uownioaaea oy Ltlo1se~tale umvers1lyJ at rns:S/ :ll :September Wl l Abstract: defending ture defence, experience neers! nia, to history "Old an works novels the root cence; the Niel Scott adventurers Keywords: on of phil forth a Boise queville, state. a those the unmediated Church. New osophy. rooted undermines her out Herbert, West," Yenor Copyright© reveals frontier. State (1913) a deepen new later courteous the who who the West, commercial community of kind Examining He who great American is which University, Cather, novels, could conquer the laid several a and this an Once split who has hero aspirations of Great were brooding assistant the My brotherhood, diagnosis 2007 novels was they Her ilia American man-small, written in it would "dispel would especially of Catholicism, phases foundation Antonia culture is presidency, the of unpractical War: Cather's settled Wi A alet novels, earliest treat Idaho, Heldref settled, believers Western are lost lla professor Willa on spirit for but and the of itntv mrcn themes. American distinctive in West set Cather's David ( by human her 1918), where strong her lady could bourgeois however, O status offer Publications narrow, of for "dreamers, in and to Pioneers! living illustrious world decadence, the One freedom, is America's American Hume, the of (1923), a not in issues he greatness. depict as morning nmiuu. Her unambiguous. way corpus policial especially of attack but greedy, in point illustrated the hold" teaches an commercial Ours, the Alexis out in out and of author prairie the career. great contrasts the Cather's of Great shadows civilization church West, of to science freshness, and My greatness generous diagnose Her magnifi­ political those of a weak hearted de literary O by brings of return Anto­ petty. After 1 SCOTT War, later Pio­ Toc­ cul­ and and the the the of in at 29 YENOR civilization. Matthew souls starting greatness These shows pean manifestation must primeval emerged easy broke geois human destruction that tradition, acteristic into al artist hoping Cather's West" ican shaken mediated novel education's those ciation not cation The It arts. only a frontier is life profitable high antedates be depicts dissatisfied in self-satisfaction to early reevaluation how crisis "at for wrong greatness, in point She two neglected the from read of forest." Arnold, and, the the of with culture. the human One a of the novels American ability reassesses brought in involves the to dangerous for commercial Turns of Cather conflict ability ultimately, in the Marne" to the the 1922 great her help bits, 2 a moral of analyzing 4 light confine greatness through universities through greatness For war with deeper which Pulitzer Cather's West slaughter Mirroring criticize narrow-minded, had art to Ours, raise an or land-holders" saw as of Cather, a between used or West. of crisis redeem from the as bourgeois thereabouts." sundering ethic service occurred on the secularized "at life. spiritual she Cather's her the America, that informed the Prize-winning efficacy where a early, the_ of unfolding Versailles." The the match factory splinters factory match hostile new too, education often cultural observation crisis soldiers. the bourgeois the to battlefield American perspective and the crisis; emptiness. coinage" more abstract of understanding she and "literary associates of orei wrd and world bourgeois Cather 3 to by from bourgeois liberal closing One and standards in secular leisure, cut questions liberal advocates optimistic the This history. novel, that life spiritual of aspirations ideals is saw every due West's destruction vulgar, world education Ours of the World of liberal and She with beauty, "the education. in to life, the is and thing had The a arises phy of Western the the such decline (1922), human liberal doubts novels Amer­ appre­ public which world Euro­ War bour­ liber­ char­ been sical edu­ self­ "the best fact "up art, the for as of in to I redeem bourgeois life, but also the goodness of bourgeois things; gardens; repose. These are first-ratethings. and out of life as such. first-rate stuff is art made. It is possible that machinery has finishedus as faras this is concerned. Nobody stays at home Cather did not solve this problem in One of Ours, but she any more; nobody makes anything beautiful any more. Quick overcame it in her later novels, which emphasize the cen­ transportation is the death of art. We can't keep still because rality of religious faith and community to human thriving. it is so easy to move about." In her later novels, the presence of religious faith and Catholicism specifically coincides with the experience of Her literary treatment of Europe in relation to America is happiness and nobility (Shadows on the Rock [1931]; Death not as clear-cut as this statement suggests. Europe, home Comes for the Archbishop [1927]; My Mortal Enemy of the Great War's slaughter, was not immune from the [ 1926]), whereas the absence of religion means the novel spiritual crisis that Cather saw in America. Cather saw ends with the tragically sundered world (The Professor's rootless decadence, caused by the evaporation of culture's House [1925]; Lucy Gayheart [19351). She "progressed" protective mist, as the problem of modern Western civi­ from seeing beauty in commercial heroism and decent fam­ lization. The problem was just more advanced-and hence ily life to developing a backward-looking appreciation for more peaceful-in the more democratic and commercial an almost feudal community of devotion. After sketching American context. her progress as a novelist, the article concludes that Cather's Cather's early novels reflect an appreciation for the tragic vision opposed political radicalism as much as the "romanticism of everyday life."7 The Song of the lark scientific spirit. ( 1915), 0 Pioneers!, and My Antonia present progress-the advancement of civilization, its code of honor, and the spread of opportunity to all-as the meaningful, enduring ARTISTIC CANVAS AS CULTURAL CANOPY: LIBERAL American moral canopy. In these novels, conflicts between EDUCATION AS MEDIATOR bourgeois life and human greatness aremediated by liberal For Cather, human beings are restless, uneasy, and anx­ arts education. Characters often see that it is difficultto find ious, and the canopy of culture provides an interpretation their places in this dynamic commercial order, but restless of this native psychological disposition. Without that life­ ambition finds expression in diverse institutions as the com­ lending canopy, human beings become unmoored and are mercial order spreads a rousing restlessness throughout doomed to wander, aimless and alienated from what is society. These early novels constitute a moral defense of most needful. Against modern individualism and the uni­ the capitalist order, although they reflect an awareness of versalism of what is now called globalization, Cather's the vulgarizing tendencies of that order. In The Song of the account of human thriving emphasizes how healthy life is lark, a brewer (Fred Ottenburg) and a free-thinkingd octor informed by a traditional horizon from which individuals (Dr. Archie) support Thea Kronborg'srise from a dreary life initially take identity with their breast milk. As Claude as a minister's daughter to greatness as a singer. Thea con­ Wheeler, the hero of One of Ours, relates, "Life [is] so ceives of art as "an effort to make a sheath, a mould in shortthat it meant nothing at all unless it were continually which to imprison fora moment the shining elusive element reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows which is life itself."8 Alexandra Bergson of O Pioneers! of individual existence came and went against a back­ made the high land bring forth crops herself, but her great­ ground that held together."5 ness is only appreciated by Carl Lindstrum, an engraver. In One of Ours and A lost lady, Cather shows how The best example of this convention is My Antonia, America's freedom, economic mobility, and progress shat­ which presents Antonia's beauty in the context of America's ter the enduring background in America. America gives