THE PLATONIC AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION IN
WILLA CATHER’S WRITING
_______________
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
San Diego State University
_______________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
English
_______________
by
Svitlana Anatolivna Pukhnata
Fall 2011
iii
Copyright © 2011
by
Svitlana Anatolivna Pukhnata
All Rights Reserved
iv
DEDICATION
In Memory
of My Mother
Alexandra Ivanovna Kasilova (Pukhnata) 1929-2001
v
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
The Platonic and Christian Tradition in Willa Cather’s Writing
by
Svitlana Anatolivna Pukhnata
Master of Arts in English
San Diego State University, 2011
This is a thorough study of the influence of Platonism, Neoplatonism, and
Christianity on Willa Cather's writing. It aims to show how Cather used Platonic-Plotinian
and Christian ideas and images within her fiction and nonfiction. The ideas of Plato's
dialogues and the writings of Neoplatonists (who were more popular in the West than Plato
in the early Middle Ages) were assimilated into, as described in St. Augustine's Confessions
and The City of God, a Christian culture by the Church Fathers. However, St Augustine,
highly influenced by the Neoplatonic ladder of love, reconstructed it to suit his Christian
worldview. Platonic pride and the cult of the heroic personality who longs for selfdevelopment and self-realization were substituted for the concept of God's grace: only by
surrendering to God's will, relying on God's grace and surpassing his or her pride and selfcenteredness, can a genuine believer reveal God's presence in his life.
It is evinced that Cather's early writings (The Kingdom of Art, The Troll Garden, and
some early short stories, in particular “The Joy of Nelly Deane”) are permeated with such
Platonic ideas and images as symbolism of the light (which points to the illumination and
awakening of the soul), the cicadas myth, the idea of immortality of the soul, and the
Platonic-Plotinian theory of ecstatic creativity (to which Cather adds the necessity of learning
an artistic tradition as well as vocational craft). To Cather, only a combination of God's gift,
knowledge of a vocational technique, and unremitting and dedicated labor can produce
genius in art. Notwithstanding Cather's favorite characters' yearning for the ideal world (i.e.
the Platonic world of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good), the terrestrial world, and life in
general, are never totally discarded in her works. This suggests that Cather's admiration for
the Platonic ascetic ideal is leveled by her simultaneous desire to worship life and nature.
Such a reverence for life and nature must be indebted to Plotinus's theory of emanations,
which aimed to bridge the gap between the terrestrial and celestial worlds and was expanded
upon by the German idealists Shelling and Fichte, not to mention Carlyle and Emerson.
Overall, Cather does not differentiate between Plato and Plotinus, considering them as one
Platonic-Neoplatonic tradition, perhaps because Plato has been read through a Neoplatonic
lens for centuries. In Cather's early works, a pull towards Christian imagery is also
discernible, but it appears as an undertone suggesting that the Platonic cult of beauty,
enhanced by the Neoplatonic cult of art (which was evolved by romantics, aesthetes, and
symbolists — through whose writings Cather also could become interested in the Platonic
tradition), are the predominant images within these works.
Cather's religious preferences become more apparent after World War I when she
begins to depict Christianity, and especially the Roman Catholic Church, with a great amount
of veneration and admiration. She seems to be perpetually drawing on Christian imagery and
vi
alluding to both the Bible as well as philosophers and theologians like St. Augustine and
Pascal. In addition, Cather employs the narrative modes of hagiography and legends (the
legends of the Virgin Mary apparitions, in particular). In her later novels, A Lost Lady, Death
Comes for the Archbishop, and Shadows on the Rock, which are analyzed in this study,
Cather presents Christianity as a powerful, unifying, and illuminating force, a counterforce
against the powers of disorder and disunity. Yet, it is also worth mentioning that the PlatonicPlotinian cult of beauty and art is also apparent in Cather's later novels, insofar as the
aesthetic side of Roman Catholicism is constantly highlighted through the depiction of
beautiful sacramental rituals of the church and religious images of the saints and Mary. Thus
in these works the Platonic and Christian traditions intermingle.
While in Cather's early fiction and nonfiction the religion of art and beauty is
promoted (thereby betraying her aestheticism and elitism), her later novels convey the idea of
the indivisibility of art and religion — an idea that was widespread in the Middle Ages, but
had been put into question since the Renaissance, a movement which caused art to become
more and more secular and autonomous. In Cather's later works, the medieval atmosphere of
miracles, the chivalric ideal of worshipping the Beautiful Dame, and the Christian utopia of
the Heavenly City strongly indicate that the Middle Ages was the historical period that
Cather most revered, as evinced by her repeated projections of the Middle Ages on much
later time periods within world history. The early Christian church is presented as an
example to be emulated — a sacred union, which sought to conform to Jesus' ideal of love
and brotherhood. In these novels, Cather's favorite characters aim to restore and strengthen
faith, and to bring the cross to remote lands of the New World, claiming these lands for God
and joining (through the sacrament of baptism) their inhabitants to the long and glorious
Christian tradition.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
ABSTRACT...............................................................................................................................v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................................... viii
CHAPTER
1
INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1
2
PLATONISM, NEOPLATONISM, CHRISTIANITY, AND CATHER‘S
ARTISTIC EVOLUTION .............................................................................................9
3
THE FORMATIVE YEARS: CATHER’S AESTHETICISM VERSUS
NATURALISM, REALISM, AND REGIONALISM ................................................25
The Platonic and Neoplatonic Imagery in Cather's Early Criticism and
Short Stories...........................................................................................................25
Cather's Critique of Naturalism, Realism, and Regionalism .................................35
Art in The Troll Garden.........................................................................................42
4
CHRISTIAN IMPLICATIONS OF CATHER’S LATER NOVELS..........................52
Pagan and Christian Symbolism in A Lost Lady....................................................52
Death Comes for the Archbishop as Hagiographic Narrative................................63
Marian Symbolism in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on
the Rock..................................................................................................................77
5
CONCLUSION............................................................................................................86
BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................91
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to all the Cather scholars, especially to Joan B.
Acocella, Hermione Lee, Mark Madigan, Joyce McDonald, John Murphy, Ann Romines,
Susan J. Rosowski, Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Bernice Slote, David Stouck, Janice P. Stout,
Donald Sutherland, Joseph Urgo, and James Woodress. Without these scholars' brilliant and
illuminating books and essays on Cather my research project would have never been realized.
There are many other people I would like to thank for helping me to write this thesis.
I am very grateful to my advisor, Prof. June Cummins-Lewis, who approved the topic of the
thesis and encouraged me to investigate the Platonic and Christian tradition in Cather's
writing. Prof. Cummins-Lewis made suggestions for structural, stylistic, and grammatical
revisions and helped me to keep faith in the project. I give warm thanks to my dear teacher
and friend, Prof. Jeanette Shumaker, whose thorough proofreading of my thesis made it more
clear and readable. I have fond memories of being in Prof. Shumaker's Victorian literature
class which was conducive to my better understanding of Victorian authors' influence on
Cather. In addition, I am greatly indebted to Prof. Joseph A. Smith's class on Plato's
Symposium which introduced me to new facets of Plato's dialogues. Also, I am very thankful
to my friend, Prof. Charles Toombs, whose vision of American and African-American
literature I value greatly and who was always hospitable and helpful during my sojourn in the
US. Thanks are due as well to Professor Emeritus Sinda Gregory who introduced me to
Cather's A Lost Lady. I am indebted to my friend, Prof. Jennifer Fitzgerald, for her invaluable
advice on the Desert Fathers. Jennifer, I will never forget your hospitality and our
conversations. I dedicate this thesis to my mother, Alexandra Ivanovna Kasilova (Pukhnata),
who instilled in me a passion for reading and literature.
1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
This study was inspired by Joan Acocella’s book, Willa Cather & the Politics of
Criticism, in which the nation’s premier dance critic states that the word that “comes closest”
to a definition of Cather’s fictional world is “Platonism” (87). Acocella is not the only
researcher1 who articulated Platonic implications of Cather’s writing, but she is perhaps one
of the most elaborate critics in identifying the affinity between Platonism and Cather’s fiction
and nonfiction, for most often in works on Cather the discussion of Platonism is merely made
in passing when dealing with other topics. Besides highlighting the Platonic connotations of
Cather’s cave allegory used repeatedly in her novels (The Professor's House, Death Comes
for the Archbishop), Acocella indicates Plato’s influence on Cather’s symbolism of light:
“The light is the key, as in Plato…Above all, it shapes our attitude toward those scenes in
which we are being pointed to the idea” (83).
Despite the fact that Cather's references to Plato were more implicit and indirect than
explicit and unconcealed, her writing is filled with the Platonic imagery and ideas and
Platonism can be identified as the philosophical background of her works. George Steiner
rightly observes that fiction is intrinsically immersed in philosophical ideas, being (on a
conscious or unconscious level) permeated “by abstractions of a philosophic-systematic kind
given executive forms by the actions, by the speech of characters” (qtd. in Daniela Carpi 78).
Cather was well acquainted with classical philosophy and literature, thanks to her
classical background and her formidable knowledge and love for Shakespeare and British
Romantic poetry, especially Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, who were in turn inspired
by the Platonic ideal of eternal, everlasting, and immortal beauty and strove to portray and
1
See Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Willa Cather’s Gift of Sympathy (Cardondale: Southern
Illinois UP, 1962); Evelyn Helmick Hively, Sacred Fire: Willa Cather’s Novel Cycle (New York: UP of
America, 1994); Ann Moseley, “Spatial Structures and Forms in The Professor‘s House.” Cather Studies 3.
Ed. Susan J. Rosowski (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996) 197-211.
2
communicate this beauty to the reader through their writings. In addition, Cather’s Platonism
seems to have been strongly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe‘s poetry and literary essays, not
to mention French symbolism and British aestheticism.
Notwithstanding her disapproval of Oscar Wilde’s personal behavior and some harsh
remarks on the school of art for art’s sake, her Kingdom of Art acquires aesthetic contours
outlined by Walter Pater which led Harold Bloom to the conclusion of “Cather’s quite
Paterian religion of art” (2). At the same time, Cather’s Platonism (in which kalokagathia, or
inseparable unity of the good and the beautiful, or ethical and aesthetic, is one of the main
postulates) vacillates perpetually between John Ruskin’s fusion of rigorous Christian
moralism with the cult of art and Pater’s pure aestheticism (although the Platonic ethical
essence is never directly proclaimed but rather encoded in her writing).
On the one hand, not unlike Pater and Wilde, Cather states: “Most art is useless, all
art is without ethics, or if it happens to touch them one way or the other they are incidental
effects…” (Kingdom 285). On the other hand, Ruskinian as well as Jamesian aesthetic
moralism is tangible in her other statement made about the same time, in the 1890s.
Reflecting upon Wilde’s downfall, which, as she says, “pre-figures the destruction of the
most fatal and dangerous school of art that has ever voiced itself in the English tongue,”
Cather comes to the rigorous conclusion: “Overwrought senses like overwrought reason end
in madness, chaos and confusion. A man who founds his art upon a lie lives a lie, it matters
not what form his sins may take” (Kingdom 390).
Yet, in her article on Paul Verlaine’s poetry and tragic fate Cather exclaims: “You
cannot judge an artist by ordinary standards because his duty is to do extraordinary things”
(Kingdom 397), for herself personally she chooses another destiny  “ceaseless and
unremitting labor” (Kingdom 413) and life “not vexed by human hobbies and human follies”
(Kingdom 407). In an essay, ‘The Rights of Genius,” Cather makes it even more clear: “Now
the artist, poor fellow, has but one care, one purpose, one hope  his work. That is all God
gave him; in place of love, of happiness, of popularity, only that. He is not made to live like
the other men; his soul is strung differently” (Kingdom 142).
The beginning of Cather’s literary career coincided with the 1890’s. During this time
period, Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism had become the most influential philosophy not
only in Britain but in America as well. British aesthetes had chosen Platonic idealism as a
3
powerful weapon in fighting positivism and Spencerism which thus allowed them to oppose
the representation of reality as something mechanistic and constantly changeable, stripped of
any trace of the transcendent. At this time, Pater’s lectures on Greeks and especially those
concerning Plato and Platonism (which proclaimed Plato as a seeker of beauty and a defender
of the fortress of art and artistic creativity) were also becoming popular.
As aforementioned, Cather shared the Paterian religion of art, but she never accepted
hedonistic implications of British aestheticism, which went to an extreme in Wilde’s writing.
Her Kingdom of Art is not only for art’s sake but also for soul’s sake. The soul, which craves
eternity and immortality, can only find the opportunity to feel the presence of the
transcendent power in the world through art. In addition, through the creation of art, the soul
is able to leave its own distinct trace in the world of constant flux and mutability.
It is no surprise that by defending the spiritual concept of art as a form of worshipping
and creating beauty and awakening the soul, Cather found herself in an uncompromised
opposition to naturalism, realism, and regionalism, and to those writers who were associated
with these modes of representation of reality (e.g., Emile Zola, Hamlin Garland, and
William Dean Howells). Her aesthetic is not only “decisively anti-realist”, as Paul Petrie
insightfully notes, but also belligerently anti-naturalist and overtly critical of any type of art
that tends to either copy reality or to focus on bodily functions (albeit she herself, especially
in youth, valued highly barbaric and primitive potencies of life, Cather’s primitivism had
never gone in the direction of bodily animalism, like in some of Zola’s novels)2 (175).
Platonic and Neoplatonic3 ideas, motifs and symbols, which include two-level reality
2
Cather’s disapproval of the naturalistic rendition of bodily functions can also explain why she was not
appreciative of D. H. Lawrence’s treatment of the topic of sex. Although there is some affinity between Cather
and D. H. Lawrence (both shared a turn-of-the- century interest in primitivism and paganism), in general,
Cather is rather critical of D. H. Lawrence’s attempts to precisely render erotic sensations that his characters
experience: “Literalness, when applied to the presenting of mental reactions and of physical sensations, seems
to be no more effective than when it is applied to material things. A novel crowded with physical sensations is
no less a catalogue than one crowded with furniture. A book like The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence sharply
reminds one how vast a distance lies between emotion and mere sensory reactions. Characters can be almost
dehumanized by a laboratory study of the behavior of their bodily organs under sensory stimuli — can be
reduced, indeed, to mere animal pulp. Can one imagine anything more terrible than the story of Romeo and
Juliet rewritten in prose by D. H. Lawrence?” (Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” 42).
3
Peter Liebregts notes that “the term “Neoplatonism” was introduced by German scholars in the
eighteenth century to circumscribe that part of the Platonic tradition begun by Plotinus (ad 25-70). The modern
distinction between Platonism and Neoplatonism would have surprised Plotinus, since he regarded himself as
an inheritor, interpreter, and continuator of Plato’s work” (19).
4
— reality of becoming and being, or appearances and Forms; the soul as a self-mover; twopart structure of the soul (it is worth noting that the division of the soul into two parts is a
Neoplatonic remake of Plato’s tripartite structure of the soul)4  the lower one which strives
to adjust to the external world, the world of appearances, and the upper one which longs to
realize the divine potential; the cave as a symbol of our imprisonment in the world of
appearances; and especially the sunlight as the manifestation of the Good (God), are present
in many of Cather’s short stories and novels, such as The Troll Garden, Alexander’s Bridge,
O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Antonia, One of Ours, and The Professor’s House.
Platonic-Plotinian idealism had also a great impact on Cather’s protagonists (e.g., Jim
Burden, Niel Herbert, Tom Outland, Professor St. Peter) who may look to some extent
effeminate and detached from a life of action and not interested in material success but,
nevertheless, perfectly fit both Plato’s and Plotinus’s ideal of a contemplative aspirant for a
higher reality, who devotes his life to the spiritual quest for beauty, truth, and transcendence.
They are, not unlike their creator, overtly repelled by American reality and its growing
materialism, commercialism, and tastelessness.
It is worth noting that Cather’s dissatisfaction with American reality strikingly
resembles lamentations over American ways of life uttered by James Lees, her Greek
professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, who was “a magnificent scholar. British
born, with British conservatism dyed in his wool, educated at Johns Hopkins under the great
classicist Basil L. Gildersleeve, passionate admirer of Paul Shorey, Platonist, despiser of his
times and particularly of anything savoring of democracy” (Johnson 87). Was it possible that
Cather’s mistrust of Roosevelt’s New Deal and egalitarian ideas of the Democratic Party has
something to do with Lees’ Platonism and Plato’s critical attitude toward democracy? Or did
it come from Carlyle’s antidemocratic tirades and his idealization of two classes —
aristocrats and peasants and his contempt for businessmen as worshippers of Mammon? But
the Carlylean arguments against soulless and merciless capitalism stem from German
idealism (as expressed in the writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm
4
In The Enneads, Plotinus says: “There is a lowest power of the Soul, a nearest to earth,“ as well as “the
higher phase [which] holds itself to the spheres, poised towards the Above but hovering over the lesser Soul
and giving forth to it an effluence which makes it more intensely vital” (II. 2. 3).
5
Joseph von Schelling), which in its turn follows in Plato’s footsteps. Plato could never
forgive the Athenian democracy for convicting his teacher, Socrates, one of the noblest and
wisest citizens of the polis, to death and always emphasized (especially in The Republic) the
loose and degrading direction in which the democratic state can go. The freedom treasured
by the democrat, as Plato recognizes, is the freedom to live as one wishes (Republic VIII 557
b).
It seems that Plato's aristocratic animosity to democracy (which, if unrestrained, tends
to turn into the power of the crowd) fed the imagination not only of Carlyle but also Edgar
Allan Poe5 who, similar to Plato, was hostile to the multitude, the crowd, and was an admirer
of the chosen few and their noble, aristocratic ways of life. Apparently, these PlatonicCarlylean- Poeian antidemocratic views influenced Cather’s conservatism, which is
expressed both in her nonfiction and fiction (especially in A Lost Lady where chivalry and
nobility are in strong opposition to pettiness and commonality). Yet, it is important to note
that often in her writing these antidemocratic views are at odds with her simultaneous
admiration for community and communal support and generosity.
Cather’s Platonism is a phenomenon whose existence is widely in evidence yet which
remains elusive, problematic and difficult to define with inclusive rigor. We dare to state that
Cather’s Platonism had not become the subject for thorough research not only because it
requires a foray into the philosophical study but also because of Cather’s lack of obvious
bent to philosophy.6 Her mind was not theoretical and analytical but rather imaginative and
intuitive. She never studied philosophy professionally like T. S. Eliot, who came to Oxford to
engross himself in Francis H. Bradley’s idealism; she did not write essays on Neoplatonists
or directly referred to them like, for example, Ezra Pound in The Cantos; and, at last, she had
5
Robert D. Jacobs has observed that “by whatever source it may have been transmitted, it was the
Symposium, that marvelous parable of the soul ascending the ladder of beauty until it is able to grasp the idea of
beauty, that influenced Poe” (307-08). It is apt to note that Cather was especially fond of Poe as a fellow
Virginian, a singer of the South and Southern chivalry and nobility. In addition, Poe’s detective, Auguste
Dupin, has based his method of investigation on Socratic dialectic: by asking his interlocutor (who is the
narrator of the story as well) new and more sophisticated questions, he tries to unravel the mystery of a crime
and find out the most plausible person who committed it.
6
The other obvious thing to say is that Plato himself eschewed pure philosophy and continuously relied on
narrative devices -- the dialogues, and the myths within them -- to communicate ideas about dialogue, about
education of the soul, about beauty and truth. For this observation, I am indebted to Prof. J. A. Smith.
6
never made notes on major Platonic dialogues like Virginia Woolf did.7
There is also an additional reason why Cather’s Platonism has not attracted a great
amount of critical attention  it has been overshadowed by her unconditional and numerous
times proclaimed Latinity, albeit in her early essays she seems an obvious Hellenophile and
her admiration for the Greek language and culture apparently surpasses her interest in Roman
civilization and values:
To one who does not understand Greek, spoken or chanted, the real beauty of the
Greek play lay in two things; the music one heard and the colors one saw. The
music was twofold, first, the rich harmony of Mendelssohn, second, but none the
less beautiful, the speech itself, the 'vowelled Greek.' One often hears it said that
Greek is more musical than Latin, but to realize this properly one must
hear….Greek following Latin, like music following speech. (Kingdom 216)
Moreover, in her early essays ancient Rome sometimes epitomizes tastelessness,
crudeness and lack of creativity, the peculiarities which she has often attributed to her own
country.8 But the initial image of ancient Rome as the embodiment of brutality and
aggressive imperial power is replaced by culturally refined and simultaneously decadent
Rome in The Troll Garden and eventually turned in her mature works into something
precious and endearing to her soul, something frozen in time, immutable and indispensable
for old European culture, tangible in Latin “inscriptions on monuments” and in “the mass”
(Sutherland 125), something that was kept in the West as an original mother tongue and
became a model for emulation for Cather personally, inasmuch as the brevity, solemnity and
concision of the Latin language were those distinct properties she wanted to achieve in her
own prose. Latinity eventually overshadowed her Hellenophilia and made the Platonic trace
7
As Brenda Lyons says, “Virginia Woolf herself was familiar with most of dialogues and her study notes
on the Euthyphro, Phaedrus, Symposium, and Republic, though cursory outlines, indicate special attention to
questions of creativity, love, and truth” (292).
8
In The Kingdom of Art, Cather made a harsh comparison of the Roman empire and the US: “… yes,
America is a strange country. It doesn’t make, but it buys. Having no very great painters it buys all the greatest
pictures in the world. Having no poets it is the first to recognize and honor the poets of other countries….
There was another nation once that made nothing, yet had all; the poets of Greece, the harpers of Ionia, the
purple of Tyre, the gold of Africa, the scholars of Egypt, the warriors of the North, and loved its gladiators
better than them all. A nation that gleaned the world and gathered into its colossal city everything that was
worth loading on its galleys — everything but taste; whose emperors offered a kingdom for a simple native
artist  and never found him. Great statesmen, great generals, rich merchants, not one singer, one painter, one
master of marble” (195). Only later Cather started admiring the Roman imperial power and made the imperial
ideal prominent in her fiction.
7
even more coded and intangible, for Latinity and especially French culture9 in her writing
always has a flavor of sensuality palpable even in the sacramental rituals of the Catholic
Church, so different from the gloomy atmosphere of Protestantism.
Although Cather’s unflinching Latinity overshadows her Hellenophilia, it
simultaneously clarifies the constant juxtaposition of the Platonic ascetic ideal and the
vibrant potentiality of life present within her fiction. The characters who overindulge in the
sensuality of life and the temptations that accompany it, end in defeat and failure (i.e. Bartley
Alexander in Alexander’s Bridge), while those who choose ascetic existence, solitude, and
contemplation, such as Niel Herbert in A Lost Lady, feel that something very important was
missing in their lives. Maybe the only successful story of total detachment from the
corporeal realm into the realm of true spirituality is rendered by Cather in The Song of the
Lark, the only one of her novels where the heroine successfully realizes the Platonic
aspirant’s desire to become like a god. Otherwise, the pull toward the transcendent reality
never leads to a total denial of life and its delight, which discloses a fusion of Platonism and
Neoplatonism in Cather’s writing. Unlike Plato, Plotinus tended to bridge the gap between
the reality of becoming (the terrestrial world) and the reality of being (the celestial world). As
John Shannon Hendrix highlights in Aesthetics & the Philosophy of Spirit: From Plotinus to
Shelling and Hegel, the philosophy of Plotinus “lays the groundwork for the Philosophy of
Spirit, in its systematic attempt to bridge the real and ideal in the hypostases of being and
hierarchies of emanation” (47). In other words, this Plotinian tendency was furthered by
German idealists, especially by Shelling, who succeeded in turning Plato’s dualism to
monism and whose divinization of nature had a great impact on Carlyle whom young Cather
so admired.
9
It is important to note that Cather’s admiration for France strikingly resembles Nietzsche’s assessment of
French culture as a delightful mixture of North and South, especially in Provence, “as in the French character
there is a successful half-way synthesis of the North and South, which makes them comprehend many things,
and enjoins upon them other things, which an Englishman can never comprehend. Their temperament, turned
alternately to and from the South, in which from time to time the Provencal and Ligurian blood froths over,
preserves them from the dreadful, northern grey-in-grey, from sunless conceptual-spectrism and from poverty
of blood — our German infirmity of taste” (Beyond Good and Evil 570). As Nietzsche has nicely put it, “…the
whole of Protestantism lacks the southern delicatezza”(Beyond Good and Evil 437). Also, Cather’s love for
Southern France (especially Provence) was engendered not only by her paramount interest in the Latin-Romanic
world but also by her vision of the Mediterranean South as the locus where the Occident met the Orient and
acquired that exotic and sensual property which added to Gallic rationalism a fascinating Oriental flavor and
barbaric energy as well.
8
It seems that Cather did not differentiate between Plato and Plotinus and perceived
both of these philosophers as an inseparable unity, as one idealistic Platonic-Plotinian
tradition. Such a perception is not surprising: Plato was read for many centuries through the
writings of the Neoplatonists, especially Plotinus. Platonic philosophy blends in Cather’s
perception with the Neoplatonic one and helps her shape her own principles of high art and
even of her own life which will be totally devoted to art (not unlike Plato’s life which was
totally devoted to philosophy), this “handmaid of beauty” (Kingdom 402).
It is also important to note that in Cather’s later novels (Death Comes for the
Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock) the influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism (which
accentuate self-development and self-realization and tend to valorize bright and heroic
individuals) seems to be less apparent. In these novels, Cather is more prone to use both
Christian symbolism and literary forms associated with medieval Christian literature, such as
hagiography and legends, including legends of the Virgin Mary apparitions. To put it
summarily, Christian symbolism (combined simultaneously with harsh criticism of
institutionalized religion, especially Protestantism) was always present in her novels, but it
did not become the predominant force until her later works. Sometimes Platonic and
Christian symbolism are used in the same novel (e.g., in The Professor’s House Tom
Outland's heroic Platonism is juxtaposed to Augusta's Christian moralism), which creates
narrative tension and indecisiveness in the end and forces readers to search for their own
interpretation to the problematic conclusion.
