University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Fall 1984 Nebraska Naturalism In Jamesian Frames John J. Murphy Merrimack College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Murphy, John J., "Nebraska Naturalism In Jamesian Frames" (1984). Great Plains Quarterly. 1755. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1755 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. NEBRASKA NATURALISM IN JAMESIAN FRAMES JOHN J. MURPHY So much has been written about Willa Cather portrayals of the commonplace ("the drama of and the influence of the classics and later Euro­ a broken tea cup, the tragedy of a walk down pean literature that one sometimes forgets the the block").3 Romance would stress the abnor­ American literary climate in which she devel­ mal in characterization and plot, treating Amer­ oped.1 It was a postromantic age of realism, ican social problems, the dwellings of the poor, epitomized by William Dean Howells's attempt the outcasts, and so on, and would not be to limit fiction to normal characters in com­ restricted to the norm of experience. McTeague, monplace situations, which would make of it, the 1899 novel in which Norris tried to fulfill as Cather complained, a "sort of young lady's these social responsibilities, was praised by illusion preserver.,,2 But the new breed of Cather as a "great book," a powerful depiction "naturalists," Cather's contemporaries, were in of "brute strength and brute passions," a revolt against Howells and his more accom­ "searching analysis of the degeneration of ... plished contemporary, Henry James, and advo­ two souls"; she detected his method as Zola's, cated a return to romance without the chivalric "perhaps the only truthful literary method of trappings of Walter Scott and Dumas pere. dealing with that part of society which environ­ Frank Norris, the most outspoken of a group ment and heredity hedge about like the walls of that included Jack London, Stephen Crane, a prison.,,4 and Theodore Dreiser, pleaded for a serious One need only review Cather's early story response in his pointedly anti-Howells, anti­ "The Clemency of the Court" (1893) to recog­ James statement against so-called realistic nize her penchant for all the trappings of our naturalistic school: the effects of environment, evolutionary theory (the association of beast A professor of English at Merrimack College, and man, and the reduction of a human to a } ohn }. Murphy has published essays on Willa Cather in American Literature, Western Ameri­ bestial level), and adventure punctuated with can Literature, and other journals. He is the revolting details (the killing of the dog and the editor of Critical Essays on Willa Cather (1984). farmer, and the tale of a prisoner in Russia committing suicide by biting deep into his [GPQ 4 (Fal11984): 231-37.] arm, tearing open the veins with his teeth, and 231 232 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 1984 bleeding to death).5 A story like "On the Wharton," she confessed, "were our most inter­ Divide" three years later (1896) is similarly esting novelists.,,12 within the revolutionary, anti-Howellsian con­ In fact, the influence of the artistry and per­ ventions of the age; it depicts a Norwegian spective of Henry James, directly and through giant who carries off a screaming woman, Jewett, defines Cather's approach to her drinks himself into demonic stupors, and material, an approach that is somewhat contra­ performs suicidal rituals in an oppressively puntal to the influences of the young natural­ hot, treeless environment where "it causes ists and her own Nebraska experience. Edward no sensation ... when a Dane is found swing­ and Lillian Bloom explain the approach Cather ing to his own windmill tower, and most of shared with James as the "fusion of moral the Poles, after they have become too careless idea and physical reality," and as fictional and discouraged to shave themselves keep shaping appropriate to "the inner experience their razors to cut their throats with." It is which is the only justifiable substance of fic­ appropriate that Willa Cather wrote like this, tion.,,13 James appealed to the young Cather's knowing her independence of mind, her mas­ need for cultivation; she said of reading James, culine bent, and her introduction to rather "You may not be greatly moved at any time primitive conditions when she came to Ne­ but the most respectable part of your mentality braska a century ago at the age of nine. (One must be awakened, refreshed, interested, satis­ recalls the incident recorded by Mildred Ben­ fied.,,14 nett about Willa helping the local doctor My thesis is that Willa Cather used the ro­ during the amputation of a boy's leg.)6 mantic, adventurous material called for by the But her mature fiction reveals another side naturalists to rescue the nation's fiction from of Willa Cather. As William Curtin has noted, the tragedy of the broken teacup and the ad­ the fondness for romance she shared with the venture of an afternoon call, but that she young naturalists "put her at odds with William enclosed it, framed it, and viewed it from the Dean Howells." 