Copyright © 1990 by the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation ISSN 0197-663X Fall, 1990 Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter VOLUME XXXlV, No. 3 Literary Annual RED CLOUD, NEBRASKA

Death Comes for the Archbishop: what as she used the statue of the Auvergnat Bishop Lamy A Map of Intersecting Worlds which inspired her. Evelyn Hailer, Doane College Clearly, "the life-size bronze" In her invocation of God’s or genre clusters relate to and statue before St. Francis ca- plenitude -- "He takes all reinforce each other because thedral became a monumental forces, all space, all time to fill she found a subject ideally bronze, if not a colossus, in her them with universes of beauty" suited to her interests and her imagination. It was "something ("Moral Music" 178) --Willa technique. fearless and fine and very, very Cather anticipated a model that The first of these genre well-bred m something that she herself used in writing visions is Franco-centric and spoke of race" ("On DCA" 7) -- Death Comes for the Arch- qualified by apologetic bio- that the statue communicated to bishop. She achieved credibility graphical tracts. The second her that inspired her to structure in this narrative, as she pre- medieval and characterized by her "biography" of Bishop Lamy ferred to call it, by invoking the iconography and hagiography. toward heroic myth. A visual rules of a variety of genres The third, Mexican, contains disparity between Lamy the which provide differing visions elements such as folklore, the bronze statue and Lamy the man of the cosmos -- a term more tall tale, the ballad of violence becomes clear when one com- accurate in this instance than and sex -- all anticipatory of pares the three-dimensional "world views." By juxtaposi- magic realism. This cluster in- heroic image with the portrait of tion, the four cosmic visions cludes references to the rites of Lamy in the Palace of the Gover- the Penitentes and the practices of the morada (their meeting- house); folk art appears as in religious wooden carvings called bultos and two-dimen- sional images called santos. The fourth cluster, the Indian world of myth and ritual drawn from oral and pictorial tradition, includes ancient practices from several tribes, including the Anasazi, the Zuni, and the Hopi. The point at issue in this delineation does not concern what Cather believed or did not believe, but how she made a literary structure for her arch- bishop. ]’hat Cather adapted history as found in William Joseph Howlett’s 1908 biog- raphy of Bishop Joseph Mache- beuf (the basis for Father Vaillant) and other sources can be demonstrated by comparing her novel with Paul Horgan’s 1975 biography Lamy of Santa Coatlicue: Museo -- Nacional de Fe. The differences suggest that Virgin of Guadelupe: Taylor Museum Mexico Cather used "history" some- of Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

~ge15 nors showing a worn old man himself is a tower and an order- covertly that because Indians with a narrow mouth and erased ing principle. But the centrality had overcome oppression in the features. As E. K. Brown sug- of the bishop in the world of the past, there might be hope for gested almost fifty years ago, novel as well as in our con- them in the 1920s. During the Latour corresponds to Cather’s sciousness corresponds to the writing of the novel, Secretary ideal of a person of aristocratic Hopi notion of living at the Albert B. Fall of the Interior sensibility at peace in an center of the world in "the Department and his Indian aesthetically severe landscape middle" among six points: the Bureau were victimizing the and provided a subject that cardinal points of north, south, Pueblos -- an assault which suited her profoundly (192-93). east, and west as well as the was not resolved until 1933 At the center, then, of zenith and the nadir. Here we when the old Indian Bureau was Cather’s novel is the 1statue of have a triple intersection: the overturned. Though Cather Bishop Lamy standing in front of Hopis’ understanding of what it could not have known that out- his golden cathedral -- a truly means to be alive; the hier- come, she refers to a nineteenth- golden structure ("Yellow, a archical world of hagiography century parallel in the Govern- strong golden ochre, very much and iconography, and the world ment’s relocation of the Navajos like the gold of the sunlight that of historical fiction based on to the Bosque Redondo: "At last was ,tow beating upon it" [Arch. European values, such as his- the Government at Washington bishop 240]) in contrast to the tory being the biography of great admitted its mistake -- which grotesque illusions generated men. governments seldom do. After by the greed of the Conquista- Why is this pluralism, these five years of exile, the remnant dores. Like gold beaten to "an four worlds or dominant cosmic of the Navajo people were per- airy thinness" to illumine visions at the heart of Cather’s mitted to go back to their sacred medieval manuscripts, the novel novel? "Everything goes by places" (Archbishop 296). on re-reading is bathed in a fours with our people," a Papago Moreover, the Archbishop’s last golden light. As Clinton Keeler woman stated (Peck and Waiters discernible words spoken in the observed, "[A]s in a legend, light 218). And again, "Four is both a text are: "God has been very is a correlative of belief .... The ceremonial and a magical num- good to let me live to see a sun!ight and distance .of the ber with the Pueblos; if one is happy issue to those old Southwestern landscape are im- asked a question four times he wrongs. I do not believe, as I portant subjects of the narra- is compelled to answer" (Tyler once did, that the Indian will tive" (126). 6). The Southwestern culture is perish. I believe that God will saturated with such multiplicity, preserve him" (Archbishop 297). The novel’s intersecting Here I disagree with Bernice worlds are akin to medieval and Cather was drawn to the Southwest, spending many Slote’s suggestion that the levels of meaning or, perhaps novel signals the "changing of more appositely, concentric months there at intervals be- tween 1912 and 1926. She was gods" ("First Principles" 110); circles, for that scheme also instead, I find a simultaneity or approximates the Indian layered not a casual visitor; she wanted to learn what she could of the synchronicity of the gods, for view, and Cather relates Bishop ancient gods are fixed to places, Latour’s life through a cyclical ways of the native people. She developed a friendship with a as Bishop Latour sympathetical- pattern whereby, from a medie- ly heard Chief Manuelito ex- val perspective, all time is pres- Belgian priest, Father Halter- mann, who lived in Santa Cruz plain. Some may be transported ent as it is to God. On the other and "drove about among his like Aeneas’s lares, but others hand, if we combine Latour’s eighteen Indian missions with a continue to live in "those inac- name (the tower) with the linear spring wagon and a pair of cessible white houses set in structure of traditional biog- mules. He knew a great deal caverns up in the face of cliffs, raphy -- which Cather said she which were older than the white was doing when she compared about the country and the Indians and their traditions" man’s world .... Their gods the movement of her narrative to were there, just as the Padre’s that of two white mules moving ("On DCA" 4). By 1916 Cather slowly forward (letter to had absorbed a considerable god was in his church" (Arch- amount of information about the bishop 295). I would suggest Foerster) -- we joumey on a that rather than being "a Catho- Dantean spiral.~ On re-reading, Indians, some of it from Norden- skjold’s book, as shown in her lic novel" -- an idea Cather set we observe the working out of a straight by writing to the editor foregone conclusion: the salva- Mesa Verde essay written for The Denver Times.3 of Commonweal ("On DCA" tion of Latour. Glen Lick ob- 3-13) -- her novel is the work of a serves that Tom Outland is like Perhaps another matter was pluralist, delighting in plenitude the tower in the ruin, the order- at issue: contrary to her usual and multiplicity. The signs in- ing principle in The Professor’s reluctance toward political dicate that Cather’s earth- House; just so Bishop Latour statement, Cather intimates yearning visions are congruent

Page 16 with those of an ancient tribal in a ’multi-verse.’ Indians don’t kneels before a cruciform tree, people rather than the dominant believe that there is one fixed putting himself within the white view. As Frank Waiters and eternal truth; they think human nature of Christ to makes clear, "the Hopi [will not] there are many different and imagine what He experienced view.., the universe as an in- equally valid truths" (5). during His life on earth. But it is separably interrelated field or By the end of Death Comes Vaillant who finds the bell from continuum [in a way to] be quite Chaucer’s time whose ringing for the Archbishop we have transports Latour to Jerusalem palatable to those who tacitly found not a synthesis but rather accept the role of man as a ra- where he has never been. Later an overlapping of spheres with when Vaillant sets out to the tional entity created to stand each retaining its integr.ity in apart from nature in order to new mission field of Gold Rush large measure. Cather’s struc- Colorado in an oddly triumphal control its politically ordered ture permits a multi-faceted cosmology with an imperialistic simultaneity or synchronicity cart which tumbles down moun- mechanization" (xiii). tain sides, the many accidents whereby many things go on at from which he recovers suggest once: Lamy is idealized; Father the durability of martyrs in Vaillant believes in miracles and Jacobus da Voragine’s The has the resiliency of a Golden Golden Legend.~ Certainly both Legend saint; the cosmic view Vaillant and Latour serve God in of the artisans who carved the the loneliness of the desert of santos out of cottonwood is the New World as the founders congruous with the landscape; of monasticism had in the but the Ancient People as well deserts of Egypt. Their activities as later tribes provide the foun- are exalted intersections of dational culture because the French nineteeth century biog- story is revealed in New Mexico. raphy and da Voragine’s legends Meanwhile, the novel testifies to of devotion and courage for friendship and fidelity as real- medieval Christians. ized through the objective cor- relative of the two white mules Two motifs appear in all four who work together in harmony of the novel’s intersecting and are most content when each worlds: the figure of Death and is in the presence of the other. the figure of the Maiden/Mother. It is Latour, however, who Not only was the Virgin Mary a dreams of building a church and means of offsetting the patri- succeeds. He understands why archal emphasis of Roman Ca- Our Lady of Guadalupe would tholicism; it is also evident to St. Augustine - Florence: Church of want a church built on the site of one who studies classical litera- Ognissanti, Florence her apparition, but he does not ture, as Cather did, that Mary For a novel to include a variety appreciate the vernacular archi- was a means of satisfying the of cosmic visions within a single tecture, thinking it disrespectful needs of early converts familiar narrative so that they spin to make God’s house out of with Latin and Greek female together well enough to pro- mud. Although Father Vaillant divinities. Latour recognizes mote the willing suspension of does not concern himself with Hidden Water as a sacred spring disbelief that constitutes poetic such distinctions, he is empha- and remembers how, in the faith, requires a brave new struc- tic that miracles like Guadalupe Auvergne, "Roman settlers had tural device: worlds ostensibly can be accommodated in this set up the image of a river god- within a Christian celestial world. Vaillant sees a miracle as dess at similar places" (32). The sphere containing un-Roman- "something we can hold in our concern of Father Machebeuf, ized multitudes. The armillary hands and love," while Latour Vaillant’s prototype, that "blind sphere provides a visual ana- says a miracle is "human vision devotion" to the Blessed Virgin logue, such as the one in Botti- corrected by divine love" (50). "sometimes mixed with fanati- celli’s portrait of another bishop, Latour sees God in nature, "but cism and superstition" and Augustine of Hippo. (See note 4 his dear Joseph must always "needed to be explained and and the reproduction of St. have the miracle very direct and properly directed" (Howlett Augustine.) In any case, appre- spectacular, not with Nature, 180-181) suggests an ancient ciation of the novel’s structure but against it" (29). Both are foundation for the practice requires a tolerance for diversity right. which the Christian Virgin Mary if not ambiguity. As Jamake Soon after we meet Latour he continued rather than initiated. Highwater insists, "Indians is engaged in the Spiritual Exer- Howlett implies the ubiquity don’t believe in a ’universe,’ but cises of Ignatius Loyola as he of Marian devotion when he in-

