Landscape and Nature in Willa Cather's Pioneer and Artist Stories

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Transformative Worlds: Landscape and Nature

In Willa Cather’s Pioneer and Artist Stories

A Thesis

Presented to

the Faculty of the Graduate School

of Millersville University of Pennsylvania

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

of Master of Art

By Hannah Halter

March 23, 2018

The Thesis for the Master of Art Degree by

Hannah Halter

has been approved on behalf of the

Graduate School by

(signatures on file)

Dr. Carla Rineer Assistant Professor of English

Dr. Timothy Miller Professor of English

Dr. Melinda Rosenthal Associate Professor of English

Date: __ March 23, 2018__

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

TRANSFORMATIVE WORLDS: LANDSCAPE AND NATURE

IN WILLA CATHER’S PIONEER AND ARTISTS STORIES

Hannah Halter

Millersville University, 2018

Millersville, Pennsylvania

Directed by Dr. Carla Rineer

Many foundational authors of American literature build complex and subtle links between landscapes and the mentalities of their characters. Once perceived as an author of limited regionalism, Willa Cather has become an author of increasing scholarly interest, and the affective resonance of her landscapes--especially the Nebraska prairie and other regions of the

American midwest and southwest--contributes greatly to her position as a unique and prolific figure of modern American literature. By tracing the relationship between the minds of Cather’s characters and the definitive landscapes of their lives, the theme of transformation can begin to come into focus. Two of Cather’s main character models, the pioneer and the artist, take central roles in the following sampling of her novels, and the transformative power of landscapes differs between the two. O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and A Lost Lady can be understood as pioneer stories, within which nature acts upon characters gradually and shapes their identities and their understanding of the world. In contrast, The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, and Lucy

Gayheart are best understood as artist stories, with natural images, real or imagined, appearing suddenly to inspire moments of understanding or emotional change. In both story types, the

natural world continually transcends its basic role as a backdrop and impacts the courses of the main characters’ lives, reaching them on a deeply personal level and shifting both their individual perspectives and often the very courses of their lives.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I: Introduction … 5

Chapter II: Pioneer Stories…22

O Pioneers!...22

My Ántonia...36

A Lost Lady...48

Chapter III: Artist Stories...58

The Song of the Lark...58

The Professor’s House...67

Lucy Gayheart...77

Chapter IV: Conclusion...85

Works Cited...88

Chapter I: Introduction

In the latter years of her life, author Sarah Orne Jewett, a writer of American regionalism,

began corresponding regularly with Willa Cather. Jewett recognized Cather’s great talent for

prose and urged the younger writer to shift her focus from journalism to creative writing, as she

felt Cather’s youth would best serve her creative work (Rubinstein 328). Early during their

correspondence, Jewett wrote that Cather needed to “find [her] own quiet center of life, and write

from that to the world...write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes

to make up” (241). Jewett’s advice remained with Cather, and years after Jewett’s death, Cather

placed the words of her friend that definitively guided her artistic course within the preface of

her first book: “Of course, one day you will write about your own country. In the meantime, get

all you can. One must know the world so well before one can know the parish” (Cather,

Alexander’s vii).

Jewett’s words privilege location and the knowledge connected to it above all else as a basis for writing regional literature, linking the local with the global in an effort to highlight the connection between the specific and the universal. Cather deeply respected Jewett and had a great love for her work. She enjoyed Jewett’s predilection toward “everyday people who grow out of the soil,” and, citing Jewett’s sketches of country life in The Country of the Pointed Firs,

the way she allowed her stories to “melt into the land and the life of the land until they [were] not

stories at all, but life itself” (Cather, Not Under Forty 87). In the words of Hermione Lee,

Jewett’s life and work “pointed Cather the way she would go” (69).

Cather’s first published creative works, the novel Alexander’s Bridge and the collection

of short stories The Troll Garden, did not yet reflect Jewett’s prediction that Cather would write

about her own country. These relatively short works are heavy with monologue and dialogue,

focusing on propriety and relationships between characters. They do not rely on setting nearly as

much as Cather’s later novels do; the majority of events in these works could arguably take place

in any number of locations. Cather herself was critical of American writers who worked within

strict story boundaries drawn from other traditionally successful books instead of lived

experience (Laird 242). In her view, these writers chose “unvarying, carefully dosed ingredients”

to create familiar plots (Cather, Willa Cather 58). Looking back on Alexander’s Bridge and early

short stories found in The Troll Garden, Cather recalls trying to imitate Henry James and Edith

Wharton (two successful authors with very little regard for the specifics of landscapes in their

works) and wandering into the same pitfalls of familiar narratives (Lee 83; Laird 242). However,

Lee notes that the best stories in The Troll Garden take place in the West and in Pittsburgh,

places where Cather lived, and they featured solitary artist figures (75). Cather would go on to

pen her greatest works based on the criteria noted by Lee; the fiction Cather set in locations from

her real-life experiences and featuring artist figures forms the heart of her most prolific and canonical works.

A palpable shift came when Cather authored O Pioneers!, an undoubtedly canonical book to readers and scholars of her works. In reference to O Pioneers! Cather echoes her sentiments toward Jewett’s advice, as she states, “In this one I hit the home pasture and found that I was

Yance Sorgeson [Sorgenson, Webster County farmer] and not Henry James” (Randall 62). This realization follows a turn Cather took toward her home country in this foundational book. Being her first “affirmative” work about Nebraska (62), O Pioneers! marks Cather’s premiere venture in accepting the raw material of the region as the foundation of her creative vision. Randall writes that Cather “became converted to organic form” for the first time in this book (62). This

defining shift would persist in Cather’s major works, a shift that incorporates and presents the

author’s lived experiences. The divide between her works before and after/including O Pioneers!

is clear, especially in light of today’s scholarly consensus on Cather’s canonical pieces. When

Cather turned away from the established models created by writers she imitated and acted upon

the value of her own past and personal interests--expressed most vividly in her connection to

landscapes and her love of music, especially opera--her works became genuine, subtle pieces of

literature. In a sense, Cather became a pioneer herself, both in her subject matter and her

narrative strategies (Laird 243). While any number of explorations could be undertaken on

Cather’s literary strategies, I suggest that from O Pioneers! onward, Cather’s use of landscape

hinges on the complex relationship between humanity and nature and the transformative effects of this relationship.

The beginning of Cather’s own transformation as a writer is rooted in her youth.

Although she was born in Virginia and her family roots were southern, Willa Cather spent much of her childhood in Red Cloud, a small town in Webster County, Nebraska, after her family

relocated. Ross points out that Cather utilizes Red Cloud to build the central fictional towns

featured in six of her twelve novels, including Hanover in O Pioneers!, Moonstone in The Song

of the Lark, Black Hawk in My Ántonia, Frankfort in One of Ours, Sweet Water in A Lost Lady,

and Haverford in Lucy Gayheart (“A Walk”). All of these towns feature similar structures and

landmarks, most of which were drawn from Cather’s experiences. Many of her characters, too,

are adapted from impressions of those she encountered. For example, her extensive interaction

with immigrant families living on the prairie frames her portrayal of the immigrant characters

appearing in My Ántonia, especially (“A Walk”). In her best works, Cather populates a detailed,

realistic world with characters true to her experiences. With her conversion to lived experience

and her new esteem for the defining landscapes of her life forming a basis for Cather’s career as a writer, the subtle functions of landscapes and nature in her literature can be better explored.

As Cather’s novels demonstrate, human-nature relationships are not always simple. The facts of nature collide with both individual imagination and wider cultural understanding

(Jenseth and Lotto v). This collision is often amplified in literature, where story elements can take on complex, interconnected roles. Cather’s works show that building a natural setting not only involves creating a believable site for events to take place but also involves the slow formation of a constant force that underlies the core of a story and interacts with the minds of characters. The Nebraska prairie is not just a place for pioneer characters to live; it is also a living stage of struggle and triumph for characters such as Alexandra Bergson and Ántonia

Shimerda. The ruins of cliff dwellings in Blue Mesa and Panther Cañon are not just places to explore for Tom Outland and Thea Krongborg; they are also monumental centers of life-altering mental and spiritual renewal. In Cather’s case, the essential connection between these two levels of artistry (creating a believable site for events and infusing them with literary force) is natural and seamless, echoing Randall’s statement on the author’s conversion to “organic form” (62).

Landscapes in Cather’s works are inherently rich enough to command attention from readers, but they transcend their physical elements to act as guiding images and bestow meaning on everyday life (Schneider 485). To Cather’s original literary models, Henry James and Edith Wharton, landscapes mean next to nothing in the lives of their characters, making Cather’s artistic shift all the more substantial.

Nature and landscapes can become fully dynamic in literature, their presentation changing with mindsets of characters and the mindsets of characters mirroring their surroundings. Examples of American authors who utilize this type of dynamic interaction are

manifold, from Cooper to Hawthorne to Faulkner, and each author offers a unique set of steps in

this dance between mind and nature. This ever-changing interaction is best played out in literature, a form that melds concrete realities with abstract thought and visceral emotion, and given the unique aspects of the American landscape and the varied history of its settlement, the

interaction underscores the land’s unique history. Studying literature with attention to

geographical place enables extensive charting of landscapes’ effects, impressions, and concepts

within a narrative. Cather’s works are rich with possibilities for this premise of literary research.

Beth Rundstrom discusses the physical and conceptual outlook in most scholarship surrounding

literary geography in her article “Harvesting Willa Cather’s Literary Fields,” as she writes,

“Human-land relationships are the inspiration and impetus for invented landscapes…. Authors

use invented literary settings, the where of a story, to represent landscape symbolically. Literary

geographers examine an author’s conceptual sense of place to enhance understanding and to

enrich readers’ geographies” (217). Cather’s inspiration can be traced to her own experiences

and observations, but in a larger sense, the American landscape is the central resource shared by

American authors, all of whom portray it through the lens of their own experiences and learning.

Among the many representative authors of modern America, Cather stands out in terms of

inventing landscapes of varied emotional resonance that affect the courses of her characters’

lives. Like many of the nation’s greatest authors, her observations of the land, most notably the

prairies of Nebraska and key landmarks of the Southwest, gave rise to the artistic connections

she makes between landscapes in her fiction and the vistas of the human mind through her

characters, culminating in a vision of landscape underlying and guiding physical and moral life.

The important distinctions within the term “landscape” can be easy to overlook, and the

assumption that it is simply a visible expanse of land is too reductive for a literary study.

According to John Brinckehoff Jackson, when the word “landscape” was introduced in the

English language, it did not mean the view of some stretch of land as it most often means today.

Instead, it meant “a picture of it, an artist’s interpretation,” overall more of a composition of a view than an actual view (Landscape 299). These differing definitions are both important to note in terms of Cather’s literary landscapes. Cather’s books combine the objective truth of a view and the artistic qualification of that view, both through her realistic portrayal of settings and in her way of filtering them through her characters’ perspectives. With this combination at play, the views are carefully constructed within a network of associations and affective features. With the fusion of the two meanings of “landscape” as a foundation, Cather’s literary landscapes thrive. In his extensive study of the American landscape, Jackson writes, “Landscape is a space on the surface of the earth...it is a space with a degree of permanence with its own distinct character, either topographical or cultural, and above all a space shared by a group of people” (Landscape

302). Jackson’s idea of a landscape’s “character” hinges largely on its basic physicality and its anthropological connections. From a literary standpoint, however, the “character” of a landscape is better understood as its affective profile. This profile arises from a profusion of individual feelings and communal impressions toward the corresponding landscape. Framing the character of a landscape means evaluating the subjective statements that have arisen from characters’ interactions with it.

In order to understand and apply the concept of landscapes having a sense of “character,”

I offer the following conceptual model of viewing and interpreting space that can be applied to

Cather’s works. By combining her impression of a given landscape--whether constructed from her imagination, reconstructed from her memories, or a combination of both--with the fictional perception of a character, Cather creates a mental unit that “views” a given landscape.

Information and impressions gleaned from the view reach this mental unit (the collective mind of

Cather and her character), and baseline descriptions coalesce with statements regarding interpretation, emotion, meaning, metaphor, and even anthropomorphization. Cather fine-tunes this viewing and interpretation into text that the reader then processes. These steps are multifaceted, repeated, and endlessly divisible, yet even this simplified version of creating a textual moment based on a landscape nevertheless demonstrates that Cather and her characters imbue landscapes with meaning, metaphor, and anthropomorphic power, thus bestowing “character” upon them. While the examples of meaningful viewing within Cather’s books are manifold, one example that serves to demonstrate this process takes place when Jim Burden from My Ántonia returns to the Nebraska prairie as an adult and sees how much it has changed. With Cather’s memory and imagination driving his fictional viewing, Jim begins by making baseline observations, such as “The old pasture land was now being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing” (Cather, Ántonia 229). His words quickly evolve into statements regarding interpretation, as he recalls, “all this meant happy children, contented women, and men who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue….all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility” (229). Jim arrives at an affective statement when he states, “These changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me”

(229), and he points to a feeling of a personification in the land when he concludes, “I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modeling of human faces”

(229). While My Ántonia is one of the most prolific of Cather’s books in terms of affective viewing of landscapes, many other moments in her various stories call on this system of viewing that builds up the “character” of a landscape. Without this complete process of viewing, a literary landscape remains devoid of “character.” Simply put, “character” is bestowed upon a landscape

by those who view it, whether a character or a narrator or both take part in the viewing. With this model as a conceptual foundation and an automatic process of viewing and interpreting, the character of a given landscape within Cather’s novels can be more fully discussed.

Based on these rudimentary discussions of Cather and her literary landscapes, one can already observe the importance of emotion, perception, and individual identity in the connection between mind and nature. Due in part to these affective associations, featuring landscapes in literature often ties in with the concepts of Romanticism (Mellard 474). While Cather’s works fall into the modern era, some prominent writers of her time criticized her works for their arguably Romantic characteristics. The care she takes in rendering the emotional and even spiritual resonance of her landscapes surely contributed to such criticism. In addition, Cather was acutely aware of the encroaching industrial society of the modern era, and she presented pioneering stories of Nebraska immigrants in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia as an alternate vision of society (Dyck 163). The themes of Cather’s pioneering stories hint that the author’s hopes revolved around preserving the best the era had to offer and instilling the wonder, perseverance, and magnanimity--the greatness of spirit--in individuals as they faced the changing world. In this way, Cather's work is rife with nostalgia, and while her esteem for life lived close to the landscape seems Romantic, the theme of nostalgia is often aligned with Modernism. Still, it would be a mistake to regard Cather’s vision of pioneer living as utopian, given that her novels never shy away from the darkness of human nature and the immediacy of death entwined in frontier living. Her stories continually diverge from Romanticism’s idealization of rural life, and she does not use these narratives to make any overt point about the harms of industrialization, as her interest seems more aligned with preserving an essential historical period and the pioneering spirit that was nurtured by its opportunities as well as its tribulations. Steep difficulties arise in

the lives of her non-pioneer artist characters as well, though more often in the form of personal

tragedies and identity crises. Cather’s novels often sway between awe-driven Romanticism and grave pessimism on a scene-by-scene basis.

Still, there is no question that Cather held the romance, as a form of fiction, in high regard. In her book compiling Cather’s critical outlook from 1893 and 1896, Bernice Slote presents Cather’s assertion that “Romance is the highest form of fiction” because of its timeless power to “come back to us in all its radiance and eternal freshness” (62). Cather’s statement draws extensively on American literary traditions of the past. Among all the foundational literary voices of American Renaissance, Nathaniel Hawthorne devotes the most attention to distinguishing between the creative work he calls a romance from a novel. In his preface to The

House of the Seven Gables, he writes that the romance “sins unpardonably so far as it may

swerve aside from the truth of the human heart,” but that it “has fairly a right to present that truth

under circumstances...of the writer’s own choosing or creation” (Hawthorne 3). He continues,

writing that if the author sees fit, “he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out

or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture” (3). In siding with the

romance form for the book that follows, Hawthorne stresses the romance’s introspective and

subjective brand of truth over the novel’s commitment to clear, undoubtable verisimilitude. The

primacy of the romance form in American literature holds sway over the scholarship of

numerous Americanists; Richard Chase, among the first major scholars of American literature to devote extensive study to the essential qualities of the American novel, goes so far as to frame his book, The American Novel and Its Tradition, around the assertion that “the American novel, in its most original and characteristic form, has worked out its destiny and defined itself by incorporating an element of romance” (vii). While Cather’s esteem for the romance certainly

does not mean that her books should be considered romances, it remains clear that the affective tenets of the form influenced her thinking as a writer and touched upon her creative process.

