Copyright © 1986 by the Willa Cather PioneerMemorial and Educational Foundation ISSN 0197-663X

Summer, 1986Special Literary

Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Issue

NewsletterVOLUME XXX, No. 3 Editor, Mildred R. Bennett RED CLOUD, NEBRASKA

The Dantean Journey in Cather’sMy Mortal Enemy

My Mortal Enemy presentsreaders with several difficulties,among which are extreme brevity-- this is Cather’s ultimate unfur-nished novel -- and a puzzling pro-tagonist m a woman whose cruel-ty to her husband seems inhumanand unforgivable. Also, this puzzl-ing woman is viewed indirectly andincompletely (through a bird’s eye)by a narrator who fails to under-stand her sufficiently. Louis Kron-enberg complains about the firstdifficulty, that "All bones and noflesh is never a wise method. Inthis instance Miss Cather has doneeven worse -- though she hasused very little, she has not alwaysused the bones. Significant thingsare left out, and the reader is leftnot only unsatisfied, but also puz-zled." (See Note 1) Among criticswho have tried to put flesh on thebones we can thank Harry B. Eic-horn for overlaying the skeletonthrough Myra Henshawe’s allu-sions to Shakespeare’s King Lear(which expresses her thoughts ondeath), and to Richard II and KingJohn (which contain reflections onher relationship with her uncle, onher youth, and on her decline), andthrough the implications (which Iwill indicate later) of the singing ofthe "Casta Diva" from Bellini’sNorma near the end of Part I. (SeeNote 2) The other major difficul-ties, the puzzling protagonist andour indirect and incomplete view ofher, are a bit more problematic.Narrator Nellie Birdseye’s disillu-sionment (and that of most read-ers) with Myra’s "emerging real-ism" Susan Rosowski interprets asa departure from the "simplisticromanticism of... youth." Rosow-ski’s reading attempts to explainMyra positively, as "most fully her-self in her last days." (See Note 3)

The key to this unpuzzling and self-realization of the protagonist is, Ithink, her religion, which, she ex-claims to her priest confessor, as"different from everything else; be-cause in religion seeking is find-ing." (See Note 4) My Mortal Ene-my can be viewed as an allegory ofthe apostasy of a soul -- its daysof sin, its punishment, its journeyback to God -- as viewed by a ro-mantic young woman only partiallyunderstanding it. The novel depictsa journey like the journey inDante’s Divine Comedy, and likeDante’s poem includes the confes-sional ritual, the crucifixion image,the ascent to the mountain top,and the vision of dawn.

I call Myra an apostate and ex-communicated from the Churchbecause of the significance she at-taches to breaking with her greatuncle, old John Driscoll. OswaldHenshawe’s comment to Nellie onthe day of Myra’s death is a tellingone: "It is one of her delusions thatI separated her from the Church. Inever meant to" (99). CertainlyMyra could have been married withthe blessing of the Church withouttoo much difficulty, but instead shewas married in a civil ceremonythe Church would never recognize.Myra explains, "1 went before ajustice of the peace, and marriedwithout gloves, so to speak!" (85),adding immediately afterwards,"Yes, I broke with the Churchwhen I broke with everything elseand ran away with a German free-thinker; but I believe in holy wordsand holy rites all the same." WhatMyra believed she did for love wasto cut herself off from the spirituallife of the sacraments. In her mind,and in the novel’s iconography, oldDriscoll, who withdrew his favorand made her poor, was like God.

"A poor man stinks, and God hateshim" (15) the old man warned her,for coin is the material counterpartof grace, the favor of God. Myrahad been cast out of Eden m theDriscoll home became forbiddento her, surrounded by a high ironfence behind which the Sisters ofthe Sacred" Heart paced underapple trees. Nellie’s recollection ofDriscoll’s funeral indicates thateven in her mind there is an un-canny association between Dris-coil and divinity: "Driscoll did notcome to the church; the churchwent to him .... I thought of JohnDriscoll as having ~.. been trans-lated .... straight to the greaterglory, through smoking censersand candles and stars" (18-19).

"[W]hen Love went out of thegates and gave the dare to fate"(17), as Nellie puts it, Myra’s paganlife commenced, a life filtered to usthrough romantic sensibilities. Sheseems to Nellie a dispossessedgoddess, larger than life, haughty,imperious, and extravagant; andher angry deriding laughter makesNellie shiver: "Untoward circum-stances, accidents, even disas-ters, provoked her mirth. And itwas always mirth, not hysteria;there was a spark of zest and wildhumor in it" (10). (Myra’s name issuggestive of this pagan context; itis a variant of Moira, an Irish ver-sion of Mary but also the Greekpersonification of fate.) The NewYork section of the novel is sym-

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bolized by Saint Gaudens’ great,gilded Diana atop Madison SquareGarden, seen first against a greyand then flashing "against a green-blue sky" (25, 32). As pagan moongoddess, Diana relates to Cather’spersistent moon references -- tomoonlight, being moonstruck, hawing eyes like half moons, etc.These, in turn, relate to Nellie’sidealized New York, a city like theone in "Paul’s Case," a well-groomed and impressionistic cas-tle ("[T]he snow blurred everythinga little, and the buildings on theBattery all ran together u lookedlike an enormous fortress with athousand windows. From themass, the dull gold dome of theWorld building emerged like aruddy autumn moon at twilight"[22-23]) -- a setting of Englishviolets protected in oiled paper."Here," says Nellie, "1 felt, winterbrought no desolation; it wastamed, like a polar bear lead on aleash by a beautiful lady" (25). Inthis place Myra serves love: "Myrais so fond of helping young menalong," says Oswald. "We nearlyalways have a love affair on hand"(29). However, in reality, Myra isnot without guilt feelings in helpinglove along; in the case of EwanGray, the kind of boy women takeinto jungles, and the actressEsther Sinclair, the daughter of anold and proper New England fam-ily, she is encouraging a repetitiono! her own story and admits that"very likely hell will come of it!"(31). Oswald too feeds his romanticnature through the attentions ofyoung women, and it is the gift ofone of these that reveals to Nelliethe reality behind the romanticfacade of the Henshawes’ life.(Whether or not he is unfaithful tohis wife is never established by Ca-ther.)

The high point of romance forNellie is the New Year’s party inthe Henshawes’ tastefully fur-nished apartment. The "CastaDiva" aria sung at the conclusionof this party focuses on Myra’sconflict, and she listens to it whilecrouching low with her head in herhands. It is a prayer to the moongoddess expressing Norma’s con-flict of loyalties, as priestess, be-tween religion and romantic love;her love for the Roman Pollione in-

volves giving up her religion andcountry, and as a result she ispossessive of him and fiercely jeal-ous when she discovers his un-faithfulness in an affair with ayoung virgin. The conflict betweenMyra and Oswald, the undercur-rent of which has been felt in theaffair of the topazes given Oswaldby an admiring young woman, sur-faces in the chapter immediatelyfollowing. (The duality of Part I, theromantic surface and the hell be-neath, can be encapsulated nicelyby juxtaposing the scene in whichMyra, "like a dove with its wingsfolded," stands with Oswald in thewindow (35) and the one whereNellie happens upon their passion-ate quarrel about a key ring.) Theenchanted castle collapses for theyoung girl: "and now everythingwas in ruins .... Everything aboutme seemed evil... When kindnesshas left a place where we have al-ways found it, it is like shipwreck;we drop from security into some-thing malevolent and bottomless"(51). Nellie further comments,"The air in that room had been likepoison" (52); add to this the finalimage of Myra’s scorn, when "hermouth .... seemed to curl andtwist about like a little snake" (54),and we have a clear indication ofthe hell that came of her marriage.

Part II begins as hell exposed;the Henshawes "had come on evildays" (60) and are reduced to ashabby apartment in a sprawlingWest-coast city. To Nellie, Oswaldhas the "tired face of one who hasutterly lost hope" (61), and Myralooks broken but still the rebel, herangry laughter at the human condi-tion seeming to say: "Ah-ha, I haveone more piece of evidence, onemore, against the hideous injusticeGod permits in this world!" (65) (Iam reminded here of the similarlyresentful inhabitants of /nfemo,particularly Vanni Fucci, the thiev-ing, bastard nobleman of Pistoia,who in his discontent makes an ob-scene gesture to God.) The hellishextreme of Myra’s condition is evi-dent in the heavy tramping of pa-lavery Southerners in the apart-ment overhead. In Myra’s mind,the woman of this family trans-forms into a tormenting serpent:"she has the wrinkled, white throatof an adder .... and the hard eyes

of one" (74). During her tormentMyra widens the gulf between her-self and Oswald by blaming him forher suffering: "If i were on my feet,and you laid low, I wouldn’t let yoube despised and trampled upon,"she complains.

Myra’s visit to the headland isthe turning point in this section, forit is the beginning of insight, whichis why it represents Gloucester’scliff to her. She begins to desireforgiveness, "to see this place atdawn .... That is always such aforgiving time" (73). The first stepon this journey to .forgiveness isrecognition of her sins, and in herconsternation she laments to Os-wald the very happening of theirlives together, blames their condi-tion on youthful passion when onhot nights she used to lie on thefloor and listen to the expresstrains: "It’s been the ruin of usboth. We’ve destroyed each other.I should have stayed with myuncle. It was money I needed"(75). Money has great significancefor Myra; as grace, it would haveprotected her from hellish torment:"Oh, that’s the cruelty of .beingpoor; it leaves you at the mercy ofsuch pigs! Money is a protection, acloak; it can buy one quiet, andsome sort of dignity" (68). (Thisfinal emphasis on money was anti-cipated in the New York sectionwhen Myra became impatient withthe rich Germans she was forcedto flatter for the sake of Oswald’sbusiness, and when she resented arich acquaintance for owning acarriage. Myra wished to play LadyBountiful, and could have had shenever crossed her great uncle.)

With Nellie, Myra repeatedlyvisits the headland with its solitarycedar, which definitely looks backto the tree of life at the top ofDante’s Purgatory and forward inCather’s own work to Bishop La-tour’s cruciform tree in the open-ing of Death Comes for the Arch-bishop. As her situation focuses,Myra draws closer in spirit to whatshe had abandoned along ago. Sheremembers with fondness and nowrelates to John Driscoll: "1 can feelhis savagery strengthen in me. Wethink we are so individual and somisunderstood when we are young;but the nature our strain of bloodcarries is inside there, waiting,

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Like our skeleton" (82). The Churchshe once abandoned and the sig-nificance of religion also occupyher. The process ks one of purga-tion, which a recent Catholiccatechism defines as the processof "final detachment from things ofthis world." (See Note 5) The head-land itself, rising above the sea,recalls Dante’s Mount Purgatory,rising in the southern seas, whichsinners must climb to reach theEarthly Paradise (our lost Eden)before translation through thespheres of Heavenly Paradise.