Page 17 forms us that in Santa Fe around though severe Spanish face" predecessor of Our Lady of 1851 there were three chapels (Archbishop 256-257), fits a Guadalupe, an account of for the public, all dedicated to statue brought by Father Alonso whose appearance in 1531 is the Blessed Virgin under her Beneavides when he arrived in told Latour and Vaillant by Padre appellation of Our Lady of 1626 as Superior of the Indian Escolastico Herrera, a man of Guadalupe, Our Lady of the Missions and as Commissary of nearly seventy (46-50). Later in Rosary, and Our Lady of Light. the Holy Office. Though the the sixteenth century Fray Ber- "This last chapel was under the statue represented the Assump- nardino de Sahagen, who had special charge of Father Mache- tion, before long "the people learned Nahuatl quickly, beuf" (Howlett 178). Mache. were calling it La Conquistadora thought the use of the title beuf’s devotion to Mary had or Lady of the Conquest." Then, Tonantzin "should be remedied, grown so much a part of his life as now, the restored statue was for the correct [native] name of that he saw in its unfolding, a kept in its own chapel in the the Mother of God, Holy Mary, is pattern of her many feasts. most significant church in Santa not Tonantzin but rather Dios Cather retains much of the Fe (Chavez 4). Cather goes on to inantzin." He knew, furthermore, Marian matter in her character. spin analogies with European that on "a small mountain called ization of Latour as well as monuments of Marian art: Tepeyacac... they had a temple Vaillant. After feeling acutely These poor Mexicans, [Latour] dedicated to the mother of the deprived of the company of reflected, were not the first to gods [Cioacoatl] whom they Vaillant and of nieces and pour out their love in this sim- called Tonantzin, which means nephews he would have enjoyed pie fashion. Raphael and Titian Our Mother. There they per- in France, Latour attains seren- had made costumes for Her in formed many sacrifices in honor ity, and perhaps joy, through their time, and the great masters had made music for of this goddess." He further contemplation of the Blessed Her, and the great architects observed that of the many Virgin whom he regards in lyric had built cathedrals for Her. churches dedicated to the mode suggestive of the un- Long before Her years on Blessed Virgin, this was the one declared title "Mediatrix of All earth, in the long twilight be- that drew multitudes especially G races": tween the Fall and the before the seasonal rains for A life need not be cold, or Redemption, the pagan sculp- which the people felt obliged devoid of grace in the worldly tors were always trying to "to take their offerings in appre- sense, if it were filled by Her achieve the image of a god- ciation." SahagOn was con- who was all the graces; Virgin- dess who should yet be a vinced that "in the minds of daughter, Virgin-mother, girl woman. (256-257) the common people who come of the people and Queen of The continuation of Mexican Hearers;/a reve supreme de la devotion to the Virgin signaled there, it is nothing other than the chair. The nursery tale could by the passage above is ancient custom" (Sahagt3n not vie with Her in simplicity, epitomized in the old woman 1:90-92). the wisest theologians could Sada, victim to low-caste Prot- From that perspective Frank not match Her in profundity. estants to whom she was en- Waiters describes "the dark (256) slaved. "[T]he little silver medal, Madonna of the Tepeyac, .... La with a figure of the Virgin" Virgin Morena," whose festal Though Bishop Latour could gathering he saw in a crowd of not accept adobe churches be- which Latour presses on her so half a million people in the mid- cause he was unable to see "she would have a treasure to twentieth century. She is beyond their mud construction, hide and guard, to adore while Goddess of the earth and corn, he was charmed by the Mexican her watchers slept" is an "Image, related to Tlaloc, god of rain. santos, wooden figures, likely the physical form of Love!" Clad in her mantle of sky-blue, inspired by Franciscan devo- (214-216). Significantly, Cather dotted with stars like toasted tional practices, carved and blurs theological distinctions maize grains .... This was the painted by Mexican craftsmen. about the kind of attention Mary idol behind the altar, the Thomas J. Steele suggests that -- let alone an image -- is en- kachina within the mask, santos anticipate later develop- titled to from the Faithful: strict- which the people still wor- ly speaking, she is not to be shipped. Tonantzin’s new ments in Westem art (2), and Spanish name of Guadalupe Cather’s own delight in santos adored; rather than adoration or did not deceive them. It only emphasizes her recognition of /atria, to which she is not en- lent official and ecclesiastical experimental modern as well as titled, Mary receives hyperdulia, sanctity to their forbidden folk forms. Her description of a higher form of the dulia pagan worship. (37-40) "one of these nursery Virgins, a rendered to saints. Significantly, Our Lady of little wooden figure, very old and "Adoration," however, links Guadalupe does not crush a very dear to the people .... Sada’s Kind Woman in Heaven snake beneath her foot, unlike about three feet high, very state- to Tonantzin, the ancient Aztec most Tridentine representations ly in bearing, with a beautiful mother of the gods and the of the Blessed Virgin. Her

Page 18 predecessor on Tepeyac, Cioa- The image itself of Death on a the connection here lies merely coati, who, writes Sahagbn, "is cart drawn by Penitentes during in the fact that both Masou and also called Tonantzin" (92), may Easter Week did not carry a the spirits of the dead inhabit wear a skirt of snakes. Guada- scythe, like Holbein’s figure, nor the underground region. Most lupe does, however, stand on a was he safely in two dimen- important of all, Masou is a god crescent moon, signifying icon- sions. Rather, this Death carried of germination; and here the ographically the triumph of a bow and arrow aimed at spec- connecting idea seems to be the Christianity over Islam and tators and was himself "a multi- conception that the growth of thereby showing European influ- plicity of axes" thereby resem- plants is dependent on warmth, ence.6 bling the overlapping worlds of and warmth is the product of Cather’s narrative. There is, fire" (60). According to some But the presiding genius of accounts Masu’u is found in a Cather’s narrative is Death. moreover, an appositeness about this icon of death, for garden where crops grow abun- Though Cather tells us the title dantly though in the dark. When "was simply taken from Hol- despite the bow and arrow’s probable origin in the Spanish Latour dies, his garden has been bien’s Dance of Death," there is blooming extravagantly. more to it than that. Cather had theatre, this weapon "fitted well into the New Mexican scene, How had Latour lived to merit where the Indian archer consti- metaphoric inclusion after death tuted a threat for anybody’s life" in a sphere additional to that of (Wilder and Breitenbach pl. 32). his own culture? Though Latour And what of Archbishop La- was chosen for New Mexico tour’s relation to the Death that because of his French ability to comes for him? Unlike Every- arrange, he prides himself on his man, Archbishop Latour does willingness to leave others not say to Death that he has alone except in instances of dire come when he had him least in abrogation of church discipline. mind. Rather, Latour’s life as We are shown, analogously, how shown through the narrative has he gives horses their heads in been a preparation for that en- trusting them to find water, counter and planned with taste aware that they know more than and diligence out of a tempera- he does. Latour, the tower, has mental necessity for order. the ability to see afar. Therefore, Moreover, Cather describes though Latour is at the center of Latour as lying on his bed the structure which is, osten- meditating on his catafalque sibly, his biography, the implied with the implication that he is linear biography has in effect preparing for the time he will lie moved away from Rome, where in his cathedral in front of the the novel opened, to Santa Fe. altar before lying beneath a The center of the structure is stone slab until JudgmenV as if where Latour is and chooses to The Death Cart: Taylor Museum of he were to lie in a French be, not least because of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center cathedral in the Auvergne. heavenly air. He visits Rome in expressed her preference for the his pattern of duty as a bishop; There remains the specifically but his spirit dwells in Santa Fe, old adobe churches in the hills, Indian dimension of Death in the churches that had not been form of the Pueblo god Masau’u and there he chooses to die. Americanized with vulgar manu- or Skeleton Man, who relates to The archbishop’s decision is factured plaster statues. She Latour’s readiness to "die of congruous with the Pueblo wrote: "In lonely, sombre having lived" (269). "To the cosmic view which holds that villages in the mountains the pueblo Indian," Hamilton A. the people (Pueblo ancestors) church decorations were som- Tyler writes, "the antithesis be- emerged from just under where bre, the martyrdoms bloodier, tween life and death, and in they live, and when they die the grief of the Virgin more particular the distinction be- themselves they will return to agonized, the figure of Death tween this world and the other the underworld at an entrance more terrifying" ("On DCA" 11, world, does not have the same within walking distance of their 5). She speaks of the santo. force that it has for us" (3). The community dwelling. The con- "Tt,~ Triumph of Death" was photographer Edward S. Curtis gruity of Archbishop Latour’s dy- close to the bone for Cather, for tells us Masou "is connected ing but a short distance from she had observed in a letter to with fire. He is also in a sense of where he is laid in state before Irene Miner Weisz that after one god of the dead, his name being being buried in the cathedral reached forty it reined death. used as the term for corpse, but which he has brought into being

Page 19 D "fathered," if you will -- novel. Augustine is shown in an Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the brings together Franco-centric architectural setting as if he were a Archbishop. 1927. New York: Vin. biography, hagiography, and saint within a cathedral niche. In tage, 1971. Botticelli’s painting, however, he is fundamental Pueblo myth to Letter to Norman Foerster achieve a quietly resounding not only enlivened but shown at dated 22 May 1933. Slote Collec. resolution to the novel, the hole emblematic work which summarizes how his life has been spent and tion. Special Collections, Love in the floor of the golden cathe- what has made him a figure of Library, U of Nebraska-Lincoln. dral resembling the sipapu of heroic sanctity. He leans toward a .... . Letter to Irene Miner Weisz. New. the kiva, an umbilical cord to the Gothic bookrest and writing board; berry Library, Chicago. earth goddess. .... he holds an inkwell with an ex- ---. "Moral Music," Journal, October In the concluding chapter en- truding quill pen in his left hand. 7, 1894, 13, rpt., The Kingdom of titled "Death Comes for the Behind him a scientific treatise is Art. Ed. Bernice Slote. Lincoln: U Archbishop," a passage sum- open on a ledge together with a of Nebraska P, 1966. marizes the intersecting worlds clock indicating the first hour after sunset which is also the hour when "On Death Comes for the of Latour’s life: Archbishop Latour dies. Fore- Archbishop." On Writing. New He observed.., that there was grounded with Augustine is an ar- York: Knopf, 1962. no longer any perspective in millary sphere. It is fitting that the Chavez, Fray Angelico. The Santa Fe his memories ..... He was gaze of the Bishop of Hippo, whose soon to have done with calen. Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi. diocese included Carthage, was, by Santa Fe: 1947; rev., 1987. dared time, and it had already implication, sometimes directed ceased to count for him. He toward an armillary sphere that Curtis, Edward S. Selected Writings sat in the middle of his own could signify non-Christian world- (Excerpts from Volumes I-XX of consciousness; none of his views that continued to be held in The North American Indian.) Ed. former states of mind were North Africa and the Mediterranean Barry Gifford. Berkeley: Creative lost or outgrown. They were all -- world-views which had influenc. Arts Book Company, 1976. within reach of his hand, and ed Augustine himself. In Cather’s Highwater, Jamake. The Primal all comprehensible. (290) novel, Archbishop Latour -- as Mind: Wsion and Reality in Indian distinct from the historical Lamy -- America. New York: Harper & ponders the changes he hasseen Row, 1981. and acknowledges that there re- Horgan, Paul. Lamy of Santa Fe. mains much that he does not under. stand about the rites and beliefs of New York: Farrar, 1975. NOTES the indigenous people as well as Howlett, William Joseph. Life of the ’1 am indebted to my husband, those of New Spain whose practice Right Reverend Joseph P. Mache- Robert S. Hailer, for his observation of Christianity differs from his beuf, D.D., Pioneer Priest of Ohio, that the figure of Death on the wall French style. Pioneer Priest of New Mexico, of the morada at the Old Cienega ~ The Golden Legend of Jacobua Pioneer Priest of Colorado, Vicar Village Museum at El Rancho de las de Voragine, trans, and adapted Apostolic of Colorado and Utah, Golondrinas fifteen miles south of from the Latin by Granger Ryan and and First Bishop of Denver. Santa Fe probably had something to Helmut Ripperger (1941; New York: Pueblo, Colorado, n.p., 1908. do with Cather’s title. This essay Arno P, 1969). A thirteenth century Denver: Regis College, 1987. grew out of that idea. We were in compilation of readings.(legenda) in New Mexico because of James Keeler, Clinton. "Narrative Without saints’ lives for the laity to accom- Accent: Willa Cather and Puvis de Work’s third expedition to Cather pany the ecclesiastical year, it was country in May, 1986. Chavannes." American Quarterly one of the most popular books of 17 (1965): 119-126. 2See John Murphy, "Cather’s New the Middle Ages and was translated World Divine Comedy: The Dante and printed by Caxton in 1483. Lick, Glen. "Tom Outland: A Central Connection." Cather Studies 1 (Lin- ~For another iconographic inter- Problem." Southwestern Ameri- coln: U of Nebraska P, 1990) 21-35. pretation, see Thomas J. Steele’s can Literature 8.1 (1981): 42-48. ~Susan J. Rosowski and Bernice discussion of the Guadalupe image Peck, Peggy V. and Anna L. Waiters, Slote, "Willa Cather’s 1916 Mesa signifying the Virgin’s triumph over ed. The Sacred: Ways of Knowl- Verde Essay: The Genesis of The Quetzcoatl, 97-104. edge, Sources of Life. Tsaile Professor’s House, "which includes ~The fact that Lamy was buried in Navajo Nation, AZ 86556: Navajo the text of Cather’s essay." Prairie "a deep pit" dug "in the center of Comm. Coll. P, 1977. Schooner 58 (1984) Winter:. 81-86 (for the old transcept" rather than in "a SahagOn, Fray Bernardino de. Cather). burial vault or crypt beneath the General History of the Things of 4See, for example, the reproduc. Cathedral sanctuary" invites com- New Spain. Eds. Arthur J. O. parison with the kiva. See Chavez, tion of "St. Augustine in His Cell" Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. from the Church of Ognissanti, Sante Fe Cathedral, 26, 28. 13 parts. Monographs of the Florence. The armillary sphere in School of American Research, this portrait of St. Augustine pro- WORKS CITED Santa Fe: School of American Re- vides a narrative image for the Brown, E. K. and Leon Edel. Willa search and University of Utah. cosmic visions or genre clusters Cather: A Critical Biography. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 1982. contained within the structure of the 1953. New York: Avon, 1980. 1:90-92.

