Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter
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Copyright © 1994 by the Willa Cather Pioneer ISSN 0197-663X Memodal and Educational Foundation Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter The Willa Cather Society 326 N. Webster Street VOLUME XXXVIII, No. 2 Red Cloud, Nebraska 68970 Summer, 1994 Short Story Issue Telephone (402) 746-2653 Poet Bill Kloefkom of Lincoln reads poetry on lawn in front of the restored Burlington Depot in Red Cloud as part of the annual Willa Cather Spring Conference. -- Photo by Beth Bohling "The Old Beauty" and Conference Activities Maternal Purity The 37th Annual Cather Spring Conference John N. Swift Red Cloud, May 6-7 Occidental College Beth Bohling I Hastings Tribune To begin a reading of some of the ambivalences of Oldtimers and newcomers gathered Friday and Cather’s bleak 1936 story, The Old Beauty," I want to Saturday for the 37th annual Willa Cather Spring move immediately to its emotional center, Mr. Henry ~ Conference and there was plenty to please everybody. Seabury’s recollection of witnessing the attempted rape Blanche H. Gelfant, professor of English at Dart- or seduction of Gabrielle Longstreet in her New York mouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, said she home. His memory is striking enough to bear recount- was excited to be back in Red Cloud for her third visit. ing in its entirety. Seabury is twenty-four, "only a boy" Gelfant was featured speaker at the Saturday evening as Gabrielle remembers (49), entering the chambers of banquet. She compared Cather’s artistry in writing the a beautiful, mature woman, =considered notorious... short story,Old Mrs. Harris" with the performance of a a divom4e, known to have more friends among men stage magician. "Cather evokes illusion to delight and than among women" (50). baffle the readers," Gelfant said. She cited instances From the doorway he beheld something quite in the story as examples of Cather using the magi- terrible. At the far end of the room Gabrielle Long- cian’s tricks of production, transformation, vanishing, street was seated on a little French sofa -- not seated, but silently struggling. Behind the sofa escape, penetration and restoration. "Cather has stood a stout, dark man leaning over her. His left found the secret o~ the perfect magical trick," she said. arm, about her waist, pinioned her against the =Her method is completely inexplicable and invisi- flowered silk upholstery. His right hand was thrust ble." (Continued on Next Page) (Continued on Page 19) - 17- "THE OLD BEAUTY" AND whose principal task (the duty refused by Marian Forrester) is to maintain a literal shrine to the past -- MATERNAL PURITY, (Continued) her traveling photo collection, an imaged paternal past deep into the low-cut bodice of her dinner gown. In of masculine authority, =uniforms, military and naval, her struggle she had turned a little on her side; her caps and gowns; photographs, drawings, engravings" dght arm was in the gdp of his left hand, and she (33). was trying to free the other, which was held down If Gabrielle Longstreet is in some sense a mother, by the pressure of his elbow. Neither of these two if her figure conjures a memory of filial love, then the made a sound. Her face was averted, half hidden averted rape’s intensity becomes clearer. In his 1909 against the blue silk back of the sofa. Young essay on "Family Romances," Freud had noticed that Seabury stood still just long enough to see what the in some of these fantasies the child’s determined situation really was. Then he stepped across the threshold and said with such coolness as he could adulation of his parents is complicated by an awaken- command: "Am I too eady, Madame Longstreet?" ing sexual differentiation and desire, so that, while the The man behind her started from his crouching father figure remains distant and abstract, regarding position, darted away from the sofa, and disap- the mother =the child.., tends to picture to himself peared down the stairway. To reach the stairs he erotic situations and relations, the motive force behind passed Seabury, without lifting his eyes, but his this being his desire to bring his mother (who is the face was glistening wet." (52-3) subject of the most intense sexual curiosity) into Cather’s readers will recognize this memory as com- situations of secret infidelity and into secret love- pensatory, the closing of an account nearly fifteen affairs" (239). Seabury’s recollection is just such a picture: an ambiguous "primal scene," a reconstructed years old. Cool-headed Seabury does what his ~ prototype Niel Herbert had failed twice to do in A Lost infantile discovery of parental sexuality. Lady (with Frank Ellinger and Ivy Peters): intruding on At least four distinguishable forces shape the a scene of caddish violation, he decisively ejects the scene. First, some desire to know, to be certain, villain and saves his unattainable lady’s honor. As creates an