In dying away from the things ofthis world Myra recognizes thatshe and Oswald were mortal ene-mies. "People can be lovers andenemies at the same time, youknow," she tells Nellie. "We were.... A man and womandraw apartfrom that long embrace, and seewhat they have done to each other.Perhaps I can’t forgive him for theharm I did him" (88). This lastspeculation is seldom quoted bycritics, but it is one of the most im-portant sentences in the novel.While we can guess the lady Myrawould have become had shestayed in grace and inherited theDriscoll fortune, the heroic poten-tial ruined in Oswald is less obvi-ous, although it is suggested inNellie’s reflection on the day of thegreat Henshawe rupture in NewYork: "1 felt that his life had notsuited him; that he possessedsome kind of courage and forcewhich slept, which in another sortof world might have asserted them-selves brilliantly. I thought heought to have been a soldier or anexplorer" (52).

Purgatory proper in the Danteanjourney begins with the sacramentof Penance and ends with purifica-tion on the mountaintop, whereDante confesses to Beatrice his er-ror, his straying from spiritual toworldly pursuits, and where Matil-da dips him in and makes him sipthe waters of Lethe, which dis-solves his feelings of guilt. Thissame process is present in Ca-ther’s novel. The long visits of Fa-ther Fay are spiritual consultationsculminating in confession of sins,and it is after one of these encoun-ters that Myra’s soul utters thechilling question: "Why must I dielike this, alone with my morta

enemy?" (95), an enemy variouslyidentified as Oswald, the object ofMyra’s passion; as Myra’s passion-ate nature; and, lately by MerrillSkaggs, as Nellie, the youthful re-flection of Myra. In Dante’s poem,the three steps through PurgatoryGate symbolize confession, contri-tion, and gratitude for God’smercy; and the Angel Guardian,who represents the priest con-fessor, carries two keys, one ~n-dicating his consideration of thesinner’s worthiness and the other,the power of absolution, the powerto restore the soul to grace. In re-ceiving the Eucharist, which in theCatholic tradition is the receivingof the Body and Blood of Christ,Myra is fully restoredto grace, ifnot fully purged for her s~ns, whenshe makes her final journey to thetop of the headland to die at dawnwhile clutching the crucifix. Myrahas equated this dawning with thekind of purification Dante experi-ences on the mountaintop:

[Dawn] is always such a for-giving time. When that firstcold, bright streak comesover the water, it’s as if allour sins were pardoned; as ifthe sky leaned over the earthand kissed it and gave it ab-solution. You know how thegreat sinners always camehome to die in some religioushouse, and the abbot or theabbess went out and re-ceived them with a kiss? (73)

The end of Dante’s journey islight, light within the soul as well aslight striking the eye. The experi-ence is one of calmness, whichflows from harmony with God, andfrom such harmony comes under-standing:

¯ ¯. as I grew worthier to see,the more I looked, the moreunchanging semblance ap-peared to change with everychange in me. (See Note 6)The youthful priest’s comment is

a summary of Myra’s story: "1 won-der whether some of the saints ofthe early Church weren’t a gooddeal like her. She’s not at all mod-ern in her make-up, is she?" (93)Put her accomplishment, her at-tempt to comprehend the sacrificeof Christ through her own suffer-ing, next to Oswald’s final words to

Nellie, and one can begin to fa-thom why Myra seemed so unfeel-ing when she grasped the crucifixfrom Nellie. Perhaps this actionand her uttering the truth about hermarriage were unfeeling. Willa Ca-ther is asking us here to considersalvation as a drift away from thethings of the world. Early in thebook Nellie comments that Myra’s"chief extravagance was in caringfor so many people and in caringfor them so much" (43). Myra’send is a drift away from humanityand toward God. The direction cer-tainly opposes modern sociologi-cally-based theologie,~, but it is,nonetheless, I think, positive withinCather’s context. But Myra’saccomplishment is undercut byher husband’s blindness and, in asense, indicates his unworthinessof her. He prefers his memory ofher youth to the character, like .thelines on aged faces, gainedthrough experience: "These lastyears it’s seemed to me that I wasnursing the mother of the girl whoran away with me," he tells Nellieafter his wife’s cremation. "Noth-ing ever took that girl from me. Shewas a wild, lovely creative .... Iwish you could have seen herthen" (104).

I admit being puzzled by thisnovel’s several ironies. I sense ten-sion between what appears to beChristian service to Myra on Os-wald’s part and the socially cruel,vertical mysticism of her conver-sion. I am reminded in Myra of thebitter taste of herbs Godfrey St.Peter associates with the conven-tionally saintly Augusta in The Pro-fessor’s House, but the bitternessin My Mortal Enemy lingers, anaftertaste of hostility and impa-tience for Myra. Nevertheless,Myra is a heroine, a difficult one,like Electra and Antigone.

m John J. Murphy(Paper presented for "The Pass-

ing Show" Panel Discussion at the31st Annual Spring Conference,May 3, 1986.)

Notes1. Originally published in the

New York Times Book Review, 24October 1926, p. 2, Kronenberg-er’s review is reprinted in CriticalEssays on Willa Cather, ed. John J.Murphy (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984),pp. 228-30.

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2. The Eichorn essay, reprintedin Critical Essays on Willa Cather,pp. 230-43, appeared originally inColby Library Quarterly, 10 (Sep-tember 1973) 121-38. Richard Gi-annone, in Music in Willa Cather’sFiction (Lincoln: University of Ne-braska Press, 1968), also exploresthe Norma and other musical refer-ences.

3. Susan J. Rosowski, "Narra-tive Techniques in Cather’s MyMortal Enemy," Journal of Narra-tive Techniques, 8 (1978), 144,145, 147.

4. My Mortal Enemy (New York:Vintage Books, 1954), p. 94. Sub-sequent quotations are from thisedition.

5. Herbert McCabe, The Teach-ing of the Catholic Church: A NewCatechism of Christian Doctrine(London: Catholic Truth Society,1985), p. 46.

6. Paradise, trans. John Ciardi(New York: New American Library,1970), XXXIII, 112-114.

Nellie BirdseyeIn considering Willa Cather’s

most difficult and defurniturednoveL, My Mortal Enemy, a readermust begin by dealing with the cen-tral issue the title focuses. Who isthe mortal enemy Myra names inher murmured protest at the end ofher life? "1 could bear to suffer...so many have suffered. But whymust it be like this? I have not de-served it. I. have been true in friend-ship; I have faithfully nursed othersin sickness .... Why must I die likethis, alone with my mortal ene-my?" (95). In answering Myra’squestion, readers normally dividebetween those who hear Myra ac-cusing her husband Oswald ofbeing her mortal enemy, and thosewho assume she more bitterly ac-cuses herself. Some others haveoccasionally assumed Myra has inmind something more abstract --her diseased body, for example,her hatefulness, or the aging proc-ess. A third presence in the room,however, is the narrator NellieBirdseye, who reports this speechto us, the readers. The argument ofthis paper will be that Nellie Birds-eye is also a prime candidate formortal enemy, when one pondersMyra’s comment. Nellie functions,as so many central characters inCather’s fiction do, as an embodi-ment of opposite qualities. In thisnovel, she also serves as recorderof events, dictator of their apparentimportance, and destructive force.

Susan Rosowski has alreadydemonstrated that Nellie’s point ofview is an important considerationwhen untangling this intricate

tale. [1] To understand that in-tricacy, one must first consider hername. Nellie may remind some ofEmily Bronte’s narrator Nelly Dean[2], while others think of James’The Bostonians when they registerMiss Birdseye. Still others maythink merely of a little Nell, aneverywoman, against whom tomeasure Myra’s larger-than-life,mythic dimensions. But certainlyBirdseye reminds us that Nellie, asnarrator, passes us informationdistinctly tinted by her own vision.We also realize, in passing, thatbirds see from only one eye at atime -- with less broad synthesisor coherence than humans arethought to achieve.

The first scene between Myraand Nellie is crucial. Before thetwo actually meet, Myra has been"the theme of the most interesting,indeed the only interesting, storiesthat were told in our family..." (1).As the only interesting subject inNellie’s constricted small-townworld, Myra suggests all the gla-mor for which Nellie longs. Yet assoon as Myra is introduced on thefirst page, we spot our first inter-esting discrepancies. It is on such ’discrepancies that this interpreta-tion must be built. And hereNellie’s Aunt Lydia refers to ourostensibly central figure as MyraDriscol/, the princess; to Nellie, onthe other hand, she is always Mrs.Myra or Myra Henshawe m thequeen.

Nellie has grown up hearinghometown stories of how Myra, afairytale princess, defied the

wicked king, her guardian, tomarry a forbidden but handsomeprince. [3] The old Driscoll estatein town seemed to childish Nellie"under a spell, like the SleepingBeauty’s palace; it had been in atrance, or lain in its flowers like abeautiful corpse, ever since thatwinter night when Love went out ofthe gates and gave the dare toFate" (17). The last overwroughtromantic phrase suggests Nellie’sage when she, as an adolescent,first meets the Henshawes. Whatshe wants at that moment is to findthat they have lived "happily everafter." What she hears instead isthat they were merely "As happyas most people" (17). She findsthat more accurate account dis-heartening because "the verypoint of their story was that theyshould be much happier than otherpeople" (17). For Nellie, the crucialpart of their story is not their dra-matic romance but their magicmarriage. As a would-be memberof their wedding, Nellie initiallyseems to be in love with the Hen-shawes as a unit, and with everyaspect of the Henshawes’ marriedlife. It is to a happy Henshawe cou-ple that Nellie hopes to relate.

Nellie’s first account of Myra ap-pears to emphasize the differ-ences between the two of them. Attheir first encounter, Myra is 45,plump, attractive, peremptory, andcruel, while Nellie describes her-self as 15, young, shy, vulnerable,and eager to make contact. Nelliewants Myra to like her, while Myraseems sporadically caustic andjudgmental about Nellie. We natur-ally take Nellie’s word for it, atleast through the first couple ofreadings. But sooner or later weremember how much important in-formation Cather compacts in theopening sentences of her works. Inthis novel’s opening line, the firstwork is I, and the first person pro-noun appears in the first sentencean extraordinary four times. Thisopening signal suggests that theactual -- if disguised m concernof My Mortal Enemy is the speakerwho shapes the tale; and a majorconcern of the Birdseye observeris herself, especially herself inrelation to the Henshawes.

.The second crucial fact is thatMyra first glimpses Nellie in a

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mirror, not face to face. Nellie tellsUS,

She must have heard me, andglancing up, she saw my re-flection in a mirror; she putdown the guitar, rose, andstood to await my approach.She stood markedly andpointedly still, with her shoul-ders back and her head lifted,as if to remind me that it wasmy business to get to her asquickly as possible and pre-sent myself as best I could.(5)

Several interpretations suggestthemselves after this passage. Forexample, when Myra (or mira)glances in a mirror, what she seesis Nellie. Thus, Nellie is Myra’smirror image w both her duplicateand her opposite. Either may beseen as a psychological projectionof the other. Or one might say thatin their defining scene, Nellie isseen obliquely, not directly. Or fur-ther, the first Nellie to be seen isnot the real woman but rather anillusion; one must look elsewhereto find the real Nell. These possibil-ities suggest in turn that any con-clusions about the two womenmust reflect both their similaritiesand their opposition.

