Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark DIALOGUE 10 Edited by Michael J. Meyer Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark Edited by Debra L. Cumberland Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Cover Photograph: Paul C. Mims Cover Design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3203-3 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3204-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands CONTENTS Acknowledgements xiii Series Editors’ Preface xv Introduction xix Genius and the (Un)Dead Girls: Consumption, Artistry, and the Female Body in The Song of the Lark 1 Meghan L. Burke Anatomy Is All: The Pathology of Voice in The Song of the Lark 21 Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg Künstlerroman Revised: Doubleness and Catharsis in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark 39 Erica D. Galioto Immeasurable Yearnings: The Artistic Legacy of the Landscape in Cather’s The Song of the Lark 67 Danielle Russell Place, Inspiration, and the Railroad in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark 91 Annette R. Dolph A Place Apart: Transcending Social Topographies in The Song of the Lark 107 Tony R. Magagna The Kingdom of Culture: Culture, Ethnology and the “Feeling of Empire” in The Song of the Lark 127 Eric Aronoff Locating Mexicans in The Song of the Lark 149 Sarah Clere “You Are What You Read”: Wharton’s Undine Spragg and Cather’s Thea Kronborg 165 Julie Olin-Ammentorp A Tale of Two Sisters: The Influence of “Goblin Market” on Cather’s The Song of the Lark 183 Debra Cumberland “The Inevitable Hardness of Human Life”: The Song of the Lark as Naturalism 205 Richard S. Pressman Willa Cather’s Transitional Novel: The Song of the Lark as a Romantic-Naturalistic Novel with a Modernist Center 225 Ann Moseley Gift Giving and Community in Cather’s The Song of the Lark 241 Beth E. Torgerson About the Authors 267 Abstract of Arguments 271 Index 277 Acknowledgements It takes a good number of individuals to complete a book and I would be remiss if I did not credit them for their contributions to this volume. I would like to thank the Dialogue Series Editor, Michael J. Meyer, for asking me to edit this volume. His advice and encouragement were appreciated. I would also like to thank the Rodopi editorial staff, especially Esther Roth, and the talented contributors to this volume. Winona State University provided me with a sabbatical, which proved invaluable in allowing me the time to finish the project. I would also like to thank our department chair, Ruth Forsythe, and my colleagues, for their support. I would particularly like to acknowledge the assistance of Traci Austin, Linda Kukowski, Marilyn Hoekenpoehler, Kimberly Vogt, and Drucilla Mims Wall. Thanks are also due to Paul Mims who generously donated his photograph of the southern Colorado landscape for the cover. I am also grateful to my parents, William and Ingrid Cumberland, who first introduced me to the work of Willa Cather. It is with deep sadness that I mention the passing of Merrill Maguire Skaggs, a renowned Cather scholar, a death that occurred as I began this project. While I never had the opportunity to meet Merrill in person, I held, like so many others, a profound admiration for her work. I was thrilled when Merrill expressed an interest in contributing to this volume, but unfortunately, she passed away in the very early stages of the project, leaving her essay unfinished. She will be missed. Series Editors’ Preface The original concept for Rodopi’s new series entitled Dialogue grew out two very personal experiences of the general editor. In 1985, having just finished my dissertation on John Steinbeck and attained my doctoral degree, I was surprised to receive an invitation from Steinbeck biographer, Jackson J. Benson, to submit an essay for a book he was working on. I was unpublished at the time and was unsure and hesitant about my writing talent, but I realized that I had nothing to lose. It was truly the “opportunity of a lifetime.” I revised and shortened a chapter of my dissertation on Steinbeck’s The Pearl and sent it off to California. Two months later, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my essay had been accepted and would appear in Duke University Press’s The Short Novels of John Steinbeck (1990). Surprisingly, my good fortune continued when several months after the book appeared, Tetsumaro Hayashi, a renowned Steinbeck scholar, asked me to serve as one of the three assistant editors of The Steinbeck Quarterly, then being published at Ball State University. Quite naïve at the time about publishing, I did not realize how fortunate I had been to have such opportunities present themselves without any struggle on my part to attain them. After finding my writing voice and editing several volumes on my own, I discovered in 2002 that despite my positive experiences, there was a real prejudice against newer “emerging” scholars when it came to inclusion in collections or acceptance in journals. As the designated editor of a Steinbeck centenary collection, I found myself roundly questioned about the essays I had chosen for inclusion in the book. Specifically, I was asked why I had not selected several prestigious names whose recognition power would have spurred the book’s success on the market. My choices of lesser known but quality essays seemed unacceptable to those who ran the conference which produced the potential entries in the book. New voices were unwelcome; it was the tried and true that were greeted with open arms. Yet these experienced scholars had no need for further publications and often offered few original insights into the Steinbeck canon. Sadly, the originality of the lesser-known essayists met with hostility; the doors were closed, perhaps even locked tight, against their innovative approaches and readings that took issue with scholars whose authority and expertise had long been unquestioned. xvi Song of the Lark Angered, I withdrew as editor of the volume, and began to think of ways to rectify what I considered a serious flaw in academé. My goal was to open discussions between experienced scholars and those who were just beginning their academic careers and had not yet broken through the publication barriers. Dialogue would be fostered rather than discouraged. Having previously served as an editor for several volumes in Rodopi’s Perspective of Modern Literature series under the general editorship of David Bevan, I sent a proposal to Fred van der Zee advocating a new series that would be entitled Dialogue, one that would examine the controversies within classic canonical texts and would emphasize an interchange between established voices and those whose ideas had never reached the academic community because their names were unknown. Happily, the press was willing to give the concept a try and gave me a wide scope in determining not only the texts to be covered but also in deciding who would edit the individual volumes. When Debra Cumberland asked about a volume on Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark, I was quite pleased to see a proposal for an initial volume that would likely discuss the contributions of an author whose gender issues were often questioned. While a volume on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was already in print, I wanted to encourage a wide range of interest in the Dialogue series. The resulting essays address many of the issues that caused the novel to be such a controversial text: In this volume’s pages, such issues are not avoided but are addressed skillfully by authors with a variety of publication histories, some experienced, some neophytes. All are committed to a discussion of what earlier reviewers had determined were pluses and minuses of Song of the Lark’s characters and plot and to addressing elements in Cather’s stylistics and themes that were seen as unusual or as flaws As you will see, some of authors break fertile new ground in the process, and offer approaches which will help readers see the novel from several new angles. This volume will soon be followed by studies on Laura Esquivel’s Like Water For Chocolate, and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. Volumes on Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are also in progress. It is my hope that as each title appears, the Dialogue series will foster not only renewed interest in each of the chosen works but that each will bring forth fresh interpretations and will open doors to heretofore silenced voices. In this atmosphere, a Introduction xvii healthy interchange of criticism can develop, one that will allow even dissent and opposite viewpoints to be expressed without fear that such stances may be seen as negative or counter-productive. My thanks to Rodopi and its editorial board for its support of this “radical” concept. May you, the reader, discover much to value in these new approaches to issues that have fascinated readers for decades and to books that have long stimulated our imaginations and our critical discourse. Michael J. Meyer 2010 Introduction Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark was the first book I read about a talented, creative young woman who wanted to be an artist and actually followed through with it. Anne of Green Gables marries Gilbert and writes occasional sketches, and Jo marries Professor Bhaer and that seems to be the end of her scribbling in the attic.