Page 20 SIote, Bernice. "First Principles: The Waters, Frank. Book of the Hopi. heart attack. She cancelled her Kingdom of Art." The Kingdom of 1963. New York: Ballantine, 1969. planned trip to Europe and Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles m. Masked Gods¯ 1950. New York: stayed in Nebraska until he and Critical Statements, 1893- Ballatine, 1970. recovered. When she returned to 1896. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, Wilder, Mitchell A. with Edgar B. New York City, she found that 1966, Breitenbach. Santos, The Relig- storing her belongings was "like Steele, Thomas J., S. J. Santos and ious Folk Art of New Mexico. Col- having a funeral" (Woodress, Saints: The Religious Folk Art of orado Springs: Taylor Museum of 413). Two months in Jaffrey, Hispanic New Mexico. 1974¯ Colorado Springs Fine Arts Cen- New Hampshire, left her un- Santa Fe: Ancient City P, 1982¯ ter, 1943. restored. She had no ideas for Tyler, Hamilton A. Pueblo Gods and new work and experienced her Myths¯ Norman: U of Oklahoma P, first "let-down" or involuntary 1964. "let up" in five years. Her "tem- porary" New York lodgings were in the Grosvenor Hotel, but she was back in Red Cloud from Shadows on the Rock: Cather’s Miracle Play Christmas until late February. Merrill M. Skaggs, Drew University One week after she returned In the first sentence of Shad- eval. Through a seventeenth- to the Grosvenor, her father ows on the Rock, five units of century hamlet that preserved a died. Cather reacted so quickly time are running out. Hour, day, more archaic lifestyle, she that she reached Red Cloud via month, year and century begin created a community which train at 3:00 A.M., the morning to expire as the novel opens, and could experience miracle. Her after she got the news. Her ar- by the end of the second sen- method was to keep miracle play rival in the dark gave her time to tence, the last link with ordered in mind both as genre and meta- sit quietly alone with his body security -- the ship La Bonnephor. She wrote Governor Cross, until daybreak. But after the Esperance -- sails out of sight. "You seem to have seen what a body was moved for the funeral, The philosopher apothecary of different kind of method I tried "she paced frantically back and Quebec looks down at a world to use from that which I used in forth between the house and the which seems "empty." From the the Archbishop." And again, "1 ¯ . . church . . . , wringing her facts we can reconstruct of ¯ . . tried to develop it into a hands, apparently unable to con- Cather’s life at this time, her prose composition not too con- quer the grief and panic which world must also have looked clusive, not too definite: a series overwhelmed her. Acquain- empty, with time running out. In of pictures remembered rather tances felt that her grief was not her preceding novel, she had than experienced; a kind of unmixed with ... fury.., that thoroughly explored the concept thinking, a mental complexion time, her greatest enemy, could of miracle and now she must inherited, left over from the past, effect such changes" (Bennett have thought she needed one.’ lacking in robustness and full of 28-29). After her brother Doug- Cather consciously summoned pious resignation" (On Writing lass took their mother to Cali- her miracle in Shadows on the 14-15). Her own immediate need fornia to recover, Cather stayed Rock. This polished play on may have impelled her, but her on alone in the old family house miracle became, by deliberate desire bloomed as a fiction for over a month, to find healing analogy, her miracle play. which made the play of miracle in the silence, as Myra Hen- For at least a decade and itself concrete and real. shawe had once advocated. probably more, Cather had The happy days which the After a while, "She felt rested longed for medieval times. Edith~ previous novel Death Comes for and strong as if her father him- Lewis reported that in their the Archbishop initiated lasted self had restored her soul" travels of 1920 Cather said "she about six months, though read- (Woodress 414). wanted to live in the Middle .ing proofs for the novel seemed During this solitude, Willa Ages. And we did live in the "like having a gorgeous party all spent hours getting the house Middle Ages, so far as was over again" (Woodress 412). By ready for her mother’s return possible" (Lewis 119). What hap- summer of 1927, however, the and doing things as she thought pened at the time she wrote party was over. In a traumatic her mother would like to have Shadows, I’m suggesting, is that upheaval, Cather was forced to them done. When Shadows on fertile ideas she had been leave her Bank Street apartment. the Rock eventually appeared, gestating for years came to To avoid the turmoil she went the daughter’s driving desire to term. Though the 1697 date on west to visit her brother Roscoe follow an absent mother’s which action begins here is not in Wyoming, and coming back system of housekeeping is "middle ages," the Quebec life- by way of Red Cloud, was on crucial to the emotional thrust style, as we shall see, was medi- hand when her father suffered a of the book. Finally, however,

Page 21 Willa embarked again for New By the signs we can read, miracle plays . .. the pen~ion- York, arriving "absolutely tired." then, in Quebec Cather spotted naires give at Christmas-time..." She had done no writing for six a new place which grippingly (Shadows on the Rock 61). We months and was in no physical represented what she yearned understand that dramatic cele- shape to begin any. "Ufe does for: miraculous stability and un- bration of the Nativity and beat us up sometimes, she disrupted cultural continuity. In saints’ lives and miracles was wrote [Mary] Jewett, and we her letter to Governor Wilbur natural in a place like Quebec. must take our drubbing" Cross Cather said, Walking abroad in the autumn (Woodress 414). To me the rock of Quebec is fog "was like walking in a By Edith Lewis’s report, their not only a stronghold on which dream .... Not even the winter newly-built cottage on Grand many strange figures have for snows gave one such a feeling a little time cast a shadow in of being cut off from everything Manan "seemed the only foot- the sun; it is the curious en- hold left on earth" (Lewis 153). and living in a world of twilight durance of a kind of culture, and miracles" (61-2). For the sake of novelty, they narrow but definite. There decided to travel to it tim long another age I~ersists. There, Indeed, in every season the way -- by way of Montreal and among the country people and Kebecois assume the possibility Quebec -- and see new country. the nuns, I caught something of miracles. Miracles occur daily According to Lewis, "from the new to me; a kind of feeling here. Some, of course, are more first moment that she looked about life and human fate that flamboyant than others. When down from the windows of the I could not accept, wholly, but the town survives bombardment, Frontenac on the pointed roofs which I could not but admire. one church is renamed "in and Norman outlines of the town (On Writing 15) recognition of the protection of Quebec, Willa Cather was not The kind of life she glimpsed which Our Lady had afforded merely stirred and charmed -- there was not unlike the fanta- Quebec in that hour of danger" she was overwhelmed by the sized medieval life she longed (64). As a matter of fact, flood of memory, recognition, for. In it, a commonly shared celebrating the miracles of Our surmise it called up; by the faith or "myth structure" unified Lady was a primary purpose of sense of its extraordinarily a culture. the most popular miracle plays.3 French character, isolated and In Quebec, Cather’s imag- And on solemn feast days in kept intact through hundreds of inative energy revived with a tale Quebec, "all the stories of the years, as if by a miracle, on this set in the past, conveying a rock came to life for Cecile; the great unFrench continent" unified Kebecois feeling about shades of the early martyrs and (Lewis 153-4). In other words, life. The tale would extoll a great missionaries drew close just at the point when her old coherent life pattern developed about her. All the miracles that homes disintegrated, Cather by a cohering community which had happened there, and the glimpsed a new emotional honored loving and daughter- dreams that had been dreamed, home, full of recognizable and nurturing fathers. She had barely came out of the fog; every spire, beloved things which had been started her fiction, however, every ledge and pinnacle, took kept intact for centuries, as if when she was forced to confront on the splendour of legend" (95). just for her. She must have felt not only the mortality of fathers Pierre Charron, one of the semi- like Tom Outland discovering but also of mothers. The novel skeptical citizens, believes in Cliff City. appeared within the month her miracles because he has per- Cather began historical re. mother died. In fact, in her sonally experienced them. search on the place immediate- mother’s failing years it served Jeanne le Bet, his childhood ly, while Lewis experienced a as Willa Cather’s rock of refuge sweetheart, promised to pray (Woodress 423). that he would not die unex- well-timed attack of the flu. pectedly before having a chance Then after two restoring months As theatrical expression of to adjust his soul; he can assert, on Grand Manan, Gather re- rocks of refuge, miracle plays "1 have certainly been delivered turned to New York and "began grew out of the rites of the from sudden death" three times, writing Shadows on the Rock medieval church. Those rites as a result of her prayers that Fall at the Grosvenor .... established and celebrated com- (180). The entire community’s She was working with.., energy munal order. Miracle plays re- 2 acceptance of miracle is a and concentration.., when, in mained popular for centuries. crucial point in this reading. December, she got word that her Such theatrical forms also, R. George Thomas reminds us, mother in California had had a Cather’s novel plausibly asserts, the pageants were a confirma- paralytic stroke; and broke off flourished in seventeenth- tion -- through the media of her writing" ~Lewis 156). It century Quebec, directed at the speech, action, song and spec- was another terrifying reminder Ursuline school by Sister Anne tacle -- of the living faith and of the inexorable march of de Sainte-Rose. This nun, we powerful assumptions of an time. read, invites Cecile "to the little entire community which be-

Page 22 lieved itself to be an integral town. It also leads us to remem- But the central event in a part of a wider community (or ber Cather’s scholarship. She re- miracle play is a miracle. For all ecclesia) which encompassed searched this novel thoroughly, the wonder of sinless Cecile, all space and all time. (12) but she gravitated to that task there’s a more dramatic source In Shadows on the Rock, because she had been admiring of miracle here, which thrills all Quebec is not only that kind of medieval Norman culture for of Canada. And one feels some- coherent community out of years. how back in closer touch with which miracle plays developed; the familiar Willa Cather after it also physically suggests the The metaphor of a miracle realizing that the greatest saint manger scenes which brought play directs episodes in this in Shadows on the Rock is also, such dramas alive: book and explains the pro- by the novel’s implied or com- Auclair thought this rock-set nounced oppositions David munity standards, its greatest town like nothing so much as Stouck comments on (156), the sinner. Jeanne le Ber, the one one of those little artificial folk elements Marilyn Callander visited by angels, is the one who mountains which were made catalogs (66), the emphasis on betrayed her father’s fondest in the churches at home to pre- the Holy Mother which Susan hopes and broke his heart, sent a theatric scene of the Rosowski highlights (184), the denied her mother’s deathbed Nativity; cardboard mountains, unrelieved virtue of the central broken up into cliffs and character that bothers James wishes and refused a final kiss, ledges and hollows to accom- rejected her lover’s pleas, send- Woodress (430), and the con- ing him into the forest, cut modate groups of figures on servative nature of the Cathol- their way to the manger .... herself off from all elements (5) icism John J. Murphy discusses of the community, embraced (37). A miracle play employs flat hunger and cold and discomfort Three-tiered Quebec in fact characters. It also juxtaposes resembles the two- or three- brutal mishaps and mutilations -- everything the colony works storied sets of medieval pageant to conquer; and took on all the with better-than-life virtues. Its sin and misery of the continent. wagons, with church and heaven order includes miracles and at the top and sin and hell at the saints. In short, the maverick is the bottom. saint who provides the miracle Quebec’s physical character- One expected element in they all long for. As reward for istics suggest, by t~h~ writer’s in- miracle plays is dramatic con- having "thrown the world away" versions, and we have several (182), Jeanne earns a voice tention, the kind of theatric examples of them in Shadows "harsh and hollow as an old backdrop familiar to the Norman 4 French who not only founded on the Rock. Medieval cycle crow’s -- terrible to hear!" (80). Quebec but also originated the plays also emphasized the She wears "a stone face . . . first trope-writing activities from crucial occasions in the church [which] had been through every which liturgical drama, and calendar year, as this novel sorrow" (182), and walks full of eventually medieval vernacular follows a year in the life of "resignation and despair" (183). church drama, evolved. The still- twelve-year-old Cecile Auclair. But angels work for terrible extant Rouen Nativity play, Cather often used seasonal and Jeanne. And the news electrifies given at Christmas, is one of the cyclical time as a structuring Canada. "The people have loved earliest, simplest, and loveliest device, but this novel stands out miracles for so many hundred as a carefully contained one- years, not as proof or evidence, of the type (Williams 23). And but because they are the actual from the first pages of Cather’s year-with-epilogue organization, novel, Quebec is associated analogous to the structure of flowering of desire. In them the with such Nativity plays and medieval cycle plays. Cecile vague worship and devotion of with a permeating Christmas may do little else than duty, but the simplehearted assumes a spirit, even though the actual in the context we’ve now placed form" (137). The most important time when the novel begins is her we can see that she is event in the novel, then, is not late October. Soon after that fashioned to function as the only a miracle a whole culture beginning Cecile reports to hope of the New World. It is no can celebrate. It is also a miracle brought about by the bad girl -- Count Frontenac, "Oh, every- accident that this budding the willful, family-disrupting and thing we do, my father and I, is a adolescent is as good in the -rejecting daughter who kind of play" (58). novel’s middle as in its begin- chooses to take on the awful I take Cecile’s assertion to be ning or end. Cecile’s personal knowledge of the sins of the a book-defining statement. It development is not necessary world. Thus considered, Jeanne leads us to make comparisons for a character in this form. The is not unlike her creator. between medieval Norman novel celebrates communal Through her story this novel ex- theatrical tastes and those the growth, which is made possible tolls a fully committed life which Quebec citizens brought with by female stability and depend- by artful focus becomes itself a them when they founded the ability. rite, a drama, and a miracle.