Ten years later, Nellie arrives onthe scene to hold Myra’s head be-tween her hands, "making a framefor her face" (62). From the firstscene, however, Nellie’s impera-tive business as both guest andnarrator is to get her eyes off themirror, where she is also looking,and to get to Myra as quickly aspossible. We are invited to ask our-selves, from this point on, how wellshe goes about that framing busi-ness. Or rather, in how many waysdoes Nellie "frame" Myra?

It soon becomes a matter of in-terest that Nellie’s vision is calledinto question by Nellie’s own ac-count. She says that she first seesMyra from a great distance, "at thefar end of the parlour." She addsthat her first reaction was bewil-derment (5) and her first sensation:"1 felt quite overpowered by her --and stupid, hopelessly clumsy andstupid" (7). She soon adds, "1 felt Ididn’t have half a chan ce with her;her charming, fluent voice, herclear light enunciation bewilderedme... I was fascinated, but very

ill at ease" (7). In other words,Nellie repeatedly stresses her be-wilderment and therefore calls intoquestion her own account of theirfirst exposure to each other. Sherepeatedly reminds us that she isbefuddled, vulnerable, defensive,and insecure. It is certainly nowonder that when Oswald appearsshe turns to him with relief, andsoon thereafter seems "moon-struck". Nellie’s name, by the way,derives from such names as Elea-nor, which are associated with themoon, the variable or inconstantfeminine power.

When Nellie goes to visit theHenshawes in New York at Christ-mas, she is chaperoned by "theblurred, taken-for-granted image ofmy aunt that I saw every day" (43).But it is not merely the representa-tive of the homefolks whose imageis blurred. Nellie explains, "1 wasstraining my eyes to catch, throughthe fine, reluctant snow, my firstglimpse of the city .... The snowblurred everything a little, and thebuildings on the Battery all ran to-gether .... "

Nellie’s vision is indeed blurred,for she is thoroughly moonstruck,as Myra observes. In fact, only themost dangerously distorted visioncould experience winter in NewYork City as a thoroughly tem~)er-ate condition that "brought nodesolation; it was tamed, like apolar bear led on a leash by abeautiful lady" (25). But to eu-phoric young Nellie, New York’sMadison Square "seemed to meso neat, after the raggedness ofour Western cities; so protected bygood manners and courtesy B likean open-air drawing room" (24).When the weather clears, how-ever, Nellie’s vision does not. Asthey step out of their hotel the nextmorning, Nellie remembers that"the sun shone blindingly on thesnow-covered park" (32).

Repeatedly in the first half of thebook, then, Nellie’s perception ofthe basic facts are quietly under-mined by our doubts about theclarity of her vision. Those doubtsaffect not only the moonglow of thehappy scenes but also the terror ofthe angry ones. Nellie, in short, notonly exaggerates Myra’s magic butalso her malice. So in a roomwhere Myra, with justice, is thor-

oughly furious with her philander-ing husband, Nellie reports,

What I felt was fear; I wasafraid to look or speak ormove. Everything about meseemed evil. When kindnesshas left people, even for afew moments, we becomeafraid of them, as if theirreason had left them. When ithas left a place where wehave always found it, it is likeshipwreck; we drop from se-curity into something malev-olent and bottomless. (51)

This is, perhaps, a caution weshould remember. In any case, thisreaction of Nellie’~ seems as ex-cessive as any of Myra’s dramat-ics. Nellie herself seems to playthe naive Snow White, helpless todigest the wicked queen’s poi-soned apple of knowledge.

Once we understand the patternof visual distortion, we can alsosee that Nellie, in longing for thelife she imagines Myra to. live,begins to appropriate Myra’s expe-rience (including her romance).Finally she tries to duplicate orsupersede Myra herself. Even inher first fumbling encounter, shehas noticed that Myra was "notaller than I" (6). Though thirtyyears separate them, Nellie, hav-ing recognized in herself a similarphysical type, promptly falls in lovewith Myra’s glamorous friendssuch as Madame Modjeska. Whenshe falls in love with Myra’s mar-riage, the emotion necessarily in-volves loving Myra’s husband aswell. In fact, if Nellie is uncon-sciously presenting herself as anearnest duplicate of Myra, andtherefore incidentally as an unreli-able narrator, it is of some interestthat she describes Myra, whomshe duplicates, as one whose chiefextravagance lay. "in caring for somany people and in caring forthem so much" (43).

Soon after Nellie arrives in theCalifornia boarding house the Hen-shawes already occupy, her lifesettles into a routine which in-cludes pleasant nightly Clinnersalone with Oswald, Myra’s hus-band. In her California duplicationof the routine the Henshawes oncefollowed in New York, Nellieseems content until she too en-counters a younger rival who

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threatens to displace her. The rivalis a young journalist who followsthe profession Myra once recom-mended to Nellie. Nellie claims ofthe intrusion, "We enjoyed talkingwith her at lunch or dinner" (77)and then summarily dismisses theyoung woman as "perhaps eight-een, overgrown and awkward, withshort hair and a rather heavy face"(78). Nellie admits that the girl has"clear, honest eyes that made onewonder," but prods the reader towonder why Nellie would wonderabout clear and honest eyes. A fewpages later Nellie wonders how"That crude little girl [could have]made all the difference in the worldto him" (91). Soon thereafter shenotices that Oswald still wears thetopaz sleeve-buttons an illicit NewYork love once gave him. She ap-pears, in the moment, as obser-vant and as jealous as Myra.

Nellie herself once witnessed ajealous explosion Myra set off, dur-ing which she declared to heramused husband, "1 will gothrough any doors your keys open"(49). We register the Freudianimage here and remember thatCather would have been aware ofit. One door Oswald’s key openedhas apparently led to Nellie’sheart. One key to the novel’s end-ing is our answer to this question:does Myra, true to her word, in factpenetrate Nellie’s heart to take aclear look around before she dies?

In their first New York holidaytogether, Myra has chilled us byasking, "Oh, Nellie .... It’s all verywell to tell us to forgive our ene-mies; our enemies can never hurtus very much. But oh, what aboutforgiving our friends?" (43) Thisline, paraphrased slightly fromBacon’s "On Revenge," [4] setsup the motif of withheld forgive-ness or revenge as a factor in thisnovel’s action. When we bringMyra’s searing question to ourconsideration of the novel’s end-ing, we reconsider the facts Nelliesupplies us about Myra’s last hours.

Myra’s determination to die inher own way, on the cliff she and

Nellie have often visited, is formu-lated after she has in fact askedNellie provocatively, "Why didn’tyou leave me out there, Nellie, inthe wind and the night?" In the last

day of Myra’s life, that is exactlywhat Nellie does: "1 sat down tothink it over. It seemed to me thatshe ought to be allowed to meetthe inevitable end in the way shechose" (99). What Nellie gets forher decision to leave Myra out todie in the wind and night is ofcourse a life as full of disappoint-ments as Myra’s. Oswald promptlybetrays Nellie by leaving for Alas-ka. Myra merely bequeathes Nellieher heart-chilling amethysts. ButMyra, first the fairytale princess,then the powerful queen, finally thedestructive crone, takes the lasttrick here. While Nellie is left with alife so empty there’s nothing fur-ther about it worth recording, Myraachieves a kind of heroism at thelast. In this tale of reversals andduplicity, Nellie assures us, as sheassures Oswald, "There was everyreason to believe... [Myra] hadlived to see the dawn" (101).

m Merrill SkaggsDrew UniversityMadison, New Jersey

Work CitedWilla Cather, My Mortal Enemy,

Marcus Klein, ed. (New York: Vin-tage Books, 1961).

Footnotes1. S. J. Rosowski, "Narrative

Technique in Cather’s My MortalEnemy," The Journal of NarrativeTechnique, 8 (Spring 1978).

2. The importance of Cather’sfascination with Bronte’s NellyDean was first mentioned in mypresence by Bruce Baker at theSpring, 1984, NEMLA Cather ses-sion.

3. The many significances ofCather’s uses of fairytales werefirst pointed out to me by MarilynBerg Callander, who is now com-pleting a dissertation on the sub-ject at Drew University.

4. Professor Larry Berkove hascalled my attention to the fact thatBacon writes, "Cosmus, Duke ofFlorence, had a desperate sayingagainst perfidious and neglectingfriends, as if those wrongs wereunpardonable. ’You shall read,’saith he, ’that we are commandedto forgive our enemies, but younever read that we are com-manded to forgive our friends’ "(52). In the same essay we alsofind this relevant passage: "Publicrevenges are for the most part for-tunate; as that for the death ofCaesar... and many more. But inprivate revenges it is not so; nay,rather vindictive persons live thelives of witches, who, as they aremischievous so end they unfortu-nate" (53). Bacon’s Essays withWhateley’s Annotations (Student’sEdition) and Notes and a GlossarialIndex, Franklin Fiske Heard (Bos-ton: Lee and Shepard, 1873).

Myra’sFor the basis of my analysis --

not judgment -- of the marriage inMy Mortal Enemy, I have selectedEric Fromm’s The Art of Loving. Hefirst cites the confusion betweenfalling in love and standing in love."If two people who have beenstrangers, as all of us are, sudden-ly let the wall between them breakdown, and feel close, feel one, thismoment of oneness is the most ex-hilarating, most exciting experi-ence in life. This miracle of suddenintimacy is often facilitated if it iscombined with, or initiated by sex-ual attraction and consumation.However, this type of love is by itsvery nature not lasting." p. 3

Myra realizes this fact when sheexplains: "People can be lovers

Marriageand enemies at the same time, youknow. We were . . . A man andwoman draw apart from that longembrace, and see what they havedone to each other." MME, p. 88

Myra and Oswald had the initialexcitement of falling in love, butobviously, they had somethingmore that kept them together.When Nellie sees them for the firsttime, twenty-five years after theirelopement, she notes: "He [Os-wald] came into the room withouttaking off his overcoat and wentdirectly up to his wife, who roseand.kissed him.., she was clearlyglad to see him ~ glad not merelythat he was safe and had got roundon time, but because his presencegave her lively personal pleasure.

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I was not accustomed to that Idndof feeling in people long married."MME, p. 78 My personal observa-tion (admitting I have an evil mind)has been that husbands and wiveswho show public demonstrationsof affection have enormous privatemarriage problems. The greaterthe effusions, the more estrange-ment concealed in the private life.

We have already had a glimpseof the snake in Eden in the wayMyra has rebuffed Nellie whodoesn’t have courage to meetMyra’s eyes and gazes at theamethyst necklace. But the volatileMyra (after she sees she has hurtNellie -- and who wouldn’t knowthat a remark like hers would hurtanybody?) comforts her. But Nelliehas observed, "Her sarcasm wasso quick, so fine at the point itwas like being touched by a metalso cold that one doesn’t knowwhether one is burned or chilled."MME, p. 7

Fromm says the capacity to lovedepends on productive activities ’~nother areas. As Kahlil Gibran sug-gests we should "fill each other’scup but drink not from one cup."The Prophet, p. 17 Is either Myraor Oswald productive in any crea-tive way? Oswald works for a rail-road D probably a dull job. Myradid bake some cakes to send toModjeska and otherwise spendsher time buying extravagant giftsfor her artistic friends, visitingthem. She cultivates rich people,whom she hates, for Oswald’ssake D his advancement. Shemakes matches between herfriends but no longer believes inlove.