increasingly secular society. Her self-sacrificing inner beau­ rise to a rootless, commercial bourgeois unable to sense the ty, as expressed in motherhood, is not naturally attractive to beautiful, good, and noble. European countries (especially bourgeois, but the sensible artistic imagination formed by France), in contrast, maintained an enduring horizon, liberal education makes Antonia's beauty irresistible. social stability, and organic local traditions that sustain a Through art, Americans can sense the dignity in common humane vitality and a sense of place. Unlike what she things and stem the tide of vulgar democracy. Liberal arts viewed as the artificialmonotony of American commercial education liberates the narrator, Jim Burden, from Ameri­ life, the organic European canopy brought forth the full ca's stifling"mode of existence" that "was like living under range of human emotions and talents. Cather distinguished a tyranny."9 At the university, Jim undergoes a "mental Europe and America in an interview shortly after she pub­ awakening" as a sophisticated, sickly European teacher ini­ lished One of Ours: tiates Jim in the "world of ideas." Introduced to the "pecu- 1iar charm and vividness" of liberal learning, Jim ranges The Frenchman doesn't talk nonsense about art, about self­ expression; he is too greatly occupied with building the over human experience to appreciate the naturalistic beauty things that make his home. His house, his garden. his vine­ and dignity in Antonia and her fully immersed, meaningful yards, these are the things that fillhis mind. He creates some­ I ife of motherhood. Cather's opposition to the merely tech­ thing beautiful,something lasting. And what happens? When nical Progressive education movement afootduring her day a French painter wants to paint a picture he makes a copy of could not be clearer-it deadens the sensibilities and there­ a garden, a home, a village. The artin them inspires his brush ... Restlessness such as ours, success such as ours, striving by fosters a prosaic, subtly tyrannical democracy dominat­ such as ours, do not make for beauty. Other things must ed by empty individualism, restless materialism, and tech­ come first: good cookery; cottages that are homes, not play- nology. Nor could her faith in art and liberal education be more pronounced-only it can ennoble the New West. Jim trol while distracting people from thinking about the ends translates Virgil-'"For I shall be the first, if I live, to bring to be served by technology. Questions of meaning are the Muse to my country"' 10-and so Cather seems to con­ obscured from human view by materialistic success, con­ ceive of her own works of art in these early novels. tinual striving for progress, and scientificeducation. Amer­ Through Jim, Cather makes the sensibilities dwell on the ican farmers felled beautiful orchards and Cottonwood beauty and fittingness of a situated, nonmechanical life. trees because they were callous to the "old things they used Hers is a classical approach to art, where the poetic presen­ to take pride in," but such trees were a source of pride tation of beauty and ugliness educates readers in virtue and among the French (cf. 85 and 274-75). vice. Instead of priests or pastors conveying a sense of Normally, one would expect those great questions to be meaning, the liberally educated narrators in these early nov­ raised in the context of religious faith. This does not hap­ els provide the spiritual guidance and interpret beauty for pen in One of Ours, Cather's most ostensibly anti-Christian the philistines in the middle. The early Cather is a critic of book. Gone is Cather's nostalgia for the old religion char­ bourgeois flatnessof soul without being alienated. acteristic of the early portions of My Antonia. Christianity Liberal arts education would not prove strong enough to in One of Ours appears firstas oppressively moralistic and resist the democratic tide. 11 Appealing only to the fewtaken worldly. The ugly American of the book, Bayliss Wheeler, with intellectual delights, liberal education proves inca­ Claude's older brother and the embodiment of censorious pable of cultivating gentility on a mass scale. More to the Puritanism, teams up with Claude's wife, Enid, to embitter point, the possibility of liberal education shaping sensibili­ Claude. Even as Claude looks out over corpses in the No ties depends, to an extent, on a consensus about what those Man's Land of France near the novel's denouement, he liberal arts teach or even that those liberal arts teach; mean­ insists that no "battlefield or shattered country he had seen ingful instruction depends on shared meaning more than a was as ugly as this world would be if men like his brother conversation about meaning. In post-frontier America, Bayliss controlled it altogether" (339). Bayliss anticipates there was no artistic consensus about the interpretation of a A lost lady's Ivy Peters. Just as Ivy turns the Forresters' life that should be elevated through art. Progressive novel­ meadow into farmland, Bayliss buys the only traditional, ists such as Sinclair Lewis gave a more strikingly material­ beautiful mansion in town and plans to "pull down the old istic interpretation to native restlessness, an interpretation trap and put up something modern" (93). Unlike the cun­ more akin to Marxist alienation than spiritual longing. The ning, voluptuary Ivy, Bayliss wants to regulate the plea­ American moral horizon turned against itself and destroyed sures of drink (he supports Prohibition), song, and learn­ the conditions under which art can redeem and elevate ing. Following the Progressives, Cather sees Christian American society. public opinion stifling life, love, and learning (although she does not align it with property rights, which are secure CATHER'S TURN FROM LIBERAL EDUCATION: THE without religious support). DESTRUCTION OF THE WEST In Cather's attempt to take Christianity seriously (i.e., apart from bourgeois life), her deepest reservations about The bourgeois, commercial world splits irrevocably Christianity come forth. Claude's devout mother, Evange­ fromthe artistic life in One of Ours, and the consequences line (literally: preacher) Wheeler, tries to bring Claude into of the split are immense. Bourgeois life and art suffer­ the fold. She thinks "the trouble with her son [is] that he had artists lose the horizon of civilized opportunity that sus­ not yet foundhis Savior" (86). Like Claude, Evangeline is tained great achievements, whereas the bourgeois lose the old-fashioned, but her sentimentalism is grounded in sim­ sensibilities that make life worth living. All that seems left ple-minded Christian faith that shies from confronting the is artistic alienation as expressed in juvenile criticisms of world; she is praying and "always hoping to hear that petty bourgeois life. Claude Wheeler, 12 the hero of One of [Claude] at last felt the need of coming closer to the Ours, is definedby a restless dissatisfactionwith life on the church." Although Claude initially thought much about reli­ settled prairie. Outlets forambition closed with the settling gion, "there was something stubborn in him that would not of the West. 13 This closing shattered the American moral let him avail himself of the pardon offered." He felt con­ horizon that sheltered, nourished, and ennobled life for demned, "but he did not want to renounce the world he as generations. Claude and his ambitious friends "lament that yet knew nothing of'; he wanted to enter life "with all his the book of History was finished" (208), that all the great vigour, with all his faculties free"( 42-44 ). The school that deeds have been done, that the death of heroism brings Claude attends at the behest of Bayliss and his mother, Tem­ with it a debilitating narrowing of human horizons. Most ple College, breeds contempt for Christianity in Claude. people are oblivious to this dreary reality, preferringto dis­ Claude dismissed "all Christian theology as something too tract themselves with trinkets and busy-bodying rather than full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned about. The thinking about the death in lifethat was America. Claude's men who made it, he felt sure, were like the men who taught younger brother Ralph, for instance, fills the Wheeler it ... 