Seaton, James

Citation: American Scholar. v67 n1, Winter 1998. Page: 146. Length: 5 page(s).

In Willa Cather's fiction, friendship nourishes and protects while romantic love leads to disillusion or death. Jim Burden of My Antonia cares for Antonia Shimerda all his life because when he was young he dreamed about Lena Lingard, not Antonia. Antonia's own marriage to Anton Cuzak is secure, because the two are not romantic lovers but live together on "terms of easy friendliness, touched with humour. " When Niel Herbert in A Lost Lady discovers that Marian Forrester has slept. with Frank Ellinger while her husband is far away in Denver, he loses "one of the most beautiful things in his life," a romantic vision that constituted "an aesthetic ideal. " Myra Henshawe's elopement seems the height of romance, but the question she whispers on her deathbed as her husband sits nearby pronounces "a terrible judgment" on their love: "Why must I die like this,alone with my mortal enemy?" Emil Bergson and Marie Tovesky Shabata become lovers in O Pioneers! andare shot a few hours later by Frank Shahata when he finds them together under the white mulberry tree. Emil'solder sister, Alexandra Bergson, tells Frank in prison that "I think they were more to blame than you. " She has no "fears" about her own marriage to Carl Linstrum, because it is based on friendship rather than love. Shetells Carl, "I think when friends marry, they are safe. We don't suffer like--those young ones. " Willa Cather endows such fictional characters as Marie Shabata, Marian Forrester, and Myra Henshawe with qualities that earn the reader's respect, despite their author's implicit questioning of the mystique of romantic love. In her criticism Cather could be less generous. In her review of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, she had little sympathy for those "clamoring" women who demand "more romance out of life than God put in it. " It was obvious to Cather that "the passion of love" is an "individual and self-limited passion" that should not be expected to "fill and gratify every need of life. " Those susceptible to the illusions of romantic love seemed to her less notable for the strength of their emotions than for the weakness of their "faculty of observation, comparison, reasoning about things. " She considered the vicissitudes of sexual passion a "trite" and "sordid"theme, which a writer as talented as Kate Chopin would do well to avoid in favor of "a better cause. " One school of contemporary criticism finds in her putative lesbianism a sufficient explanation for Cather's refusal to place romantic love between men and women at the center of her fiction or her view of life. Willa Cather's sexual orientation, indeed, is sometimes held to provide the key to understanding her entire oeuvre,not merely those stories that deal with sexual themes. There are some obvious advantages to this approach. At least Willa Cather is now being read and discussed. Once, before the rise of feminist criticism, Willa Cather seemed in danger of being classified as a more talented Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, at best a white Jesse Fauset, certainly not a major writer in the same league with an Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway himself had dismissed Cather's World War I novel One of Ours as hopelessly inauthentic, transparently derived from a movie rather than experience. Of course it wasn't Cather's fault that she hadn't seen combat. The modernist Zeitgeist never-theless posed certain questions that did not have to be asked explicitly to reduce her literary standing. Hadn't Cather revealed her fundamental attachment to genteel culture when, like Edith Wharton and Henry James, she accepted the nobility of the Allied cause in World War I? Wasn't Cather part of that genteel culture that was overthrown by Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, H. L, Mencken, and the other rebels of the twenties?And wasn't Cather's unswervingly positive treatment of the agents of European colonization, whether it was farmers in Nebraska, the Catholic Church in the Southwest, or the French settlers in seventeenth-century Quebec, additional proof of her acceptance of traditional values? Wasn't alienation from family life, from tradition, from religion, from one's country the mark of the authentic masterpieces of the twentieth century? The assumptions behind such unstated questions discouraged interest in Cather more surely than explicit attacks. Today it may be shrewd tactics for defenders of Cather to keep emphasizing that Willa Cather was a woman and even shrewder to stress, over and over again, what Cather herself never declared, that she was a lesbian. In the long run, however, playing the gender and sexual orientation cards will probably not do much more for Cather's reputation than would an attempt to historicize and excuse her as a product of Victorian genteel culture. Joan Acocella concludes her devastating essay, in The New Yorker (November 25, 1995) of recent Cather criticism with the suggestion that we would all be better off if people just stopped writing about Cather altogether, and, given the excesses cited in her essay, she has a point. There should be, however, room for some alternatives between nonsense and silence. If Willa Cather is to be taken seriously, as she deserves--that is, as a major writer and cultural critic- then the search for the origins of her opinions must give way to a renewed attempt to understand the significance of the view of the world achieved when those opinions became transmuted into novels, short stories, and essays. Perhaps it is time to look for another way to understand Willa Cather's criticism of romantic love as well as her affirmation of organized religion and ordinary family life.