Perhaps Slote best reflects Cather’s thinking by stating, “To set down a multitude of exact details about the physical and actual world would not in itself give a sense of life” (62). Cather’s approach to building her natural settings is drawn from the romance, as subjective strains of interpretative language contribute to their formation just as much as realistic descriptions do. Just as Cather’s works blend Romanticism and Modernism, her landscapes--presented through the mental ties her characters have to them and through the concrete images drawn from Cather’s memory--feature characteristics akin to both romances and novels.

For decades after Cather’s death in 1947, her books were largely considered to be works of limited regionalism, but more recent scholarship has begun to characterize Cather as a major player in Modernism among the ranks of Woolf and Joyce in terms of complexity (Ross). While

Woolf and Joyce exceed Cather in terms of the complex narrative techniques evident in major works of High Modernism, the subtlety and ambiguity of Cather’s stories surely played a part in rehabilitating the author’s literary status. In addition, the roots of Cather’s regionalism underlie far more than just the Nebraska prairie, as they tap into the essence of pioneering: the imagination and perseverance of diverse immigrant populations facing an unfamiliar, eye- opening landscape. Ross stresses the current importance of Cather’s “tense relationship with the mythology of the American heartland” (“A Walk”), and such assessments elevate her work beyond a vast swath of American regional literature. Much of what sets Cather apart from the common forms of regionalism during her time is her complex vision of the human mind cast against a powerfully affective landscape and how such a vision characterizes the nation.

Cather portrays her vision of the character of the nation through her commitment to

dramatizing the reality of pioneer life, as she closely re-creates the unique situation of American country living in the midwest in her pioneer stories. The harsh realities she portrays stand in stark contrast to the idea of country living in England. In England, from the beginning of the

Industrial Revolution, the countryside was often regarded as a place to escape from urban realities, and even though sophisticates generally found country life dull the countryside provided a temporary reprieve from the blur and push of urbanity (Thomas 252). By the

eighteenth century, social and literary movements combined to delineate a marked tension

between urban progression and rural desirability within English society (Thomas 253). However,

Cather’s landscapes demonstrate a very different story in terms of country living in America.

The vastness of the countryside along with the different ethnic and economic profiles of Cather’s immigrant characters hardly made country living seem idyllic. The struggle to cultivate an

unfamiliar and unpredictable landscape frames the lives of the characters in books such as O

Pioneers! and My Ántonia, just as it framed the lives of immigrants during America’s frontier

era. Viewing Cather’s works through the lens of history also touches on the social changes

brought about by the demands of American pioneering.

With such startling, life-and-death realities defining the lives of pioneers, challenges to

existing social structures arose, and arguably no other social structure is as important to discuss

in Cather’s works as gender. The central role of individual female characters in Cather’s prairie

novels, as well as in several of her later novels, calls for an examination of gender in relation to

the landscape. Centering on the experiences of European immigrants entering America, Annette

Kolodny’s book The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers,

1630-1860 examines the female response to American settlement and expansion as a

counterpoint to the more articulated male vision. Kolodny points out the configurations of man-

land relationships in early America as a mingling of erotic and maternal projections (4), as male

settlers and explorers most often viewed the American landscape as wilderness to be conquered

and/or space to find comfort and well-being through the cultivation of the earth. Kolodny writes

that women took up an “alternate set of images” in their adaptation to the New World (3),

devoting their energy and imagination instead to their homes and gardens, “spaces that were

truly and unequivocally theirs” (5-6). The relative smallness of American women settlers’ and

pioneers’ relationship with the landscape limited their reach but allowed for a careful and

comprehensive building of their domestic landscapes. Kolodny writes that the “dream of a

domestic Eden had become a nightmare of domestic captivity” for many women, despite the

popularized fantasy of the domestic paradise (9).

Still, the American prairie was a unique place of affirmation for “the newly self-

conscious American Eve;” on the prairie, necessity allowed women to claim and cultivate a landscape in which “the garden and the home were one” (Kolodny 6). Kolodny's characterization

of such cultivation does not involve extraction or exploitation of the land, but it involves a

creative act of taking in the raw materials of the earth and situating oneself within them, much

like a bird gathers materials for its nest. The relative increase in female agency brought on by the

pioneer lifestyle is played out in Cather’s prairie novels. Her main female characters, especially

women like Alexandra from O Pioneers! and Ántonia from My Ántonia, represent an evolution

from the gendered divides Kolodny outlines in her study. Male and female landscape fantasies of

early American settlement broadened and melded in Cather’s works, given that her books are set

beyond the timeline of Kolodny’s study and that the unique challenge of cultivating prairie lands

sometimes broke down the status quo of gender roles. Even so, such a breakdown was most often

temporary. For example, according to Laird, the ending of O Pioneers! suggests that traditional gender roles reemerge “with the advent of greater ease and prosperity” (246). Overall, the unique conditions inherent in the settlement and initial cultivation of new landscapes required social adjustment for the greater good of the venture. Permanent social change in the area of gender roles never truly materialized despite the initial power of an unfamiliar landscape. Cather’s pioneer women, in varying degrees, settle down, so to speak. All three of the pioneer women studied here marry or remarry and begin more stable lives after experiencing profound growth, facing personal tragedies, and making their unique mark on the American landscape as pioneers.

Leaving her readers in a state of emotional ambiguity at the end of these stories, Cather melds the mournful and the restful in creating a final tone to match the complexity of her artistic outlook.

Discussing landscape in Cather’s artist stories does not call for as extensive an introduction as her pioneer stories do; they do not bear the weight of American pioneering history and the life-and-death struggle of pioneering played out upon frontier lands. Still, the very same concepts of viewing and interpreting landscapes through the minds of characters apply to these stories, and Cather’s personal experiences and interests continue to play into the characters and content that make up her artist stories. Cather’s personal love for operas and her encounters with the talented women who starred in them provide the impetus for her subtle and emotionally probing künstlerromans like The Song of the Lark and Lucy Gayheart. In her biography of Willa Cather, Hermione Lee describes the sharp divide she sees between Cather’s pioneer and artist characters, describing the former as “semi-mythical figures” from the vast heroic tradition and the latter as “dangerously seductive, theatrical ‘ladies’” (15). While Lee’s statement is unmistakably true, these contrasting character models both draw on the

transformative power of the landscape in their lives through gradual, immersive interaction

(pioneer women) and through sudden flashes of understanding (artist women). Bringing together

Cather’s “semi-mythical” and “seductive, theatrical” characters in a single study reveals the different yet equally important transformative agency of the landscapes in these stories.

A fair sampling of Cather’s works must include a range of her earlier and later books. For

the sake of a discussion centered around landscape and nature, Cather’s pioneer trilogy,

comprising O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia, provides a wealth of

opportunities for study. In addition to the trilogy, and to broaden the scope of the earlier three

books with later selections, Cather’s A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, and Lucy Gayheart

serve to extend this study. One example of an organizing principle in approach to Cather’s works

can be observed in Rosowski’s article “The Pattern of Willa Cather’s Novels.” According to

Rosowski, a key distinction exists between Cather’s earlier and later novels, founded upon a

sense of dualistic identity. She writes that Cather’s main characters express “two selves,” and

that “one self is personal, temporal and physical; a second self is impersonal, transcendent, and

spiritual” (Rosowski, “Pattern” 244). In early novels such as O Pioneers! and The Song of the

Lark, Rosowski notes the “relatively straightforward patterns of growth” Alexandra Bergson and

Thea Kronborg experience and their clear responses to “the spiritual expanses offered by the

Great Plains and by music,” but characters in her later novels face more complex courses of

“substitution, denial, and death” (244-45). The degree to which Cather’s characters exhibit these

aspects of self form the organizational basis of Rosowski’s study.

Somewhat similarly to Rosowski, I approach these novels with a basic categorical

foundation, but instead of grouping these six books only in terms of early versus later works, I

observe two story types arising from these selections: pioneer stories and artist stories. These two

Catherian story archetypes apply to all six of these works, as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and A

Lost Lady are certainly pioneer stories, while The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, and

Lucy Gayheart are artist stories. With some overlap granted, given the thematic similarities between these two story types, the pioneer story and the artist story feature characters with differing proximities to landscapes and nature. In general, the pioneer stories are undergirded literally and figuratively by the landscape itself, while the artist stories claim some distance from the land yet carry essential, nature-based revelations and connections. The land itself is often a site of essential character development and moral value for the main characters of Cather’s pioneer stories, but in her artist stories, the land is an accompanying force of emotional reflection and mental growth for main characters. Even with these differences noted, the landscape still provides essential moments of understanding for characters in both the pioneer and artist stories.

With this divide between story types, the identities of key characters are given a basic platform upon which they can be observed, whether they are settlers, wanderers, or somewhere in between. Alongside those identities is the character of the landscapes, interacting with and changing the courses of the characters’ lives.

With this two-fold structure as a guiding principle, this study delves into Cather’s novels as individual, complete works of art that can be viewed structurally and thematically, focusing on key interactions between Cather’s characters and the landscapes and natural features that comprise their worlds, whether these interactions are framed directly in the minds of the characters or are suggested by Cather’s narratorial voice. With the work of other scholars as a scaffold, I seek to align these observations with the greater question of how the natural world functions in each of these novels and to distill from them fair statements--not reductive conclusions--that have the potential to enrich scholarship patterns based on Cather’s works. The

total drive of my findings hinge on the central idea that landscapes and nature function in

Cather’s books as sites of transformation in the physical, mental, and spiritual lives of her main

characters, and that the circumstances and outcomes of these transformations are largely

contingent on whether the story centers on pioneers or artists.

Much of the scholarship on landscapes in Willa Cather’s works seeks to answer questions about the author’s personal views on land and nature. Often drawing on the precepts of ecocriticism, scholars have sought to analyze Cather’s works in an effort to understand the place of environmental concerns in her stories as well as in her personal philosophy beyond the text.

For example, Lucy Schneider’s article “Artistry and Instinct: Willa Cather’s ‘Land-Philosophy’” falls in line with these efforts, as Schneider uses Cather’s literature to expound a set of principles that delve into the author’s “ambivalent” regard towards the land and its effects on people (485).

While these types of studies provide essential insight on Cather’s connection to the land, I approach each work as containing a unique system of land ethics. With some overlap granted, I view each story as a different expression of human-land relationships to be explored as a unique unit among other, closely related units. Cather’s novels certainly contain hints as to her personal views of land and nature, but my concern is focused more on the individual machinations of each novel. Put another way, my interest here regards Cather’s literary technique and not her personal beliefs about the environment or humankind’s stewardship toward it.

I do not approach these works as puzzles to be solved or as riddles with some predetermined meaning, nor do I attempt to report and analyze every statement Cather has made on the landscapes of her novels and how she intended them to function. While I do not presume to apply my findings to Cather’s entire body of work, the six books studied here represent a prolific snapshot of the author’s literary vision. Similar to the way an art student may study a

work of art, I approach each novel as if it were a detailed painting with key elements of composition that inspire my individual impressions, invite me to experience them in context with other elements, and motivate me to place them in conversation with others who have viewed the painting, keeping in mind the individual and social impetus behind the piece’s creation. I propose that viewing this specific selection of Cather’s novels in this fashion can begin to do justice to the subtlety of the author’s transformative literary worlds.

Chapter II: Pioneer Stories

O PIONEERS!

Cather presents her richest and most canonically revered fiction when she writes about the Nebraska prairie, from which she draws out the multifaceted character and powerfully affective traits of this unique topographical zone of America. Cather’s works that are most closely connected to the landscape are characterized by an increase in imagery and metaphor compared to her other works (Randall 63). In her books that lean more heavily on landscape,

Cather presents natural locations scenically and often statically (Randall 63), much like a photographer capturing a vast panorama. Cather’s increased care in crafting realistic and affective landscapes influences both the content and form of her fiction; her pioneer stories are characterized by gradual, extended timelines, numerous seasonal cycles, and ever-evolving personalities. Her concerted shift in the site of physical, emotional, and moral value away from familiar novel formats and toward authentic experience combines with her more poetic presentations of settings and events, resulting in her most revered works.

Cynthia K. Briggs discusses the importance of place in Cather’s novels and just how deeply place can become involved in the identities of her characters. Briggs writes that Cather’s characters often “feel a sense of insulated isolation in their place,” and that Cather uses landscapes to create “personal sanctuaries that strengthen [her characters’] spirits and enable them to better cope with their world” (159). While the optimism of Briggs’ latter statement is often undercut by the scarcity, danger, and tragedy of prairie life, her observations tie in well with the overall direction of Cather’s pioneer stories. Alexandra Bergson of O Pioneers!,

Ántonia Shimerda and Jim Burden of My Ántonia, and Marian Forrester and Niel Herbert of A

Lost Lady all bear deep connections with prairie lands, each experiencing different degrees of

insulation and personal strength through their interactions with their worlds. The beginnings of these patterns are found in O Pioneers!, the first of Cather’s pioneer novels.

Cather’s closer narrative tie to nature in O Pioneers! led her to assert that her book lacked a definite form, just as the Nebraska prairie itself possessed an amorphous quality (Sergeant 97).

Basing the structure of her story on the quality of the landscape hints at the foundational role nature plays in the story, whether Cather had initially planned to model the novel’s form after the land or if the story took on such a shape as she developed it. Like the majority of Cather’s works, the basis of O Pioneers! rests upon the author’s personal experiences, taking place in a fictionalized Webster County, Nebraska, where she spent much of her childhood and adolescence on the Divide and later in the town of Red Cloud (Woodress 240).

Cather’s narrative structure in O Pioneers! plays on the fundamental divide between space and place. In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan defines space as an area of “no fixed pattern of established human meaning,” but instead a “blank slate on which meaning may be imposed” (54). Place, in contrast, is an “enclosed and humanized space” to Tuan, and perceiving a landscape as a place infuses it with meaning and resonance (54).

Tuan’s arguments appear in a wide range of scholarship on literary geography. Based on Tuan’s discussion of the separation between the two terms, Karen K. Ramirez studies O Pioneers! in terms of spatial mapping. Ramirez reveals these two perceptions of landscape at work in

Cather’s narrative style throughout O Pioneers!, characterizing them as separate but related mappings. During the era in which the story is set, plat map cartography was a popular means of mapping the Great Plains, and this type of mapping largely espoused a place-oriented view of the world by displaying human-made structures and markings largely surrounded by vast blankness representing lands unsettled by pioneers (Ramirez 99). Despite popular place-centered notions

demonstrated by plat maps, Cather does not privilege one mapping over another in O Pioneers!, as she presents space and place narratives in balance with one another and reveals positive, negative, and neutral factors in both mappings (Ramirez 103). Patrick K. Dooley makes similar observations to Ramirez in noting Cather’s “divided alliance” between humanity and nature (65).

He writes that O Pioneers! contains a “dialogue” between Cather’s two “land ethics” that center around humanity and the natural world (65). The interpretive inclusivity of this dialogue extends beyond the example of space and place land ethics. Ramirez finds the best example of this dialogue in Alexandra, whose “gradual awareness of both an intimate closeness to the land and an agricultural productivity drawn from the land” blends the ethics of space and place (110). As a character, Alexandra demonstrates composite viewpoints. Ramirez’s observations on the character’s land ethics as both emotionally intimate and economic can be connected back to

Kolodny’s feminine and masculine visions of the New World, both of which apply to

Alexandra’s efforts. One clear strength of Cather’s novels is their tendency to combine dualistic themes, such as past and present, death and transcendence, and dread and wonder. In this way,

Cather presents a view of the world that is much more complete than if she had focused on only one side of her stories’ binary themes.