'Faith,' as he saw it exemplified in the faculty at the house with inventions, which he justifies as labor-saving Temple school, was a substitute formo st of the manly qual­ devices, but which really are his source for meaning and ities he admired" (44). Foremost among these manly quali­ pride. Cather and Claude doubt technology's value as a ties was the willingness to tempt death for a great idea­ saver of labor. Their deepest worry, however, is that tech­ Claude is fascinated by martyrdom. 14 The hapless Brother nological society seeks to bring nature under human con- Weldon, who relies on platitudes and loves being pampered & ...... , ...... 11...... :,VII.r. v1•11.•'-'u.• v""''""'"""'""' by friendly old ladies, typifiesthe comfortable Christianity longs for something great to which he can dedicate his life. around Claude. The life of Christian charity tames restlessness with other­ This attraction to self-sacrifice and charity brings worldly aspirations; this life Claude regards as an "unman­ Claude to Enid Royce. Enid nurses Claude back to health ly" denial of life altogether. He is disenchanted with the fter he suffers a farm accident. Her beautiful, ethereal, horizontal, bourgeois world, and he stops thinking about the dignified appearance-a refractionof her soul-"made one vertical, elevated, religious world (331). think of something 'early Christian"' (i.e., prebourgeois Artistic greatness and liberal learning had mediated such Christianity) (104). It seems Enid's faith attracts Claude to tensions in the earlier novels, but One of Ours depicts a cri­ her. Faith, the "natural fragrance" of her mind, lifted her sis in mere liberal learning. Claude matriculates at state above the "prosaic and commonplace" world of males college in European history and, like Jim Burden in My ( 107). Never seeking marriage with Claude, she wants to Antonia, his eyes are opened to something "vital, which dedicate her life to missionary work in China, bringing had to do with events and ideas" (32). He falls in with an light to those living in darkness. Her shunning of the bour­ educated, happy, poor German family headed by Augusta geois order makes her all the more irresistible to Claude. Erlich (her name means highest, truthful).Claude sees new Claude pursues her as the "one who would put him right life-"interesting and attractive" conversations, charged with the world and make him fit into the life about him," with "generous enthusiasms and ennobled by romantic although she is as much an outsider as he (122). After first friendships" (69-70). As in Cather's early novels, the aes­ declining Claude's proposal, she seeks advice from Broth­ thetic tradition needed to sustain such vitality comes from er Wheeler, who advises her to marry Claude and bring him European immigrants who bring with them values that to the Church. Out of Christian duty, she abandons her mis­ make human endeavor meaningful; unlike the early novels, sionary calling for a marriage to Claude, although her One of Ours acknowledges no role for Christianity in the attempts at converting Claude resemble wifely nagging horizon the Erlichs bring to America. Claude is attracted to more than Christian evangelizing. the Erlichs' (selective) backwardness: he too is a back­ Enid shuns earthly delights, and hence she embodies the ward-looking traditionalist opposed to the progressive spir­ shunning of the natural. She does not eat meat, imbibe, or it of his family.17 consummate her marriage with Claude. So opposed to carnal After Claude shows great promise at the university, his desires is Enid that she introduces an experimental means of father's bourgeois ambitions put an end to his education fertilizingchickens that does not require sexual reproduction. (56). Claude must return to the farm. We last see the Erlichs When told that her sister, already in China, is ill, she does not buying a warehousing business-and there is some indica­ hesitate to abandon Claude with the hope of nursing her sis­ tion their heartiness will be drained by the demands of busi­ ter back to health. Her escape shows that Enid neither fath­ ness (75). However this may be, those interested in artistic oms nor desires to fathom human relationships; she is with­ greatness or liberal education are, in the world of One of out eros, "selfish whims" (144), or "ardour" (172). Enid Ours, unsuccessful outsiders, inefficient dreamers, and denies the place of nature, self, deep relationships, and aes­ shunned by polite society ( 129). Cather came to understand thetic refinementto bring the Gospel to the world.15 This por­ that art, aligned with liberal learning, could not withstand trait of lifeless self-abnegation and inhuman asceticism is the subtle power and temptation of bourgeois materialism Cather's most serious critique of Christian caritas as shaped as it controlled public opinion. Art ennobles common life by American pietism.16 Enid's faith compounds Claude's only by latching onto that which is noble in common life or problem. He longs to serve "something splendid about life" by assimilating itself into a larger universe of meaning, but (46), but Enid's Christianity denies that merely human life is there is no such thing in Cather's New West. As Neil noted splendid; Claude's restlessness (e.g., 17, 24, 25) shows that on the demise of Captain Forresterin A Lost lady, the New he is not at home in the world, but he longs to be; Christian­ West's ugly Americans co-opt their more generous enemies ity teaches that people cannot be at home in the world. Chris­ or prevent them fromarising altogether. tianity in the New West of One ofOurs is an abstraction from Cather suggests that perhaps truly romantic love might daily life that doesnot show how faithgrows out of daily con­ fill the void in Claude's soul through her portrayal of his cerns (although this abstraction is part of Claude's attraction relationship with Gladys, his well-wisher and soul mate. to Enid). Enid's Protestantism proves uninterested in showing Gladys's openness to Bayliss's courting embitters Claude, how God's footprintscover the land as she seems busy trying however. Claude and Gladys are reconciled only after to transformthe world; Brother Wheeler's comfortableChris­ Claude is married and about to leave for war, and she tianity fails to distinguish between American and Christian swears offBayliss and marriage in general. Cather depicts concerns. Both see Christianity as a means of making man an impoverished, materialistic rural world not dissimilar to moral; neither sees Christianity as growing out of deeper that in Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Cather tempts readers human concerns and longings. Just as important, the mar­ to think that Claude might have been contented if he had riage shows that Claude's longing formeaning leads him into married the stylish Gladys instead of the ascetic Enid. Her serious error, as nearly all of his family, friends, and even his other works, Lucy Gayheartespecially, show that romantic fianceeunderstand. This is not Claude's last misjudgment. love produces debilitating personal dependence and tragic Claude facesa world that has been split in two. The bour­ disappointment. geois life channels his restlessness toward this-worldly Cather's portrayal of Claude's war experience, in the last comforts; such a life cannot satisfy one such as Claude, who book of One of Ours, is the only time her completed novels ,, 111�'-'I -VVl1 'fVIUlll1", ..IV1 1,UlllV\.,L I .J.J leave the New World for the Old. As the relationship that makes the lady's distinction between feeling and made between Europe and America is a central concern of hers, things ring hollow. Although Cather identifies and sympa­ this section is especially significant. Early in the book, the thizes with those repairing the ruins, the war seems to have French appear well-mannered, courteous, patriotic, spirited, shattered the beautiful canopy irretrievably. nd