Myra says," Love itself draws ona woman nearly all the bad luck inthe world." MME, p. 28 and "noplaying with love" ~ in regard toher sending Ewan to Esther ~"and very likely hell will come ofit." Myra apparently thinks lovemeans what you can get out of it,not what you can give. She hasn’tgone beyond the "falling in love"ecstasy.

Love depends on communica-tion. But these two do not commu-nicate. Oswald has to sneak in hisgift of the topaz cuff links knowingMyra will be jealous:Myra hoardsgold coins against her death, stillthinking money can buy anything.

Oswald has a key and Myradoesn’t know what it opens. Shegoes to the bank and finds it is nota lock box key. Oswald fumes ather, "Then it was you who took mykeys out of my pocket? I mighthave known it! I never forget tochange them. And you went to thebank and made me and yourselfridiculous. I’can imagine theiramusement." MME, p. 50

Nellie’s feelings after this quar-rel are "everything was in ruins...everything about me seemed evil¯.. something malevolent and bot-tomless, the air in that room [was]¯ .. like poison." MME, pp. 51-52

Myra thinks that if they had hadchildren, things would have beendifferent. Children have neverpropped up a failing marriage, andthank goodness Oswald and Myrahad no children. If Nellie sufferedso much at Myra’s hands, whatwould Myra have done to her ownoffspring?

Oswald has bought six newshirts, but cannot find them. Myrahas given them to the janitor’s son.They are not elegant enough forher image of Oswald. Oswald mustbe on exhibition as her prize pos-.session. Oswald’s bitterness ap-parently arises not from being thebeautiful dog on the leash, butfrom economic loss. But she haswaited to reveal her perfidy untilothers are present so as to com-plete his humiliation.

Why does the marriage last?Fromm suggests three types ofunity: orgiastic, conformity to theherd, creativity wherein one bondswith the material of creative work.The latter type does not involveanother human being and lacksvital comfort. The unity of the herdlulls one into a false sense ofbelonging, and sex excitementfades, for the most part, with tl’iehoneymoon. The Henshawes havenone of these three unities.

Fromm discusses the pathologyof love in our Western World. Sex-ual satisfaction requires always anew partner ~ a tendency obviousat present. A certain appearanceof unity comes from teamwork ~the Mom and Pop industries, or thecommon practice now of both part-ners working to keep up a lifestylewherein marriage becomes a busi~

ness partnership and children aresuperfluous. Some marriages sub-stitute one mate for a parent.Some find idolatrous love in whichone loses self in the loved one.Oswald may be guilty of idolatry.

Some critics see Oswald as theembodiment of sentimental love,unable to perceive Myra’s terminalillness. According to Fromm senti-mental love lives in fantasy D pastlove or future love ~ never in thepresent.

Rollo May in Love and Will says,"Sentimentality is thinking aboutsentiment rather than genuinelyexperiencing the object of it." p.288 and "Care is always caringabout something. We are caughtup in our experience of the objec-tive thing or event we care about.In care one must, by involvementwith the objective fact, do some-thing about the situation... This iswhere care brings ’love and will to-gether." p. 288

Is Oswald doing somethingabout the situation? He is, althoughhe can do little ~ providing a roof(albeit noisy) over Myra’s head andhe cares for her as a nurse would.If he were to do something aboutthe situation, he should have doneit long before when he might havesaved some money for security¯But his chance has .passed and hedoes the best he can now.

Myra accuses Oswald of re-membering things as better thanthey were. But Myra remembersthe hot summers when Oswaldstudied in the East and she re-mained suffering in Parthia, depen-dent on secret messages throughLydia. Does Myra choose to re-member the worst while Oswaldremembers the best? Then whichof them does better? The apostlePaul in Philemon 4:8 says, "What-soever things are true, whatsoeverthings are honest, whatsoeverthings are just, whatsoever thingsare pure, whatsoever things arelovely, whatsoever things are ofgood report: if there be any virtue,and if there be any praise, think onthese things."

Dr. John Neihardt once told methisstory. He had a student whowas always complaining. One dayDr. Neihardt said tO the youngman, "Do you like to eat?"

Page f 7

The young man said, "Oh, yes!""Do you eat swill?" For non-

farmers, swill is the garbage fed topigs.

"Certainly not."Then Dr. Neihardt said, "You

could talk for twenty-four hoursabout how terrible the world is,how unjust, and you would be ab-solutely right. But, on the otherhand, I could talk for twenty-fourhours about how beautiful andgood the world is, and I would beabsolutely right."

Obviously one chooses his/hermental diet. As the old sun-dial in-scription read: "1 count only thehours that shine!"

Do you think Oswald, when hecomes in the morning to bathe anddress his wife and administer med-ication, is so stupid that he doesnot realize that Myra is dying?Painfully and inevitably! Do youthink Myra would be happier ifOswald chattered on: "We’ve cer-tainly had a wretched marriage.What about those six shirts yougave away? They’d buy severalmeals now. Remember those to-paz cuff links? Well, I still havethem. See? And you went off toPittsburgh to punish me. And thosekeys that you were so jealousabout?" Would that be a better sit-uation? Does Oswald bear theblame of not being able to discussMyra’s terminal illness? She won’tlet even Nellie talk in a kind wayabout Oswald. If Oswald’s failurecan be called sentimental, then Iprefer him that way. Not that he’s aperson that I admire. He’s tooweak. But he has only the past. Hehas no present or future with Myra.

What game, then, are Myra andOswald playing in their continuedexistence together and their con-tinuous cruelty to each other?Fromm describes symbiotic love,best illustrated by the need of thefetus for the mother’s body, andvice versa. In marriage one some-times finds the symbiotic relation-ship wherein one partner domin-ates and the other submits. This, Ithink, is the classification for theHenshawe’s marriage. Myra dic-tates, Oswald lets himself be used.Fromm says: "The active form ofsymbiotic fusion is domination orsadism . . . One inflates and en-

hances himself by incorporatinganother person, who worshipshim." p. 6 "The sadistic personcommands, exploits, hurts, humili-ates, and the masochistic personis commanded, exploited, hurt, hu-miliated. They have fusion withoutintegrity." p. 16

Do Myra and Oswald fit thiscategory? Myra g~ves away Os-wald’s shirts but waits to informhim in front of the little group offriends where he will be publiclyhumiliated. When she gets angryabout the cuff links, Nellie feelsthat kindness has departed fromthe place. Everyone in the househurts from the quarrel. Myra runsaway to Pittsburgh to punish Os-wald. Myra spends money withflagrant abandon, but when Os-wald cannot support her in herstyle and he never could sheberates her fate in not having acarriage of her own. She hates andblames Oswald for the final pover-ty which subjects her to the noisesfrom the apartment above. (Thisdoes not mitigate the actual pain ofnoise for an ill person, let alone theagony of terminal cancer.) ButMyra wants Oswald to suffer asmuch as she.

And Oswald seems to love tosuffer. He admires her castigation:"I’d rather have been clawed byher, as she used to say, thanpetted by any other woman I’veknown." MME: p. 104 And heloves to remember her jealousy.Oswald says: "... ’when she wasjealous . . . her suspicions weresometimes w almost fantastic.’He smiled and brushed his fore-head with the tips of his fingers, asif the memory of her jealousy waspleasant still, and perplexing still."MME, p. 104

But jealously is not love. Frommsays that envy, jealousy, ambition,any kind of greed are passions.Love practices human powerfreedom and not as compulsion.But neither Myra nor Oswald hasever been free. They are entangledin passions m not love.

Fromm declares one must knowa person objectively to know him inessence and in love. Does Myraknow Oswald objectively, or viceversa? I think not. Each projectswhat he/she needs to love or hateupon the other. When Oswald

thinks of the wild, lovely girl hemarried, he does not also see herselfish greed, her love of moneyand class status. Nor can Myra ad-mit Oswald’s slavish devotion --his "indestructible constancy."She projects upon him infidelity tomake him more desirable for herjealous passion.

Love implies care, responsibil-ity, respect and knowledge. Os-wald cares, but cannot take theresponsibility inherent in his ac-quisition of the spendthrift Myra.Oswald respects Myra, but hisknowledge depends on his projec-tion of her. For her part, Myra haslost all four ingredients for love.She doesn’t care, doesn’t know,doesn’t respect Oswald. And shehas never felt responsible exceptthat he should appear successfuland attractive as her appendage.

Now, about forgiveness: Thetwo times Myra has previouslymentioned the idea: are first thefriend who could have stood byand helped Oswald didn’t, and shehas never forgiven him. Thenagain, Myra speaks of Oswald,"Perhaps I can’t forgive him forthe harm I did him." MME, p. 88And dawn "is always such a forgiv-ing time." Ibid., p. 73 But who isgoing to forgive whom and forwhat? 1st John 4:20, 21: "If a mansay I love God and hateth hisbrother, he is a liar; for he thatIoveth not his brother whom hehath seen, how can he love Godwhom he hath not seen? And thiscommandment have we from him,that he who Ioveth God love hisbrother also." Could we subsitutehusband or wife for brother? Myraadmires her uncle’s hatred and hisunforgiving nature.

About Myra’s final obsession ofreturning to the church, Frommsays: "The awareness of humanseparation, without reunion by love-- is a source of shame. It is at thesame time the source of guilt andanxiety." p. 8 Myra says: "Now I’mold and ill and a fright, but amongmy own kind I’d still have my cir-cle; I’d have courtesy from peopleof gentle manners, and not havemy brains beaten out by hoodlums.Go away, please, both of you, andleave me." MME, p. 75 NeitherNellie nor Oswald are of her class!

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Because Myra has not beenable, through her infatuation withOswald, to grow into a love for her-self, Oswald and thence all man-kind, she finds herself anxious andalone. She could have kept thechurch and Oswald, had their lovebeen a growing creative relation-ship.

Fromm states: "In contempor-ary Western society the union withthe group is the prevalent way ofovercoming separateness. It is aunion in which the individual selfdisappears to a large extent andwhere the aim is to belong to theherd." p. 11 In her anguish at nothaving found unconditional love(which is God) through her relation-ship n marriage, Myra turns to theonly group she has known: thechurch.

The failure of marriage in MyMortal Enemy ’=s then, a failure of

Love to co-create a newer andagain a newer concept of lovewhich would have led both of themto the unconditional love thatecstasy demands.

-- Mildred R. Bennett(Paper presented for "The Pass-

ing Show" Panel Discussion at the31st Annual Spring Conference,May 3, 1986.)

BibliographyCather, Willa, My Mortal Enemy,

New York, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,1926, Vintage Edition.

Fromm, Erich, The Art of Loving,New York, Harper, Row, PerennialLibrary Edition, 1974.

Gibran, Kahlil, The Prophet, NewYork, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971.

May, Rollo, Love and Will, NewYork, Del Publishing Co., Inc.,1974.