An interdisciplinary approach and some elements of genre and reader-response
criticism are employed as the main theoretical tools in this research project. Cather's explicit
and implicit allusions and references to Plato and Plotinus (and those romantics, British
aesthetes, and French symbolists who followed in their footsteps and through whom Cather
was indirectly influenced by Plato) as well as to Christian theologians and philosophers, such
as St. Augustine and Blaise Pascal, are thoroughly analyzed, and Cather's use of the medieval
modes of narration (hagiographic genre and legends) is highlighted. This study focuses
primarily on Cather's early nonfiction, the first short story collection, The Troll Garden
(1905), and three novels published in the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, A Lost Lady
(1923), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and Shadows on the Rock (1931), though
some other novels and short stories are also brought to light.
9
CHAPTER 2
PLATONISM, NEOPLATONISM, CHRISTIANITY,
AND CATHER’S ARTISTIC EVOLUTION
In this chapter, the ideas behind the Platonic and Christian traditions will be
evidenced and explained. In addition, the influence of these traditions upon Willa Cather’s
works will also be examined. While Cather’s early fiction and nonfiction are permeated with
the Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas and symbols, the later novels (Death Comes for the
Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock) are based on the Christian values that are to some
extent different from the Platonic and Neoplatonic ones. Yet, Greek philosophers’
worshipping of beauty is never discarded by Cather and is still evident in her Catholic novels.
In “The Beauty of Truth: Some Thoughts on the Symposium or Banquet of Plato,”
Guy Wyndham-Jones highlights the significance of Platonism for man’s self-identification
and self-development: “The form of philosophy called Platonic is, of all others, the greatest
aid in helping man to understand what, why, and who he is, and what is his power, and what
is his potential” (131). Also, in her introduction to Thomas Taylor’s translations of Hellenic
and Hellenistic philosophers, Kathleen Raine has declared that “the Platonic tradition may
be likened to an underground river that from time to time sends up a spring; wherever its
waters flow, the soul is reborn, and with it the conception of intellectual form, the beautiful,
and true art” (6).
Platonism as a variant of objective idealism has a long and complicated history.
While Plato himself built up his philosophy on his predecessors’ ideas  Heraclitus’s and
Parmenides’, not to mention Socrates’, his followers (including his students from the
Academia as well as all the subsequent philosophers associated with the Academia) added
some new nuances to Platonism, at the same time leaving untouched Plato’s idealism, his
unflinching belief in the existence of the eternal and beautiful reality beyond our terrestrial
world.
In the majority of Platonic dialogues, the figure of Socrates is used to communicate
philosophic ideas. The most amazing peculiarity of the figure of Socrates as well as the
10
Platonic dialogues as a whole is an open, uninhibited, and undogmatic approach to
philosophy. In the dialogues, many profound and far-reaching questions are raised, and the
complexity and difficulty of attaining the whole truth is constantly demonstrated. It is apt to
note that Christian theologians (who borrowed a lot from Platonism), even such an
intellectual as St. Augustine, look much more strict, dogmatic, and intolerant to other ways of
thinking than Plato and his teacher Socrates.
Notwithstanding the vastness and diversity of issues discussed in the Platonic
dialogues (e.g., pertaining to metaphysics, epistemology, cosmology, politics, etc.), the main
concern of interlocutors is ethical problems, such as defining the type of life that can be
considered just and meaningful, and discovering what virtues should be cultivated in order to
achieve eudemonia (the fullness of life, or well-being, or happiness). Plato believed that men
have the intellectual and moral capacities to achieve well-being in this world and to fashion a
good life for themselves by their own efforts, by the efforts of their souls.
In “The Ladder of Love,” Allan Bloom relates that when Socrates and Plato appeared
on the scene, “there were no place for soul in the natural philosophy [they] confronted”
(160). They made the soul the theme for philosophy and postulated that man is “being toward
eternity” (161). Thus the soul, its immortality, and its structure is at the core of Platonism,
and in order to make the invisible visible, Plato creates a resplendent and memorable myth
about the tripartite structure of the soul. In the Phaedrus and Republic, Socrates describes
the soul as a composite of three segments: the charioteer (the reasonable part), the noble
steed (the spirited part), and the ignoble steed (the appetitive part). While reason aims at the
common good, the spirited part values honor and victory, and the appetitive part desires food,
drink, sex, and above all money, which can be used to satisfy other appetites (Republic, IX.
581 a-b, 586 b, 587 a).
According to this idea, prior to its entry into the body the preexisting soul had
dwelled with the Gods in the higher world, the realm of Forms or Ideas. The soul’s
embodiment must be due to a ‘fall,’ a culpable attachment to sensuous and physical pleasures
(the ignoble steed distracts the soul from the celestial realm and causes its downfall). But the
soul never completely forgets the beautiful celestial world, keeping vague memories of
splendid visions of the different, not earthly world. In Platonism, the preexistence of the soul
is supported by the theory of recollection (anamnesis), which holds that when people look at
11
beautiful things in the terrestrial world, they will vaguely recall a beauty which their souls
enjoyed in the forgotten ages before they were born, and to which the best of them may hope
to return.
The theory of recollection is linked to the theory of Forms, Plato’s most distinctive
doctrine, by which he meant eternal objective realities (abstractions or universals). The
Forms exist apart from their earthly particulars, occupying a heavenly region, the plain of
truth, and serve as ideal standards, to which material objects or human actions and qualities
have some resemblance but never perfectly conform. The theory of Forms is the main
support for Plato’s rigorous moralism, as well as his major counterargument against sophists
who have enchanted many young Athenians by their moral relativism and dazzling
eloquence.
Plato’s Socrates is a radical critic of the sophistic movement which spellbound both
pupils and parents in fifth and fourth century B.C. Athens. The sophists, a class of
professional teachers, promised to impart to their followers a competence which would
ensure success in civic and political life. The sophists taught their pupils the arts of public
speaking and of persuasive argument which were so significant for succeeding in arts of
politics. They overtly professed and taught moral relativism, claiming that morality was a
matter of human convention rather than natural necessity of divine command and could be
easily ignored if it impeded personal success. On the contrary, Socrates and Plato held that a
man’s soul, and its goodness, should be his chief concern. Socrates’ reputation for moral
integrity was confirmed by his manner of life and his heroic death. In Plato’s dialogues,
Socrates is presented as a new type of hero, an intellectual hero, who is ready to die for his
ideas, a role model for his disciples and followers,“ a sympathetic and heroic ideal of
intellectual honesty and morality” (Press 33).
In the Gorgias, Socrates argues that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,
since the man who does wrong injures his most precious possession, his own soul (Plato 469
c). It is no surprise that not only later Platonists, including Neoplatonists, but also some
Christians (Origen and St. Augustine) tended to value Plato as a moral and religious teacher.
For example, in the Middle Ages, Plato’s Timaeus and its impressive picture of the creation
of the universe by a divine Craftsman or Artificer (demiurges) had been interpreted as
affording confirmation of the Book of Genesis.
12
Arguing against sophists, who inflicted a final straw to the general devaluation of
Athenian moral and societal values, Socrates and Plato postulated the permanent and
unchangeable nature of moral laws: they are not conventional and circumstantial, as sophists
have claimed, since there are the eternal Good and Justice. But to reduce Platonism to the
strict moralism would be wrong and misleading. It would not explain an inexplicable
attraction to Platonism not only by philosophers but by artists as well. In Platonism, the Good
is inseparable from the Beautiful and the True, which is not surprising, since it correlates
with the Hellenic ideal of indivisibility of kalos (beautiful, noble) and agathos (good,
dutiful).
In addition, Plato’s theory of artistic creativity based on divine interference and the
power of imagination had a great impact on subsequent aesthetic thought and its
repercussions are audible not only in Neoplatonism but in the Italian and British Renaissance,
German idealism, British romanticism and aestheticism and French symbolism as well. For
example, in the Ion Plato presents the poetic creation as the result of divine possession and
inspiration. The poet does not create by his own powers but, deprived of his senses, utters the
prophesies of the gods:
And what they [poets] say is true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy,
and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself,
and reason is no longer in him. So long as he has this in his possession, no man is
able to make poetry or to chant in prophecy. …Herein lies the reason why the
deity has bereft them of their senses, and uses them as ministers, along with
soothsayers and godly seers. (534 b-d)
Echoing Plato’s Ion, Cather proclaims in her early essay on a Russian composer
Anton Rubinstein that “every true artist is in the hands of a higher power than himself,…he
cannot do what he will, but what he must. Effort and conscientious labor count for nothing
against that inspiration which is not of man” (Kingdom 161). But it is also true that later she
will add to the inspiration craft, perseverance, and unrelenting labor; only a combination of
these qualities can produce a great artist.
In The Orphic Vision: Seer Poets from Novalis to Rimbaud, Gwendolyn Bays points
out that “the creative process is compared by Plato to a Bacchic frenzy”(4). She also
highlights that the ‘ecstatic’ theory of artistic creation will “appear again in Plotinus six
centuries later…” (4). At the same time, it is important to remember that Plato is critical of
artists because they tend to imitate the world of perceptual appearances. Criticizing mimetic
13
art, Plato refutes the commonly-held belief of Greek times that poets can teach and impart
wisdom, for only philosophers can lead to it.
Evolving and simultaneously reshaping Plato’s ethical and aesthetic ideas, Plotinus
and his followers reinterpreted Plato’s Forms in a more mystical light as the thoughts of God
and made them perceivable not only by philosophers but also by artists, for the artistic mind,
being imaginative and creative, is capable of bypassing the world of sensory appearances and
achieving direct access to the true. Attacking the Aristotelian conception of art as an
imitation of nature, Plotinus maintains that the artist, instead of copying nature, must shape it
as the sculptor does his marble in accordance with his own vision. Artistic excellence, in the
Plotinian doctrine, depends on the quality of the artist’s vision, which improves only as he
develops spiritually. In The Enneads, Plotinus, paraphrasing Plato’s Phaedrus, compares the
spiritual aspirant and the sculptor, both of whom must “cut away all that is excessive,
straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow of
beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the
godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the
stainless shrine” (I.6.9).
In The Enneads arguing against Plato’s attempts to disparage the significance of art,
Plotinus proclaims:
Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content, and working by the
Idea of reason — Principle of the beautiful object it is to produce, must itself be
beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the seat and source of that
beauty; indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any
comeliness of the external. (V.8.1)
Moreover, Plotinus calls artists “holders of beauty,” for they are endowed with the
gift to add ”where nature is lacking”(V.8.1). To illustrate this statement, he refers to
Pheidias’ statue of Zeus which was wrought “upon no model among things of sense but by
apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become manifest to sight” (V.8.1).
Neoplatonism (including, besides Plotinus, such followers as Porphyry, Proclus,
Iamblichus, etc.) emerged in the third century A.D. when Christianity was on the rise, and the
mood of the new age became more and more prone to the suprarational and mystical. While
the tone of religiosity in Plato’s dialogues was rather an undercurrent, in Neoplatonism it
became a powerful leitmotif, and the old Greek conviction that the truth can be reached by
reason alone was put into question. Only by means of intuition, a sudden leap in imagination,
14
a flash in vision can we approach it. Although it is true that in some dialogues (e.g., in The
Republic and Symposium) Plato himself held in suspension means by which we can reach the
world of transcendence, Plotinus obviously favored the suprarational over the rational,
stating in The Enneads:
Only by a leap can we reach this One which is to be pure of all else, halting sharp
in fear of slipping ever so little aside and impinging on the dual: for if we fail of
the centre, we are in a duality which does not even include the authentic One but
belongs, on both sides, to the later order. (V.5.4)
Evolving from Plato’s cosmological views expressed in the Timaeus, Plotinus created
his theory of three hypostases: the One (the Absolute, the First principle), Nous (Spirit,
Divine mind, Intellectual principle) and the World Soul. Plotinus maintained that the
Absolute is a power, or force, or energy, which produces the whole universe. The activity of
the Absolute overflows (emanates) to create a succession of types of existence. The first
emanation is Nous, which, in its turn, creates the World Soul, and the World Soul creates not
only human souls but nature as a whole, the phenomenal world. On a side note, it is worth
noting that the World Soul may have been borrowed by Plotinus from ancient Indian
philosophy, not to mention that Emerson’s idea of the Over-Soul could also have been drawn
from the joint influence of Neoplatonism and the Upanishads.
Plotinus believed that there were several ways of attaining the height of
Transcendence, one of them being contemplation of beauty in any form, including the beauty
of nature:
Admiring this world of sense as we look upon its vastness and beauty and the
order of its eternal march, thinking of the gods within it, the celestial spirits and
all the life of animal and plant, let us mount to its Archetype, to the yet more
authentic sphere: there we are to contemplate all things as members of the
Intellectual — eternal in their own right, vested with perfect knowledge and life
— and presiding over these, pure Mind and unapproachable Wisdom. (V.1.4)
In the Platonic-Plotinian tradition there is, besides this outer way to the mystical
vision of the Absolute, an additional inner path. By shutting out everything external and by
concentrating exclusively on the inmost self, men can find god, become sages, as described
by Plotinus, who states:
The sage, then, has gone through a process of reasoning when he expounds his
acts to others; but in relation to himself he is Vision: such a man is already set,
not merely in regard to exterior things but also within himself, towards what is
one and at rest: all his facility and life are inward-bent. (III.8.6)
15
In Cather’s The Song of the Lark, the heroine, Thea Kronborg, by contemplating the
beauty of nature and by concentrating on her awakening inner resources, embarks upon these
outer and inner paths to the Absolute and becomes like a god, cold and distant from common
people’s desires and aspirations. Observing Thea’s spiritual and artistic growth and the
heroine’s detachment from life, Acocella notes that in this novel Cather’s idealism is quite
different from the Christian one, since “the symbols in which she expresses her idealism
have a kind of coldness that is foreign to Christianity” (86). Thea Kronborg, an outstanding
singer, is one of the first Platonic aspirants in Cather’s writing, who also include Jim Burden,
Niel Herbert, Captain Forrester, Professor St. Peter, Tom Outland and of course the gifted
artists from The Troll Garden and some other short stories devoted to art and artistic
creativity. The majority of these characters do not have families of their own or if they are
married these marriages are neither happy (Jim Burden, Professor St. Peter) nor conventional
(Captain Forrester). Creating families of their own and producing offspring do not belong to
the main priorities in these characters’ lives, for they pursue a different ideal — the PlatonicPlotinian ideal of Beauty and Truth. Family ties, it seems, are sacrificed to the quest for the
transcendent reality, the Absolute, the One, and the means of expressing it in art.
Similar to Platonism, in Neoplatonism the One is associated with the Sun and the
sunlight: for instance, Plotinus describes the nature of his numerous intimate experiences of
union with the One in these words:
We may know we have had the vision when a soul has suddenly taken light. The
light is from the Supreme and is the Supreme…; the light is the proof of the
advent. Thus, the soul unlit remains without vision; lit, it possesses what it sought.
And this is the true end set before the Soul, to take this light, to see the Supreme
by the Supreme…, just as it is by the sun’s own light that we see the sun. (V.3.17)
As aforementioned, this symbolism of the sun has a strong relation to the Platonic
dialogues. In Book VII of The Republic, the famous parable of the cave renders the
atmosphere of delusion and spiritual darkness in which people imprisoned in the cave are
doomed to live, not suspecting that there is another world, the sunlit world of transcendent
reality, so different from the physical, material world of time and change which prisoners of
the cave consider the only reality. Plato imagines that someone is taken outside, into the
light; gradually, as his eyes become accustomed to the sunlight, he can see more and more
and is able to understand that the sun is the source of life, light, and sight; it allows men to
see beauty and the truth.
16
It is also plausible that this association of the Good (God) with the Sun in both
Platonism and Neoplatonism is analogous with the Egyptian cult of the Sun as the source of
life and illumination. And it seems Cather was well aware of the significance of Egyptian
culture for formation of world culture, inasmuch as she brought up this subject numerous
times both in her fiction and nonfiction: e.g., in her early essay on Shakespeare’s Anthony
and Cleopatra she proclaims: “All the greatest Romans took post graduate work in Egypt”
(Kingdom 296).
It is also likely that Cather’s style in the passage of time more and more tended to
emulate hieroglyphic inscriptions on Egyptian temples and obelisks; it became more concise,
terse, less verbose (she departs totally from the wordiness of Henry James’s manner),
reminding one of engraving and enshrining, which possibly alludes to John Keats’s desire to
enshrine beauty in poetry, to make it frozen in time. But Keats, in turn, was influenced by
Platonic-Plotinian philosophy in Thomas Taylor’s translation and interpretation and could be
acquainted with Plotinus’s interest in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were “manifestation of
“knowledge and wisdom” as “a distinct image, an object in itself, an immediate unity, not
aggregate of discursive reasoning and detailed willing” (V.8.6).
Thus Platonic-Plotinian philosophy manifests itself in Cather’s writing not only in
themes, motifs, ideas, symbols, and characters’ aspirations but also in her style, which
becomes more and more encoded and symbolic. Therefore, Sutherland’s insightful remark
that Cather’s stylistic brevity emulates the Latin “inscriptions on monuments”(125) can be
furthered by our observation that it emulates Egyptian hieroglyphs on tombs and obelisks as
well. References to the Egyptian hieroglyphs and Egyptian culture reverberate throughout
both her essays and fiction. Perhaps the most memorable one is given in My Antonia when
the narrator, Jim Burden, describes the “worldliness” of one of the “hands” of his
grandparents, Jake Marpole: “Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and
he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk” (Cather 715). This reference displays
perfectly Cather’s suggestive style  an Egyptian obelisk is not just a fortuitous reference; it
is a vivid symbol, a verbal picture, a hint at an author’s intention (it implies how Antonia is
envisioned in the text — as a heroic figure on the obelisk).
Cather’s borrowing from other arts, in this particular case from visual arts, is indebted
to German idealism and romanticism whose influence on her fiction may have come both
17
directly and indirectly (via Poe’s essays and short stories). The conception of an artist as a
universal genius who strives to fuse in poetry different types of art (musical, visual, and
verbal) is one of the favorite ideas of German romanticism. It is also apt to note that the first
philosopher who paid attention to the resemblance of writing to visual arts was Plato,10 albeit
he made this discovery thanks to Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad.
Later, Virgil will emulate the Homeric verbal painting in The Aeneid, describing the same
shield of Achilles, and the term will be coined for this particular rhetorical device —
ekphrasis. Cather’s use of ekphrasis is especially visible in My Antonia, A Lost Lady (where
Captain Forrester’s sun-dial, which eventually will be put on his tombstone, is described),
and Death Comes for the Archbishop (with its vivid description of Bishop Latour’s
architectural masterpiece — the Catholic cathedral). In all these cases, the use of ekphrasis
helps create the sacred locus in Cather’s texts, the shrine of beauty and artistic creativity, and
simultaneously a monument to her enduring characters.
Compared to Neoplatonism, Christianity appeared more than two centuries earlier,
during a time of intense apocalyptic pessimism. Tim Abbey in “Diotima’s Continuum of
Love” says:
It [Christianity] started within a Jewish community when it was facing a real
crisis — one that ended in the Diaspora and the deliberate dismemberment of the
Jews as a nation. The rise of Christianity coincides with the collapse of the
Roman Empire, and the strand of the religion which triumphed at the expense of
other forms was the one which provided the strongest central and the authoritarian
support for a civilization failing in the face of internal and external corruption.
(135)
At this time period, when all the stability and predictability of life vanished without a
trace and the future became gloomy and uncertain, the idea that the world is dominated by
evil forces had a great impact on the new religion. While Plato and Plotinus believed that
men have the capacities to achieve well-being in this world, the Church Fathers, on the
10
In the Phaedrus, Socrates says: “You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which
makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive, but if
you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to
you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed,
they go on telling you just the same thing forever” (275 e).
18
contrary, considered man’s natural powers to be severely limited. They felt that the only
means that man could be saved by was through God’s grace.
If both Platonism and Neoplatonism were sophisticated philosophical systems which
appealed to the upper class intellectuals11, Christianity, at least in its early versions, were
directed largely toward the uneducated and illiterate.12 As a contemporary philosophical
system, Neoplatonism was both attractive and threatening for the Church Fathers, as
evidenced in St. Augustine’s writing. St. Augustine was not well read in Plato because in the
Middle Ages Plato, being considered a pagan Greek philosopher, almost lost his grip on the
Latin (and eventually Christianized) West,13 but he was well acquainted with Neoplatonic
philosophy which, at a certain period of time, became attractive for the Roman elite. The
Neoplatonic philosophers’ books were translated from Greek into Latin, and Augustine read
them with passionate enthusiasm not long before his conversion to Christianity. Neoplatonic
bias toward transcendence and its emphasis on the centrality of mystical experience appealed
to Christians, and it is no surprise that Augustine was taken by this philosophy. Christians
shared with Plato and Plotinus the doctrine of the supremacy of the transcendent reality over
the contingent material world, which reinforced in Christianity a metaphysical dualism that
in turn supported a moral asceticism. Also, similar to Plato’s Socrates, a devout Christian
perceived himself as a pilgrim to the spiritual world and a stranger to the world of the
terrestrial flux.
But contrary to the Greek philosophers, both Jesus Christ and the Church Fathers,
including St. Augustine, were not interested in the cultivation of the talents and those higher
aesthetic satisfactions that loomed so large in Platonism and Neoplatonism. Despite the fact
that Augustine’s The City of God against the Pagans has some congruity with the Platonic
ideal city (they both are based on the idea of justice, and their joint influence is palpable in
11
For example, among Plotinus’s followers in Rome were the emperor Gallienus and his wife Salonina,
and Plotinus even attempted to get the emperor’s support in realizing his project — to build in Campania an
ideal city of philosophers, Platonopolis, modeled on Plato’s Kaliopolis, but due to the political obstruction this
project had never been realized.
12
At the same time, there is an obvious affinity between Platonism and Christianity. For example,
Nietzsche, who was educated as a classical philologist, has insightfully noted that “Christianity is Platonism for
the 'people'” (Preface to Beyond Good and Evil 378).
13
Only one complete text of Plato, whom St. Augustine all his life revered as the greatest of Greek
philosophers, was available to him; it was the Timaeus, translated into Latin by Cicero.
19
John Bunyan‘s Pilgrim‘s Progress, one of Cather's childhood favorite books), the major
object of its harsh criticism is paganism and Porphyry, who was a Greek philosopher and
Plotinus’s biographer and disciple. St. Augustine condemns him “as a representative of all
those educated people in the Roman world who, secure in the rationality of their own
positions, regarded Christian teaching as ridiculous” (Beckett 106).
St. Augustine also pinpoints the main deficiency of the Plotinian tradition: a lack of
humility, coupled with a contemptuous self-sufficiency, makes the Plotinian philosophers
unresponsive to the revelation of truth in Christ and “blinds them to the humility of Christ in
his Incarnation, in his death, in his bodily resurrection” (Beckett 106). It is also apt to note
that the Platonic -Plotinian arêtes (virtues) included not only temperance and justice, but
courage and pride as well. In Christianity, on the contrary, pride was very often associated
with arrogance and selfishness and was subjected to criticism while humility and meekness
were the most valued traits, inasmuch as only the humble and the meek were, due to God’s
grace, able to discover God’s truth:
But this in fact is grace, which heals the weakness of those who do not proudly
boast of their delusive happiness, but instead make a humble admission of their
genuine misery… But humility was the necessary condition for submission to this
truth; and it is no easy task to persuade the proud necks of you philosophers to
accept this yoke. (Augustine, The City of God 10. 28, 29)
In the Confessions, Augustine makes it clear why he was dissatisfied with Plato and
Plotinus: the main reason being a lack of piety and humility in their philosophical books,
which steered him away from them and turned him to the Scriptures, and particularly to Paul,
where he found not just the existence of God, but the relation to God discussed and
acknowledged. Thus, says Augustine, in the Scriptures, “all the truth I had read in the
Platonists was stated here together with the commendation of your grace” (Confessions 1301). Summing up Augustine’s conversion in History of Western Philosophy, Nigel Tubbs
says: “He [Augustine] now sees the Platonists as those who knew what truth is but not how
to get there. Platonist pride gives way to the strength of Christian weakness” (51).
In “Augustine and Dante on the Ascent of Love,” Martha Nussbaum accentuates the
conspicuous difference between the Platonic and Augustinian ladder of love to an even
greater degree, as seen with the lines, “Profoundly influenced by Neoplatonic versions of the
Symposium’s ladder of love, he [Augustine] uses these ideas, early in his career, as positive
paradigms for the Christian life that can easily recast in Christian terms” (63). But in his later
20
works, especially in the Confessions, Augustine rejects “the air” of serenity and detachment
typical of Plato’s celestial love and talks of Love of God as an unending longing, constant
and unsatisfied thirst, very similar to passionate erotic desire which, in the Platonic concept
of love, should be overcome. Thus, as Nussbaum states, “the Platonic ladder is an altogether
inappropriate path for the good Christian soul” (67). Besides, in Christianity “it would be
idolatrous folly to be a god or the father of gods” (Edwards 155), the most desirable objective
for disciples of both Plato and Plotinus.
In The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our
World View, Richard Tarnas observes that despite the influence of Platonism and
Neoplatonism on Christianity, "the Christian approach to truth was substantially different
from that of the classical philosophers"(112). In contrast to Greek philosophers’ independent
self-development to the transcendent sphere of absolute knowledge, “the Christian approach
centered on the revelation of one person, Jesus Christ, and thus the devout Christian sought
enlightenment by reading Holy Scripture” (Tarnas 112). In Christianity, only unconditional
faith in God’s power and grace could lead to mysterious interaction with God and salvation.
Intimacy with God became so intense and personal (compared to Plato and Plotinus whose
portrayal of God was more abstract and ineffable), thanks to the idea of the Trinity, in
particular the miraculous embodiment of the transcendent Logos in flesh, in Jesus Christ,
whom his Heavenly Father sent to the world to redeem and save human beings. As Tarnas
notes, "All heroism, so central to the Greek character, was now concentrated in the figure of
Christ. The human surrender to the divine was the only existential priority. All else was
vanity. Martyrdom, the ultimate surrender of the self to God, represented the highest
Christian ideal" (115). Christian martyrs, giving up their lives for the sake of their faith,
strived to emulate their redeemer; and their humility, not pride, became the major requisite
for salvation. Members of Christian churches were proclaimed brothers and sisters, the
definition quite eloquent in regards to their relations to each other. These relations were
equated to personal familial ties, for all Christians were considered children of the same
Heavenly Father and, therefore, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. Thus family values were
not only restored in Christianity but also proclaimed sacred. This sacredness is especially
apparent in paintings of the Holy Family, inspired by the New Testament and endowed with
an unprecedented amount of love and devotion among its members.