emotional, whereas the Americans are vulgar utilitari­ This paradox manifests itself when we compare the vil­ ans without reverence or respect. But many doughboys love lagers' hopeful (yet pitiful) reconstruction of ruins and their new European home, and they shun America, where David Gerhardt's dejected reaction to the war. David there is, in one character's words, a "conspiracy of Church embodies Claude's image of human greatness (279, 332). and State to keep you down" (267). One soldier, a blessed Before the war, David moved to Paris to study violin under one in Claude's eyes, has been so wounded that he has for­ a master, but he believes that the world into which his vio­ gotten his life before he arrived in France (271-73). Cot­ lin took him has been smashed to pieces with his violin tonwood groves and Gothic architecture provide a life-lend­ (329). When Claude objects to David's fatalism about the ing shadow and express the European disdain for utility. postwar world, David believes that the war killed the con­ As the soldiers go deeper into France, Cather forces ventions that sustained artistic desire; David has seen "'so "' readers to raise a question that the Francophile Claude will many beautiful old things smashed (286; also 328, 330). not: How could the Great War come to such a civilized peo­ His fellow students-and their teachers-were killed at the ple? This question is acute in light of the war's terrible war's onset. Mass warfare appears to accelerate the corro­ human cost. After Claude's first engagement he travels to sion of the enduring backdrop afoot in modern society. Headquarters and meets an orphan from a "Pal Battalion" Does Cather embrace the romantic reconstruction repre­ on the way. A Pal Battalion is a group of classmates from sented by the French village or the tragic vision embodied school who formed a battalion to fight for king and coun­ by David? try. Ordered to take an enemy trench, a thousand school­ Commentators often resolve this paradox by seeing a boys, the survivor relates, were slaughtered by the Huns' hopeful, Francophile Cather.18 Claude, on this reading, guns, leaving only seventeen to fight again. There is, embodies Cather's thinking about the persistence of a Cather understates in narration, "something very unpleas­ French high culture. This reading, in my view, overlooks the ant about the idea of a thousand fresh-faced school boys 800-pound gorilla-the Great War. As much as Cather being" slaughtered without effect (304). Claude and his sometimes presents France and its culture as an alternative companion never want to hear about Pal Battalions again. to American bourgeois order, its physical ruin brought on This exchange happens just before the most decisive scene by its war calls into question that culture's health. Further, of the book for understanding Cather's assessment of the novel shows that the war destroys European high culture France and Western civilization: Claude's visit to Mlle. while raising the question of whether that culture was Olive de Councy. healthy at the war's onset. Presumably the war was attrac­ The encounter is Claude's immersion in French life and tive in Europe for the reasons that it was attractive to Amer­ leads Claude to confront his longing for European cultural ican boys. Spiritual longings and restlessness found no wholeness. Claude is first impressed by the village's steady expression in religious belief and insufficient satis­ decay-he stands in an ancient ruin able only to imagine faction in liberal education, the very possibility of which the grandeur of the dead culture. The village of eighteen was called into question in post-Nietzschean Europe. Youth thousand has been reduced to four hundred. As Claude greeted calls to national sacrifice with relief and enthusiasm kicks about the ruins, he meets a one-armed former soldier because the coming bourgeois order was devoid of higher busy trying to repair them so that the villagers can enjoy meaning. Without a community of meaning in peacetime, the comforts of life again. Mlle. de Councy serves Claude soldiers and society at large embraced a regimented com­ lunch and tea among the rearrangedruins too. Claude steps munity in the trenches (304 ff.).19 It was not only the Ger­ with a light foot among the junk, worried that among the man army that was an "unprecedented power of destruction ruins he was "imperiling something fragile." This scene is ... loose in the world," destroying "ancient" seats of learn­ paradoxical. On one hand, the spirited love of home pre­ ing in impersonal, methodical, novel ways (137-38).20 sented bespeaks a noble instinctive patriotism. The thought Bayliss's forward-looking bourgeois spirit is linked to war­ that French national spirit could be untouched by the Great fare against the human spirit, breaking the "background that War is a beautiful thought, as expressed by Mlle. de Coun­ held together'' and lent meaning to "individual existence." cy at lunch with Claude. The war, she relates, has taught The war awakens men to focus and feeling. Claude used to her that "the made things matter" but little; "only the feel­ lament that "the world had come to avaricious old age and ing matters" (311-12). Claude feels that he has been noble enterprise was dead forever" (208), but he laments it searching his whole life for this sentiment; its hearing no longer. transforms him somehow. On the other hand, Claude's Just as Protestantism is an abstraction for Enid, the war worry about "imperiling something fragile" among the brings "the purity of an abstract idea" to Claude (142). Their ruins forgets the war, which ruined the town in the first common focuson abstract ideals and their mutual rejection of place. As Claude leaves, he observes that this lady of twen­ the here and now united them in marriage; theirservice to dif­ ty-four years appears over forty and that the town will ferent ideals-one otherworldly, the other political or com­ never be the same. This village had its own "Pal Battalion" munal-led to opposite sides of the world. Each illustrates of a sort; it seems few male villagers will return-a point the problem of a world wherein the life-lending cultural I "-l�'lt,J\,,\,,l,.lY\,,,'l VII I Vllll\,,(.11 �\,,l\,,II\,,\,, canopy is disintegrated. They never see other people as other CATHER'S TURN: RELIGION AND A SENSE OF people, nor are they educated toward a sustainable, humane PLACE conception of the good life. Cather's critique of Enid seems obvious; her critique of Claude's abstraction is equally impor­ These questions cannot be radically answered (or cannot ant but not often observed. Claude's view of the war is not a be answered without a form of political radicalism). The solution as much as it is another awful misjudgment. If the New West causes people to forget about beauty and the civilization Claude left is sick, there is also a sickness in the human good in the ebb and flow of restless lives. People war's remedying the bourgeois sickness. The war exposes nevertheless feel the import of what is permanent about the incoherence in Claude's way of finding meaning. Soldiers human condition: "birth, love, maternity, and death cannot died for an idea whose time was already past. A conversation be changed." The naturalness of domestic concerns sug­ between Claude and David Gerhardt illustrates the povertyin gests, in Cather's late novels, man's need for God. "Art and Claude's view. Claude "never knew there was anything worth religion express the same things in us,-that hunger for living for, till this war came on." David dryly replies, '"You'll beauty that we, of all animals, have," but art that is not admit it's a costly way of providing adventure for the aligned with religious expression will not satisfy.23 The young."' Claude answers, meekly, '"Maybe so; all the same New West of One of Ours and A Lost Lady dismisses what ... "' (338-39). The war taught Claude that "there were a Americans regard as cramping conventions that could point great many people left who cared about something" different to the beautiful, noble, and good. Absent healthy civic con­ from Bayliss and that "men could still die for an idea; and ventions, only natural desires and experiences point people would burn all they had made to keep their dream." The war to the greatest questions; few heed the call when conven­ proved to Claude that "the future of the world was safe. The tions are hostile.24 Cather wakes people from technological careful planners would never be able to put it into a strait­ distraction by drawing on natural resources, especially jacket,-cunningand prudence would never have it to them­ death, that force people to confront ultimate questions, selves" (338-39). Claude praises camaraderieculminating in while exposing our impoverished conventions for dealing heroic sacrifice, but his understanding of that sacrifice rests with them. on the morally unsustainable view that war and martial Cather's late novels fall into two categories, depending virtues are ends in themselves rather than means to higher on the setting. Novels set in the modern world reach a res­ ends of peace, leisure, virtue, or piety. Confronting a world olution only when protagonists address ultimate questions without excitement and purpose, Claude embraces a mere within an explicitly Catholic framework, whereas the other means (and a bloody one at that) to give his life meaning. novels are set in quasi-feudal times in which the reader is Such is the desolation of the moral landscape in One of Ours afforded a glimpse of what Cather deems to be a healthy that this sacrifice is not entirely dissatisfying. cultural canopy provided by the Church. As the novel ends, Claude and David die warding offa The split Cather diagnoses in the modern world frames German counter-attack. Cather suggests that Claude was the tragic Professor's House (1925). That novel's protago­ better offdead. On his return, Claude would have feltalien­ nist (Godfrey St. Peter) is saved from death by his devout ated as he came from a lifeof intense focusand noble self­ maid (Augusta), but he will not accept the religious educa­ sacrificeto the loose, directionless, bourgeois world. Cather tion she has given him at the novel's denouement.25 My writes as follows: Mortal Enemy (1926) is the late novel set in modern times in which a Catholic resolution to the world's split is explic­ One by one the heroes of that war ... leave prematurely from itly canvassed.26 Cather mediates this story through Nellie the world they have come back to. Airmen whose deeds were Birdseye, a simple narrator who comes to understand the tales of wonder, officers whose names made the blood of significance of the Church for the novel's heroine. Myra, youth beat faster, survivors of incredible dangers,-one by one they quietly die by their own hand. Some do it in obscure the heroine, is raised by her Catholic and public-spirited lodging houses, some in their office. where they seemed to uncle. As she nears the age of marriage, she is taken with be carrying on business like other men ... When Claude's the romantic ideal of marrying against her uncle's wishes mother hears of these things, she shudders and presses her and falls for Oswald Henshawe, a free thinker. Myra's hands tight over her breast, as if she had him there. She feels uncle threatens her with disinheritance if she leaves the as if God had saved him from some horrible suffering, some horrible end. (370)21 faith; this adds thrill and romance to her forbidden love. She marries Oswald, and Uncle Driscoll leaves his fortune Better an honorable death than a bourgeois life. Western to a local convent. civilization willed its own destruction out of a sense of self­ Although the romanticism of their marriage suggests loathing and spiritual penury.22 There is little in One of Ours bliss, they are not "happier than other people" (14). They to resist the conclusion that the West was correct in willing move to New York's Madison Square, where their social cir­ its own death. cles resemble Madison Square's (and the modern world's) Art cannot ex nihilo build backgrounds from which the double personality: one circle is American and commercial, shadows of individual existence achieve meaning. Art res­ the other European high society and artistic. Myra's soul is onates only in certainconditions. America was hostile to it, split too. For every evening party, gorgeous play, and beau­ and civilization's ghosts populated the European wasteland tiful poem, there is a trail of tears, broken friendships, and too. Can this decadence be averted? Is Claude's fate also lost love. She tries to relive the thrill of her betrothal by ours (he is "one of ours," after all)? playing matchmaker, although she is convinced that it is '' IIIL\,,l .&..\JV I• l'VIUIII\,, .JV, I 'IUIIIU\,,I I .,., "very likely hell will come of it" (26). She scorns unforgiv­ story" or sees "a common feeling exalted into beauty by able ex-friends (36-37). Her admired marriage is compli­ imagination, generosity, and the flaming courage of cated by her husband's infidelity. She is light, easy, and youth," she remembers Myra's severe judgment: '"Why smiling, but equally angry, sarcastic, severe, and remote. must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy!"' (85). er civil marriage leaves her spiritually guilt-ridden and Romantic longing and merely artistic expression of the impoverished as she traded God and the Church for common are mortal enemies to the life-giving canopy con­ romance and art. stituted by religious opinion. When, ten years later, Oswald's career crashes and Myra Although art points to the beautiful and noble, its mean­ takes ill, the couple lose their former "friends" who had ing derives from its connection either to this world or the embraced them because Oswald was able to finance Myra's next; and what Cather's art connects itself to makes all the favoredartists. Her fallfrom this height exposes a deep hole difference.27 Consciousness of her impending death impels in her soul that she longs to fill. Oswald and Myra move to Myra to confront her discontent. Her return to the Church the slums. After being reunited with Nellie, Myra picnics depends on her firsthaving had a home in the Church, or on with her near an oceanside cliff that reminds Myra of the prior existence of a canopy wherein her seeking finds "Gloucester's cliff' in King Lear (60). After this picnic, a meaning. As Cather establishes the importance of religious rapidly declining Myra takes comfort in Heine's poetry and culture to human thriving, her artistic attention turns away other works of art. Heine's poem mentions a flower grow­ from the theme of how well-educated artists fit into the ing on the grave of a suicide, die Armesunderblum (the world and toward works of art depicting common life illu­ poor-sinner's flower), which Myra feels is her flower (66). minated by Christian faith. Cather comes to equate artists These incidents conjure powerful emotions culminating in divorced from the divine with alienation, so her own art is her return to the Church. henceforth less directly concerned with artists. For histori­ Father Fay, Myra's confessor, wonders whether "some of cal and theoretical reasons, Cather must draw a picture of the saints of the early Church weren't a good deal like her. what a healthy political community is, and for this she She's not at all modern in her make-up" (76). Her pre­ turns, strangely, perhaps, to the neofeudalism of colonial modernity refers to her seeing deeper significance in ordi­ Quebec (Shadows on the Rock) and the founding of the nary things: candles, forinstance, do not just give light; they Church in the American Southwest (Death Comes for the are "in themselves religious" (76-77). In this same spirit, Archbishop). Feudal society provides a unique artistic she interprets her restlessness as a desire for transcendence: opportunity because, under feudalism, religious conven­ "Religion is different from everything else; because in reli- tions vivify the natural. ion seeking is finding"' (77). Her formulation of religious Shadows on the Rock concerns, as Susan Rosowski argues, desire resembles biblical passages, the most famous of the "modernthemes of