Who Was Myra Henshawe?(From John March’s corre-

spondence and unpublished Hand-book to Cather)

In a letter to John March, May10, 1960, Mrs. Walter Trent (grand-daughter of the Lincoln Wester-manns, the Erlichs of One of Ours)writes: "Myra Henshawe in MyMortal Enemy may have beenMyra Tyndale, Mrs. Westermann’ssister-in-law and wife of TroilusTyndale. They had a daughterEleanor, who was an actress."(Myra died of cancer in Seattle,July 17, 1903. Her mother was adirect descendant of William Penn.Her father came from Ireland.)

Mrs. Trent also writes "Dr. Ju-lius (sic) Tyndale was born in Phila-delphia, November 1, 1843. He leftNew York early in 1893, ’for good’as my grandmother wrote, be-cause of failing health and lungtrouble ’to locate at Eddy, NewMexico, where he had been madea good offer, supposedly in refer-ence to his specialty of lung dis-eases.’ Whether or not he went toNew Mexico is doubtful, for he was~n Lincoln whenever we visitedthere. One thing I remember is thathe was very much interested in thetheatre, and was always able to gettickets for the members of the

family. He lived to be 86 years old(1929).

EDITOR’S NOTE: Willa Catherknew the Tyndales during the col-lege years. In a letter to MarielGere from Pittsburgh, Catherspeaks of a friend as devoted asDr. Tyndale. She also says she hasno Dr. Tyndale to queer her (letter,Pittsburgh, April 25, 1897) and shegets along well in her social life.This statement indicates that com-ment had been made about herand Dr. Tyndale. Elsie Cather toldme that in his old age Dr. Tyndalehad no money and Willa supportedhim.

James Woodress writes that aCather letter written to PendletonHogan 5 February 1940 says Myrathought Oswald her mortal enemy.

-- Mildred R. Bennett

Gems and Jewelry:Cather’s Imagery inMy Mortal Enemy

"No one can say just how orwhen the change comes, any morethan they can say how the lightfades from an opal. In some ’n-

discernible way the elusive qual-ity of value goes and what wasprecious becomes common clay"(Kingdom of the Art, 152). AlthoughCather was referring to the declineof an actor’s talent, she might alsohave been addressing largerissues such as the need for loveand the desire for pleasure, powerand material wealth: human needscentral to the characters in suchnovels as A Lost Lady, My MortalEnemy, and The Professor’sHouse, in which Cather uses pre-cious gems to explore traits incharacters and to explicate rela-tionships. Cather knew that"jewels symbolize hidden treas-ures of knowledge or truth, but[they] also profane love and trans-ient riches" (Cooper, 89), and sheuses the gems worn or mentionedby the characters in her books toreveal the transitory quality of loveand worldly possessions. If we ob-serve how Cather attributes parti-cular items of jewelry and allusio nsto gems used by specific charac-ters and then analyzes the love ormarriage in which they are en-gaged, we can understand howshe uses the gems as indicators ofthe power framework establishedbetween the partners. [1]

Two such partners are Myra andOswald Henshawe in My MortalEnemy, the story of a fairy taleromance and of Myra Henshawe’sdramatic departure from thewealth and wisdom of her unclewho advises Myra that "it’s betterto be a stray dog in this world thana man without money" (15). Herdecision leads to a life-long strug-gle to gain the power that bothmoney and love wield. In her final,bitter agony, she realizes that bothare transient riches not destined tobe hers. In My Mortal Enemy, Ca-ther creates a female character atodds with the accepted norms ofhuman behavior and of her society.For all her "dramatics" (54) andimpetuous actions. Myra DriscollHenshawe cannot escape middleage, a double chin, and argumentswith her husband. My Mortal Ene-my presents alternate versions oflove. Cather tells a story of mythi-cal romantic love that, like theopal, brings a woman "nearly allthe bad uck in the world" (28), anda story of the drunken passion of

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love purportedly cured by the coolviolet amethysts Myra wears. Sherelates a story of a husband whowishes his wife to know otherwomen appreciate him by reveal-ing the topaz sleeve buttons heconnives to have. My Mortal Ene-my tells a story of the sensual lovefor which a woman might, Myra in-timates, perjure herself "... forpearls!" (54).

The gems Cather chooses forthe characters in My Mortal Enemygive clues to the interpretations ofthe characters and their relation-ships. Theodore Adams believesthat "My Mortal Enemy employssymbols, echoes from point, sug-gestive details and many allu-sions," and that "the reader musttake hints and combine implica-tions and strive to feel, as WillaCather herself phrased it, ’all thathas been cut away’ " (Adams,139). Another writer, for instance,might choose an obvious elementsuch as a glaring red stone, a rubyor a garnet, to symbolize Myra’sflamboyant character based on thestrong Iovelpassion/hatelangeremotions commonly associatedwith red. These strong emotionsappear at work in Myra in her rela-tionships with her uncle, her hus-band, and her friends. But Catheradorns Myra with cool, violet ame-thysts, the gem stone symbolic ofroyalty, signifying peace of mind,humility and resignation, and longreputed to be a cure for drunken-ness including the drunken passionof those over-excited by love(Kunz, 58). Certainly a woman aspassionately in love with love asMyra Henshawe, when she "givesthe dare to Fate" (17) and throwsaway her claim to fortune, heruncle’s money, could use a curefor the romantic passions workingwithin her. Life and time teachMyra about passion, one of thetransient riches of love, and itleaves Myra so embittered that herexample permanently affects Nel-lie. According to Adams, "severalyears after Myra’s death, Nelliecannot wear Myra’s jewels givento her by Oswald as a remem-brance. The amethysts, tradition-ally symbolic of love, bring a chillto her heart" (145). Nellie nevergoes beyond "the bright beginningof a love story" (104) without hear-

ing Myra’s lament: "Why must I dielike this, alone with my mortal ene-my!" (105).

In addition to its reputation forpreventing intoxication, the ame-thyst is recognized as the mostcherished of all precious stones by"Roman matrons who believedthat it would preserve inviolate theaffection of their husbands"(Brewer’s, 31). Certainly Myrawould like to believe she could pre-serve Oswald’s affection, but shesuspects that another of the tran-sient riches of love that passeswith time is fidelity. Oswald’s af-fection outlasts the passion ofyoung love better than hers, whichturns to resentment, frustration,and finally outbursts against thosewho have loved her best, Oswaldand Nellie Birdseye. After Myra’sdeath, Oswald implores Nellie toremember Myra as he has foryears, "as she was.., when shewas herself, and we were happy.Yes, happier that it falls to the lot ofmost mortals to be" (103).

His statement shows Oswald tobe a romantic optimist who sees orremembers the sunny side ofthings, even when conditions andpeople are at their worst. He stillcherishes the young Myra heloved, "would rather be clawed byher han petted by any otherwoman" (104), and tends to look atthe bitter, dying old woman as themother of the girl he married. Forhim Cather chooses the fickleyellow topaz, sometimes the sym-bol of divine goodness, faithful-ness, friendship and love (Cooper,89) believed to "dispell the vagueterrors of the night and dissolve en-chantments" (Kunz, 67). Seen inthis way, the topaz undergirds theimage of Oswald as Myra’s goodand faithful friend. Long after thepassion of their young love hasfaded, he cares for her in her dyingagonies and, following her death,speaks well of her.

On the other hand, "yellow wornby a man denote[s] secrecy, andwas appropriate for the silentlover" (Kunz, 29). Oswald arrangesto receive his topaz sleeve buttonsfrom Myra’s friend Lydia. The ex-cuse he gives Lydia for having thetopazes, a gift "from a youngwoman who means no harm butdoesn’t know the ways of the world

very well.., from a breezy West-ern city where a rich girl can give apresent whenever she wants toand nobody questions it" (33), [2]lends credence to the possibilitythat he, indeed, has a "youngwoman" for whom he harbors aspecial fondness, one on intimateenough terms to bestow a gift ofpersonal jewelry upon a man in aday when such a gift was consid-ered the domain of immediatefamily members only, one forwhom Oswald has enough affec-tion to go through the deceptionsnecessary to be able to keep andwear the jewels. At least he asksLydia to believe his story and she,in turn, asks Myra to believe herfabrication that the jewels are left-overs from an old friend whocouldn’t keep them because of"unpleasant associations" (35).Lydia justifies her action to Nellieby suggesting that "1 really thinkhe ought to have them .... Every-thing is always for Myra. He nevergets anything for himself" (34).

Myra seems surprised whenLydia presents her gift. Indeed, sheresl~bnds with "delight" (36) andexclaims that the topaz cuff but-tons are "exactly right" (36) forOswald, thus accepting Lydia’s,and indirectly, Oswald’s pretense.That evening at the opera Myralaughs and says: "Oh, Oswald, Ilove to see your jewels flash!"(37). On the surface her remarkshows sincere admiration, but it in-sinuates also an ironic, bawdy,double entendre aimed at his sex-ual organs and at what she impliesto be his sexual infidelities. Later,when Myra confronts Lydia withthe knowledge that she has "per-jured" (54) herself for the sleeve-buttons, Lydia defends her act bysaying "a man never is justified,but if ever a man was..." (54),thus confirming that she, too, con-siders Oswald’s unfaithfulness apossibility.

The color yellow has two faces:that of friendship and constancy,and that of jealousy, deceit and be-trayal (Achen, 33). Whether Os-wald betrays Myra and their mar-riage in a physical relationship orin an emotional way through liesand deceit, the fact remains thathe betrays her and their love.Whatever his reason, Oswald be-

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comes "disturbed and not over-pleased" (36) at Myra’s enthusias-tic reaction to the yellow jewelsand, Nellie believes, genuinelyashamed at having tried to deceivehis wife. The topazes signify Os-wald’s betrayal in one form oranother, and, therefore, imply aweakening of the marriage and astrengthening of the battle forpower between the partners.

The reappearance of the yellowcuff buttons in the last days of Os-wald and Myra’s life together re-inforces Oswald’s quiet assertionof his power to enjoy the admira-tion of other women. Nellie noticeshim at breakfast with a youngwoman reporter in the decrepithotel in which he and Myra exist intheir last years and observes thathe is "talking with evident plea-sure" (77) to her. She also noticesthat "he still wore his topaz sleeve-buttons" (78). Nellie sees Oswaldas having other traits attributed toyellow, "indestructible constancy¯ . . almost indestructible youth"(103). He never outgrows his needfor love, for attention, for people.He never forgets the passion hefelt for the young Myra, eventhough he serves his fretful wifefaithfully and with indestructibleconstancy to the bitter end of herdays. Yellow, in the traditionalseven ages of man, typifies adoles-ence (Kunz,= 29). Oswald, the per-petual adolescent, becomes an oldman who still loves love, the ideaof the young girl he married, andwomen who respond to him. Myraknows this characteristic and tellsNellie "he was always a man tofeel women, you know, in everyway" (91). Myra has come to ac-cept that trait in her mate with thebitterness of a lover whose idealhas been tarnished.

