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Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for

Fall 1984

Willa Cather Today

James E. Miller Jr. University of Chicago

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Miller, James E. Jr., "Willa Cather Today" (1984). Great Plains Quarterly. 1754. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1754

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. WILLA CATHER TODAY

JAMES E. MILLER, JR.

From 1947, the year Willa Cather died, until sidered feminist, another sociological, and the today, Cather studies have expanded from a third psychoanalytical. Nebraska cottage craft to an international in­ The first of these is Blanche H. Gelfant's dustry. During this time the number of publica­ "The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My tions about her life and work has become Antonia." This essay, which appeared in the formidable. Recently 1 made an assault on the journal American Literature in March 1971, ever taller mountain of Cather material, and may be seen in part as a product of its tumultu­ although 1 have not reached the peak, 1 have ous times. On the opening page, the author says spent considerable time slogging up some that she is going to "challenge Jim Burden's treacherous slopes. What 1 present here is a vision of the past" and adds, "I believe we have bundle of my own biases, selective in nature, reason to do so, particularly now, when we are without any pretense of comprehensiveness. making many reversals in our thinking."l With 1 would like first to take a brief look at three those times now behind us, and some of those works on Cather which, though they may at "reversals" not so firmly established, 1 wonder first glance appear to be striking out on new how well Gelfant's "totally new reading" holds paths, actually lead (in my view) to dead ends. up. They are perhaps a representative selection in The author begins by proposing to expose that one essay may, in a loose sense, be con- Jim Burden as a "disingenuous and self-deluded narrator" and adds, "Once we redefine his role, My Antonia begins to resonate to new and Professor of English at the University of Chi­ rather shocking meanings which implicate us cago, James E. Miller, Jr., is a leading contem­ porary authority on American literature. He has all. We may lose our chief affIrmative novel, published numerous books and articles on writ­ only to find one far more exciting-complex, ers including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, subtle, aberrant.,,2 This is the first of many of Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, the essay's misleading assertions: the author is J. D. Salinger, and willa Cather. not performing a salvaging of a novel through reinterpretation, as suggested, but rather at­ [GPQ4 (Falll984): 270-77.] tempts a savaging-a slash-and-burn operation

270 WILLA CATHER TODAY 271 that, if successful, would destroy Cather's My Professor's House, represent a "regressive pat­ Antonia and most of her other work. tern" signaling Willa Cather's "longing for The essay is long and its argument devious, death.,,7 but a few sentences should give us a sense of its If we may take this essay as a feminist read­ exotic polemical thrust. "Jim Burden belongs ing of My Antonia, it appears to be indicting to a remarkable gallery of characters for whom the book, and Willa Cather's work as a whole, Cather consistently invalidates sex .... Though as antifeminist. There is a virulence in the criti­ the tenor of her writing is normality, normal cal attack that is disproportionate to the as­ sex stands barred from her fictional world. Her sumed revelations of Willa Cather's psyche. A characters avoid sexual union with significant reader of the essay might ask, what is driving and sometimes bizarre ingenuity, or achieve it this critic to rage? Is it really possible that the only in dreams.... Cather's heroes have a closing lines of My Antonia suggest to her only strong intuitive aversion to sex which they re­ Jim Burden's need to "reenter childhood" veal furtively through enigmatic gestures.,,3 because of his fear of sex? Read those lines: Further on: "Though this interpretation may sound extreme-that the real danger to man is This was the road over which Antonia and woman, that his protection lies in avoiding or I carne on the night when we got off the eliminating her-it seems to me the essence of train at Black Hawk and were bedded down the most macabre and otherwise unaccountable in the straw, wondering children, being episode in My Antonia. I refer to that grisly taken we knew not whither. I had only to acting out of male aversion, the flashback of close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the Russian Pavel feeding the bride to the wolves.,,4 wagons in the dark, and to be again over­ Still further on: "To say that Jim Burden ex­ come by that obliterating strangeness. The presses castration fears would provide a facile feelings of that night were so near that I conclusion: and indeed his memoirs multiply could reach out and touch them with my images of sharp instruments and painful cut­ hand. I had the sense of coming home to ting. The curved reaping-hook in Lena Lingard's myself, and of having found out what a hands [as she appears in Jim's sexual dream of little circle man's experience is. For Antonia her 1 centralizes an overall pattern that includes and for me, this had been the road of Des­ Peter's clasp-knife with which he cuts melons; tiny; had taken us to those early accidents Crazy Mary's corn-knife . . . ; the suicidal of fortune which predetermined for us all tramp 'cut to pieces' in the threshing machine; that we can ever be. Now I understood and wicked Wick Cutter's sexual assault."S And that the same road was to bring us together finally: "Jim's need to reenter childhood never again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed relents, becomes even more urgent as he feels together the precious, the incommunicable adult life vacuous .... This Romantic mystique past.8 of childhood illuminates the fear of sex in Cather's world. Sex unites one with another. Its Surely the emotion here has its own excuse ultimate threat is loss of self. In Cather's con­ for being and is familiar to us all in moments of struct, naively and of course falsely, the child deep nostalgia. Our critic's interpretations here is asexual, his love inverted, and his identity and elsewhere in the novel give us not persua­ thus intact.,,6 This last statement comes from sive insights but convoluted distortions. If this a cluster of simplistic arguments: that Willa essay represented feminist criticism in general I Cather's dressing in a middy blouse and duck would want to save Willa Cather from it, even skirt reveals that "she tried to hold on to child­ if it meant giving her back to the much-despised hood through dress"; and that such child "phallic critics." figures as the boy Godfrey, who emerges in A second example of criticism is James Godfrey St. Peter's fancy near the end of The Schroeter's 1965 essay, "Willa Cather and The 272 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 1984