21
Also, Christianity proclaimed God’s “vital concern for every human soul, no matter
what level of intelligence or culture was brought to the spiritual enterprise, and without
regard to physical strength or beauty or social status”(Tarnas 116). Christ’s sacrificial death
made redemption possible for all, not just the chosen few, and simple souls were as loved by
the Heavenly Father as profound thinkers or gifted creators, maybe even more, because of
their simplicity, selflessness, and gift of love and compassion.
In Cather’s universe, this shift from the Platonic heroic ideal of the few elected,
whose creativity lifts them over common people14, is especially noticeable in the later novels.
In these novels, characters such as Augusta, a seamstress, devote themselves to serving other
people’s needs (The Professor’s House). In Shadows on the Rock, a totally unassuming and
unworldly apothecary, Euclide Auclair, whose gift of healing and peacemaking makes him
very similar to Augusta, reminds the reader of Jesus Christ’s gift of healing and redeeming.
In these later writings, one witnesses a metamorphosis of the heroic ideal in Cather’s writing,
a metamorphosis that can strikingly remind one of Flaubert’s evolution from the romantic
revulsion for the common and undistinguished in Madam Bovary and Sentimental Education
to the appreciation of a poor, uneducated servant-woman, Felicite, in “A Simple Heart.” As
Julian Barnes says in Flaubert’s Parrot, in the heroine’s existence,” not surprisingly, the
consolations of religion come to make up for the desolation of life” (17). Like Augusta,
Flaubert’s pious and humble Felicite is presented as a devout and selfless woman whose
dedication to other people’s lives goes unnoticed and unappreciated, while Loulou, her
stuffed parrot to whom she says her prayers, is compared to the Holy Ghost.
Cather’s eventual surrender to Christianity also resembles Wagner’s (who was one of
her favorite composers) transition from the passionate, pagan, and Bacchic early operas (e.g.,
the tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung) to the reserved, spiritual later ones that are imbued
with Christian symbolism (e.g., Parsifal and Lohengrin). It is worth noting that Wagner’s
surrender to Christianity greatly disappointed one of his most devout admires, Nietzsche, and
14
In Cather's early fiction and nonfiction, they are definitely the central figures, and she even proclaims:
“The man is nothing. There are millions of men. The work is everything” (Kingdom 387). This is also a
paraphrase of Nietzsche's assessment of Flaubert's works in Nietzsche contra Wagner (74), which calls into
question my statement about Nietzsche's indirect influence on Cather. It seems that H.L. Mencken was right in
emphasizing direct Nietzsche's impact on Cather's early writings.
22
affected their relationships which eventually ended in rupture and Nietzsche’s overt attacks
on his idol in The Case Of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner.
Interestingly enough, Nietzschean revolt against Christian overtones of Wagner’s
later operas comes hand in hand with his attacks on Flaubert’s later short stories and novels
(first of all “A Simple Heart”). And, as usual, the German philosopher makes stunning and
shrewd parallels between men and ideas at first glance incongruous: he points out the
similarity between Flaubert and Blaise Pascal:
Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with instinctive judgment at
bottom: “Flaubert est toujours haissable, l'homme n'est rien, l'œuvre est tout”.…15
He tortured himself when he composed, quite as Pascal tortured himself when he
thought — they both felt “unegotistic.” “Unselfishness” — the decadenceprinciple, the will to the end in art as well as in morals. (Nietzsche contra Wagner
74)
It is a well-known fact that Cather, contrary to Henry Louis Mencken and Jack
London, has never been spellbound by Nietzsche, notwithstanding her awareness of his
powerful presence in European philosophy and some Nietzschean undercurrents in her early
writing. It seems that a short story, “Jack-a-Boy,” is the only piece of fiction where she
directly refers to the German philosopher: “a volume of Friedrich Nietzsche” (Cather 314) is
mentioned among other books belonging to one of the characters, an old Professor. But
Cather’s attitude toward Pascal was quite different — warm and affectionate, which is
apparent in Death Comes for the Archbishop (in which a direct reference to St. Augustine is
also included [Archbishop 365, 444]). Obviously, Pascal embodied to her the best in
Christianity — the selflessness and readiness to die for the Christian faith — traits that
appalled Nietzsche but constituted for the mature Cather a splendid human ideal. The mature
Cather’s affinity for Pascal, coupled with her departure from Nietzsche, clarify the ideals that
were influencing her and helping to shape her later ethical beliefs.
In the introduction to his pioneering critical biography of Cather, Edward Killoran
Brown notes that, with the passage of time, the author’s attitude towards religion and the
institutional church becomes more sympathetic and appreciative, as seen with the lines: “It
was not until after the First World War, when she was nearing her fiftieth year, that religion,
15
“Flaubert is always hateful; the man is nothing, the work is all.”
23
in a broad sense, came to play a more significant role in her art. In 1922, with her father and
mother, she was confirmed in the Protestant Episcopal Church” (xv).
While in her earlier novels and short stories Cather is often critical of official religion
and institutional church, portraying their stultifying and repressing impact on bright and
unordinary individuals, in her later novels religion and the Church are presented as a
powerful unifying and enlightening force playing an indispensable role in shaping culture
and national spirit. It is important to note that in her Catholic novels (Death Comes for the
Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock), emphasis is placed on the beauty of sacramental
rituals and spiritual and creative power of Christianity which has exorcised elements and
turned chaos in order. Of course, it is an idealized and beatified image of the Catholic church,
but Cather’s vision, despite her sharp awareness of the tragic side of life, has never been
morbidly disillusioned and apocalyptic.16 In a similar fashion, Janis P. Stout stresses Cather’s
even more passionate turning to Christianity in the 1940’s:
During these years of strain and grief, Cather increasingly turned to religion, or at
any rate to a fixation on western tradition, which she invested with religious
authority. Her Christmas greetings in 1943 took on an explicit Christian rhetoric
not in evidence before. Perhaps the most overt statement of such a turn in her
sensibility appeared in the card she sent George Beeches, the bishop who had
confirmed her and her parents in the Episcopal church. The front picture,
Canterbury Cathedral, she labeled the stronghold of civilization, and inside the
card she wrote that humanity seemed to be nearing a world without Christianity
and when that light went out there would be nothing but ultimate darkness and the
gnashing of teeth. She added that she had once again been reading the Venerable
Bede. Her tone of certitude here about eternal things rings of very much the kind
of pious assurance she had mocked in her youth. (Willa Cather: The Writer and
Her World 303-04)
At the same time, it is not accidental that Cather has favored Catholicism (especially
in its French variant) over Protestantism: she was attracted to the aesthetic side of
Catholicism — the beauty of its sacramental rituals, the cult of the Virgin Mary with its
sensual and affectionate love for the Mother of Jesus. She considered Protestantism, in
particular Puritanism (perhaps, it is the main reason why she had never been inspired by the
16
Maybe that is why, contrary for example to Faulkner, Cather was never impressed by Dostoevsky’s
novels and preferred Turgenev’s and Tolstoy’s.
24
Puritans’ colonization of the New World), cold and almost unresponsive to beauty and art.17
In Catholicism, the ethical has been enhanced by the aesthetic, which suggests that art, its
beauty, and its importance for man were never completely rejected by Cather even in the
later novels overfilled with Christian symbolism and passionate faith. They convey an
amalgamation of Platonic-Plotinian philosophy and Christianity rather than the total rejection
of the Greek sages. Albeit it is true that some traits of Plato’s philosophy (his indifference,
even negligence of the cult of the family,18 his proneness to the bright and distinguished),
which were so appealing for young Cather, will never prevail in her later fiction, the Platonic
cult of beauty will still be there. In addition, the Christian system of ethical virtues, which is
to some extent different from Platonism, becomes the domineering force in Cather’s later
novels.
17
In general, Cather’s attitude towards Protestantism was mixed rather than entirely negative. On the one
hand, she was raised on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the masterpiece of the Puritan mind; on the other hand,
young Cather is critical of Puritans’ lack of taste and interest in art. Her criticism goes so far that it sometimes
becomes unjust, especially when she attacks the Puritan hymns: “It is strange that in this age, in which music
has developed so rapidly, in which so many of the seers and prophets have been musicians and in which the
Lord so revealed himself to man through music, the churches should cling to the old whining psalms of the
Puritans” (Kingdom 177).
18
In ‘The Ladder of Love,” A. Bloom has noted that in Plato’s Republic, the ideal city, Kaliopolis, is not
founded on the family; Socrates is coolly indifferent to family ties, and “the family is annihilated in the name of
the city” (66).
25
CHAPTER 3
THE FORMATIVE YEARS: CATHER’S
AESTHETICISM VERSUS NATURALISM,
REALISM, AND REGIONALISM
THE PLATONIC AND NEOPLATONIC IMAGERY IN
CATHER'S EARLY CRITICISM AND SHORT STORIES
A close reading of Cather’s early drama, music and literary criticism, and early
fiction prove that Cather did not view Plato’s ideas as unquestionable and indisputable but
was rather involved in a passionate and continuing polemic with Plato, departing from and
simultaneously gravitating to his philosophy. The Platonic motifs appear in her early writing
as a secret code which is very hard to decipher (especially if the reader accepts Cather’s
attack on Plato as her final opinion). It seems that her Platonism comes not only directly from
Plato’s dialogues, but also from the Renaissance and Romantic literary and philosophical
tradition (which, in its turn, was an amalgam of Platonism and Neoplatonism). Plato and the
literary idols of Cather, including Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Poe, Ruskin, Pater, and
French symbolists (all authors who were seeped in the Platonic imagery), play an
indispensable role in shaping Cather’s aesthetic (her religion of art), which shuns realism and
naturalism19 and expresses a new sensibility: a craving for beauty and pure romance.
As various critics attest, it seems that Cather was largely indirectly influenced by
Platonism — as if there is no direct link between the two authors (even though I attempt to
prove that the connection between the two was both direct and indirect). Ann Moseley, a
contemporary critic of Cather, frustrated by her incapability of finding any evidence of
Cather’s direct references to Plato’s dialogues, states that there is no “…direct connection
between Cather’s reading and Plato” and the probability is that Plato’s ideas came to her
works indirectly, via “Emerson’s link” (205).
19
Cather's aesthetic also shuns positivism and Spencerism — the philosophical systems tangible in these
modes of representation of reality.
26
With this indirect link between the two authors in mind, it becomes easy to
understand why Moseley concluded that the majority of references to Plato are implicit and
indirect in Cather’s writing, even though his name is alluded to more frequently than those of
other philosophers. Moreover, it is hard to imagine a more antiplatonic writer than Willa
Cather. In her early twenties, she launched a constant vendetta against the forces of
intellectuality, rationalism, and science. She produces an impression of an ardent Wagnerite
and Carlyleite, a vitalist and antirationalist repelled by such words as ‘analysis,'
‘examination,' and 'dissection.' To some degree, Cather’s distrust of scientific methods had
been engendered by her literature professor, L. A. Sherman, whose method of literary
analysis “often came down to mere word-counting” (Slote 18).
But to make conclusions concerning Cather’s antirationalism based upon her personal
dislikes would be superficial; Cather was writing during a time period that was searching for
vitality and regeneration. The desire to restore the lost joy of life, to overcome apathy and
boredom, and to rescue human beings from the abyss of materialism and faithlessness
seemed to be a common mood at the turn of the century. This neoromantic impulse was
expressed in literature by Robert Louis Stevenson (unconditional love for his writing is
proclaimed numerous times in The Kingdom of Art) and Rudyard Kipling (Cather’s attitude
towards Kipling was much more lukewarm) and in the philosophy of Nietzsche.
In terms of her refutation of rationalism, which stems from Platonism, it seems that
Cather often follows in Nietzsche’s footsteps, as evidenced by her somewhat similar critiques
of intellectualism, science, and Platonism and her admiration for sensualism, savagery,
barbarism, and primitivism. Like Nietzsche's, Cather’s20 attacks on these schools of thought
convey the idea that they embody and promote cold and austere rationalism.21 In regards to
pinning down how Nietzsche came to influence Cather one may have some difficulty,
although it would be a great temptation to proclaim that Cather was indirectly influenced by
20
21
Cather's early essays seemed instigated by Nietzsche’s critique of Plato and Socrates.
In Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche notes: “It seems that in order to inscribe themselves
upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as
enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance,
the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly
be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist
error—namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself ” (Preface to Beyond Good and Evil 378).
27
Nietzsche through Thomas Mann. But this could not have been the case due to the fact that
the Nietzschean opposition “Dionysian-Apollonian” appears in Cather’s essays published in
the 1890s, several years before the publication of Buddenbrooks (1901), Thomas Mann’s first
piece of work. And although there is no evidence to support that Cather ever read Nietzsche
in the first place, there is evidence that she may have become acquainted with his ideas
through Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), the book she often refers to and quotes in The
Kingdom of Art.22 On top of this, it is also worth noting that in Becoming Modern: Willa
Cather’s Journalism M. Catherine Downs refers to Cather’s conversation with George Seibel
(a Pittsburgh journalist of German descent) about Nietzsche’s philosophy: “…upon
interviewing pianist Harold Bauer, the musician had discussed mainly Nietzsche, but so
rapidly that Cather could not take notes fast enough. Seibel’s [later] synopsis helped Cather
fill in gaps in her story” (65).
Ironically enough, although Cather was enraged by Nordau’s assessment of the
renowned European’s geniuses and considers his work to be the result of a Philistine’s
inability of appreciating art, she often repeats his accusation of European culture as being
effeminate, anemic, and decaying. In addition, all these ideas are borrowed by Nordau from
Nietzsche’s essays and cunningly combined with both Charles Darwin's and Cesare
Lombroso's ideas. At the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche was the most powerful
opponent of science, positivism, intellectualism, Christianity, and Platonism, blaming Plato
for promoting negligence towards life and putting the nonexistent upper world over the
earthly being.
Slote states that, in these early years, Cather “…was caught in that ancient pull of the
gods, torn between the Dionysian and Apollonian forces of rapture and repose, release and
containment… That conflict was at the very center of her creative will. She wanted both in
one” (81). It seems that, at least at the beginning of her authorial career, Cather strongly
opposed Platonic philosophy because it rejects (or rather, doubts) the testimony of the senses
and relies on reason as the main source of nearing and perceiving the Beautiful, the True, and
22
In Nordau’s infamous volume, Wagner, Nietzsche, Paul Verlaine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Henrik Ibsen,
Vincent van Gogh and some other European artists, composers and writers are presented as degenerates.
28
the Good. In her early essay on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, she argues against the widespread
interpretation of the Danish prince as a philosopher, a man of thought and intellect:
The melancholy Dane must be pulled down from banqueting with Plato and
Socrates and put over with Charles I and Prince Arthur and all the other royal
failures. Tragedy will not come stalking with a stage strut and toga. Then Hamlet
will no longer be played as a philosopher and the standing enigma of the ages, but
as a princely gentleman, very sensitive and very miserable, who might just as well
have lived today as then. The actor of the future will give to Hamlet neither
profundity nor knowing irony, but romance and melancholy and the almost
effeminate grace and charm. (Kingdom 303)
But several months after Cather’s attack on critics’ tendency to interpret the
Shakespearean tragedy as a philosophic matter (such words as “philosopher” and “to
philosophize” have distinct negative connotations in her early essays) she publishes another,
quite different assessment of Hamlet:
Other nations have written great tragedies, tragedies of men’s heart and of his
passions, but we alone have this tragedy of the soul, and of man’s divinity. For
Hamlet is not a play of love or action or impulse, but of thought, and of those
deep and secret motives which deal with the soul alone, which fix the relations
between it and the man himself, which decree its doom, which “summons it to
heaven or to hell.” (Kingdom 306)
One could strongly argue that the essay’s vocabulary is replete with Platonic key
words  soul, divinity, and at last, ethical justice23 (Kingdom 307). At the same time, the
Platonic ideal of self-control and self-restraint seems to appear in Cather’s early writing as
something unattainable and incongruous with modernity. Pondering upon the performance of
old Greek plays (a part of Sophocles’ Antigone and a chorus from Euripides‘ Electra) by the
student theater at the University of Nebraska, Cather cannot help but express a nostalgic
longing for the bygone time:
But then, too, in real life we are a little more emotional, some of us, than those old
peoples who set up for their ideal a calm, contemplative self-development to an
absolute human perfection. "In nothing go too far,” that was their motto. They
went through the world — the philosophers among them — grandly selfrestrained, every passion in vain, every ardency subdued. (Kingdom 221)
23
In The Kingdom of Art, Cather says that Hamlet’s personal life is immolated by “the great demands of
his soul, of ethical justice, that great struggle with the Titanic powers of fate” (307).
29
Cather’s reference to Plato’s ideal of contemplative life as well as the image of Plato
itself as an unworldly philosopher unaffected and unspotted by the tumultuous earthly
existence is decipherable in this passage even though his name is never mentioned. In her
future writings, it seems that Cather’s authorial methods and constructions call to mind an
electromagnetic field: the reader can feel the tension and sense an allusion to something
vaguely familiar, but he or she is incapable of promptly identifying the source. Plato’s name
is mentioned only a couple times in her early essays and only once in early short stories
(“The Son of the Celestial,” 1893) while indirect references to him are numerous.
When one considers Cather’s unprecedented knowledge of world literature and
culture, as well as her synoptic vision of culture as an amazing interweaving of ethnically
different elements, it would not be an exaggeration to state that Cather is well aware of the
interactions between various artists of differing time periods and regions, even though the
interactions very often emerge as subtle reverberations. For instance, in several essays she
quotes the penultimate line of Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Beauty is Truth, Truth
Beauty,” but never directly attributes it to Keats. She alludes to Shelley’s poem, “One Word
Is Too Often Profaned,” reciting a famous line from it, “The desire of the moth for the star,”
in her essay on Sarah Bernhardt and the French actress’s supposed admiration for Julia
Marlowe (Slote 80), but does not bother herself with mentioning the author’s name. The
same is true for Hamlet’s final words, “the rest is silence,” which reverberate throughout The
Kingdom of Art and are amplified by a quotation from Henry James’s short story, “The
Middle Years,” which states that “We work in the dark, we do what we can  we give what
we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art”
(Kingdom 360). She seems enchanted by the same tranquil and serene incantation in both
Shakespeare’s and James’s lines and the striking affinity between them and seeks to make the
reader become mesmerized by these lines and by the mystery of their authors, whose
identities she almost always conceals. Does she keep secret the authorship because of her
sophisticated game with the reader? Does she consider these lines so famous that they do not
need to be identified (they are already in a repository of European cultural memory)? Or is it
both? It seems that to seek to discover an answer to this straightforward question would be in
vain. But the one thing that is apparent is that Cather is trying to make the reader sense the
striking correspondence between Henry James and Shakespeare (the importance of
30
Shakespeare’s works for Cather’s has not been thoroughly researched), as well as Keats,
Shelley, and Plato. All of these authors belong in her Kingdom of Art to a very different trend
from Alexandre Dumas' (sr.), Stevenson's, and Kipling's literature of action (which she
admired so much in her youth). This difference is articulated fairly well in her essay on
Byron:
He [Byron] frankly confesses to Shelley that he cannot greatly admire Keats’
verse; and no wonder, for Keats was a poet of new and spiritual school that could
move Byron no more than it could the dark-eyed Turkish girls he loved.
(Kingdom 398)
Does this mean that she rejects Byron and embraces only this Keatsian new spiritual
school? It is doubtful; she admires both of them, but her pull to this Platonic-Keatsian upper
world of Beauty and Truth becomes so powerful and unrestrained that it starts
overshadowing her organicism, her admiration for nature and earthly beauty acquiring purely
Platonic undertones, as seen in these lines from her essay on Emile Zola’s The Fat and the
Thin24:
One could almost sell his soul to know for one minute the dreams that
Shakespeare or that Dante saw, but who for all his fortune and for all his fame
would be Zola?… All this massive work of Zola’s is one of those terrible granite
bulls unearthed from Nineveh, it lacks the impress of a human soul. Its life is
sluggish, like the blood that flows in reptiles, you never feel in it that thrill as of a
soul that wakens and expands .before the sun. (Kingdom 370-71)
An implicit reference to Plato’s Republic and Phaedo (in both of these dialogues
Plato discusses the sluggish existence of human souls in caverns, hollow places of the earth
(Phaedo 109 b-e), or their submerged existence in the depths of the sea where they become
disfigured and nearly unrecognizable [Republic 611 b-612 a]25) can go unnoticed by the
reader if the latter does not pay attention to such words in Cather’s essay as ‘sluggish,' ‘a
soul,' ‘wakens,' and ‘the sun’ and is unaware of their very similar connotations in Plato’s
dialogues. In the Republic, Book X, Socrates speaks of philosophy as that longing and
impulse which can bring the soul up, out of and away from “the deep ocean in which it now
24
Another, more apt translation of this novel was also known in the English-speaking world under the title
The Markets of Paris.
25
It seems these images of submerged life correlate with the much more known Plato’s cave allegory.
Also, Acocella refers to Cather’s late, unfinished essay, “Light on Adobe Walls,” which echoes the cave
allegory (107).
31
is” (Plato, 611 b-612 a). A philosopher, a lover of wisdom, is the only one who is capable of
awakening the soul of those who are willing to follow him and ascend to the celestial world
of the Beauty, the Truth, and the Good (which in Plato’s world, converge in the One, the
Good, or the God). The kindling, inflammatory, and awakening power is also given by Plato
to Eros, or love. But eventually a philosopher is associated with Eros: similar to the latter, he
is a mediator between the terrestrial and celestial world, he helps the soul grow its wings and
soar up to the Sun, the symbol of the Good.
Also, it seems that Cather’s initial critique of Plato stems from the same “old quarrel
between philosophy and poetry” (Republic 607 c), the main obsession of Plato himself,
which made him become involved in an unending war with poetry. This forced Philip Sidney
and later Shelley to write almost similarly titled tracts (The Defense of Poesy by Sidney and
A Defense of Poetry by Shelley), in which the rights of poetry are restored, and an attempt to
reconcile poetry and philosophy is made. At least Shelley had proclaimed Plato a
philosopher-poet, which was much more credible representation of Plato’s image than
Nietzsche’s later attempt to reduce the Greek philosopher to a cold-blooded rationalist.
Was Cather aware of the poetic, imaginative strand in Plato’s dialogues or did she
undoubtedly share Nietzsche’s stern interpretations? It would be very appropriate to discuss
Plato’s poetic side, his “Bacchic frenzy,” prior to answering this question. In a very
interesting and sound argumentative essay on Platonism in Keats‘s poetry, “Adapting
Philosophy to Literature: The Case of John Keats,” E. Douka Kabitoglou says:
The presupposition that Dionysian frenzy, Apollonian prophecy, Musean
inspiration, and Aphrodisiac love (leading ultimately to the philosophical “chase
after being”) have common roots dominates Platonic metaphysics and aesthetics.
(116)
There is much evidence in Plato’s dialogues that Socrates, Plato’s ideal philosopher,
is not just a cold rationalist and skeptic (of course, it would be ridiculous to deny his
rationalism but there was something else in him), for his speech sometimes acquires
dithyrambic and passionate character (e.g., when he talks about madness of love in the
Phaedrus) and, thus, “calls into question Nietzsche’s rendition of the Socratic voice as utterly
anti-Dionysian, the non-Dionysian par excellence”(Baracchi 129).
Furthermore, while analyzing Plato’s Phaedrus in his essay, “The Strangeness of the
Phaedrus,” David J. Schenker points out that Plato’s characterization of Socrates is
32
polemical and argumentative, for his “Socrates celebrates the irrational in the dialogue, in a
wide variety of forms and manifestations, in direct response to the intellectual sterility [of
Lysias] so attractive to the interlocutor Phaedrus” (67). The author draws the reader’s
attention to Platonic myth of the cicadas, emphasizing its provocative and inverse character.
The cicadas myth is rendered by Socrates in a highly poetic location, in “the nymph-infested
countryside, not in the city…” (Schenker 76). Cicadas, says Socrates,
…were men — men of an age before there were any Muses — and that when the
latter came into the world, and music made its appearance, some of the people of
those days were so thrilled with pleasure that they went on singing, and quite
forgot to eat and drink until they actually died without noticing it. From them in
due course sprang the race of cicadas, to which the Muses have granted the boon
of needing no sustenance right from their birth, but of singing from the very first,
without food or drink, until the day of their death, after which they go and report
to the Muses how they severally are paid honor among mankind, and by whom.
(Plato, Phaedrus 259 c-d)
Plato cunningly inverts Aesop’s famous fable about the ant and the grasshopper (or
the cicada), in which the grasshopper is presented as a lazy and thoughtless idler while the
ant as an industrious and resourceful doer. To him, the cicadas, being mediators between the
mortals and the Muses, epitomize the madness of poetry and imagination. On the contrary,
the ants are presented in the Phaedo as “social and disciplined creatures” (82b) who
regretfully totally lack imagination and are incapable of seeing beyond the ground.
Interestingly enough, at the beginning of the Phaedo, Cebes, one of Socrates’ interlocutors,
asks the latter about the lyrics which he has been “composing lately by adapting Aesop’s
fables and the prelude to Apollo” (Plato, 60 d). Thus the adaptation and remaking of Aesop’s
fable by Socrates is well known to his friends and followers and even becomes the subject of
the discussion in the Phaedo.
Cather was especially fond of the cicadas myth (which is not surprising, for music,
composers and singers are at the core of her writing; she even called singing “idealized
speech” [Kingdom 217]), alluding to it at least twice in her early writing. In the essay devoted
to Italo Campanini, Italian tenor and the bosom friend of Verdi, whose remarkable voice
decayed early because of his love for whiskey, she draws the parallel between him and “more
provident tenors [who] smile at him indulgently:" “But who shall say that it is not better to
sing for a summer than to build ant hills for a century? The winter doesn’t count anyway, one
33
might as well freeze as anything else then, and to have been an ant in June is decidedly worse
than to starve in December” (Kingdom 166).