Myra and Oswald represent twowidely separated perspectives onlove. Oswald, the romantic, neverfails to see the sunny side ofthings, to be the faithful friend, thecontinual seeker. In the friendshipof other women, including Lydiaand Nellie, he finds admiration andsupport which satisfy his ego andallow him to live on the memory ofthe passion of young love. For himthat passion never dies. Myra, thecloudy side of love, holds grudgesand resentments, turns scornful

and mocking, remains faithful onlyuntil love and friends disappointher. Oswald is the sun, and Myra isthe moon: she is cold royal purpleto his warm friendly yellow.

Cather uses two other gems totalk about love in My Morta/Ene-my: the opal and the pearl. Dis-appointed in love for herself, Myraadvises Ewan Gray that he shouldnot give opals to his beloved be-cause "they have a bad history.Love itself draws on a womannearly all the bad luck in the world;why.., add opals?" (28). The opal,long revered because it combinesthe virtues of all the variouscolored gems united in its spark-ling light, came into disfavor as agemstone about 400 years ago.Apparently its bad reputationbegan with a tale by Sir WalterScott, "Anne of Geierstein," inwhich the heroine, Hermione, whowears an opal in her hair, dieswhen a drop of water falls onto theopal. The opal "appealed toShakespeare as a fit emblem of in-constancy for in Twelfth Night he

¯ makes the clown say tothe Duke:Now the melancholy God protectthee, and the Tailor make thy’gar-ment changeable taffeta for thymind is very opal" (Kunz, 151).Cather chooses to use the opal toundergird Myra’s own feeling ofbad luck in affairs of love. LikeAphrodite, who never tired of help-ing young lovers, Myra attempts tohelp Gray and other lovers makematches and thus vicariously livesout her dreams of everlasting pas-sion, although her own fantasies oflove have brought her little but badluck.

Although Nellie perceives thatMyra and Oswald have a strongphysical bond (8), Myra’s refer-ence to the notion of a woman per-juring herself for pearls indicatesthat the sensual side of marriage isless than satisfying and that shewould like to have mor~ control.Myra tells Lydia "you needn’t haveperjured yourself for those yellowcuff-buttons. I was sure to find out,I always do... it’s disgusting in aman to lie for personal decora-tions. A woman might do it now ....for pearls!" (54). Myra, heroineand princess of the myth createdby her friends in Parthia, seesherself as a mythical recreation of

a woman like Queen Elizabeth I,powerful yet feminine proponent ofpearls. Myra hints that to havepower Such as women iike QueenElizabeth and Aphrodite-would beworth lying f0r. [3] While the pearlrepresents feminity, chastity andpurity, it also symbolizes Aphro-dite, who rose from the foam of thesea, or, in Greek legend, from thefoam generated when the severedgenitals of. Uranus were thrown in-to the sea. Aphrodite symbolizessensual love as opposed to ..thespiritual, and since she was an un-faithful wife, .her name implies thepleasure of sex.ual love not only inbut also outside of marriage.

Myra implies that Oswald haslied for more than personal decora-tion, a trait unforgivable in a manbut perhaps justifiable in an other-wise powerless woman, for theright reward¯ Whether Oswalddesires to have the topazes tosmuggle a gift from a lover past hiswife, or to have-something expen-sive without having to defend thepurchase, or to assert his power inthe marriage, he betrays becausehe lies. Cather twists society’sdouble standard. What disgusts usin a man, we may justify in awoman, a reversal of the norm.Cather breaks the convention thatmen don’t receive such personalgifts from women who are notclose family to convey the idea-that Oswald has broken the con-vention of the ideal marriage, theperfect, all-fulling Ioveone dreamsof finding in one’s partner, the fan-tasy Myra expects to possess andwhich others expect her to live outforever in her fairy tale romance,

Cather has selected amethysts,topazes, opals and pearls to speakfor and about the characters andthe manner in which each assertshis or her power in relationships inMy Mortal Enemy. In the end,however, she talks not about theindividuals but about their expecta-tions. Myra, heroine of a myth per-petuated by the women in herhometown, cannot be less thanhappy, less than perfect, less thanthe goddess of supreme maritalbliss and the idol of sexual fidelityand fulfillment. A royal purple prin-cess, she is Aphrodite, goddess oflove; she desires to be what soci-ety wants her to be: perfect love

#age 21

personified. In other words, shecan’t be human. But human reali-ties get in the way. She growsolder, her hair turns gray, and herchin doubles. Economic conditionsforce her to a poverty level exist-ence. Her husband is not a perpet-ual Prince Charming in a happily-ever-after fairy tale but a mortalman with faults and failures. Lifecatches Myra and Oswald in a con-flict beyond their control, that be-tween myth and reality. Instead ofromantic heroes they are unwillingvictims of the myth makers.

In sum, Cather uses gems andjewelry to underscore the person-alities of Myra and Oswald Hen-shawe and add depth to our under-standing of their relationsh p. Thecharacters of Myra and Oswaldwould struggle for identity and in-dividuality if it weren’t for the coolamethysts and bright topazes, thepearls and opals that reveal thehuman frailties in the love storythey live. The gems Cather usesnot only "symbolize hidden treas-ures of knowledge or truth"(Cooper, 59), they add dimensionto the individuals and to their strug-gles to resolve the conflicts withintheir relationship.

Kathryn T. StoferGrand Island, Nebraska

(Written for Willa Cather Semi-nar, Great Plains Literature Pro-gram, University of Nebraska, Lin-coln.)

Notes1. For other discussions of Ca-

ther’s use of jewelry symbolismsee: Theodore S. Adams, "WillaCather’s My Mortal Enemy: TheConcise Presentation of Scene,Character and Theme," Colby Li-brary Quarterly, X (September1973) #3: 138-156; Harry B. Eic-horn, "A Falling Out with Love: MyMortal Enemy," Colby LibraryQuarterly, X (September 1973) #3:121-138; James Schroeter, ed.,"Willa Cather and The Professor’sHouse," Willa Cather and Her Crit-ics, (Ithaca, NY: Corneil UniversityPress, 1975).

2. Slote, p. 157. Cather wrote ofMary Anderson that "she grew upin a breezy [emphasis mine], busy,confident, unartistic atmosphere;she never saw deeply and serious-ly into the awesome mystery of

creative art." Using "breezy" todescribe the home of Oswald’s"young woman who means noharm but doesn’t know the ways ofthe world very well" is Cather’sway of setting up the contrast be-tween Oswald’s supposed admirerand his wife who knows the waysof the world very well and has adeeply artistic, creative spirit.

3. Slote, p. 166. Myra would liketo have the power to earn the re-spect of others that Cather alludedLily Langtry to hold over the Italiantenor Italo Campanini: "We all rev-erence power and in a way thosewho possess it, whether it is powerof wealth or beauty or genius orsimple goodness."

List of Works CitedAchen, Sven Tito. Symbols

Around Us. 1978. New York: VanNostrand Reinhold Co., 1981.

Adams, Theodore S. "Willa Ca-ther’s My Mortal Enemy: The Con-cise Presentation of Scene, Char-

acter and Theme." Colby LibraryQuarterly. Series X (September1973) #3:138-156.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phraseand Fable. Revised and enlarged.New York: Harper Brothers Pub-lishers, 1953.

Cather, Willa. My Mortal Enemy.1926. New York: Vintage, 1954.

Cooper, J. C. An Illustrated En-cyclopedia of Traditional Symbols.London: Thomas and Hodson, Ltd.,1978.

Eichorn, Harry B. "A Falling Outwith Love: My Mortal Enemy." Col-by Library Quarterly. Series X (Sep-tember 1973) #3:121-138.

Kunz, George Frederick. TheCurious Lore of Precious Stones.Philadelphia: J. E}. Lippincott Com-pany. 1913.

Slote, Bernice, ed. The Kingdomof the Art: Willa Cather’s First Prin-ciples and Critical Statements1893-1896. Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1966.

The Fascinating Complexity of My Mortal EnemyOn the surface, My Mortal Ene-

my is a story about the discrep-ancy between romance and reality-- the way we imagine life to beand the way it actually is. Ro-mance will have us believe thatlove can surmount all difficulties,that it will triumph over poverty,disease and even death. Yet in ac-tual life, the desire for money andmaterial comfort often clasheswith love and destroys it.

Here then is the story of awoman who abandons wealth andcomfort for love, only to realize atthe end of her life that for her,wealth and comfort are more im-portant. As Myra Henshawe liesdying in poverty, her hatred of herhusband intensifies. Her marriageto him has deprived her of themeans which would have broughther dignity and privacy in her lastyears of life.

It is also the story of the educa-tion, or rather disillusionment, ofNellie Birdseye, the young girl whowitnesses Myra’s tragedy andwhose belief in romantic love iscompletely shattered. Many yearsbefore, Myra had disregarded heruncle’s warning and relinquished

her fortune to marry for love. Yetwhat is the consequence of hersacrifice? She had happiness for awhile but no more so than othercouples. And first there were pettyquarrels and jealousies, then morebitter exchanges, and finally thepenury of her last years sharedwith a partner she no longer lovesbut denounces as her "mortal ene-my." This has a catastrophic effecton Nellie. She no longer believes inlove. Whenever she watches thebeginning of a romance in others,she recalls Myra’s terrible wordsand envisages her tragic end.

Whether the story speaks forMyra or for Nellie, the message is:romantic love does not last; it isonly an illusion. This thought doesnot please, and many writersprefer to evade it by ending beforethe problems begin. Not so Cather.She begins her story several dec-ades after the wedding mercilesslyto record the gradual change inMyra’s feelings. As in her earliernovels of the twenties, Cather con-fronts facts refusing to paint a rosypicture.

The novella cannot only be seenas an indictment of romantic love;

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it can also be read as an indict-ment of money and its corruptingpower. In this work, perhaps, Ca-ther intends to show how the lustfor money taints human relationsand destroys love m as she haddone earlier in The Professor’sHouse. We sense her disapprovalof Myra’s extravagance and love ofshow and grandeur, in her descrip-tion of the casual manner in whichMyra gives away six new dressshirts of her husband’s to the jani-tor’s son, of the lavish tips sheshowers on the drivers, portersand street musicians, and of herpresent of the most expensiveholly bush in the flower shop to anactress she admires. She knowsthat she spends more than her hus-band, Oswald, can afford, but shehas extravagant habits; because ofher vanity, she wants to appearwealthy, and perhaps even be-cause she wants to spite her hus-band, whom she probably con-siders tightfisted. We also seeavarice in her attitude towardsOswald’s wealthy German busi-ness friends. She .despises themfor not possessing the wit, learningor taste that she believes shouldaccompany wealth. On the otherhand, she envies them for shecraves the social position andcomfort which they have but, shefeels, do not deserve.

Cather shows us not only Myra’samibitions but also where theycome from and where they leadwhen thwarted. Myra inherited herextravagance and avarice formoney and social station fromJohn Driscoll, her wealthy great-uncle, with whom she grew up. Hehad enough money that when hesigned his name on a Treasurynote, he would burn it if he"spoiled the sig-nay-ture." Thedescription of her early life withhim, through brief, shows us thathe spoiled her with his money, buy-ing her everything she wanted:"dresses and jewels, parties, afine riding horse, a Steinwaypiano." She had her portraitpainted by "a famous painter."Even the town band would come toplay for her whenever she held aparty. Accustomed to getting whatshe wanted without thinking of itsprice she had difficulty adjusting toa different way of life. As Oswald

clerked and did not make muchmoney, her spendthrift ways oftenled to bitter words. Myra remem-bers her great-uncle’s views ofpoverty. He once warned her: "It’sbetter to be a stray dog in thisworld than a man without money.... A poor man stinks, and Godhates him." These views of wealthand poverty have now become in-grained in her, and form her crite-rion in judging Oswald.