alienation, loss, despair, and annihila­ which is fromChrist's Sermon on the Mount: "Seek and ye tion."28 These themes are developed in the breach mostly, in shall find" (Matthew 7:7). Christ's formulation suggests that Cather depicts a society whose protective, traditional that seeking culminates in finding; the two activities are dis­ mist of meaning furnishes ready-made opinions with which tinct. Myra seems to collapse seeking and finding, with the to interpret life's most pressing questions. Just as the theme implication that desire is not different from the fulfillment of Shadows is modern anomie, so also is the theme perpetu­ of the desire. It is fashionableto see Myra's turnin this light ation-perpetuating familial traditions after a mother's death; and, therefore, to doubt the plausibility of her return to the transferring Old French and Catholic traditions to the New Church at the novel's end. Instead, her seeking-spurredby World; and perpetuating a life of faith from generation to her impending death and her deathly marriage-proceeds generation within the New France. France's feudalism was fromher renewed sense of her need for God and grace. Her cruel and unjust (26),29 but the novel holds out hope that the departure from the Church increased her own sense of this community of New France can purifythe life-giving conven­ need. This seeking leads to a terrible judgment on her hus­ tions of feudalism while transferring them to the New World band, whom she now considers her "mortal enemy" forhav­ (75). When "an adventurer carries gods with him into a ing taken her from the Church. This judgment on her dedi­ remote and savage country, the colony he founds will, from cated Oswald and her dismissal of Nellie dramatize her the beginning, have graces, traditions, riches of the mind and willingness to deny the world in the same manner as Enid, spirit. Its history will shine with bright incidents, slight per­ although Myra's severity appears less inhumane given her haps, but precious, as in life itself' (78). A purified Catholi­ spiritual struggle. After dismissing her friends, Myra's cism is the aim of the novel's devout culture, but that culture Negro cabman drives her to an oceanside cliff, where she is problematically compromised in the beautiful marriage dies while grasping an ebony crucifix as she watches the between Pierre Charron (who combined the "good manners sunrise over the sea. of the Old World" and "the dash and daring of the New" After Myra's death, Oswald instructs Nellie to forget the (139]) and Cecile Auclair, the devout daughter of a back­ Myra of the later years and embrace the memory of the ward-looking apothecary, near the novel's end. Madison Square Myra. He gives Nellie Myra's string of The first two books especially show that Quebec's air is amethysts as a token. However, Nellie finds the secular enchanted. Cathedrals tower over the city, and the jewelry "unlucky" and "chilly," an indication that she has Church's mores, rituals, and liturgical style insinuate been better instructed by taking into account Myra's whole themselves into the daily lives of the Quebecois. Catholic life. Whenever Nellie watches the "beginning of a love dogma constitutes New France's public opinion. Charac- l '-'l.>tJ\,,\,,UY...,,'J VII I Vll\l\,,UI ._,\.lt...11\.\,, ters are concerned with sin, death, confession, divine a French linguist and aristocrat who had served the Hurons vengeance, miracles, ritual, and relics. Cather describes despite his humiliating inability to learn their language and this life-giving horizon as follows: his contempt for their savage ways. Tempted to return to France and shun the savages, Chabanel instead vowed to [The Quebecois] were still in their accustomed place in the serve them until his death-a sacrificeennobled by the fact world of the mind (which for each of us is the only world). and they had the same well-ordered universe about them: that Chabanel had sacrificed so much. Bred to a university this all-important earth, created by God for the great pur­ position, Father Hector likewise foregoesthe tempting com­ pose. the sun which He made to light it by day. the moon forts of firesideand book to serve the Church in the wilder­ which He made to light it by night,-and the stars, made to ness ( 120-24). Here, Cather plants a seed of doubt through beautify the vault of heaven like frescoes. and to be a clock the imagination of Auclair, "the philosopher apothecary of and compass for man. And in this safe. lovingly arranged �nd ordered universe (not too vast, though nobly spacious), Quebec" (3), who wonders "whether there had not been a in this congenial universe, the drama of man went on at Que­ good deal of misplaced heroism in the Canadian mis­ bec just as at home ... There was sin. of course. and there sions,-a waste of rare qualities which did nobody any was punishment after death; but there was always hope. even good." After conjuring this problem, he allows himself to for the most depraved. (78) sleep by thinking that his question was akin to that of the Within the drama of eternity, everyday sufferings-early disciples who chastised Mary for applying precious oint­ death, injuries due to accidents, handicaps, sickness, and ment on Christ (125). Here, the cultural canopy serves life hunger-have meaning. Cather does not hide the techno­ by foreclosing skepticism. logical backwardness and material deprivation of this new The most memorable tale, however, concerns the world­ feudalism. Deprivation serves a pedagogical purpose by denying piety of Jeanne Le Ber, a piety akin to Enid's and enhancing the enjoyment of the rare and by quietly helping Myra's. Affectionateand gentle from her infancyand beau­ one to orient one's desires toward salvation (I I 9-120). Suf­ tiful in girlhood, Jeanne becomes a recluse without com­ fering is the school of compassion for the devout ( 130). munication with her family or her appointed lover. Her This portrait of communal lifecontains little action or plot, reclusion causes her father to despair and her mother to die as the novel is designed to display an assimilative moral with a heavy heart. So world-denying is she that, asked to horizon. Alienation, psychological turmoil, and disappoint­ emerge fromher cell to kiss her dying mother, she keeps the door locked but infonnsher mother that she is "'praying for ed ambition, such as Claude's in One of Ours, are seen through the lens of temptation, human imperfection, and her, night and day"' ( 108). Offered rich foods, she instead God's mercy. fasts.Cather's portrait of this almost inhumane self-abnega­ Individual lives pass through the French-Canadian cul­ tion shows that this life has its rewards-angels visit the ture, which in turn passes through the individuals; this recluse. Her life serves as a beacon to the devout and as an healthy codependency is the hallmark of a world not split in image of a life totally given to God ( 110-11 ). two. Lifewithin this horizon is fulfilling,passionate, intense, These stories-and others frombook 3, "The Long Win­ and charitable. The colonial governor purchases new shoes ter"-highlight Quebec's air as a problematic solution to for Jacques, the bastard son of a prostitute, while the com­ the world's contradictions. To broaden the comparison with munity takes a genuine concern for his body and soul. The One of Ours, the "trenches" are replaced by a beautiful, not "stubborn, high-handed, tyrannical, quarrelsome" Bishop unproblematic devotion in Cather's Quebec. Devotion can Laval rules over his charge like a shepherd over sheep by lead to inhumane excesses and credulity, though it makes calling parishioners to daily prayers and by setting an exam­ life happier, more sociable, and more dignified. Quebec's ple of pious self-abnegation and charity (60). The chief char­ community of devotion is more sustainable, less deadly, and acters of Shadows-Auclair and Cecile-follow the bish­ more philosophically defensiblethan the community of dis­ op's example. The Auclair family surrounds itself with the cipline in the trenches. Quebec serves high ideals, encour­ gentilities and