7 Yet she acknowledged his Jamesian perspective. In My Antonia, for exam­ greatness, despite his mildness, and his ability ple, we immediately recognize the naturalistic to "make very common little men in sack coats" bent of the material: the narrator meets and be­ live, even if he could not create very great friends the daughter of a Bohemian immigrant ones.8 She defended Henry James's as well as family impoverished by a scheming country­ Howells's "theories as to the delicacy and man; the family members are reduced to animal decency of literature," and developed for James level, almost freezing and starving during the a reverence that might seem inconsistent with winter, and depending upon handouts from her admiration for the naturalists.9 The spell their neighbors. The father, unable to cope of James materialized after 1896, when, al­ with this alien environment, shoots himself in though she lamented his failure to address the head, leaving his daughter to be brutalized modern society, modern "degeneracy," and the by field work. When she goes to work in town, new woman, she expressed admiration for the one employer attempts to rape her; she meets a perfect control of his art, "as calm and as subtle railroad conductor who impregnates and then as the music of Mozart.,,10 She had earlier dis­ abandons her. She returns to the family farm in tinguished James with Hawthorne and Poe as disgrace to bear her child alone one evening our only masters of pure prose, and in a 1913 after a day in the field. Tucked into this story interview in the Philadelphia Record she de­ are tales of the killing of a rattlesnake; wolves scribed James, Mark Twain, and Sarah Orne attacking and eating a wedding party; a de­ Jewett as her "favorite American writers."ll ranged wife pursuing the local seductress across In 1911 she attempted in Alexander's Bridge the prairie with a butcher knife; a tramp throw­ to write a Jamesian novel with drawing rooms ing himself into the blades of a thresher; and and clever people; "Henry James and Mrs. so on. The inchoate if popular deterministic NEBRASKA NATURALISM IN JAMESIAN FRAMES 233 and evolutionary doctrines espoused by the whose almost exclusive function in the novel is naturalists (partially, one suspects, for effect) to react. and implicit in early Cather stories like "The The intentional, consciousness-filtering meth­ Clemency of the Court" and "On the Divide" od of Cather is best understood through certain are evident in the webbed fingers of Antonia's basic aspects of impressionism in painting and brother Marek, the phrenological assessment of their affinity to the method of James: The im­ pianist d' Arnault's skull, Mr. Shimerda's inabil­ pressionist painters emphasized light and color ity to cope with the bitter prairie winter, and in their paintings and approached objects from the sexual permissiveness his daughter seems to various angles; more important, they employed share with her mother, who had conceived the broken brushwork technique that requires Ambrosch out of wedlock.1S viewing from a distance to assemble the pieces Cather's treatment of this sensational ma­ and compose the picture.17 James once de­ terial I would label Jamesian, particularly in clared that he had grown determined to give the cultivated consciousness she bestows "not ... my own personal account of the affair upon narrator Jim Burden, who is passive, at hand, but ... my account of someone's im- self-absorbed, and prone to idealize women­ pression of it ... through the opportunity and traits variously evident in such Jamesian con­ the sensibility of some more or less detached, sciousness reflectors as Ralph Touchett in The some not strictly involved, though thoroughly Portrait of a Lady, John Marcher in "The Beast interested and intelligent witness orreporter.,,18 in the Jungle," and Lambert Strether in The Such a perspective goes beyond the mere Ambassadors. Like Godfrey St. Peter and Tom assembling and composing of what is physically Outland in The Professor's House, Archbishop witnessed. The journey from the physical world Jean Marie Latour, and to a lesser extent Niel to the realm of consciousness is obvious, for Herbert in A Lost Lady and Nellie Birdseye example, in Cather's "A Wagner Matinee" in My Mortal Enemy, Jim Burden is a superior (1904), one of the stories she wrote during her being, endowed to an extraordinary degree, Jamesian phase.