University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for

Fall 1984

Nebraska Naturalism In Jamesian Frames

John J. Murphy Merrimack College

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly

Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons

Murphy, John J., "Nebraska Naturalism In Jamesian Frames" (1984). Great Plains Quarterly. 1755. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1755

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

JOHN J. MURPHY

So much has been written about Willa Cather portrayals of the commonplace ("the drama of and the influence of the classics and later Euro­ a broken tea cup, the tragedy of a walk down pean literature that one sometimes forgets the the block").3 Romance would stress the abnor­ American literary climate in which she devel­ mal in characterization and plot, treating Amer­ oped.1 It was a postromantic age of realism, ican social problems, the dwellings of the poor, epitomized by William Dean Howells's attempt the outcasts, and so on, and would not be to limit fiction to normal characters in com­ restricted to the norm of experience. McTeague, monplace situations, which would make of it, the 1899 novel in which Norris tried to fulfill as Cather complained, a "sort of young lady's these social responsibilities, was praised by illusion preserver.,,2 But the new breed of Cather as a "great book," a powerful depiction "naturalists," Cather's contemporaries, were in of "brute strength and brute passions," a revolt against Howells and his more accom­ "searching analysis of the degeneration of ... plished contemporary, Henry James, and advo­ two souls"; she detected his method as Zola's, cated a return to romance without the chivalric "perhaps the only truthful literary method of trappings of Walter Scott and Dumas pere. dealing with that part of society which environ­ Frank Norris, the most outspoken of a group ment and heredity hedge about like the walls of that included Jack London, Stephen Crane, a prison.,,4 and Theodore Dreiser, pleaded for a serious One need only review Cather's early story response in his pointedly anti-Howells, anti­ "The Clemency of the Court" (1893) to recog­ James statement against so-called realistic nize her penchant for all the trappings of our naturalistic school: the effects of environment, evolutionary theory (the association of beast A professor of English at Merrimack College, and man, and the reduction of a human to a } ohn }. Murphy has published essays on Willa Cather in American Literature, Western Ameri­ bestial level), and adventure punctuated with can Literature, and other journals. He is the revolting details (the killing of the dog and the editor of Critical Essays on Willa Cather (1984). farmer, and the tale of a prisoner in Russia committing suicide by biting deep into his [GPQ 4 (Fal11984): 231-37.] arm, tearing open the veins with his teeth, and

