which it is easier to feel than express.

According to Daiches the most significant part of Cather's contribution

is that she brought a kind of American perception to bear upon her themes.

He continues:

Yet the subject she handles most successfully and most

characteristically--the subtiliing of courage by vision and

discrimination and the search for a culture that combines all three

qualities-is more than an American theme. It transcends

national problems to illuminate one of the great questions about

c iv i~ i i t i on .~~

A collection of short stories 73e Old Beauty and Others was published

posthumously in 1948. The book contains three stories. Of these 'The Old

Beauty" tells the story of m artist. "The Best Yearsn a Nebraska story and

"Before Breakfast" the story of an American businessman.

Uncle Valentine and Other Stories (1973) and Stories and Poems

(1992) are among the many collections of Cather's works which have

appeared till date. Cather still continues to be a fascinating author for readers

at various levels. in spite of being regarded as a local colourist or a regional

novelist, Cather is acclaimed as a writer of stories having universal

significance. The polyglot cornmunit), she vividly portrays in her writings-the

Bohemians, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Russians, and the Swedes

of Nebraska. the Spanish-Americans of the Southwest, and the French

Canadians of Quebec-leave a deep impression on the readers like the

"daubs of color on a painter's palette."36 The landscape, the people and the

scenes she had got familiar with find their way into her fictional world. In fad,

Cather is one of the many writers who found the American West and the

Frontier a lunng theme for their writing. Though she did not have any

first-hand experience of the pioneer life on the Nebraskan prairies, she had

seen the pioneers, and felt their experiences vicariously.

She knew what a frontier was like and what the problems of the

transplanted Europeans were. She witnessed the conflict between the Old and

the New Worlds. "She saw the great land make and break its people. She

saw the full-blooded European immigrants, Czechs and Swedes. plowing the

unbroken land, on the way up from peasants to proprietors."37

She also saw the second and the third generation falling into a life of

ease and comfort, and losing the enduring values of the elder generation.

Naturally the best of her fiction tends to concern itself with frontier life. We

witness both the rise and fall of the West in her novels. When the present

ceases to provide her with solace and security, she looks back upon the 18th

century missionaries and the 17th century settlers of Quebec. Whatever the

locale be, whoever the characters be, it is invariably the determination and

endurance of the people that compel her attention and admiration.

The cowboy and the mountain man figured in the Wild West stories of

Cooper and other writers, but Cather combines the elements of the mythic

heroheroine and the common manlwoman in her characters. Alexandra in

0 Pioneers! and Antonia in My htonia are characters of epic dimensions

who, however, are of common origin. If the sons of the Leatherstocking

moved in the wilderness of the Wild West, Cather's people are mostly set on

the plains or prairies of the Midwest of America. She has fictionalized

Nebraska in her short stories and novels. As she said in the case of Virgil, she

was the first to bring the muse into her country.38 Red Cloud forms the

background ot many of her novels. Hanover in 0 Roneers!, Moonstone in

7he Song of the Lark. Black Hawk In M~ ~ntonia . Frankfort in One of Ours,

Sweet Water in A Lost Lady and Havetford in Lucy Gayhead are basically

variations on the same theme. Red Cloud of Nebraska appears in multiple

names. In the choice of the familiar Nebraskan setting for her novels she was

like Hardy who immortalised his familiar Dorsetshire wuntry as Wessex and

peopled it with remarkable characters. Some critics voiced their strong

sentiments aganst the depiction of Nebraska in Cather's fiction. A New York

critic remarked that he simply did not care a damn what happened in

Nebraska, no matter who wrote about it.39 Most of the Nebraska farmers in

0 Pioneers!are Swedes and they were appearing in fiction for the first time.

Evcept for humorous sketches there was no significant literature about the

Swedes.

Nebraska, when Cather saw it, was a frontier territory, devoid of human

landmarks; the s d e t s lived in sod houses, clay-caves, scarcely distinguishable

from the earth. Roads were faint wagon trails, and the fields contained long,

red and shaggy grass. Cather has remarked: "that shaggy grass wuntry had

gripped me with a passion, 1 have never been able to shake. It has been the

happiness and the curse of my life."* Cather is able to depict the mingled

feelings of happ~ness and bitterness which chamderise her fiction.

It was Catheis liking for strong-minded people which led her to the

creation of such characters in her fiction, whether they were artists, pioneers or

founden of civilization. Her major characters-Alexandra and h ton ia the

farmers; Thea, the singer. and Fr. Latour and Fr. Vaillant, the French Catholic

missionaries-resemble the mythic heroes in their devotion and

determination. Most of her novels deal with the transplanted Europeans who

constitute a vital force in the alien land. When the pioneering philosophy

fascinated her, the struggle became more interesting than success to her and

the road was more important than the end.41 Hence it is no wonder that we

have the glorification of pioneering in Cather's representative novels,

0 Pioneers!and M~ ~ n t o n i a and that the same pioneering spirit continues to

be the quality of her major characters of the later fiction.