Page 23 NOTES ’When "an English sailor lay sick pastoral themes and imagery. In ’In a recently completed disserta- at the Hotel Dieu, Mother Catherine them, Cather traces the prom- tion Barbara Caspersen thoroughly de Saint-Augustin ground up a tiny ise, the decline, and the death of explores Cather’s use of this term, morsel of bone from Father Bre- the pastoral as an ideal of (The Flowering of Desire: the feuf’s skull and mixed it in his gruel, human life. Sources of Cather’s Miracle, un- and it made him a Christian" (125), published dissertation, Drew Uni- and so forth. In Obscure Destinies, Cather versity, May 1990); however, I believe returns to pastoral themes she Cather was exploring ungranted WORKS CITED had explored in many of her miracles in My Mortal Enemy. earliest stories and novels, Bennett, Mildred. The World of Willa when she, like Virgil, was bring- 2"Actually, changing social and Cather. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, ing the Muse to her homeland. historical conditions have made the 1951. Like My Antonia, Obscure plays differ little in spirit from their Callander, Marilyn. Willa Cather and Destinies reflects her deep sources, predecessors, and succes- the Fairy Tale. Ann Arbor: UMI Re- familiarity with Virgil’s Georgics sore: the same naive reverence and search P, 1989. and other classical literature. faith in heaven’s omnipotence oc- Cather, Willa. On Writing: Critical curs in the thirteenth-century Much, however, had changed for Studies on Writing as an Art. Lin- Cather since she had written her miracles of Gautier de Coincy and coln: U of Nebraska P, 1988. Rutebeuf, in the sixteenth-century early pastorals. Increasingly Shadows on the Rock. alienated from the society miracles of Jean Louvet." Grace New York: Random House, 1971. Frank, The Medieval French Drama around her and saddened by the (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960 Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. recent death of her parents, she [1954], 119). Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1953. was questioning the founda- Murphy, John J. "The Art of tions of her earlier beliefs. For ~"lnterest centres in the Virgin’s Shadows on the Rock." Prairie Cather herself, as much as for intercession, her aid to sinners, Schooner 50 (1976): 37-51. the narrator in "Two Friends," however wicked, who have repented. Rosowski, Susan. The Voyage Peri- Obscure Destinies memorializes This moral may be tucked away in lous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism. the passing of the certainties of various exciting tales intended to Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986. keep a restive medieval audience youth. entertained, yet it is always there. Stouck, David. Willa Cather’s Imag- ination. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, Pastorals are characterized by Modern taste may be offended by retreat from the complexities of the way in which the worst of 1975. criminals have only to offer oppor- Thomas, R. George. Ten Miracle urban society to a secluded rural tune prayers to be forgiven. But the Plays. Evanston: Northwestern U place such as a farm, field, spectators who first witnessed P, 1966. garden, or orchard, where these miracles performed were con- Williams, Arnold. The Drama of human life is returned to the cerned in paying homage to their Medieval England. Lansing: Michi- simple essentials of the natural tutelary saint, and the greater the gan State U P, 1961. world of cyclical seasons, rain crime the greater the power of the Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A and drought, love and fertility, Mother of God." Frank, Medieval Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Ne- birth and death. According to French Drama, 119. braska P, 1987. David Stouck, "Mythically, pastoral seeks to recover a ’Golden Age’ when existence was ideally ordered and there The Passing of a Golden Age in was no conscious separation of self from the rest of the world -- Obscure Destinies no separation of subject and ob- Kathleen A. Danker, South Dakota State University ject, all things sharing an iden- tity of order and purpose" (35- Obscure Destinies has been Nebraska, they have no overlap- 36). Presumably written for an recognized as containing some ping characters or events, and urban audience, the agrarian of Willa Cather’s strongest the first story takes place later, pastoral as exemplified by the writing. Yet, how its three in the 19205, than the second Georgics celebrates the joys stories, "Neighbour Rosicky," and third, which are set in the and virtues of working the land "Old Mrs. Harris," and "Two late 1880s and the mid 1890s and reaping its harvests, of tend- Friends" tie together has re- respectively. Those studies that ing work animals and herds of ceived relatively little attention. have considered the volume as a cattle, of loving home, family, Indeed, at first glance, the whole have focused on ideas of and continuing generations, and stories seem not to have much romanticism (Rosowski) and of holding fast to one’s own in common. Although they are strategies of narration (Leddy). I local area or patria. In the all set in rural communities propose that these stories are pastoral, too, the vices of recognizably based on Red Cloud unified also by Cather’s use of society are condemned by

Page 24 means of contrasting city ills land, an expression of Czech In "Neighbour Rosicky," with country virtues. heritage, and a means of show- country burial is associated with "Neighbour Rosicky" estab- ing affection for and creating human caring, continuity with lishes the pastoral ideal in ties with family, friends, and life, and connection with the Obscure Destinies in ties to even animals. Cather writes that earth; while city burial, treated land, work, farm animals, home, with Mary Rosicky, "to feed as a money-making business, children, traditions, and com- creatures was the natural ex- means human indifference -- munity, as well as in image pat- pression of affection, -- her being forgotten. Rosicky is terns of life and death. The story chickens, the calves, her big "distrustful of the organized in- is set on a Nebraska farm where .hungry boys" (10). In true dustries that see one out of the the Czech immigrant Anton pastoral fashion, Mary is world in big cities," preferring Rosicky lives with his wife Mary associated with the fruit of the his own rural community where and their children. His oldest bough, the field, and the vine. "if you died, fat Mr. Haycock, the son Rudolph and American She makes her own wild-grape kindest man in the world, buried daughter-in-law Polly live near- wine, cooks up plum preserves you" (60). And Dr. Burleigh con- by. The Rosickys are hard- to go with hot biscuits, sends trasts the country graveyard working, humble, affectionate prune tarts to Polly and where Rosicky lies to "city people with only enough money Rudolph, serves her husband cemeteries; acres of shrubbery to keep them out of debt, people apricot kolaches, and urges Dr. and heavy stone, so arranged such as are described in Gray’s Burleigh to marry so she can and lonely and unlike anything "Elegy" -- "Let not Ambition take his wife some nut bread. in the living world. Cities of the mock their useful toii,/Their The Rosickys eat family meals dead, indeed; cities of the homely joys, and destiny ob- forgotten, of the ’put away.’ But together, during which they ex- this was open and free, this little scure" (9) -- from which Cather change family and local news, derived the title of her volume. square of long grass which the tease one another, and tell wind for ever stirred .... Nothing As a child, Rosicky had stories. At Christmas dinner, could be more undeathlike than "formed those ties with the Mary recalls a Fourth of July this place ..." (70-71). earth and the farm animals and family picnic, and her husband growing things which are never follows with a story from his Pastoral themes and imagery made at all unless they are made London years about begging established in "Neighbour early" (32). He had spent his money for food on Christmas Rosicky" continue through the young adulthood struggling with Eve. Later, Polly decides to in- other two tales in Obscure poverty and restlessness in Lon- vite her in-laws over to supper -- Destinies. Before the story told don and New York City before on New Year’s Eve. These in "Old Mrs. Harris" begins, emigrating when nearly middle- repeated celebrations of public Hillary and Victoria Templeton aged to Nebraska, marrying, and and religious holidays empha- have already severed their tie to settling down on the land. There size continuities over time and the land by selling Grandma Har- he devotes the remainder of his space: connections with pre- ris’s comfortable country home life to the care of his farm and vious years and with cultural in Tennessee and moving to a family. After he dies, he is traditions of national and inter- little rented house in the small buded in the country graveyard national scope. town of Skyline, Colorado. With near where his horees work in Life in "Neighbour Rosicky" them, however, they have summer and his cattle eat fod- is emphasized over death, and brought the entire family: their der in winter. His death seems a there are few images of sick- fifteen-year-old daughter Vickie, natural part of the cycle of life ness. Even Rosicky does not the twins Adelbert and Albert, seen in the recurring seasons "look like a sick man" (4).-The young Ronald, baby Hughie, and holidays of the year. Grandma Harris, and the bound major death imagery appearing girl Mandy. With them, too, they The imagery ~Cather uses in the story involves dust and have transplanted their family throughout Obscure. re~ tinies is drought, when the dry earth can- cat Blue Boy, and, to the dismay consistent with pastoral em, not support the life of growing of their orderly new neighbor phasis on the essential ele- plants, and bitterly cold weather Mrs. Rosen, their horse Cleve- ments of the natural world: without snow, when seed land and cow Buttercup. earth, water, sun, stars, moon, freezes in the ground. Beyond seasons, animals, plants, birth, that, there is a burial motif In caring for these domes- life, and death. Her use of food which makes a connection be- ticated animals, the Templetons in "Neighbour Rosicky" is par- tween the earth, death, and retain a connection with the ticularly striking. Food in this human traditions. Cather uses pastoral life they have left story is not only a necessity of this motif to contrast the coun- behind. Similarly, Grandma Har- life, but the product of the try with the city, a pastoral ris relives, in a way, the pastoral Rosicky family’s labor on the theme reminiscent of Georgic II. ideal by remembering her be-

Page 25 loved former home in Tennes- family’s social difficulties as world, a world in which the old see. The themes of rural com- she does her husband for the ideals that held life together are munity, labor on the land, and financial problems that confine dying. the fruit of the bough are all them to their overcrowded How seriously the pastoral present in a scene in which she house. In this situation, in which ideal has been weakened in "Old recalls "the old neighbours, the the ties of traditional identity, Mrs. Harris" can be seen in the yard and garden she had worked family affection, and community role food plays in the story. No in all her life, the apple trees she relationships are all strained, longer either a tie to the land had planted, the lilac arbour, tall Vickie seeks the means to ac- (the Templetons have no garden) enough to walk in, which she cept a partial college scholar- or a source of social unity, food had clipped and shaped so many ship, Victoria is dismayed to in "Old Mrs. Harris" is both a years. Especially she missed her find she is once again pregnant, sign and a cause of family and lemon tree, in a tub on the front and Grandma Harris realizes she community disunity. The Temple- porch, which bore little lemons is dying. tons eat their meals in separate almost every summer, and In spite of their difficulties, groups in separate places at [which] folks would come for separate times, and Victoria’s miles to see..." (96-97). Hillary however, the Templetons are Templeton, too, finds a kind of able to hang on to their family difficulties with her neighbors traditions and, some of the time, over her mother manifest them- pastoral escape during an in- at least, to their affection for one selves in terms of food. If Mrs. terlude in which he rides out to another. Although family ties Rosen brings Grandma Harris the country to visit an old Ger- and neighborhood friendships sweets, Victoria is jealous; and man couple who rent a farm are strained, they are not when she takes one of her from him: broken. The tension of this mother’s cakes to an ice-cream The Heyses kept bees and raised turkeys, and had honey- strain, the sense of a precious social, Victoria is critized for suckle vines running over the and precarious balance, is part keeping someone in the kitchen front porch. He loved all those of what makes "Old Mrs. Harris" to do her baking. things. Mr. Templeton touched such a powerful story. It is a ten- The Templetons’ social ma- Cleveland with the whip, and sion that appears even in the laise is mirrored by their physi- as they sped along into the story’s concluding paragraph, cal ills. After leaving Tennessee, grass country, sang softly: which describes how Grandma Mr. Templeton first moved to a "Old Jesse was a Harris’s death will affect Vic- mining-company town in Colo- gem’man, toria and Vickie: Way down in Tennessee". rado where he had a good job, Thus Mrs. Harris slipped out "but the altitute of that moun- (180) of the Templetons’ story; but tain town was too high for his The song that Hillary Templeton Victoria and Vickie had still to family. All the children were sick sings here makes a connection go on, to follow the long road between the Heyses’s farm and that leads through things un- there; Mrs. Templeton was ill Grandma Harris’s old home in guessed at and unforeseeable. most of the time and nearly died Tennessee, while the bees and When they are old, they will when Ronald was born" (133). In come closer and closer to Skyline as well, Victoria has fre- even the honeysuckle vines sug- Grandma Harris. They will quent headaches, Grandma Har- gest Georgic IV. think a great deal about her, ris can think of numerous times This is not the harmonious and remember things they when the boys have been sick, a world of "Neighbour Rosicky," never noticed; and their lot will cut on Vickie’s finger becomes be more or less like hers. They so badly infected that she has to however. In "Old Mrs. Harris," will regret that they heeded public celebrations have been her so little; but they, too, will carry her arm in a sling, and reduced to ice-cream socials, look into the eager, unseeing Grandma Harris’s health de- and the Southern traditions that eyes of young people and feel clines. Even the cat Blue Boy the Templetons have brought themselves alone. They will catches distemper and dies, with them to Colorado set them say to themselves: "1 was thereby causing another family at odds with the expectations of heartless, because I was dispute. Grandma Harris, who their neighbors in the "snappy young and strong and wanted herself used to carry out the little Western democracy" of things so much. But now I compassionate country rituals Skyline (133). Grandma Harris know." (190) connected with returning the and Victoria are bewildered This ending is deeply am- dead to the earth, is angry when when their way of living draws biguous, balancing as it does Victoria tells Hillary to arrange criticism from their neighbors. the positive values of family for Blue Boy’s body to be hauled Insinuations that she exploits continuity, memory, and self- off with the trash. Indignantly, her mother as a drudge espe- knowledge, with a sense of she instructs the twins to "go to cially hurt and anger Victoria, isolation, loss, and regret. It is a that crooked old wilier tree that who blames her mother for the vision born of an imperfect grows just where the sand creek