In “The Joy of Nelly Deane,” a short story published in 1911, Cather, in order to
make the antithesis “the imaginative person versus the unimaginative one” more vivid and
memorable, employs the cicadas (or the grasshoppers) myth again. The heroine, Nelly
Deane, endowed by nature with a beautiful voice, marries a common man and several years
later dies in childbirth. The narrator, struck by a heroine’s tragic fate, exclaims: “It still seems
strange to me that in easygoing Riverbend, where there were so many boys who could have
lived contentedly enough with my little grasshopper, it was the pushing ant that must have
her and all her careless ways” (Cather, “Joy” 62). It is Plato instead of Aesop who kindles
Cather’s imagination and lurks in the depth of the plot, inspiring the narrator to brood upon
Nelly Deane’s “sweet, strong voice” (“Joy” 57) and “her unquenchable joy” (“Joy” 56). The
“little grasshopper,” subjected to the merciful procedure of baptism in a cemented pit (it was
one of the main prerequisites of her marriage — to become a Baptist, for it is the creed her
future husband belongs to), is so horrified by it that it seems that the baptism turns into a
ritualistic killing. One could argue that in this scene the complex interplay between Platonic
and Christian symbolism is enacted: while Christian symbolism of baptism as resurrection is
undermined, Platonic (and mythological on the whole) symbolism of water is highlighted. In
Plato’s dialogues going under the water always symbolizes death, destruction, and oblivion
(alluding to the river of Lethe). In Cather’s works, many characters will die by drowning
(Bartley Alexander in Alexander’s Bridge and Lucy Gayheart in the novel of the same name
are just some of them), an occurrence that may remind the reader of Plato’s dialogues.
All aforementioned similarities between Plato’s and Cather’s writings make it clear:
she has read Plato’s dialogues firsthand and her allusions to Plato were deliberate and
conscious. But it does not annul the fact that her growing interest in Plato was stirred up by
her reading (first of all by Shakespeare26 and such romantic poets as Shelley, Keats and Poe)
as well as by the spirit of time she lived in, a time which was very receptive to Platonism.
26
In a recent book, Shakespeare and the Fire of Love (London: Shepheard-Walwyn Ltd, 2004), Jill Line
convincingly defends an idea that Shakespeare was acquainted with Marcilio Ficino’s De Amore, a
commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Ficino’s amalgam of Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Christianity
had a great impact on Shakespeare’s poetry and plays, as well.
34
Nietzsche’s attacks on Plato seem to be an exception to the rule at the end of the nineteenth
century.27 Plato had been employed as a powerful ally in fighting realism and naturalism,
positivism and Spencerism by French symbolists and British aesthetes prior to Cather (and
by Ruskin prior to Pater). Her fondness for such French symbolists as Paul Verlaine and
Stephan Mallarme is well documented. The Kingdom of Art is replete with numerous
references and quotations of Verlaine, as well as her later essay, “The Novel Démeublé,”
which is based on Mallarme’s idea of art as suggestion, not enumeration.
History tends to repeat itself: in the 1860s the second Greek revival occurred at
Oxford (the first one happened at the beginning of the Romantic era and was inspired by
Thomas Taylor,28 the British Neoplatonist and the first translator of the Platonic corpus as
well as Plotinus‘s, Porphyry‘s, Proclus’s and Iamblichus’s works from Greek into English),
and Benjamin Jowett had undertaken the translation of Plato’s dialogues into English.29
On the surface, Cather’s Kingdom of Art seems purely Paterian (it is important to note
that Pater, who published a book, Plato and Platonism (1893), became one of the main
disseminators of Plato’s ideas in Victorian England). She repeats in her early essays that art
and moral teaching are totally incongruous and that a sermon can kill art, but in reality she,
as it was mentioned in the introduction, vacillates between Ruskin and a pure aesthete Pater.
Also, Wilde’s art and life (his fate serving as an example of what will happen to those who
betray God’s birthright and become mob-pleasers, although in Wilde’s case the mob
consisted of British aristocracy rather than common people) seem to make Cather shrink
away from the aesthetic movement and its hedonism (Kingdom 387-93).
Again, in her essay on Wilde and the aesthetic movement, Plato’s voice is discernible,
especially when Cather envisions the other, better world than the earthly one:
Where we can look at white light without shrinking [is it Plato’s sunlight?] and
not long for the flare of gas lamp or the glow of firesides. Where the soul can feel
27
It is worth noting that many more attacks on Plato would occur in the twentieth century — Martin
Heidegger, Karl Popper, Luce Irigaray, etc.
28
On the influence of Thomas Taylor on Shelley and Keats, see James Notopoules, “Shelley and Thomas
Taylor,” PMLA, 51. 2 (Summer 1936), 502-17; Frank B. Evans, “Thomas Taylor, Platonist of the Romantic
Period,” PMLA, 155. 4 (Winter 1940), 1060-79; Thomas C. Kennedy, “Platonism in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian
Urn,’” Philological Quarterly, 75.1 (Winter 1996), 85-107.
29
Benjamin Jowett was a Greek professor at Oxford and Pater happened to be one of his students.
35
as here the senses do, where there will be a better means of knowing and of
feeling than through those five avenues so often faithless, that alike save us and
lose us, that either starve us or debauch us. (Kingdom 393)
From Cather’s standpoint, those “five avenues” played a fatal role in Wilde’s life,
misled him as an artist and turned his art into the epitome of insincerity and mannerism. The
Platonic ideal of eternal, everlasting and immortal beauty was lost by Wilde because the art
of living overshadowed the art of creating in his life (it is not accidental that Wilde called
himself the King of Life). Donald Sutherland is absolutely right in stating that Cather “had a
revulsion of her own against the glittering manner of Wilde” and avoided “epigrams,
witticism, and paradox” (133) in her writing. She wanted to be an ardent creator, not “a
harlequin,“ “a comedian,” and “a buffoon”(Kingdom 391) like Wilde, but rather, someone
like Eleonora Duse who had embodied to her a Platonic type of artist (Kingdom 154). For
Duse, art was inseparable from self-discipline and restrain: “She takes her great anguish and
lays it in a tomb and rolls a stone before the door, walls it up and hides it away in the earth”
(Kingdom 119). It seems that not only Mallarme’s essays and poetry but also Duse’s
reserved, subtle, and noble performative manner revealed the prerogatives of suggestive,
symbolic art over full-blooded, unrestrained, and overly descriptive narratives to Cather.
The Kingdom of Art, the collection of Cather’s early dramatic, musical, and literary
criticism, as well as her early short stories, proves that she was well read in Plato and
gravitated to him more and more, eventually overcoming Nietzsche’s negative assessment of
the Greek philosopher as a cold rationalist. Her interest in Plato could also be increased by
British Renaissance and Romantic era artists as well as by British aesthetes and French
symbolists who, rejecting mimetic art of realism and naturalism, chose Plato as their guide to
more spiritual and suggestive art.
CATHER'S CRITIQUE OF NATURALISM, REALISM, AND
REGIONALISM
Contrary to positivists, Darwinists and Social Darwinists, who stripped nature of
spiritual dimension and of some higher mind working behind the scene and presented human
society as a collection of disconnected atoms, maintaining that man is just a piece of natural
and social process, Cather’s aesthetic from the beginning was shaped by a PlotinianEmersonian and romantic attitude towards nature as the embodiment of incessant creativity
36
of the Divine mind. While Spencer’s theory of survival of the fittest became very appealing
to such American writers as Jack London, Frank Norris, and Theodor Dreiser, Cather
remained unmoved by both Darwinism and Spencerism and even made an ironic remark on
Darwinism in one of her early essays: “No one can say why a man with everything in his
favor has not commanding greatness, any more than they can say why a man with everything
against him has it. Science has never told us the origin of genius” (Kingdom 271).
Similar to Plotinus, whose aesthetic had a large influence on German idealism and
European romanticism, Cather has also maintained the idea of superiority of art over science,
since artists, through intuition and imagination, are capable of penetrating the visible and
the superficial and of discovering the ultimate truths and the higher reality: "The scientist
who sees the world as a collection of atoms and forces, the political economist who sees it as
a set of powers and federations, sees falsely. They see facts, not truth” (Kingdom 143).
Later, in Pragmatism William James, an American philosopher and psychologist,
with whose works Cather was well acquainted, expressed even deeper concern about the
future of human beings influenced by Spencerism: “The energies of our system will decay,
the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate
the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all
his thoughts will perish” (76).
Reflecting on the formation of Cather’s aesthetic, Slote observes:
Willa Cather in these [early] years was a passionate idealist. Neither the kind,
form, substance, nor principles of art would matter if there were not the ‘other’ —
the high, rare, splendid ideal that justifies the quest and the devotion. ...Splendor
in art gives the impulse to transfigure, lift, shine, and make more than ordinary.
The greatest artists then, become as the gods, and the highest arts are holy ground.
(59)
Cather’s idealism, aimed at awakening the reader’s soul, leaned towards a pure
“romance with war and blood and love and honor, like the romances of the Grail or the Holy
Sepulchre” (Kingdom 319). Similar to Plato, who endowed his Socrates not only with
wisdom but also with courage on the battlefield, Cather was prone to praise war as a
counterbalance against a too peaceful and comfortable life, which is evident in her remark on
the possibility of war between Argentina and Brazil in 1895 on the grounds of the boundary
disputes:
37
Perhaps if the South American war would materialize it might give us the heroic
impulse again, and we could read The History of a Crime or Sevastopol or even
the ancient Les Miserables and think them possible. Too much security and
comfort in living begets a sort of apathy toward the heroic, and an
unconsciousness of those shadowy ideals that watch us out yonder in the big dark.
(Kingdom 330)
French naturalism with its predilection for physicality and biological (hereditary)
determinism and its tendency to reduce man to a bunch of animal instincts was vehemently
criticized by young Cather due to its unresponsiveness to the heroic side of human nature, its
incapability of showing the ideal and awakening the soul:
Only a diamond can cut a diamond, only can a soul touch a soul. All this question
of art is just another version of Bunyan’s siege of the town of Mansoul. All the
creators in the world have sent out their armies to rouse that sleeping king; when
for a moment they can command his high attentions, immortality is theirs. Emile
Zola is one of the strongest craftsmen of his time, but he cannot accomplish that
which is the end of the craft. (Kingdom 371)
In her early essays, Cather builds up the literary empire based on the principle of
meritocracy, not equality. Among artists, Shakespeare is accorded the highest position:
“Emperor of literature, he is the almost unbearably rich, godlike creator, king of language
and imagination, who must be worshipped and loved” (Slote 60). All writers should “gauge
their work” by Shakespeare’s magnitude, his “gigantic moral and artistic scope” (Kingdom
307). Cather’s devotion to Shakespeare is akin to worshipping and genuflecting, which, from
her point of view, should be shared by all the peoples of the English-speaking world: “But as
long as every spring the primroses blossom in the fields of Avon, and every summer the wild
thyme blows about Anne Hathaway’s cottage, we may all of us turn to that sacred and
greatest name of our race and do it reverence” (Kingdom 307).
Trying to define those unmistakable qualities which are markers of a work of genius,
young Cather envisions them in imagination, passion, and ecstasy (which are quite Platonic
characteristics of the creative process). Cather’s same authorial peculiarities will be
emphasized in 1922 by Button Rascoe in his essay devoted to a comparison between Edith
Wharton and Willa Cather. The critic says overtly that Miss Cather, not Mrs. Wharton, is
“first among the women writers of America”:
The difference between Mrs. Wharton and Ms. Cather is largely a difference
between fine workmanship and genius, talent and passion, good taste and ecstasy.
It is essentially, that Mrs. Cather is a poet in her intensity and Mrs. Wharton is not
38
… Mrs. Wharton gives us correct pictures; Ms. Cather gives us life and poetry
and beauty of its emotions. (qtd. in Slote 51)
It is no surprise that Cather’s aesthetic based on the Platonic-Plotinian concept of art
as passion and ecstasy and play of imagination (as well as artist as a god-like figure, a seer,
a visionary, a priest in the Temple of Art) found itself incongruous with an aesthetic of “the
dean of American literature,” William Dean Howells. From the beginning of Cather’s literary
career, her ”mythic, archetypal, even magical vision” (Slote 109) became irreconcilable
with Howells’s promotion of down-to-earth literature aimed at the description of ordinary,
common people and their unremarkable, sometimes even trivial lives. Howellsian realism,
with its exclusion of the heroic and aspiring side of life, as well as his attempts to erase the
boundary between literature and journalism (from his standpoint, a writer has to become as
observant and attentive to nuances of mundane life as a reporter), was targeted by Cather as
something she wanted to constantly criticize and oppose.
Unlike Howells, Cather never mixed up literature and journalism, notwithstanding her
own long journalistic career. In her essay on Eugene Field, a well-known Midwestern
journalist, she vividly describes the detrimental effect of working for a newspaper upon the
artist’s development:
Journalism is vandalism of literature. It has brought to it endless harm and no real
good. It has made an art a trade. The great American newspaper takes in intellect,
promise, talent; it gives out only colloquial gossip. It is written by machines, set
by machines, and read by machines. (Kingdom 332)
Cather’s Platonic-Carlylean cult of a heroic personality and her elitism (especially at
the beginning of her literary career) went so far that she proclaimed in her essay on Bernhardt
and Duse: “The many must suffer that the one may rise. It is the old law. If every man were
something of a poet, something of a musician, something of an actor, then there would be no
great names in art. If all men were happy, refined, cultivated, then society would be a
monotonous plane  there would be no mountains” (Kingdom 117).
In a similar fashion, Cather’s elitism and aestheticism became irreconcilable with
Howells’s realistic aesthetic and its extraliterary purposes (from Howells’s vantage point,
literature was a form of communication aimed at social harmony and better understanding
between representatives of the upper and the lower classes). Also, as Petrie has aptly
observed, Howellsian “conversion of literature into a medium for truthful social
39
communication required authors and readers alike to abandon the conception of art as a
privileged and autonomous realm” (7-8), which was absolutely unacceptable for Cather.
In her early essays, Cather attacks both Howells’s novels and literary criticism,
finding them trivial, banal, and prone to commonality. It seems that “ the pedantic,
autocratic, exclusive flavor” of Howells’s literary criticism irritated her even more than
triviality of life presented in his novels. Comparing Howells’s collection of essays, The
Literary Passions, with aforementioned Midwestern journalist Field’s piece of literary
criticism, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, Cather favors the latter’s “genuine, humble,
reverent love of the very leaves and covers and odors of books” (Kingdom 332) over
Howells’s trivial assessments of well-known facts, such as “Tolstoy was better as an artist
than as a teacher,” or that the story “Polikushka” was one of Tolstoy’s best” (Kingdom 332).
Cather’s attacks on Howellsian realism goes hand in hand with her critique of
regional writers whom Howells supported and promoted. One of them, Hamlin Garland,
becomes a sort of a whipping boy for Cather. She makes numerous sarcastic and scornful
remarks about his writing, even stating that “ art is temperament and Hamlin Garland has no
more temperament than a prairie dog" (Kingdom 331). She is appreciative only of fiction that
has “subtle, allusive poetry and sympathy that makes even the most prosaic and
commonplace tale beautiful. It is just the sort of thing that poor Hamlin Garland is always
trying and always failing to do.” From her point of view, Garland failed as a writer because
he had lacked “imagination and style” (Kingdom 331). The only exception among regional
writers Cather makes is for Sarah Orne Jewitt who, despite the Howellsian influence on her
and their longtime friendship, was inclined to envision in her region, New England, “an allpervasive metaphysical order, which includes the social and the material but is not limited to
it” (Petrie 93), for it is permeated with the spiritual and the suprarational as well.
Thus Slote's insightful observation that Cather “was not at all a regional writer… She
was not at all interested in showing a region, in demonstrating individual differences of local
color, but she used regional materials because they were her deepest emotional recourses” (7)
is valid and can be supported by Cather’s herself, in particular by her essay “Scottish
Novelists: A Limited Landscape.” The title of this essay (devoted to Ian Maclaren and
Samuel Crockett, the young Scottish novelists), is eloquent and revealing, insofar as it
highlights these authors’ limitations. Cather doubts “if local color alone ever gave real
40
greatness to any man,” since “a sameness and monotony about the work of these two
Scotchmen” only demonstrate “their limited powers and limited imagination.” She relies on
Turgenev, one of her favorite novelists, in order to support her assessment: “The greatest
artists, like Turgeneff, have always used it [local color] with an almost niggardly care. There
are places in Turgeneff’s novels where you can fairly feel him refraining from assisting
himself by somber Russian landscapes and the threadbare, pathetic Russian peasant”
(Kingdom 339). Cather is definitely in favor of Stevenson, a “citizen of the world,“ over
these two young Scottish writers whose vision of life is so limited that it becomes an
obstacle, hindering greater artistic achievement.
In one of her early essays, Cather quotes the passage from Stevenson’s sketch about
an old stranded player he met at Precy:
If a man is only so much of an actor that he can stumble through a farce, he is
made free of a new order of thoughts. He has something else to think about than
the money box. He has a pride of his own, and, what is of far more importance, he
has an aim before him that he can never quite attain. He has gone upon a
pilgrimage that will last his life long, because there is no end to it short of
perfection”. (qtd. in Kingdom 169)
This highlights that a great artist’s life is always a pilgrimage to the unknown and an
unremitting labor towards personal perfection.
Realism as a mimetic representation of reality (in its Howellsian variant as well as in
some regional authors’ writings) is rejected by Cather on the grounds of its limited vision of
life; it fails to see the deeper meaning of the ordinary and the usual, and it is too frequently
merely concerned with the trivial and the insignificant. Besides, as Cather notes in The
Kingdom of Art, “following the creed of realism,” the author “can no longer create knights
and ladies, but tells of the things that are” (187). Inspired by both Platonic idealism and
Carlyle‘s cult of the hero, Cather longed to present a noble and heroic ideal to her readers
instead of just simply copying the surface of mundane life.
In Bergson and American Culture: the World of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens,
Tom Quirk rightly asks, "And who, among American writers in the twentieth century, except
perhaps William Faulkner, has given us more frequent and more compelling images of
nobility than Cather and Stevens?” (12) Although Quirk and some other critics emphasize an
41
affinity between Cather’s vitalism and Henry Bergson’s philosophy, which is undeniable (her
interest in this philosophy is well documented30) and especially obvious in O Pioneers! with
its Whitmanian-Bergsonian celebration of nature and creativity. But it is important to
remember that Bergson’s en vital is to a large extent indebted to Plotinus’s three hypostases
and their emanations, not to mention that the French philosopher’s theory of memory (which
played a great role in shaping the aesthetic of not only Cather but also Marcel Proust) and its
importance for creative imagination derives from Plotinus’s evolution of Plato’s theory of
recollection (anamnesis). To put it summarily, Cather has simultaneously relied on Bergson
and has departed from him: while the "Bergsonian universe is a universe of immanence"
(Quirk 11), the Catherian one has not only linear, horizontal dimensions but also vertical and
transcendent ones.
It is worth noting that besides Garland, Cather launched a merciless attack on another
Howells’s protégé, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and its adaptation
for the stage are dismissed as melodramatic and untruthful:
From a literary point of view the play is like the book, exaggerated, overdrawn,
abounding in facts but lacking in truth. The work of a woman who sat up under
cold skies of the north and tried to write of one of the warmest, richest and most
highly-colored civilizations the world has ever known; a Puritan blue-stocking
who tried to blend the savage blood of the jungle and the romance of Creole
civilization. (Kingdom 269-70)
One can argue that not only Stowe’s sentimentality irks Cather but also the Northern
authoress’ misrepresentation of the South and its rich cultural heritage which was reduced to
the “poorest melodrama” aimed at one purpose  to serve its duty to an abolitionist cause.
But, as Cather says:
The mind that can follow a ‘mission’ is not an artistic one. An artist can know no
other purpose than his art. A book with a direct purpose plainly stated is seldom
the work of a great mind. For this reason Uncle Tom’s Cabin will never have a
place in the highest ranks of literature. (Kingdom 406)
Cather believed in the inevitable downfall of realism and naturalism:
France will run analytical fiction to death as it does everything else, and will go
charging back to romance, singing a new Marseillaise. The possibilities of
30
For Bergson’s influence on Cather, see Loretta Wassermann, Willa Cather: A Study of the Short Fiction
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991) 10-12.
42
analytical fiction are limited; it can go on until it has lost all poetry, all beauty,
until it reaches the ugly skeleton of things, there it must stop… Some fine day
there will be a grand exodus from the prisons and alleys, the hospitals and
lazarettos whither realism has dragged us. Then, in fiction at least, we shall have
poetry and beauty and gladness without end, bold deeds and fair women and all
things that are worth while. (Kingdom 325)
Thus Cather shuns positivism and Spencerism, which played such a significant role in
the formation and advancement of realism and naturalism, and chooses idealism in its
Platonic-Plotinian version (and in the romantic development of this version) over coarse
materialism and scientism. By envisioning art as religion, a “privileged and autonomous
realm,” a domain of beauty, and a creative process as passion and ecstasy, she follows in
Plato’s and Plotinus’s footsteps, exemplifying the vitality and attractiveness of ancient Greek
philosophy for modern literature.
ART IN THE TROLL GARDEN
The first collection of Willa Cather’s short stories, The Troll Garden, published in
1905, is a highly sophisticated and ambitious work of literary art. All seven stories included
in the volume (“Flavia and Her Artists,” “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” “The Garden Lodge,”
“’A Death in the Desert,’” “The Marriage of Phaedra,” “A Wagner Matinee,” and “Paul’s
Case”) are devoted to art and introduce the reader to different types of artists or characters
with artistic sensibility. With The Troll Garden, Cather tends to challenge realist and
naturalist traditions that prevailed in American literature at the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth century by turning instead to Platonism and Neoplatonism as well
as literary romanticism and British aestheticism (which have an affinity with these
philosophical systems), not to mention romanticism in music and impressionism in painting.
By implying that art is a manifestation of absolute beauty and harmony in the sensible realm
and an artist is capable of awakening his admirers’ souls and hurrying them to a vision of the
other Sphere, Cather displays her indebtedness to both the Neoplatonic concept of art and its
repercussions in world literature and philosophy.
The two epigraphs to the book create the magic and ambiguous atmosphere that never
goes away and constantly reminds the reader of a magic, religion-like nature of art. The
theme of art as magic is inseparable from the theme of art as craft and tradition, which is
manifested in the collection’s title. The title, the two epigraphs, the recurring variations on
43
the theme of art, and numerous allusions to world literature and culture not only imply the
author’s intention to link the seven stories in some loose unity, but also Cather’s aestheticism
as well as her tireless search for new forms of expression.
At the turn of the century, realism and naturalism prevailed in American literature as
seen in writings of Howells, Dreiser, Norris, Steven Crane and such regional authors as
Garland, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Jewett. In these writers’ works (with the exception of
Jewett), external reality was presented as absolute, not to mention that the objective and
accurate representation of reality was considered the major goal. Contrary to works by
naturalists and realists, Cather’s The Troll Garden displays a different sensibility: external
reality is unstable and constantly shifting; it does not reveal but rather symbolizes and
suggests ultimate truths. Cather’s literary references in this volume disclose her choice to
favor romanticism and British aestheticism: there are numerous direct quotations of,
paraphrases of, or scenes related to works by William Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Robert
Browning, Heinrich Heine, as well as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Pater.
The two epigraphs in the book, taken from Charles Kingsley’s historical work, The
Roman and the Teuton (1864), and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” introduce the
reader to the themes of sorcery, magic, and craftsmanship, while simultaneously presenting
the themes of seduction and corruption. In Kingsley’s work, the trolls epitomize the corrupt
but fascinating Roman civilization, and the forest children, seduced by Roman treasures,
stand for the barbaric but innocent Teuton. However, Cather’s trolls, being rather ambivalent
and elusive creatures, resist any definite and unequivocal interpretation, acquiring sometimes
opposite connotations. The volume’s title, borrowed from Kingsley’s The Roman and the
Teuton, also implies that a magic, fairy-tale-like atmosphere will permeate all of its stories.
By entitling the collection The Troll Garden, Cather suggests that it is the most suitable
atmosphere for artists, the creators of things rare and precious. Being the main magicians in
The Troll Garden, the artists are able to “kindle marble” and “strike fire from putty” (The
Troll Garden 76).
The theme of art predetermines the division of the book’s characters into two groups
— those who worship art and cannot live without it and those who put no value in it. In The
Troll Garden, the priests at the Temple of Art and their sympathizers are irreconcilable with
those who are blind, deaf, and incapable of perceiving the magic of art. Although in Willa
44
Cather: A Life Saved Up Hermione Lee defines this opposition as a confrontation between
“the deadening weight of rural provincialism,” “the philistine wilderness,” and “a solitary
figure with artistic talents or inclinations” (75), some stories challenge Lee’s observation. It
is undeniable that in the book the Midwest has a connotation of spiritual desert and
wilderness. But philistinism in The Troll Garden cannot be reduced to the rural Midwest: it
can be found anywhere, even in the artistic salons of New York (“Flavia and Her Artists”), as
well as in the refined world of the British aristocracy (“The Marriage of Phaedra”).
Cather’s opposition between Philistines and artists has an obvious affinity with
German romanticism and its cult of the artist who opposes the narrow and profane world of
the Philistines. For instance, one of the stories, “’A Death in the Desert,’” is both
thematically and structurally indebted to Heine’s Florentine Nights. Similar to Heine’s
romantic novella, Cather’s story depicts a beautiful, dying young woman and a man who
attempts to relieve her agony by telling stories related to art and artists. While Heine’s
narrator, Maximilian, tells the dying heroine, Maria, about real Italian composers and
virtuosos (such as Vincenzo Bellini and Niccolo Paganini), Cather’s character tells a dying
singer, Katharine Gaylord, about his brother, a composer, Adriance Hilgarde. Cather’s
narrative establishes a sophisticated and hidden connection between Adriance Hilgarde and
the outstanding Italian musicians, implying that all three of them belong to the same rank of
inimitable Masters.
It seems that the complex narrative structure of Heinean Florentine Nights has also
influenced “’A Death in the Desert.’” Precisely speaking, all the seven narratives in The Troll
Garden are to some extent indebted to Florentine Nights, which, in turn, are modeled on The
Arabian Nights. It is worth noting that the Oriental theme, surfacing in all the collection’s
stories, discloses the author’s inclination to see all phenomena of world literature and culture
as interconnected; they are living proofs of tradition, continuation, and development. By
keeping alive the tradition of oral storytelling, both Heinean Florentine Nights and
Scheherazade’s tales serve as a narrative model for Cather, inspiring her to create a similar
richly layered and polyphonic narrative texture. All the seven stories fit into the mold of
stories within stories, tales within tales, as well as all artifacts created by her Masters are
reflected in artifacts of world literature and culture. The motifs of mirror, reflection, and
reverberation, bringing to light the importance of tradition in art history, are some of the most
45
powerful motifs in the book. In order to create something new and experimental, Cather’s
artists have to feel at home in art, to immerse themselves in its history, and to learn their
craft; they long “for all that is chastened and old, and noble with tradition” (The Troll Garden
42).