The related findings of Ramirez and Dooley address the foundational spatial function of the setting of O Pioneers! The work of the pioneer is to convert space into place; pioneers create habitable sites, and, as Thea Krongborg in The Song of the Lark experiences during childhood, they leave behind lasting signs of their efforts. Still, Cather’s vision of pioneer life in O

Pioneers! is not a conversion of Tuan’s idea of space to his idea of place but an amalgamation of the two. Within the context of Alexandra and her family, Cather demonstrates the interaction between human-centered land ethics and untouched, unbounded stretches of land. Alexandra’s

imaginative vision and tenacity in creating a place combine with the landscape’s own features and capacity to stand as its own unique space. Much of the respect Cather displays for the land through both her narratorial persona and Alexandra’s perspective is developed through careful, poignant personification. In a way, landscapes are never just places in Cather’s novels. They are not blank, meaningless stretches of wilderness. The collective gaze of her characters instantaneously fuses space and place, imbuing the outer world with meaningful emotional resonance and presenting a vision of the American midwest and southwest that combines the complex land ethics of wild lands and settled lands.

Before Cather explores Alexandra’s subtle relationship with her home landscape, she presents the harrowing difficulty the character’s father faced when trying to cultivate his small stretch of the Great Plains. Soon before his death, Alexandra’s father had little faith in people’s efforts to “make any mark” on the Nebraska plains (Cather, O Pioneers 5). To him, the land had a mind of its own, and he concluded that it “wanted to be left alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness” (6). This type of characterization pervades the first section of the book, “The Wild Land.” The land is a temperamental force, an “enigma” (8) upon which human efforts were often lost or abandoned.

During three years of drought early in the book, before the Bergsons’ success, the land makes its

“last struggle” against “the encroaching plowshare” (18). This is the land that Alexandra promises never to lose, the land in which she puts her complete faith. The land is a fierce adversary, but to Alexandra, attempting to cultivate it becomes the most rewarding venture she and her family could have possibly taken. In her usual fashion of fusing binary ideas, Cather portrays the land and the pioneers as battling for dominance, all the while playing out a fruitful partnership between the two forces by the end of the novel, as Alexandra looks back on the

venture with lighthearted respect for the land. A true “winner” in the match is never really

revealed in Cather’s pioneering novels; one force never fully subdues the other, as pioneers

experience ups and downs in their ventures yet persist in their efforts often to great success, and

landscapes gradually change yet retain their native force in the lives of Cather’s characters. What

began as a battle between pioneers and the land in O Pioneers! becomes a dynamic, lifelong set

of cyclical interactions.

When these interactions yield success for the Bergson family, Alexandra looks to the character of the landscape itself to fully express her thoughts. Despite the arduous work of farming on the plains, which Cather stresses in the first three of the book’s five sections,

Alexandra credits the land itself with her family’s success (Laird 244). Her language full of the personification that often characterizes Cather’s landscapes, she states, “The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich just from standing still” (Cather, O Pioneers! 45).

Realistically, Alexandra’s claims are steeply humble, yet her words underscore the depth of her trust in the land. Her personal understanding of the landscape is founded upon a sense of honor for its original nature as a space, and within that nature, she believes the land held the innate ability to become the place her family needed. All the land needed was the touch of humanity to draw out its bounty. Her belief, undoubtedly combined with her bravery and creativity along with assistance from those around her, has outlasted the tenuous seasons on the plains, and her humility reveals the benevolent capacity of the land to not only yield to human activity but also

to enrich it. In this way, the land ethics of space and place weave together to create a more

complete picture of reality and result in a successful pioneering venture for the Bergson family.

With the amalgamation of space and place continually at play, Cather builds upon the

theme of youth in O Pioneers! in a way that is deeply connected to her landscapes. From the very outset of O Pioneers!, introduced by Cather’s poem “Prairie Spring,” the theme of youth stands as an indispensable force that guides the events and outcomes of the story. Randall writes that the story contains two guiding themes: land and youth (65). With Randall’s observation as a basic foundation, it becomes clear that land and youth are not just separate themes that function within the story, but that they interact as a pair of central ideas. Throughout the story, the two themes align and diverge at key moments in the development of the main characters. Cather’s poem “Prairie Spring,” which precedes later editions of O Pioneers!, pits these themes against one another. The landscape lays in solemn eternity, harsh in its vastness, while youth appears in all its dynamic beauty, “singing and singing, / Out of the lips of silence / Out of the earthly dusk”

(Cather, April Twilights 207-08). With what is very likely a nod to Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle

Endlessly Rocking,” (an apt pairing given that the title O Pioneers! is borrowed from Whitman), this poem elevates the interaction between pioneer and landscape to a somewhat mythical level, and it speaks to the themes of land and youth in O Pioneers!. Youth drives a new era of human- land interaction for both the Bergson family and the greater pioneering population, and

Alexandra acts as the frontwoman of this shift in Cather’s exploration of pioneer life within this book.

Cather demonstrates youth in two contrasting ways across the lives of three characters:

Alexandra Bergson, Emil Bergson, and Marie Shabata. Alexandra’s youth is characterized by great perseverance and imagination, while Emil, her brother, and Marie’s youth are characterized by restlessness and dissatisfaction, leading to the emergence of reckless passion. Alexandra’s efforts in youth succeed through steady growth and even-headed, familial relationships, while

Emil and Marie’s youthful energy is quashed under social constraints, their passion provoking

their murders at the hands of Marie’s husband. In response to Cather’s presentation of such

different outcomes of youthful energy, Randall writes that Cather condemns “spontaneity in the

relation between the sexes” (95). The suddenness and passion of Marie and Emil’s intimate

relationship proves unsustainable. Whatever her thought process behind the tragedy in O

Pioneers!, Cather bases financial success and familial harmony on commitment to the landscape,

not on passionate and intimate human relationships. The very taming of the land from a wild, temperamental force to a stable, ordered landscape mirrors the presentation of Alexandra’s even- headed lifestyle as favorable in comparison to the passionate and problematic relationship between Marie and Emil.

The danger of passion and instability is a theme that appears across multiple works by

Cather. In O Pioneers! these dangers appear in the guise of a temperamental, untamed landscape and human romance. The opposite of these--gradual, stable growth--appears in the union of people and land, a union which tames and curbs extremes in both parties involved. Especially in

O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, main characters often gain a final sense of stability in their

relationship to the landscape, the locus of moral meaning and the place to which they always

return even after suffering great personal sorrows. Even if their return is temporary, such as in

the case of Jim Burden from My Ántonia, they come to a mental resting point in the country, a

place strewn with memories and sentiment. Even so, Cather does not present settlement and

land-based living as a solution for all her characters. Lingering at home, as opposed to travelling

away and moving forward in life, proves fatal for Emil and Marie, and the same fate awaits Lucy

in Cather’s later novel Lucy Gayheart. Joseph R. Urgo points out the parallel between the

murdered lovers, Emil and Marie, and the migratory ducks that return to the Divide only to be

hunted; lingering in one place “past the moment when it is clearly time to move” ends in tragedy

(Urgo 51).

In Willa Cather and the Myth of American Mirgration, Urgo offers the idea that “the

central theme, the overarching myth, the single experience, that defines American culture at its

core is migration: unrelenting, incessant, and psychic mobility across spatial, historical, and

imaginative places of existence” (5). Urgo situates Cather’s work within this “myth,” writing that

she embraces mobility and “displacement” in her imaginative work (5). This argument can apply

to many of Cather’s books, the six novels in this study included. O Pioneers! marks the clearest

starting point of such themes as movement and displacement in her works. Instead of centering

strictly on homemaking or rootedness, both of which are essential to Cather’s prairie trilogy,

Urgo finds that Cather uses specific places as sites of travel and transformation, whether that

transformation is expressed in a changed landscape or a character’s inner change. Such a pattern

is based on the essential connection between the perspective of a character and the traits of a

landscape; in most cases, a character’s perspective reveals those traits, and those traits interact

with that character’s mindset. Nowhere is this clearer in O Pioneers! than in the connection

between Alexandra as a settler and the landscape of her homestead. In addition, spatial motion

often accompanies changes in perspectives, a pattern clearest in Cather’s traveling characters.

Cather’s main characters often come in pairs, one being a settler figure and the other a

wanderer figure, such as Alexandra Bergson and Carl Lindstrum from O Pioneers!, Ántonia

Shimerda and Jim Burden from My Ántonia, and Professor Godfrey St. Peter and Tom Outland

from The Professor’s House (Urgo 57). Subsequently, the degree to which each character fits his or her role, whether settler or wanderer, shapes the course of his or her life. The roles of settler and wanderer are naturally joined to the themes of rootedness and homelessness, themes that

appear in tandem throughout O Pioneers! (Urgo 45). Urgo refers to the rift between rootedness

and homelessness as the “Catherian ‘Great Divide,’” illustrated most clearly in Alexandra and

Carl, and through their final union, “the great American solution of rooted homelessness” is

achieved (48). In this way, Alexandra's and Carl’s differing experiences coalesce in one

household and complete one another. The roles of wanderer and settler do not often converge

within any given character, but they combine and enrich one another through the interactions of paired characters, who are nearly always intimate, lifelong friends. At the basis of these two identities is landscape, a controlling factor that forms a foundation for major themes across the entire story.

Alexandra and Carl as pioneer and wanderer gaze upon the land somewhat differently, yet their views have a shared sense of deep respect for the plains. From Carl’s perspective,

Nebraska possesses wild beauty and enticing power, despite the gravity of its challenges. Carl became aware of something “strong and young and wild” coming from the landscape on some days during his time there (Cather, O Pioneers! 19). Carl and Alexandra are able to see past the silent, somber vastness of the land that the narrator often communicates and that Cather represents in “Prairie Spring.” Carl’s response is more aligned to awe while Alexandra applies personal faith to the land’s capacity. Such responses may bring to mind two ways that religious people view God. Whether or not Cather intended such a connotation, the divide between these attitudes is much like the divide between a fine artist and a pioneer, two roles that demand perceptiveness, vision, and perseverance--two roles that Cather seems to find more alike than different and upon which she bases a large portion of her creative work. The beginning of the

Bergsons’ success comes when Alexandra’s perception of her family’s land is gradually wrought into an ironclad sense of faith, leading her to fully commit herself to its cultivation.

Cather highlights the moment of Alexandra’s instantaneous connection with the land, elevating this connection to an almost mythical level. She writes, “For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her” (25). The heroic tradition Hermione Lee finds within

Cather’s singular female pioneers comes through clearly in passages such as this one. Still, within these words rests an underlying rejection of the validity of Native Americans’ rich, complex activities and perceptions involving the landscape. Critics often point out Cather’s lack of regard for Native Americans, finding it a problematic restraint upon the social equity and reality of her narratives. While Cather’s book Death Comes for the Archbishop includes more palpable signs of Native American presence, the main body of her work either completely disregards Native American settlement or compresses its existence into relics of the past experienced and interpreted--most often with transformative reverence, on a somewhat positive note--by her non-native characters.

With this important limitation granted, Alexandra’s gaze acts as a catalyst for the dawn of a new era involving the American pioneer’s tie to the landscape. Cather addresses the forward motion of this development when she writes, “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman” (25). Alexandra stands at a decisive junction in American history. With such a universal description, her actions represent the total efforts of plains development by immigrant pioneers, touching on the evolution of the nation as a whole through the efforts of people like

Alexandra. As Rosowski writes, “Cather's greatness begins with this fact, with her ability to persuade us to look again at a region still generally considered flat, barren, and monotonous, and,

in doing so, to see it differently” (142). Alexandra’s capacity to do just that secures the subsequent success of her family and represents the capacity of the nation as a whole.

Even though Cather largely presents Alexandra’s pioneer lifestyle positively, Alexandra

expresses some regret over her choice to devote herself to developing her family’s land. Carl’s

return after a long absence prompts her to assert that she would rather have the freedom he did

than continue possessing her land. Carl assures Alexandra that her identity as an individual is

preserved on the plains, citing the depersonalization of city life (Cather, O Pioneers! 47), and by

the end of the book, his perception of Alexandra’s identity melds her with the land, as he says,

“You belong to the land...as you have always said. Now more than ever” (122). After working

through the tragedy of Emil and Marie’s deaths, Alexandra challenges her former sentiment

about her desire for freedom, saying, “There is great peace here, Carl, and freedom” (121). By

the end of the story, she understands the mental and moral benefits that she has reaped from the

land. A life like Alexandra’s is characterized by slow, stable growth that overall lacks sudden,

life-changing highs or lows. Cather’s presentation of her in relation to the people in her life,

especially Emil and Carl, underscores this stability.

A sense of belonging and understanding pervades Alexandra’s relationship with the land

throughout the story. This relationship is based on a sense of symbiotic harmony and gain. To

Alexandra, the land seems to have reached a point of maturity and balance during her time with

it, becoming a better version of its “younger” self, and the Bergson family reaps life-altering

compensation from the land’s change. The shaky beginnings of the Bergson family’s relationship

with the prairie echoes the sentiments of early American writers who highlighted various

struggles against the whims of an unfamiliar landscape. Kolodny cites Hannah Robbins Gilman

as a female voice from the early decades of the nineteenth century to demonstrate the shift from

trouble to prosperity in the New World. Referring to the Ohio frontier, Hannah Robbins Gilman states that she was “tak[ing] up [her] abode in a howling wilderness,” fearing the wildlife and the presence of Native Americans (Kolodny 35). However, in 1823, she reports that her life was completely changed: “We were blest with children….Our substance increased--to whatever we turned our hand, we were prospered” (35). No longer did Gilman use fearful images to describe the landscape; she instead referred to the land as her “beloved home” (35), and the total effect of her words hints that her family’s prosperity largely rested on the eventual taming of the landscape. The journey Alexandra and her family undertook from suffering to prosperity is repeated time and again in the history of American settlers and pioneers. The general shift toward development and community in these stories transforms the affective potential of the landscape. When the land becomes a hub of comfort and success, those who benefit from it, like the fictional Bergson family and Hannah Robbins Gilman and her family, forge a bond with it.

Cather easily could have told an equally realistic story of suffering and failure, dooming the efforts of the Bergson family on the frontier and forcing them to abandon their homestead. By demonstrating their good fortune with the land in contrast with their darkest moment, arising from a single passionate interaction between Emil and Marie, Cather takes creative stock of her home country and allows it to stand as a shining example of human possibility during the age of

American pioneers.

The magnitude of such possibility certainly affected the perceptions of farming communities in the prairie lands. Yi-Fu Tuan examines the mentality of Great Plains farmers spanning the years of Cather’s creative interest and beyond in Topophilia: Study of

Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. He writes that small farming families benefited from land ownership, and that a farmer “could nurse a pious attitude toward the land that

supported him and that was his sole security. The successful proprietor-farmer took possessive pride in his estate, in the transformation of nature to a fruitful world of his own design” (Tuan

97). Alexandra’s relationship with her farmland somewhat follows Tuan’s assessment, yet the fact that Alexandra diverges from this type of attitude adds more to the discussion of Cather’s landscapes. The character’s faithful regard for the possibilities of the landscape can be understood as pious, but her outlook expresses something closer to reverence, even awe, for the natural world both within the boundaries of her property and stretching beyond the horizon. She transforms the land into a fruitful garden, but her attitude is not at all prideful; instead, she credits the land itself for becoming stable and fruitful. In terms of Kolodny’s masculine and feminine fantasies of the New World, Alexandra remains between each fantasy, possessing the land and using it for profit without much overt sentimentality, all the while humbly owing her success to the land and joining her home with the “garden” of her family’s land. Despite her success as a leading pioneer, Alexandra must contend with the constraints of gender norms which intensify as the Bergsons’ economic outlook improves and the land becomes more responsive to their efforts (Laird 246).

Near the end of O Pioneers!, Alexandra concludes, “We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while” (122). Through this statement, Cather captures both the power of human influence on the land and the ephemerality of individuals. Instead of stressing the concept of possessing and using the land, Alexandra frames the relationship between landowners and land in terms of genuine emotional connection. From the very start of the book, Cather describes the natural spaces and vistas in terms of permanence while the settlements and houses are described in terms of transition (Rosowski 144). While the Bergsons’ farm later becomes a settled entity, the contrast

between the landscape’s permanence and humanity’s ephemerality persists yet evolves into

images of emotion and, ultimately, relationship. Cather’s narratorial voice echoes this level of

relationship in the final words of the book: “Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts

like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn,

in the shining eyes of youth” (122). Here resides a sense of immortality, in that the land

metaphorically offers the goodness of those buried within it through its crops and support of

subsequent generations. These final words also hint that human-land relationships, if

harmonious, continue across generations in a potentially never-ending cycle.