Professor's House." We might label the work Schroeter calls this "one of the nastiest dedica­ sociological criticism, inasmuch as it interprets tions any first-rate writer has ever appended the novel as a commentary on American social to a first-rate book."l1 He reaches this amazing structures and changes. Its major claim is that conclusion because, he says, The Professor's The Professor's House is an anti-Semitic novel House is so "deliberately anti-narrative." in its portrait of the Professor's son-in-law, Clearly the dedication was an embarrassment to Louie Marsellus. Through him, claims Schroeter, Schroeter's thesis about the book and had to be Cather is saying that "the Jew is a money­ dealt with in one bold stroke. But Willa Cather maker rather than a creator, a traditionless would surely not have wasted a dedication on aggressor who invades from the outside; he someone she did not like, with an inscription threatens and destroys the past; and he sym­ so subtly insulting that even Hambourg might bolizes what is wrong with the present .... If not have recognized it as such. Further, The the Professor can be taken as a symbol of Professor's House has quite a lot of narrative, America, then Willa's 'message' is simply that even in the parts dealing with the Professor, America is falling into the hands of the Jews.,,9 and especially in the section devoted to Tom Suggesting that Louie Marsellus is based on Jan Outland. Hambourg, who in 1916 married Isabelle Mc­ A third example of criticism taking a wrong Clung and thus deprived Willa Cather of the one turn is found in Leon Edel's Stuff of Sleep and who had been her closest, most intimate friend Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology, for many years, Schroeter adds a psychological published in 1982. In an essay entitled "A Cave dimension to his sociological analysis: of One's Own," which is a revision and elabor­ ation of the essay "Psychoanalysis" in his book The portrait of Marsellus must have come Literary Biography (1957), Edel, like Schroeter, from both roots [psychological and cultur­ finds major importance in Willa Cather's rela­ al]. Otherwise one can hardly account for tionship with Isabelle McClung and in the the vigor of Miss Cather's hatred or the con­ trauma she experienced when Isabelle married sistency with which she has worked it into Hambourg in 1916. One paragraph summarizes the symbolic scheme. But no other portrait Edel's thesis: of a Jew Willa Cather ever did has anything like the same development or is fueled by Here we touch the heart of our psycholog­ anything resembling the same degree of crea­ ical analysis. We can see what brought on the tive energy. In fact, there is no other ex­ depression of Willa Cather's middle years in ample in her novels of a major anti-semitic the very midst of her success, and we can strain. 10 understand why she wrote that "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts," for It is startling to go from Schroeter's essay we know that to her search for inner secur­ to a rereading of The Professor's House and to ity, going back to childhood, was added the see how little the actual portrait of Louie Mar­ deeper sense-hardly irrational from an adult sellus squares with Schroeter's analysis. In fact, point of view-that she had been cast off, Louie Marsellus is one of the most congenial that her beloved had turned from her to characters in the book, and the Professor likes another. The reality was that Isabelle had him more than he likes his own daughters. It moved forward in life and had married. Willa would be easier to read the novel as antifemi­ Cather had been unable to move forward; nist or antimarriage than as anti-Semitic. As for for her there had been a "divorce," and this Jan Hambourg lurking beneath the surface of represented a regression. In her novel, Cather Marsellus's characterization, there is the warm is so identified with her professor that she is dedication to him of The Professor's House it­ unable to supply a "rejection motif" for his self: "For Jan, because he likes narrative," despair. All she could say was that the world WILLA CATHER TODAY 273