The reader has to keep in mind the polyphonic structure of The Troll Garden, to hear
the multiple voices in its stories, and to see how stories are interconnected within the
collection; otherwise, the reader can end up with a distorted view about what happened. For
example, Susan J. Rosowski, one of the most respected scholars in Cather studies, was
spellbound by the two epigraphs to the book and their literal application to The Troll Garden.
In her monograph, The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism, Rosowski arrives at
the conclusion that Cather, in “The Marriage of Phaedra,” discloses a menacing and evil
nature of Treffinger’s unfinished painting as seen in this line: “although Cather calls the
painting a masterpiece, her plot suggests that such art is a curse against humanity” (26).
Rosowski fails to notice that in Cather’s universe Treffinger really belongs to the
same category of priests in the Temple of Art as Harvey Merrick (“The Sculptor’s Funeral”),
Raymond d’Esquerre (“The Garden Lodge“), and Adriance Hilgarde (“’A Death in the
Desert’”). The voice of Cather herself is audible in the narrator’s assessment of Treffinger’s
painting, “There was in him … the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the
religious mysticism which lay back of the fifteenth century“ (The Troll Garden 90).
Treffinger’s “freshness and spontaneity” is what the author always wanted to achieve in her
own writing. Besides, Treffinger’s life and legacy remind the reader of “a medievalist
English painter like Burne-Jones” (Lee 74), who was closely associated with the later phase
of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Also, an art critic, Mr. Rossiter (Cather, The Troll Garden
83), lecturing on Treffinger’s art at Oxford, resembles Ruskin, whose tireless attempts to
awaken artistic spirit in Victorian England are well known. None of these implications in
Cather’s text support (rather, they contradict and disprove) Rosowski’s interpretation.
Victorian ethical and aesthetic thought seems to be a cornerstone of The Troll Garden. In
Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World, Stout shrewdly observes: “From the first, she tried
to work out a coherent position regarding the place of morality in aesthetics — an issue of
notorious elusiveness” (76). The tie between morality and art appears as something Cather
wanted to see in the world of art, simultaneously understanding that it was her personal
46
utopia, her heroic ideal. Her early reflections on art exhibit her aestheticism and her clear
understanding of the limits of a moral approach to art. She is not sure that an assessment of a
piece of art should be based on an evaluation of the artist’s moral nature because “art itself is
the highest moral purpose in the world,” “art is its own excuse for being” (Kingdom 378,
406). In The Troll Garden, Cather hesitates to choose a religious moralist who fell in love
with art, Ruskin, over a pure aesthete, Pater, which is displayed in different types of artists:
only one of them, Harvey Merrick, entirely fits Cather’s ideal of an artist as a flawless,
sacrificial hero, while d’Esquerre, Treffinger, and especially Adriance Hilgarde, are selfcentered, narcissistic, and even destructive to the people around them.
Despite flaws which Cather attributes to her artists, there is something heroic, noble
and regal in all of them. They are presented as aristocrats of the spirit,31 embellishing and
ennobling life, making it bearable and meaningful. To a large degree, Cather’s cult of the
artist-hero was engendered by her interest in Carlyle’s ideas. Fighting the materialism of
Victorians, Carlyle presented his compatriots with outstanding people whose lives had
proven that there was something more important in this world than worshiping material and
utilitarian values and pursuing physical comfort. In turn, Carlyle’s enraged tirades against
worshippers of the Golden Calf echo not only Jesus’ similar accusations in the New
Testament but also Plato’s tirades against men who reduce their lives to the mere satisfaction
of bodily needs:
Then those who have no experience of wisdom and virtue but are ever devoted to
feastings…, and so sway and roam to and from their lives, but they never
transcended all this and turned their eyes to the true upper region nor been wafted
there, nor even been really filled with real things…, but with their eyes ever bent
upon the earth and heads bowed down over their tables they feat like cattle,
grazing and copulating, ever greedy for more of these delights, and in their greed
kicking and butting one another with horns and hoofs of iron they slay one
another in sateless avidity, because they are vainly striving to satisfy with things
that are not real the unreal and incontinent part of their souls. (Republic 586 b)
31
Cather admired the hereditary aristocracy as well, which has been highlighted by James Woodress who
reflected on Cather’s close friendship with Stephen Tennant, the youngest son of an English lord: “Cather’s
fascination with a young British aristocrat is particularly interesting because it points up a facet of Cather’s
character that earlier biographers missed. Cather had a great desire to be a Virginia lady like her mother and as a
result had very elitist tastes. She never lived ostentatiously, but one of the several dichotomies of her life was
her ability to love and write glowingly about the immigrants in Nebraska and at the same time to live
elegantly the life of a New York sophisticate with aristocratic tastes and little interest in the Masses” (113).
47
Moreover, in “the Carlylean meritocracy men of letters and poets belong equally with
statesmen and warriors to the heroic fraternity” (Goldberg 361). Carlyle’s presence is
tangible in “The Sculptor’s Funeral”: the Scotsman’s indomitable and heroic spirit is
recognizable in both Harvey Merrick and his friend, Jim Laird. Similar to Carlyle's,
Merrick’s life is filled with solitude and work, duty and self-renunciation, and even the
sculptor’s desire to be buried in the place where he came from echoes Carlyle’s will to bury
him in the native town of Ecclefechan, Scotland.32 Also, Laird’s enraged verbal attacks on
local dignitaries and their materialistic ideals remind the reader of Carlyle’s thunder-like
tirades against worshippers of Mammon. The Scottish theme is further amplified by some
other details: Laird’s last name derives from Scottish and means “God,” Merrick’s picture in
boyhood hints at his Scottish origin — he wears a kilt; Laird’s trip to the Colorado
Mountains and death from the cold he got there also signify Carlyle’s presence in the text,
since Carlyle has been associated with the mountains of Scotland.
In addition, Laird’s wrathful attacks on the pillars of the provincial town who are
incapable of appreciating the sculptor’s achievements also echo the Carlylean heroworshipping:
Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back East. We were dead in
earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We meant to be great
men. Even I, and I haven’t lost my sense of humor, gentlemen, I meant to be a
great men. I came back here to practice, and I found you didn’t in the least want
me to be a great man. You wanted me to be a shrewd lawyer - oh, yes!…Well, I
came back here and became the damned shyster you wanted me to be. (Cather,
The Troll Garden 46-7)
In this fierce speech based on a cunning inversion of a fable about the Prodigal Son,
Laird appeals to the great ideals of the founding fathers, George Washington and John
Adams, and accuses his listeners of replacing them with profane ideals of local financiers and
con artists (Cather, The Troll Garden 46). Alluding to “this hog-wallow’’(The Troll Garden
47), which the provincial “great men” worship, Cather’s narrative not only employs the
32
In her early essay on Carlyle, Cather mused on his death: "He died as he lived. Proudly refusing a tomb
in Westminster, as did one other great English writer, he was buried out on the wild Scotch hearth, where the
cold winds of the North Sea sing the chants of Ossian among the Druid pines. He lies there on that wild hearth,
the only thing in the British Isles with which he ever seemed to harmonize. He dreamed always in life great,
wild, maddening dreams: perhaps he sleeps quietly now, — perhaps he wakes” (Kingdom 425).
48
imagery of the fable of the Prodigal Son but also suggests that these “dignitaries”— not
Harvey Merrick, the outstanding sculptor — are prodigal sons, unable to keep alive the great
ideals of their forefathers.
Besides Carlyle's, another hero-worshiper’s presence is powerfully manifested in The
Troll Garden. No one in Cather’s pantheon of outstanding masters of verbal, musical, and
visual arts is so often alluded to in the collection as Wagner, a German composer of the era
of romanticism, who played a great role in launching German modernism. Wagner emerges
as a god-like ideal artist, and the themes and motifs from his operas and from Norse
mythology constantly reverberate throughout the entirety of the book. For Cather, Wagner’s
operas not only demonstrate the invigorating and rejuvenating power of myth but also serve
as an example of syncretism in art. Besides the novelty of his music itself, one of the most
famous of Wagner’s innovations is a skillful interconnection of musical, visual, and dramatic
arts. In performances of his operas he strived to restore the cathartic spirit and heroic pathos
of Greek tragedy. Wagnerian artistic syncretism reveals to Cather the enriching potentialities
that music and painting, sound and color have for literary art.
To Cather’s characters, Wagner’s music suggests passion, youth, and an indefatigable
search for the ideal, disclosing the confinement and misery of their earthly existence as seen
in the short story, “A Wagner Matinee,” “in which the composer’s music paradoxically
converts the confined place of the opera house into a place of infinite emotional possibility
and renders the open space of Nebraska a place of claustrophobic confinement” (Kennecott
192). Both her early reviews of performances of Wagner’s operas at the Pittsburgh and New
York theaters and her characters’ reflections on Wagnerian music in The Troll Garden
“suggest an immediate and total capitulation to the music” (Kennecott 190). Cather discerns
in Wagnerian operas the spirit that is very close to Carlyle’s: both of them despise the
materialism of their contemporaries and call them to fight the power of the Golden Calf. For
her, Carlyle is full of “Wagnerian flashes and thunders and tempests” (Kingdom 222).
The Catherian artists and characters with artistic sensibility fight not only the hostility
of a geographical and social environment but also the temptations offered by material
comfort, fame, and wealth. In “Flavia and Her Artists,” Frank Wellington, a beginning
writer, becomes an easy target for “a great American syndicate which most effectively
befriended struggling authors whose struggles were in right direction, and which had
49
guaranteed to make him famous before he was thirty” (Cather, The Troll Garden 17). The
very depiction of “the young Kansas man who had been two years of out of Harvard and had
published three historical novels” (Cather, The Troll Garden 17) is sarcastic and loaded with
an implication that this young author is lost for art: commercial artists are rather con artists to
Cather and never allowed in her Temple of Art.
The last story of the collection, “Paul’s Case,” is “set in turn-of- the-century
Pittsburgh” (Madigan 134) and delivers the tragic fate of a teenage boy, Paul, who has the
soul of an artist but does not have enough strength to resist the power of “the iron kings.”
The motif of “the iron kings,” or “iron genii,” which evolve “our century” fairy tales (Cather,
The Troll Garden 11), is one of the most complicated in The Troll Garden. It seems it comes
from Wagner’s tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelung, where it has a negative connotation: the
iron genii are dwarfs, the owners of the underworld riches, who were skillful craftsmen and
blacksmiths in the past and were later subdued by the most cunning and mean dwarf,
Alberich, the worshiper of gold. In turn, the Wagnerian dwarfs derive from the dwarfs in the
medieval German epic, The Song of the Nibelungs, based on Norse myths about Gods,
heroes, giants, and trolls. Thus Wagnerian dwarfs are connected with Scandinavian trolls,
which makes Cather’s book quite ambiguous, since the first impression of trolls in The Troll
Garden is that they are artists, magicians, and creators of the enchanted garden of art.
In “Paul’s Case,”the iron kings” are “the magnates of a great steel corporation”
(Cather, The Troll Garden 119); the stories of their glorious fates and triumphs perpetually
circulate in Paul’s surroundings and eventually affect his vision of the world. Ironically
enough, Paul, the worshiper of music and theater, whose sensitive soul hates the dreadful and
monotonous existence at Cordelia street, eventually mixes up his high ideals with profane
ideals of this street. By displaying Paul’s fascination with the Sunday World supplement,
filled with pictures of luxurious parties of the rich, the narrator implies that the much more
powerful melody of the Golden Calf replaces the magical tune of art which once elevated
Paul’s soul. The innuendo of the Golden Calf is a reference to Charles Gounod’s opera,
Faust, in which the most famous aria is Mephistopheles’ song about the Golden Calf. The
very crime committed by Paul, a cash theft from the bank, is begotten by materialistic values
of his surroundings and the consumerism of life in America. It is not accidental that arriving
in New York, Paul spends a lot of time at the department stores and at Tiffany, "buying with
50
endless reconsidering and great care” new suits, hats, shoes, scarves, silver, and scarf-pins
(Cather, The Troll Garden 123). His revels at the Waldorf, the New York hotel, remind the
reader of the revels of a consumer intoxicated by “the glaring affirmation of the
omnipotence of wealth” (Cather, The Troll Garden 126). Paul is so enchanted by the shining
world of wealth that even in the lodge at the Metropolitan Opera House he cannot stop
thinking of his evening suit and the splendor of his regal attire. The reader is never notified
what opera has been performed this night, because Paul is entirely absorbed by his own
appearance and his “triumph” over the hostile world.
The theme of the Golden Calf emerges again at the end of Paul’s sojourn in New
York. The narrator attracts the reader’s attention to “the shiny metal” (Cather, The Troll
Garden 130) lying on the dressing table in Paul’s hotel room — it is the change given to him
by the restaurant waiter the previous night. Paul does not like how it looks: it reminds him of
spending almost all of his stolen money. This scene reveals to the reader that money, the
golden metal, becomes the main object of his desire: “money was everything, the wall that
stood between all he loathed and all he wanted” (Cather, The Troll Garden 130). Cather does
not describe the power of gold over people directly, but instead its power is shown through
symbolic details. The motif of gold echoes in some other of the collection’s stories: “gold
powder” (The Troll Garden 61) is mentioned in “’A Death in the Desert,’” and the narrator’s
Aunt Georgina is compared to “old miners who drift into the Brown hotel in Denver” from “a
frozen camp on the Yukon” (Cather, The Troll Garden 106) in “A Wagner Matinee.” The
gold in these stories appears as an undercurrent, and is then turned into a powerful leitmotif.
Undeniably, Wagner’s use of leitmotifs in his operas becomes an invaluable example for
emulation for the beginning writer, Cather.
Furthermore, to create an emotional atmosphere, to produce lasting impressions on
the reader’s consciousness, to make a depiction moving and enchanting and to destabilize
static pictures in her narrative, Cather turns to French impressionism. Asad Al-Ghalith points
out that in “A Wagner Matinee” “Cather describes the effect that the brilliant lighting colors
and atmosphere [at the concert hall] might have had on Aunt Georgina” (272):
One lost the contour of faces and figures, indeed any effect of line whatever, and
there was only the colour of bodices past counting, the shimmer of fabrics soft
and firm, silky and sheer; red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose, yellow,
cream, and white, all the colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape,
51
with here and there the dead shadow of a frock coat. My aunt Georgina regarded
them as though they had been so many daubs of tube-paint on a palette. (The Troll
Garden 106)
Cather admired Alfred Sisley’s impressionist painting, Village on the Shore of the
Marne, because of the memorable images of trees: “With Sisley it was the silver poplar, the
whole tree permeated and riddled with light like lattice” (World 808). Sisley’s silver poplars
are fused in Cather’s memory with the black poplars in the Midwest and both play a
significant role in the imagery of “The Sculptor’s Funeral.” The Sisleyian poplar leaf is
detectable in the description of Harvey Merrick’s art (“The Sculptor‘s Funeral"):
[Merrick’s] mind was an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions, and so
sensitive that the mere shadow of a poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wall
would be etched and held there forever. Surely, if ever a man had the magic word
in his finger tips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he revealed its holiest
secret: liberated it from enchantment and restored it to the pristine loveliness, like
the Arabian prince who fought the enchantress spell for spell. Upon whatever he
had come in contact with, he had left a beautiful record of the experience — a sort
of ethereal signature; a scent, a sound, a color that was his own. (Cather, The Troll
Garden 42)
A dream of “a scent, a sound, a color,” which would become her own “ethereal signature,” a
sign of her uniqueness, and her ticket to immortality is discernible in Cather’s description of
this character’s art.
By making art the central theme of The Troll Garden and presenting the artist as a
hero, a craftsman, and simultaneously a magician capable of rescuing people from sinking
into the quagmire of materialism and mercantilism (as well as capable of reshaping reality in
accordance with his high ideal), Cather not only challenges mimetic representation of reality
by realists and naturalists but also displays her own aestheticism and its Platonic-Plotinian
connotations and her desire to dedicate her life to high art. The theme of art also indicates
Cather’s obsession with form, her search for new literary technique, and her turn to myth,
music, and painting in hopes to rejuvenate a literary art.
52
CHAPTER 4
CHRISTIAN IMPLICATIONS OF CATHER’S
LATER NOVELS
PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM IN A LOST LADY
With the passage of time, Cather’s writing becomes more and more imbued with a
deep religious feeling, and her favorite characters are endowed with a capacity for discerning
the presence of transcendent forces in their environment. They are indefatigable in their
search for a meaningful, purposeful life and their place in the universe. The religious bent of
Cather’s fiction and the author’s growing dissatisfaction with the muscular materialism
which America had manifested in its surge to world power become more obvious after World
War I. Her short novel, A Lost Lady (1923), is permeated with a feeling of a loss of a
beautiful ideal embodied in an estate owned by Captain Forrester and his wife. Depicting the
refined and highly cultivated world of the pioneer aristocracy, Cather grieves for its
vanishing and points out an exhaustion of the spiritual springs of life. The Captain’s estate is
presented by the author as a sacred locus where nature and culture harmoniously coexist and
the noble and generous ways of life are realized. Although profane forces of commercialism
and materialism encroach upon the blessed terrain, shattering its integrity and wholeness and
desacralizing it, the author provides a narrative about the Golden Age of pioneers with the
flavor of a glorious legend, suggesting that it is still sacred in individual and collective
memory. The sacredness of the Forresters’ estate is constructed by the use of medieval
Christian and pagan symbolism: while the Captain is endowed with the traits of a medieval
knight, and his enchanted estate alludes both to Norse mythology and a city upon the hill; his
wife, Marian, has some affinity with Aphrodite and simultaneously with the Virgin Mary. It
is the first novel in Cather’s corpus in which Marian symbolism is powerfully employed,
foreshadowing the author’s deepening interest in the cult of the Virgin Mary and her turn to
Christianity as a counterforce against disorder and destruction.
According to Mircea Eliade, the dichotomy between the sacred and profane has
defined the human perception of the world from ancient times (91). While the sacred
53
symbolizes the holy, the transcendent, and the uncommon, the profane is connected with the
desacralized and the common. Contrary to the sacred terrain where the ties between the
terrestrial and celestial domain are tangible, in the profane they are lost and forgotten.
Desacralization of the Western world due to a spread of rationalism and utilitarianism, the
crisis of Christianity, and a loss of faith in God, which became obvious at the turn of the
century and was emblematized in Nietzsche’s statement, “God is dead,” fractured the
Western picture of the world, affecting a human’s ability to discern the presence of the
transcendent in everyday life.
The design of A Lost Lady reflects the author’s clear understanding that the world has
irrevocably changed: “broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts” (Cather, Not Under Forty v).
Rosowski shrewdly observes that the author’s vision of the world as split into two parts
predetermines “a two-part structure and a backward-looking view” (“Historical Essay” 19192). Going back in time, the narrator describes the sunrise and sunset of the railroad
aristocracy, the great architects of the West who were able to achieve integrity and wholeness
through an integration with nature and a discovery of “a meaningful place in which to dwell
and live their lives” (Cave 238).
Captain Forrester’s story is an archetypal Catherian story, a story of a displaced and
dispossessed man who craves to find his place in the universe and longs to create his own
home and hearth. The theme of displacement is intensified by other characters’ similar stories
 first of all Niel Herbert's (although the narrative voice is omniscient, the reader very often
looks at the Captain and his wife through Niel’s eyes  a device known in narrative theory
as free indirect discourse) and his parents', the immigrants from Kentucky. Niel’s father will
never secure a place in the town of Sweet Water, moves to Denver, and disappears from the
narrative, while his mother, who is broken by the uprooted existence in the prairie town,
finds her eternal rest in the hostile and inhospitable western land.
Compared to Niel’s unlucky and misfortunate parents, the Captain’s story is much
more encouraging and inspiring, for he is described as a hero able to overcome misfortune
and to succeed in fulfilling his dreams. As a railroad constructor, in his youth he literally
lived on the road. The Captain’s first marriage had made his existence even more insecure
and unstable: the necessity to take care of an invalid wife had drained all joy and ease from
his life, forcing him to keep “his nose to the grindstone” (Cather, A Lost Lady 28). Besides,
54
as a participant in the Civil War, he had known of the tragic side of life prior to his coming to
the West. In the prairie, he is compelled to start his life from scratch: a warrior becomes “a
driver for a freighting company” (Cather, A Lost Lady 28).
Noticeably, while relating his life story, the Captain never mentions his Civil War
experience and avoids rendering in detail the tragic circumstances of his first marriage,
saying only that in “those years he had sickness to contend with and responsibility” (Cather,
A Lost Lady 28). It is no surprise that later Captain Forrester understands so well the feelings
of his second wife, Marian, who is bound to share his fate and to live with an ill spouse for
many years, not to mention that the Captain himself changes from a strong and successful
man into a powerless invalid. All the disheartening details of his youth make it
understandable why the discovery of a miraculous hill in the middle of the Sweet Water
valley (where his house will later be erected) is so meaningful to him. The Captain, “greatly
taken with the location” (Cather, A Lost Lady 28), senses the presence of supernatural forces
in the area.
Undeniably, this episode plays a central role in Captain Forrester's life  in this
location he experiences an epiphany-like moment, which illuminates his soul, disclosing that
here he is destined to take root and to build his perfect home. The willow tree, severed from
its roots and miraculously resurrected, symbolizes his own nomadic soul which wants to be
integrated into something bigger than itself. On this wondrous hill, the character is exposed
to what Eliade and Sullivan call hierophany (from Greek hiero-, “sacred,” and phainein, “to
show”) “ manifestation of the sacred in some object“ (“Hierophany” 313), in this case 
in the resurrected willow tree. The Captain is not separated from the land and nature
anymore; microcosm and macrocosm fuse in the One, the Whole, betraying PlotinianEmersonian undertones in Cather’s narrative. By building, planting, and gardening, Captain
Forrester strengthens his ties with the land, expresses his artistic genius, and turns his estate
into a vast sacred zone where trees, meadows, flowers, and all living creatures enjoy freedom
and feel safe and protected.
In turn, the cottonwood grove, the lane bordered by the Lombardy poplars, the silvery
marsh meadows, and two creeks which separate the Captain’s estate from the town of Sweet
Water also acquire the protective potentiality, shielding this territory and emphasizing its
extraordinary, mysterious essence. The Captain’s creative energy, which he pours out on his
55
beautiful rose garden (the only consolation at the sunrise of his life), does not violate but
increases the pristine beauty of the place; it is the terrain where all God’s creatures are
protected by the benevolent and generous landowners. The scene in Chapter VI, Part One,
when Captain Forrester and his wife feed rabbits and birds that are caught off guard and
divested of food in the midst of a severe winter blizzard, is loaded with a deep religious
feeling, a feeling of compassion and love for all living creatures. In this scene, the mysterious
chain that connects man and nature in the Captain’s estate becomes visible.
It is worth noting that the trees, the meadows, and the flowers have a symbolic
meaning in the novel; as a result of the multiple symbolic details, the narrative eventually
acquires a mythopoetic quality. The narrator repeatedly emphasizes the sheltering and
restorative potentiality of the cottonwood grove. The Captain’s house stands “close into a
fine cottonwood grove that threw sheltering arms to left and right and grew all down the
hillside behind it” (Cather, A Lost Lady 4). Resting “on the clean grass under the grateful
shade of the tall cottonwoods” (Cather, A Lost Lady 7), Niel and other children keenly
experience the bliss and beauty of the place and the joy of life. Later, at the time of the
Captain‘s illness, when Mrs. Forrester's confinement at the house becomes especially
unbearable, she restores her inner balance in the cottonwood grove.
In addition, the tall Lombardy poplars remind the reader of sentinels standing guard at
the Forrester’s place and help Niel find the house when a blizzard has covered the whole
area with a thick coat of snow: “He [Niel] broke his trail by keeping between the two lines of
poplars” (Cather, A Lost Lady 39). The tree symbolism is further extended by a comparison
of the handicapped Captain with a tree: moving around with the help of two canes, he looks
“like an old tree walking” (Cather, A Lost Lady 64). Also, the Captain’s last name itself
evokes the tree imagery, acquiring a profound, almost mystical power in the novel.
In Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, Gaston Bachelard
says that “the tree is an axis by which the dreamer normally passes from the terrestrial to the
aerial” (215). It goes without saying that Captain Forrester is a dreamer, a visionary who had
envisioned his perfect home prior to building it. His vision has obvious Biblical implications,
for his house upon the hill echoes the city upon a hill from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount,
which is underscored by these lines: “Thus placed on the hill, against its bristling grove, it
was the first thing one saw on coming into Sweet Water by rail, and the last thing one saw on
56
departing” (Cather, A Lost Lady 4). By placing the Forresters’ house on the hill, the author
implies the indissoluble connection of the Captain’s dream and the national imagination, in
which a city upon a hill is one of the most cherished and sacred symbols.
At the same time, the pagan essence of the place is hidden beneath the Christian
symbolism, encoded in some apparently Teutonic markers of the text, which allude to Norse
mythology (the presence of German brothers, Adolph and Rheinhold Bloom, makes the
Teutonic motif even more apparent in the narrative). Needless to say, the forest has played
the most significant role in the history and culture of the Germanic tribes and shaped the
racial imagination of all the Teutons, including the Anglo-Saxon tribes. It seems that the
sacredness of the Captain’s estate is built upon the complex interplay between the sacred
symbols of Christianity and paganism.
In an ode, “The Hill and the Grove,” Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, a German poet of
the eighteenth century, brought to light the difference between religious practices of the
ancient Greeks and the Teutons: while the former had worshipped their gods in the temples
erected at the top of a hill, the latter had preferred to pray to their higher forces in sacred
groves where they felt invigorated and regenerated by the cosmogonic power of the trees. In
Norse Mythology, Rasmus Bjorn Anderson highlights the noble essence of the tree
symbolism in the picture of the world created by the Nordic tribes:
Ygdrasil [the ash tree] is the most sublime and finished myth. It is a symbol
unifying all the elements of mythology into a poetical system. The tree
symbolizes, and extends its roots and branches into, the whole universe. It is the
Tree of Existence… Ygdrasil is the tree of the poetic experience of the Gothic
race. (205, 207)33
What is more, the tree symbolism indicates not only the sacredness of Captain
Forrester’s domain, but also serves as a signifier of his sacred role in the narrative. By
constantly stressing that the Captain belongs to the noble and heroic race of pioneers, the
narrator distinguishes him and his friends, the “courteous brotherhood” (Cather, A Lost Lady
58), from common people -- first of all from such "a coarse-grained fellow"(Cather, A Lost
Lady 66) as Ivy Peters and a crowd of self-righteous, hypocritical, and greedy female
creatures, who, as the narrator says, “went over the [Captain’s] house like ants” (Cather, A
33
The more common spelling in Norse myths is Yggdrasil.