This cycle of life and death continually maneuvers between the concepts of permanence and change. According to Jackson, an ideal landscape is “defined not as a static utopia dedicated to ecological or social or religious principles, but as an environment where permanence and change have struck a balance” (Discovering 148). For the major part of Alexandra’s adult life, the prairie acts as an ideal landscape. Cather’s vision of the Nebraska plains, exemplified in the ending of O Pioneers!, reveals a sense of permanence in the physicality of the landscape, but change in both the people who own it over the years and in the “mood” of that landscape. Over the course of the story, the land moves from temperamental to tame under the Bergsons’ care by means of Alexandra’s visionary faith, a transformation from constant change to relative permanence in that the Bergsons are able to become accustomed to it to the point of gleaning great success from its cultivation. Despite the careful balance between permanence and change that underlies the Bergsons’ success, Cather certainly does not portray the Nebraska plains--or

any American landscape in her works--as an ideal landscape. The artistic and even romantic

musings that sometimes crop up in the minds of Cather’s characters do not undermine the

realism that pervades the author’s landscapes. The dangers of death and failure provide a

counterbalance to the soaring revelations her characters have in their observations of and interactions with the landscape and nature. Again and again, Cather fuses overarching binary ideas to create a more balanced reality, tracing the course of life-changing transformations brought on by her characters’ deep connections with the landscape.

MY ÁNTONIA

Perhaps even more than in O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark (the first two installments of Cather’s prairie trilogy), nature and landscapes in My Ántonia have an undeniable power that pervades the course of the story and underscores the identities of characters. This canonical book is a resounding confirmation of the central roles landscapes and nature play in

Cather’s stories. Due to the scope of this novel and the subtlety of its ideas, scholarly approaches vary widely. Catherine D. Holmes taps into the complex ideas built throughout the story by identifying dueling binaries hinted at in the framing narrative. Before the main story of My

Ántonia begins, the unnamed narrator rides a train westward from her home in New York City.

During her journey, she crosses paths with Jim Burden, a childhood friend, and it is through his memories that the story is told. Holmes begins by pointing out the notable difference between the speeding motion of the train and the static images of the landscape it passes through, drawing out a wide selection of binary themes that Cather later explores in the story.

In the image of the train traversing the static landscape, Cather manages to convey

this clash of worlds: the interior and the exterior, the real and the imaginary, the

moving and the still, the free and the determined, the past and the present, the lost

and the found, the old and the new. The particular texture of My Ántonia comes

from the freight of associations, often contradictory, that Cather allows the clash

of worlds to bear. (Holmes 337)

Framing an extensive study on binary ideas in Cather’s works would yield rich and wide-

ranging results, but homing in on the role of landscape calls for a more spatial approach that can

specifically reflect the tremendous role landscapes and nature play in My Ántonia. In an

overarching, metaphorical sense, Cather’s landscapes in this final installment of the prairie

trilogy extend in every direction, having an impact upon the characters as they grow and move

forward with their lives, as they reach backward into their memories, as they are brought low by

the harshness of life and immediacy of death, and as they reach high for some sense of spiritual

transcendence. The total effect of these impacts is one of fundamental transformation in the lives

of Cather’s central characters. In regard to the spatial frameworks embedded in the story, Wilhite

notes the collision of regions in My Ántonia, as “Bohemia, Southern, Midwestern, and even

quasi-mystical landscapes coexist within the narrative as shifting sites of alienation and identification for Jim and Ántonia” (270). The magnitude of regional meaning throughout the book is suffused in the characters’ lives as they grow and change, with each region composing a

part of their identities.

While the preceding novel in the prairie trilogy, The Song of the Lark, stands as a

kunstlerroman, My Ántonia is largely considered a bildungsroman by Cather scholars (Dillman

236). Despite not being an artist story in my mode of categorization, My Ántonia demonstrates

one of Cather’s most abiding creative approaches: setting in motion the growth and development

of one or more characters who most often possess some measure of artistic sensibility and/or

sensitivity. In this book especially, landscapes and nature forward this development. Nearly

every aspect of Jim Burden's and Ántonia Shimerda’s childhoods, spent as members of farming

families on the Nebraska prairie, is closely linked with the landscape. With the death of his

parents fresh on his mind, Jim first encounters the landscape of his new home on the prairie with

a feeling of profound unfamiliarity, recalling through hindsight how he “had the feeling that the

world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction”

(Cather, Ántonia 12). He even contemplates the leveling effect the landscape had on his

perception of his own existence, thinking, “Between the earth and the sky I felt erased, blotted

out” (13). The terror of an orphaned child torn from his home lies within Jim’s recollection, but

these troubling feelings prove temporary as he moves forward in his new life. Jim’s reaction is a

direct adaptation of Cather’s own feelings when she and her family moved from Virginia to

Nebraska, as she recalls how the move was “a kind of erasure of personality” (Lee 30). Like Jim,

however, Cather soon adjusted to her new life. As Ross puts it, “erasure permitted self-

invention,” first for Cather and later for her fictional counterpart (“A Walk”).

Jim’s perspectives control the story, so Ántonia’s perspectives are largely hidden from readers, but given that she too was uprooted from her home, it is not a stretch to assume she harbored similarly upsetting feelings toward the new land. Jim and Ántonia are forced to exchange familiar landscapes for an unfamiliar one; Jim gave up his mountainous, pastoral home in Virginia, and Ántonia gave up her home across the world in Bohemia, a place from which she draws vivid memories, as she later states “My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you” (181). The drastic uprooting of the children’s lives, although difficult, sets each of them on a new course of development. Jim seems to foreshadow their growth when he thinks, “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made” (12). Here again, Jim’s words harbor his

discomfort, but in a greater sense, the material of the children’s lives has been transported to the

blank slate of the prairie, and they must build themselves anew.

The early years of Jim and Ántonia’s lives on the prairie are accompanied by images of a

landscape in motion. Early in the novel, on a September morning spent outdoors with his

grandmother, Jim muses, “More than anything else I felt the motion in the landscape; in the

fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of

loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping…” (Cather,

Ántonia 18). Jim’s perception of the grass points to great force and motion beneath the surface of

the land, and while he connects this energy to a physical image of buffalo herds, the symbolic

associations of a land in motion persist. The Nebraska prairie--indeed the West itself--thrums

with the energy of wildness and opportunity. The swaying motion of the grass, a simple

occurrence that Jim notices on multiple occasions as he grows up, introduces the various images of motion related to the prairie, from these small beginnings of Jim moving across the country and growing accustomed to frontier living to the gradual development of the countryside into a

prosperous farming community. Dillman takes note of these images and links them to the

forward motion of the characters’ development, writing, “There is no stasis, no inertia. Events

happen, characters develop and the countryside develops” (238). For Jim, the motion of the

country is connected to the everyday necessities of maintaining a farm, as he joyously embraces

the demands of a life in motion by assisting his family and friends with agricultural tasks.

Ántonia’s family, however, struggles with the demands of farming, given the numerous

disadvantages brought on by their immigration from Bohemia, including their limited access to

fertile land and their differing language. Ántonia’s sorrows linger long past her childhood;

beyond just the trials of poverty, her father’s suicide and her abandonment by Donovan weigh

down her opportunities for growth. By the end of the novel, however, Ántonia has returned to the

prairie and established an active, thriving family. Despite her struggles, Cooney writes that “In

transforming the once-foreign land into something familiar, Ántonia transformed herself from an

immigrant girl to a pioneer woman” (142-43). Even though the stability Ántonia finds in family life on the prairie allows her to transcend the complications and eventual heartbreak she faced as a young adult, Cather certainly does not present Ántonia’s life at the end of the story as a perfectly clear and happy ending. Especially from Jim’s perspective, the ending is clouded with ambiguity and sombre weighings of the past and present. The Ántonia readers have come to know is still Jim’s vision of her, from childhood to adulthood, and her transformation at the close of Jim’s recollected story remains an impression of her from a point of view not her own. Even so, what remains unmistakable is the prairie land’s powerful sway over the course of Ántonia’s life in both her childhood and adulthood.

Near the end of the novel, the same landscapes Jim once referred to as raw material have shifted from pastures to a thriving civilization of wheat and cornfields, and sod dwellings have been largely replaced by wooden homes. Jim describes the developing country with awe and admiration, as Cather writes, “The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea” (Cather, Ántonia 229).

Jim does not begrudge any of the changes made to the land of his youth; he welcomes the expansion of humankind’s reach and sees the dramatic changes as the fair and fruitful result of the pioneers’ skillful work and staunch endurance. Just as Cather aligns her developing characters to the landscape, Jim himself comments on the way the development of the land can

mirror human progress, just as the prairie—made dynamic by the images of motion Jim

describes and its role in the expansion of American civilization—accompanies and even reflects

the growth of Jim and Ántonia from childhood to adulthood. As Thacker suggests, landscapes

are “symbiotically connected to characters” and instrumental in “reveal[ing] the values,

concerns, and life struggles of those characters connected to them” (198). Ántonia, like the bright

red grasses that are rooted yet moving, stays close to a landscape she ultimately makes her own

by returning to the prairie after spending a portion of her life in the town of Black Hawk. In the

spirit of American exploration, Jim travels beyond the lands of his childhood. Still, after visiting

Ántonia, Jim seems to find one of the deepest manifestations of meaning in his life, all based on

his connection to the land and to Ántonia, rooted in his childhood home on the prairie and sealed

away in the past.

Along with the forward motion of character development, the impact of landscape in My

Ántonia is closely tied to memory. Because My Ántonia includes the span of Jim's and Ántonia’s

lives from adolescence to adulthood, memory plays an important part in Jim’s narrative, which is

presented as a recollection in and of itself. The many positive aspects of Jim’s childhood on the

prairie are brought into greater relief when he and Ántonia immerse themselves in town life at

Black Hawk. Even when years have passed and Jim returns to Black Hawk, he is underwhelmed by the trip and only manages to pick up on “the curious depression that hangs over little towns” until he returns to the land of his childhood, still rife with “the long red grass of early times,” and clears away his thoughts of the town until he is able to declare, “My mind was full of pleasant things” (Cather, Ántonia 272). The years Jim has spent away from the Nebraska prairie have done little to dampen the joy attached to the landscape through his childhood memories. Of course, Jim’s connection to the prairie did not start out positively, and he does not shy away from

the memory of his arrival and the immediacy of it in his mind, thinking, “This was the road over

which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk…. I had only to

close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that

obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch

them with my hand” (273). As Jim recounts the power of that experience, he ponders the very

road beneath his feet, imbuing it with significance by referring to it as “the road of Destiny” that

set his and Ántonia’s lives in motion (273). That prairie road closed the complete circle of Jim’s

arrival, absence, and return. The capacity for the landscape to contain great meaning is magnified

through the lens of Jim’s memory. Hindsight imbues both the town and the prairie with

emotional significance that is collected, reconstructed, and crystallized in Jim’s mind. Cooney

aptly captures the link between landscape and memory, writing, “In My Ántonia, the land is also

a mediator between the present and the past, as though all the organic and inorganic features of a

place preserve and prompt a person’s memory…. The details—shapes, colors, smells—of one’s environment can be a catalyst for dense memory” (143-44). For Jim, the prairie is a physical reality closely tied to his past experiences and laced with complex emotions. In his perception, the landscape maintains the meaningful emotions of “the precious, incommunicable past,” from the leveling effect of the land on his very identity when he arrived to the deep connection he felt with the panorama of prairie life during his youth (My Ántonia, 273). Jim conjures up memories of the places and people that “stood out strengthened and simplified,” reminding him of “the image of the plough against the sun” (198). Recalling the plough is an imagistic approach he takes in reconstructing the past. Whether through simple images or extended musings on nature,

Jim continually draws on the landscape of his youth to explore and evaluate his fondest memories of both people and places.

With all these notions of growth and nostalgia acknowledged, it is important to note that

Cather clearly presents harshness and danger indivisibly linked to the landscapes in My Ántonia.

Alongside the forward motion of growth and the backwards glance of memory exists the

grounding force of death. Just as Cather can be quick to portray nature as a protagonist in some

aspects of her books, she also often presents nature as an antagonist, a tendency that is vividly

portrayed in My Ántonia (Forbes 106). Although life on the Nebraska prairie in My Ántonia is

often a source of joy and fulfillment for Jim on an emotional and even spiritual level, he and

Ántonia are made aware of danger and death in a series of both first-hand and second-hand

experiences. Looking back on his arrival on the prairie, Jim remembers feeling as if he had left

the spirits of his parents behind in Virginia, and he recalls, “I did not say my prayers that night:

here, I felt, what would be would be” (My Ántonia, 13). With this deterministic frame of mind,

Jim manages to grimly underscore the more harrowing aspects of prairie life. Often there is no room for error in the day-to-day lives of those who rely on the land for survival, and even with

the necessary skills and resources, life itself still can be a gamble. Thanks to his grandparents’

support, one of the only major dangers Jim personally experiences is an enormous rattlesnake he

comes across when exploring the prairie dog burrows with Ántonia. After successfully killing it,

Jim notes how it “seemed like the ancient eldest Evil” (42), no doubt drawing parallels between

the snake and the serpent in Eden, confirming the connection between this scene and the

moments of Edenic beauty Jim and Ántonia share in the garden and on the prairie during their

childhood. Jim’s comment also serves to voice the ever-present reality of nature’s hazards

opposing humankind’s well-being. Jim celebrates his victory and sees it as a coming-of-age

moment, yet he does not fail to realize his luck when he states, “Subsequent experiences with

rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter was fortunate in circumstance…. So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance” (43).

In a way, “the game” was fixed in Jim’s favor in a much more overarching fashion. Jim and Ántonia may have shared the same basic geography during their childhood, but Jim has a clear economic and social advantage. Although his grandparents were not wealthy, they owned a well-established farm and a stable home and had the advantage of fluency in English. Entering

America without the advantage of speaking English, the Shimerdas, an immigrant family based on real people Cather knew well in her youth (Lee 34), suffer further with poor farmland and scant resources, their struggles depicted in images such as their ruined windmill (My Ántonia,

23). The most gruesome event of Jim’s childhood on the prairie is Ántonia’s father’s suicide, a tragedy linked to the Shimerda family’s struggle as poor immigrants in an unfamiliar and unforgiving landscape. The grisly details of Mr. Shimerda’s death, coupled with the harshness of the blizzard that renders the landscape impassable at that time, form the dark, naturalistic heart of the prairie narrative portion of the story. Mr. Shimerda is buried at what later becomes a crossroads, and Cather presents a bittersweet parting image of his grave, as Jim thinks, “The grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper” (94). Dillman writes that Mr. Shimerda’s grave is situated in a “land of nexus” among the roads, granted mercy by the road-makers’ decision to let the grave remain untouched (232-

33). Jim’s thoughts reconstruct the positive aspects of the landscape, since he presents the gravesite as both an idyllic spot between dirt roads that stretch into the distance like calm rivers and as a continually acknowledged testament to Mr. Shimerda himself.

Another instance of death in My Ántonia is the suicide of the man known only as the

“tramp.” As with Mr. Shimerda’s suicide, Ántonia experiences this horrific event in a much more direct way than Jim. The tramp comes to the Iverson’s farm and assists Ántonia as she workes with a thresher, and after a few minutes, he waves to Ántonia and jumpes into the machine (My Ántonia, 139). She reports that the tramp was carrying a penknife, a wishbone, and some poetry, which the character Frances identifies as “The Old Oaken Bucket” (140). Dillman closely examines these details, writing, “The wish-bone suggests that [the tramp] was down on his luck and ‘The Old Oaken Bucket’ suggests that he may have longed for the pastoral rural paradise depicted in that song and poem” (234). Taking Dillman’s conclusions into account, the tramp represents a worst-case scenario of prairie life. His suicide, along with Mr. Shimerda’s, likely has much to do with economic difficulty and the thwarted desire for a more ideal landscape. Such deep longing for stability and comfort is smothered quickly and severely in a landscape as vast, volatile, and sparsely-populated as the Nebraska prairie during the time at which Cather set the story. All in all, the frontier life carried tremendous possibilities yet retained the potential to be violent and tragic (Dillman 238).