undeniable acknowledgement of maternal Hermione Lee has said, this is =bad melodrama" (356) sexual possibility, confirming a number of vague but still an engagingly boyish melodrama with a high suggestions earlier in the narrative (Sir Wilfred’s chivalric purpose. Seabury is appropriately rewarded, unaccountable jealousy, for example, or Gabrielle’s after a thirty-year interval, by Gabrielle’s lavish grati- uncertain reputation). But another counter-energy tude and praise, and eventually by a dance, a =spirited disavows that acknowledgement at the moment of its waltz.., in the grand style" (58-9). appearance: what’s pictured is after all only a potential rape, and Gabrielle emerges (thanks to Seabury’s Other readers, .psychoanalytically inclined (and intervention) with her purity intact. This is perhaps the thus understanding that some story of infantile love simplest Oedipal reading, casting the father as brutal always informs and deforms adulthood’s narratives), predator, the mother as victim, the son as her white will find more here: an unabashed expression of knight, still young enough to escape complicity in Oedipal desire, a confused fantasy of filial triumph and sexuality’s sweaty squalor: =Am I too early, Madame renunciation. Since I cannot in a short paper present Longstreet?" Seabury asks, simultaneously longing for all the evidence necessary to make such a reading persuasive, I’ll simply offer axiomatically a working and resisting the unimaginable. Yet the dominant hypothesis: like A Lost Lady, =The Old Beauty" un- insistence on purity is itself qualified by the witnessed equivocally manifests the structure that Freud called act’s visual complexity. Seabury recalls a moment of =the family romance," a common adulatory childhood recognition in which he "stood still just long enough to fantasy that replaces real parents with royal or noble see what the situation really was" -- but readers trying surrogates; and, like Marian Forrester, Gabrielle to duplicate the strange twinings that he describes will perhaps feel a doubt: is Gabrielle in fact an assault’s Longstreet becomes in that structure the maternal 3 object of the boyish narrator’s desire.’ Casting Ga- passive victim? Or is she herself a willing participant, bdelle as an unacknowledged =mother," unlikely on the =silently struggling" in an obscure responsive passion, face of it, actually throws some light on Seabury’s blind and is Seabury saving her from herself? Finally, and adoration and vague reverence. Situating her in a lost most significantly, if Gabrielle is indeed a participant, if past "whose manners, dress, conventions, loyalties, her sexuality is active as well as passive, the scene codes of honour, were different from anything existing offers an opportunity for disguised Oedipal gratification, in the world today" (5), he recalls her as =a woman as the youthful watcher identifies himself with the who had had the real thing" (25), one whose special =stout, dark man" -- a lover as far removed as possi- virtue was an elusive capacity to be beautiful and to be ble from the quintessentially British =great men," the loved: =She was not witty or especially clever," he "succession of Great Protectors" (23) who elsewhere muses, =--had no accomplishments beyond speaking in the story provide the paternal imago in the ennobled French as naturally as English. She said nothing parental couple. This final allegory traces desire’s memorable in either language. She was beautiful, that radical renunciation, which reads: -- despite my desire was all. And she was fresh" (17). She survives into for her and my fantasy of her availability, I will res- 1922 as a kind of familial relic, an austere widow (Continued on Page 20) - 18- Hartmann Roggenkamp of Detroit, Michigan, who was CATHER SPRING CONFERENCE the first winner of the Norma Ross Walter Scholarship (Continued) when she was a student at Minden High School, Seventeen states and-a foreign country (Austria) presented this year’s scholarship to Kelly Elizabeth were represented at the spring conference. Don Bare of Lincoln Southeast High School. The $8,000 Connors of Huntington Beach, California, retired scholarship is awarded to a Nebraska high school English teacher and a member of the Cather Founda- senior girl planning to major in English tion Board of Governors, said 35 years ago he was on Saturday’s events began with an ecumenical the first bus trip ever taken to visit country sites related service at Grace Episcopal Church, led by Father to the author. He had sponsored a trip from Omaha Steven J. Ryan of St. Thomas More Catholic Church, for students who were reading Cather’s works. This Austin, Texas. Several people participated in reading year Connors was one of the guides for bus tours. Cather selections, and hymns were performed by the However, they were confined to town and highway St. Juliana Choir, which was organized several years locations since recent rains made the country roads ago to sing for the conference.