57
Lost Lady 77). The pioneer past is presented as the epitome of not only cosmic but also social
order: the narrative suggests that in those times wealth and social distinction were welldeserved rewards for heroic deeds and hard work, not for schemes and fraud. In Cather
studies, the interconnection between the Forresters and the Southern cavalier culture has
already been illuminated.34 Although it remains unknown almost to the end of the narrative
from which state Captain Forrester has come to the West,35 there are too many Southerners in
his surroundings, and in the novel as a whole, to be fortuitous. Niel Herbert, his parents, and
his maternal uncle, Judge Pommeroy, are natives of Kentucky; Judge Pommeroy is a
graduate of the University of Virginia; Mrs. Ogden was born in East Virginia and speaks
with a thick Southern accent. Also, Marian Forrester’s gracious and vivacious beauty is
constructed in accordance with both Southern and Shakespearean ideals of beauty: she is a
Southern belle and simultaneously the Shakespearean Dark Lady36 who puzzles and dazzles
men and whose mystery will never be entirely divulged.
In the realm of the novel, the West and the antebellum South blend together, and the
Forresters, the western pioneers, are endowed with distinct traits of the Southern aristocracy.
Captain Forrester’s metamorphosis from a self-made man, a driver of a freight wagon, into a
gentleman, a man of manners and high culture, is striking and memorable; it intensifies the
theme of culture as cultivation, preparation of both land and soul for growth and untiring
development. The character, whose life is defined by a knightly code of conduct, incongruent
with treachery, pettiness, and materialistic interests, is described as a man of honor and
34
Joyce McDonald points out that Cather employs antebellum Southern myths, in particular “the Cavalier
legend as the central origin of antebellum culture.” As McDonald states, “if the Cavalier died at Gettysburg, he
could be resurrected in another form: the pioneer aristocrat, the valiant conqueror of the new wilderness. If the
gracious, elegant plantation world had been left in cinders and shambles, it, too, could rise again — mirrored in
the aesthetic values and gracious lifestyles of wealthy bankers, landowners, and railroad barons: the new
Western elite” (45). Ann Romines also discusses the importance of Southern heritage for Cather and
highlights it as follows: “Much of Cather’s best fiction before her specifically Southern novel of the 1940s, on
some level, engaged with the problem of how to remember and to render the South” (279).
35
At the end of A Lost Lady, the narrator makes it clear that the Captain is a veteran of the Union Army by
mentioning that Mrs. Forrester “sends a cheque to the Grand Army Post every year to have flowers put on
Captain Forrester’s grave for Decoration Day” (98).
36
The Shakespearean code of A Lost Lady is concealed in both a quotation from Sonnet 94, “lilies that
fester smell far worse than weeds,” and in one of the large, old-fashioned engravings, “Shakespeare reading
before Queen Elizabeth,” hanging on the wall in the Forresters’ home. In addition, the epigraph to A Lost Lady
is taken from Hamlet. It seems also that the motif of engraving echoes through the entire novel, betraying the
author’s intention to make the narrative sound like a solemn epitaph engraved on the pioneer’s tombstone.
58
loyalty. The Captain’s highly ritualistic household epitomizes “the generous, easy ways of
life of the great land-holders” (Cather, A Lost Lady 59), whose generosity resembles and is
attuned to the abundant land on which they live.
For Niel, Captain Forrester embodies the fulfilled and accomplished life, an example
to emulate. Volunteering in nursing the bedridden Captain and in shielding him and his wife
from merciless female visitors, Niel acts exactly like Captain Forrester would (the latter’s
capacity for healing and caretaking is legendary). The motif of caretaking reverberates
throughout the entire novel, forcing the reader to constantly compare the different types of
caretakers  the Captain, his wife, and Niel Herbert. This comparison makes it clear: in spite
of Marian Forrester’s extramarital love affair, she is worthy of her husband and equal to him
in faithfulness and loyalty, while Niel fails in his caretaking as he is incapable of helping
Mrs. Forrester after the Captain’s death when she needs his help most.
Although Niel has since childhood known about how different Mrs. Forrester is
compared to ordinary people and how sacred her role is in his life, his puritanical and frigid
nature forces him to give up on her eventually. Both the Captain and his wife are presented as
luminous figures in the narrative, attributed with incredibly glowing personalities. The
characters’ capacities for illuminating other people’s lives are accentuated by the perpetual
association with celestial bodies: while he, as the embodiment of noble and refined
masculinity, is akin to the Sun,37 she, epitomizing the eternal feminine, albeit not in a
Goethean but in a Catherian sense, is akin to the Moon.38
Also, Marian Forrester is the novel’s most enigmatic and elusive character, and
without her presence the narrative would be too didactic and moralizing. Critics still argue
about this heroine and tend to come to diametrically opposed conclusions about her. For
instance, in Isolation and Masquerade: Willa Cather’s Women, Frances W. Kaye states that
37
The Captain’s association with the Sun is most visible in his sun-dial, which actualizes the theme of the
sunset of the Golden pioneer age and eventually turns into his tombstone.
38
In many episodes, the link between Marian Forrester and the Moon is stressed: after the first encounter
with the heroine in front of the Episcopal church, Niel sees “the hollow, silver winter moon” (40) in the sky; in
Chapter III, Part Two, he finds Mrs. Forrester “on the bridge over the second creek, motionless in the clear
moonlight” (68). In addition to the moon, a rose and a lily also become sacred symbols in Marian symbolism —
in Christian iconography the Virgin Mary is presented as standing or enthroned on a lunar crescent.
59
“Cather’s portrait of Marian Forrester is direct: the Lady is both virgin and whore” (134).39
Paying no attention to numerous details which indicate that she belongs to the lofty world of
the pioneer aristocracy, which is opposite to vulgar commonality, Kaye nevertheless, says:
“By the time the reader meets Mrs. Forrester… the vulgarity seems to have disappeared
entirely, though we will see that it is simply submerged” (134). Needless to say, such an
interpretation is biased and can be easily disproved by the text: vulgarity and Mrs. Forrester
are incompatible and incongruous.
At the same time, by encoding this heroine with different cultural and mythological
codes,40 the author intentionally makes her elusive and evades rational explanation. She does
not walk upon the earth like other people (she is apparently different, for example, from Ivy
Peters who “tramps” along the Forresters' estate with “an air of proprietorship” (Cather, A
Lost Lady 66) but rather scuds or rushes [Cather, A Lost Lady 5]), reminding the reader of a
bird or a butterfly, an unearthly creature, whose main element is air. Niel, exposed to a scene
of Mrs. Forrester’s encounter with Cyrus Dalzell, President of the Colorado and Utah
railroad, notices how similar her “light and fluttery” fingers are to “butterfly wings” (Cather,
A Lost Lady 53). The motif of flight is furthered by her passion for dancing and her
undomestic nature. As Neil observes, compared to her, other, homely women, look “heavy
and dull; even the pretty one seemed lifeless, — they had not that something in their glance
that made one’s blood tingle” (Cather, A Lost Lady 21).
Besides, both Daniel and Marian Forrester are not only able to understand and value
beautiful things but also to create them. While the Captain’s artistic genius expresses itself in
growing roses, narcissuses, and hyacinths (all the flowers are associated with his wife and her
blossoming, spring-like beauty), her artistic nature manifests itself in dancing and fine
39
Frances W. Kaye claims that both Jim Burden and Niel Herbert are lesbians in disguise: from her point
of view, in order to conceal homoerotic desire in My Antonia and A Lost Lady, Cather turns these characters
(endowed with obvious femininity) into males, the "masquerade" figures (99, 117). Mrs. Forrester’s
heterosexual love affairs obviously irk this critic.
40
For instance, Hermione Lee notes that Cather loves meaningful names: “When she calls the Captain
‘Forrester‘ (and turns him into an old tree), the upstart parasite ‘Ivy’, the town ‘Sweet Water’, and the heroine
‘Marian’, addressed by her husband as ‘Maidy’, she is letting us know that cottonwood grove is meant for the
greenwood, a Nebraskan Sherwood Forest. From the Elizabethans to the Romantics (and on into Tennyson’s
pseudo-Shakespearean late play, ‘The Forresters,’ where Maid Marian appears as a moon-goddess and makes
Sherwood ‘Eden o’er again,’ the greenwood was always linked to the lost golden age, with Robin Good and
Maid Marian as its rulers, sometimes in the guise of the King and Queen of the May)” (202-03).
60
handwriting. Niel compares her “inviting, musical laugh” with “the distant measures of dance
music, heard through opening and shutting doors” (Cather, A Lost Lady 21-2).41 By and large,
it is underscored repeatedly that the greatness of the West was created by people endowed
with an artistic genius, and Cather’s pioneers are presented as great artists who left indelible
signatures upon the landscape. In this novel, the pioneers’ trace is visible in the grandiose net
of railroads, “the iron harness” (Cather, A Lost Lady 95) used by the great men to tame the
plains and mountains.
It also seems that by describing Marian Forrester Cather introduces a motif of the
Virgin Mary in the novel: the heroine’s name, Marian, implies it as well as her central role in
a knightly, gallant circle of the Captain and his friends  she is akin to a medieval image of
the Beautiful Dame which in the poetry of troubadours very often tended to fuse with the
Virgin Mary in one, highly spiritual image. In Sacred Fire: Willa Cather’s Novel Cycle,
Evelyn Helmick Hively points to the interconnection between the heroine and the Virgin
Mary: “Her name, of course, links her to the supreme female inspiration for medieval
heroes…” (102).
However, this motif is a muffling undertone rather than a powerful leitmotif; and, it
is hard to decipher, especially considering her significant physicality and her bodily charm
that enable her magnificent power over men. In spite of this, her spiritual, nurturing power is
also palpable in the text. Niel’s first encounter with her is depicted in Chapter III, Part One,
which follows the chapter where Niel’s mother’s death is mentioned. Being a motherless
little boy, he is struck by both Mrs. Forrester’s unearthly beauty and by the fact that this
41
The motif of music “heard through opening and shutting doors” intensifies the theme of Niel’s
detachment from life: he does not have enough energy and ardor to plunge into it, to surrender to its wild
delight. This motif strikingly resembles a similar one in Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kröger” (1903): like Niel
Herbert, Tonio Kröger is detached from life and admires young and beautiful characters (Hans Hansen and
Ingeborg Holm), especially their knack for dancing. At one point of his life, Tonio Kröger meets them at a
hotel in Denmark (the setting obviously echoes Shakespeare's Hamlet); standing on the veranda and separated
from the illuminated living room where they are dancing by the door (a symbol of his separation from life), he
realizes that he will never be able to enjoy life like these charming and easygoing people. Interestingly enough,
the epigraph to A Lost Lady is also taken from Hamlet, “… Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night,
sweet ladies; good night, good night,” (Hamlet IV. V. 71-73) — Ophelia speaks these words as she is going
mad. Overall, this motif of delightful music in both Cather’s and Mann’s narratives betrays WagnerianNietzschean undertones (both Wagner and Nietzsche were singers of youth, spring, and delight of life and
relied on Norse and classical mythology in their works).
61
encounter occurred in front of the Episcopal church.42 And, he follows her “through the open
door,” seeing “her enter a pew and kneel” (Cather, A Lost Lady 22). In hindsight, Niel feels
proud that “he had recognized her as belonging to a different world from any he had ever
known” (Cather, A Lost Lady 22). This scene clearly foreshadows the apparition of the
Virgin Mary to a humble Indian in Cather’s novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927),
which would be published four years later. The vision of the Virgin Mary as well as the
vision of the different area, not the prairies but the mountainous landscape, appears as a flash
in A Lost Lady, the last novel about the Golden pioneer age, suggesting in which direction
the author will move.
At the same time, the scene of Niel’s first encounter with Mrs. Forrester is loaded
with some different implications which are incongruous with the image of the Virgin Mary:
the gracious movement with which the heroine thrust a black, shiny slipper “out of a swirl of
foamy white petticoats” (Cather, A Lost Lady 22) is imbued with a sexual energy and
illustrates the natural bodily power of this woman. In this case, a signifier of a different,
pagan side of her personality is an epithet “foamy,” one of the first allusions to the heroine as
the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite. Prior to this, while conversing with Niel and his
friends, she mentions California and her love for swimming in the ocean. She also wears
memorable earrings  “long pendants of garnets and seed-pearls in the shape of fleurs-delys”(Cather, A Lost Lady 21). In this image, the author again blends together Christian,
pagan, and even heraldic symbolic details: pearls are associated with a shell, which
eventually emerges in Chapter II, Part Two: “a large flat shell from the California coast”
(Cather, A Lost Lady 64), and undoubtedly signifies Aphrodite; while fleur-de-lys, or flower
of lily, is significant in both Marian symbolism and in the French regal heraldry.
According to classical mythology, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and spring,
is the personification of the generative powers of nature, and the mother of all living beings.
In the narrative, Mrs. Forrester is always associated with nature: she likes to wade barefoot
across the silvery meadows; at the beginning of the novel she is described as bareheaded
(hats and veils appear in her dress code much later). In her presence Niel always feels elated,
electrified by her effervescent vitality. Mrs. Forrester epitomizes the fullness and beauty of
42
In 1922, Cather joined the Episcopal church although she was born into a Baptist family.
62
life and youth, and reminds him that both of them are evanescent and transient. At the end,
reminiscing about her, Niel wants to know “whether she had really found some everblooming, ever-burning, ever-piercing joy, or whether it was all fine play-acting” (Cather, A
Lost Lady 97).
In the last chapter of the novel, Niel admits not only the Captain’s but also Mrs.
Forrester’s impact on his life: “He came to be very glad that he had known her and that she
had had a hand in breaking him into life” (Cather, A Lost Lady 96). The narrator never
explicitly says that Niel’s life is eventless and empty, but the reader senses a great amount
of melancholy in the character’s “calling up the shade of the young Mrs. Forrester” in hopes
of disclosing “the secret of that ardor” and “a wild delight that he has not found in
life”(Cather, A Lost Lady 97). It is also important to keep in mind that Niel is not a young
man anymore — the events he recalls occurred, as the narrator says, “thirty or forty years
ago” (Cather, A Lost Lady 3).
In A History of Religious Ideas, Eliade and Sullivan highlight the significance of the
religious valorization of the present:
The simple fact of existing, of living in time, can comprise a religious dimension.
This dimension is not always obvious, since sacrality is in a sense camouflaged in
the immediate, in the “natural” and the everyday. The joy of life discovered by
Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of
sharing — even fugitively — in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the
world. (259-60)
The spontaneity of life, and the sacredness of existence, embodied in Mrs. Forrester,
seem not to have been realized in Niel’s own existence but were given to him as a flash, as a
reminder of life’s measureless potentiality which can be discovered only by those who are
not afraid of it and who dare to defy norms and proprieties. Niel is a great young man--noble,
refined, sensitive to the beauty of nature and art, but he is too contemplative and stiff, and too
conscious of public opinion and what other people say. Unlike him, Mrs. Forrester is defiant
and fiery (fire is her other element): “She mocked outrageously at the proprieties she
observed, and inherited the magic of contradiction” (Cather, A Lost Lady 43).
The younger generation, exemplified by Ivy Peters and bankers of the Denver
railroad bank, whom the narrator ironically presents as those “bright fellows” (Cather, A Lost
Lady 51), does not have the Captain’s greatness or his sense of honor. None of these “bright
fellows” is capable of taking responsibility for poor depositors; at the critical moment they
63
unabashedly wash their hands and strip the Captain of all his savings. In a similar fashion,
the Forresters’ estate will be invaded and taken from the previous owners by Ivy Peters, the
epitome of rascality and vulgarity in the novel. This character foreshadows William
Faulkner’s villains  Jason Compson and Flem Snopes (the latter will, similar to Ivy Peters,
wear the black felt hat which is his sinister, distinct sign). Ivy Peters presents the new type of
American businessmen, who is ruthless, unscrupulous, and unresponsive to refined and
beautiful things. Niel knows for certain what Ivy Peters would do to the Captain’s estate: he
“would destroy [it] and cut up into profitable bits, as the match factory splinters the primeval
forest" (Cather, A Lost Lady 59). And, as the reader already knows, Ivy Peters has drained
the beautiful silvery meadows and turned them into a profitable piece of land, destroying its
holy power.
Although there is gloom and despair in the narrative, it does not create an impression
of dreary darkness; there is light and glow present too, and the reader sees how this
illumination is reflected on both Niel Herbert’s and Edd Elliott’s faces when they talk about
Mrs. Forrester. Both of them were initiated into life by her when they visited the Forresters’
enchanted estate that will remain in their memory as a sacred symbol. And, it is not
accidental that the anonymous narrator often calls himself “we,” emphasizing that he talks on
behalf of the community. The narrated story is already the folk story, the legend of the glory
of the Golden pioneer age.
By employing complex Christian and pagan (based on both classical and Germanic
myths) symbolism, and constantly emphasizing the noble essence of her pioneers, Cather
lifts them above common men, brings to light the difference between the past and the
present, and indicates that the image of the pioneer is one of the most sacred in American
history and culture. The reader is given the opportunity to sense its sacredness, to feel “the
taste and smell and song of it,” and to see “the visions those men had seen in the air and
followed... ” (Cather, A Lost Lady 95).
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP AS HAGIOGRAPHIC
NARRATIVE
Cather had been interested in the arid American Southwest for a long time before she
wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop. In a letter published in 1927 in Commonweal, a
64
Catholic magazine, she states that this region was inseparable from its Catholic dwellers.43
She goes on to mention that “the story of the Catholic Church in this country was the most
interesting of all its stories” (Cather 971). During her visit to Santa Cruz, New Mexico44 in
1912, Cather befriended a Belgian priest, Father Haltermann, from whom she learned about
the nineteenth-century French missionaries, Father Lamy and Father Machebeuf, after whom
her characters, Father Latour and Father Vaillant,45 were modeled.
Cather was immediately fascinated with Father Lamy, the first archbishop of New
Mexico, who “had become a sort of invisible personal friend” (972). A monumental bronze
statue of him in front of the cathedral of St. Francis in Santa Fe embodied, as Cather puts it,
“a pioneer churchman who looked so well-bred and distinguished. In his pictures one felt the
same thing, something fearless and fine and very, very well-bred something that spoke of
race. What I felt curious about was the daily life of such a man in a crude frontier society”
(972). As Antonia S. Byatt rightly says in Passions of the Mind, “Cather wholeheartedly
admired the French aristocratic way” (212) and endowed her Archbishop Latour with the
aristocracy of the spirit enhanced by his ancestral nobility which is emphasized in the novel
by Father Vaillant’s reference to his friend’s long aristocratic lineage: “Your ancestors
helped to build Clermont Cathedral, I remember; two building Bishops de la Tour back in the
thirteenth century” (Cather, Archbishop 424).
43
Patricia Allitt has drawn the reader‘s attention to a Catholic revival that occurred in the US after World
War I : “The First World War brought the US progressive movement to an end. It also marked the beginning of
a Catholic revival, a period of bolder social policy, accelerated institutional growth, and a new concern with
intellectual life” (191). In 1924, Commonweal, a new Catholic magazine, was created by a group of enthusiastic
New York writers, in which the most prominent role was played by a recent convert to Catholicism, Canadianborn Michael Williams (1877-1950), a central figure in the Catholic revival in the US. Notably, in 1927 two
prominent Catholic novels were published — Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Thornton Wilder’s
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
44
New Mexico is an idealized state for Cather: it would have had virtually no middle class. Just a land
owning aristocratic set, and peasants with no capital, no means of income other than working the land and
bartering. New Mexico could also represent a desert state, a New Egypt, where "pioneers" could live monastic
lives in the desert, confronted not by lions, but by wolves, etc. For this comment, I am indebted to Prof. J. A.
Smith.
45
Antonia S. Byatt has noted that Cather’s major characters ”are named for what they represent. Vaillant,
valiant-for-truth, goes out on journeys: associated with him are mules, waggons, litter, cooking, social
encounters. Latour, the Tower, is conscious culture, well-read, reserved, just, whose crowning achievement is
his cathedral, built like the Palais des Papes in Avignon, Midi Romanesque, 'the first Romanesque church in the
New World,' but built in, and of, the local golden rock, as part of the landscape” (215).
65
In a letter to Commonweal, Cather had also pointed out her interest in Puvis de
Chavannes’ murals and the Golden Legend, which are visual and verbal hagiographic
narratives respectively:
I had all my life wanted to do something in the style of legend, which is
absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment. Since I first saw the Puvis de
Chavannes frescos of the life of Saint Genevieve in my student days, I have
wished that I could try something a little like that in prose; something without
accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition. In the Golden Legend
the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt upon than the trivial incidents of
their lives; it is as though all human experiences, measured against one supreme
spiritual experience, were of about the same importance. The essence of such
writing is not to hold the note, not to use an incident for all there is in it  but to
touch and pass on. I felt that such writing would be a kind of discipline in these
days when the “situation” is made to count for so much in writing, when the
general tendency is to force things up. (973)
In “Narrative Without Accent: Willa Cather and Puvis de Chavannes,” Clinton Keeler
highlights the significance of the figure of St. Genevieve in the history of France as well as
religious and patriotic implications of Chavannes’ frescos:
As the leader of her people against the Huns in 451, she was made the patroness
of Paris. Also, she is said to have established the church of St. Denis; in the latter
part of the eighteenth century the Pantheon was built on the site of her tomb. In
the 1870s Puvis de Chavannes commissioned to paint a memorial on the walls of
the Pantheon. (120)
Keeler has also noted that “movement in the Archbishop is like that of a viewer
moving from picture to picture, panel to panel. It is a common place in criticism to note the
effect of tableaux in the Archbishop from Latour’s youth to his death” (122). It seems that in
Archbishop Cather has pursued a goal very similar to the French muralist, namely: to create a
non-dramatic narrative consisting of several highly visual scenes (the meaning of which is
enhanced by a juxtaposition to each other) as well as a pantheon of glory of the people who
contributed to America’s greatness, who left a visible trace in the landscape -- in this case, in
a shape of missionary churches and cathedrals erected in the desert of the Southwest.
Interestingly enough, the theme of the desert as a testing ground for man initially
emerged in one of Cather’s early essays, “Pierre Loti’s Romance of a Spahi,” in which her
meditations on the desert end in a eulogy to the French writer’s literary craft:
I like to think of Pierre Loti, soldier, sailor and artist, sailing among his green seas
and palm-fringed islands, through all the tropic nights and orient days. Anchoring
at white ports and talking with wild men, now on the high seas and now on the
66
desert, which the ancients quaintly called a sea. We see too much of civilization,
we know it all too well. It is always beating about our ears and muddling our
brains. We sometimes need solitude and the desert, which Balzac said was “God
without mankind.” Loti is a sort of knight-errant to bring it to us, who gives to
[us] poor cold-bound, sense-dwarfed dwellers in the North, the scent of
sandalwood and the glitter of the southern stars. (Kingdom 367)
In this essay, by quoting a line about the desert as a desolate place, “God without
mankind,” Cather is referring to Balzac’s short story, “A Passion in the Desert.” By
skillfully interweaving Loti’s and Balzac’s narratives, she not only demonstrates her
awareness of the extant desert literary tradition, but also her fascination with the exotic and
the primitive, which was widespread at the turn of the century and found its most
conspicuous expression in the myth of Tahiti.46 Moreover, in the same essay an image of
the Virgin Mary is also present, noticed when Cather mentions “a silver image of the
Virgin,” which the protagonist of Loti’s novel holds in his hand before death (the image had
been tied about his neck by his parents “in far away France” [Kingdom 367]). With the
presence of the desert, God, The Blessed Virgin, and the primitive, already seen here, one
could argue that these themes had converged in Cather's consciousness a long time before
she conceived Death Comes for the Archbishop, also making it seem that Loti's novel just
happened to be one of many sources that Cather drew from. In addition, this essay evidences
that Christian symbolism was never a foreign concept to Cather, even in her early writing.
Like an underground current, it emerged over and over in her works, sometimes betraying
her hesitation to elaborate on the theme of Christianity, since so many writers failed in doing
this.
Cather's feelings in regard to the difficulty of drawing upon Christian themes when
writing can be seen in the essay “A Mighty Craft.” Here, she ponders the hardship of
rendering and even touching sacred subjects in art, which becomes almost insurmountable
when artists dare to "build up the proper background about the ‘pale Galilean’" (Kingdom
415), for “all their profuse descriptions and the splendor of their oriental settings only detract
from the grave central figure which is most beautiful in its simplicity, and no account of him
46
For the affinities between Paul Gauguin’s paintings and journal, Noa Noa, and Cather’s novels, The
Song of the Lark and Death Comes for the Archbishop, see Nancy M. Holland, “Willa Cather and Paul
Gauguin” (Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter 47.1 (2003): 51-5.
67
ever written now can equal the plain and childlike one set forth in the gospel of the New
Testament” (Kingdom 415). It seems to Cather that since “the days of the Florentine and the
Italian school, no art — music which is essentially modern excepted — has ever attuned
itself perfectly to sacred subjects” (Kingdom 415).
But despite her doubts and hesitations of drawing from sacred Christian themes,
Cather did make the first advance in approaching to the most sacred figure in Christianity in
one of her early short stories, “Jack-a-Boy” (1901). In this story, the death of six-year-old
child, who was endowed by the narrator with some affinity with the Redeemer, unites and
enlightens all the tenants of the boardinghouse, as seen in the narrator’s musing:
I was thinking how the revelation of the greatest Revealer drew men together.
