Willa Cather’s Transitional Novel: The Song of the Lark as a Romantic-Naturalistic Novel with a Modernist Center

Ann Moseley Texas A&M University-Commerce

Because Willa Cather was so much a part of her time and her complex literary milieu, it has been impossible to place her within a single major movement—a fact that, ironically, left her outside of mainstream American literary studies for nearly half a century. Viewing The Song of the Lark as a major transitional novel in Cather’s oeuvre, however, helps to establish an important context both for the novel and for Cather’s work as a whole. The novel was itself written between the fall of 1913 and the spring of 1915, during a significant transition period in Cather’s life after she had left her position as managing editor of McClure’s Magazine in 1911 to become a full- time novelist and after she had taken a pivotal trip to Arizona in 1912 that included a visit to Walnut Canyon—the source for Panther Canyon in the novel. Preceded by the romanticism of her early stories and of O Pioneers! and followed by My Ántonia with its modernist point of view and the even more clearly modernist A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House, The Song of the Lark holds a pivotal position in Cather’s canon. Even more specifically, however, the novel transitions internally from romanticism in Part I, to naturalism in Parts II and III, to modernism in Part IV, “The Ancient People”—which is the novel’s central fulcrum, and finally back to romanticism—German romanticism in particular—in Part VI. Cather’s 1895 statement that “Children, the sea, the sun, God himself are all romanticists” (Kingdom 233) shows an early commitment to romanticism, and elements of romanticism thread their way—sometimes brightly, sometimes darkly—throughout her works, including The Song of the Lark. According to Rosowski, Cather’s writing is shaped by the “English tradition” of romanticism (7). Images associated with English romanticism do appear in the novel, particularly in Professor Wunsch’s Wordsworthian reference to the artistic knowledge that must be “inside from the beginning”;1 in Thea

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Kronborg’s association of the artist with birth and childhood; and in Cather’s description of a lamp2 being “turned up inside” Thea when she perceives organically a passage she is studying with her Chicago piano teacher Andor Harsanyi (SL 162). The literary and philosophical roots of both O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915) spring more clearly, however, from the mainstream of American romanticism, particularly transcendentalism. In giving her second novel the Whitmanesque title O Pioneers! Cather places herself in the line of succession of Emerson’s true American poet—the visionary representative of Truth, Beauty, and the Good. In The Song of the Lark, she, like Whitman, portrays the rural and urban landscapes of America as well as the body and soul of an artist. From the beginning of the novel, Thea, like Emerson, studies nature and trusts herself. Similarly, in Anton DvoĜák’s New World Symphony she recognizes the “new song” of her own joyous country (SL 186)—a song she will later transfer to the powerful romanticism of Wagnerian opera. In her Emersonian independence and “stubborn self-assertion” (SL 185), Thea fiercely rejects threats against her life and her art, declaring that the “ecstasy” of art will be hers as long as she lives (SL 171). Indeed, Cather gives Thea vital romantic experiences, including her quest for artistic understanding in the historical and even mythic landscape of the cliff dwellings, her organic understanding of forms and of art as a whole rather than as a combination of parts, and her symbolic birth as an artist in a sunny cave in Panther Canyon— experiences that foreshadow Cather’s developing modernism. Through Thea’s epiphany in Panther Canyon—“The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself” (SL 254), Cather provides a perfect illustration of Emerson’s definition of art as “a nature passed through the alembic of man.” (34). Three years later in My Ántonia, Cather would fulfill the promise of The Song of the Lark by becoming, as Jim Burden writes of Virgil, “the first . . . to bring the Muse into [her] country” (256). In so doing, she becomes the first woman to fulfill Emerson’s call for a writer to recreate the “America [that] is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres” (338). Cather’s literary principles and style were developing during a time of major transitions in dominant American literary movements.