relics that lend stability and peace to their ages mutual service and love, and provides a better canvas lives. Outside of Quebec and its Church lies a terrifyingNew for beauty. Cather puts forth in Shadows the prerequisites World without Old World manners, education, stability, and for a life-lending communal canopy: the conventions of beauty. We get a glimpse of this world when Cecile leaves Catholicism; a measure of political and religious hierarchy; Quebec for the first time to visit the Harnois, a rough fami­ social consensus enforced through public opinion; the abil­ ly living in a relatively untamed part of Canada ( 153-60). ity and desire to rest, contemplate, and meditate; and a will­ Their lack of manners and fineryupsets Cecile such that she ingness to distinguish the high from the low. cuts her three-day visit short. After leaving the kind, untu­ From the perspective of skeptical philosophy-a per­ tored Harnois,she realizes that the Church and the mores she spective that Cather quietly introducesinto the book-Que­ causes make "a climate within a climate" and made "the bec's air appears preposterously devout and individual sac­ days,-the complexion, the special flavour, the special hap­ rificing serves no purpose. Enter Pierre Charron, whose piness of each day as it is passed" ( 160). name adorns book four. Pierre Charron is named for a six­ As the novel proceeds, Cather draws images of people teenth-century French skeptic and companion of Michel de drinking meaning fromthe mist enveloping Quebec. Father Montaigne. In fact, according to legend, Montaigne died in Hector, for instance, relates the story of how he took a vow Charron'sarms and bestowed on Charronthe familycoat of of perpetual stability to serve as a missionary among the arms.30 A restless and adventurous furtrader, Cather's Char­ Hurons. He begins by relating the story of Noel Chabanel, ron holds old ideas of clan loyalty and friendship. His atti- ff 111\.\,,,I ""'VV I' 't'VIUIII\,,, .JV• 1 'UIIIV"'-'l I tude toward religion proceeds from his clannishness, not reverence for the loyalty, spiritedness, and depth of passion fromdevotion. "For him, familywa s the firstand finalthing characteristic of feudal society. in the human lot; and it was so engrafted with religion that World War I was caused by, and accelerated, the destruc­ he could only say ... 'Religion forthe fireside, freedom for tion of the community of shared meaning necessary to enno­ he woods"' (141). He embraces civil religion while he ble bourgeois life. Cather believes liberal education cannot claims that he could do without any religious authority. provide the essential shared meaning because its efficacy Cather also shows that this feudal world is disintegrating depends on a larger cultural canopy that orders and gives as the novel ends. The book ends with the death of the meaning. Hers is a communitarian-aristocratic critique of King's appointed governorof colonial France, Count Fron­ democratic capitalism, emphasizing capitalism's destruc­ tenac. The count was a man of the Old World, in that, like tiveness of the conditions of human happiness and the par­ Myra, he believed in things unseen. From childhood, the tiality of its claim to justice. In response to the triumph of count had known of something "in himself and in other men democratic capitalism, her art satisfies and spurs the long­ that this world did not explain. Even the Indians had to ings for greatness and for community, even as it shows that make a storyto account for something in their lives that did these longings cannot be easily satisfied in modem society. not come out of their appetites: conceptions of courage, Her political science, as developed in Shadows, charts the duty, honour . . . These ideas came from some unknown conditions under which communities of depth and feeling source, and they were not the least part of life" (200--1). For can exist. Satisfying desires for greatness and community the count, the Church explained these matters. This kind of presupposes the existence of strong, pervasive religious con­ submission in spiritual matters, already weakening in polit­ viction; a measure of deference to political and religious ical matters, is also a hallmark of the dying old order. As a authority; and a willingness to recognize and laud noble returning bishop relates, "'at home the old age is dying, but behavior and punish and censure ignoble behavior. Unlike the new is still hidden ... The changes in the nations are all today's squishy communitarianism, hers is a communitari­ those of the old growing older"' (227-28). anism with teeth. Theproblem, for Cather, is that the condi­ The new order emerging is represented by the civil Char­ tions of community and human greatness are undermined by ron. Without the authority of parchment and seal and with­ science's chilly arrogance, which distracts people from that out the stamp from the throne, Charron has the authority something inside them that escapes scientific control and that comes "fromknowledge of the country and its people; which levels traditions that sustain life. Science, for Cather, fromknowledge, and from a kind of passion. His daring and appears at the crest of a larger cultural wave, one that shakes his pride seemed to [Cecile] even more splendid than Count authority and fosters religious skepticism. Frontenac's" (217). Charron's marriageto Cecile represents This being said, Cather unalterably opposed Fascist or the melding of civil religion and genuine devotion, which, Communist attempts to reinstitute "face-to-face" societies for Cather, marks a kind of improvement and a kind of in modern times (as her letters from the 1930s show).32 decline. It is improvement because it serves more people in Tempted by feudalism, Cather does not succumb.33 Her justice and might moderate the excesses in Quebec's devo­ unwillingness to advocate a radical return to the past tional culture. It is decline, however, because it represents bespeaks her moderation. Much Protestantism was imbued the fracturing of the feudal cultural canopy and moves civ­ with democratic morality, but not with beauty or love. ilization toward its bourgeois future. Charting Cather's Catholicism, in contrast to the cold speculations of Protes­ declinist thesis in her works, it is but a small move from tantism, vivifieshuman sensibilities by adapting itself to the Charron'sadventurousness to Captain Forrester'shonorable senses, enjoining religious observances, and providing a building in A lost lady, which devolves into the bourgeois coherent reference for the apparently chaotic world. world of Ivy Peters and Bayliss Wheeler. This is the tragic Although not Catholic, Cather finds it necessary to dissolution of a world split in two for Cather. approach the divine through the beautiful conventions of Catholicism-forit is the love of the beautifulthat prepares the heart fora goodlife. Cather's beautiful novels cultivate CONCLUSION: TRAGEDY AND PERSPECTIVE this love of beauty through a clear-eyed nostalgia imbued Cather's solemnity, as reflected in her sympathetic treat­ with an understanding of the human good. ment of feudalQuebec, bespeaks her assessment of the pos­ sibility of ennobling life in a "world split" between bour­ geois decadence and grand culture. She edifies those NOTES inclined to revere "yesterday's seven thousand years," and I. Only Shadows on the Rock (New York: Vintage, 1995; set in colonial she makes the past beautiful and young to encourage nos­ Quebec) and One of Ours (New York: Vintage, 1995; set in France during 31 World War I in the latter part of the book) are exceptions to this rule. talgic backward looking. Unlike Evelyn Waugh (Cather's 2. Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (New York: Vintage, 1951), 89-90. contemporary), who often made sport of rootless, superfi­ 3. Cather, .. Preface," Not Under Forty(Lincoln: University of Nebraska cial modern souls, Cather treats the loss of faith as a Press, [1933] 1968), v (emphasis added). 4. As Cather asks how the change in Westerncivilization "came about," tragedy, a loss of inestimable value. She does not invoke the she takes Arnold. among others, 10 be a representative of the old order debunking corrosive of postmodern psychology to unsettle overthrown and devalued. See "148 Charles Street," in Not Under Forty, complacent characters. The mood she creates is closer to 74. 5. Cather, One of Ours. 328. See also Shadows 011 the Rock, 50, 7S-79, tragedy than comedy; she writes with pity rather than scorn, and 83-84. sympathy rather than ridicule. Cather cultivates a sense of 6. New York TimesBook Review, 21 December 1924, 11. cols. 1-5. JO l \.,l."tt,J\..\,UV\.,."t VII I VIILl\,,UI �\,,l\.,11\,,\.,