was out of joint for him-as it was for her. her imagination in only one regard-that of This depression is described in the first part, providing sufficient motivation for the Profes­ in the account of the professor who doesn't sor's deep depression, a failure rendering the want to keep pace with his family, although book "unsymmetrical and unrealized." his work has been crowned with success. The professor grieves not for a lost love; he A PROBLEM OF AMBIGUITY IS. sImp . Iy al·Ie nate d . 12 The Professor's House is a major Cather text The theory and practice of "literary psy­ about which a considerable body of contra­ chology" throughout Edel's work and in this dictory critical commentary has accumulated. latest book have my respect and admiration; Rather than summarizing what is in the rec­ indeed, his ideas have influenced my own work. ord-for example, the treatment of the house What I object to in Edel's essay is not that he symbolism by E. K. Brown and the handling of stresses the relevance of the Willa Cather­ the mythic dimension of "Tom Outland's Isabelle McClung relationship to the emotional Story" by David Stouck-I want to point to depth of The Professor's House, but rather, that some aspects that have been slighted or omitted he assumes that Cather's feelings on losing Isa­ altogether .15 I have chosen The Professor's belle McClung to Jan Hambourg caused her to House because I consider this novel and My An­ identify so closely with the Professor that she tonia to be Willa Cather's masterpieces. In my was "unable to supply a 'rejection motif' for opinion, contrary to Leon Edel's, The Profes­ his despair." Edel's assumption is that The Pro­ sor's House is indeed a fully realized novel that fessor's House is a crippled novel: was never meant to be mechanically symmetri­ cal; the motivation behind the Professor's deep The two episodes relating to the professor depression gives the work its fascinating com­ [Parts I and II of the book] hardly consti­ plexity and its teasing profundity. tute a novel; they convey a picture of his Before commenting on these matters, I deep depression, which nothing in the book want to show how I believe the Cather-McClung really explains .... His wish to die is at no relationship and separation are relevant to the point sufficiently motivated by the facts of impact of the novel. For explanation, I turn to small-town life, the general hopelessness of a quotation from T. S. Eliot referring to Four the philistine surroundings. To believe so OJ,tartets. Eliot was dissatisfied with his draft of intensely in art and the religion of art, and "Little Gidding," and in some frustration wrote to have created so fully, and yet at the same to John Hayward, who was reading and criti­ time to be overpowered by a sense of futil­ cizing the poem as it was being written: "The ity and ineffectuality-these are the contra­ defect of the whole poem, I feel, is the lack of dictions we discern within the professor .13 some acute personal reminiscence (never to be explicated, of course, but to give power from Edel concludes, "The world did break in two well below the surface).,,16 Cather would have for [Willa Cather]. One part of it moved on; understood perfectly Eliot's meaning here be­ she remained stranded in the other. And The cause she was, I believe, committed to writing Professor's House, in its very structure, con­ out of strong and passionate feelings, but tained this break. It is an unsymmetrical and leaving her "acute personal reminiscence [s] " unrealized novel because Willa Cather could "well below the surface" from where they not bring the two parts of her broken world could supply their "power." Thus Edith Lewis's together again.,,14 It seems strange to me that paradoxical comment on the novel makes Edel would assume, in a novel as brilliantly sense: "The Professor's House is, I think, the executed as The Professor's House is through­ most personal of Willa Cather's novels-and for out, that somehow Cather's feelings disabled that cause, no doubt, is given a more symbolic 274 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 1984 expression than her other stories.,,17 Because The fmal release in this "letting go" comes in the novel lies so close to passionate intensities, the climactic scene near the end, when St. it required "a more symbolic expression" to Peter almost dies of asphyxiation from the keep the personal experience beneath the stove gas. The Professor lives, but something surface. dies in his soul-the Kansas boy that has come In a presentation copy of The Professor's back to him in his crisis. It is this other, young­ House, Willa Cather wrote to Robert Frost: er self that he "could not consciously have "This is really a story of 'letting go with the relinquished," but which he lets go. The evoca­ heart' but most reviewers seem to consider it tion of the youthful St. Peter, who is then an attempt to popularize a system of philos­ destroyed, provides the structural backbone of ophy.,,18 Many critics have written about the the book. structure of the novel, using Willa Cather's own In Book I, as St. Peter's soul sinks lower and hints in a well-known quotation from Willa lower, his imagination moves back and forth Cather on Writing, in which she says she was over his past in search of answers to questions trying "two experiments in form," the "aca­ he does not know how to phrase. When he and demic sonata form" and the "square window" his wife, through Louie Marsellus's largesse, are often found in Dutch interiors looking out to at the