Page 26 turns off the road, and.., dig a store and listen to their banter "an office in a high building" little gravefor Blue Boy, an’ bury over local affairs and farmers where he sits "morning after him right" (144-145). and their discussions of plays morning, apparently doing noth- Strong as they are, scenes of they had seen together in St. ing ..." (229). sickness and dying in "Old Mrs. Joseph and Kansas City. The narrator who wanders Harris" are balanced by ones of The friendship between the through the graveyard land- life: Victoda nursing her baby in two men was destroyed, how- scape of "Two Friends" is an un- the parlor, Albert bringing his ever, when they quarreled over substantial figure -- a lost and grandmother a glass of water, Dillon’s avid support of William ghostly child. She has no name, and Grandma Harris joyfully Jennings Bryan’s monetary re- no playmates, and virtually no caught up in the young lives of forms. Soon after, Dillon died body -- we only surmise she is her grandsons. Mandy, too, is suddenly, and Trueman left for female because she plays jacks, associated with the most an- San Francisco without attending usually a girl’s game. She cient pastoral values in pas- the funeral, selling his ranches neither eats nor drinks, almost sages where she milks the cow, and other property in Kansas. no one in the story does. Nor does the dishes, or having For the narrator, the "breaking- does she or the others get sick; finished her work at night, tends up of that friendship between only living creatures can Grandma Harris’s feet: two men who scarcely noticed become ill. Sent on "countless Beside the kitchen stove [her] existence was a real loss errands.., day and night" (197) Mandy had a little wooden tub ¯ . . and has ever since been a by parents who are "glad to have full of warm water .... She put regret" (229). To her it repre- the children out of the way" Grandma’s feet in the tub and, sents "a truth that was acci- (210), she seeks out Dillon and crouching beside it, slowly, dently distorted -- one of the Trueman because they seem slowly rubbed her swollen legs truths we want to keep" (230). "solid" to her, like Dillon’s store, .... Mrs. Harris... never asked wall, and sidewalk (197). Yet she for this greatest solace of the The imagery used in "Two never speaks to the two men, day; it was something that Friends" portrays a ghostly, life- and they rarely speak to her. Mandy gave, who had nothing less world, one in which the else to give .... Mrs. Harris pastoral ideal is a thing of the Witnessing an occultation of dozed from comfort, and Mandy past, like the narrator’s story Venus with Dillon and Trueman herself was half asleep as she itself. The earth here is a grave: late one summer night, the performed one of the oldest narrator thinks that "Wonderful rites of compassion." (92-93) ankle-deep dust which absorbs moonlight, muffles sound, and things do happen even in the Reminiscent of "Neighbour lies "soft and meek like the last dullest places -- in the corn-. Rosicky," this passage com- residuum of material things, -- fields and the wheat-fields" bines elements of water, warmth, the soft bottom resting-place" (212). Yet, in the occultation, a labor, and human traditions, (212). Scenes recalled by the bright and swiftly-moving "star" with the touch of the human narrator occur mainly at night, disappears behind the moon hand as it makes connections only to re-emerge as a "wart" and freely bestows a gift of under "the rich indolence of a full moon, or a half-moon set in and a "planet" which no longer love. uncertain blue" (210). Physical- seemed to move. Only, the "inky There is no comparable scene ly, the two friends are bloodless, blue space between it and the in "Two Friends," the final story as if made of stone. Trueman is moon seemed to spread" (213). in Obscure Destinies. In this heavy and immobile, while This "wonderful" occultation is tightly-wrought tale, the narrator Dillon, below his jet-black hair, really a celestial omen of mis- recalls a friendship she ob- has skin that is "very white, fortune such as can be found in served as a child between two bluish on his shaven cheeks and Georgic I and throughout clas- prominent businessmen in the chin .... a face in many planes, sical literature. It prefigures the small Kansas town where she as if the carver had whittled and death of the friendship between grew up. She had admired these modelled and indented to see the two men. men because they were secure, how far he could go" (194-195). As influential and wealthy established, and led more varied The men are associated in the business men with connections lives than other men in town. narrator’s mind with the window- in big cities, Trueman and Dillon R. E. Dillon owned a bank and less, "blind," brick wall of represent "success and power" general store and rented out Dillon’s store against which to the child who looks up to farms in the country, while J. H. they sit at night. In the moon- them (194). That they can "acci- Trueman was a wealthy cattle- light, this wall appears carnelian dentally" distort (230) the "un- man. On summer nights, the nar- red, the color of blood, but hard alterable" reality (193) of their rator would sit near Dillon and and inanimate (211). After mov- friendship in a quarrel over Trueman on the wooden side- ing to the city, Trueman seals politics and money, however, walk beside the wall of Dillon’s himself up in the mausoleum of throws doubt on the values they

Page 27 exemplify, as well as on the home orchard is safe. Without spiritual ideal in a seemingly dis- foundations of the narrator’s the support they need, Lucy sociated world -- lies at the faith. Although the country town Gayheart and Nancy Till cannot heart of Cather’s fiction. setting of "Two Friends" evokes stay in the rural communities of ~ Nathan A. Scott, Jr., argues ironic echoes of "Neighbour their youth; to run away into the that the major movements in Rosicky," Trueman and Dillon unknown becomes their only contemporary literary criticism represent a vastly different recourse. Thus Cather ends her speak, one way or another, of world, a world in which money is lifelong story of the pastoral "tragic losses, and of losses the highest value, farms and cat- with cautionary tales about a ultimately rooted in the loss of tle are investment properties, world of exile in which there is God" (Scott, Broken Center 78). children are unwanted, com- no Golden Age, no rural haven The operative postulate of the munity is expendable, traditions -- a world where the pastoral twentieth-century imagination is are forgotten, funerals are un- idea remains merely as an invisi- that "we ultimately face . . . a attended, idleness means suc- ble measure of what has been Silence, an Absence, a threaten- cess, and home is abandoned lost. ing Emptiness at the center" of for exile. reality (79). Scott stresses, how- While Anton Rosicky’s hand ever, that this has not always communicates a gift of love to been the status of literature. Ex- his daughter-in-law that brings panding on arguments posed by "her to herself" (67), the two Erich Auerbach, Scott finds the friends give their young admirer WORKS CITED kernel of Western imagination in empty material substitutes for the Judeo-Christian ethos. The human caring: a handkerchief Cather, Willa. Obscure Destinies. two constitutive elements of she must return to Dillon and a New York: Knopf, 1932. that ethos are creation and in- red carnelian seal Trueman Leddy, Michael. "Observation and carnation. The Genesis ac- drops into her hand for a "keep- Narration in Willa Cather’s Ob- counts of creation assert dra- sake," as he "evasively" calls it scure Destinies." Studies in matically that, despite the con- American Fiction 16.2 (1988): 141- (228). Her memories of the men 153. tingency and fragmentation bring her "sadness" and "un- which fester on this planet, the Virgil. The Eclogues and Georgics of easiness" (229-30); they leave Virgil. Trans. C. Day Lewis. New sublunary world is neither illu- her no "anchors" to give her York: Doubleday Anchor, 1964. sory nor evil, but rather the "courage" (193). Her plight here essentially good donation of a Rosowski, Susan. "Obscure Des- anticipates that of the young tinies: Unalterable Realities." The beneficient Providence. The heroines of Cathe~s two final Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s heart of the Jewish, and thus novels, Lucy Gayheart and Sap- Romanticism. Lincoln: University Christian, understanding of the phira and the Slave Girl. Illu- of Nebraska Press, 1986. 189-204. cosmos finds expression in sions of youthful security dis- Gray, Thomas. Thomas Gray: Elegy Genesis 1:31: "And God saw integrate also for Lucy Gayheart Written in a Country Churchyard. everything that he had made, and Nancy Till when they come Ed. Herbert W. Starr. Columbus, and behold, it was very good" of ~ge into worlds where self- Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publish- (110). The saga begun with Crea- interest overshadows disinter- ing Co., 1968. tion continues with the call of ested love and support. For Stouck, David. "The Pastoral Imag- the Israelite nation and the event them, pastoral retreats are ination." Willa Cather’s Imagina- which galvanized a powerful dangerous deceptions: neither tion. Lincoln: University of Ne- religious sentiment, the Exodus, the country skating-hole nor the braska Press, 1975. 35-37. wherein it is believed God inter- vened dramatically in the tem- poral, natural sphere on behalf of the Chosen People. "A World Above the World": But the climax of the Judeo- Transcendence in Cather’s Fiction Christian story comes in the In- Steven P. Ryan, S.J., University of Texas at Austin carnation, by which humanity wins a ringing legitimation. "The That which is essential to stability and purpose. They doctrine of incarnation," notes Cather’s writing and renders her evoke recollection of the Jewish Sallie McFague TeSelle, "shows art so refreshing to the modern Exodus -- for the Israelites, too, concretely that this inescapable imagination is her view of this left a familiar land in order to finitude and temporality of man world as a window to the trans- pursue an unknown, and hope- is both his structure and his cendent. Uprooted from their fully transcendent, destiny in possibility" (TeSelle 62). More- homelands and cast in the wild, the wilderness. This quest -- over, the human enterprise Cather’s characters yearn for the seeking and finding of a proves not to be a disjointed

Page 28 succession of events, but rather bishop are commissioned "to try" (Pioneers! 15) exacts a terri- an all-encompassing sweep carry the Cross into territories ble toll on the human spirit of from creation to the parousia. yet unknown and unnamed," some pioneers. Jim Burden, re- The episodes of history do not into "a succession of mountain calling the suicide of a strug- transpire haphazardly; instead, ranges, pathless deserts, yawn- gling neighbor, "knew it was they anticipate, recall and il- ing canyons and swollen rivers" homesickness that had killed lumine each other. Such a view (41). In Shadows on the Rock, Mr. Shimerda" (Antonia 101); the enabled people to see their French settlers carve out a com- Old World artisan "had... been milieu as deeply meaningful, as munity "on a grey rock in the so unhappy that he could not a " ’glass of vision’ into the Canadian wilderness" (4). The live any longer" (103). Alexan- ultimate mysteries" (Scott, Wild settlement of Quebec quivers dra’s father, defeated in his Prayer 7). Scott’s observations between two threatening realms: struggle with the land and stag- draw from Auerbach’s concept behind it "the wastes of obliter- gering to a premature death at of the figura, i.e., an understand- ating, brutal ocean" (25), before forty-six, contemplates "his ing of the .basic relationality of it the impenetrable "black pine white hands, with all the work all that exists, and especially of forest . . . [which] stretched no gone out of them" (Pioneers! the mundane world to the occult living man knew how far" (6). 24). realm. The course to transcend- Midwestern homesteaders in O The newcomers inevitably fall ental .reality is thus through the Pioneers! soon learn that "the upon their own traditions as a created world. But this is a diffi- great fact was the land itself, means of bringing order to an cult passage for contemporary which seemed to overwhelm the existence which would other- humanity to negotiate, because little beginnings of human wise have none. Venerable for of the prevailing control- society that struggled in its her efforts in this area is oriented and manipulative out- sombre wastes" (15). Human el- Madame Auclair, who in Shad- look it bears. "The things of fort seems inconsequential, for ows on the Rock resolutely earth," cautions Scott, "are to even after seasons of striving, carries on the timeless art of be approached in a spirit of "the record of the plow was in- homemaking in the Canadian homage, not aggressively or ex- significant, like the feeble wilderness. "You will see," she ploitatively.., since it is in them scratches on stone left by tells her daughter, Cecile, "that and through them that the ad- prehistoric races" (19-20). your father’s whole happiness vent of Being becomes manifest Finding themselves in an de pends on ~order and regularity, -- to him who warts" (Scott, unrelenting, antagonistic wilder- and you will come to feel pride Negative Cal~ability 84). Thus, ness, and lacking the familiar in it" (24). Cather valued the the stance of the modern in- conventions of human refer- careful maintenance of folkways dividual before the universe ence, the pioneers suffer the and felt the French to be particu- needs be patient and reverential. disturbing misgiving of some- larly gifted in this respect. In The purpose of this paper is to how having become lost in the Death Comes for the Arch- trace the quest for transcen- universe. This apprehension is bishop, Father Vaillant prepares dence which lies at the core of given poignant expression in O an exquisite onion soup from Cather’s fiction. This pursuit, we Pioneers! in an image of Alexan- scant ingredients, and Bishop shall find, arises from Cather’s dra Bergson and Carl Linstrum Latour recognizes it as a product perception of the sacramentality as they stand by the Hanover spanning the generations. of this world, i.e., a vision by roadside: The conservation of long- which "reality is encountered in The two friends stood for a few its dimension of depth, of inex- moments on the windy street established practices proves a haustibility, of radical mystery" corner, not speaking a word, means of sheltering the pio- (102). We find in Cather’s works as two travelers, who have lost neers from the surrounding the exception which proves the their way, sometime stand and chaos. The Shimerdas bring rule of a literary age lost of a admit their perplexity in their favorite delicacy from sacramental principle. silence. (10-11) Bohemia -- dried mushrooms Cather’s wilderness seems -- and offer handfuls as prized Repeatedly throughout her resentful of human encroach- gifts. Throughout the bitter fiction, Cather casts her charac- ment; the immigrants are un- Canadian winter Cecile Auclair ters into an untamed and cruelly needed, unwelcome nomads. carefully guards the parsley inhospitable wilderness. Jim Huddled in a sod hut on a winter plants which her family brought Burden, a ten-year-old new- day, one can hear "the wind to the New World. The preserva- comer to unsettled Nebraska in singing over hundreds of miles tion of tradition and the main- My Antonia finds "there was of snow" (Antonia 101) and ex- tenance of an orderly manner of nothing but land: not a country perience the unspeakable loneli- proceeding enable human life to at all" (7). The missionaries in ness known only to the prairie cohere beyond the boundaries Death Comes for the Arch- settler. This "stern frozen coun- of civilization. They give shape