231 232 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 1984 bleeding to death).5 A story like "On the Wharton," she confessed, "were our most inter­ Divide" three years later (1896) is similarly esting novelists.,,12 within the revolutionary, anti-Howellsian con­ In fact, the influence of the artistry and per­ ventions of the age; it depicts a Norwegian spective of Henry James, directly and through giant who carries off a screaming woman, Jewett, defines Cather's approach to her drinks himself into demonic stupors, and material, an approach that is somewhat contra­ performs suicidal rituals in an oppressively puntal to the influences of the young natural­ hot, treeless environment where "it causes ists and her own Nebraska experience. Edward no sensation ... when a Dane is found swing­ and Lillian Bloom explain the approach Cather ing to his own windmill tower, and most of shared with James as the "fusion of moral the Poles, after they have become too careless idea and physical reality," and as fictional and discouraged to shave themselves keep shaping appropriate to "the inner experience their razors to cut their throats with." It is which is the only justifiable substance of fic­ appropriate that Willa Cather wrote like this, tion.,,13 James appealed to the young Cather's knowing her independence of mind, her mas­ need for cultivation; she said of reading James, culine bent, and her introduction to rather "You may not be greatly moved at any time primitive conditions when she came to Ne­ but the most respectable part of your mentality braska a century ago at the age of nine. (One must be awakened, refreshed, interested, satis­ recalls the incident recorded by Mildred Ben­ fied.,,14 nett about Willa helping the local doctor My thesis is that Willa Cather used the ro­ during the amputation of a boy's leg.)6 mantic, adventurous material called for by the But her mature fiction reveals another side naturalists to rescue the nation's fiction from of Willa Cather. As William Curtin has noted, the tragedy of the broken teacup and the ad­ the fondness for romance she shared with the venture of an afternoon call, but that she young naturalists "put her at odds with William enclosed it, framed it, and viewed it from the Dean Howells." 7 Yet she acknowledged his Jamesian perspective. In My Antonia, for exam­ greatness, despite his mildness, and his ability ple, we immediately recognize the naturalistic to "make very common little men in sack coats" bent of the material: the narrator meets and be­ live, even if he could not create very great friends the daughter of a Bohemian immigrant ones.8 She defended Henry James's as well as family impoverished by a scheming country­ Howells's "theories as to the delicacy and man; the family members are reduced to animal decency of literature," and developed for James level, almost freezing and starving during the a reverence that might seem inconsistent with winter, and depending upon handouts from her admiration for the naturalists.9 The spell their neighbors. The father, unable to cope of James materialized after 1896, when, al­ with this alien environment, shoots himself in though she lamented his failure to address the head, leaving his daughter to be brutalized modern society, modern "degeneracy," and the by field work. When she goes to work in town, new woman, she expressed admiration for the one employer attempts to rape her; she meets a perfect control of his art, "as calm and as subtle railroad conductor who impregnates and then as the music of Mozart.,,10 She had earlier dis­ abandons her. She returns to the family farm in tinguished James with Hawthorne and Poe as disgrace to bear her child alone one evening our only masters of pure prose, and in a 1913 after a day in the field. Tucked into this story interview in the Philadelphia Record she de­ are tales of the killing of a rattlesnake; wolves scribed James, Mark Twain, and Sarah Orne attacking and eating a wedding party; a de­ Jewett as her "favorite American writers."ll ranged wife pursuing the local seductress across In 1911 she attempted in Alexander's Bridge the prairie with a butcher knife; a tramp throw­ to write a Jamesian novel with drawing rooms ing himself into the blades of a thresher; and and clever people; "Henry James and Mrs. so on. The inchoate if popular deterministic NEBRASKA NATURALISM IN JAMESIAN FRAMES 233 and evolutionary doctrines espoused by the whose almost exclusive function in the novel is naturalists (partially, one suspects, for effect) to react. and implicit in early Cather stories like "The The intentional, consciousness-filtering meth­ Clemency of the Court" and "On the Divide" od of Cather is best understood through certain are evident in the webbed fingers of Antonia's basic aspects of impressionism in painting and brother Marek, the phrenological assessment of their affinity to the method of James: The im­ pianist d' Arnault's skull, Mr. Shimerda's inabil­ pressionist painters emphasized light and color ity to cope with the bitter prairie winter, and in their paintings and approached objects from the sexual permissiveness his daughter seems to various angles; more important, they employed share with her mother, who had conceived the broken brushwork technique that requires Ambrosch out of wedlock.1S viewing from a distance to assemble the pieces Cather's treatment of this sensational ma­ and compose the picture.17 James once de­ terial I would label Jamesian, particularly in clared that he had grown determined to give the cultivated consciousness she bestows "not ... my own personal account of the affair upon narrator Jim Burden, who is passive, at hand, but ... my account of someone's im- self-absorbed, and prone to idealize women­ pression of it ... through the opportunity and traits variously evident in such Jamesian con­ the sensibility of some more or less detached, sciousness reflectors as Ralph Touchett in The some not strictly involved, though thoroughly Portrait of a Lady, John Marcher in "The Beast interested and intelligent witness orreporter.,,18 in the Jungle," and Lambert Strether in The Such a perspective goes beyond the mere Ambassadors. Like Godfrey St. Peter and Tom assembling and composing of what is physically Outland in The Professor's House, Archbishop witnessed. The journey from the physical world Jean Marie Latour, and to a lesser extent Niel to the realm of consciousness is obvious, for Herbert in A Lost Lady and Nellie Birdseye example, in Cather's "A Wagner Matinee" in My Mortal Enemy, Jim Burden is a superior (1904), one of the stories she wrote during her being, endowed to an extraordinary degree, Jamesian