CCoollbbyy QQuuaarrtteerrllyy Volume 10 Article 3 Issue 7 September September 1974 NNaattuurree aanndd CChhaarraacctteerr iinn tthhee NNoovveellss ooff WWiillllaa CCaatthheerr John Ditsky Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn Colby Library Quarterly, series 10, no.7, September 1974, p.391-412 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. Ditsky: Nature and Character in the Novels of Willa Cather Colby Library Quarterly Series X September 1974 No.7 NATURE AND CHARACTER IN THE NOVELS OF WILLA CATHER By JORN DITSKY Obvious as is the presence of Nature in the novels of Willa Cather, few readers have attempted to restore what must have been Cather's system, conscious or not, of treating the relationship between Nature and individual character. The ele ments which constitute Willa Cather's employment of the Na ture-man relationship are expressed typically (if briefly and concisely) in the poem entitled "PrairieSpring," which appears by way of foreword to 0 Pioneers!: Eveningand theflat land, Rich and somberand always silent; Themiles offresh-plowed soil, Heavy and black, full ofstrength and harshness; Thegrowingwheat, thegrowing weeds, Thetoiling horses, the tiredmen; The long, emptyroads, Sullenfires ofsunset, fading, Theeternal, unresponsivesky. Againstall this, Youth, Flaminglike the wild roses, Singinglike the larksovertheplowedfields, Flashinglikeastaroutofthetwilight; Youthwith its insupportablesweetness, Itsfierce necessity, Itssharpdesire; Singingand singing, Outofthelipsofsilence, Outoftheearthy dusk. As rare in its Whitmanesque freedom as it is correspondingly indicative of the seriousness of Cather's revealed concerns, this poem suggests a triple division of Cather's use of the Land: as Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1974 1 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 10, Iss. 7 [1974], Art. 3 392 Colby Library Quarterly embodiment of history or witness to the past (here, in the un varying figures of the "toiling horses" and the "tired men" posed in stark relief against the "eternal, unresponsive sky"); second, as source of hope and reflection of human dreams (Youth whose "fierce necessity" and "sharp desire" resemble the warmth of the rose, the brilliance of a star, the song of a lark); lastly, as shaper of individual character, especially in terms'.of orientation to Art (the synthesis of the other two: the moral process by which the "strength and harshness" of life upon the land inevitably yield to the "insupportable sweetness" of the near-inexpressible song). What f9llows is an attempt to trace the development of this constant triple division through the body of Cather's novels, with some suggestion of the ultimate value and meaning of such usage. I Willa Cather's use of the land to embody history or serve as witness to human activity is not fully developed in Alexander's Bridge, and one has little difficulty in maintaining that the novel's flaws are at least partly traceable to her failure to as similate Nature to her purposes. Perhaps because Cather was consciously writing a Jamesian novel, her employment of Na ture is conventional; significant action and language are ordi narily prefaced by glances at the landscape and consultations of the heavens. Cather hardly gets past ordinary pathetic fallacy. Yet the fragility and impermanence of human en deavor, the idea that balance and order in life are subject to the constant vibration of a universe bent upon discovering flaws, are most clearly and purposefully set forth in the notion of bridges - both that of the title and Alexander's first sus pension bridge, which Mrs. Alexander associates with her marriage: "We were married as soon as it was finished, and you will laugh when I tell you that it always has a rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest river, with mists and clouds always battling about it, and it is a.s.~elicat_e as.a,cobweb h~nging in the sky. It really was a bridge into thefuture."l 1 . Willa Cath~r, Alea:anaer'8 Bridge (Bantam edition, New York, 1962), 14. All other page refe·rences which app~arin my text are to the standard hard· cover Houghton Mifilin and Knopf editions of her novels. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol10/iss7/3 2 Ditsky: Nature and Character in the Novels of Willa Cather Colby Library Quarterly 393 Yet Cather is ~learly using a scheme or system of Nature images, however conventional, even in this first of her novels. In 0 Pioneers!, Cather discovers Nature within herself, and in later works leaves it only at her artistic peril. As the, poem already quoted implies, the land witnesses the apparent futility of its first settlers' efforts to make a real impression upon it. "None" of the settlers' houses "had any appearance of perma nence" (3-4), because the "wild land" had "ugly moods": "Its Genius was unfriendly to man" (19-20). But Alexandra reads promise in the land, and sets her face towards it "with love and yearning" (65). Her attitude makes all the difference: "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman" (65). Thus the land is, for Alexandra, the means of recapturing youth (125-126), living the concentrated lifetime (258-259), and entering oneself in the chronicles ofits futurity (307-309). Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark carries Cather's understanding of the land's historical function even further. Beset by reminders of her region's relatively recent pioneer past, and by the threat of reversion to wildness or savagery, Thea experiences a renlarkable epiphany in Nature on a visit t.o a pioneer trail site in Wyoming. "She told herself she would never, never forget it. The spirit of human courage seemed to live up there with the eagles" (69). And in a later moment, Thea finds in the Indian cliff-dwellings of Panther Canyon "a voice out of the past, 'not very loud, that went on saying a few simple things to the solitude eternally." People akin to eagles, like the pioneers and Indians, have left behind them on the ground their wheel-ruts and "bits of their frail clay vessels, fragments of their desire," and it is in their spirit of harmony with a "geological world" "indifferent to'man" that the con scious individual must act (370-408). It is the specific sight of the Midwestern landscape that pro duces the narrative of My Antonia, "not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made" (7-8). Seem ingly the source of story, the land releases tale after tale; its embodiment of history is total and permanent, although human capacities to interpret its meanings vary. The picnic scene finds Antonia and Jim staring at the fantastic emblem of a magnified plow upon a magnified sun; "heroic in size," it is a prediction Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1974 3 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 10, Iss. 7 [1974], Art. 3 394 Colby Library Quarterly of Antonia's return to the land, her momentary dissatisfactions reconciled in an acceptance of the land's purposes (232-245, 369-372). One of Ours develops the possible applications of this aspect of the land to their quantitative peak. Because Claude Wheeler sees Nature's link with history, he comes to face seemingly in soluble problems of land distribution (80). Visiting a clifI house, he comes as well to long for another country, for "there was no West, in that sense, any more" (117-118). Dissatis fied, he uses World War I as a means of experiencing another land: he requires contact with the moon's dominions to com plete his narrow and sunny education: "Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual exis tence came and went against a background that held together" (403-406). In a standard Cather ending, therefore, Claude dies "believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country can ever be" (453-459), in reconcilia tion with the land. Captain Forrester in A Lost Lady has rooted a dream, his personal history, upon the land; essentially, the Captain sees the West as an attainment of individual dreams jeopardized by a coming generation not possessed of Niel Herbert's knowledge of the land and history. The specific threat to what Captain Forrester stands for, the upstart Ivy Peters, has its physical counterpart in the draining of the beautiful marsh the Captain had preserved. And what holds the declining Captain's at tention as he sits in his garden is the naturally-formed red sandstone sundial-pillar; it becomes his grave marker. Thus Cather makes tracts of land as well as objects taken fronl Na ture into emblems of historical change, reinforced by Nature participation of the older sort - such as the wild night of tor rential rains matching Mrs. Forrester's desperate attempt to phone Ellinger (127-136). Strong in its use of the land as mirror of history, A Lost Lady encapsules "the very end of the road-making West," a warm place in time where "the embers of a hunter's fire" are dying (168-169). The building in its title gives The Professor's House its first image in Nature-as-history, an unusual one for Cather. Bu Professor St. Peter is a historian whose Nature-love finds https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol10/iss7/3 4 Ditsky: Nature and Character in the Novels of Willa Cather Colby Library Quarterly 395 work-space in that house within sight of Lake Michigan; from it, lines of novelistic irony lead to the pretentious house being built by the Professor's son-in-law - the future - and to the Indian cliff-houses which center Tonl Outland's "Story" - the past. Tom himself becomes a historian on discovering the cliff city's "immortal repose" and contemplating the land's having saved it (201-215). But Tom's country will not hear him, and he returns to find the results of his careful excavations sold out to a European. Outland protests that the artifacts had "be longed to this country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit from" (242-244). But all to no avail; we waste the past that might "establish" us in time with value of our own. Yet at the end, S1. Peter saves himself from dying by recalling his own commitment to history, his own identity: "He was earth, and would return to earth" (262-270). The history book of Nature lends him stoicism; it lends his novel depth. In comparison, Myra's meditations on her "Gloucester's Cliff" in My Mortal Enemy seem slender indeed, a near-abandonment of Nature from which Cather would quickly recover. Instead of single episodes returning to her favorite scene, the Southwest Indian cliff-dwellings, Cather would now turn over a whole novel to the exploitation of that region's thematic resources. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Bishop Latour finds an identity of region and religion that is profound; com ing across a village built below a spring in a place "older than history," he recognizes it as "his Bishopric in miniature" (31 32). Or: This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incom pleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waitingto bemade into alandscape. (94-95) The rock of Acoma is "the utmost expression of human need," "the universal human yearning for something permanent, en during" (97-98), and its people identify with their place of residence for its firming-up of their aspirations, its fixing of their definitions of themselves. Latour is thus ready to confront the sacred place of Indian ritual, a "lofty cavern" which is Nature's great heart and "one of the oldest voices of the earth" Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1974 5 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 10, Iss. 7 [1974], Art. 3 396 Colby Library Quarterly (127-132). Acquiring knowledge, therefore, of the whole re lationship of Indian and landscape, Latour becomes a local success; his major project, a Cathedral, seems in its "kinship" with its setting to "start directly out of those rose-coloured hills - with a purpose so strong that it was like action" (271-273). His career derives its integrity from his respect for the institu tions and customs of his people, a respect based on the knowl edge that the land is "mother" to the Indian, source of identity and embodiment of history, and most of all "part of their re ligion; the two were inseparable" (292-296). Once again, in Shadows on the Rock, Cather uses Nature as image of a world in potential state, this time a forest that is "the dead, sealed world of the vegetable kingdom, an un charted continent choked with interlocking trees, living, dead, half-dead, theirroots in bogs and swamps, strangling each other in a slow agony that had lasted for centuries" (6-7). Thus the cluster of human habitations clinging for security to the rock of Kebec share an urgent need to create and cherish history: "All the nliracles that had happened there, and the dreams that had been dreamed, came out of the fog; every spire, every ledge and pinnacle, took on the splendour of legend" (95). By com ing to represent the Church in the New World, by changing from rock to Rock, it affects and alters and becomes history. The rock is courage and witness of courage for those who, in turning to it instead of what had been abandoned in France, created themselves Canada. Lucy Gayheart is another maverick among Cather's novels, a late attempt to capture the milieu and the success of her early works. But its heroine is opposed to "history," and burns her self out like a flare, and the land has no record of her but three light, swift footprints in an old sidewalk threatened by flowers and weeds - an effect as impermanent as "a shower of spring raindrops" (226-227). Lucy has seized her day, and after her death Harry glances referentially at the stars of "eternity" and decides that "time had almost ceased to exist; the future had suddenly telescoped out of the past, so that there was actually no present" (220). Late into her career, Cather's concern with the land as embodiment of history of witness of man's acts has led her, with little change in the actual means employed, to an obsessive preoccupation with time and its effects. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol10/iss7/3 6 Ditsky: Nature and Character in the Novels of Willa Cather Colby Library Quarterly 397 So that it is unsurprising when Sapphira and the Slave Girl returns Cather to a Virginia setting, making a cycle of sorts of her career. The theme of slave versus free is reinforced in the specific and history-bearing properties which are the novel's backdrop; Cather traces the history of the Dodderidge property (like Faulkner) up to the point at which the book opens (26 27). Further, the mill property where Sapphira's husband lives in retreat and exile is an old structure that reaches both back ward in time and outward into Nature, and there the miller's relationship with Nancy enjoys relative security and freedom. And there are other locales in the novel of an explicitly history related sort; essentially, however, Willa Cather's final novels show a weakened technique of using Nature to embody human history. We have not, then, been discussing the use of Nature in any but the most pertinent historical senses - not, therefore, those involving land-presence which is either accidental or necessary in no truly meaningful way, nor those in which historical details are supplied more for the sake of a dubious authenticity than as integral components of structure and movement. Cather's use of this historical aspect of Nature's relationship to char acter is, in summary, relatively consistent, though there is some loss of interest in the device towards the close of her career. Here concept of the theme shows a duality of development: first, the weaker and more ordinary strain (and here plainly the lesser one, for many authors regularly use it, though seldom progressing beyond the simple pathetic fallacy) in which the land anlplifies action, placing the accents and providing the terminal punctuation; second, the stronger and more typically American form in which Nature frames history, giving it ex tension and depth, tying it to epic and myth, and making it seem a part of an orderly, purposeful sequence of events pro ceeding towards a definite end. Cather performs her most en gaging sleights of hand with this device, yet most noticeable and