Jim becomes acquainted with the harshness of life more directly during his time in the town of Black Hawk. The brand of harshness he experiences is one that does not arise from the prairie landscape but one that stands as an aberration from it. The center of Jim’s discontented views on town life is made apparent in one of his silent monologues:

On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling

at the little, sleeping houses on either side….Yet for all their frailness, how much

jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life

that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to

save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of

gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny…. The

growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that

the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. (My Ántonia 168)

Some of the worst aspects of town life that Jim identifies, such as envy and evasiveness, do appear, albeit in a different permutation, in the relationship between Jim’s and Ántonia’s families. When Jim asks Ántonia why she acts like her brother Ambrosch so often rather than being her “nice” self, she ultimately answers, “Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us” (111). The tyranny of town culture seems separate in Jim’s mind from the tyranny the

Shimerdas lived under as poor, rural immigrants, pushed to the envy and evasions Jim recognizes and despises in Black Hawk. The major difference that remains between town life and rural life lies in the landscape. Although Jim’s social critiques are not perfect, nor do they completely set up the dualism of town and rural lifestyles, his emotion-laden perspectives on the bleakness of the town and the awe-inspiring beauty of the open prairie are quite telling. For example, Jim often praises the play of light upon the colors of the countryside, describing the fruitful garden, the range of unique bugs, the fiery redness of the grasses during sunsets, and much more. In town, Jim’s attention is pulled away from the prairie and set upon the interactions of the residents, which he vividly characterizes in the above mentioned monologue. One of Jim’s few descriptions of nature’s contact with the town is eminently bleak, as he notes how the “pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify” the scene at all, and that the wind swept through “with a kind of bitter song” that suggested all of summer’s beauty was a lie (136). In this way, the contrast between the descriptions of natural features greatly add to Jim’s critiques of town culture and display the harshness of life lived apart from natural landscapes.

Although harshness and death are inherent in the landscapes and locations of My Ántonia,

Cather typically favors an emphasis on the life-giving aspects of the natural world, especially in this book. At the very height of the characters’ interactions with the land is often a sense of transcendence or spiritual imminence. Cooney quotes Cather when she writes that an artist

“should be able to lift himself into the clear firmament of creation where the world is not. He should be among men but not of them, in the world but not of the world” (142). Cather’s words on the artist echo through these stories, reflecting the power of artistic elevation within the transcendent experiences of her characters. Looking back on his childhood, Jim recognizes the stirrings of a mystical feeling that arose in him when he interacted with the prairie. Early in the prairie section of Jim’s narrative when he is lingering in his grandparents’ garden, he recalls the following feeling: “I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like this when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep” (Cather, Ántonia 20). This passage is a stand-out moment across all of

Cather’s works. Cooney points out that the prairie “serves as a conciliator between the material self and the spiritual self” (142), and that the garden acted as a “mediator” that “prompted Jim’s early epiphany that all things are interconnected” (143). The physical and mystical are bridged by means of the landscape, and in this recollected moment, Jim mentally—even spiritually—

transcends the boundaries of the physical separations the vast majority of people typically

perceive and use to frame their lives.

Jim’s description of his epiphany bears a surprising connection to his feelings upon

arriving at his grandparents’ farm. Although Jim recalls feeling “erased” and “blotted out” when

he was relocated to the prairie (13), in the garden, he was “entirely happy” to feel as if he was

being “dissolved” into oneness with his surroundings (20). Both descriptions point to a loss of identity, but the latter elevates Jim’s loss of self by incorporating him into the beauty all around that brings him peace. Jim’s initial anxiety was driven by fear of the new and the unknown, causing him to hold fast to his threatened sense of self and refuse to accept the peace he later possesses. These two passages, very close to one another in the book, demonstrate the not-so- thin divide between existential dread and mystical awareness, a divide maintained by Jim’s shifted perspective and subsequent emotional change. The garden space acts as an introductory landscape for young Jim, leading him to open his perspective and reach a sense of oneness with the vast wildness of the prairie. The emotional force of the passage detailing Jim’s mystical connection with his surroundings in My Ántonia is further heightened by the fact that Willa

Cather’s tombstone bears the inscription “…that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” The mystical heart of Jim’s childhood on the prairie goes far beyond a moment of natural beauty or character development and reaches toward the sacred mystery of mankind’s spiritual connection to the natural world.

A LOST LADY

Cather’s A Lost Lady takes place in the small Western prairie town of Sweet Water, a place deeply connected to the Transcontinental Railroad. This book is often read as “an elegy for the pioneer past” that is dependant upon the specificities of its setting (Rosowski, “Paradoxes”

51). Still, as Rosowski writes, although Cather’s A Lost Lady may be deeply rooted in place and time, it takes on universal themes involving aesthetic ideals and bridging the past and present

(51). Landscapes and nature quickly become indispensable in both rooting the story in a key

moment of American history and in touching on the overarching themes developed by the characters’ lives.

At the beginning of the book, the two groups of residents of Sweet Water are

“homesteaders and hand-workers” there to labor for a living and “bankers and gentlemen” there to invest in the development of the West (Cather, Lost Lady 10). Despite the drastic divide between these groups, both of them rely on the railroad, an extensive construction with undeniable connections to the unique challenges and vast potential of the American landscape.

Captain Daniel Forrester--a member of the latter group of residents--possesses the wealth necessary to “humour his fancies” in terms of keeping his property fully natural and uncultivated

(11). Captain Forrester’s actions are one example of many that show the link between economics and land management; homesteaders and workers cultivate the land out of necessity while the wealthy can afford to keep their land in whatever state that pleases them aesthetically or emotionally. Wealth defines Marian Forrester’s character throughout the story as well, as her hospitality is enabled by it, and the landscape itself even appears in her descriptive representation. In a way, the character of Marian Forrester, the extensive advantages of wealth, and the landscapes comprising Sweet Water form a thematic triangle, given each member’s connected associations.

In terms of her overall character, Mrs. Forrester (referred to in this way throughout the story, perhaps in part to root her identity within her husband’s wealth) possesses ties to land and nature through her appearance and behaviors. Her husband recalls how she was never more

“captivating” than on the day she went into the meadow to gather flowers and was chased by a new bull in the pasture, an event that sent her running back to him and laughing (Cather, Lost

Lady 13). Niel, a main character who possesses most of the story’s internal perspectives, stresses

Mrs. Forrester’s bewitching charm and physical grace in his recollections such as her skin always having the “fragrant, crystalline whiteness of white lilacs” (35). Such a description simultaneously ties her character to nature while demonstrating the fact that she does not perform long hours of labor outdoors. Additionally, Mrs. Forrester “was an excitement that came and went with summer,” referring to her travelling schedule enabled by her wealth (31).

The landscape becomes a point of connection for Mrs. Forrester and the young boys introduced at the start of the story. Her generosity shines through as she brings treats for Niel and his friends during their gatherings outdoors. She meets them on their level of experience and understanding as she discusses her own activities outdoors, and they have a conversation about wading (18-19). The boys know she is a unique woman, and the Blum brothers are especially aware of her wealth as the strongest factor in making her stand out (19). This short episode demonstrates the triangle of wealth, landscape, and Mrs. Forrester’s character. Interaction with the landscape serves as a commonality between her and the boys, but her wealth separates her from most. Later in his youth, Niel contemplates seeing Mrs. Forrester for the first time and thinking she belonged to a world apart from the other residents of Sweet Water; upon thinking this, he “paused for a moment at the end of the lane to look up at the last skeleton poplar in the long row; just above its pointed tip hung the hollow, silver winter moon” (42). These sere images of winter seem to predict both the downfall of Sweet Water and the decline of Mrs. Forrester as a figure of grace and hospitality. Mrs. Forrester’s world apart from the majority turns out to be fragile and incompatible with changing times and unfortunate economic circumstances.

Even more important than Mrs. Forrester’s descriptive ties to the landscape are the connections her metaphorical loss have to the overall change that comes over Sweet Water and the greater pioneer venture, losses that are deeply tied to the landscape. At the most personal

level, Mrs. Forrester’s loss is framed by Niel’s perceptions of her and the delicate symbiosis of

her wealth and her captivating, natural charms. An episode most representative of the breakdown

of Niel’s admiration for Mrs. Forrester takes place on the morning Niel awakens at dawn to

watch the sunrise over the marsh. He is thrilled by the “limpid and joyous” state of living things,

finding “almost a religious purity about the fresh morning air, the tender sky, the grass and

flowers with the sheen of early dew upon them” (Cather, Lost Lady 84). Niel wonders why he

has not come to the marsh at dawn more often “to see the day before men and their activities

ha[d] spoiled it, while the morning is still unsullied, like a gift handed down from the heroic ages,” and he cuts a bouquet of roses “only half awake, in the defencelessness of utter beauty” for “a lovely lady” (85). These sensuous descriptions are aligned with Niel’s personal ecstacy at the beauty of the morning, a feeling he comes to focus upon Mrs. Forrester as he prepares the bouquet. Niel’s experience at the marsh leads him to offer her the roses, small representations of what he sees in her--aesthetic beauty, fragility, guiltlessness, and grace. Even so, the act of cutting the roses puts an imminent stop to their growth. Niel is highly responsive to the beauty of the roses, yet he becomes a “ravager” in this scene (Rosowski, “Paradoxes” 58). Still, it seems more reasonable to understand Niel’s actions as an effort to capture aesthetic beauty and communicate it, rather than ravage it. Here, again, the landscape is connected to Mrs. Forrester’s character, but just after these moments, Niel is crushed when he hears Frank Ellinger and Mrs.

Forrester in the Forrester home, further confirming their affair. Niel throws the roses into a mudhole, and suddenly he feels “he ha[d] lost one of the most beautiful things in his life”

(Cather, Lost Lady, 86). He “[can] never recapture” that “admiration and loyalty that ha[s] been like a bloom on his existence” (86). His idea of Mrs. Forrester, one that he has treasured since childhood, is suddenly struck down. With vitriol, Niel thinks, “lilies that fester smell far worse

than weeds,” (87), a stinging homage to Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 that contextualizes the pain

Niel feels; like a patron whose deeds break down a poet's devotion, Mrs. Forrester's affair tarnishes Niel's emotional and aesthetic appreciation of her.

Niel’s affective judgments aside, Mrs. Forrester’s wealth dissipates after a series of financial downturns, her isolation worsens, and she gradually takes to drinking while nursing her doomed affair with Frank Ellinger. These changes in her life are gradual and connected. Out of economic necessity, she begins spending winters at home in Sweet Water, something she hated doing, and her isolation is painfully highlighted during a flood that separates her home from the town, during which she discovers that Ellinger has married (Cather, Lost Lady 127-131). This episode drives her deeper into drinking, and by this time, she has “ceased to care about anything”

(139). Although Niel’s contempt for her seems unfair at times, his feelings toward her “loss” are synchronized with his feelings for the loss of Sweet Water’s success as a pioneer town and the dramatic changes coming to the very concept of pioneering and westward expansion. By studying Niel’s perception of Mrs. Forrester, Rosowski states that Niel progresses through three stages of development from the beginning of the story to the end (“Paradoxes”). These stages are youth (characterized by his complete adoration of Mrs. Forrester), adolescence and early adulthood (associated with his disillusionment toward Mrs. Forrester), and maturity (marked by his complete separation from Mrs. Forrester and his fond memories of her). In these first two phases, Niel judges Mrs. Forrester against “his abstract standard of aesthetic perfection,” but in his final phase, he matures past such judgments (Rosowski, “Paradoxes” 61). The shifting perceptions of the land and its opportunities progress alongside Niel’s changing perceptions of

Mrs. Forrester. In both cases, he is able to move forward, strengthened by his recollection of earlier times.

Near the end of the story, when Niel no longer associates with Mrs. Forrester, he muses about the state of the era: “This was the end of the road-making West….It was already gone, that

age; nothing could ever bring it back” (Cather, Lost Lady 168-169). Judging by various clues in

the narrative, a web of events resulted in the downturn of Sweet Water, including successive

crop failures, banking disasters, and changing viewpoints of the new generation. Niel is angry

that Mrs. Forrester “was not willing to immolate herself, like the widow of all these great men,

and die with the pioneer period to which she belonged; that she preferred life on any terms”

(169). Niel’s thinking, although highly unfair in a realistic sense, nevertheless resonates

thematically. The broken fantasy of permanent land-based wealth and adventurous development is indivisibly tied to Niel’s crushed perception of Mrs. Forrester. Niel’s personal sorrow over one loss is connected to his sorrow over the other. Mrs. Forrester stood as an embodiment of the best of pioneer living, by means of her marriage, home, and charisma. She demonstrated a complete vision of pioneering perfection, living a lifestyle in which the landscape is a pleasure and in a location where the motion of human advancement is apparent. She was a node of beauty and brilliance, situated between the railroad and the landscape itself, two great locuses of growth, and her arresting presence and dignified bearing made her decline all the more marked.

The changing practices of the prominent generation following Captain Forrester’s death become apparent late in the story, as they are reflected in the fate of the captain’s property after his passing. Ivy Peters, a character aptly nicknamed “Poison Ivy,” first rents and later owns the

Forrester marshy meadow land, draining it in order to raise wheat (Cather, Lost Lady 104).

Cather stresses Ivy’s brutish and arrogant personality from the beginning of the story, illustrating his coldness and lack of mercy when he stuns and blinds a female woodpecker--described in a

way that stresses its femininity and innocence--in a grisly episode during Niel’s childhood (25).

While Niel’s compassion for the woodpecker points to the value of “aesthetic sensibility” in the formation of his identity, Ivy’s disregard for the creature exposes his violent personality

(Rosowski, “Paradoxes” 57). Cather juxtaposes Ivy, a member of the younger generation, with the pioneers, writing that pioneers like the Forresters were greathearted but lacked the ability to keep permanent holdings, while people like Ivy took over what remained of their efforts and often succeeded: “They would drink up the mirage, dispel the morning freshness, root out the great brooding spirit of freedom, the generous, easy life of the great land-holders….The space, the colour, the princely carelessness of the pioneer they would destroy and cut up into profitable bits, as the match factory splinters the primeval forest” (106). Cather’s remarks pit one binary idea against another, such as conservation versus consumption, ease versus toil, and aesthetics versus practicality. The Forresters’ holdings shifting into the hands of Ivy Peters becomes a microcosm of the widespread efforts of the new generation. Niel resents this change and recognizes the harsh blow it deals to the aesthetic value of the landscape, taking it as yet another loss just like the loss of his faith in Mrs. Forrester. Niel perceives Ivy’s takeover as his way of

“assert[ing] his power over the people who had loved those unproductive meadows for their idleness and silvery beauty,” and that power is further hinted at when Niel sees signs of Ivy’s physical involvement with the widowed Mrs. Forrester (106). Given Ivy’s continually negative characterization by Cather, Niel’s line of thinking is warranted. The Forrester lands become a means of economic gain and personal leverage for “Poison Ivy,” and the loss of the land’s beauty and spirit grieves Niel, who once adored its loveliness on the morning his perception of Mrs.

Forrester was shattered.

No matter how sorrowful these losses are to Niel and to the Forresters, Cather does not hide the essential shortcomings of the greathearted pioneers like Captain Forrester and of their

geographical and financial ventures. The heart of masculine pioneering idealism is summed up in

a scene at the Forrester home, where friends of the family, including Niel, are gathered for

dinner. In his usual seat at the head of the table, Captain Forrester recounts the often-told story of

how he found his land. During his youth, the captain was a freighter, and he recalls his extensive

travels across the plains from Nebraska to Colorodo as “glorious,” remembering the “boundless

sunny sky” and the “boundless plains of waving grass,” a panorama of explorative wonder upon

which he lived “an ideal life for a young man” (Cather, Lost Lady 52). When he found the land

he would later own, he drove a willow stake into the ground with single-minded determination to someday possess it (52). As lofty as his story seems, hindsight reveals its fragility and ephemerality, not to mention its selfishness, given that Captain Forrester planted his willow stake and mentally claimed the land despite there being an Indian encampment upon it. He avoids mentioning the encampment any further in favor of preaching his philosophy that “what you think of and plan for day by day, in spite of yourself, so to speak--you will get” (54). Continuing his streak of idealism, the captain states, “a thing that is dreamed of in a way I mean, is already an accomplished fact. All our great West has been developed from such dreams; the homesteader’s and the prospector’s and the contractor’s. We dreamed the railroads across the mountains, just as I dreamed my place on the Sweet Water” (55). His speech presents the best of pioneer dreams for the West, and he, along with the residents of the town, succeeded in building those dreams. Still, Captain Forrester’s story does not end in lofty dreams but in bankruptcy. The fragility and ephemerality of the pioneer venture in certain areas such as Sweet Water seal the fate of those places. That fate is played out in the life of Mrs. Forrester and in the delicate balance of wealth and landscape ethics.