Ideal existence for Cather is one in consonance with Nature and in

novel after novel she makes it known what store she sets by man's harmony

with nature. The one quality she highlights most significantly in characters like

Alexandra and h ton ia , is, for example, their almost spiritual affinity with

nature. She shows how Fr. Latour accommodates himself to the wild region

of New Mexico. He admires the Indians' way of living, and their harmony

with Nature. Cather's interest in the primitive life of the Indians gets projected

in Latour's deep impression and admiration of them. The great insights into

which Cather was awakened by the Cliff-dwellings and the Walnut Canyon in

Arizona are shared by Thea in 73e Song of the Lark, and Tom Outland in The

h f s s o r ' s House. Ivar in 0 Pioneers! reveals a peculiar kind of love and

veneration of nature, which is comparable to the Indians' attitude in Death

Comes for the Archbishop.

Cather delights in presenting man as pitted against a hostile

environment; situations of artists versus society, pioneers vs land, founders vs

wilderness, etc. interest her and she is at her best when her characters get

identified with the permanent. enduring values of the land. Cather's

characters triumph over the hastile environment by force of will. A strong

interaction between character and environment runs through her major works.

Not everyone's is a success story in Cather. There are losers, dreamers

or misfits also in Cather's fictional world. They are manacled by a great sense

of n d g i a for their forsaken land. Peter and Mr. Shimerda are examples of

such characters. Certain characters like Carl in 0 Pioneers!and Eric in "The

Bohemian Girl" are poised between their love for artistic endeavour and the

love for their land. They can understand and appreciate the great-hearted

adventurers but they lack the vitality and vigour to stick to the land. Some are

artists who are misfits in the society. Cather's most successful characters live

in proximity to Nature.

The conflict between the Old and New Worlds is quite obviously

intemvined with the stoy of the immigrants. There are times when wen

Alexandra and Antonia experience the strong pull between the East and West,

before they can imbibe the spirit and the heritage of the land.

Nostalgia is a dominant feeling recuning in Cather. Her characters feel

homesick for either the East or the West. Nostalgia for childhood days is also

a common feature of Cather and her characters. 'Optima dies . . . prima

fugit . . .' rings in sad tones. Hany Hamvick writes:

As the leitmotiv for her novels, Miss Cather has chosen the passing

away of romance and adventure from the West, the liquidation of

our pioneer era, the decay of the frontier spirit into the weedy

materialism of a machine age. "The old order changeth." runs the

burden of her song, echoing Tennyson: and Virgil's "Optima dies

. . . prima fuglt" decorates the title page of ~ ~ h t o n i a . ~ *

Yet another recurrent theme in Cather is the inexorable flux of time

which deprives one of one's youth. Alexander in Alexander> Bridge and

Peter in 7he h o f m r r ' s House inwardly mourn the passing of their youth.

They have got a 'second self' which has some relation to their lost youth.

Often while they have to oblige to the needs of their superficial self, they long

for the fulfilment of the needs of their 'second self,' which is, in fad, their real,

inner self. And their real self is what pertains to the quality which is

permanent and enduring to them, and the quality gets focus often during a

confrontation between materialism and spirituality.

A strong sense of history and the past permeates Cather's works.

Persistence and continuity are qualities other than strong-mindedness which

deeply interested her. Like many of her contemporaries she found in the

Southwest powerful reminders of America's rich historical legacy. Cather's

'cultural and historic vision' motivates her characters to get enthralled by the

cliff-dwellers and the Indians and their way of living and habitation. For

example,

ne Profesurr's House amply represents Cather's cultural and

historical vision-in particular, her acute judgements on modem-

day materialism--and also her poetic sense of the redemptive.

creative contact with nature that may give an individual, and _.--

perhaps even a culture, a basis for right living.43 . ''

She was conscious of a link between the past and the present, and a

continuity into the future.

Cather's disapproval of the materialistic way of life makes her major

characters unequivocally express their stand against philistinism of all kinds.

In many of her novels the tension develops from the juxtaposition of the

materialistic and the spiritually minded. The threat of growing materialism is

so strong that the characters like Don Hedger in "Coming Aphrodite," and

Harvey Memck in "The Sculptor's Funeral," have to find themselves in

precarious situations.