7. James Seaton, "On Politics and Literature: The Case of O Pioneers!" intellectuals-such as Emile Durkheim. Max Weber. George Simmel, Igor Perspectives in Political Science 28 (Summer 1999): 144. Stravinsky, and countless others-greeted the war as a chance to shake the 8. Cather, The Song of the Lark (New York: Signet, 1991), 263. See souls of people, to prepare people for spiritual things, to relieve the bore­ Christine Dunn Henderson, "Singing an American Song: Tocquevillian dom of modern mechanized civilization, and to restore a sense of human Reflections on Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark," in Seers and J11dges, solidarity. d. Christine Dunn Henderson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 20. As if to emphasize that adversaries in the Great War share a common 3-86. culture, Cather places works of German poetry repeatedly on the coffee 9. Jim continues: "The life that went on in [the town] seemed to me made tables of the dedicated Frenchmen. up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and 21. This is also Godfrey St. Peter's judgment about the death of his prize cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip ... People's speech, their student in the Great War in The Professor's Ho11se (New York: Vintage, voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual 1953), 236-37: "Had he lived, [he) must have been put to other uses. His taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in fellow scientists, his wife, the town and State, would have required many those houses, I thought, tried to live like mice in their own kitchens; to make duties of him. He would have had to write thousands of useless letters, no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark." frame thousands of false excuses ... He had escaped all I hat.He had made Cather, My A111011ia (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 164. something new in the world-and. the rewards, the meaningless conven­ 10. MyAntonia, 193,195,197. tional gestures, he had left to others." 11. This despite the fact that Neil Herbert could build the contrast 22. Consider the comparison between Cather and Spengler's The Decline between Captain Forrester and Ivy Peters in part because he received a of the West as it is developed by Matthias Schubnell, 'The Decline of classical education fromhis uncle's Bohn classics, as Cather describes stir­ America: Willa Cather's SpenglerianVision in The Professor's Ho11se," in ringly in A lost Lady, 66-68. The pertinent point is that Neil proves more Cather S111dies, ed. Susan J. Rosowski (Lincoln: University of Nebraska ineffectual than Burden or Ottenburg in supporting the greatness in Amer­ Press,1993 ), vol. 2, 92-117. ican democratic life that has come to be dominated by Ivy. 23. Cather, "Nebra�ka Scored for its many Laws," in Willa Cather in Per­ 12. Claude's name bespeaks the two sides of the world's split-a mar­ son (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 148, 149. riage of French civilization (Claude) with American technological devel­ 24. Consider Tocqueville's Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey opment (Wheeler). C. Mansfield Jr. and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago 13. "The statue of Kit Carson on horseback, down in the Square, point­ Press, 2000), 463: "One must therefore not expect poetry in democratic ed Westward; but there was no West, in that sense, any more" (100). All peoples to live on legends, to be nourished by traditions and ancient mem­ references in this section are to One of O11rs. ories ... It lacks all these resources; but man remains, and he is enough for 14. Consider his discussion with Ernst Havel ( 46) and his I hes is on Joan it. Human destinies, man, taken apart from his time and his country and of Arc (53-55). placed before nature and God with his passions, his doubts. his unheard-of 15. Academic critics have been too harsh to Enid. E. K. Brown, in Willa prosperity, and his incomprehensible miseries, will become the principal Cather: A Critical Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 220, and almost unique object of poetry for these peoples." overstates when he calls Enid a ''loveless bigoted girl "; John H. Randall, in 25. Engeman, Tom, unpublished article (Department of Political Sci­ The Landscape and the Laoking Glass: Willa Cather's Search for Val11e ence, Loyola University). (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 165, also oversimplifies in comparing 26. Henceforth all citations are to My Mortal Enemy (New York: Vintage, Enid's "nay-saying" pietism to the "yea-saying religion" of Catholicism. 1990). Enid is neither loveless nor bigoted. Hers is a Christian love, caritas, as 27. Artists divorced from the divine are led to self-indulgence,exploita­ Claude realizes (172); her apparent bigotry (seen in her Prohibition activi­ tion, and ignominious death as in Cather's l11cy Gayheart (New York: Vin­ ty) is not like Bayliss's, which is motivated by spite. Enid's commitment to tage, 1995). rohibition is in keeping with her desire to ensure that people understand 28. Susan Rosowski, The Voyage Peri/011s: Willa Cather's Romamicism that their true home is not in this world. Her un-Christian inhumanity lies (Lincoln; University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 176. in placing these activities above her marriage vows, vows she undertook 29. All subsequent references are to Shadows on the Rock. against her inclinations in deference to the comfortable, cunning Brother 30. Richard Harris, "Willa Cather and Pierre Charron on Wisdom," in Weldon. Cather St11dies: Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections, ed. 16. Enid is a Protestant manifestation of the ascetic, anti-nature religious Robert Thackerand Michael A. Peterman, vol. 4, 67--69. spirit Cather depicts in Shadows on the Rock, in which Jeanne Le Ber, a 31. Not Under Forty, v. The novel unfinishedat the time of her death was beautiful young maiden, leaves her family and her noble suitor for a life of a sympathetic treatment of the Avignon Papacy. For a discussion of this reclusive, solitary piety in a convent. novel, see George N. Kates, ''Willa Cather's Unfinished Avignon Story,"in 17. Consider Claude's backwardness as seen in his love for the old grist Willa Cather: Collected Stories (New York: Vintage, 1992), 464-93. mill (102, 124). 32. Cather's will prohibits the publishing of her letters until 20 I 4, 18. Consider Brown, Willa Cather, 225; and Sally P. Harvey, Redefining although short synopses of her letters can be found in A Calendar of the the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather (Rutherford, NJ: Fair­ letters of Willa Cather, ed. Janis P. Stout (Lincoln: University of Nebras­ leigh Dickinson University, 1995), 68-69, ka Press, 2002). See the calendar for letters 1442, 1491, 1608, and espe­ 19. Cather was familiar with Henri Bergson, perhaps France's greatest cially 1496. thinker of this period. who saw in the war an opportunity to realize elans 33. Cather's close relationship and artistic kinship with Norwegian­ vitals and bring forth the moral regeneration of Europe. Roland N. Catholic novelist Sigrid Undset, Nobel Prize winner for her Kristen Stromberg, in Redemption by War: lntelleclllals and /9/4 (Lawrence. KS: Lavransdatter trilogy (Oslo, Norway: Aschehoog, 1920-1922), is impor­ Regent's, 1982), chronicles the enthusiasm with which most European tant in this connection.

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