phase. When narrator Clark takes his as Dorothea Krook says of Jamesian heroes Aunt Georgiana to the symphony concert in and heroines, with the gifts of "intelligence, Boston, the description he gives of the audience imagination, sensibility, and a rare delicacy of resembles an impressionistic painting: "One lost moral insight" bound up with an "inordinate the contour of faces and figures, indeed any ef­ capacity for being and seeing" - "the eye of the fect of line whatever, and there was only the soul [moving] perpetually back and forth, colour of bodices past counting, the shimmer of between the activity of apprehending the fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer; red, objective world and the activity of apprehend­ mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose, ing its own apprehensions." Further, James yellow, cream, and white, all the colours that makes his characters "articulate about all that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, they see and understand.,,16 All this does not with here and there the dead shadow of a frock mean, Krook cautions us, that these characters coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as are so intelligent and so conscious that they are though they had been so many daubs of tube­ never blind or never suffer uncertainties or paint on a palette.,,19 The last line of the make mistakes. One might call them highly passage suggests Clark's tendency to explore civilized, conversant with the best in litera­ his aunt's consciousness through impressions ture and the fine arts, to which they frequently of the sights and sounds of the physical world refer to explain what they see and understand. around her, and this reveals his own predilec­ Their function strikes us as somewhat passive, tions for viewing her life as a disastrous waste. and nowhere does the American western ex­ We begin with the physical world but travel perience seem as passive as when Cather Hlters inward. it through the consciousness of Jim Burden, Jim Burden's initial response to the Nebraska 234 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 1984 landscape is decidedly impressionistic in this personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. way. (Italics are mine in the following passages.) The thing one immediately noticed about him "There seemed to be nothing to see .... If was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I there was a road, I could not make it out in the once heard a missionary say it was like the faint starlight.... nothing but land-slightly beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only undulating, I knew, because often our wheels made it more impressive" (pp. 11-12). Grand­ ground against the brake as we went down into ma Burden "was a spare, tall woman, a little a hollow and lurched up again on the other stooped, and she was apt to carry her head side.,,20 Note that Jim is describing his impres­ thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if sions of the place rather than the place itself. she were looking for something, or listening to At this point he tells us of his feeling of isola­ something, far away. As I grew older, I came to tion from Virginia, and we are led momentarily believe that it was only because she was so away from Nebraska and toward images of Vir­ often thinking of things that were far away .... ginia. Later, he feels that the prairie grass is Her laugh . . . was high, and perhaps a little the country "as the water is the sea" and com­ strident, but there was a lively intelligence in pares its redness to "wine-stains" (p. 15). Note it" (pp. 10-11). how all descriptions of the country are centered The introduction of Lena Lingard is also a in Jim's responses and the images they generate painterly impression, even to its frame: "A in him. The insistence on bright color, especial­ plump, fair-skinned girl was standing in the ly shades of yellow shimmering in the sunlight, doorway. She looked demure and pretty, and is indeed painterly: "As far as we could see, made a graceful picture in her blue cashmere the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in dress and little blue hat, with a plaid shawl sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at drawn neatly about her shoulders and a clumsy any other time of the day. The blond corn­ pocketbook in her hand" (p. 159). (One is fields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy reminded here of Ned Rosier's view of Isabel and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was Archer in a doorway frame in chapter 37 of like the bush that burned with fire and was not James's The Portrait of a Lady.) consumed. That hour always had the exaltation The reader can gauge the inward progress of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's of Cather's novel by comparing the initial, ob­ death-heroes who died young and gloriously. jective description of Antonia, a girl holding It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of oilcloth bundles within a family group illumi­ day" (p. 40). The fleeting momentary vision, nated by the red glow of the locomotive fire the rich color, and the scattered details resem­ box (pp. 5-6), to .the more impressionistic bling the broken brush technique all come to­ description of her eyes as "big and warm and gether for us in the perceiving consciousness. full of light, like the sun shining on brown Jim describes details of the landscape at dif­ pools in the wood. Her skin was brown, too, ferent times of day and through the four and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark seasons, walking around his subject like a good colour. Her brown hair was curly and wild impressionist, taking in its full effect while looking" (p. 23). By the last book, the por­ leaving it open-ended. trayal of Antonia has become even more sub­ character descriptions in My Antonia are jective and internalized: "As I confronted her, also impressionistic, taking us beyond the eye the changes grew less apparent to me, her and into the mind and involving us in the identity stronger. She was there, in the full values, judgments, interpretations, and past ex­ vigor of her personality, battered but not periences of the perceiver in his attempt to go diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in beyond the surface of what he sees and hears. the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well" Grandpa Burden, for example, "was not demon­ (p. 331-32). It is interesting to compare these strative. I felt at once his deliberateness and descriptions to Isabel Archer's initial impression NEBRASKA NATURALISM IN JAMESIAN FRAMES 235