Strands of Feminism are evident though Cather did not seem to make a

deliberate attempt to be a feminist. The androgynous element which, Virginia

Woolf has said, is essential in an artist is discernible in Cather's female

characters. Woolf wrote in "A Room of One's own": "It is fatal to be a man or

wor~lan pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is

fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with

justice for any cause; in any way to speak consdously as a

Cather's trilogy of heroic women seems to be deliberately unaware of

the limitations on women. In fact, as Jessup has remarked, "woman as

consewator of civilition, woman as counselor, one function blends well with

the other; and in the novels of Willa Cather, there is always a more or less

pliant male over whom woman's tutelage shows effect."45

Willa Cather has attracted considerable critical attention and it is

natural, considering the quality of her books which compare favourably with

those of the very best authors in the United States. In addition to the

book-length studies, innumerable articles have appeared in periodicals and

journals of American bterature These articles and books throw light on

various aspects of Cather's person and writing.

A veteran in English Literary Criticism, David Daiches was the first to

give a critical introduction to Cather in the form of a book in 1951. It is a safe

and handy gu~de to the general reader and to the serious students of Cather's

work. In the course of his discuss~on of each of her novels, he deals with the

glorification of the West in the early novels, the decline of the West in the

novels of the middle period, and the claims of History in the later ones. He

briefly discusses Cather's critical theories and principles, short stories and

poetry and finally makes an assessment of Cather's unique position in

American Literature.

A well-known biographical work on Cather was published by Mildred

R. Bennett in 1951. She traces the sources of Cather's works to her life, and

studies the Nebraska background and discusses the influence of childhood

associations in the fiction.

Among her many biographies the mast detailed and by far the most

definitive one is -authored by E. K Brown and Leon Edel. In fact, this is the

first major and substantial critical biography done on Cather mostly by Brown

and completed by Leon Edel in 1953. The book is an account of Cather's life

in its relation to her art. in two sections are given the details of Cather's Life

and a discussion of her works with parallels from her life, illustrations from the

books, interviews, letters, etc. He elaborates on the connection between the

ancient people and the pioneers. As Leon Edei remarks in the F m d . the

volume is,

the life of a great American noveilst of the first half of the twentieth

centuy seen through the windows of her work and through the

eyes of those who knew her. It will be read also as the ad of

courage of a scholar for whom. like Willa Cather's protagonists,

only death could be defeat--and even it was to be challenged to

the

A companion volume to BrownIEdel is the Boswellian biography Mlla

Cather Living: A Personal Record (1953) by Edith Lavis, which is, as the title

indicates, more a personal biography than a formal, critical one. What makes

the work authentic is the stature of the author as a friend and companion of

WiUa Cather for forty years. As one written by a friend who has shared the

greater part of a person's life, Lewis's biography, though, of course, with

references to the works and illustrations by way of her remarks and quotation

from her letters, reads like a story.

1953 witnessed another biographical study on Cather when Elizabeth

Shepley Sergeant, one of Cather's life-long friends, produced Wlla Cather: A

Memoir, which is a re-construction of the life and career of Willa Cather based

on the author's own reminiscences.

A major critical study on Cather's works appeared in 1960 when John

H. Randall 111 published n e Landscape and the Looking G l a s Wlla Gther's

Search for Vdue. It is an exhaustive and penetrating analysis of Cather's

nwels, and focuses on her search for value and garden image, and records

her strengths and weaknesses as a novelist.

in Willa Cather's GI/? of Sympafhy (1962) Edward A. Bloom and Lillian

D. Bloom discuss Cather's themes and techniques. The study is important as

it deals with Cather's literary theories and practices and her relationship to

various literary traditions.

Dorothy Van Ghent's pamphlet on Willa Cather (1964) gives a brief

but perceptive analysis of Cather's life and work, and looks into her works in

quest of "self" and "ancestors" and security. She states:

It is as if the aridities of her girlhood, and the drudgey that

followed, had left her with a haunting sense of a "self" that had

been effaced and that tormented her for realization. She was to

search for it in elusive ways all her life, and sometimes, in her

greatest novels, when she left off searching for it she found it4'

In The Faith of Our Feminists (1965) Josephine Lurie Jessup analyses

the nwels of Edith Wharton, Ulen Glasgow and Willa Cather as documents of

the cult of feminism.

Willa Cather declared her admiration for big characters and big

careers, especially when they were the characters and careers of

women. And the spirit of her whom these writers zealously

served-Athena. the spirit of woman disjunct and triumphant in

her separateness-shows forth in the body of their n o v e ~ s . ~

Jessup discusses the role of Cather's women characters as tutelary patxonesses

to her male charaders.

In Psychoanalysis and American fic6on (1965) edited by Irving Malin

Leon Edel makes a psychoanalytical study of 73e Professor's House.

In MUSIC in Mlla Cather's Fiction (1966) Richard Giannone examines

Cather's novels from the perspective of musical references and structural

dimensions. He also discusses the influence of music upon theme, character,

and forin in Cather's stories.