Whatever the approach a Cather scholar may take in reading A Lost Lady, the story

remains to be about change, and the life of Marian Forrester demonstrates the theme of change

from beginning to end. Rosowski aptly frames this paramount idea:

Cather suggests that the hope for the future does not lie with the memory of a

pioneer spirit of the land--a spirit that is unable to cope with the passing of time.

Such inability is regrettable, Cather maintains, for the pioneer period was a noble

one. However, the real tragedy would be for representatives of that period to

immolate themselves on the past, leaving the future to the Ivy Peterses. Instead,

hope for the future lies with the ability of men and women to translate this spirit

to life. (Rosowski, “Paradoxes” 62)

Cather’s pioneer stories reach into the past with fondness, but they do not dwell in a frozen world

of the past, nor do they mourn its passing with a final sense of sorrow. They are stories of dynamic, aspiring people that bridge the past and present, never exempt from the pains and tragedies of life yet never forsaking the wonder of the era and always coming face-to-face with

the abundance of opportunities for growth afforded by the course of immigrant history in

America. A Lost Lady, particularly, dramatizes the highs and lows of a passing era by presenting

Mrs. Forrester against a backdrop of transformation, from the very landscape of her property

converted into fields to the overarching shift of new perceptions of the West. Cather

demonstrates the inevitability of change, but the spirit of the pioneer era is still preserved, albeit

in other, more personal forms. Mrs. Forrester, much like the pioneering era itself, may be “lost”

in some ways, but she survives, carrying the pleasures and burdens of her pioneering past into

her new life. Transformation becomes a necessity in preserving the spirit of the past in a world

that can no longer accommodate its past forms. The variable role of landscapes, whether

perceived as centers of aesthetic beauty or sites of cultivation and development, enables the

many transformations that take place in A Lost Lady, and the determination to nurture a transformed sense of the pioneering spirit, a determination reflected in all of Cather’s pioneer stories, interacts with human will and morality. As the pioneering spirit continues to both pass away and transform, the fact remains that the American landscape itself lies at the very root of this spirit.

Chapter III: Artist Stories

THE SONG OF THE LARK

In comparing O Pioneers! and My Ántonia to The Song of the Lark, Randall writes that the first two titles demonstrate “the locus of the search for value” and “the pursuit of the ideal” as being centered on nature, while the last work--which Cather wrote between the time of the first two--centered its focus on the world of art (61). Despite this turn away from plotlines that revolve around extended human-landscape relationships in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, The

Song of the Lark nevertheless contains powerful moments of emotional clarity that are rooted in landscapes and other natural features, mainly through the perspective of the book’s central character, Thea Kronborg. Thea is not directly involved in farm work, like Alexandra and

Ántonia from the other prairie trilogy books, so her relationship with her home landscape is less constant. Also, given that Thea’s childhood landscape is best characterized as a desert, her relationship with it is more observational and panoramic, as opposed to personal and value- driven. Cather’s focus on Thea’s development as an artist certainly commands the course of the story, but the emotional effects of the landscapes Thea knows from childhood and experiences as an adult deeply affect her perception as an artist. Music and memories of childhood landscapes become associated in Thea’s mind, reaching a point of dramatic confirmation when she takes an extended trip to the ruins of a canyon city during her adulthood.

Two of the key landscapes Thea interacts with contain physical testaments to the monumental efforts of humanity. She experiences the first of these landscapes during childhood, during a trip with her father to a ridge in the hills of the Laramie Plain, where she observes the wagon-trails of 49ers and Mormons, two distinct groups journeying across uncharted lands. In her observations, Thea is struck by wonder at humankind’s lasting mark upon the land, a larger-

than-life history written in the earth. Eagles thrive above the track-scored gorges and ravines, and

the man guiding Thea and her father remarks, “the spirit of human courage seem[s] to live up

there with the eagles” (Cather, Song 69). Thea goes on to associate her reaction to this landscape

with later moments during which she is “moved” (69). Cather’s remarks on this experience are

brief yet poignant, much like many of Thea’s childhood experiences which are fitted into a rapid,

cyclical pageant of seasons in the town of Moonstone. During her adulthood, when she is

absorbed in her artistic endeavors, Thea experiences another great landmark of human effort, this

time in Panther Cañon in the midst of an ancient stone city carved into the rock. Given her

extended stay in the deserted settlement and her maturity as an artist, Thea develops a deeper,

more physical regard for this landscape, while still discovering the same echo of meaning from

her childhood trip to the Laramie Plain: The power and passion of the human endeavor to not

only survive, but thrive is written upon the face of the earth. Landscapes define the boundaries of human achievement in many ways, and the signs that people have striven there appear in the wagon tracks on the Laramie Plain, in the fragments of clay vessels in Panther Cañon, and in the countless details, large and small, that dot the American wilderness. Upon the plains and canyons of the nation, especially, rest palpable signs of human migration and striving. These two landscapes are controlling images in Thea’s story, marking the connection between land and people and her immersive interaction with that connection in both youth and in adulthood.

While Thea’s experiences with the two landscapes discussed above contribute most to a

discussion on landscape in The Song of the Lark, other key moments in the story warrant study.

During a childhood trip to the sand hills near her home, Thea along with Ray Kennedy, a friend

and suitor, and other family members, departs from Moonstone with “a sense of escape and

boundless freedom” (Cather, Song 59). These feelings continue to describe Thea’s lifelong

connection to certain landscapes, and they develop more depth as she ages and faces numerous challenges, both major and minor, as a pianist and ultimately a singer. Thea’s response to the Art

Institute of Chicago presents these emotional developments, as she finds it a place of “retreat,” as the sand hills or the Kohlers’ garden used to be during her youth. This short passage and the portion of the book that follows chart Thea’s responses to art and music, both of which carry close associations with landscapes, especially the landscapes of Thea’s youth. For the purpose of discussing landscapes in The Song of the Lark, the section of the story including Thea’s observations at the Art Institute, her experience listening to a Dvorak Symphony, and her visit home combine to form the thematic heart of the book that essentially melds the meeting of landscapes and art in Thea’s mind. Following all these passages, the capstone of Thea’s connection to landscapes is her time at Panther Cañon, a time of emotional and artistic transformation for the artist.

The most vivid representation of Thea’s regard for the Art Institute lies in a painting displayed there called “The Song of the Lark” by Jules Breton which depicts a young woman, presumably a farmer, standing among flat, wet fields in the light of morning. Thea draws

“boundless satisfaction” from the painting, feeling that it is “her picture” and that “nobody care[s] for it but herself” (Cather, Song 249). The painting engages her in a somewhat ineffable way, as “it would take a clever person to explain” what Thea meant by thinking Breton’s artwork was “‘right’” (249). This painting is a physical expression of Cather’s artistic landscape of choice and even main character of choice in her pioneer stories (a woman connected to the land) inspires Thea’s affection and links her vocation as an artist to her feelings toward familiar landscapes. Perhaps Thea’s satisfaction and fulfillment in experiencing the life of the woman vicariously through the painting echoes the sense of fulfillment the leading women in O

Pioneers! and My Ántonia experience, whose connections with the land are physical and financial yet deeply personal. The connection between art and landscape in The Song of the Lark, closely evidenced by Thea’s feelings toward the painting, plays a role in tying all three installments of the trilogy together. Appropriately named many years after Cather’s death, the prairie trilogy is held together by the emblematic presence of landscapes spanning midwestern, mountain, and southwestern regions of America, each landscape forming a part of many characters’ identities, even if the main source of value flows foremost from art in The Song of the

Lark. As the story goes on, natural images and visions of landscapes are reconstructed in Thea’s mind reflexively when she experiences and appreciates art.

Soon after Cather’s discussion of the painting, she writes about Thea’s response to

Dvorak’s Symphony in E Minor, subtitled From the New World. The first movement seems to transport Thea back to the “high tableland above Laramie; the grass-grown wagon-trails, the far- away peaks of the snowy range, the wind and the eagles” (Cather, Song 251). The music inspires memories of landscapes that reflect the wonder of human striving, an idea that sticks with Thea after her childhood visit to Laramie. When the theme of the Largo begins, Thea’s thoughts wander home.

Here were the sand hills, the grasshoppers and locusts, all the things that wakened

and chirped in the early morning; the reaching and reaching of the high plains, the

immeasurable yearning of all flat lands. There was home in it, too; first memories, first

mornings long ago; the amazement of a new soul in a new world; a soul new and yet old,

that had dreamed something despairing, something glorious, in the dark before it was

born; a soul obsessed by what it did not know, under the cloud of a past it could not

recall. (251)

Thea’s vivid recollections of home quickly shift into a fusion of thoughts on inner striving and identity. The theme of ineffability returns here, an idea that emerges during other points in the story, such as when some of the male characters consider Thea’s artistic magnetism, and the idea of ineffability ends up underlying Thea’s own understanding of herself as an artist and as a member of an immigrant family. Despite her youth, Thea is an old soul, sensitive to fluctuations in her own perspective, aware of her disadvantaged status among formally educated musicians, and captured by the thought of her unknown past and Swedish roots. Experiencing the symphony leads Thea’s mind to her home landscape, and her memories of youth accumulate into comments on her identity; in this passage, art opens to land and culminates into emotional revelations.

When Thea returns home for a visit, she “[feels] that she [is] coming back to her own land” (Cather, Song 276). Her return draws this section of the book to a close. Thea’s experience with the painting as a touchstone of satisfaction and fulfillment as well as her emotional revelations during Dvorak’s symphony come to a confirming close when the character of her home landscape becomes apparent to her.

This earth seemed to her young and fresh and kindly, a place where refugees from old,

sad countries were given another chance. The mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind

of amiability and generosity, and the absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a wider

range….It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks

sang--and one’s heart sang there too….It was somehow an honest country, and there was

a new song in that blue air which had never been sung in the world before. It was hard to

tell about it, for it had nothing to do with words; it was like the light of the desert at noon,

or the smell of the sagebrush after rain; intangible but powerful. She had the sense of

going back to a friendly soil, whose friendship was somehow going to strengthen her; a

native generous country that gave one its joyous force, its large-hearted, childlike power

to love, just as it gave one its coarse, brilliant flowers. (276)

Thea’s thoughts that arose from the painting and the symphony arise again in her fresh

observations of the landscape. The song of the lark is literal here, drawing out feelings of inner

freedom and possibility, much like the rush of freedom Thea and her party feel during their trip to the sand hills earlier in the story. For the early generations of immigrant families, the story of

America is a story of freedom and possibility, told here in Thea’s perspective on the characters of the landscape. She finds the character of the land to be best expressed not by words but by physical representations and sense-driven observations, both of which she experiences in bits and piece throughout the story and much more palpably when she later stays in Panther Cañon. In a way, the landscape itself is an artist, revealing its possibilities and inviting interpretation by presenting physical signs. The landscape’s “artwork” is the object of Thea’s--and Cather’s-- evaluations, and the personified traits Thea observed in the landscape reflect upon her momentary state of mind as well as her identity as an individual and as a member of a wider community. These related passages tie art and landscape together, forming a thematic core that qualifies the rest of the story, including Thea’s childhood and adulthood, and culminating during her visit to Panther Cañon.

Thea’s time at Panther Cañon comprises the final group of Cather’s most telling landscape-related passages in The Song of the Lark. The canyon is the site of ruined cliff dwellings, empty of inhabitants but rife with centuries-old signs of civilization. Thea claims a room of her own, making herself at home within the dwellings. As both a child and an adult,

Thea’s experiences with certain landscapes contribute to formative moments that capture her imagination and move her, but the moments Cather highlights in Panther Canyon surpass others

in their affective power to alter her character’s perspectives. Cather first presents a shift in

Thea’s temporal perception, all based on her new environment. During the blur and push of her busy life, Thea typically felt that she was trying to catch up, undoubtedly self-conscious about her comparative lack of formal training during her youth, but in the cliffs, she feels “as if she

were waiting for something to catch up with her” (Cather, Song 372). Thea temporarily escapes

from “the stream of meaningless activity and undirected effort” (373) that characterizes her

everyday life. The breakdown of time is an idea first introduced during Thea’s childhood

explorations on the sand hills, where mirages made wild cattle appear like mammoths on the

horizon and heat and light mingled to create a ghostly, prehistoric sea (60). In Panther Cañon,

however, Thea’s life experiences, combined with the ancient signs around her, make her more

keenly aware of the slow, eternal pace of the landscape; her life as a member of society, speeding

through everyday obstacles, concedes to a whole new temporal plane, and Thea is able to fully

experience the place and all its effects on her. Cather vividly comments on the eternity of

landscape, as she later writes about the nearby gorge: “The sullenness of the place seemed to say

that the world could get on very well without people, red or white; that under the human world

there was a geological world, conducting its silent, immense operations which were indifferent to

man” (388-89). The breakdown of time Thea experiences can be understood as her transition

from the human world to the geological world, a plane of existence that equalizes all people in

the end, no matter their ethnicities or cultures nor their experiences and achievements.

Soon, Thea becomes less of an observer of her environment and more of a participant in

its own state of being. Much like Blue Mesa in Cather’s later book, The Professor’s House,

Panther Cañon in The Song of the Lark has a mystical effect upon individuals who transcend the

barriers of comfort and normalcy to experience it fully. Thea feels she could “become a mere

receptacle for heat, or become a colour, like the bright lizards that darted about on the hot stones

outside her door; or she could become a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas”

(Cather, Song 373). Here again, Cather demonstrates her interest in the mystical, as she did in My

Ántonia and as she would later in The Professor’s House. Mysticism’s breakdown of singular

identity appears here, as Thea feels she can experience the canyon by embodying its elements.

She even visualizes, hears, and feels what it might have been like as an inhabitant of the ancient

settlement, walking the paths of a long-dead woman she conjures in her mind (376). Thea focuses on this kind of spiritual embodiment during her time at the canyon instead of singing

(381). Even though singing is Thea’s primary artistic endeavor, it is fitting that she does not sing in Panther Cañon; she temporarily lets go of her social identity, takes a rest from her usual

concerns and aspirations, and gathers all she can through her senses. This temporary change in

her day-to-day life can be inferred to affect her approach to singing and even her understanding of herself as an artist.

Panther Cañon imparts on Thea a measure of encouragement to do her best, a sentiment that originates with the late Ray Kennedy and manifests itself in Thea’s relationship with the

canyon. The restful energy of the place cannot last forever, and Thea develops a desire for

action, not in a way that rejects the lessons of the canyon, but in a way that allows her to move

forward with her personal life, including her romance with Fred Ottenberg and of course her

upcoming career as a singer (Cather, Song 382). Cather again explores the concept of gathering

what is best from the past and carrying it forward into the future within Thea’s story, just as she

does in the various transformations comprising A Lost Lady and in Tom Outland’s interaction

with Blue Mesa and Professor St. Peter’s subsequent vicarious participation in The Professor’s

House. The fusion of art and landscape, already closely paired in previous passages, builds into a

sense of empowerment by the end of Thea’s stay in the canyon. In a sense, The Song of the Lark as a künstlerroman reaches its turning point as Thea nears the end of her stay at the canyon. Her very sense of self is altered, as she finds “the Cliff-Dwellers ha[ve] lengthened her past. She ha[s] older and higher obligations” (382). Thea, an old soul from the beginning, now finds herself grounded in experience and purpose. Despite not finding closure in learning more about her Swedish roots, she is still able to dramatically reframe her perspectives after living in a world seemingly apart from time. She continues her life as a singer with a broadened mind and a nourished spirit.

