FROM ROMANTIC AESTHETICISM TO AESTHETIC CHRISTIANITY: WILLA CATHER’S THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE, MY MORTAL ENEMY, AND DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by JOHN GOLDEN WEATHERFORD IV (Under the Direction of Hubert Horton McAlexander, Jr.) ABSTRACT The Professor’s House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1927), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1928), three of Willa Cather’s most important works, collectively comprise Cather’s transition from Romantic Aestheticism to Aesthetic Christianity. Though critics have set forth many competing readings of the three works, none have considered them as a cohesive unit of Cather’s output. By examining together these three disparate-seeming works, one can observe and better understand the intimate and deep, though not initially obvious, connections that unify this period of Cather’s career. INDEX WORDS: Aestheticism, Catholicism, Christianity, Death Comes for the Archbishop, My Mortal Enemy, Religion, Romanticism, The Professor’s House, Willa Cather FROM ROMANTIC AESTHETICISM TO AESTHETIC CHRISTIANITY: WILLA CATHER’S THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE, MY MORTAL ENEMY, AND DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by JOHN GOLDEN WEATHERFORD IV B.A., University of Georgia, 2007 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2009 © 2009 John Golden Weatherford IV All Rights Reserved FROM ROMANTIC AESTHETICISM TO AESTHETIC CHRISTIANITY: WILLA CATHER’S THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE, MY MORTAL ENEMY, AND DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by JOHN GOLDEN WEATHERFORD IV Major Professor: Hubert Horton McAlexander, Jr. Committee: Jonathan Duane Evans Hugh Ruppersberg Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2009 iv DEDICATION Soli Deo gloria. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE ......................................................................................6 MY MORTAL ENEMY..............................................................................................29 DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP .............................................................44 WORKS REFERENCED ............................................................................................55 1 INTRODUCTION “The DNA lottery may have left you smart / But can you stand up to beauty, dictator of the heart?” - U2, “Stand Up Comedy” Most critical works that consider the entirety of an author’s literary career make some sort of attempt to define a “trajectory” of what the author has produced. This idea of tracing a trajectory through an artist’s works is natural enough; one can almost imagine a mathematical function in which, for a given time period, the author’s personal history and contemporary current events are inputs that generate the output of a given novel, story, or poem. All that remains is to plot each point on a coordinate plane, and before long one is left with a neat, tidy graph that conveys all that one might ever need to know about an author and her or his work. Taken to such an illogical extreme, the notion of a trajectory quickly begins to look ridiculous, as detractors of biographical criticism have well pointed out. However, simply because an idea fails to provide a grand unifying theory of all literature in no way means that it holds no value. Rather, the idea of a literary career having a trajectory--though admittedly sometimes seeming over-worn, indefensible, or just plain unhelpful--when carefully and appropriately applied, can offer a remarkably useful and insightful method of examining an author’s works. A trajectory implies movement and change, but not at random. With the gift of perspective given by time, a trajectory imbues a comprehensible shape, logic, and order to the perceived chaos of the events that constitute a life and a life’s work. 2 Many Cather critics have used such an idea, and, with a few exceptions, they sketch a surprisingly similar picture, especially in one regard: nearly all prominent Cather critics regard a trio of Cather’s novels--The Professor’s House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1926), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)--as collectively representing a volta in her oeuvre. Susan Rosowski provides an excellent (and more accurate than most) instance of this trend in an introduction to a book that covers Cather’s complete works: Following A Lost Lady, Cather asked a question that had run as an undercurrent through her previous writing: what is left when the imagination fades and the world is fallen? In The Professor’s House (1925), Cather told a romantic version of the fall... Then, as if preparing for the new key in which she would write, Cather, in My Mortal Enemy (1926), created characters who reject a romanticism that had deteriorated into sentimentality. (xii-xiii) Like many others, Rosowski attempts to find a common thread, a continuity, that ties the trio together, and rightly so: the three works, written sequentially and within an astoundingly short time of each other, bear certain unmistakable continuities. Critics note that all three comprise distinct formal experiments: “Tom Outland’s Story” startlingly inset into The Professor’s House, not to mention the novel’s contracted third act; the absolute sparseness of My Mortal Enemy; and the serene montage created by the fluid assemblage of moments in the life of Father Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop. They also comment on Cather’s fascination 3 with the American Southwest in The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, the prominence of women in all three texts, and other shared themes. However, the works differ from one another far more substantially and significantly than they resemble one another, and the differences raise issues of far more critical interest. Why, for example, does Cather interrupt her journey toward the Southwest (The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop) with a short, intense detour to New York City and the west coast (My Mortal Enemy)? Or, what is one to make of the intensely bitter tone of My Mortal Enemy, especially in contrast with the serenity of Death Comes for the Archbishop immediately following it? Critics are unified in ascribing importance to these three works in the overall trajectory of Cather’s career; however, they disagree about what exactly these remarkable books mean in relation to one another. Further fanning the flames of the critical debate, Cather wrestles with heavy--and therefore controversial--matters in all three books. The insistent pedal tone of death sounds throughout all three, and each work also confronts questions of meaning and purpose, too. In The Professor’s House, Godfrey St. Peter looks to find new sources of meaning and structure in his life after completing his great academic work. Myra Henshawe, in My Mortal Enemy, rages against the world more and more as she finds that the romantic love upon which she grounded her life will not sustain her. Death Comes for the Archbishop, though lacking the anxiety and unease that characterizes the other two works, nonetheless concerns itself with 4 what it means to live a full life and, in Father Latour’s quest to build his cathedral, what it means to leave one’s mark upon this world once one leaves it behind. Unsurprisingly for works that focus so intently on the ultimate questions of life-- meaning, purpose, death--the three novels all pay a good deal of attention to religion, specifically Christianity. Cather, in fact, thrusts religion increasingly into the spotlight in each of the three sequential works. In The Professor’s House, Christianity makes its appearance only in the book’s final act, with St. Peter finding hope in “a world full of Augustas” (257) after his near-death experience, a reference to the unassuming, devout seamstress who saves his life. My Mortal Enemy engages religion more centrally. A difference of religious beliefs between Oswald Henshawe and John Driscoll leads to Myra and Oswald’s elopement, and Myra attempts to find solace in Catholicism at her life’s end. Needless to say, religion permeates the entirety of Death Comes for the Archbishop, informing not only its subject matter but also its very tone. Although the three works vary greatly in terms of form, tone, and outlook, they are in fact connected by a recurring inquiry into death, purpose, the meaning of life, and into religion as the answer to those questions. Many critics have noted that the three works are stitched together by Cather’s gradual turning from Aestheticism to religion as the answer to life’s questions. However, these analyses prove insufficient, for they fail to define with sufficient clarity what they mean by “religion.” For Cather, as for many, “religion” signifies a complex interweaving of beliefs, outlooks, doctrines, traditions, hopes, and longings. If these three 5 books are in fact about Cather’s turning to religion, then a clearer picture of what religion meant to Cather must be reconstructed based on the evidence presented in each novel. And, it will show how Cather’s evolving understanding of religion informs each work, allowing us to trace a clear and defensible, though complex, trajectory for these three compelling works. 6 THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE The park was deserted. The arc-lights were turned off. The leafless trees stood quite motionless in the light of the clear stars. The world was sad to St. Peter as he looked