Wjlla Cather and Her Cn'tics (1967) edited by James Shroeter is an

attempt to sort out the best writing from 1916 to 1965 as part of the corpus of

Willa Cather criticism. Some of the best commentary made by Lionel Trilling,

Rebecca West, Brown, and Whipple which has been neglected finds its way

into this book. In six sections he has arranged the critical pieces and essays

with an introduction to each section shedding light on Cather. The book

contains an analysis of the critical and cultural factors which guide groups of

critics at different ages, as well as personal views and reminiscences of Cather

by writers, and reviewers of her works. The essays "Willa Cather: the Paradox

of Success" by Leon Edel, "The Case against Willa Cather" by Granville

Hicks, and 'Willa Cather: Lady in the Wilderness" by Maxwell Geismar are

brilliant and thought provoking.

James Woodress's Wills Cather: Her Life and Art (1970) is the most

recent, the finest and the most scholarly of critical biographies. Woodress uses

new materials, letters, interviews, etc. in his illustrations of Cather's life and art.

Dorothy McFarland's study on Cather (1972) analyses each of her

works and gives the story of her life as well.

In 1974 Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner edited 7he Art of Willa

Cather in which are recorded the proceedings of the international seminar on

Cather in Lincoln in October 1973.

In 1974 John J. Murphy edited the Eve Ejsays on WiUa Catherwhich

are papers read during the Cather Symposium held at Menimack in 1972.

Giannone in his "Willa Cather and the Human Voice" says that Cather tries to

restore to fiction the human voice and make the novel a human experience.

Murphy's "Willa Cather: The Widening Gyre" is an attempt to connect Cather

with the classical tradition of American fiction, that of Melville, Hawthorne and

James. John Randall in his "Willa Cather and the Pastoral Traditionw

maintains that Cather's prairie novels are in the pastoral rather than realistic

traditions, their fonn resembling the eclogues of Virgil. Bernice Slote traces

the complex sources of Willa Cather's works in "Willa Cather; The Seaet

Web." In "The Poetics of Willa Cather" the Blooms discuss Cather's notion of

desire as the impetus of fiction.49

Philip L Gerber produced a compact volume on Willa Cather in 1975

containing details of her life and art. He discusses the influences on Cather,

and makes a brief study of each of her works.

Again in 1975 David Stouck published Willa Cather's Imagination

where he considers the various modes from pastoral to satiric through which

Cather's fiction moves.

Ciitical ESMys on Wlla Cather which John J . Murphy edited in 1984

includes a survey of Cather's critical reception. reprint, significant a y s and

reviews from 1912 to 1984 among which the essays by James Woodress,

David Stouck, Paul Comean and Murphy himself contain original, perceptive

analysis.

In 1986 Susan J. Rosowski published 7Te Voyage Perilous: Mlla

Cather's RomanrYasm which places Cather in the British romantic tradition.

Sharon 0. Brien's WiIla Cather: 7he Emerging Voice (1987) is another

recent major work on Cather, and it deals with the psychological aspect of

mother-daughter relationships developed by Nancy Chedorov in the

Reptuduct?on of Mothering.

James Woodress's Wila Cather: A Literary Life (1987) is a full-length

biography which is built upon his earlier work, W a ather: Her Life and Art

(1970) and contains more letters, speeches and inte~ews.

Hermione Lee's WIIa Cather: Double Lives (1989) is an important

feminist study which traces the contraries or the paradox in Cather's works.

She discusses the androgynous element in the artists presented in Cather's

writing.

John J. Murphy's My Antonia: ne Road Home (1989) is a close study

on, and a profitable introduction to the novel. Basing on Cather's comments

on landscape painting, he traces signs of impressionism and luminism from

the visual arts in Cather's landscapes.

Among the journals WornenS Studies (1984) and Modem Ection

Studiesthe Spring Volume of 1990 contains important articles on Cather and

her works.

The above survey of Willa Cather criticism is by no means an

exhaustive one, but it represents the comparatively more important titles. An

area which does not seem to have received adequate critical attention is the

interrelationship between character and environment in her novels. This is

indeed a very relevant topic vis-a-vis the novels of Cather since, like Hardy,

she is greatly fascinated by the interaction between character and

environment. In her novels like 0 Pioneers! and M~ ~ntonia, her interest in

this interrelationship becomes almost an obsession. An attempt is made in this

dissertation to examine the various aspects of the interaction between

character and environment in Willa Cather's novels.

All the persons portrayed in the novels are referred to by the term

'character,' though the major characters are dealt with in an indepth study.

'Environment' means the conditions under which the persons live or are

developed, and the sum total of the influences which modify and determine

the dwelopment of life or character. In Cather's novels, characters are

engaged in struggles against the geographical, sociological, intellectual, and

spiritual environment.

Cather who had seen the immigrants of the Old World struggling

against a strange, harsh, and often hostile environment in the New World

depicts this interaction in her novels and stories. In fad this crucial interaction

between the character and the environment is one of the important

contributions of Willa Cather as a novelist. The author who could not free

herself from the bitter and sweet relation with the environment deals with the

impact of the environment on her characters. In her depiction of the mutual

interplay Cather is reflecting her own sensitivity which has been awakened to

the shaping influence of the limitless prairies which form the backdrop of quite

a good number of her novels.