Page 29 and meaning to a life which "without the influence of exam- to legend: "Once upon a time would otherwise descend to the ple or emulation, with no incen- .... " Such introductions lend brutish. Even common house- tive but some natural yearning her stories the aura of saga, of hold tools take on a deep signif- for order and security" (221). archetypal and ageless tales of icance. Ordinary domestic uten- Related to this observance of human quest¯ One idle summer sils become the very building life-sustaining customs is a afternoon by the river, Jim blocks of immigrant life for deeper, profounder theme of Burden entertains Antonia and Cecile: "These coppers, big and awareness of and spiritual com- several of her friends with little, these brooms and clouts munion with ancestral peoples. stories "about Coronado and his and brushes, were tools: and Throughout her fiction Cather is search for the Seven Golden with them one made, not shoes continually enlarging, in ways Cities" (Antonia 243). or cabinet-work, but life itself" both small and large, the scope The girls had began to wonder (Shadows 198). A carefully of her narrative to encompass among themselves. Why had tended home provides a refuge the larger sweep of human his- the Spaniards come so far? for the settler, a secure ark in an What must this country have tory. For example, the pottery been like, then? Why had Coro- ocean of desolation. Recalling Tom Outland uncovers resembles nado never gone back to the winters of his youth, Jim Mediterranean crockery of antiq- Spain, to his riches and his Burden remembers "the base- uity. Some of the wares still bear castles and his king? I couldn’t ment kitchen seemed heavenly soot -- "from when it was on the tell them. I only knew the safe and warm in those days -- cook-fire last," Tom explains, school-books said he "died in like a tight, little boat in a winter "and that was before Columbus the wilderness, of a broken sea" (Antonia 65). landed, I guess" (Professor’s heart." (244) The need for an established House 119). Through the world Remembering her own father, manner of living extends beyond around them, Cather’s charac- and perhaps.all who suffered a the individual household. The ters are inexorably drawn into a similar fate, Antonia adds softly, traditions of the church likewise binding affinity with their fore- "More than him has done that¯" help to anchor the tiny human bears. In O Pioneers! Marie In Cather’s world, the past is communities. The bishops of Shabata sits beneath a tree and always accessible. Not only can Quebec take care that their tells a friend of her people’s an- it be felt, but it can be seen and liturgies are performed as elab- cient belief, and reveals that it touched -- in dusty potsherds; orately and splendidly as any- survives somewhat in her: in the soot, lingering on prehis- where. Bishop Laval renews his "The Bohemians, you know, toric walls, of long-dead fires; in decades-old ritual .of ringing the were tree worshipers before cliff dwellings "preserved the missionaries came .... church bell to summon worship- The old people in the moun. throughout the ages by a ers to five o’clock Mass, an act tains plant lindens to purify miracle" (Professor’s House representative of the deter- the forest, and to do away with 244). These relics whisper the mined constancy of all the Que- the spells that come from the deepest secrets of nearly forgot- becois. And the ability to bring old trees they say have lasted ten peoples. Thea Kronberg in order to an environment is a from heathen times." (152) The Song of the Lark receives prime virtue in Cather’s South- Likewise, a desert spring be- just such a communication west missionaries. comes for Bishop Latour a step- when she visits northern Ari- Moreover, this longing and ping-stone into the remote past: zona’s Panther Canyon. Thea is ability to bring order to one’s en- This spot had been a refuge for most deeply affected by two vironment is not limited to Euro- humanity long before these remnants of the long-extin- peans, but is found to an equal Mexicans had come upon it. It guished Indian civilization: the was older than history, like canyon stream and the native degree in Native Americans as those well-heads in his own well. In The Professor’s House, country where the Roman set- crockery. The brook had been Tom Outland and two asso- tiers had set up the image of a the very life-source of the in- ciates marvel at the remains of a river goddess, and later the habitants, and the manufacture lost Indian civilization dis- Christian priests had planted a of vessels to reserve its prec- covered on an isolated mesa. cross. (Archbishop 32) ious cargo a solumn commis- The extinct tribe developed Some critics suggest that the sion. sophisticated methods of agri- opening lines of some of But the meanings of the past culture and Irrigation, and facil- Cather’s novels, e.g., Death do not belong to the past alone; ity in the crafts of weaving and Comes for the Archbishop ("One they pass on to those sensitive pottery. The discoverers realize afternoon in the autumn of 1851 enough to intuit them. Thea that long ago, in the same raw ¯.. ") (17) and Shadows on the bathes daily in a pool created by landscape where they now Rock ("One afternoon late in the stream, her bath taking on a stand, a hopeful people once October of the year 1697... ") meditative and ritualistic aura. lifted itself off the desert floor, (3), recall the customary preface During one cleansing, she expe-

Page 3O riences a moment of penetrating terprise goes on, renewing it- as she has to her vitality. Her illumination. She recognizes her self in each succeeding genera- reverence for the land, which in struggle as an artist as the con- tion. her fantasy approaches passion- tinuation of the struggle of the Alexandra Bergson is espe- ate love, enables Alexandra to ancient people, binding her to cially gifted at intuiting the inci- see that, while the rolling grass- them so that in her own career in pient fertility of the grudging lands endure, all that lives upon the opera she must "help to prairie. The ineffable power them eventually passes away. fulfill some desire of the dust abiding within the slumbering Like Bishop Latour in Death that slept there" (306). Tom Out- grasslands touches her in a Comes for the Archbishop, she land, too, finds that his excava- manner that is vaguely incarna- too will one day "die of having tions link him deeply to the tionah lived" (269). Her tranquility with perished tribe, calling its Then the Genius of the Divide, this reality perhaps serves as revered ceramicists "my . . . the great, free spirit which the finest measure of the depth grandmothers" (Professor’s breathes across it, must have of her submission to the land. House 243). Clearly, for Cather bent lower than it ever bent to Joining Alexandra in this wor- the past is neither exhausted a human will before. The his- tory of every country begins in shipful stance toward the land is nor lost, but rather a vibrant Crazy Ivar, a harmless, though reality lying at one’s feet or at the heart of a man or a woman. (Pioneers! 65) mistrusted, eccentric. Ivar lives one’s fingertips, begging to be alone, in a manner wholly con- tapped so that it might bestow Alexandra’s insight distin- its precious secrets of continu- guishes her from her brothers. sonant with the natural world ity and meaning. Oscar, for example, has a face around him. He makes a home with "an empty look" and works "in the clay bank, without defil- The realization of the fun- "like an insect" (55). Alexandra’s ing the face of nature any more damental continuity of all brothers flounder in their spirit- than the coyote that had lived human life, though perhaps not ual poverty, suffering in their in- there before him had done" as prevalent in Cather’s plains ability to grasp the sacral dimen- (Pioneers! 36). Like Alexandra, fiction, nonetheless does ap- sion of the plain. Though they Ivar’s respect for the land is pear in a strategic way in her work the land hard -- even borne of a deep spiritual aware- first Nebraska novel, O Pio- harder than Alexandra -- they ness: neers/ In their adult years, Alex- do not share in the consolation He expressed his preference andra and Cad Linetrum reflect of her vision. Laboring slavishly for his wild homestead by say- on the passionate struggle of and soul-lessly over what is, to ing that his Bible seemed truer their youth and recognize that it them, an unfathomed land, they to him there. If one stood in lives on in others. Carl muses: transcend nothing. While her the doorway of his cave, and "Isn’t it queer." there are only looked off at the rough land, father and brothers have strug- the smiling sky, the curly two or three human stories, gled -- fruitlessly -- to subdue and they go on :repeating them- grass white in the hot sunlight; the plain, Alexandra submits if one listened to the rapturous selves as fiercely as if they had herself to it, knowingly and lov- never happened before; like song of the lark, the drumming the larks in this country, that ingly. Through her devotion, of the quail, the burr of the have been singing the same therefore, Alexandra takes locust against that vast five notes for thousands of possession of the prairie in a silence, one understood what years." (119) way no mere conqueror ever Ivar meant. (38) Cather’s characters find affinity could, and in the only way any This abandonment to the land with ancient explorers and mortal can ever hope. is woven throughout the fabric peoples because of her own Alexandra’s surrender to the of Cather’s prairie stories. In abiding belief in the basic prairie is perhaps best seen in "Neighbour Rosicky," the soil changelessness of the human her recurring fantasy of willful again emerges as the medium of ethos. For Cather, "human life, abandonment to a shadowy but spiritual wholeness. To Rosicky, even on its simplest level, is gentle lover-god. Olympic in a genial Bohemian farmer in his reaching out toward ’something stature and redolent of the mid-sixties, landlessness is else’; indeed [she] seemed to be harvest, this mystic husband- tantamount to non-existence. suggesting that there is no truly man personifies the "Genius of "To be a landless man," he human life without this reaching the Divide" with whom Alexan- reflects, "was to be a wage- out" (McFarland 33-4). For this dra shares spiritual communion. earner, a slave, all your life; to reason her fiction gravitates A god of fertility and ripeness he have nothing, to be nothin.g" toward quintessential seekers: is, inevitably, a god of death as (93). Here Rosicky echoes An- pioneers and artists. There may well. Every living thing has its tonia, who confides to Jim be variations -- different contin- season, Alexandra knows, and Burden, "I’d always be miser- ents, different races, different when hers is over, she will sub- able in a city. I’d die of lone- obstacles -- but the human en- mit to her mortality as naturally someness. I like to be where I

Page 31 know every stick and tree, and (18). The land is able to be the project of the lost Indian ~where all the ground is friendly" medium of uplifting simply peoples who figure so prom- (Antonia 320). Rosicky’s many because of the transcendent inently in The Song of the Lark, years of farming have led him to possibilities inherent in the The Professor’s House, and a rich spiritual insight. Walking natural world. Jim recalls his Death Comes for the Arch- across the fields one December first autumn on Nebraska’s bishop. The same spiritual sig- evening, he pauses to take in the golden reaches in a passage nificance the land bears for vista which opens up before him that stands as one of the finest Alexandra, Jim Burden, and -- from his family’s modest examples of Cather’s skill at Rosicky reappears in the South- farmhouse to the sweeping richly evocative description: western desert mesas and the farmlands to the soadng vault As far as we could see, the escarpment in New France. above: miles of copper-red grass were Bishop Latour marvels at how He stopped by the windmill to drenched in sunlight that was literally the native peoples look up at the frosty winter stronger and fiercer than at realized and fulfilled the depth stars and draw a long breath any other time of the day. The of their spiritual yearnings: before he went inside. That blond cornfields were red gold, The rock.., was the utmost kitchen with the shining win- the haystacks turned rosy and expression of human need;¯.. dows was dear to him; but the threw long shadows. The it was the highest comparison sleeping fields and bright whole prairie was like the bush of loyalty in love and friend- stars and the noble darkness that burned with fire and was ship. Christ Himself had used were dearer still. (94) not consumed. That hour that comparison for the dis- Here, Cather’s theme of union always had the exultation of ciple to whom He gave the with land opens up to encom- victory, of triumphant ending, keys of His Church. And the pass the entire natural wodd. like a hero’s death -- heroes who died young and glorious- Hebrews of the Old Testament Rosicky’s affinity with, first, the ly. It was a sudden transfigura- ¯ .. their rock was an idea of land and, also, the cosmos God, the only thing their con- tion, a lifting-up of day. (40) querors could not take from enables him to find his spiritual Here, Cather represents crea- bearings with remarkable effect. them. Already the Bishop had tion itself as reaching out long- observed in Indian life a The old farmer stands "like a ingly for transcendence. Her strange literalness, often tree that has not many roots, but characters have the ability not shocking and disconcerting. one tap-root that goes down only to apprehend nature, but to The Acomas ....actually lived deep" (88-9), a man with an un- respond through it to the super- upon their Rock ....(Arch- shakable sense of self and of natural, to the divine force dwell- bishop 97-8) the basic goodness of human ing within: The Indian mesas and their living. He is able to face Alexandra drew her shawl descendent, Quebec, rise altar- disasters such as crop failure closer about her and stood... like out of the surrounding, in- and droughts with uncanny looking at the stars which glit- hospitable wilderness -- rocks equanimity, for he recognizes tered so keenly through the of visible, tangible trans- them as mere momentary pertur- frosty autumn air. She always cendence, and expressions of bations in a prevailing pattern of loved to watch them, to think the ageless human need to find, benignity. In his deep affinity of their vastness and distance, as Tom Outland would say, "a with the natural world, Rosicky and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the world above the world" (Pro- is the masculine counterpart of fessor’s House 240). Alexandra. For both Alexandra great operations of nature, and and Rosicky, the horizontal when she thought of the law In Cather’s fiction one finds a that lay behind them, she felt a movement from the generally dimension of life is the gateway sense of personal security. to its vertical dimension. undefined religious sentiment (Pioneers! 70-1) of O Pioneers! to a more The expansion of this theme, The untamed land and the over- specifically Christian and even from union with the land to arching heavens become the sectarian focus in her later union with the universe, con- meeting place of the pioneer narratives. For example, Roman tinues in My Antonia. Eady in and the mystic. Through the Catholicism constitutes the the novel, Jim Burden recalls his sacrament of the macrocosm, spiritual heart of Death Comes arrival on the Nebraska table- Cather’s voyagers gain insight for the Archbishop and Shadows land. Strange and wild and ini- and union with the sacred. on the Rock. While protagonists tially disconcerting as his new The land, the primary symbol such as Alexandra develop a surroundings are, he none- in Cather’s prairie stories, yields generic spiritual belief, the theless soon experiences a to the rock in her later writing. Quebecois and the French mis- moment of pregnant self-surren- The Quebecois of Shadows on sionaries bring the full force of der to the universe: "that is hap- the Rock, in building a com- their religion to the struggle in piness; to be dissolved into munity on a Canadian promon- the wilderness. An early episode something complete and great" tory, merely renew the heroic in Death Comes for the Arch-