readily discards it when she wants her novel demeuble. II The second aspect of the Nature-character relationship in Cather's novels involves futurity in much the same way as the first concerned pastness. In Cather's fiction the land frequently Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1974 7 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 10, Iss. 7 [1974], Art. 3 398 Colby Library Quarterly appears either as source of or as springboard to the recognition and realization of hopes and dreams; conversely, the land may also reflect disappointment or hopelessness. Essentially, how ever, it is a nlatter of Nature functioning as mirror (or rabbit hole) for the inner person seeking to make his image visible to the outer. For all of its devotion to the topic of imperial arrlbition, Alexander's Bridge evidences little working of Nature in this hope-and-dream sense into the actual fabric of the novel. It is as though Nature were present only conceptually, externally it might be claimed: as part of the conceit which motivated the writing of the book itself. I refer to the image of the Bridge it self, the connection which conquers chasms, at the heart of Bartley Alexander's reduction of existence to metaphor: there was a lover in the world. And always there was the sound of the rushing water underneath, the sound which, more than anything else, meant death; the wearing away of things under the impact of physical forces which men could direct but never circumvent or diminish. Then, in the exaltation of love, more than ever it seemed to him to mean death, the only other thing as strong as love. Under the moon, under the cold, splendid stars, there were only those two things awake and sleepless; death and love, the rushing river and his burningheart. (94-95) But by the time of 0 Pioneers!, Willa Cather was arguing the possibility of triumph in life by nleans of accepting Nature's truths as lesson and guide. Perhaps the simple discovery of her proper setting gave Cather the ability to show her Alex andra what her Alexander could not see, the chance of creating her own future there of its materials. Nature gives her a vision of the "law" that justifies her great "operations"; she receives a "sense of personal security," "a new consciousness of the country," "almost a new relationship to it": "Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring" (70-71). Personifying the land as a sleeping giant finally awakened, Alexandra credits itwith having made her prosperous by "work ing itself" and giving her riches nlerely for "sitting still" upon it - that is, by remaining in one place and working (116). Moreover, the book uses this figure of the giant to convert the notion of death into simply another aspect of the land's eternal futurity. The life-in-death theme is introduced first as a mys tery in a dream of Alexandra's, and then solved; embodying https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol10/iss7/3 8 Ditsky: Nature and Character in the Novels of Willa Cather Colby Library Quarterly 399 unconscious desires, the dream concerns an unrecognized man, "yellow like the sunlight" and having "the smell of ripe corn fields about him." Because Alexandra's usual response is, in effect, a cold shower, she shows implicit recognition of the dream as a sexual fantasy. But as she ages, the dream's more passonate aspects drop away, and the dream lover becomes "a strong being who took frolll her all her bodily weariness." Eventually, she learns that her lover is also Death (206-207, 282-283). It is the land itself rewarding those who work upon it with redemption from suffering. This presentation of a dream-mystery of the land functions as eventual rationalization of the land-imaged passion of Emil and Marie, for earthly lovers show "always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain - until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman" (248). The rule which emerges: one either accepts the rule of Nature as law, in which case he shares Alexandra's "security," or one finds his own rule of Naturewithinoneself, inwhich case one experiences the "sweet ness" of passion and resultant pain. Nature herself is a spur to the expression of secret desires: "There are always dreamers on the frontier" (301). The frontier dreamers in The Song of the Lark may express themselves differently, but their longings and sufferings still proceed from such notions as Doctor Archie's that the glorious Colorado night pleads that "there ought to be something better to do" (6). When Thea responds to Wunsch's tirade about the shallowness of American women by going out to the sand dunes in a state of "passionate excitement" to think, the result is the understanding that she must leave (99-100). Cather again uses the image of the star to suggest human destiny; the "big clock" which is the ordered universe runs by "little wheels and big," people destined to do great things and those destined to help them (154-156). Though much in this novel, such as Ray's accidental death, rests upon contingency, Cather effec tively moves Thea to Chicago by means of it; her favorite paint ing is itself a picture of harmony between the land and human striving (249), and she knows that though one must leave the land to attain oneself, one must also develop according to the same Nature's plan. On her Panther Canyon visit, Thea ap- Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1974 9