Coming to the new land which was still a frontier temtoxy was both an

exciting and a terrifying experience to Cather as a child. Jolting in the wagon

along the faint trails over the grass without any fencing, she "felt a good deal

as if we had come to the end of everythingit was a kind of erasure of

personality."50 Later in her literary career, the material which she could claim

entirely as her own was gathered from her life in this pioneering region, which

had a strong impact on her at her most impressionable age. In an i n t e ~ e w in

the Omaha "Daily Bee," October 29, 1921, Cather herself recorded that she

felt homesick and lonely in the new land. Her mother herself was homesick

and nobody paid attention to her. "So the coun* and I had it out together

and by the end of the first autumn, that shaggy grass counhy . . . the

happiness and the curse of my life.""

Cather's characters, whether pioneer settlers, artists, missionaries or

founders of civilition, are linked by certain common elements seen in them.

They are bound by a strong sense of determination and single-mindedness of

p u m and armed with a vision and a sense of mission. The devotion and

dedication to the cause they undertake, the tenacity of their purpose, and a

strong will make all Cather characters either pioneers or artists. Cather herself

has remarked that all her charaders are artists in a way. Cather writes:

Most of the women artists I have known--the prima donnas,

novelists, poets, sculptors-have been women of this same type.

The very best cooks I have w e r known have been prima donnas.

When I visited them the way to their hearts was the same as to the

hearts of the pioneer rancher's wife in my childhood-l must eat a

great deal, and enjoy it. . . . The German housewife who sets

before her family on Thanksgving Day a perfectly roasted goose,

is an artist. The farmer who ~ o e s out in the moming to harness

his team, and pauses to admire the sunrise-he is an artist."

Cather is often regarded as the novelist of the transplanted Europeans.

In fad the immigrants from the M occupy a very dominant position in her

fiction. She knew and understood the problems of the i m m i p t s and not

infrequently her fiction mimots the sensitive immigrant at odds with a hostile

surrounding.

The motif which runs through a number of her novels and short stories

is the struggle of an individual, often a chosen one, against the environment.

Cad Van Doren says that Cather deals with the struggle of 'some elect

individual' against the e n v i r ~ n m e n t . ~ ~ Alexandra, h t o n i a , Fr. Latour and

Fr. Vaillant are chosen by the author as elect individuals.

Alexander's Bridge is set against sophisticated Boston and London, and

the struggle which the characters undergo is mainly psychological. The

prairies of Nebraska form the environment in Cather's novels 0 Pioneerrland

My htonia and in some of her short stories like "Neighbour R o s i w and

"Old Mrs. Harris." which glow with the pioneer gloy in spite of a certSn

precariousness in some situations. The confines and conventions of a small

town are set against the protagonists of 7he Song of the Lark and One of

Ours. The pioneer gloy has largely diminished in A Last Lady and 7he

Professorr's House and the major characters are pitted against a materialistic,

sophisticated society. My Mortal h e m y shows the heroine in unfavoumble

circumstances, suffering from a dearth of opportunities as a result of her

rejection of her uncle and her rights of inheritance. Death Comes for the

Archbishop represents the struggle of the two French missionaries in the

Southwest and Shadows on the Rock relates the s toy of the French settlers in

Quebec. Lucy Gayheatwhich tells the reverse of the s toy of 7he S n g of the

Lark deals with the theme of art and is set against a Nebraska which has lost

much of its lustre. Her last novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl is set in the

slave-owning society of Virginia.

Some of Cather character,; show resistance against the environment.

The sculptor in "The Sculptor's Funeml," Thea in the early part of 7he Song

of the Lark, and Claude in One of Ours rebel against their narrow

surroundings. Total surrender and passivity happen in the case of some

characters like Peter in "Peter" and his prototype Shimerda in My htonia

who end up in a suicide. But Cather's most successful characters adapt

themselves to the surrounding and identify themselves with the environment,

though, of course, they have come to this stage of adaptation through an

evolution of attitudes to the environment. The best illustration of this can be

had in Alexandra and h t o n i a who are tough-minded women and who put

up a brave and heroic fight in the alien Nebraskan plains. Their initial attitude

of resistance and repulsion changes into adaptation and acceptance and

finally they merge with the landscape. Though they have not voluntarily

chosen the struggle, they gradually dwelop an organic relation to it.

McFarland's comment, "the idea of man's creative relationship to the land is

n 54 . personified in Alexandra is applicable to h t o n i a also. What sets them off

from many of their predecessors and their contemporaries is love and a sense

of belonging to the country. Cather poetically describes this in 0 Pioneen.!