of her future husband Gilbert Osmond in and animal figures of the cr~che are displayed J ames's The Portrait of a Lady, or her initial on the tree. Mr. Shimerda comes to visit the impression of Madame Merle, who sets her up Burdens in this episode and prays before the as Osmond's victim. candles on the tree. The winter thaw separates The perceiving consciousness in Cather's this from the next picture framed by snow, in world, as in James's, are artists in that they which Mr. Shimerda kills himself in a barn with communicate to us not only what they see and animals, and a lantern is hung over his body, hear, appropriately investing it with feeling, but before which the family members kneel and arrange it so that the scattered impressions can pray. be assembled toward the effects they desire-in This impressionistic approach to material­ other words, they do not merely respond to the this Jamesian filtering of material through world, they make the world. This process is consciousness-when applied to the naturalistic illustrated in James's The Ambassadors, just material that was Cather's "bent," explains why before the climax, when Lambert Strether we are usually distanced from violence in My travels by train into the French countryside in Antonia and why a book so unrepresentative order to find the elements he once saw as­ of what Howells would term the norm of Amer­ sembled in an impressionistic landscape paint­ ican life hardly strikes us as a sensational book. ing at a Boston gallery. When he discovers When Pavel tells his horrible story of the "the particular note required," he gets off the wolves, we focus through Jim on Pavel's "con­ train and assembles the landscape according to temptuous, unfriendly expression" toward his memory of the painting: "The oblong gilt Peter, Pavel's excitement during the telling, the frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars release of his rage, and his story's effect on Jim and willows, the reeds and river-a river of and Antonia, who clasps Jim's hand under the which he didn't know, and didn't want to table (pp. 54-55). When old Shimerda commits know, the name-fell into a composition, full suicide, the attention is on Jim's reflections on of felicity, within them; the sky was silver and the journey of the soul, possible motives, his turquoise and varnish; the village on the left reminiscence of the old man's visit at Christ­ was white and the church on the right was mas, and imagined scenes in the old world re­ grey; it was all there, in short-it was what he constructed from scattered details provided wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, Jim by Antonia. it was Lambinet [Emile Lambinet, the paint­ The two incidents in which Jim encounters er). Moreover he was freely walking about in violence firsthand are his struggles with the it.,,21 snake and with Wick Cutter; yet even in these This ordering, designing, arranging approach the emphasis is on their effect on him, his is not only evident in My Antonia in painterly nausea, his resentment of Antonia, his pride, or passages like the one where Jim Burden de­ his shame. However, these are exceptional epi­ scribes the pattern in the grass after the first sodes and worthy of comment because in them snow fall-"like strokes of Chinese white on there is a fusion of two literary worlds. In the canvas" (p. 62)-but in Jim's overall assembling Jamesian world, sexual passion is outlawed; of materials. Seasonal changes as well as cul­ hence the killing of the snake can be read as the tural phases have been noted as organizing ele­ rejection of sexual passion, even though it sur­ ments in Cather's novel, but I am not aware of faces again in Wick Cutter's attack. Viewing any analysis of Jim's splicing of the parts of sexual passion in terms of the snake, as Blanche his narrative, so that the center of the first Gelfant has, also associates sex with evil.22 book is arranged around two blizzards that Although Frank Norris called for explorations function as framing devices. The first blizzard of the mystery of sex as well as of the depths provides a setting for Christmas, during which of the heart and soul, he and his fellow natur­ the birth of Christ is celebrated and the human alists, as Stanley Cooperman has indicated, 236 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 