Page 32 bishop sets the tone for the en- and, after a manner, the adoles- within and beyond. Divine reality tire saga~ The incident before cent Jim -- whom she fears may does not descend from an alien the cross-shaped evergreen re- be falling to the amorous sphere, but rather emanates veals the primary assumption of clutches of a scheming Lena from the whole of the natural the novel, that is, the sublunary Lingard -- and, certainly, world. The land, the sky, the world is neither meaningless nor presides over the vital forces of heavens -- these become the opaque, and even seemingly life. But nowhere does the pro- meeting places of the pioneer mundane objects, events, and tectress theme appear as fully and the mystic, and through persons have specific religious as in the Catholic novels, where them Cather’s seekers glimpse reference. The evening star the mother of Jesus appears as divine being and purpose. The reminds the young bishop of a benign demigoddess as well world of Willa Cather, rather Ave Maria Stella, an early Marian as a symbol of the church. Her than being opaque and meaning- hymn often sung in his seminary name is on everyone’s lips: a less, is readily transparent to days. From on high, people and host of characters pray to her. ultimate reality. animals look "like figures of a Father Vaillant aspires to devote Thus, Willa Cather emerges child’s Noah’s ark" (165). The In- himself to her by a life of con- as a modern writer of rare gifts. dian people thresh their grain in templation; a Mexican child in a We find in her a vibrant and ex- the same manner as "the Chil- hidden village startles Bishop pressive figural imagination. Her dren of Israel" (30), and a flock of Latour with the greeting, Ave writing affords us a vision of a goats brings to mind a chapter Maria Purisima, Senor (24); the benign and ordered universe in the Apocalypse (31). The school in Santa Fe is named Our freed from any dichotomy be- world, seen through the mis- Lady of Light. In Shadows on the tween the natural and super- sionaries’ eyes, is charged with Rock Mary is considered protec- natural. In her stories we see the religious association. Even tress of Quebec and especially continuity of the human saga events as ordinary as the Cana- of the unfortunate waif, and the sacramentality of the dian sunset suggest such mean- Jacques. macrocosm. ing: The stories of the Canadian The crimson flow, that efful- settlers and the French mission- gence at the solemn twilight aries present the church as the hour, often made Cecile think about the early times and the indispensible font of life. Before martyrs [viz., Jesuit mission- Bishop Latour and Father Vail- aries Isaac Jogues, Jean de lant make their entrance into Brebeuf, st. al.] -- coming up, Santa Fe, they observe from on as it did, out of those dark high that "the long main street forests that had been the began at the church [and that] WORKS CITED: scene of their labours and the town seemed to flow from it Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the their fate. The rainbow, she like a stream from a spring" Archbishop. 1927. New York: Vin- knew, was set in the heavens (Archbishop 22). On Christmas tage-Random, 1971. to remind us of a promise that all storms shall have an end- Eve, the Canadian faithful flow -... My Antonia. Boston: Houghton toward their spiritual harbor:. Mifflin, 1918. ing. Perhaps this afterglow, Across the white ledges that too, was ordained in the sloped like a vast natural stair- --. "Nelghbour Rosicky." 1932. Five heavens for a reminder. (Shad- way down to the Cathedral, Stories. New York: Vintage- ows 23.3.4) black groups were moving, Random, 1956. A significant barometer of the families and friends in little ---. 0 Pioneers! Boston: Houghton importance of the theme of faith flocks, all going toward the Mifflin, 1913. is the motif of the Virgin Mary same goal, -- the doors of the ---. The Professor’s House. 1925. qua protectress. In the earlier church, wide open and show- New York: Vintage-Random, 1973. novels, Aiexandra and Antonia ing a ruddy vault in the blue --. Shadows on the Rock. 1931. New emerge as beneficent quasi- darkness. (Shadows 113) York: Vintage-Random, 1971. goddesses -- Alexandra a corn The cathedral expresses in .... . The Song of the Lark. 1915. Lin- or earth goddess, Antonia a god- stone and mortar the value of coln: University of Nebraska dess of life itself. In these roles, religious faith to the immi- Press, 1978. the women further serve as grants. McFarland, Dorothy Tuck. Willa guardians. Aiexandra watches Cather’s pioneers thus evolve Cather. New York: Frederick over her younger brother, Emil; from deracinated nomads to Ungar Publishing, 1972. the younger Carl, who looks to secure citizens of the universe. Scott, Nathan A., Jr. The Broken her for strength; the friendless Those achieving transcendence Center. New Haven: Yale UP, Ivar; and, ultimately, over a do so by virtue of their ability to 1966. bountiful prairie. ~,ntonia looks see through the natural world to -.-. Negative Capabifity. New Haven: after her large brood of children the supernatural realm both Yale UP, 1969.

Page 33 .--. The Wild Prayer of Longing. New TeSelle, Sallie McFague. Literature Short Fiction 26:81-86), Joan Haven: Yale UP, !971. and the Christian Life. New Wylie Hall suggests that the Haven: Yale UP, 1966. seldom-discussed story be read not as typical muckraking fic- tion but as an artistic adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Works on Cather Darkness, which, Wylie claims, 1989-90: A Bibliographical Essay is Cather’s "deep foundation." Wylie finds many definite Virgil Albertini, Northwest Missouri State University parallels in the two works, and her comments need to be ex- Although the number of ies 18:1-11) is a discussion of panded into an article. Virgil pieces devoted to Willa Cather both the Woodress and O’Brien during the last year -- book- biographies. Apthorp discusses Albertini’s "Willa Cather and length studies from 1989 to early Baseball: Some Personal and the underlying disagreements Literary Connections" (Platte 1990 and articles since the critics have with the two works spring of 1989 -- is not as great and gives her own honest and Valley Review 17:16-24) tries to as in some previous years, criti- build the case that Cather relied fair assessment: "... each book on her early background in Red cism and scholarship on Cather offers a superb contribution to Cloud, where baseball was part shows no sign of abating, and Cather studies -- Woodress’s of her formative years, including Cather is in no danger of as a lucid, richly comprehensive the sport in O Pioneers! and neglect. This survey of Cather resource for research, and criticism includes twenty-two ar- O’Brien’s as a stimulating inter- Lucy Gayheart. Albertini’s ticles, five books, and a chapter pretation of Cather’s early life discussion relies rather heavily in a book. As the following and work." She skillfully com- on supposition. discussion indicates, many of pares the biographies and offers Two high-quality studies of the studies are substantial. interesting commentaries on The Professor’s House were I will begin with two review how Woodress handles the published in 1990; the first con- essays of recent criticisms and question of Cather’s sexuality tributes an interesting angle on then evaluate a "tour," a note, and how O’Brien focuses on the the novel and the second links and a general discussion about youth of the creative individual. the novel with Hemingway. Fritz Cather and baseball before com- Biographies serve different Oehlschlaeger seeks to build menting on major items. In needs, and Apthorp finds the upon and extend previous crit- "Willa Gather: Reassessment two indispensable because ical analyses of Professor God- and Discovery" (Contemporary "they serve exquisitely the frey St. Peter’s despair in "lndis- Literature 30:444-447), Linda different purposes for which ponsibilit~ and the Anxiety of Wagner-Martin acknowledges they are designed." Authorship in The Professor’s the importance of James Wood- Wayne Fields does the com- House" (American Literature 62: ress’s Willa Cather: A Literary mentary and Jill Enfield supplies 74-86). While drawing upon Life and Sharon O’Brien’s Willa the appropriate photographs for feminist work, Oehlschlaeger Cather: The Emerging Voice but "Cather Country" (American argues convincingly that the praises Marilyn Arnold’s con- Heritage 41:79-89). His discus- professor’s split condition near cise and precise Willa Cather’s sion on the town of Red Cloud the end comes from his seeing Short Fiction. Wagner-Martin and the surrounding country is his life as an object; Godfrey proceeds, and not surprisingly, nothing new, but he neatly suffers indisponsibilit~ (unavail- to attack Robert Nelson’s Willa para.llels the Nebraska novels ability), and, as a result, experi- Cather in France: In Search of a with Cather’s literary materials ences a split between his mind Lost Language as unconvincing, -- the house on Cedar Street, and body and the disruption of but then, and surprisingly, she is the Miner home, the Divide, and his sense of the past, present, critical of Brent Bohlke’s collec- the town. The Wheeler farm, and future. Oehlschlaeger’s con- tion Wiila Cather in Person, however, is merely mentioned, clusion is not startling: Augusta although she praises Bohlke’s and it is disappointing not to is the one who saves the Pro- editorial work. Wagner-Martin have a photograph of the George fessor and helps him to his ends her review on a somewhat Cather house (the Wheeler place renewed availability. contradictory note by calling all in One of Ours) or an acknowl- In "The Professor’s House: five works important contribu- edgement of its splendid reno- Cather, Hemingway, and the tions to the study of Cather’s vation by Sayra Wagner, George Chastening of American Prose work. "Speaking of Silence: Cather’s granddaughter. In Style" (Western American Liter- Willa Cather and the ’Problem’ "Cather’s Deep ’Foundation ature 24:295-311), Glen A. Love of Feminist Biography" by Elaine Work’: Reconstructing ’Behind claims Cather has been unjustly Sargent Apthorp (Women’s Stud- the Singer Tower’ " (Studies in overlooked in the development

Page 34 of American literary prose style. experimented with form and her gerations, although he does sug- He feels her essays "On the Art novels all differed from each gest a plausible reason that of Writing" and "The Novel other because she "regarded Lewis "portrays the places they Demeuble" reveal modernistic true art as that which finds its visit as remote, primitive, and directions in the novel, and her own form and which is different, largely unknown, as if waiting central theories of style anti- therefore, from every other piece for aesthetic discovery." When cipate Hemingway’s theory of of art." Arnold diligently surveys Mildred Bennett talked, people omission by three years. several of Cather’s lectures and listened; when she wrote, they Cather’s theory, Love effectively interviews to show Cather as absorbed, and her discussion shows, predicted and defined "an energetic and fearless "At the Feet of Willa Cather: A "the formal directions of Hem- spokesperson for artistic free- Personal Account of Edith Lewis ingway at the beginning of his dom." Cather obviously fol- as Protector" (19-22) presents career." Love skillfully uses The lowed the artistic freedom she Lewis as spending her life in Professor’s House as a stylistic verbally defended and, to be helping and sustaining Cather, representation of the omitting sure, never wrote by formula. and thus submerging her own process and shows how the For that reason, Arnold empha- talents to help promote Cather’s length of the novel’s three sec- sizes, her writings "will always work. She shows, too, that her tions indicates the process. be new." help and support were not Here, says Love, there is a Cather scholarship certainly always healthy. Bennett is quite stylistic "unfumishing" that car- gains from the seven articles in convincing when she relates her ries out the theory of omission the Willa Cather Pioneer Memo- own troubles with Lewis while articulated in Cather’s critical rial Newsletter Special Literary researching and writing The essays on style. Finally Love World of Willa Cather. As Ben- theorizes that Hemingway Issue (Fall 1989). This volume, edited by Ronald W. Butler, is a nett demonstrates, Lewis cer- almost certainly would have tribute to the work of Mildred R. tainly complicated matters for read Cather’s "unfurnished" Bennett, the pioneer of Willa Cather biographers. For Ben- novels such as My Antonia, A nett, Lewis’s grave is a lasting Lost Lady, and The Professor’s Cather studies, in celebration of her eightieth birthday (Septem- symbol of how Lewis in life sub- House, along with her critical serviently placed herself at omission essays, and he ber 8, 1989). The essays here consider Edith Lewis, One of Cather’s feet and "gloried in her wonders whether Hemingway’s position" there. (Marilyn public rejection of One of Ours Ours, Shadows on the Rock in relation to another 1931 novel, Arnold’s perceptive "Fore- contributed to Cather’s neglect and A Lost Lady. word" to the new addition of as a major participant in the Lewis’s Willa Cather Living: A movement toward simplifying Lewis seems to have been as Personal Memoir [Athens: Ohio American literary prose. A cor- undesirable as some of Cather’s UP, 1989] should be mentioned responding note to Love’s essay own villains, and Patricia L. here for offering additional in- on style is Mark J. Madigan’s Yongue begins the assault in the sight on the Lewis and Cather "Willa Cather’s Commentary on lead article with "Edith Lewis relationship.) Three Novels by Dorothy Can- Living" (12-15). Yongue refers to field Fisher" (American Notes Lewis’s final act in her relation- Michel Gervaud in Cather’s and Queries 3:13-15). Madigan ship with Cather -- her burial at "One of Ours: A French Perspec- paraphrases from and discusses the foot of Cather’s grave -- as tive" (22-26) calls Cather an "in- four Cather letters to Dorothy probably "the consummation of veterate Francophile." Cather Canfield Fisher emphasizing her a series of such acts which belie cherished the literature, art, theory of omission and unclut- conflicting motives." Yongue land, and people of France, and tered prose style. Cather’s com- concludes that Lewis governed in One of Ours she com- ments on Fisher’s Rough Hewn, and controlled Cather after her municated this passion to The Deepening Stream, and Claude Wheeler. Cather, accord- death. David Harrell’s "Tall ing to Gervaud, never acknowl- Seasoned Timber are interesting Tales of the Southwest" (15-19) edged any of France’s weak- and read like her own critical extends the Lewis discussions nesses and always had a "warm theodes of writing. with an account of Lewis and loving vision of France" -- Cather’s 1915 trip to Mesa Verde whether it was right or wrong. Marilyn Arnold’s "Willa and Taos. Harrell clearly shows Cather’s Artistic ’Radicalism’ " John J. Murphy does not dis- that Lewis misrepresented both appoint with his discussion of (CEA Critic 51:2-10) takes issue places in Willa Cather Living, with those who think of Cather Cather’s other French novel in making them seem far more "Coming of Age and Domes- in the traditional mold, and Ar- primitive than they really were ticating Space in the Wilder- nold perceives Cather’s work to and generally altering the facts be modernist. In this important ness: Roberts’s The Great of the trip. He has no answers Meadow and Cather’s Shadows essay, Arnold argues that Cather for Lewis’s distortion and exag- on the Rock" (26-31). After first