opera Mignon, he exclaims to her at in­ sky and sea.19 These analogies have their rele­ termission, "We should have been picturesquely vance. But there is a carefully wrought struc­ shipwrecked toge.ther when we were young." ture in the interior action of the novel, sug­ She replies: "One must go on living, Godfrey. gested by Cather's characterization of the story But it wasn't the children who came between as a "letting go with the heart." The Professor's us." The Professor thinks to himself: "The disenchantment with his life is profound, as heart of another is a dark forest, always, no we begin to learn on the Hrst page when we wit­ matter how close it has been to one's own." ness him unable and unwilling to make the Later that night, St. Peter fmds himself longing move from the old house into the new. We soon for a scene of his youth that did not include his learn that his disenchantment has been a long wife-in a ship along the southern coast of time growing and is virtually complete, related Spain, at the time he was conceiving the design as it is to Tom Outland's death in the war, the of the master work he would write.20 The pull shoddy products of a consumer civilization, and into the past accelerates with the several evoca­ the crass commercialism of a materialistic tions of the image of Tom Outland, and fmally, society that inckde; '-is wife, his daughters, after his family departs for Europe, the Profes­ and their husbands. At the same time, the Pro­ sor begins to edit Tom's diary and is led to fessor does not give up his moral responsibility recall the night Tom Outland told the full when he Hnds that the housekeeper Augusta story of his past. Thus Book II is framed as a has lost her life savings in an investment scheme, reminiscence of the Professor, his listening or when he learns about the hard times suffered presence felt on every page. by his colleague Crane, the faculty member in This long recollection-"Tom Outland's physics under whom Tom Outland was working Story"-is followed almost immediately in when he invented the gas that was later to en­ Book III by a strange metamorphosis. As the rich the Professor's daughter, Rosamund, and Professor enjoys the luxury of his solitude and his son-in-law, Louie Marsellus. Thus Godfrey cultivates a "novel mental dissipation," he St. Peter is detached about his own interests begins to enjoy a "new friendship": "Tom but involved when the serious interests of Outland had not come back again through others are in question. the garden door (as he had so often done in It is in this state of crisis that the Professor dreams!), but another boy had: the boy the begins the inexorable movement suggested by Professor had long ago left behind him in Cather's phrase, "letting go with the heart." Kansas, in the Solomon Valley-the original, WILLA CATHER TODAY 275 unmodified Godfrey St. Peter." This creature is "loneliness of death," to the "thought of eter­ strange indeed: nal solitude." When the Professor learns of the imminent return of his family, he realizes that He was a primitive. He was only interested his greatest desire is to be alone: "Surely the in earth and woods and water. Wherever sun saddest thing in the world is falling out of sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, love-if once one has ever fallen in." And: wherever life sprouted and decayed, places "Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling were alike to him. He was not nearly so cul­ out of all domestic and social relations, out of tivated as Tom's old cliff-dwellers must have his place in the human family, indeed." It is been-and yet he was terribly wise. He when he has gained this self-awareness that St. seemed to be at the root of the matter; De­ Peter has his brush with death. As he awakes, sire under all desires, Truth under all truths. the room is "pitch-black and full of gas." He He seemed to know, among other things, debates with himself as to whether he'll open that he was solitary and must always be so; the window: "He hadn't lifted his hand against he had never married, never been a father. himself-was he required to lift it for himself?" He was earth, and would return to earth. The next thing he knows, he is lying warmly When white clouds blew over the lake like covered under the protective scrutiny of the bellying sails, when the seven pine-trees sturdy, deeply religious, always practical Augus­ turned red in the declining sun, he felt ta. She had heard "a fall" and had rushed up to satisfaction and said to himself merely: find him "lying on the floor" -evidence for the "That is right." Coming upon a curly root reader that St. Peter had made the attempt to that thrust itself across his path, he said: open the window, had not yielded to the attrac­ "That is it." When the maple-leaves along tion of death. But in the life-and-death crisis, the street began to turn yellow and waxy, he had experienced "a moment of acute, ag­ and were soft to the touch,-like the skin on onized strangulation," the "letting go with the old faces,-he said: "That is true; it is time." heart.,,23 All these recognitions gave him a kind of sad What none of the readings of The Professor's pleasure.21 House has done is to acknowledge the inten­ tional ambiguities of this remarkable ending. This extraordinarily beautiful passage is Ambiguities cluster around the crisis scene, something of a prose poem, suggestive of deep around the nature of the boy Godfrey and his religious experience, evocative of Zen and other visitation, and around the meaning of what