"For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of

geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. . . . The

history of wery country begins in the heart of a man or a woman."55

The French missionaries in Death Comes for the Archbishop and

Rosicky in "Neighbour Rosicky," like their female predecessors, emerge

successful through their organic and creative relationship with the

environment.

The struggles of these chaiaders awaken them to an awareness of their

potentialities and inadequacies. They bear the hardships with admirable

physical strength and mental composure undaunted by the hostility of Nature.

Though occasionally they fail in their struggles, they are not disheartened by

these failures. They are never gloomy and they never lose their dogged

determination. Struggles draw out the latent powers in them and the future is

nwer bleak or dismal to them. While their struggles take place on the earthly

lwel, they find themselves in possession of energy, security and happiness

and their relationship develops into a spiritual one.

In Death Comes for the Archbishop the Catholic priests establish the

church of faith amongst the pagans of the Southwest: In doing so they

sometimes accentuate the contrast between the Christian faith and the

simplicity and beauty of the faith of the Indians there. Without despoiling

their customs. rituals and faith, Fr. Latour builds up a Cathedral which is

suited to the environment. The Cathedral functions more like a symbol of the

growth of faith "Latour the artist c r architect of a vital church sensitively

adopts the shade and shapes of his new world."" The result is an unusual

blending of the character and the environment.

Archbishop Latour's indomitable will to fulfil his mission and his

tenacity of purpose are inspiring. The bad weather, the primitive conditions

and maliaous people cannot dissuade him from his goal. Father Vaillant's

equally strong, rather militant spirit captivates the readers. With Spartan

courage, with Robinson Crusoe's thriving spirit, and with Ulysses' adventurous

impulse "to strive. to seek, to find, and not to yield,"57 they face opposition

from the land, the climate, and the people. The more they suffer, the stronger

they grow. They have the stubbornness and p e w e m n c e to see through the

work, to get the task finished and the mission fulfilled. They do not yield to

adversity. A constant fight they put up through pain, discomfort, illness, etc.

Even when their homeland remains fresh and vivid in their memoy, they

make New Mexico a home away from home.

Ucile and her father in Shadows on the Rodr set a new order in an

alien land, among the people, and they hold fast to the old values and faith.

Reme Charron is the progenitor of a new generation of the French Canadians.

Claude in One of Ours seeks a liberation from the confines of the

prairies and lacks the strong will and determination of the female protagonists

of 0 Pioneers! and My htonia. He is a youth full of idealism and

romanticism and is impatiently waiting for something splendid in life. He

makes a feeble attempt of struggle and finally tries to seek salvation in war

which in reality is only an illusion.

Mrs. Forrester in A Lost Lady in spite of her fall from the pioneer

standards in the view of the narratorxharacter, is still a fascinating character

with an indomitable will to survive. All her energy and vitality as Marie

Shabata's in 0 Pioneers! are released in the wrong direction.

Myra in My Mortal Enemy and the Professor in n e Professor's House

are characters who have lost their enthusiasm in living, and death seems a

liberation to them. Myra cannot retain her adventurous spirii, idealism and

romanticism owing to economic impoverishment. We see no longer the epic

struggle of the heroic characters which warmed our hearts in 0 Pioneers! and

MY ~ntonia.

Sapphira in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a strong, but domineering

character, behaves in a perverted manner in the treatment of Nancy, the slave

girl. Again, no heroism motivates the characters. Lucy in Lucy Gayheart lacks

the determination and strong will of the early heroines like Alexandra,

Antonia, and especially her fictional counterpart, Thea.

Once they find themselves in harmony with Nature, Cather's

characters begin to experience great happiness and a sense of security. A

landscape or a natural spot is enough to give them joy and solace. Alexandra

in 0 Pioneers!experiences great joy w h e ~ , she watches a single wild duck in a

river. and cherishes the memory of it for her future happiness in

contemplation. Her gloom and depression are greatly released by the big

storm and rain in the graveyard. Alexandra shares her feelings with bar.

Ivar. I think it has done me good to get cold clear through like this,

once. I don't believe I shall suffer so much any more. When you

get so near the dead. they seem more real than the living.

Worldly thoughts leave one. Ever since Emil died, I've suffered so

when it rained. Now that I've been out in it with him, I shan't

.dread it. After you once get cold clear through, the feeling of the

rain on you is sweet . . . 58

Thea in 7he Song of the Lark feels indescribable joy in the moments

she spends in proximity to the natural landscape. She enjoys her trips to the

red hills during her childhood. Later in her grown up life the Panther Canyon

and ancient dwellings awaken her to deeper insights as to the vocation of her

life and settle the doubts and confusions in her mind. She in her mystic

communion with Nature finds out her own position in the chain of the

ancestral link to the future through the present. Jim in My ~ntonia

experiences a peculiar kind of happiness while sitting in the garden, with the

yellow pumpkins. ground-cherty bushes, giant grass-hoppers, gophers, queer

little bugs, etc., and with the wind blowing softly against the tall grasses.