In a soaring return to Thea’s past wonder at the strength of human willpower, Cather again cites the symbol of the eagle and the signs of human will evident upon the landscape, echoing Thea’s childhood trip to the Laramie Plain: “O eagle of eagles! Endeavour, achievement, desire, glorious striving of human art!....A vanished race; but along the trails, in the stream, under the spreading cactus, there still glittered in the sun the bits of their frail clay vessels, fragments of their desire” (Cather, Song 399). Time and again, in book after book,

Cather juxtaposes the unforgiving eternity of the landscape and the passion of human endeavors extant upon the face of the earth. Human achievement is never perfected within the grand scale of geological time, but it still garners awe from those acquainted with its vestiges. Like these signs, Thea, a single artist, inspires curiosity and admiration from those around her. Her ineffable magnetism extends to some greater truth drawn upon through art, perhaps like the small and fragile signs of human achievement corresponding to a more transcendent sense of desire, of striving, or of the driving force of life itself. As Professor A. Wunsuch tells a young Thea,

“Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life

is little. There is only one big thing--desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little. It brought

Columbus across the sea in a little boat und so weiter” (95).

For scholars and casual readers alike, one of the most quoted sentences of The Song of the Lark is this: “What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?” (378). What makes the image of the sheath so fitting is its versatility. Art is a sheath; Thea is a sheath; the landscape is a sheath. Thea stands at the nexus of art and landscape, society and wilderness, human time and geological time. The Song of the Lark is the story of an artist within communities and environments, and in her imperfect, individual way, Thea pushes herself to a point of wholeness of identity and public acclaim, led onward by those formative moments made possible by the underlying artistic power of landscapes and nature.

THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE

The Professor’s House is somewhat of a departure from the usual elements of Cather’s novels. Occupying the perspectives of two male characters, a professor of history and a student who became a chemist, Cather diverges from presenting a central female character as a pioneer or artist. A rich and complex novel, The Professor’s House presents two concentric stories, centered around the present experiences of Professor St. Peter and the past experiences of Tom

Outland, St. Peter’s favorite student, close friend, and intended son-in-law. I argue that this unique book can be considered an artist story, given that Professor Godfrey St. Peter’s authored several inspired books on Spanish Adventurers and Tom Outland penned a vivid, emotional journal of his own adventures that comprised a large portion of The Professor’s House. Tom,

especially, shares the sensitivity, intelligence, and artistic talent that characterizes Cather’s other artist figures, like Thea Kronborg and Lucy Gayheart.

The story revolves around St. Peter’s dissatisfaction with his life and mournful regard for the joys of his past, both of which are transformed as he revisits the journal of Tom, whose death deeply pained the professor and his family. These two characters and their intersecting stories are quite different, demonstrating the divides between past and present, youth and agedness, inspiration and stagnation, and most importantly in terms of landscapes, boundlessness and boundedness. Still, each story relies on the other and shares thematic ties to its counterpart; St.

Peter’s life turns in a positive direction after reading Tom’s diary, and Tom’s posthumous story is honored through St. Peter’s remembrance. In both stories, landscape defines greater patterns and themes, furthering the dualism between St. Peter and Tom Outland’s lives. In these characters’ overlapping spheres of lived experience, landscapes and other natural features underscore both positive and negative themes that building upon their personal transformations.

Anna Wilson introduces the dualism inherent in the characterization of St. Peter and Tom

Outland by writing, “In contrast to the Professor's static, nihilist contemplation, Tom Outland's story is all movement and aspiration” (67). For the majority of the book, Professor St. Peter’s interactions with landscapes are bounded to limited spaces, with two key examples being his garden and the view from his attic window. St. Peter’s French garden, in its carefully designed symmetry, stands in contrast to the vast, awe-inspiring landscape of the American Southwest that

Cather later explores through Tom Outland’s journal. Cather writes that St. Peter had “tended this bit of ground for over twenty years, and had got the upper hand of it” (Professor’s 105), her words highlighting the relative smallness of the garden and St. Peter’s close control over its condition. St. Peter also interacts with a limited landscape--or in this case, waterscape--by means

of his office window, as he is able to see the “long, blue, hazy smear” of Lake Michigan, serving

as a call-back to the “inland sea of his childhood,” a lake he loved in his youth (114). Even the lake itself—with all the freedom and happiness St. Peter attributed to lakes since childhood— exists in a limited state, bounded by land. Quite literally, St. Peter’s open office window keeps him alive by clearing the air made unclean by his gas stove, but more subtly, the window bears a connection to the distant lake and reminds him of the childhood joys of living near a lake.

Only by isolating himself and revisiting Tom Outland’s story of Blue Mesa through the

diary does St. Peter see past these limited connections to the natural world and tap into the vast

energy aligned with unbounded landscapes. As he reads, St. Peter uncovers the identity of his

young self when he lived in Kansas, describing himself as “a primitive” who was “only

interested in earth, woods, and water” (Cather, Professor’s 260). Instead of drawing anguish

from his memories of Kansas as he did early in the book (he “nearly died” out of sorrow from

leaving the lake near his childhood home), St. Peter recovers the vitality of his former life in the

wheatlands (115), a change in awareness that is immersed in nature.

The greatest adventure of St. Peter’s adult life is arguably the time he wrote a book series

on Spanish adventurers, a project to which he happily committed himself. Interestingly enough,

the inspiration for these books is connected to a landscape, since St. Peter claims the design of

his book “unfolded in the air above him” as he lay looking up at the mountains of coastal Spain

from the deck of a boat (Cather, Professor’s 161). St. Peter’s memories of joy and mental vigor

brought on by writing the books is comparable to his past friendship with Tom, which allowed

him a “second youth” of sorts (255). Because of Tom’s death, the role of landscapes in his

memory is largely unexplored. Still, Tom’s connection to the mesa is paramount in St. Peter’s

memory of him. Tom is a major catalyst who affects St. Peter at the depths of his identity and personal outlook.

Just as Jim from My Ántonia reconstructed the past as he stood on the road to his grandparents’ old farm, St. Peter and his daughter, Kathleen, reconstruct the memory of Tom

Outland as a prolific explorer deeply connected to the land. St. Peter’s daughter, Kathleen, hints at the idealized rendering of Tom that thrived in their family’s memory when she says, “Our

Tom is much nicer than theirs,” (Cather, Professor’s 177) referring to a version of Tom associated with ancient artifacts and thrilling stories of adventure, stories that St. Peter recalled as having “no shadows” (171). Kathleen elevates the Tom she and her father revere while discounting the more public version of Tom who “turned out chemicals and dollars and cents”

(177) when he establishes himself as a highly successful scientist. In a way, St. Peter’s sweeping shift in perspective is rooted in a vicarious association with the landscapes of the American

Southwest that framed a meaningful portion of Tom’s life. The land set Tom on his path of exploration and discovery, and St. Peter’s precious memories of Tom are based on those explorations. In this way, the landscape remains at the heart of St. Peter’s relationship to “our

Tom,” as Kathleen said, and from it sprang the emotional transformations experienced by Tom and, in turn, St. Peter.

St. Peter’s mental breakthrough after reading Tom’s diary, underscored at every turn by landscape, is not a final sense of happiness but a shift in his perspective. Despite allowing the gas stove to nearly suffocate him, his story ends with positive, forward motion. Feeling as though he finally had “ground under his feet,” St. Peter knew that he could face the future “with fortitude”

(Cather, Professor’s 271). All in all, St. Peter’s major arc of character development is apparent in his shift from a discontented man trapped beneath a growing sense of ennui to a man gathering

his strength from the past to face the future, and these two states of mind are accompanied by the inertia of bounded natural features (the garden and the distant lake) and the active energy of expansive landscapes (Blue Mesa and Kansas). Once again, by means of landscape, Cather builds upon the theme of the past enabling a more positive outlook for the future.

The heart of Tom Outland’s posthumously recounted story involves Blue Mesa, a feature of the American Southwest’s landscape based on a real-life counterpart, Mesa Verde, that takes on titanic meaning in the section of the book devoted to the contents of Tom’s diary. The original lure of simply exploring the mesa grew to new proportions when Tom discovers within it the ruins of a city once populated by Pueblo Indians. After finding artifacts such as pottery and tools,

Tom thinks, “To people off along, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk on” (Cather Professor’s, 216).

Apart from the initial awe and excitement of adventure, Tom’s discovery of the stone city stands as the first major push toward his deep connection with the mesa. Tom sees national importance in his discovery, and in agreement with his travelling companions, Roddy Blake and Father

Duchene, he travels alone to Washington D.C. to present his findings to the Smithsonian. Not only is Tom stalled and his findings ultimately dismissed during the trip, but his partner, Roddy, sells the artifacts Tom collected when he was away at Washington, betraying his trust. Tom sees

Roddy’s actions not just as a breach of trust between the two men but as an affront to the nation, as he says, “You’ve gone and sold your country’s secrets” (246).

Tom is grieved by the Smithsonian’s rejection compounded with Roddy’s betrayal, but soon, he undergoes a crucial shift in his perception that is central to his character development.

When Roddy leaves, Tom experiences “happiness unalloyed” with the feeling that he had “found

everything,” and he describes the time he spends on the mesa alone as the “high tide” of his life

(Cather, Professor’s 253), a description that echoes St. Peter’s “golden days” of writing his

Spanish Adventurers books (116). Wilson points out Tom’s clear understanding that the civilization would likely never be known and revered by larger circles of society after the artifacts are removed and the mummified remains of “Mother Eve,” a former inhabitant of the mesa, are destroyed (67). As a result, Wilson writes, “Tom adjusts his perspective, making no continuing claim for the mesa's place in the nation's imagination of origin, settling instead for a purely personal relation to the city” (68). Despite the painful experiences that took place while

Tom studied the ruins, he nevertheless takes root alone at the mesa and finds fulfillment that overrides his disappointment. When trying to pin down the cause of his fulfillment, Tom concludes that the feeling was “possession,” a notion that enables him to feel as if it were the first time he was “really on the mesa at all” (Cather, Professor’s 253). He trades the ambition to actualize his discoveries and add them to the cultural heritage of the nation for the satisfaction of connecting with the land and ruins as a lone inhabitant instead of an advocate, all the while appreciating the place’s value and possessing its relics to the point of experiencing transformative happiness.

Despite the many positive aspects of Blue Mesa, the austerity of life and the immediacy of death is made apparent in Tom’s experiences and discoveries. Unlike My Ántonia’s Jim finding empowerment in killing a snake, Tom’s experience with the same creature has a much more tragic end, as his companion, Henry, is bitten on the forehead and killed during one of the group’s explorations in the ruins (Cather, Professor’s 231). A child’s victory against an enormous snake and an explorer’s sudden death by a smaller, hidden snake reveal how unpredictable the whims of nature can be. In addition, the evidence of the mesa’s former

inhabitants that Tom collects and Father Duchene interprets suggests that the civilization saw a

swift and violent end. In the words of Father Duchene, the inhabitants of the stone city created a complex and carefully-designed society.

I see them here, isolated, cut off from other tribes, working out their destiny,

making their mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man, purifying life by

religious ceremonies and observances, caring respectfully for their dead,

protecting the children, doubtless entertaining some feelings of affection and

sentiment for this stronghold where they were at once so safe and so comfortable,

where they had practically overcome the worst hardships that primitive man had

to fear. They were, perhaps, too far advanced for their time and environment.

(233-34)

Father Duchene goes on to theorize that the inhabitants of Blue Mesa were “utterly exterminated” while occupying a summer camp in an unprotected area of the landscape (234).

The end of the civilization occurred despite the tribe’s cultural and societal advancements. An important distinction to make, however, is that the features of the landscape itself did not wipe out the civilization--roaming attackers most likely did--yet the geography of the plains enabled

its demise, just as the mesa enabled its degree of growth. As Tom implies for the people of the

mesa, the landscape ultimately became the deciding factor as to whether their civilization would

survive much more so than the sophistication of their society.

In addition, Tom Outland’s experiences exploring Blue Mesa reveal a different sort of

harshness that does not arise from the landscape itself but through his absence from it. During his

stay with the Bixbys in Washington D.C., for example, Tom witnesses how petty and slavish

their lifestyle was, and he subsequently feels a degree of “low-spiritedness” he had never before

felt (Cather, Professor’s 242). Cather juxtaposes Tom watching the Washington Monument

“colour with those beautiful sunsets” with workers streaming out of buildings at the end of the

day (242). This moment shows that Tom still searches for familiar beauty even in a bustling,

unfamiliar city, but his search concludes with stifled, artificial images. When Tom is travelling

back to the mesa following his unsuccessful trip, he wants "nothing but to get back to the mesa

and live a free life and breathe free air, and never, never again to see hundreds of little black-

coated men pouring out of white buildings” (243-44). Tom’s thoughts reveal the link he perceives between the mesa and freedom, drawing on the contrast between the highly populous, largely black and white city versus the solitude of a varied landscape rich with color. Despite the danger and volatility of the wild, uninhabited landscape, Tom still prefers it over the stifling world of urbanity, a world he sees as enslaved to materialism and peopled with masses meaninglessly clamoring for money and possessions. Tom feels the grip of materialism once again when he returns to the mesa to find that Roddy Blake sold his collection of artifacts from

the ruins, and Tom remedies the pain of the event by spending time alone at the mesa and

reconnecting with it. Having found fulfillment in living close to the land, Tom feels that he

cannot fully mesh with the dominant culture of the world beyond the mesa. Still, much like Thea

from The Song of the Lark, Tom returns to society and finds great success in his endeavors. The

connections these characters forge with the ancient settlements restore their spirits and allow

them to make the most of their lives.

Echoing my approach to categorizing landscape roles in My Ántonia, both St. Peter and

Tom experience moments of transcendence and spirituality connected to the landscape.

McGiveron diversifies the mystical themes connected to unbounded vistas by identifying the

human drive to think about one’s place within a grander, more universal scheme.

Especially in the section of the book chronicling Outland's story of the Blue

Mesa, these distances not only call the heart but also lead it to wonder about one's

place in the universe, terrestrial nature, and humanity. The characters who hear

this call come to realize that because the individual is connected with the whole

both physically and spiritually, one must not withdraw from the natural and

human worlds, as St. Peter first attempts, but instead must try to embrace and

enjoy them. (McGiveron 396)

Both St. Peter and Tom seek solitude, attain it, and then return to their roles within a wider community. In St. Peter’s case, acknowledging his “first nature” as a child whose greatest cares were the lake and the land stands as a moment of transcendence that begins freeing him from his troubled mindset (Cather, Professor’s 261). St. Peter’s healing transformation hinged on the actions of Augusta, the family seamstress. Augusta is a character deeply connected with spirituality, and St. Peter’s evaluation of her after she rescues him from suffocating in his office aligns her with the land. He compares her to a taste of bitter herbs, calling her “the bloomless side of life that he had always run away from” and noting just how “seasoned and sound and on the solid earth she surely was” (270). In a way, Augusta acts as a healthy dose of earth and spirit that benefits St. Peter greatly by not only saving his life but by reconnecting him with reality.

The combination of St. Peter’s discovery about his latent identity with Augusta’s rescue and assistance and his “temporary release from consciousness” allow him to transcend the growing discontent and emptiness plaguing his mind (271). These factors have much to do with the landscapes St. Peter recalls from childhood, the presence of Augusta, and the professor’s vicarious tie to Blue Mesa through Tom.

Compared to St. Peter’s transcendent experience, Tom’s is much more direct and completely dependent upon the landscape. As Tom spends more and more time at the mesa, his emotions toward it develop. Early in his explorations, Tom describes the effect of the mesa’s pure air on him as “produc[ing] a kind of exaltation,” hinting at the spiritual effect the mesa would have on him as he spent more time there (Cather, Professor’s 220). When Tom returns from his trip to Washington and spends time alone at the mesa, he begins to see it as “no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion” (253). Up on the mesa, Tom feels he was “a close neighbor to the sun,” and he describes how the morning rays would hit the top of the mesa even as the rest of the world below him waiting in shadow (253). His descriptions cast the mesa as a physically and spiritually elevated landscape, a veritable “world above the world” (246).