it oriental philosophies and mystic beliefs. It ap­ is the Professor relinquishes, or lets go. Yet pears subterraneously related to those latter throughout these chapters, Willa Cather's style portions of "Tom Outland's Story," in which h'ls never seemed more sure of itself, the con­ Tom, all alone on the mesa, realizes that the trol never more certain and firm. Though one mesa is "no longer an adventure, but a religious critic has noted that youthful doubles turn up emotion": in this state he seems "to get the in other stories-such as "The Garden Lodge" solar energy in some direct way.,,22 Yet I have and Alexander's Bridge-no one has explored in seen no discussion of The Professor's House depth this recurring motif or the relation of all that has come to terms with these emotions. these figures to that remarkable evocation of Accompanying this primitive boy Godfrey youth at the end of My Antonia. is a conviction on the part of the Professor that These are tasks for the future, but I wish to he is approaching death. Even though a doctor suggest the relevance of one line of inquiry. In pronounces him healthy, the Professor is pos­ Alexander's Bridge, the little boy that the man sessed by the "instinctive conviction" that Alexander remembers leaps "from his bed into he is "near the conclusion of his life." With the full consciousness of himself. That con­ this conviction comes a reconciliation to the sciousness was Life itself.... There was only 276 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 1984 one thing that had an absolute value for each neither of the world nor of heaven 1; but individual, and it was just that original impulse, when creatures are no longer comforting and that internal heat, that feeling of one's self in suit you not at all, then both here and there one's own breast.,,24 The boy Godfrey seemed are yours.25 to the Professor "to be at the root of the mat­ ter; Desire under all desires, Truth under all In many ways, St. Peter has become truly truths." Perhaps the key terms in these two "poor in spirit," has become sensitive to this conceptions are Self and Desire, the things that poverty in others, and can no longer fInd com­ attach most fIrmly to life, to people, to things. fort in creatures. During the whole of The Professor's House, St. But the ambiguities persist, and it is pos­ Peter has observed with revulsion the desire for sible to see-as some have seen-St. Peter's state things in all those about him. Yet there is a at the end of the novel not as beatifIc but as "Desire under all desires" that endures-at willfully alienated and indulgently moody. least in the boy Godfrey as brought to life by When deconstruction criticism comes to hover the mature Professor. around Willa Cather, I predict that it will alight In exploring these ambiguities, I am drawn with alacrity on The Professor's House. Decon­ to the oblique relevance of a text I have come structionists will delight in teasing contradictions to know through my reading and teaching of to the surface of the text and there worrying Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet. The text them to a frazzle in language that itself will is the work of Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth­ enable the ambiguities to proliferate endlessly. century German mystic. After Mr. Sammler has his vision of death on the battlefIelds of Israel's TWO NOTABLE CRITICS Six-Day War, he returns to New York and to the reading of his beloved Meister Eckhart. There are two critics whose writing I would Here is a passage from the text that Sammler like to recommend to anyone beginning to pores over: work on Cather. The fIrst of these is Dorothy Van Ghent, whose pamphlet Willa Cather, pub­ "Blessed are the poor in spirit." He is lished by the University of Minnesota Press in poor who has nothing; and that spirit is poor 1964, remains, in my view, one of the most which, like the eye that is poor, being devoid brilliant summary views of Cather's work avail­ of color, is very sensitive to it. To be poor in able today. In just a few paragraphs, for ex­ spirit is to be sensitive to other spirits. God ample, Van Ghent points out some important is a spirit and the fruits of his spirit are love, connections among the ghostly child versions peace and joy. Empty poverty that owns of the leading characters in "The Garden nothing and is clean, changes nature; the Lodge," Alexander's Bridge, and The Profes­ pure can make water flow uphill and do sor's House. The work is fIlled with valuable other wonders of which I may not tell you insights that could not be developed in so brief now. a volume-insights worth further pondering and If, therefore, you will fInd perfect com­ deeper exploration. fort and joy in God, see to it that you are The other critic is Bernice Slote. She created innocent of creatures and creature comforts. the foundation on which we are all standing. Certainly, as long as you can fInd comfort She had the scholar's passion for accuracy in in creatures, you cannot fInd the true com­ detail and the stylist'S passion for rightness in fort. It is only when nothing but God can the rhythms of phrase and sentence. What she console you, then he will be a real consola­ has left us in her Cather legacy is a series of tion and you will fInd delight in him and essays, books, and compilations that will with him. If what God is not gives you endure as long as Cather endures. In her chapter comfort, you are neither here nor there [Le., on Cather in Fifteen Modern American Authors WILLA CATHER TODAY 277