I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and

become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or

goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness: to be

dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to

one. it comes as naturally as sleep. 59

Jim, h t o n i a and their friends have a memorable picnic in dose

harmony with Nature and it leads to the sight of the plough on the setting sun

which gives them a mystic realisation.

On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the

field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the

distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was

exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the

tongue, the share-black against the molten red. There it was,

heroic in size. a picture writing on the sun.60

Tom Outland in 7he P r o f ~ r ' s House is an outcast from modem

technological and scientific society in spite of his own scientific discovery and

he likes to flee and seek refuge in the ancient city of the cliff-dwellers. When

in Death Comes for the Archbishop Cather tells the story of the Catholic faith

in New Mexico, the story of the landscape is also subsumed in it.

Quebec In Shadom on the Rock, the city set on the rock and symbol of

enduring faith, represents the combination of the Canadian wilderness and

French orderly beauty. Skating on the ice gives immense pleasure to Lucy in

Lucy Gayheart; the old apple trees comfort her. She is frantic when her sister

makes arrangements to cut the trees. She cries, "I can't stand it, I can't! It' all I

have in the world just now. Leave it this year, and I'll pay you back what you

lose, truly I wi~l ."~ ' The Virginian background in Sapphira and the Slave Girl

reminds us of old times and beauty.

It is interesting to trace the interrelation between the seasonal cycle and

the various phases of the human drama unfolded against it. Though the

interplay is not so vivid and strong as in Hardy, the change in the fortunes of

the characters seems to have been determined or highly influenced by the

change in the seasons. As the cycle of seasons moves round, they have their

joys and sorrows, thrills and regrets, and excitements and disappointments.

The Ind~ans In Death Comes for the Archbishop merge with the

landscape and serve as a foil to the modem's callousness, insensitivity and

materialism. The reference to the culture of the Cliff-dwellers in n e

hfessor ' House and also in f i e Song of Ule Lark offers a model to modem

civilizers. They d o not struggle against the environment, neither do they

simply yield to it in utter passivity. Instead, they gracefully merge with the

environment and adapt themselves to the surrounding without disturbing its

equilibrium. The landscape seems an extension of them and they seem an

extension of the landscape. They d o not have any physical fear of Nature. In

fact they look at Nature with spiritual awe. There is a peculiarly marvellous

harmony between the Indians and Nature. Like badgers and coyotes they live

without stirring up and upsetting the ecological balance. lvar in 0 Pioneen!

and Lou in "Lou, the Prophet" have an affinity to the primitive kind of life of

the Indians.

The Indians meet their needs from Nature, but they nwer exploit it

beyond a limit as the modems do. They d o not have the European impulse

to 'master' everything. They simply adapt themselves to the changing moods

of the climate and the seasons. A kind of blending, merging takes place.

Their way of living is a contrast to the modem way of the world. Cather's trip

to the Southwest in 1912 had renewed her sensitivity to the wild counhy and

the pioneer generations and had gven a moral and spiritual dimension to the

country where she lived.

Reflecting on the cliff dwellings of ancient Indians seems to have

strengthened Cather's concern with the moral dimensions of living

in any certain landscape-indeed with the moral and spiritual

dimensions of establishing and maintaining civilisations in general.

This moral approach to life and culture is the temtoly of her

mature fiction, in large part, and certainly of her most broadly

social western works: 0 Pioneed (1913, ~ ~ h t o n i a (1918). 77w

Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop

(1927).~'

In fact, the moral and spiritual dimension in which she moulds her

characters and their landscape is something which makes her fiction

rcmarkable. Her novels have been praised for the delicacy of her sense of

place and description of nature. In her portrayal of the Scandinavian

emigrants struggling to sutvive on the plains of the Midwest, in her

sympathetic depiction of the pioneer women, in her graphic representation of

the French missionaries establishing the Catholic Church in New Mexico, and

in her pictorial depiction of the French settlers recreating their homeland in

Quebec, it is always the interplay between the character and the environment

which fascinates the attention of any sensitive reader.

Notes

1 Qtd. in John J. Murphy and Kevin A. Synnott, Introd., CriticdIEssays

on WIla Cather, ed. John J. Murphy ( W o n : G. K Hall & Co., 1984) 1.

five Essays on WI/a Cather: 7he Menimack Symposium (North

Andwer: Menirnack College, 1974) vii.

Dorothy Van Ghent, W/la Cather (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.

1964) 6.

4 Wla Cather Living: A Personal Record [New York: Knopf. 1953)

12-13.

Wla Cather: A Ciitica/ Biography (New York: Knopf. 1953) 4041.