1984 regarded sex as evil. 23 Norris, writes Cooper­ trative of two opposing principles of what man, "was motivated far more directly by she calls "poetic idealisation." Wordsworth Calvinist-Christian guilt than by scientific "deliberately chose to exhibit 'the essential naturalism; the naturalism, indeed, was super­ passions of the heart' in and through a class of imposed upon the older determinism only on people representing the simplest, most primi­ the verbal level. ... Norris himself ... is torn tive, most uncomplicated human material between affirmation of 'purity' and masochistic available to him as a poet." According to fascination for the physical, setting up the dual­ Wordsworth's principle, "the 'ideal' man for ity between 'nature' (evil) and 'spirit' (good).,,24 the purposes of poetry-the man through whom Donald Pizer similarly notes that for Norris, the fundamental passions can be most instruc­ "sensual pleasure and gross sexual desire [were 1 tively and most beautifully exhibited-is the vestige [s 1 of man's animal past hindering his man who stands as close as possible to the gradual evolution toward the dominance of 'beautiful and permanent forms of nature,' spirit over body.,,25 whose life is innocent equally of the surface As a paradigm of sexual suppression and re­ encrustrations and the internal complexities channeling, the Samson d' Arnault episode in of more involved forms of life.,,26 "The prin­ My Antonia would hardly shock either the ciple of idealisation that regulates the art of author of "The Turn of the Screw" or the Henry James," continues Krook, "stands at author of McTeague. D' Arnault's piano is his the opposite pole to the Wordsworthian. James substitute woman and his pursuit of its seduc­ does not say, Strip and reduce; he says instead, tive siren song leads him to its body: "He Load. Load your human material (he says), touched it softly, and it answered softly, first with all the external appurtenances of kindly. He shivered and stood still. Then he civilisation. . . . Then, on top of these cul­ began to feel it all over, ran his finger-tips tivated tastes and habits, give them also the along the slippery sides, embraced the carved most refined sensibilities, the most delicate legs, tried to get some conception of its shape perceptions, and a developed power of articu­ and size, of the space it occupied in primeval lating all that they feel and see; and, passing night. It was cold and hard, and like nothing in this way from the external appurtenances of else in his black universe. He went back to its civilisation to the internal, endow them with mouth, began at one end of the keyboard and gifts of insight and powers of discrimination felt his way down into the mellow thunder, and analysis, in the field of moral relations as far as he could go. He seemed to know that in particular, far exceeding the reach of men it must be done with the fingers, not with the in real life. Finally, endow them with the fists or the feet. He approached this highly supreme gift of consciousness-specifically, artificial instrument through a mere instinct, self-consciousness." Krook maintains that the and coupled himself to it, as if he knew it was Wordsworthian world and the Jamesian world to piece him out and make a whole creature of are irreconcilable, "mutually exclusive as modes him" (pp. 187-88). This episode is strategically of rendering the fundamental realities of the placed immediately before the Italians set up human condition." the dancing pavilion, before Antonia's sexual I think that in Cather somewhat correspond­ blossoming and Jim's frustration with his ing worlds are brought together and reconciled: inability to respond sexually to her. Here, Antonia represents the Wordsworthian ideal, through Jamesian sublimation, Cather follows and Jim the Jamesian consciousness. Cather's Norris's dictum to plumb the mystery of sex "naturalism" lies within the context of the and search the innermost temple of the soul of primitive conditions she experienced in Ne­ man. braska, and the "Jamesian" filters framing such Dorothea Krook has compared the world of conditions were developed through her wide Wordsworth and the world of James as illus- reading and saturation in the fine arts. NEBRASKA NATURALISM IN JAMESIAN FRAMES 237