McGiveron takes into account Cather’s choice to call the mesa “Blue Mesa” instead of drawing more closely from the real and highly comparable location of Mesa Verde. McGiveron writes,

“whereas the color green has connotations of luxuriant growth and connection with the earth…the blue of the Blue Mesa is more evocative of the sky that is viewed so unobstructed from its high top; it connects us with the open and unmeasurable blue spaces above” (397).

Incorporating McGiveron’s argument, Blue Mesa clearly takes on a spiritual alignment, elevated high above the flat land surrounding it, occupying the space between earth and sky and inspiring religious devotion from Tom, its sole human inhabitant.

Somewhat similarly to St. Peter’s return to a life with his family and career, Tom eventually leaves the mesa. Even in his time of solitude, Tom immerses himself in classic texts and in honing his skill in Latin, conferring with great minds and ideas through his reading. His solitude precedes his entry into the wider community of education, taking on the role of student and scientist. Even the mesa itself, an untamed land once molded into a thriving civilization,

melds the themes of wildness and solitude with community and society. These details hint at

Tom’s eventual return to modern society. As McGiveron writes, Tom is not dependent on

solitude to find his place in the world, and his religious connection to the mesa and its former

inhabitants stems from his private “contemplation and appreciation of the evocative distances of

space and time in nature” (401). To Tom, the village itself was a testament to transcending time,

as it exists in “immortal repose” and sits "looking down into the canyon with the calmness of

eternity” (Cather, Professor’s 221). His observations echo Thea’s in The Song of the Lark, as she

gathers similar impressions from very similar ruins. Tom’s spiritual connection with Blue Mesa

reaches its greatest heights during the period of his solitude, but despite the true happiness he

found there alone, he was able to begin a new life apart from it. As he neared the end of his life,

Tom told St. Peter, “Troubles enough came afterward, but there was that summer, high and blue,

a life in itself” (254). Just as St. Peter reclaims the past life of his youth and reaches a more

balanced mindset with which to move forward, Tom continues in life by leaving his solitude

behind yet never forgetting his life on the mesa. The joining of St. Peter’s and Tom’s spheres of

experience and the transformative events that came from that joining were enabled by key

landscapes and nature in connection with the characters’ perspectives.

LUCY GAYHEART

In Lucy Gayheart, Cather returns to her characteristic narrative model of following the exploits of a central female artist figure. Lucy’s story shares much in common with Thea’s story in The Song of the Lark, given these two women’s careers as musicians and personal

developments as artists. Lucy Gayheart, however, is a much more emotional, internal book than

its descriptive and often more external sister, The Song of the Lark. The simplest answer for this

divide lies in Cather’s chosen point of view. A large portion of Thea’s story is told through the perspectives of others with careful attention given to verisimilitude in the building of settings, while Lucy’s story is driven along by the heart of the character herself, and the narrative is focused on the ups, downs, and fatal tragedy of her life.

In Lucy Gayheart, landscapes and nature crop up as short sights and signs in relation to events and moods. A marked separation exists between Lucy’s daily life and the landscape, especially during her time in Chicago, but even so, the natural world underscores many of her movements through life and her mindset as the months go by, as Cather places natural details in conjunction with many of the key moments in the story. In a way, the details of Lucy’s natural surroundings are accompanists to her mind. Lucy experiences three key revelations throughout the story, and each of these are related to at least one natural feature or element. Approaching this book through the structure of these three revelations--the first arising from a star, the second communicated through images of moonlight and water, and the third present in the visible features of a landscape--allows for an evaluation of Cather’s use of nature and landscapes to come into focus. Surrounding these revelations are other related instances of nature entering the narrative, the most prevalent being the recurring image orange-pink sunlight.

At the beginning of the story, on a day when Lucy was on holiday from her piano studies and visiting her hometown of Haverford situated in the prairie lands of Nebraska, Lucy experiences a fleeting “flash of understanding” (Cather, Lucy Gayheart 11) brought on by the first star in the night sky:

That point of silver light spoke to her like a signal, released another kind of life

and feeling which did not belong there. It overpowered her. With a mere thought

she had reached that star and it had answered, recognition had flashed between.

Something knew, then, in the unknowing waste: something had always known,

forever! (11)

Cather offers no clear definition of what Lucy believed she was feeling in this moment. This feeling is a starting point for Lucy as she seeks to grasp her identity and interests as an artist.

Lucy’s paradoxical sense that something in the “unknowing” expanse above her knows and identifies her inspires a powerful, ineffable feeling of which she was wholly unfamiliar. The coldness and distance of the emerging star coupled with the personal recognition Lucy identifies within it sets up a difficult impression, but the ambiguity of the moment creates its power and reveals the uncertain spirit that drives Lucy forward.

The second revelation Cather highlights takes place when Lucy attends one of Clement

Sebastian’s voice recitals soon after returning to her studies in Chicago. One of Sebastian’s songs conjures up the image of moonlight in Lucy’s mind, and as he continues, Lucy begins to feel something new yet again. Cather offers questions with a voice somewhere between her narrator’s perspectives and Lucy’s mind in attempt to offer a definition for the new feeling. Was this feeling “a new conception of art? It came closer than that. A new kind of personality? But it was much more. It was a discovery about life, a revelation of love as a tragic force, not a melting mood, of passion that drowns like black water” (Cather, Lucy Gayheart 30-31). The personal highs and lows that were to come for Lucy, particularly in her romance with Sebastian, are wrapped up in this fearful imagery. Cather’s use of drowning to describe the feeling becomes even more alarming in hindsight, as both Sebastian and Lucy die by drowning. Lucy’s drowning is partly due to her own passion which complicates and intensifies her restlessness toward her hometown, her strained relationship with her sister, and her grief over Clement Sebastian’s death.

The stark image of the singular star and the sensation of drowning in dark water both contrast Lucy’s third and final revelation, which arises from the lifelong, on-and-off relationship she builds with the natural features of her hometown. This relationship culminates in her final, sweeping emotional discovery following the tragedy of her lover’s drowning. Cather writes how

Lucy often came outside on spring mornings throughout her life, running “into the orchard, down the street, in pursuit of something she could not see, but knew! It was there, in the breeze, in the sun; it hid behind the blooming apple boughs, raced before her through the neighbors' gardens, but she could never catch up with it” (Lucy Gayheart 183). Lucy feels this mysterious “it” had become “an actual possession” through her relationship with Sebastian (183), and despite his death, “it” still existed. Within this passage, Cather frames Lucy’s third revelatory feeling in the clearest way, as she writes, “What if--what if Life itself were the sweetheart? It was like a lover waiting for her in distant cities--across the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her….those splendours were still on earth, to be sought after and fought for” (184). This moment tears down the sorrow that had weighed on Lucy since Sebastian’s death and her return to

Haverford, reviving her natural inclination to move forward and search for personal and artistic renewal. Before this moment, Lucy often confined herself to her family’s neglected orchard, the only place she felt safe and able to live fully through her memories, a place that was soon to be turned to a crop field for the sake of her family’s livelihood (156). Only when Lucy begins to identify the fullness of life all around her, from the blooming boughs to the breeze and sun, could she find the strength to seek life outside the neglected orchard. Through this final revelation,

Lucy’s natural surroundings become a central sign of her lifelong discovery of the sweetness of life itself; she grows past the mental escapism she found in the orchard and regains the sense of

dynamic searching she exhibited from the beginning of the story, if only for the short remainder of her life.

These three connected revelations are on continuums from fearful to joyful and unclear to clear. Tragically, the clearest and most joyful of these revelations comes when Lucy is nearing the end of her young life. A collection of other natural signs accompanies this structural trinity of revelations. These other features often fall under two main categories, the first being gentle and beautiful and the second being powerful and awe-inspiring. Lucy herself is most often associated with springtime and fire to those her observe her, especially Sebastian. Her personality encompasses the life-giving growth of spring while still containing flashes of fire in her swift, searching outlook and passion for the sweetness of life. Lucy’s impressions of her private moments with Sebastian as they worked in his studio include images of both gentleness and sublimity. She recalls a month “when she lived under a golden canopy among spring flowers, while the March winds and rain threatened outside the windows. Then she was never afraid of cruel surprises” (Cather, Lucy 117). Lucy treasures this short span of stable beauty far after it ends. Earlier, Lucy describes how she also feels she and Sebastian were alone “on the lonely spur of a mountain, enveloped by mist” during their studio time (75). Sebastian even bids Lucy to dream of the two of them, both young, travelling together in the French Alps (86). The traditionally sublime imagery of mountains can be associated with the awe-inspiring possibilities

Lucy found in her relationship with Sebastian, reflected in the meaningful isolation of their time together and the soaring heights of their hopes for the future. Sebastian even mentions the gardens, forests, and mountains--landscapes that become increasingly larger and more awe- inspiring in succession--he plans to show Lucy during their future trips abroad (127). These natural images of beauty and awe intertwine during Lucy’s most joyful days in Chicago. Her

feelings for Sebastian enable her to reach for the sweetness of “Life itself” (184), and while she

later draws this realization from familiar landscapes, even here Cather uses natural images to

express the joy and fulfillment Lucy feels during her time with Sebastian.

The most emblematic natural image outside Lucy’s key revelations is the orange-pink

sunlight that appears multiple throughout the book, including before Lucy’s return to Chicago,

during her time there, and after she returns to Haverford. This image opens Lucy’s story,

appearing after an afternoon of skating, and it closes her story, filling the sky at the end of her

burial. During its first appearance, Lucy and Harry, her friend and suitor, are sharing a moment

alone when they were suddenly “sitting in a stream of blinding light” as the snow glows from

rose-colored to flaming red (Cather, Lucy Gayheart 9). This fleeting moment gives way to the

appearance of the night’s first star, which leads Lucy to her first emotional revelation.

Additionally, Lucy’s selective memories of Chicago include the “orange-red sunlight” which

“perpetually flooded” the stairs to the art museum in her mind’s eye (24). The stairs of the

Lutheran church in Haverford also take on this color as Lucy later sits there and gazes upon the open country beyond Haverford (151). The brief, unique beauty of this image becomes tragic when the snow-covered hills turn rosy just after Lucy’s grave is filled (207).

This recurring color of sunset made an impression on Lucy’s mind, recalling once again the balance between beautiful and awe-inspiring natural images applied to her experiences. The light remains beyond her death, its brief appearance after her burial like an echo of her short life, burning with her passion, artistry, and personal conviction to experience life’s sweetness. As

Cather writes following Harry’s sorrowful reflections on Lucy’s death, Lucy “has receded to the far horizon line, along with all the fine things of youth, which do not change” (Lucy Gayheart

224). The fading orange light is akin to youth, as its recurring beauty never truly changes, yet it

never remains for long; it is a natural fact that cannot be captured forever and can disappear at any moment. Closing Lucy’s story this way offers impressions about youth, passion, and creativity that extend beyond just a course of events ending in a tragedy. In a way, her short life echoes Sebastian’s musings on the roses that were sent to him: “Yes, they’re nice, aren’t they?

Very suggestive: youth, love, hope--all the things that pass” (Lucy Gayheart 69).

Lucy’s tragic death somewhat echoes Emil’s death in O Pioneers! Both characters are killed, Lucy by accident and Emil by murder, when they linger at their childhood homes. Cast as wanderer characters as opposed to settler characters, Lucy and Emil are troubled by the stasis of their lives at home. The problematic nature of romance--an idea Cather seems to hold fast to within some of her works--factors into Lucy and Emil’s death. Sebastian’s death by drowning changes Lucy, leading her to wrestle her sorrow back into inspiration, only to end up drowning as well. Emil’s emerging affair with Marie spurs her husband, Frank, to kill them both. Passion between lovers in Cather’s books most often proves fragile, tragic, or deadly. As stated before, gradual and sound growth is a more stable lifestyle in Cather’s world, even though such a lifestyle is never truly free from pain or heartache.

While demonstrating the dangers of stasis for wanderers through their deaths may seem extreme, Cather nonetheless drives home the idea that responding to the promptings of one’s identity is a life-altering matter. Thea Kronborg’s fame at the end of The Song of the Lark and

Ántonia Shimerda’s thriving family life at the end of My Ántonia are more successful, albeit imperfect, outcomes of heeding one’s inner sense of purpose. These outcomes do not culminate in straightforward life lessons or story morals in Cather’s works. They arise from the subtle, organic development of the individuals within these novels, and Cather directs their courses with careful thematic artistry that continually draws upon the power, beauty, and guidance of

landscapes and nature.

Chapter IV: Conclusion

On June 3, 2017, the National Willa Cather Center opened in Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Former first lady Laura Bush gave the keynote address during the opening ceremony, praising

Cather’s portrayal of the Great Plains and the strong, resilient pioneer women that populated her

stories and embodied the timeless spirit of the nation (Hansen). A culmination of the efforts and

mission of the Willa Cather Foundation, this new center both preserves the author’s history and

supports the ongoing work of Cather scholars. Ashley Olson, executive director of the Willa

Cather society, offered the following statement regarding the center.

With the completion of the National Willa Cather Center, the Willa Cather

Foundation's rich and growing collection is now housed in an archive that will

ensure preservation for years to come. Scholars and students have hands-on

access to these materials while conducting research quietly and comfortably in

our new study center. And finally, our visitors from across the country and around

the world have discovered Cather and encountered some of her most treasured

personal possessions through our new museum exhibit. (Olson)

Once a writer in danger of falling into obscurity, Willa Cather has become a treasured member of

America’s modern literary history. The National Willa Cather Center stands today as the epicenter of honor, remembrance, and avid study of the author.

As Alex Ross’s recent article, “A Walk in Willa Cather’s Prairie,” demonstrates, one of the central draws for Cather scholars is the prairie, from its physical form and space to its metaphysical breadth. The prairie itself remains the most powerful and expansive touchstone of

Cather’s legacy as an artist. Scholars and tourists visiting Red Cloud are free to hike the local prairie lands, experiencing the surroundings that so deeply shaped Cather’s perceptions of human

nature. Hermione Lee notes how Cather continues to resonate with readers in a way that sends

them on journeys (1). Retracing the steps of many prolific authors can be helpful in experiencing

and understanding their works, but Cather’s legacy holds a special power in drawing readers to

the landscapes the author cherished. Like the center’s museum preserves important pieces that

express Cather’s life and letters, the prairie lands possesses many of the raw materials of her

artistic vision (Lee 31). Ross’s impressions of the prairie land where Cather grew up coincide

with Cather’s artistic vision, as he writes, “When you walk the Cather Prairie, you move not only

backward in time but also out into symbolic terrain, one in which the self becomes a

‘something,’ in which a moment of supreme bliss is indistinguishable from death” (“A Walk”).

Ross’s article melds the biographical and the symbolic in memory of Willa Cather, preserving a

birds-eye view of the author’s life and letters.

Still, like Hermione Lee’s effort to study Cather’s language more so than take a biographical tour of “Catherland” (17), I have attempted in this study of Cather’s landscapes in her pioneer and artist stories to turn inward upon the works themselves, and what joins the landscapes of the six books discussed here is the idea of transformation. For Cather’s pioneer and artist characters alike, the natural world acts as a physical presence that drives mental and often emotional transformation. From O Pioneers! to Lucy Gayheart, landscapes inspire success, build identities, reveal concepts, capture senses, redirect mindsets, and spark revelations. They do not just interact with the minds of Cather’s characters; they actively change character perspectives and alter the courses of their lives. Cather’s pioneer stories cast nature as an agent of gradual change through protracted moments of mental transformation, while the artist stories focus in on sudden flashes of understanding through natural images, real or imagined, that accompany the lives of the characters. While the majority of the books discussed here neatly fit such

categorization, The Professor’s House is a comparatively unique case among these selections, given that it borrows from nature-related features more akin to pioneer stories, all the while remaining an artist story.

Even while acknowledging the importance of these divisions for the sake of a scholarly perspective, the cores of these stories are more alike than different. In a sense, Cather’s pioneers and artists are united when it comes to experiencing the transformative power of landscapes and nature. These stories share a singular vision of growth, fulfillment, pain, and revelation, containing a tireless, inner drive to explore what it means to be human in a complex world that gives and takes.

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