Gary Saul Morson, in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, has coined the term prosaics to refer to "a way of thinking about human events that focuses on the ordinary, messy, quotidian facts of daily life. " Morson explains that "prosaics questions whether the most important events may not be the most ordinary and everyday ones--events that we do not appreciate simply because they are so commonplace. " He notes that"prosaic thinkers . . . are especially hostile to the ideology of romantic love, which regards ordinary marriageas uninteresting and great passion as real life. " Morson offers Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and LeoTolstoy as three exemplary prosaic novelists. He does not mention any American novelists, perhaps because many of the most famous American writers have written "romances" in which everyday life figures as the enemy of authentic existence. From Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn down to Hemingway's In Our Time and Richard Wright's Native Son, much American fiction depicts life within a family, within society, as mere existence, as spiritual death. American literature often celebrates the spiritual exultation of individuals but rarely depicts organized religion as anything more than institutionalized hypocrisy. Arthur Dimmesdale and Elmer Gantry remain the representative ministers of the American novel. Outside the novel, the verdict is the same. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and William James celebrate spirituality but have little good to say about organized religion. Allen Ginsberg is typical, not exceptional, in turning to a spirituality that opposes rather than consecrates the everyday obligations and rewards of work and family. In Willa Cather's fiction, spirituality that seems to offer an alternative to everyday reality appears occasionally but usually disastrously. In Shadows on the Rock, Jeanne Le Ber, the only daughter of "the richest merchant of Montreal," takes a vow to live alone in a cell behind the altar of a chapel. The cell is built so that she can hear the mass and speak to a confessor without ever seeing another person. She becomes known "as la recluse de Ville Marie," whose isolation is broken only by a visit from angels who repair her spinning wheel. The sincerity of her vocation is unquestionable and the stony of the miracle of the spinning wheel provides "an incomparable gift" for families otherwise telling only "tales of Indian massacres and lost hunters. " For society,then, the recluse's project brings dividends. But Willa Cather allows the reader to gauge the spiritual effect on Jeanne Le Ber herself: Her former playmate Pierre Charron, determined to learn whether Jeanne Le Ber is content, hides in the chapel at midnight and watches her come alone to the altar. He does not speak to her, but he hears her pray, in a voice "so changed -hoarse, hollow, with the sound of despair in it. " Once Pierre hears"a groan, such as I have never heard; such despair--such resignation and despair!" In O Pioneers! it is not sexuality but a spirituality that defies human nature that seems to encourage the moredangerous romantic illusions. Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata become illicit lovers only after they convincethemselves that they can move beyond ordinary human nature. Resigning herself to Emil's departure, Marie feels herself uplifted, ready to "live a new life of perfect love. " Emil Bergson, as he attends the funeral mass of his friend Amedee Chevalier, hears in the music of "Aye Maria" the possibility of "a kind of rapture in which he could love forever without faltering and without sin. " The two meet under the white mulberry tree and fall asleep, having finally become illicit lovers while searching for "perfect love" and "rapture . . . without sin. "Frank Shabata finds the two sleeping in the orchard and shoots them with his "murderous 405 Winchester,"which he was carrying to gratify his own romantic need "to feel like a desperate man. " In contrast to such romantic spirituality, organized religion figures throughout Cather's fiction as a rock anchoring the changing aspirations and hopes of individuals to a larger order-. Cather connected religion with her favorite objective correlative, the rock, in her narratives of both Quebec and the American Southwest. Father Latour surely expresses Willa Cather's own ideas in his musing when he first sees the "Enchanted Mesa," the "rock of Acoma": The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need, even mere feeling yearned for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and friendship. The pueblos and mesas of the Southwest recur in Cather's writings, offering mute testimony to the way inwhich religion can provide a basis for everyday life. In Cather's novel of seventeenth-century French Canada,the "rock of Quebec" refers not only to a geographical "stronghold" but, more important, to "the curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite. " Willa Cather's interest in seventeenth-century Quebec, the life of pre-Colombian tribes, and thenineteenth-century Southwest might be interpreted as a romantic preference for exotic times and places. Thepast