NOTES ern Illinois University Press, Arcturus Books, 1964), p. 243. 1. For classical sources and influences, see 14. Cather, World and Parish, p. 486. references in my article, "Euripides' Hippoly­ 15. In "The Form and Content of American tus and Cather's A Lost Lady," American Realism," the introduction to Realistic Amer­ Literature 53 (1981): 72-86. For European ican Short Fiction (Glenview, 111.: Scott, Fores­ influences on Cather, see Bernice Slote's "An man, 1972), George Perkins writes of the Exploration of Cather's Early Writing," Great naturalists: "In some measure philosophical Plains Quarterly 2 (1982): 210-17; also David determinists everyone (though no very great Stouck's "Willa Cather and the Impressionist case could be made for the clarity or. consis­ Novel," in Critical Essays on Willa Cather, ed. tency of their thinking), they wrote novels and John J. Murphy (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), short stories in which the heroes were victims pp.48-66. and personal success was a triumph not of char­ 2. The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's acter but of circumstance" (p. 10). Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902, ed. William 16. Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Con­ M. Curtin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska sciousness in Henry James (New York: Cam­ Press, 1970), p. 258. bridge University Press, 1962), pp. 15-16, 3. Frank Norris, "A plea for Romantic Fic­ 22. tion," in The Responsibilities of the Novelist, 17. James J. Kirschke, Henry James and Im­ bound in one volume with Criticism and pressionism (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1981), Fiction by William Dean Howells (New York: p.4. Hill and Wang, 1967), pp. 279-82. 18. Ibid., p. 209. 4. Cather, World and Parish, pp. 605-8. 19. Cather, Collected Short Fiction, p. 238. 5. "The Clemency of the Court" and "On 20. Willa Cather, My Antonia (Boston: the Divide" are reprinted in Willa Cather's Col­ Houghton Mifflin, Sentry Edition, 1961), p. lected Short Fiction, 1892-1912, ed. Virginia 7. Subsequent references to this edition are in­ Faulkner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska cluded in my text. Press, 1970), pp. 515-22 and 493-504. 21. Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. S. P. 6. Mildred R. Bennett, The World of willa Rosenbaum (New York: W. W. Norton, Critical Cather (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Edition, 1964), p. 302. Bison Books, 1961), pp. 111-14. 22. Blanche Gelfant, "The Forgotten Reaping­ 7. Cather, World and Parish, p. 258. Hook: Sex in My Antonia," American Litera­ 8. The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's ture 43 (March 1971): 69-71. First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893- 23. Norris, "plea for Romantic Fiction," p. 96, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of 282. Nebraska Press, 1966), pp. 281, 180,407. 24. Stanley Cooperman, "Frank Norris and 9. Ibid., p. 378. the Werewolf of Guilt," Modern Language 10. Ibid., p. 361. Quarterly 20 (September 1959): 253. 11. Ibid., pp. 382, 446. 25. Donald Pizer, "Evolutionary Ethical 12. Willa Cather, "My First Novels [There Dualism in Frank Norris' Vandover and the Were Two 1," in On Writing: Critical Studies Brute and McTeague," PMLA 76 (December of Writing as an Art (1949; New York: Knopf, 1961): 552. 1962), p. 93. 26. Krook, Ordeal of Consciousness, pp. 19- 13. Edward Bloom and Lillian Bloom, willa 22. Cather's Gift of Sympathy (Carbondale: South-