6 Qtd. in Philip Gerber, WI/a Cather (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Menill

Educational Publishing, 1975) 30.

' Wlla Cather: Stores, Poems and Other Wn'tings, ed. Sharon 0 Brien

(New York: The Ubrary of America, 1992) 7.

Qtd. in Philip Gerber 33.

W//a Cather: Sto"es, Poems and Other Writings 800.

10 Introd.. April Tw'lighk (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1962) v.

" Dorothy Tuck McFarland. Wla Cather (New York: Frederick Ungar.

1972) 36.

Wlla Cather: A Memoir(Philade1phia: Lippincon, 1953) 66-67.

13 Twentieth Century Literary Criticism 11 90-91.

l4 Qtd. in Edith Lewis, W//a Cather Living: A Personal Record 66-67.

l5 Willa Cather, "My First Novels," On Wrting: Cn'tical Studies on

Waitig as an Alf(New York: Knopf, 1962) 91.

1 6 h w . . nhng 92-93.

l7 Willa Cather, 'The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett," On

Writing 47.

'' Willa Cather, qtd. in John H. Randall 111, 7he Landscape a n d the

Looking Glass: Wlla Cather's Search for Value (Boston: Houghton, 1960) 62.

John J. Murphy, ed., five Ekiays on W a Cather75.

Twentieth Century Literay Criticism 11 91.

' I Willa Cather, A LostLady(New York: Knopf, 1951) 172.

" Willa Cather, "On The Professor's House." On Wrting 31-32.

23 Willa Cather, "On Death Comes for the Archbishop," On Writing 9.

24 On Wrting 10.

'' Willa Cather, "On Shadows on the Rock," On WMng 16.

26 John J. Murphy, ed., CritidEssays on Mlla Cather 280.

27 Willa Cather, Prefatory Note to Not Under Forty (New York:

Knopf, 1964) n. pag.

Dawd Daiches, WIIa Cather: A Ciitical lntroducfion (New York:

Collier Books, 1962) 115.

29 Qtd. in Philip Gerber 88.

Journal (Jan. 27, 1895): 13.

3' Willa Cather, 'On the Art of Fidion," On Wrfing 102.

32 Willa Cather, "The Novel Ddrneubld." On Writing 4 2 4 3 .

33 American Literature and Culture (New York: Cooper Square,

1972) 425.

34 Qtd. in Philip Gerber 52.

35 David Daiches 124.

36 ~ i l l a Cather, qtd. in Philip G e h r 21.

37 Robert E. Spiller et a/., eds., Literary Histoty of the United States.

3rd ed. (New Delhi: Arnerind Publ. Co., 1972) 1212.

Qtd. in Willa Cather, My Antonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

1988) 169.

39 Qtd. in On Writing 94.

40 Willa Cather, qtd. in Mildred Rhoads Bennett, The W d d of Wlla

Cather(Linco1n: U of Nebraska P, 1961) 140.

41 Willa Cather, qtd. in Mildred R. Bennett 209.

42 Qtd. in M~ ~ n t o n i a 400.

Clyde A. Milner I1 et a/.. eds., 77w Oxford Hstoty of the American

West(NewYork: OUP, 1994) 725.

Qtd. in Franchere Ruth, Mlla (New Yo&: Crowell, 1958) 17.

45 Josephine Lurie Jessup, The Faith of Our Feminists: A Study in the

Novels of Edith Warton, Ellen Glasgow, Wlla Cather (New York: Biblo and

Tannen, 1965) 73.

46 M/Ia Gther: A C~itical Biography xxiv.

47 Dorothy Van Chent 8.

Josephine Lurie Jessup 13.

49 John J. Murphy, five EEMys on Wlla Cather 122-24.

Willa Cather, qtd. in Philip Gerber 20.

51 Willa Cather, qtd. in Mildred Rhoads Bennett, 7he World of Wla

Cather 140.

52 Willa Cather, qtd. in Mildred Rhoads Bennett. The World of Wlla

Cather 167-68.

Carl Van Doren, "Willa Cather," James Schroeter, ed., Willla Cather

andHer Critia (Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1967) 15.

" Dorothy Tuck McFarland 23.

55 Willa Cather, OPioneers!(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988) 37-38.

56 Jean Schwind, "Latour's Schismatic Church: The Radical Meaning in

the Pictorial Methods of Death Comes for the Archbishop,* The Studies in

American Rction 13.1 (Spring 1985): 86

57 Alfred Tennyson, "Ulysses," Tennyson (London: Mamillan,

1958) 22.

Willa Cather, 0 Pioneers! 164.

59 Willa Cather, My h t o n i a 14.

Willa Cather, My h t o n i a 156.

61 Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheat (New York: Knopf, 1935) 160.

62 Clyde A. Milner, 73e Oxford Hi'sfoty of the Arnetican West 725.