A Literary and Field Guide to the Trees in Willa Cather's Nebraska Novels

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Open-Access* Master's Theses from the University Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln of Nebraska-Lincoln 5-2002 A Literary and Field Guide to the Trees in Willa Cather’s Nebraska Novels Linnea M. Fredrickson University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/opentheses Part of the Botany Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Fredrickson, Linnea M., "A Literary and Field Guide to the Trees in Willa Cather’s Nebraska Novels" (2002). Open-Access* Master's Theses from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 66. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/opentheses/66 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open-Access* Master's Theses from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. A LITERARY AND FIELD GUIDE TO THE TREES IN WILLA CATHER’S NEBRASKA NOVELS by Linnea M. Fredrickson A THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Major: English Under the Supervision of Professor Susan J. Rosowski Lincoln, Nebraska May, 2002 A LITERARY AND FIELD GUIDE TO THE TREES IN WILLA CATHER’S NEBRASKA NOVELS Linnea M. Fredrickson, M.A. University of Nebraska, 2002 Adviser: Susan J. Rosowski Willa Cather, one of America’s foremost novelists and short- story writers, was deeply interested in and profoundly affected by the places she lived and encountered. One small aspect of her knowledge of places was familiarity with the trees of the locale. A number of influences during her youth gave her the gift of tree awareness: a great-grandfather who was a forest conservationist, a home in the northern Virginia mixed-deciduous forest that was named for its prominent trees, perhaps the sound of her own first name, the wrenching contrast of a move to the nearly treeless mixed-grass prairie of Nebraska when she was still young, rela- tives and friends who loved botany, Arbor Day promotions, the visible results of a federal tree-planting act, her insatiable reading, which included some works with a strong and meaningful arboreal presence, and her college education. With this background, Cather was attuned to a portion of an enormous, rich, living world beyond yet very near the human world. She was thereby able to use a variety of species of trees in her novels and stories to subtly develop themes, characters, and scenes. Descriptions of a number of the trees that Cather uses, such as cottonwood, willow, bur oak, osage orange, box-elder, eastern red cedar, linden, Lombardy poplar, and locust, along with their natural and cultural histories, help illuminate both Cather’s en- vironmental knowledge and the manner in which she uses them in particular novels and stories. This thesis introduces Cather’s arboreal education and then examines her literary use of specific trees in five of her Nebraska novels: O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, One of Ours, A Lost Lady, and Lucy Gayheart. The uses confirm the depth of detail and subtlety in her writings and illuminate an artist at work in both the natural and human world. CONTENTS Introduction 1 The Farm and Creek Trees of O Pioneers! 27 My Ántonia’s Triumphal Orchards 47 The Lost and Found Trees of One of Ours 69 The Cottonwoods of A Lost Lady 100 Trees of Grief in Lucy Gayheart 118 Conclusion 133 Works Cited 138 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe many thanks to the members of my committee, Susan J. Rosowski, Barbara DiBernard, and Robert Bergstrom, for their en- couragement, advice, corrections, care, and patience during the development of this thesis. Sue Rosowski in particular I must thank, as it was she who told me about and encouraged me to attend the International Cather Seminar 2000, “Willa Cather’s Envi- ronmental Imagination,” when my chief concern was only keeping my master’s program moving through the summer months. “Are you sure?” I remember asking her about whether I had any business at- tending this scholarly meeting, having not read any Willa Cather since high school and as a seventeen-year-old dismissing her for being just another person who left Nebraska. Although I did not have a thesis in mind then, it truly started at the seminar, specifically on the back terrace of the Lied Conference Center at Arbor Day Farm, overlooking the hazel- nut grove, timbered creek, and J. Sterling Morton’s glowing white mansion on the far hill. I asked Marilyn Arnold what she thought someone interested in nature ought to write her conference paper on, and she suggested taking a look at the trees in Cather’s works. She didn’t think anyone had done much with that, and she recalled trees of significance in Cather’s books. Lynn Wake and Betty Jean Steinshouer, also out enjoying the beautiful evening, vigorously supported the idea. I began my reading the next day, slapping Post-it Notes on every mention of tree, twig, and leaf. I must also thank Margaret R. Bolick, curator of botany for the University of Nebraska State Museum, for several hours of her time one day as we dashed from herbaria to office to lab to archives, sleuthing Cather’s botanical education and exposures. Thanks too to John Swift for a couple enthusiastic conversations about Cather’s love of botany and a chance to view the Fem Bot cartoon that ran in the 1895 yearbook that she edited. I’m grateful for ideas and guidance provided by Ann Billes- bach and Chad Wall at the Nebraska State Historical Society. Likewise, Mary Ellen Ducey and Carmela Orosco of the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln were helpful and generous with their time. I looked at many photo- graphs at both places, none of which are reproduced here but that were nevertheless very helpful to me in better understanding several aspects of Cather’s background. The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation gave me a scholarship that helped me attend the seminar in June 2000 that was most helpful. The organization also invited me to read a part of my paper on trees the next summer at its 46th An- nual Willa Cather Spring Festival, “Willa Cather and Nature,” in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Virgil Albertini and Steve Shively were most encouraging and helpful as I whittled and reconstructed my facts and ideas into something worth hearing about. Finally, I really thank family, friends, and coworkers who have all been encouraging and extremely tolerant of receiving only neglect, absent-mindedness, and unpleasant sidewashes of my stress in return. I will work my way back to civility, normal conversations, and doing my chores now. “If it had not been for the few stunted cottonwoods and elms [ . ] Canute would have shot himself years ago.” —“On the Divide,” 1896 1 INTRODUCTION Willa Cather knew her trees. Willa Cather knew her trees so well that she could make great use of their qualities, characteristics, cultivation, and history in her Nebraska stories and novels. Readers will not find her fictional characters sitting under nameless leafy boughs or walking among an array of trunks as undefined as a field of tele- phone poles. Readers will also not come across trees simply because a situation calls for an outdoor setting or the variety provided by a little vegetation. Cather is as intentional, de- tailed, spare, and subtle with the trees in her works as she is with any other element. She nestles her characters’ homes in cottonwood and pine groves, lines their lane with exotic Lombardy poplars, blesses them with parklike orchards, surrenders their souls in cedars, endows their catalpa stands with the precious- ness of children, turns rivers and creeks into oases with elms and willows, and renders a sunset unbearable with honey locusts— all to powerful effect. But how did an author generally so taken by people, their actions and emotions, and particularly by music, literature, and art, and the artist’s striving, know anything about trees? Cather had quite a number of strong arboreal influences, including knowledge from family and friends, the contrasting places she lived as a child, a national push to plant and replant trees, her 2 reading, and her college education. She also had her own talent- ed, curious eye. For all her touted urban living and many trips to Europe, she was originally and always in part a rural person. During minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years of her life, her eye fell on natural designs, and what is there for an eye not to be delighted with in trees? They became part of her art in the same measure as everything human created, and she jux- taposed them with humans, just as trees are in the nonfictional world. Cather’s first arboreal influence came from her own family. It seems likely that, in the Virginia sheep-farm household of her youth, family members, from the influence of the generations be- fore them, simply lived and breathed a knowledge of trees, in the way that some families pass down a love for stock-car racing or birding from parent to children, and children on to their children. Most rural families would have known some trees and taught their names and useful characteristics to their offspring just because wood was so necessary for living: for fuel, fences, wag- ons, buildings, furniture, tools.

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