in Willa Cather's fiction, however, carries a different message. Instead of feeding an appetite for theexotic, a glimpse of the religion or the art of a past culture brings home the continuing importance of everyday life, of the meaningfulness of the constant daily efforts to concentrate upon and order an otherwise chaotic existence. Art and religion may provide the fullest examples of the impulse to order, but in Willa Cather they arise out of daily life, they are seen as continuations and deepenings of everyday routine. In The Song of the Lark, the remains of the "Ancient People" in Panther Canon give Thea Kronborg a sense of"older and higher obligations" than she has known before. For Thea, "these potsherds were like fetters thatbound one to a long chain of human endeavor. " The ruins of the Cliff-Dwellers inspire her to ignore "thehostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward any serious effort" and to pursue her musical career withsingle-minded devotion. The pottery of the "Ancient People" connects everyday life with art in a way thatsuddenly allows her to feel an importance in her own singing that she has never felt before. In The Professor's House Tom Outland finds in Cliff City the same evidence of careful, thoughtful effort in everyday life: One thing we knew about these people; they hadn't built their town in a hurry. Everything proved their patience and deliberation. The cedar joists had been felled with stone axes and rubbed smooth with sand. The little poles that lay across them and held up the clay floor of the chamber above, were smoothly polished. Thedoor lintels were carefully fitted. Father Duchene comments that the safety of the cliff allowed the tribe to develop what he calls "the arts of peace": There is evidence on every hand that they lived for something more than food and shelter. They had an appreciation of comfort, and went even further than that. . . . There is unquestionably a distinct feeling for design in what you call the Cliff City. Father Duchene feels "a reverence" for the Indian ruins because he sees that even a pagan religion can provide the order that lifts humanity "out of mere brutality. " He imagines the tribe making their mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man, purifying life by religious ceremonies and observances, caring respectfully for their dead, protecting the children, doubtless entertaining some feelings of affection and sentiment for this stronghold, where they had practically overcome the worst hardships. The notion that art, religion, and everyday life are inextricably connected is given an explicit formulation by Professor Godfrey St. Peter and even associated with the prosaic: "We were better off," he replies to a student,when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don't think youhelp people by making their conduct of no importance--you impoverish them. And that's what makes menhappy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives. St. Peter points out that for the ancient dews even "the cutting of the nails was a religious observance. "Asserting parenthetically that "art and religion . . . are the same thing, in the end, of course," he notes that the Christian theologians' recasting of the Torah proceeded on artistic as well as moral lines: The Christian theologians went over the books of the Law, like great artists, getting splendid effects by excision. They reset the stage with more space and mystery, throwing all the light upon a few sins of great dramatic value--only seven, you remember, and of those only three that are perpetually enthralling. St. Peter's references to medieval religion and ancient Judaism may make it seem as though the union of religion, art, and everyday life is possible only in the past. His own willingness to allow himself to die, if not commit suicide outright, suggests that the present is empty once romantic love is over. Because he no longer loves his wife, he seems to have fallen out "of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed. " He feels "a release from every obligation, from every sort of effort. " St. Peter, however,recovers a sense of "older and higher obligations. " He is rescued from asphyxiation, both literally and symbolically, by Augusta, the family's "sewing-woman . . . a reliable, methodical spinster, a German Catholic and very devout. " Augusta provides for the professor "a corrective, a remedial influence. " She reminds him of the world of prosaic obligations from which he was ready to escape: Seasoned and sound and on the solid earth she surely was, and, for all her matter-of-factness and hard-handedness, kind and loyal. He even felt a sense of obligation toward her, instinctive, escaping definition, but real. Professor St. Peter has lost romantic love; he must learn "to live without delight. " But "there was still Augusta,however; a world full of Augustas, with whom one was outward bound. " Willa Cather does not directly connect Augusta's "remedial influence" to her religious faith, which the Professor does not share. Her final scene with Godfrey St. Peter after she rescues him is, however, filled with reminders of the religious basis of her life. The first sound St. Peter hears