How the fishermen left their nets, without questioning, to follow him; and how
Nicodemus, who thought himself learned, came to Him secretly by night, and
Mary, of Magdala, at the public feast, wiped his feet with her hair. (322)
The recurrence of Cather's lauding and upholding of art and religion (which is so
ubiquitous throughout her later novels) also emerges in this short story. Prior to the
narrator’s observation of the spiritual power of Jesus, one of the characters, an old professor,
eulogizes Pater and his cult of beauty: “Perhaps Pater was right, and it is the revelation of
beauty which is to be our redemption, after all” (Cather, “Jack-a-Boy” 322). One could also
go on to hold that the plot of this story allows for the consummation of the union of art and
religion, thus displaying Cather's emphasis on the sacredness of both of them.
Furthermore, although Archbishop is written much later than “Jack-a-Boy," its
simplistic tone is quite deceptive, betraying the author's sophisticated play on different
literary as well as oral (if we take into account the indigenous one) traditions. It is a highly
stylized narrative that strives to simultaneously emulate both visual (as seen through the
influence of Puvis de Chavannes’ “Life of Saint Genevieve”47) and literary hagiography.
47
It seems that Archbishop also conforms to a Franciscan iconographic tradition. For example, in Chapter
2, ‘December Night,” of Book VII, Father Latour takes “the furred cloak from his shoulders and put[s] it about
her [a bondswoman Sada] ” (406), which has an obvious affinity with a San Francesco fresco of the life of
Saint Francis: here, the saint, moved by charity, gives his cloak to a poor knight. On the Franciscan
iconographic tradition, see Diane Cole Ahl, “Benozzo Gozzoli’s Cycle of the Life of Saint Francis in
Montefalco: Hagiography and Homily,” Saints: Studies in Hagiography. Ed. Sandro Sticca ( Binghamton,
1996) 191-214.
68
As D. H. Farmer underscores in the introduction to The Age of Bede,48 “the nature and
purpose of this particular literary form [hagiography]” was “to stress that the saint was a man
of God and shared in divine qualities and even in the power of miracles” (17). By
predominantly employing the hagiographic narrative mode in her novel about “quiet
saintliness,“ as David Stouck has identified it (136), and presenting the two French Catholic
priests, Father Latour and his friend, Father Vaillant, not as martyrs but rather as quiet saints,
Cather has, one may argue, approached the figure of “a pale Galilean” in such a subtle, nondramatic and delicate way so as to bring to mind another source that she relied on, the New
Testament. Within Archbishop, there are numerous allusions (both direct and indirect — the
indirect ones are coming from St. Augustine's and Pascal's writings) to the Gospels. For
example, one of the characters, a young Mexican woman, who was turned into a "shadow"
by her abusive and merciless American husband, is named after Mary of Magdala. In
addition, Father Latour’s and Father Vaillant’s masses are compared to a living water, the
Logos, which aims to awaken the spirit of their parishioners. Also, like Jesus, both of the
priests leave behind their loved ones in order to become members of a much larger family, a
family of genuine believers.
In addition, as mentioned earlier, Cather’s Archbishop also takes part in the vast
literary tradition that portrays deserts, a tradition that Cather was profoundly interested in
since her youth. She draws on this tradition by using it as a backdrop and setting for her
characters, which thus aids her in heightening their isolation and emphasizing their saint-like
qualities. For example, as Father Latour wanders in the unknown and hostile desert
landscape of New Mexico, he experiences anguish and unbearable thirst, as well as an
unusual juniper tree in “the form of the Cross” (Cather, Archbishop 186) that evokes in his
imagination the Passion of Jesus. This evocation makes him feel inseparable from Jesus'
suffering on the Cross and, through prayer and meditation, enables him to totally concentrate
on Jesus' agony rather his own bodily torment.
The saint-like characteristics of Latour and Vaillant can be further elucidated when
held in the light of actual saints. In “Accounts of Lives,” Kathleen Ashley recounts how
48
See Stout's Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World, on Cather‘s interest in a medieval English monk,
the Venerable Bede‘s writing. 304.
69
Gregory of Tours, an early medieval writer, when introducing his book on the lives of
Church Fathers, asked, in regard to the title of the book, “should we say the life or the lives
of the saints?” For Gregory, this was a rhetorical question to be answered with "the assertion
that the lives and deaths of holy people all conformed fundamentally to the pattern of a single
life, that of Christ” (Ashley 459), a life that Latour and Vaillant strive to follow. Moreover,
most of “the medieval markers of sanctity: miracle-working, acts of charity, ability to
mediate for others through prayer, divine visions and conversations” (Ashley 441) are
repeatedly found in the actions of Latour and Vaillant.
On top of this, Cather further evokes the Christ-like saintliness of the French priests
by creating a contrast between their passionate desire to emulate Jesus in their everyday lives
and the three cardinals in Rome, who are depicted as being polished, refined, and articulate—
the embodiment of the Vatican's bureaucracy, the detachment from ordinary parishioners,
and a lack of understanding concerning the true reality of religious life in the newly annexed
(1848) US territories. The American missionary, Father Ferrand, is treated as a beggar by
the Spanish cardinal de Allande, and de Allande agrees to support Father Latour’s
candidacy for the Vicariate of New Mexico primarily for the sake of his own benefit  to
get back El Greco’s picture of a young St. Francis in meditation (Cather, Archbishop 283).
With this, Cather is able to use St. Francis, a saint representative of the renunciation
of worldly values, as a figure to emphasize the lack of religious value of the Vatican elite.
The image of St. Francis and the true religious value that such an image should inspire within
the holy is totally misunderstood and overlooked by de Allande, who perceives El Greco's
painting primarily as a monetary artifact without any deeper religious value, as seen in his
abrasive rhetorical question: “What would a St. Francis, of almost feminine beauty, mean to
the scalp-takers?” (Cather, Archbishop 283).
As opposed to de Allande, both Latour and Vaillant aim to restore the values of the
Catholic church and the genuine spirit of Christianity, which was embodied in Jesus and his
sacrificial love for mankind and was tangible in the early Christian church and its saints, such
as St Anthony,49 St. Augustine, and St. Francis, all of whom openly criticized the powerful
49
On the influence of Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony on The Professor’s House, see Stephanie
Durrans, “The Temptation of St. Peter: Flaubert’s Saint Anthony and Cather’s The Professor’s House,” Willa
70
and the wealthy and sympathized with the poor and the marginalized (to whom Cather’s
priests endear themselves as well). As Father Vaillant says, “Not since the days of early
Christianity has the Church been able to do what it can here” (Cather, Archbishop 404).
Although St. Anthony’s name is never mentioned in the novel, one could argue that
Cather gives him an implicit presence within the narrative, as if lurking in the desert
landscape and the constant references to the pyramids and Egypt (Cather, Archbishop 285,
370). The pyramids, the desert as a proving ground for a saint, and (emphasized by the
narrator) the huge distances which separate the French priests from the civilized world seem
to allude to the figure so prominent in the hagiographic tradition St. Anthony. This is not
surprising, considering Cather’s reverence toward Flaubert and his writing, among which The
Temptation of Saint Anthony was attested by the author himself as a masterpiece.
Cather's use of the hagiographic narrative can be seen more clearly when one has a
better idea of the origin of this literary genre and its implications. In Desert Christians: An
Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism, William Harmless, S.J., draws the
readers' attention to the significance of Athanasius's Life of Antony50 ( usually known by its
Latin title, Vita Antonii) for the emergence of the new literary form  hagiographic
narrative:
It created a new genre of Christian literature: the life of a saint. Although
Christians had composed accounts of their heroes before this, none would prove
so popular or influential. And its popularity drew international attention not
simply to Antony, but also to Egypt, its monks, and its emerging monastic
institutions. Its publication marked the beginning of the literature of the Desert
Fathers. (60)
Harmless also emphasized that Athanasius “had drawn his portrait of Antony as an
ideal to be imitated and the archetype to measure oneself against” (69). He goes on to state
that Life of Antony:
...did not just affect Christian literature: it affected Christian lives. A barometer of
its power is an incident that took place in Milan in the mid-380s. A thirty-year-old
Cather: A Writer’s Worlds. Ed. John Murphy, Françoise Palleau-Papin, and Robert Thacker (Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 2010) 176-92. It is also important to remember that Cather used to link her works via similar
motifs, symbols, and details, and the figure of St. Anthony resurfaces in Archbishop, the novel which follows
The Professor’s House.
50
In Greek and Latin, the saint’s name is spelled with “t,” while in English with “th.”
71
African had recently arrived in the city, having just won appointment for the
municipal chair of rhetoric — a position of considerable prestige, especially given
Milan’s status as an imperial residence at the time of his appointment, the man
has been a Manichee, that is, a member of an exotic (and illegal) Persian Gnostic
sect. He had brought with him a concubine and teenage son. Once there, the
young orator began to undergo a dramatic conversion to Christianity. We know
him now as Augustine of Hippo (354-430), and the account of his conversion is
recorded in his classic work, the Confessions. (98)
It is worth noting that Athanasius’s Life of Antony played the indispensable role in
Augustine’s conversion: the young well-educated African was struck by the fact that an
uneducated Copt was “capable of taking heaven by storm” (Harmless 99), and became a
“friend” not of emperors, but of God. Life of Antony also had a great impact on Augustine’s
bishopric activity in North Africa: inspired by Antony’s example, Augustine set up a small,
tight-knit community of “servants of God” on his family farm in Thagaste. This community
played “an important role not only in Hippo, but throughout the North African province of
Numidia. It became a seminary of sorts, a “seed-bed” that produced a number of the leading
bishops of North Africa” (Harmless 100).
With this in mind, when one considers Cather's creation of St. Anthony's invisible
presence, as evinced through the desert landscape and the pyramidal form of the sand dunes
(which also launch the motif of a tomb and entombment, for the cathedral built by Father
Latour will be his tomb), as well as the saint-like lives of the two French priests, who are
constantly portrayed through a hagiographic lens, the link between Archbishop and the
desert hagiographic tradition can be easily distinguished. And going further along these lines,
one could even hold that the narrative can be considered as another variation on the lives of
the Desert Fathers, although Father Latour’s life simultaneously emulates and shuns
Antony’s vita, for the Archbishop’s life is much more similar to St. Augustine’s, who could
not imagine his existence without his books and without the joys of conversations with
friends. Latour not only demonstrates a vast knowledge of Augustine’s writing in a debate
on celibacy (as one of the main prerequisites for the sacrament of ordinance) with a
rebellious Mexican priest, Father Martinez, but also (not unlike Augustine) surrounds himself
with young missionaries from his native region of Auvergne. Latour's favorite disciple,
Bernard Ducrot, a recent graduate from the same seminary at Montferrand, is like a son to
him. As a scribe, Ducrot's main mission is to write down the dying priest’s memories of “the
old missions in the diocese” (Cather, Archbishop 444).
72
In Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism, James
Goehring points out the importance of the setting in the hagiographical genre: “The
connection between the distance and the degree of his sanctity becomes a hagiographic
topos”(80); in other words, authors, seeking to heighten their heroes' sanctity, emphasize the
distance of withdrawal from the civilized world. This type of setting is the backdrop for the
majority of the events in Archbishop: the narrator constantly stresses the unimaginable
distances in remote lands covered by the French missionaries on horse-back or mule-back or
in a wagon. For example, the narrator states, “having traveled for nearly a year to reach Santa
Fe, Father Latour left it after a few weeks, and set off alone on horse-back to ride down into
Old Mexico and back, a journey of full three thousand miles”(Cather, Archbishop 289).
In addition to the harshness of the setting and hardship of a life of a saint perpetually
emphasized by the narrator, one of the favorite themes of the hagiographic genre is a
depiction of sacramental rituals and miracles experienced or provided by a saint. Father
Latour comes across the miraculous juniper tree in the form of the Cross; thanks to the
greeting by the name of the Virgin Mary, both priests are saved by Magdalena from being
murdered by Buck Scales, her husband; in the desert of the Southwest, Lather Latour finds
the golden rock, the material from which his golden cathedral dedicated to St. Francis of
Assisi will be built. Both priests execute numerous sacraments of baptism, marriage, and the
Eucharist, linking people to the church and God through the images of saints and the Virgin
Mary, sacramental rituals and tireless prayers.
The narrator perpetually emphasizes the sacredness of religious images and a
continuation of the long iconographic tradition within the Roman Catholic Church. In
“Mariology and Christology in Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Thomas M. Casey draws
readers’ attention to the difference between the aniconic and iconic tradition in Christianity:
An aniconic religious tradition emphasizes the transcendence of God, a deity over
and above creation,… an iconic tradition prefers a more immanent God, one who
is present in all things created and most breathtakingly, in Christian belief, in the
flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth, in the sacramental confessions of Roman
Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy the numinous is encountered in persons,
places and things in an abundance that horrifies the aniconic mentality. (23)
It is worth noting that the Protestant Reformation was extremely hostile to the iconic
tradition, considering statues and shrines as well as both the cults of saints and the Virgin
Mary the epitome of superstition and delusion. Highlighting this aesthetic divide between
73
Roman Catholic51 and Protestant Christianity in his Varieties of Religious Experience,
William James has noted:
Catholicism offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so
many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its multiform
appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to Catholic eyes the
almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to the Catholic mind is
incomprehensible.” (363)
In Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Hans Belting
also stresses the negative attitude of Protestant churches to sacred images and the eventual
split between art and religion in general (which originated during the Renaissance):
Martin Luther urged his [Protestant] contemporaries to free themselves from the
alleged power of images. [Protestantism is a] purified, desensualized religion that
now put its trust in the word…Images, which had lost their function in the church,
took on a new role in representing art… Although in the Catholic world no
verdict was ever pronounced against the veneration of images, yet even there the
holy image could not escape its metamorphosis into the work of art. Art ceased to
be a religious phenomenon in itself [and] a picture is no longer to be understood
in terms of its theme, but [only] as a contribution to the development of art. (116)
Although the main events described in Archbishop occur in the middle and the second
part of the nineteenth century, its stylized hagiographic narrative strives to emulate and
render the medieval atmosphere with its belief in miracles, the sacredness of the holy images
and the indissoluble link between art and religion. The narrative disproves de Allande’s
statement about the uselessness for the Indians of El Greco’s picture of St. Francis. The
Spanish cardinal's error becomes particularly blatant in an episode in the “The Month of
Mary” chapter, in which Father Vaillant tells his friend about a Pima Indian convert who led
him to the cave where his ancestors kept as an invaluable treasure “a golden chalice,
vestments and cruets, all the paraphernalia for celebrating Mass” (402). In Archbishop, faith
is constantly emphasized as a real treasure, a “buried treasure” (Cather, Archbishop 402),
51
Considering all the aesthetic power of Catholicism, it is no accident that in 1922 Cather “converted from
a rigidly aniconic, Bible-centered Baptist church to the Episcopal church  the most iconic and sacramental
confession on the Protestant spectrum”(Casey 24). She was not a Catholic, but this conversion says a lot about
her interest in and reverence for Catholicism and its sacramental rituals, as well as reminding the reader of her
love for France and everything that is French (it seems that the very name of St. Francis of Assisi became dear
to her because he was nicknamed --the nickname eventually turned into his name-- by his father after France,
the country which he held dear).
74
which is put in an obvious contrast with “deposits of gold near Cripple Creek, Colorado”
(Cather, Archbishop 426) discovered in 1858 and the subsequent gold rush.
Cather’s priests have a sacramental sense of reality and see the numinous in the most
mundane of settings. It is worth mentioning that in Rebecca West's review of the novel,
“Miss Cather’s Business as an Artist,” the British writer points out Roman Catholicism's
embrace of the sensuous side of human nature: by referring to an episode in which Father
Vaillant carves a leg of mutton and a “delicate stream of pink juice follows the knife,” West
highlights its beautiful symbolism  it is the sacred in the mundane: “That Church has
never doubted that sense is a synthesis of the senses, and it has never doubted that man must
take the universe sensibly” (319). Thus the stream of pink juice from a leg of mutton and
Father Vaillant’s onion soup (whose excellence will be discussed later by Bishop Latour)
embody the natural variety of the harvest and imply the sacred. Furthermore, in A Church to
Believe in the Roman Catholic church's ability to envision “man’s nature as a spirit-body
composite” is furthered by Avery Dulles in these lines: “Man is of such nature that he rises to
spiritual things through the mediation of those that are bodily” (156).
In addition to numerous references and allusions to the aforementioned saints (St.
Anthony, St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi), the narrative is permeated with concealed
quotations and constant allusions to the Pensées by Pascal as well as to his personality on the
whole (although Pascal, during his life, was at odds with the state and the church, later,
starting from the nineteenth century, he is considered one of the most precious and revered
voices in the Catholic tradition).
In “’As in the Mirror and a Symbolism’: Pascal’s Mystical Theology and Cather’s
Divine Geometry in Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Jean- François Leroux points out the
similarities between Cather’s novel and Pascal’s Pensées: “For Pascal, as for his skeptical
precursor Montaigne, humankind devoid of grace is subject to vicious circling in endless
contradiction, as in a fever or a dream, since neither our senses nor our reason constitutes a
certain guide” (215). Thus, despite the acknowledgment of the importance of the senses and
the reason for believers, Pascal points out the exceptional role of our feeling, our emotional
longing for God’s grace:
Reason acts slowly, and with so many perspectives, on so many principles, which
must be always present, that it constantly falls asleep or wanders, when it fails to
have all its principles present. Feeling does not act in this way; it acts
75
instantaneously, and is always ready to act. We must then put our faith in feeling;
otherwise it will always be vacillating. (202)
Elaborating on Cather’s affinity with Pascal, Leroux comes to the conclusion that “Latour,
lost in the desert, suffering from ‘fever’ and “vertigo” (Archbishop 286-87), is a fit emblem,
then, for Pascalian humanity in its natural state” (215). Overcoming the Pascalian
“geometrical nightmare” (Archbishop 285), the sense of total hopelessness and abandonment
by God, the young French priest, as a result of prayer and meditation, is able to regain his
courage and hope and to sense God’s presence in the cross-like juniper tree, which
articulates the most cherished Pascalian theme, the ”theme of the deus absconded, or hidden
God” (Price 89).
In addition, Pascal himself appears in the narrative as a hidden symbolic figure whose
presence is tangible in some of the personal and geographical names within the novel. For
example, the first American missionary mentioned in Archbishop is Father Ferrand (“Irish by
birth, French by ancestry” [Cather, Archbishop 278]), and Father Latour was born in the city
of Clermont, which is located in the region of Auvergne. Although the correlation to these
names and Pascal may be hard to find initially, when one keeps in mind that Pascal was born
in 1623 in the city of Clermont-Ferrand, located in the region of Auvergne, the correlation
becomes much more apparent. Besides, Father Latour often recites Pascal’s Pensées: “He
often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was
lost and saved in a garden”52 (Cather, Archbishop 438).
Leroux goes on to observe that although “... Pascal’s Pensées are unlikely to have
been the historical bishop’s livre de chevet,53 Pascal is the “favorite” author of Cather’s
Latour (Archbishop 444), and I would suggest, an important source for the spirituality of
Death Comes for the Archbishop” (213). In other words, it is highly improbable that
Archbishop Lamy, a Jesuit, would admire Pascal, a Jansenist and a harsh opponent of
Jesuits’ casuistry and worldliness, but in the universe of Cather’s narrative, the old quarrel
between the Society of Jesus and Port-Royal (whose moral rigor was expressed by Pascal)
52
Cather condenses the following thought from Pascal’s Pensées: “Jesus in the garden, not of delight, like
the first Adam, who was lost there with all the mankind, but of agony, where he saved himself and all of
mankind” (273).
53
In French, this expression means a bed book.
76
has been played down and almost extinguished.54
Rosalie L. Colie defines the position of “Pascal’s man” as “precarious,” since he is
“located in an undefended open space between two vast deserts, variously called ‘all’ and
‘nothing,’ ‘infinitude’ and emptiness,’ ‘infinity’ and the ‘infinitesimally small‘” (261).
Despite Pascal’s unshakable belief in God, he often experienced bouts of melancholy and
despair when he felt the total abandonment by God and the futility of his actions, exactly
what Cather’s Latour feels55 when his old friend, Father Vaillant, leaves for Colorado:
One night about three weeks before Christmas he [Latour] was lying in his bed,
unable to sleep, with the sense of failure clutching at his heart. His prayers were
empty words and brought him no refreshment. His soul had become a barren
field. He had nothing within himself to give his priests or his people. His work
seemed superficial, a house built upon the sands. His great diocese was still a
heathen country. The Indians traveled their old road of fear and darkness, battling
with evil omens and ancient shadows. The Mexicans were children who played
with their religion. (Archbishop 405)
Despite these moments of fatigue and despair, both Latour and Vaillant live the life of
which they dreamed of in their youth, as seen in these words addressed by Father Vaillant to
his friend before the departure for Colorado:
But it has not been so bad, Jean? We have done the things we used to plan to do,
long ago, when we were Seminarians,  at least some of them. To fulfil the
54
At the beginning of Book VII, “The Great Diocese,” Cather mentions that, as a young curate, Father
Vaillant was an assistant to the old priest who initially disapproved of the young cleric’s planned “season of
special devotion of the Blessed Virgin for May,” but at the end of the same day “granted him the request he had
so sternly denied in the morning” (Archbishop 400). In the narrative, the old priest is presented as the man who
“had come through the Terror, had been trained in the austerity of those days of the prosecution of the clergy,
and… was not untouched by Jansenism” (Archbishop 400). The reference to Jansenism implies that Cather was
well acquainted with the schism the French Catholic Church went through, but in her novel this schism
between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, members of a rebellious sect in French Catholicism, is overcome, and
the old priest prone to Jansenism is eventually moved by the request of the young Jesuit, Father Vaillant.
Needless to say, in real life the split between the Jesuits and the Jansenists had never been completely
overcome, and Jansenism even today is considered a heresy by the Catholic church, albeit Pascal’s Pensées
and Provincial Letters did have a great impact on the Pope Innocent XI's critique of Jesuits’ casuistry. Beyond
any doubt, the Jansenists did succeed in exposing the negative side of the Society of Jesus and forced the Pope
to criticize it. That reconciliation between the Jesuits and their main opponent, Pascal, occurred not in real life
but in the realm of Cather’s novel, evidencing the highly providential sense of history to which her hagiographic
narrative conforms and its yearning for eventual justice for all those who were mistreated in their earthly lives.
55
Although the sin of acedia, or discouragement (by which Father Latour is often tempted), is considered
by the Catholic church one of the seven deadly sins, it perfectly fits the mood of Pascalian Pensées which are
filled with despair engendered by the precarious position of man in the universe: man is constantly teetering on
the brink of abyss, nothingness, and only faith and God’s grace can give him or her consolation and restore
inner peace.
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dreams of one’s youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly
success can take the place of that. (Cather, Archbishop 435)
Latour and Vaillant willingly come to the New World's wilderness, leaving behind
their loved ones in France, eventually falling in love with the arid lands of the Southwest and
contributing greatly to the restoration and expansion of Roman Catholicism in the New
World. In accordance with the hagiographic genre, their images are beautified and idealized,
all obstacles seem overcome56 and they both die surrounded by followers and admirers. Their
glorious deaths and burials evidence that their lives were not spent in vain  the old Spanish
mission churches restored by Father Vaillant, the cathedral built by Father Latour, and, which
is the most important the Church, the community of believers, built and expanded by both
of them—witness that their lives resemble the “Christian narratives of triumph” (P. Brown
65), the narratives about lives of holy men. The hagiographic mode of the narrative is also
emphasized by Cather's constant allusions to the lives of the renowned Christian saints and to
the concept of God’s grace so prominent in both Augustine’s and Pascal‘s works.57
MARIAN SYMBOLISM IN DEATH COMES FOR THE
ARCHBISHOP AND SHADOWS ON THE ROCK
An image of a female goddess who rules the universe has been present in Cather’s
writing since the beginning of her literary career. In her early nonfiction, the goddess appears
as “Our Lady of Beauty,” or “Our Lady of Genius,” the merciless and extremely capricious
and selective Muse who shows her affection only to those whose gift is God-given; all the
others are discarded, for, as Cather puts it, “Our Lady of Genius has no care for the prayer
and groans of mortals, nor for their hetacombs sweet of savor… She favors no one nation or
clime. She takes one from millions, and when she gives herself unto a man it is without his
56
It is worth noting that this stylized hagiographic narrative is written by a writer who contributed much to
the development of American modernism (one of the modernist writers who is greatly indebted to Cather is
Faulkner — on Cather’s influence on Faulkner, see Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Axes: Willa Cather and William
Faulkner (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007), and there are many gaps in it. Also, some Father Latour’s
opponents, for example Father Martinez, who is supposed to embody a distinct Dantesque sin of lust, are
attributed with complexity and ambiguity which does not fit hagiographic one-dimensional characters, as is
seen in the narrator’s condemning and simultaneously admiring attitude toward the rebellious Mexican priest.
57
It is no accident that Augustine’s and Pascal’s names are placed side by side in the novel (Cather,
Archbishop 444), for Pascal and other members of the Jansenist sect he belonged to called themselves
Augustinians, the followers of St. Augustine and the keepers of moral purity of the early church. It implies the
continuation of the Augustinian tradition in French literature and links Cather’s novel to it as well.
78
will or that of his fellows, and he pays for it, dear heaven, he pays!” (Kingdom 386). Later,
the goddess acquires the traits of a pagan female deity of nature (for example, in O Pioneers!
and My Antonia she has some affinity with Ceres, the Roman goddess of fertility), the benign
mother. In A Lost Lady, she is simultaneously presented as Aphrodite and the Virgin Mary,
which implies the interconnection not only between these two cults but also hints at the
evolution of the cult of Mary from the cult of pagan goddesses. In Archbishop and Shadows,
the Virgin Mary‘s presence is much more conspicuous and unconcealed when compared to
Cather’s previous works. This presence greatly contributes to the atmosphere of miracles
within these novels, and helps to signify the importance of this cult for the majority of
Christians (in Archbishop, there is even a reference to the cult of Mary in the Eastern
Orthodox Church58). Marian iconography in the New World is presented as a continuation of
the long iconographic tradition, to which both renowned and folk artists contributed, as well
as Marian symbolism is used to fashion the theme of the Holy Family and the Heavenly City.
As Jacques Bur points out in How to Understand the Virgin Mary, “While Holy
Scripture does not speak of a cult of Mary on the part of the earliest Church, it does provide
the foundations for the cult of Mary which was to arise later” (113). He also clarifies that the
main reason for the delay in this cult compared, for example, to the cult of saints “can be
explained by a concern to avoid the Christian people making Mary a new goddess” (115).