Page 35 declaring The Great Meadow Imagery in Willa Cather’s A Lost Cather studies. Saposnik-Noire and Roberts’s The Time of Lady" (35-38) adds another to uses vivid landscape examples Man as "truly great American his competent studies of such from the text and sees land- Novels," he argues that The imagery in Cather; here he con- scape in this novel as a unifying Time of Man is supedor in many tends that "strong sexuality" is and silent physical presence ways to My Antonia. Consider. one of the major elements in A with human vitality, and, like ing all the work Murphy has Lost Lady and clearly shows Twain’s river, "almost a fictional done on My Antonia, who is how Cather uses sexual imagery character in itself." going to argue with him? Mur- "to define her characters and A matter of influence is Mary phy carefully shows how the reveal the depths of their com- R. Ryder’s concern in" ’All Wheat heroines, C~cile Auclair in plex relationships." A final item and No Chaff’: Frank Norris’s Shadows and Diony Hall Jarvis on A Lost Lady is Richard C. Har- Blix and Willa Cather’s Literary in Meadow, make the two novels ris’s comparative study "First Vision" (American Literary comparable. Both heroines are Loves: Willa Cather’s Niel Realism 22:17-30). It is no secret "products of artists with serious Herbert and Ivan Turgenev’s that Cather did not care for the civilizing purposes," and "both Vladimir Petrovich" (Studies in naturalistic school of fiction, but novelists are aware that civiliza- American FictiOn 17:81-91). Har- she did like Norris’s McTeague, tion begins in the kitchen with ris demonstrates that many and Ryder offers a fascinating the domestic arts." His compari- similarities in A Lost Lady and view of Cather’s attraction to son of the familiar Cather work "First Love" and his well-argued another Norris novel, the lightly with the relatively unfamiliar one assertion is that Turgenev’s regarded Blix. She gives several by Roberts is convincing. (The story "was almost certainly an reasons for this attraction, but only other item on Shadows on influence upon Cather’s own." the underlying one, Ryder feels, the Rock this past year, Mark J. Although two books on My is that Cather found the modern Madigan’s "An Autobiograph- Antonia were published during western woman in Blix. Cather ical Scene in Shadows on the the year, only two journal arti- agreed about "what the woman Rock" [American Notes and cles appeared. In "Jim Burden of the new century should be," Queries 1:103-104], needs men- and the Structure of My An- a combination of masculine tioning here. Madigan discusses tonia" (Western American Liter- strength and feminine spiritual- his discovery of an overlooked ature 24:45-61), John L. Seizer ity. Ryder demonstrates that autobiographical reference in considers My Antonia as "a "The Treasure of Far Island" is the sledding scene with Jac- comic novel recording its title an example of Norris’s influence ques and C~cile. He cites character’s triumph and its on Cather and that Margie Van Cather’s June 1931 letter to narrator’s tardy but resolute Dyck is the literary descendant Dorothy Canfield Fisher as of Blix. establishing Jacq ups as the fic- enlightenment." What it all tional counterpart of her nephew means is that Jim, as an adult, is In "Willa Cather: The Daugh- a reliable narrator who under. ter of Exile" (85-127), in After the Chades. Madigan points out that stands the mistakes he made as Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Cather’s description of the sled- a youth. As a narrator, Jim is ding scene was obviously drawn Myth in Wharton, Cather and from her late-afternoon sleigh older and wiser, but as a Glasgow (University Park: Penn- rides with her five-year-old character he is immature. Seizer sylvania State University Press, nephew during the winter of takes issue with those critics 1989), Josephine Donovan at- who see the novel as either tempts to apply feminist theory 1927 in Red Cloud.) formless or episodic. He rightly to Cather texts. Donovan’s Linda M. Lewis’s "Cather’s A sees the work as "tightly struc- thesis is that Cather exhibits the Lost Lady and Ftaubert’s Ma- tured in a way. that dramatizes struggle of the daughter to leave dame Bovary: Re-envisioning the events of Antonia’s life and the maternal/lesbian world in Romanticism" (31-35) considers her final triumph, that critiques order to participate in the the similarities that exist be- the errors in Jim’s life, and that patriarchal one of art and action. tween Marian Forrester and sanctions his final comprehen- She applies her thesis to sixteen Emma Bovary. Her discussion is sion of those errors." Seizer shorter works and to A Lost hardly groundbreaking, but ends his discussion by saying Lady, 0 Pioneers!, Alexander’s the novel "closes affirmatively Bridge, My Antonia, One of Lewis effectively distinguishes Ours, Song of the Lark, The Pro- Cather’s heroine from Emma for comically." "The Silent Protag- fessor’s House, and Lucy not longing for escape into an onist: The Unifying Presence of Gayheart, saving us from yet unrealistic dream: "while dream- Landscape in Willa Cather’s My another mother-daughter dis- ing is merely escapism in Flau- Antonia by Shelley Saposnik- cussion by dismissing Sapphira bert, it is in Cather both prag- Noire (Midwest Quarterly 31:171- and the Slave Girl because it matic fiction and nostalgic long- 179) discusses a well-worked "has been treated sufficiently ing." Ronald Butler’s "Sexual subject generally known in elsewhere." Donovan contends

Page36 that reconciliation of "the two gated to the ranks of the local that "apparent simplicity, actual realms of feminine experience colorists and hopes that Cather complexity is perhaps Cather’s -- that of the nineteenth-century will be recognized as a major most significant achievement in mother with that of the twen- writer of universal significance. My Antonia." Especially useful tieth-century new woman- "Cather’s work will be read for is the discussion of the histori- daughter -- is the central issue as long as there are people to cal context and the comprehen- in Cather’s fiction." Cather, says read at all," she concludes. sive survey of criticism. What is Donovan, dealt with but still had unfortunate is that Murphy’s Jamie Ambrose’s Willa splendid study ends too soon. not resolved this issue in "The Cather: Writing at the Frontier Best Years," her final story. (Oxford: Berg) offers a rather Susan Rosowski’s editing of David Daiches wrote Willa bland and general review of Approaches. to Teaching Ca- Cather: A Critical Introduction in Cather’s life and work, and her ther’s My Antonia (New York: 1951, but thirty-eight years interpretations are simple and Modern Language Association), elapsed before another British predictable. She offers no a collection of work by both book-length evaluation of Cather documentation for any of her established and newer critics, is appeared. Now there are three statements but obviously leans impressive. Rosowski arranges more: Susie Thomas’s (1990); heavily on Edith Lewis’s Willa the essays in four sections Jamie Ambrose’s (1989) and Her- Cather Living and Elizabeth focusing on "Teaching the Life mione Lee’s (1989). Lee’s Wi/la Shepiey Sergeant’s Willa and Times," "Teaching the Liter- Cather: A Life Saved Up (Lon- Cather: A Memoir. (Lewis is ary and Philosophical Tradi- Don: Virago) is the one that is listed sixteen times in the index; tions," "Teaching Specific worth the long wait; it is an am- Sergeant nineteen.) She also Courses," and, finally, "Teach- bitious study that complements cites Woodress’s A Literary Life ing Specific Aspects." All of the the O’Brien and Woodress biog- as the most accurate and com- contributors, like David Stouck, raphies. What Lee describes is a prehensive, yet there are only John J. Murphy, Loretta Wasser- Cather of split identities, sexual six entries for him. The impor- man, Robert Thacker, Blanche conflict, and stoic fatalism. To tant works of critics like Gelfant, and Rosowski herself Lee, "readings which explicate Rosowski, Arnold, Stouck, Mur- are experienced in teaching My Cather’s fiction entirely as an phy, and many others are ig- Antonia, and they generously encoding of covert, repressed nored. Ambrose’s study offers a share their approaches in lesbian sexuality seem readable style, but, as a general courses that range from fresh- simplistic, even patronising." introduction to Cather’s life and man composition to graduate She lengthily explains that the writing, it is very inferior to study. Enhancing this collection male narrative voices of Cather Philip Gerber’s Willa Cather. is the introductory "Materials" are not her means of secretly ex- section. Here Rosowski offers Two books on My Antonia with comments a valuable com- pressing lesbian feelings. Lee’s were published in 1989. The first study encompasses literary tra- piliation of suggestions by in- is John J. Murphy’s My Antonia: structors and of works that dition as well as gender issues The Road Home (Boston: would be helpful for teaching and learnedly and stylishly Twayne) a well-named book with the novel. Both books on My An- argues that Cather belongs not a beautiful jacket painting titled only at the forefront of American tonia are excellent aids for both A New Land by Cather artist the student and the teacher. literary history, but also John Bergers. Murphy is the first deserves a high place in the to devote a book-length study to canon of world literature. a single Cather novel. Hopefully, In Willa Cather (New York: he will follow with eleven more, Barnes and Noble), Susie for he offers a valuable and Thomas sees Cather’s achieve- close textual reading and care- ment as the result of her "ability fully examines the influences on to transcend the limitations of the author’s art. His solid gender and nationality." She discussion includes themes, relates Cather’s particular con- raw materials from which the tributions to the American novel was created, and how literary heritage and her "pro- Cather’s imagery is indebted to found and enriching response to techniques of impressionist, European literature, music, and luminous, and genre painting. painting." Thomas’s chapters on He shows how the novel follows 0 Pioneers!, My Antonia, and themes stressed in Virgil’s Geor- The Professor’s House are gics, identifies and evaluates insightful and valuable. She wor- the darker undercurrents, and, in ries about Cather being reie- so doing, compellingly explains

Page 37 Willa Cather Newsletter Literary Annual YOU CAN PARTICIPATE IN THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF THE WlLLA CATHER PIONEER MEMORIAL ¯ By being a Cather Memorial Member & financial contributor:. Editor: John J. Murphy, Brigham Young University BENEFACTOR ...... $1,000.00 and over Editorial Associate: Patricia K. Phillips, WCPM ANNUAL MEMBERSHIPS Bibliographer: Virgil Albertini, Northwest Missouri Patron ...... $100.00 Associate ...... 50.00 State University Sustaining ...... 25.00 Family ...... 15.00 EDITORIAL BOARD: Individual ...... 10.00 Foreign Subscription add $5.00 Bruce P. Baker, University of Nebraska at to membership category Omaha WCPM members receive: Susan J. Rosowski, University of Nebraska- Newsletter subscription Lincoln Free guided tour to restored buildings ¯ By contributing your Willa Cather artifacts, letters, papers, Merrill M. Skaggs, Drew University and publications to the Museum. David Stouck, Simon Fraser University ¯ By contributing your ideas and suggestions to the Board of Governors. Loretta Wasserman, Grand Valley State ALL MEMBERSHIPS, CONTRIBUTIONS AND University, Michigan BEQUESTS ARE TAX DEDUCTIBLE Under Section 170 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1965 Willa Cather Newsletter welcomes articles and notes for its Literary Annual and other issues. AIMS OF THE WCPM ¯ To promote and assist in the development and preservation Address contribution to WCPM, 326 North Web- of the art, Ilterery, and historical collection relating to the life, ster, Red Cloud, Nebraska 68970. Essays and time, and work of Wllla Cather, In association with the Ne- notes are currently listed in the annual MLA braska State Historical Society. Bibliography. ¯ To cooperate with the Nebraska State Historical Society in continuing to identify, restore to their original condition, and preserve places made famous by the writing of Willa Cather. ¯ To provide for Wllla Cather a living memorial, through the Foundation, by encouraging and assisting scholarship in the field of the humanities. ¯ To perpetuate an interest throughout the world in the work of Willa Cather. BOARD OF GOVERNORS Keith Albers Robert E, Knoll John J. Murphy ANNUAL SPRING William Thomas Auld, M.D. Betty Kort Han’y Obltz Bruce P. Baker, II Mellanee Kvasnicka Susan Roaowskl Mildred R. Bennett 1" Ella Cether Lewis David E. Soherman CONFERENCE W. K. Bennett, M.D. Lucia Woods Lindley C. Bertrand Schultz Don E, Connors Catherine Cather Lowell Madan Bahultz James L Fitzglbbon John March Margaret Cather Shannon Saturday, May 4, 1991 Josephine Friable Dale McDole Batty She~vo~d David Gan~ood Mldam Mounfford Helen Cethar Southwlck Ron Hull William Mountfo~l Mare, ella Van Meter Patricia K. Phillips, Director

Nonprofit Organ. U.S. POSTAGE PAID Red Cloud, NE Permit No. 10 .Ameri.ca..n Ut.e. rat.u, re Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Association Meeting 326 North Webster Red Cloud, Nebraska 68970 MAY 24-26, 1991 Washington, D.C. Deadline: 10 January 1991

Address papers to: WCPM 326 N. Webster Red Cloud, NE 68970