is "the clock of Augusta's church . . . ringing the hour. " As he wakes up, he notices that Augusta is "reading a little much worn religious book that she always carried in her handbag. " Her faith allows her to face the world from which St. Peter had wanted to escape. She isn't "at all afraid to say things that were heavily, drearily true. " She speaks about death without "any of the sentimentality that comes from a fear of dying," and also without the euphemistic formulas of religious uplift: "She talked about death as she spoke of a hard winter or a rainy March, or any of the sadnesses of nature. " In Shadows on the Rock, Count Frontenac and Bishop Laval bestride the scene, but it is the apothecaryEuclide Auclair and his daughter Cecile who are presented as the bearers of the "narrow but definite" culture ofFrance in the New World. Cather herself admitted that she was more interested in "an orderly little Frenchhousehold that went on trying to live decently" than in "Indian raids or the wild life of the forests. " EuclideAuclair and Cecile, like Alexandra Bergson and Antonia Shimerda, carry on past traditions and yet also create anew way of life. Kitchens as well as battlefields do the work of history, and, for that matter, asserts Cather,"really, a new society begins with the salad dressing more than with the destruction of Indian villages. "Madame Auclair dies having passed on to her daughter and thus to future generations a way of life: The sense of "our way,"--that was what she longed to leave with her daughter. She wanted to believe thatwhen she herself was lying in this rude Canadian earth, life would go on almost unchanged in this room withits dear (and, to her, beautiful) objects; that the proprieties would be observed, all the little shades of feelingwhich make the common fine. She succeeds because of what Willa Cather calls "very fine moral qualities in two women: the mother's unswerving fidelity to certain traditions, and the daughter's loyalty to her mother's wish. " Those, like Willa Cather, who admire "unswerving fidelity to certain traditions" are unlikely to be historical optimists. Cather's fiction suggests repeatedly that the most precious traditions will eventually be destroyed by heedless violence or equally heedless "progress. " In The Professor's House Father Duchene speculates that the inhabitants of Cliff City "were probably wiped out, utterly exterminated, by some roving Indian tribe without culture or domestic virtues. " The ruins of Panther (,anon depicted in The Song of the Lark remind Thea of Ray Kennedy's comment "that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt among those ruins. " A Lost Lady narrates not only Niel Herbert's disillusionment but also the passing of the"Old West" that "had been settled by dreamers, great-hearted adventurers who were unpractical to the point of magnificence" into the hands of "men like Ivy Peters, who had never dared anything, never risked anything. "In the last pages of Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Navajo leader Eusabio, "one of the strong people of the old deep days," visits Father Latour's deathbed; he surely speaks for Cather herself when he tells the Archbishop that "men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things. " The "shadows" hanging over Quebec darken all of Cather's landscapes, even the Nebraska of 0 Pioneers! History is no more to be depended on than romantic love. All the more reason, then, to appreciate the achievements of everyday life. Ray Kennedy's sense of "the sadness of history" did not lead him to despair, Thea remembers, but instead left him feeling "an obligation todo one's best. " In "The Bohemian Girl" Nils Erickson, glancing at a group of older wives of the farmersgathered for a party, suddenly sees them in their true stature: They were a fine company of old women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find them there together. . . . There were fat, rosy old women who looked hot in their best black dresses; spare, alert old women withbrown, dark-veined hands; and several of almost heroic frame. The art of Willa Cather does not purchase its affirmation of the importance of daily life by debunking the exceptional, as the romantic mystique purchases its exultation by denouncing family life. Willa Cather never traded in the sort of sentimentality that insists that all successful people are corrupt and all "little people" have hearts of gold. The Dutch paintings Cather loved usually concentrate on "a living room warmly furnished, or a kitchen full of food and coppers. " In almost all, however, the rooms and kitchens include "a square window,open, through which one saw the masts of ships or a stretch of gray sea" ("On The Professor's House"). If Willa Cather found in the Dutch painters an appreciation of the prosaic that matched her own, she also found something more, a vision of the world that set the prosaic in the foreground but also took account of a dimension beyond. In Cather's own art, the prosaic outlook allows one to glimpse the hidden connections between grand moral principles and seemingly trivial choices, between everyday life and high art, which, in the end, included Willa Cather's own art.