The extensive development of the cult of Mary begins after 431A.D. when the Council of
Ephesus59 recognized Mary’s dignity as the mother of God and becomes “excessively
exuberant” (Bur 115) in the sixteenth century, playing an indispensable role in the Counter
Reformation.
58
In Chapter 2, “Hidden Water,” of Book I, Father Latour reflects on the wooden figure of the Virgin in
the house of an old Mexican, Benito: “The wooden Virgin was a sorrowing mother indeed, — long and stiff and
severe, very long from the neck to the waist, even longer from waist to feet, like some of the rigid mosaics of
the Eastern Church” (Cather, Archbishop 292). The affinity between Mexican and Eastern Orthodox
iconography of the Virgin Mary is quite puzzling and can be understood only if the reader recalls the picture of
St. Francis by El Greco mentioned in the prologue. El Greco (his nickname implies his Greek origin) came to
Spain after the collapse of the Byzantine empire and transplanted to this country (and to the West in general, for
he lived and worked in Venice and Rome as well) the Byzantine iconographic style. In Cather's narrative, it is
one of the numerous examples of a dialogue between different cultures, of the cultural transmission and
intermingling, in which Cather was so interested.
59
It is worth noting that in the city of Ephesus, located on the Aegean coast, Artemis, the supreme virgin
nature goddess, had one of the most famous cults in the world. For this comment, I am indebted to Prof. J. A.
Smith.
79
Although the veneration of Mary was widespread in all the Catholic countries, it
became especially popular in France due to the fact that the nation had been dedicated to the
Virgin Mary, an image that found its excellent symbolic expression in the flag of the French
King with its memorable design of the lily flower (fleur-de-lis).60 Thus in France Marian
symbolism had acquired both religious, regal, and patriotic connotations, since the Virgin
Mary had been considered the patroness of France. For Cather’s French Catholic priests,
therefore, the Virgin Mary is not only the merciful mother of Christ but also a beautiful
reminder of France, the motherland.
It is apt to note that in the Catholic tradition Mary has been given the title “Queen of
Heaven,” for she is the Queen Mother of Jesus, the King of Heaven. At the same time, it is
apparent that Mary’s regal qualities (which had played such a prominent role in A Lost Lady,
for example) are muffled in Archbishop where her closeness to and association with the poor
and the needy, the conquered and the dispossessed are stressed. In this novel, the Virgin
Mary intercedes at least twice on the behalf of two poor Mexican women, Magdalena and
Sada, not to mention Her benign intercession for the benefit of both the Indians and the
Mexicans in the scene of her apparition as Our Lady of Guadalupe to a poor Indian, Juan
Diego.
It seems that in Archbishop Cather (long before the recognition of Our Lady of
Guadalupe as Patroness of the Americas61), aware of the importance of Marian symbolism
for the Catholics of the Old World, employs this symbolism primarily in order to project it on
the New World, especially on the Indian converts to Catholicism, who, due to the apparition
of the Virgin of Guadalupe 62 to Juan Diego (a humble illiterate Indian recently converted to
Christianity) in 1531, were considered to be under Mary’s protection by the Catholic
church. In Archbishop, the legend of Mary’s apparition to Juan Diego and a miraculous
imprint of her image on the Indian’s tilma is rendered by Padre Escolastico Herrera, an old
60
I am also thankful to Prof. J.A. Smith for the following comment: the lily is a flower that is all womb,
for it enfolds a hallow cavity (where the spirit is conceived). The lily is Mary.
61
62
In 1946, Pope Pius XII declared Our Lady of Guadalupe “Patroness of the Americas.”
As Moffitt says, “the site of the Spanish [first] apparition was, in fact, on a river named Guadalupe; the
name itself derives from an odd melding of Arabic and Latin, wadi-al-lupus, which may be translated as “Wolf
Creek” (50).
80
Mexican priest, a recent pilgrim to Mary's shrine in Mexico City. By stressing all the ethnic
details (i.e. the Indian to whom Mary talks in his native language, the Mexican priest who
tells this story, Mary’s bidding to build Her shrine at the place of Her apparition and call it
“the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, after Her dear shrine of that name in Spain” [Cather,
Archbishop 305]), the narrator implies the healing and consolidating effects that this legend,
as well as the image of the Mother of God, has had for both the Indians and the Mexicans
who were initially mistreated by the Catholic church and eventually later accepted by the
same church as brothers and sisters united by faith in the same God.
Although John Moffitt undermines the credibility of the story of the Virgin Mary of
Guadalupe's apparition to Juan Diego in Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Painting, the Legend
and the Reality, and states that “the fundamental tilma story had been, as it were, concocted
in Mexico out of whole cloth, first by [Miguel] Sanches in 1648 and then by [ Luis] Laso [de
la Vega] in 1649...” (109), he, nevertheless, admits the paramount importance of this cult for
both the Spanish conquistadores, most of whom derived from the province of “Extremadura
in west-central Spain” (50) and for the conquered Indians. Paradoxically, from the historical
standpoint, the Spanish invasion of the New World had some affinity with the Moors’
invasion of Spain,63 and in Cather’s hagiographic narrative (in which time is rather
irrelevant), the Moorish occupation of Spain, the Spanish conquistadors’ invasion of the New
World, and "the American occupation” (Archbishop 389) of the Southwest echo each other.
In the past, the conquistadors themselves were a part of a conquered people, the Catholic
nation, whose lands were almost entirely taken by the Muslims. In the fourteenth century,
King Alfonso XI, who “defeated an Arab army at the battle of the Salado River (October 24,
1340), had ordered to be built for Her [Our Lady of Guadalupe] as a token of his gratitude a
new and grandiose monastery “in Extremadura” (Moffitt 50). Due to the invoking of and
prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe before the battle, the Spanish king was able to defeat his
enemies and free his people from Muslim bondage. In the legend of the apparition of Our
63
In Archbishop, Father Vaillant reflects on the Moorish invasion of Spain in Chapter 4, “A Bell and a
Miracle,” of Book I, rendering the story of the Angelus, a miraculous bell, which was made of the precious
and the baser metals in 1356 and played a significant role in defeating the Moors and lifting the siege of some
Spanish city. The story of the Angelus and its amazing silver tone is furthered by Father Latour who considers it
a proof of inevitable (and beneficial) cultural dialogue between enemies: despite the atrocities of war, the
Spaniards did learn from the Moors to work silver (303).
81
Lady of Guadalupe in the New World, Mary acts very similarly, for she sides with the
conquered people, the Indians, and helps them overcome the feeling of abandonment and
obscurity.
The Mexican priest Padre Escolastico, who renders the legend of Our Lady of
Guadalupe’s apparition to Father Latour and Father Vaillant, presents the French priests
“with little medals he [has] brought from the shrine; on one side a relief of the miraculous
portrait, on the other an inscription: Non fecit taliter omni nationi. (She hath not dealt so with
any nation.)” (Cather, Archbishop 306). Although the inscription implies that Our Lady of
Guadalupe favors the Mexican nation and thus consolidates the Mexican national identity,
Father Vaillant gives this legend a much broader interpretation  it is precious to all the
Catholics in New Mexico as well as in the entire New World, for it is “the one absolutely
authenticated appearance of the Blessed Virgin in the New World, and a witness of her
affection for her Church on this continent” (Cather, Archbishop 304).
In Archbishop, Mary is presented as a Co-Mediatrix between believers and Jesus
Christ, who in His turn is a Mediator between believers and God. Her representations and
images, as well as the prayers made to Her, strengthen faith and produce miracles. The
French priests constantly talk about miracles, live in anticipation of them, and although the
theme itself alludes to the New Testament, the original source, it echoes Pascalian Pensées as
well, as seen in these lines:
Miracles, a mainstay of religion: they have set apart the Jews, they have set apart
Christians, saints, the innocent, and the true believers…If the cooling of charity
leaves the Church almost without true worshipers, miracles will rouse them.
These are the final efforts of grace. (138)
In Chapter 2, “December Night,” of Book VII of Archbishop, Latour experiences the
miracle of the Virgin Mary’s intervention in his life: he is able to overcome the bout of
depression he plunged into as a result of Vaillant's departure for Colorado due to his
encounter with Sada, a Mexican bondswoman, enslaved by a Puritan family. Thanks to her
interminable prayers to the Virgin Mary, Sada was able to firmly keep her hope of being
redeemed and of saving both her faith and humaneness. This encounter is beneficial for both
characters: while Latour overcomes discouragement, Sada is able to find shelter within the
church, the place of safety and protection she longs for, the place where the homeless woman
feels at home. The idea of the church as home for all believers (especially for those who were
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put down by the mighty and the powerful) is supported in the narrative by Jesus’ words,
which flash into the Bishop’s mind while he kneels beside “the most enduring bond-woman”:
“He who brought it [the Kingdom of Heaven] had said, 'and whosoever is least among you,
the same shall be first in the Kingdom of Heaven.' This church was Sada’s house, and he was
a servant in it” (Cather, Archbishop 409).
Both the Catholic priest and the enslaved woman experience the miraculous presence
of the Mother of Jesus in this scene; both of them pray to Her and find themselves under Her
protection. The motif of Mary’s protection is one of the most important in Archbishop,
especially when one considers that words “Auspice Maria!” meaning ‘Watch over me,
Mary,” or “In Mary’s care,” are engraved on Father Vaillant’s signet-ring which, after his
death, will be worn by his friend, Archbishop Latour. These words also appear as the novel’s
epigraph, implying that the concept of the Virgin Mary as the benefactress, the benign
mother, will be employed in the narrative as the key concept, of the same or almost of the
same importance as the concept of Jesus and His church.
It is worth noting that the first wooden figure of the Virgin Mary appears at Aqua
Secreta, the Mexican settlement depicted in Chapter 2, “Hidden Water,” of Book I, although
one could argue that the principal wooden figure in the novel is the statue of the Virgin Mary
in the Lady Chapel of the Cathedral of St. Francis. Father Latour and Sada kneel before the
statue, pray to the Holy Mother, and Sada even kisses the statue's feet. Both of them feel that
“there was a Kind Woman in Heaven,” that only “a Woman, divine, could know all”
(Archbishop 409) about suffering. It seems that in Archbishop, the male divine principle is
constantly enhanced and supported by the female divine principle. Marian symbolism implies
not only the importance of the concept of the benign and merciful mother for different
peoples and cultures but also, as Stout says in Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration,
and the Tradition of Austin and Cather, “a dual gendering” of the West and the Southwest64
(41).
Marian symbolism is also prominent in Shadows on the Rock (1931), the second
Catholic novel in Cather’s corpus, as emphasized by Murphy and Stouck in their co-authored
64
I agree with Stout’s opinion that both Cather’s and Mary Austin’s writings evidence not an attempt to
feminize the West and the Southwest but rather to incorporate and to balance "what we are accustomed to
thinking of as the masculine and the feminine” (Picturing a Different West 41).
83
“Historical Essay” to the scholarly edition of the novel: “Both novels are devotional to a
significant extent, especially with reference to the Virgin…”(337). In this novel, Cather plays
on the double nature of the Virgin Mary: she is associated with virginity, purity, chastity, and
motherhood. The theme of Mary as the Virgin is linked to the theme of Catholic nuns, who
arrive in Quebec city as the Hospitallers, the healing sisters, and to the story of the recluse of
Quebec, Jeanne Le Ber, who puts on herself all the sins of the world and constantly prays for
sinners.
In addition, Mary’s motherly, benign essence is also constantly emphasized
throughout the narrative. The theme of the Holy Family and the Blessed Mother of Jesus, so
prominent in Archbishop, is furthered in Shadows by the depiction of Euclide Auclair’s
household which perfectly renders the atmosphere of love and devotion associated with the
Holy Family, especially if the reader takes note of the sacred symbolism of Jacques, a
prostitute’s son. Jacques is protected and sheltered by Cecile, Auclair’s daughter, who is
destined to fulfill the role of the mother of Canadians, the inhabitants of New France in the
New World.
Although some critics tend to discern imperial implications of Cather’s novels
(especially in Archbishop, which can be read as Pax Americana, the new American order)
and are able to support an imperialist viewpoint of Cather's works through the citing of
seemingly convincing quotations from her novels,65 Shadows seems to prove clearly that
Cather was not a Kiplingesque imperialist. Rather, her vision of history is complex, and her
narrative is multilayered and multivoiced.66
In Archbishop, the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi towers over Santa Fe, while in
Shadows the Church of Notre Dame de la Victoire is the most conspicuous building in the
65
For instance, Joseph R. Urgo states that “Death Comes for the Archbishop is a further projection of the
idea of American empire” (172) and interprets the entire prologue to the novel as the transmission “of the locus
of the Western civilization from Europe and Rome to the United States” (171).
66
Undoubtedly, Cather admired the imperial ideal (which is obvious in her eventual infatuation with the
Roman empire and its main singer, Virgil); she depicted the Spaniards (in this sense, Francisco de Coronado
was her favorite Spanish explorer and conquistador), who created New Spain, with a great amount of
veneration, as well as the French, who contributed to the establishment of New France in the New World.
Apparently, she attempted to render the mystique of the imperial cultures, their craving to expand, to spread, to
bring their banners, languages, and traditions to unknown territories. But, at the same time, she was perceptive
(which is especially obvious in Archbishop) about the dilemma of the conquered and the dispossessed.
84
city. The church is named after the Blessed Mother of Christ “in recognition of the protection
which Our Lady had offered Quebec” in the hour of danger when “the Count [de Frontenac]
had driven off Sir William Phips’s besieging fleet” (Cather, Shadows 504). On a number of
occasions, the narrator refers to the atrocities committed by the British against the French in
North America, which put into question Cather’s Anglo-American bias. Yet, if one
remembers that in both of these novels Cather follows in the footsteps of St. Augustine, he or
she may recall another concept — the Christian utopia of the Heavenly City. It seems that in
both Archbishop and Shadows Cather longs not for a Pax Americana but for the Heavenly
City, the New Jerusalem, so dear to St. Augustine, the author of The City of God, and myriad
other Christian writers. The vision of Jerusalem, the Heavenly City, emerges in Archbishop
in Chapter 4, “A Bell and a Miracle,” of Book I, in which the Angelus's silver tone reminds
Father Latour of Jerusalem: “Before the nine strokes were done Rome faded, and behind it
he sensed something Eastern, with palm trees, — Jerusalem, perhaps, though he never been
there” (Cather, Archbishop 302). In addition, the vision resurfaces in Shadows in Chapter 3,
Book II, “Cecile and Jacques.” When observing the Church of Notre Dame de la Victoire
from outside and inside, Cecile muses that:
The Kingdom of Heaven looked exactly like this from the outside and was
surrounded by just such walls; that this altar was a reproduction of it, made in
France by people who knew; just as the statues of the saints and of the Holy
Family were portraits. She had taught Jacques to believe the same thing, and it
was very comforting to them both to know just what Heaven looked like, strong
and unassailable, wherever it was set among the stars. (Cather, Shadows 505)
Marian symbolism, becoming the main link between the two novels, functions on
multiple levels within them. The figure of the Virgin Mary as the benign mother and
benefactress has both an aesthetic and ethical dimension: on the one side, it is a sacred
religious image endowed with healing, protecting and unifying power, but on the other side,
it is a piece of art produced by an anonymous folk artist, as we see in “Hidden Water”
where the wooden figure of Mary, kept in a Mexican house, evidences a continuation of the
long tradition of Marian iconography in the New World. In both novels, Marian symbolism
is interconnected with symbolism of the Holy Family and alludes to the Heavenly City, the
Christian utopia, which is emphasized by the depiction of the Cathedral of St. Francis in
Archbishop and the Church of Notre Dame de la Victoire in Shadows. Both of these
churches are not only architectural masterpieces but also (and first of all) the communities of
85
believers, the holy places where they feel at home, which conforms to St. Augustine’s idea
that a real church should embody the ideal of the Heavenly City on earth.
86
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION
This study was initially conceived as a research project on the Platonic tradition in
Cather's writing, specifically because the close relationship between Platonism and Cather's
fiction and nonfiction had not received a great deal of critical attention. A close reading of
Cather's works led me to link the Platonic tradition with the Christian tradition and to focus
on their interactions, convergences, and divergences in Cather's writing. As a result of a close
analysis of Cather's work, I believe that Platonism and Christianity played the most
significant role in fashioning Cather's idealism, her talent for seeing beyond everyday life,
and her ability to create a literary universe composed of horizontal and immanent dimensions
as well as vertical and transcendent ones.
Cather's interest in Platonism was engendered by her classical background and
reading preferences, which included Shakespeare, British and American romantics (i.e.
Keats, Shelley, Poe, and Emerson), Victorian cultural critics (i.e. Carlyle, Ruskin, and Pater),
and French symbolists (i.e. Verlaine and Mallarme), who were especially conspicuous in
drawing from the Platonic tradition. Despite Cather's initial critique of Plato, as evinced in
her early criticism (which could have been a repercussion of Nietzsche's austere attacks on
Plato as a representative of cold rationalism and intellectualism67), she began eventually to
gravitate to his philosophy, drawing from its main ideas, imagery, and symbols, such as the
allegory of the cave, the symbolism of light, the immortality of the soul, the concept of twolevel reality, the reality of becoming and being, or appearances and Forms. Cather's favorite
characters always embark upon the pilgrimage to the real world, the world of being — the
ideal world, the celestial world of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.
67
Notwithstanding his attacks on Platonism, Nietzsche did acknowledge that “the charm of the Platonic
mode of thought, which was an aristocratic mode, consisted precisely in resistance to obvious senseevidence—perhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger and more fastidious senses than our
contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of them: and this by means
of pale, cold, grey conceptual networks which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses — the mob of the
senses, as Plato said” (Beyond Good and Evil 395-96).
87
The Platonic implications of Cather's fiction and nonfiction are especially apparent in
her early musical, dramatic, and literary criticism collected by Slote in the volume The
Kingdom of Art, a title that implies Cather's reverence for beauty, art, and artists who (as she
perpetually stresses) are similar to God in their divine creativity and whose masterpieces not
only expand the realm of beauty, but also awaken the soul of those who follow them. In The
Kingdom of Art, Cather's veneration of art and artists goes so far that she even proposes to
measure a nation's worth by its art:
...the highest end of an individual life is to create, or, at least, to see and feel
beauty,...a people who left behind it greater monuments of art was a great people;
...a people who left none was sordid and lived in vain; ... all the spiritual force of a
nation immortalizes itself with the spirit of beauty forever; ...by the decree of God
there is no better channel it can take;...a nation barren of art had built with
straw and bits of glass, had built upon the sand and should perish utterly from the
face of the earth; ...beauty and its handmaiden, art, were the only things worthy
for the serious contemplation of men, the only things which could satisfy the
"immortal longings" within them. (402)
At the same time, as emphasized throughout this study, Cather's religion of beauty
and art was in accordance with the ideals of romanticism, aestheticism, and symbolism,
which, in their turn, had also drawn on the Neoplatonic evolution of Plato's cult of Truth,
Beauty, and Goodness. While Plato undervalued artists (considering them imitators of the
imitated world of becoming) and endowed only philosophers with the gift of the ability to
awaken the soul, Plotinus and other Neoplatonists imparted the ability of envisioning the
higher Sphere to artists, and believed that they could guide their followers to it as well. With
this in mind, it seems that Keats's poetry became one of the most influential sources through
which the Platonic-Plotinian cult of beauty came to Cather's writing, since in her early
nonfiction she perpetually refers to Keats's penultimate line from “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”
“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” In addition, Cather also emulates Keats's desire to
immortalize beauty, to freeze it in time, to entomb it, and to create a sacred zone within
literature. It is hypothesized that Keats's image of entombed beauty is indebted not only to
the Elgin Marbles and some other artifacts of ancient Greece but also to Plotinus's concept of
hieroglyphic engravings on Egyptian tombs and obelisks and their highly symbolic,
suggestive qualities. Continuing in this vein, the theme of entombment and engraving
becomes one of the most prominent themes in Cather's oeuvre, as if simultaneously echoing
Keats's poetry as well as the Neoplatonic thought that permeates it. The entombment theme
88
in Cather's fiction alludes to her intention to create a monument to those who contributed to
America's greatness, to immortalize the heroic and creative people who reshaped the
American landscape in accordance with their visions and senses of beauty.
In addition, Cather relies upon Plato as an ally in her fight against realism and
naturalism and the philosophical systems (i.e. positivism and Spencerism) that have shaped
these modes of representation of reality. As evidenced in the Kingdom of Art and The Troll
Garden, Cather considers art a privileged and autonomous domain and gives it a much higher
status than science. Cather perceives artists as seers, as visionaries with a God-given gift
whose creative process is akin to ecstasy and intoxication. Such a perception may remind the
reader of Plato's ecstatic theory of creativity, which was expanded by Plotinus. According to
this Hellenistic philosopher, a real artist does not imitate reality, but gives us his visions of
the ideal world, the world of transcendence.
In her early writing (The Kingdom of Art, “The Joy of Nelly Deane”), in order to lift
the gifted and imaginative people over the common ones, Cather often alludes to the
Platonic myth of cicadas (or grasshoppers), which proves that she had known of the Platonic
dialogues firsthand, as opposed to only being exposed to them through another author's work.
Cather (not unlike Plato and Plotinus) also displays her regard for bright and distinguished
individuals and contempt for Philistines (or those who are incapable of appreciating art).
Although the conflict of “artist versus Philistine” may have come to Cather's works through
German romanticism, the conflict has the obvious Platonic-Plotinian implications, insofar as
both Plato and Plotinus made a seer, a mediator between the terrestrial and the celestial world
(in Plato's dialogues it is a philosopher, while in Plotinus's Enneads it is an artist as well),
their main hero, a guide to the realm of beauty and goodness.
The indivisibility of the ethical and the aesthetic in the Platonic-Plotinian tradition
was challenged by Pater and Wilde, British aesthetes, who were appreciative of Plato's and
Plotinus's cult of beauty but seemed to be unmoved by the Greek philosophers' ethical views.
Although Cather was indebted to Pater's aestheticism and referred to him in both her fiction
and nonfiction, she was never capable of totally divorcing aesthetics from ethics in her
writing. Her aestheticism is closer to the aesthetic moralism of Henry James, as opposed to
the pure aestheticism of Pater and Wilde. At the same time, the ethical implications of her
fiction are never directly proclaimed (she opposed a missionary art, an art with a sermon in
89
it), but rather encoded and evinced through leitmotifs, symbols, and a juxtaposition of the
opposite ethical values, as in The Troll Garden. Here, the leitmotif of money worship (or
gold worship) reverberates throughout the entire collection of stories, alluding
simultaneously to Plato's tirades against money-crazed people (The Republic), Jesus'
condemnation of worshippers of the Golden Calf, Carlyle's enraged attacks on worshippers
of Mammon, Mephistopheles' Song of the Golden Calf in Gounod’s Faust, Wagner's
revulsion against the lure of gold in The Ring of the Nibelung, and even to the gold rush in
London's Northern Tales. The money-worship motif is one of the numerous examples of
Cather's sophisticated play on the literary and cultural tradition and her obsession with
pinning down not only the origin of "this" or "that" literary motif but also its repercussions in
world culture.
Although Cather's early writing is permeated with Platonic-Plotinian ethical and
aesthetic views and the Christian church (especially the Protestant church) is often presented
as the epitome of fanaticism or superficial and insincere piety, Christian symbolism is not an
entirely foreign element to Cather's early works. When considering her affinity for
juxtaposition and her admiration for music and musicians, it should be underscored that
Cather's use of juxtaposition very often reminds the reader of the use of a counterpoint in
music. In this sense, the Christian motifs are often present, but they are more like quiet
undertones than loud overtones. Sometimes Christian symbolism is totally muffled (like in
“The Joy of Nelly Deane”) by Platonic symbolism, but it is so prominent in her other works,
such as “Jack-a-Boy” and The Kingdom of Art, that it is hard not to notice it.
It seems that Cather, aware of the importance that Christianity holds in shaping the
Western tradition, draws on some Christian motifs, but does not dare to continue further in
this vein. Her lack of continuation in this direction may stem not only from her obsession
with the cult of art and beauty and heroic and creative individuals, but also from her
hesitations about approaching the sacred theme of Christianity in her art, for many other
artists failed in their representation of it. In addition, in her early writing her personal
religious feelings do not seem as integral and secure when compared with her later novels.
Cather's religious preferences become more obvious after World War I, as evinced in
A Lost Lady and especially in her two Catholic novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop and
Shadows on the Rock. While in A Lost Lady Cather's utopia, the sacred locus on the
90
American land, is built in accordance with both pagan (classical and simultaneously Norse)
and Christian myths and has an obvious affinity with the Cavalier legend (becoming her
tribute to the South), in Archbishop and Shadows a Christian (and apparently medieval)
atmosphere dominates the narratives. The Christian utopia of the Heavenly City is visually
presented in the two churches, which tower over their surroundings — the Cathedral of St.
Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe and the Church of Notre Dame de la Victoire in Quebec City.
In Archbishop, Cather aims to join the history of the Catholic Church in America to
the great hagiographic literary tradition, specifically by constantly alluding to the lives and
works of (and about) the renowned Christian saints (i.e. St. Anthony, St. Augustine, and St.
Francis). In both of these novels, Christian ethical values (as opposed to Platonic ones), such
as piety, humbleness, and meekness, are attributed to Cather's favorite characters. These
characters strive to emulate Jesus' selflessness and His sacrificial love for mankind and to
rely on God's grace.
Also, while in Cather's early fiction her favorite characters tend to break up and
sacrifice their family ties for the sake of their art, in her later novels such family ties are
depicted with unprecedented reverence and are considered sacred. With this, it looks as if
Cather is strongly alluding to the theme of the Holy Family in world art and to the sacredness
of marriage and family in Christianity. But at the same time, the Platonic and Neoplatonic
cult of beauty is also tangible in Cather's later novels. In these novels, not only the ethical but
also the aesthetic essence of Roman Catholicism is perpetually emphasized. It is visible in
the Catholic sacramental rituals, in the beauty of Catholic architecture and images of saints
and Mary. It seems that Cather chooses to favor the Catholic iconic tradition over the
Protestant aniconic tradition because of the presence of this strong aesthetic element in
Catholicism. It also proves that Cather's surrender to Christianity, her shift “from B.C. to
A.D.,” as Lee identifies it (260), was never a total renunciation of the Platonic cult of beauty
but rather an amalgam of Platonism and Christianity.
91
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