Her bias toward wealth be-comes manifest after they move tothe West and their fortunes furtherdecline. As Part Two begins, Myrais dying of cancer in a shabbyboarding-house -- a far cry fromher great-uncle’s estate m evenfrom her former apartment in NewYork. The contrast fills Myra withself-pity, regret and resentment:pity for herself for dying in awretched place when she couldhave been living in splendor, regretfor renouncing her inheritance,and resentment against her hus-band whom she blames for al hermisfortunes. Her deep-seatedhatred for him as the cause of herpoverty leads her to refer to him asher "mortal enemy." Now sick andpoor, she dreams of how differenther life would have been if she hadnot renounced her fortune. Thoughshe blames herself for the harmshe has done Oswald (she admitsthat he was not cut out for abusiness career and that he wasforced into it to support her), andalthough she says that they havedestroyed each other, one seesthat her concern centers abouthow she has been destroyed andshe blames Oswald for his inabilityto succeed. She regards him asher greatest enemy now becausehe separated her from her money.

The phrase rings with verbalirony, for what Myra does notrealize herself, though Cathermakes her readers aware of it, isthat the expression could be equal-ly, if not better applied, to Myraherself. She is her own mortalenemy. Myra’s craving for wealthand grandeur has destroyed her. Ifshe had not been used to recklessspending, she would not havedesired so much. If she had beensatisfied with less, she would havebeen happier and would not havebeen so envious of others. And if

she had spent less, they wouldhave had some savings to fall backon. Furthermore, had Myra beenless ambitious and more practical,she would have allowed Oswald toaccept a lower position in NewYork after the reorganization of hisbusiness instead of forcing himto try elsewhere when he wasneither young nor successful. Inshort, her poverty was to a largeextent self-imposed. Though ill-ness and poverty eventually forceMyra into some kind of self-recog-nition, she cannot see how far herown responsibility lies. For thatreason her bitter denunciation be-comes an indictment against thecorrosive power of money, whichcan destroy the closest of humanrelationships.

Her great-uncle’s influence onMyra restricts not only her viewson money, she resembles him inother ways. Tyrannical and over-bearing not only to Oswald but toanyone who criticizes her or triesto help her husband, she reveals apassionate nature and a violenttemper, sharp tongue, and deep-felt prejudices. When displeased,she can be extremely vicious. Sheseems to possess the worst of heruncle’s traits. Cather has made itclear that "she was a good deallike him; the blood tie was verystrong." And she herself admits,"as we grow old we become morethe stuff our forebears put into us."One is not surprised, therefore,that many readers see Myra as oneof Cather’s most unattractive pro-tagonists. In fact, Marcus Klein inhis introduction to the Vintage edi-tion of My Mortal Enemy (1961)cites a critic who regards the bookas "the least likable" of Cather’sworks, and Myra herself as "thor-oughly unpleasant."

While Myra can be repulsive attimes, one should not overlookanother side of her, a side whichmakes many readers hesitate be-fore judging her avariciousness ormaterialism. This side appearsmore attractive and seems to soft-en, if it does not cancel out, thenegative image Cather has paintedof her. Myra is no ordinary materi-alist despite her love of money.She does not parallel RosamondMarsellus, buying freely to showoff her wealth. In Myra, Cather has

Page23

depicted a fully-rounded characterwith the subtle complexity of a realperson. She avoids oversimplifieddivisions of character into "good"and "bad" because people in reallife do not fit categories.

Thus we see Myra’s nature bal-anced by conflicting traits. Hergreed for money, for example, isoffset by her reckless generosity toher friends as her passionatenature makes her form strong likesas well as dislikes. Her conteml~tand dislike of her husband and hisfriends contrasts with genuine feel-ing and concern for her own. Andin New York, before poverty aggra-vates their difficult relations,sometimes she and Oswald feelclose and loving. Confronted withdisease and death, she displays anuncomplaining stoicism. With herfriends she can be gay, witty, andcharming, as in better days. Shereserves self-pity for her reducedcircumstances. She does notflinch when in pain, nor does shecomplain because she has beenabandoned by the friends shehelped.

Perhaps the most appealing traitwe find in her is the poetic streak inher nature that may have some-thing to do with her Irish ancestryand which responds passionatelyto music and literature and otherforms of beauty. We sense the hid-den richness in her in the way shesits crouching in the shadow drink-ing in the notes of "Casta Diva"that moonlit New Year’s Eve inNew York. We observe the sameardent response in her recitation ofShakespeare and her reaction toHeine’s poetry -- even in her re-sponse to religion. Much morethan vanity, therefore, draws Myrato writers and artists; she feels asimilarity of temperament and ad-mires them.

So far as realization of charac-ter, Cather has made Myra’s be-havior consistent throughout. Sheis one of Cather’s most convincingand fully-realized protagonists. Heractions, though not always praise-worthy, can always be justified byher own logic. Her quick jealousywhen her husband shows interestin other women seems under-standable when we realize howmuch her own sacrifice looms inher mind. When she has given up

so much to marry Oswald, surelyhe should be more devoted thanother husbands and do all he canto satisfy her whims.

One understands her dissatis-faction with her surroundings inthe West. For a person of her sen-sitivity, taste and background, liv-ing in shabby lodgings with grimywalls and harsh lighting and thesmell of cheap kitchen odors andthe inconsideration of noisy neigh-bors would be unbearable evenhad she been healthy. Squalor andcomplete lack of intellectual oraesthetic stimulation in her sur-roundings cause Myra’s despair.She suffers like Paul in the shortstory "Paul’s Case," or like ClaudeWheeler in One of Ours. ThoughCather intended at the start tomake Myra’s avarice the object ofher criticism of the pursuit ofmoney and material success, asubject Cather felt very stronglyabout in an age of mass productionbecause of the destruction ofbeauty and traditional values, herattitude to wealth m and thereforeto Myra herself m remains ambiv-alent. Was she critical of Myra’smaterial ambitions? If so, why didshe turn Myra into an object to bepitied and sympathized with in PartTwo rather than despised andscorned?

Even where money is involved,Cather does not view with disfavorall Myra’s actions. Her ambition fora carriage and stables seems in-sane, her giving the hansom driveran extra large fee out of woundedvanity one views as extravagance,and her dissatisfaction with herfairly comfortable position in NewYork ("it’s very nasty, being poor")appears unreasonable. Yet Ca-ther’s attitude to her spending isnot always clear. Her gift of the ex-pensive holly bush and cakesstands out as only one of the manythings she has done for her artistfriends and while it may be re-garded as vanity and extravaganceit may also be seen as her gener-osity and concern for her friends.As Nellie remarks, "My aunt oftensaid that Myra was incorrigibly ex-travagant; but I saw that her chiefextravagance was in caring forthem so much." And we are notmade to feel that Myra has wastedmoney on the furnishing of her

apartment, despite its obvious ele-gance.

In short, it is not so much thatCather questions her spending ofmoney as of how she spends. (Ca-ther herself, neither puritanical norparsimonious, believed in comfortand privacy. She had a spaciousseven-room New York apartmentand a good French cook. She oftenbought flowers and enjoyed wear-ing beautiful clothes to the concertor theatre. She did not considerthose wasteful luxuries.) Privacy,beauty, taste and refinement werewhat she herself sought and onesees a lot of Cather, including herattitude to artists, portrayed inMyra Henshawe -- more of herperhaps than in any other of herprotagonists. Like Myra she hatedthe ugliness and squalor of cheapboarding houses. She had lived inthem in both Pittsburgh and NewYork, before she could move intobetter lodgings, and had foundthem suffocating. "Paul’s Case"tells the story of a boy’s hunger forbeauty and culture in an ugly suffo-cating environment and shows thewrong step he took to find fulfill-ment. The modern world, Catherthought, a world of mass produc-tion, where everything was thesame and beauty had disappeared.Given this thinking, she could feelgreat sympathy for Myra’s latersufferings and even while sheshows how love disappears with-out money, and makes Myra herobject lesson, she admits moneyas necessary to maintain a digni-fied existence. Cather certainlyagrees with Myra when she says"Money is a protection, a cloak; itcan buy one quiet, and some sortof dignity."

Hence while money creates anegative force in the story, it alsobecomes a positiv~ one, because itprovides the means for attainingspiritual fulfillment.

At the end of the story wewonder how we should judge Myra.Was she avaricious or was shegenerous? Should we hate or pity?Because of Cather’s ambivalencetowards her craving for money, thequestion cannot be answered witha simple "yes" or "no." It seems

Page24

that Cather started with one pur-pose and then put in too much ofher own feelings. However, this isnot a fault. If we look at the novelas a study and development ofcharacter, how much more realis-

tic and complex Myra Henshawehas become!

Jean Tsier~Professor of EnglishBeijing Foreign

Languages InstituteBeijing, China

Cather’s Published "Unpublished" LettersAnyone who has worked with

Cather materials is aware of theprovision in her will that forbids thepublication, in whole or in part, ofher letters. This can be a frustra-tion for scholars who have to travelfrom one end of the country to theother in order to read collections ofher letters. We all understand herdesire for privacy and her wish tokeep out of print any of her writingthat she had not carefully preparedfor publication. Nevertheless, theletters of a writer m indeed, of any-one, but especially a writer m pro-vide valuable insights into that per-son’s mind, heart, and experience.Cather herself could scarcely denythe value to the present of this verypersonal sort of record from thepast. She found in the letters ofFather Joseph Machebeuf to hissister much of the inspiration forher own Death Comes for the Arch-bishop. Without those letters, hernovel would have been a very dif-ferent book, and it might neverhave been written at all. Further-more, she appears to have used(without his permission) the per-Sonal diary of a New Hampshire’sdoctor for her account of the fluepidemic aboard the Anchises inOne of Ours ~ and then exultedover her find in a letter to DorothyCanfield Fisher.

A great many of Cather’s lettersto friends were. apparently de-stroyed at her request, but severalhundred remain nevertheless. Ca-ther students await the day whenthese treasures will be collectedand published. One notes, how-ever, that a few of them have ap-peared in print, some during herlifetime and someafter her death.Four well-known letters, now CQI-lected in Willa Cather on Writing,were printed with Cather’s permis-sion, two written to Commonweal,one to Saturday Review of Litera-

ture, and another to a friend thatwas printed in part in News Letter.