(1969), she concluded with a short section en­ 9. James Schroeter, "Willa Cather and The titled "Directions." She listed three that she Professor's House," in Willa Cather and Her saw then, and I believe they endure in studies Critics, ed. James Schroeter (Ithaca, N.Y.: of Willa Cather today. They were (1) "increased Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 372-73. emphasis on psychological or personal relation­ 10. Ibid., p. 376. 11. Ibid. ships with writer and work"; (2) "greater atten­ 12. Leon Edel, "A Cave of One's Own," in tion to the analysis and definition of form and Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Lit­ the deeper involvements of style and material"; erary Psychology (New York: Harper and Row, and (3) "world views rather than regional con­ 1982), p. 236. cerns, including emphasis on history, myth, the 13. Ibid., p. 223. total human experience.,,26 Today we might 14. Ibid., p. 239. want to add to these some special categories, 15. See E. K. Brown, Willa Cather: A Critical such as feminist criticism. Biography, completed by Leon Edel (New Critical work on Willa Cather will continue York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953); and David to add to our understanding of this major Stouck, willa Cather's Imagination (Lincoln: twentieth-century author and, through her, of University of Nebraska Press, 1978). 16. Helen Gardner, ed., The Composition of ourselves and of our origins. I would like to "Four Quartets" (New York: Oxford Univer­ close with the words of Bernice Slote: "What­ sity Press, 1978), p. 67. ever adds to our knowledge of the artist's 17. Edith Lewis, Willa Cather Living (New creativity enriches our concept of man himself; York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 137. what the artist shows us of the human exper­ 18. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather: ience deepens our understanding of our own A Memoir (Lincoln: University of Nebraska lives and the lives of others. So by studying the Press, 1963), p. 215. art of Willa Cather-both its means and its end­ 19. Willa Cather, "On The Professor's House," we may find some illumination of a peculiarly in willa Cather on Writing (New York: Alfred American, and yet very personal experience. A. Knopf, 1949), pp. 30-32. Like her own country, she was herself and she 20. Willa Cather, The Professor's House (New was everyone.,,27 York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 94-95, 106. 21. Ibid., pp. 263-66. 22. Ibid., p. 251. 23. Ibid., pp. 267-82. NOTES 24. Willa Cather, Alexander's Bridge (Lin­ coIn: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 1. Blanche H. Gelfant, "The Forgotten pp.39-40. Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Antonia," American 25. Raymond Bernard Blakney, trans., Meister Literature 43 (March 1971): 60. Eckhart: A Modern Translation (New York: 2. Ibid., pp. 60-61. Harper and Row, 1941), pp. 53-54. 3. Ibid., p. 61. 26. Bernice Slote, "Willa Cather," in Fifteen 4. Ibid., p. 74. Modern American Authors, ed. Jackson R. 5. Ibid., p. 75. Bryer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 6. Ibid., pp. 78-79. 1974), p. 61. 7. Ibid., p. 77. 27. Bernice Slote, "A Gathering of Nations," 8. Willa Cather, My Antonia (Boston: in The Art of willa Cather (Lincoln: University Houghton Mifflin, 1949), p. 240. of Nebraska Press, 1973), p. 248.