Two other letters, one ad-dressed to the Nebraska StateJournal and one to the OmahaWorld-Herald, apparently at theeditors’ requests, were publishedin full. No doubt Cather expectedthem to be published. The first,dated June 2, appeared in the Jour-nal on July 24, 1927. It acknowl-

. edges the Journal’s sixtieth anni-versary and recalls Cather’s expe-riences as a young woman writingfor that newspaper. The secondappeared in the Omaha World-Her-ald on October 27, 1929. Ad-dressed to Cather’s friend, editor-in-chief Harvey NeWbranch, itlaments the passing of the small-town opera house in Nebraska.Mildred R. Bennett edited and re-printed the letter in Nebraska His-tory 49 (Winter 1968):373-78. Inaddition to these, there are at leastnine more that have appeared inprint, either complete or ex-cerpted. They were obviously notintended for publication, and thustheyenjoy a spontaneity and can-dor not typical of Cather’s-more"public" prose. In them, and in theletters tucked away in library ar-chives, the reader finds a lessguarded, more human writer.

While it would be a violation ofthe conditions of Cather’s will, andof the policies of libraries that ownCather letters, to publish any of herpreviously unpublished letters,surely to reprint those that havealready appeared in print is per-missible. The earliest of thesenine letters (two are undated) isprobably one that was written toMary Miner Creighton, dated Sep-tember 17, 1927. It appeared in theWebster County Argus October 20,1927, in an article titled "Miss Ca-ther Writes Inscription for Stone."According to the article, the letter

was read during the exercises forthe laying of the -cornerstone forthe new Brodstone Memorial Hos-pital in Superior, Nebraska. It isCather’s response to a requestthat she compose the inscriptionfor the cornerstone. This is the let-ter the Argus printed:

My Dear Mary:Why surely, I’ll be glad to

do it, for you, for Evelyn, andmost-of all for Mrs. Brod-stone. But I wonder what kindof inscription is wanted?There are so many kinds! Ishould think it ought just totell something true aboutMrs. Brodstone, Somethingthat was like her ~ that weremember her by. Can’t yougive me some hints, tell mesome of. the things that, Jntalking it over, you and Carriehave said ought to be men-tioned?

I got your letter only yester-day, and just at a first flash I.put down some lines thatseemed like the memory ofMrs. Brodstone that came byin my mind. An inscriptionreally has to be a little stiff tohave dignity -- can’t beflowery, or very wordy. I sup-pose the first part of the tab-let, the first lines, will be astatement of gift, and thename of the hospital, will theynot? I mean something like.this:

The Brodstone MemorialHospital given to the City ofSuperior by Evelyn, Lady Ves-ty, in loving memory of hermother,Brodstone, who was born in( .) 18 and diedin Superior, Nov. 19

What I mean, Mary, is thatthis formal part would be ar-ranged by Evelyn, or her sec-retary, or the Board, wouldn’tit? And you want me to comein with a personal note, justafter. Am I right?

Well, the lines that flash in-to my mind as being reallylike Mrs. Brodstone, as Iknew her, are something likethis:

She brought across theseas a high courage, a warm

Page25

heart, a rich relish of life, anda hand skilled and untiring inthose domestic arts that giverichness and beauty and real-ity to daily living. In later lifeshe travelled far, but herheart was here, and all herjourneys brought her home.

The second paragraph, ’;Inlater life, etc.," seems to hintof the later years of her life,which were so different fromthe earlier part of it and whichnever changed her in theleast, except to make hersounder and more seasonedthan ever. Of course Mrs.Brodstone was many thingsnot mentioned above; shewas, when I first knew her soeminently sound and sea-soned; but an inscription~)ught to hint at the mostcharacteristic qualities, andto me the fine thing aboutMrs. Brodstone was the wayshe could make flowers growand gardens grow, and theway she could cook gorgeousfood and do things with herhands, and the hearty way inwhich she accepted life.

Now maybe some specialsort of inscription is wanted,laying stress-on certainthings. If so, you’ll have togive me some requisite infor-mation, and I’ll do the best Ican.

With love always, WillaOne likes to see Cather’s genu-

ine admiration for Mrs..Brodstone,and her conscientious desire to dothe older woman justice in the in-scription. The.typical Cather ververesounds, too, in phrases like "justat first flash," "eminently-soundand seasoned," and "gorgeousfood." One also sees Cather’s ap-preciation for people who wereclose to the earth and gifted in thehomely arts of cooking and garden-ing, and who lived with a hearty ac-ceptance of life. The letter tells usas much about Cather as aboutMrs. Brodstone.

Another letter that was appar-ently published in Cather’s lifetimeappeared in Fanny Butche[’s col-umn, likely in the Chicago Tribune,where she regularly reviewed andpraised Cather’s work. The un-dated clipping resides in the Willa

Cather Historical Center archivesin Red Cloud, Nebraska. The datemay be the 1930s or 1940s be-cause in her introduction Butcherspeaks as though My l(ntonia hadappeared many years ago. Shealso says that Cather is one ofAmerica’s finest.women, suggest-ing that Cather was alive at thetime the column was written. Theletter, printed in its entirety over areproduction of Cather’s signature,is the novelist’s response to Butch-er’s inquiry as to what book Catherwould rather have written than anyother. This is the letter as Butcherpublishes it:

Dear Fanny Butcher: Youask me what book I would ra-ther have written than allothers; I suppose you meanwhat novel. Well, since it’s awishing game, why be mod-est? I imagine you expect me.to name some neat, obscurebook, by some neat, obscuretalent. To be really chic Iought to say that I’d love tobe responsible for the highflying rhetoric of "MobyDick" where one metaphorabout the Mus~e de Clunyand the human soul runs tothe length of a page and ahalf.

Thank you! If I can choose,I won’t meekly say that theneck of the chicken is my fa-vorite portion, rd rather havewritten "War and Peace"than any other novel I know. Iam not sure that I admire itmore than any other, but I’drather have written it; simplyfor the grand game of makingit, you understand, quiteregardless of the result. Iwould like to be strongenough to have, and to sur-vive, so many gloriously vividsensations about almosteverything that goes to makeup human society. I wouldlike to have had that torrent oflife and things pour throughme; and yet to be well bredenough as an artist to uncon-sciously and unfailingly pre-sent it all in scale, with theproper perspective and com-position and distribution oflight; enough at least to holdthe thing together. That much

form, it seems to me, any sat-isfying work must have.

From this you may inferthat I wouldn’t choose to beswept away in Dostoevsky’storrent, though it’s as big andfull as heart could desire. Thericher the welter of life, themore it needs a restraining in-telligence. I choose "Warand Peace" because it hasboth m and in what a_degree!You remember what an expe-rience it is to read that bookfor the first time; can youimagine anything more excit-ing than writing it? The actualwriting of it, of course, was a.much more concentrated andunadulterated and smoothrunning form of excitementthan all the many, the count-less excitements, long forgot-ten, which enabled him towrite it at all. But there, ofcourse, I’m getting into amatter which isn’ot for generaldiscussion. Every trade hasits coml~ensations; but it’swiser to keep quiet aboutthem, or somebody turns upand tdes to spoil them foryou.

Sincerely yours,Will a Cather

One notes that when Cather didnot restrict herself to naminganother’s novel, she apparentlygave a different response to thequestion Butcher asked. CharlesPoore, in a review of The Old Beau-ty and Others, published in theNew York Times Book Review,September 12, 1948, reports thatwhen Cather was asked what workof another’s she might wish tohave written, she replied, RudyardKipling’s "The Mary Gloster."Poore does not indicate where orwhen Cather supposedly made thestatement.

As has been indicated, the twoletters above appeared in print dur-ing Cather’s lifetime; at least fiveothers were printed or excerpted inthe year of her death, 1947. Frag-ments from these letters were pub-lished in the Colby Library Quarter-/y for November 1947 under thetitle "Willa Cather’s Call on Hous-man." The letters were written tothe author of the article, Carl J.Weber, then professor of English

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Literature at Colby College, in re-sponse to inquiries he made of her.The Cather letters from whichWeber quotes, and which he hasgiven to the Colby Library for theircollection, are dated December12, 1944; January 10, 1945; andJanuary 31, 1945. A fourth letterfrom Cather to Weber, dated No-vember 17, 1941, is in the Colbycollection, but does not pertain toCather’s visit to British poet A. E.Housman, so it is not included inthe Quarterly article. It is pertinentto the collecting and publishing ofletters, however, because Weberhad apparently asked Cather aboutthe deposition of her letters fromSarah Orne Jewett. She claims tohave no interest in letters as col-lectors’ items m she will get herFlaubert from his books, not his let-ters. She values Jewett’s letters,on the other hand, because theyare personal letters from a friend.

According to Weber, he hadwritten to Cather asking her toveri-fy details of her by then legendaryvisit with Isabelle McClung andDorothy Canfield [Fisher] to Hous-man. Ford Madox Ford and othershad circulated a highly embroid-ered account of the episode, muchto Cather’s distress. Her reply toWeber’s first inquiry, however, iscordial and informative. He quotesall but a few lines of that letter:

¯ .. about my very pleasantvisit with Housman. Someday 1 intend to write a carefuland accurate account of thatvisit for persons who are par-ticularly interested. It all hap-pened many years ago, whenI was very young and foolishand thought that if one ad-mired a writer very much onehad a perfect rightto dng hisdoorbell. On the occasion ofthat uninvited call -- certain-ly abrupt enough -- Hous-man was not in the leastrude, but very courteous andvery [Cather’s word here isactually "even" rather than"very"; the article misquotesher] kind. ! judged he was notaccustomed to such intru-sions, but he certainly madeevery effort to make one feelat ease.Weber apparently wrote back,

calling to Cather’s attention a brier

mention of her visit in an article onHousman in Forum. Cather re-garded the comment as erroneous,and wrote to Weber on January 10,1945 (Cather’s letter is dated 1944,but postmarked 1945). He quotesfrom her letter:

If you are able to findwhere the writer.., got his in-formation, I would be obligedif you would let me know. Thestatement you quote is abso-lutely untrue.

I went not alone, but with afriend from Pittsburgh, to callon Housman at his lodgingsin Highgate, a suburb of Lon-don. I had been staying inLondon for some time. Iasked Housman’s publisher,Grant Richards, for Mr. Hous-man’s address, which hereadily gave me .... Myfriend and I were courteouslytreated .... At that timeHousman... was [then] lec-turing at the University ofLondon .... I had not knownthat he was a professor thereuntil he told me so.

Weber quotes only one sentencefrom Cather’s final letter to him,and with good reason. Her lettershows that he had begun to annoyher with his insistent questions.She indicates that she had repliedin the first place only to correct hisimpression that Housman hadtreated her rudely. She says, andWeber quotes, "He wasn’t rude atall, but very courteous." In thisletter, dated January 31, 1945, Ca-ther regrets having told him asmuch as she did, for now he hassent her something of a question-naire. She indicates curtly that thisis not a matter for the Federal Bur-eau of Investigation, and shuts, offthe possibility for further corre-spondence between them.

One notes that this visit at-tracted considerable attention andthat Cather became so concernedover it that on April 17, just daysbefore her death, she wrote toDorothy Canfield Fisher askingFisher to write her recollection oftheir visit to Housman so that if theneed arose she could have a clearand accurate statement preparedon the matter. Fisher answeredwith a detailed account of the visitas she remembered it, but her let-

ter was returned by Sarah Bloom,Cather’s secretary, on May 14,with a note attached from Bloomsaying that Cather had receivedFisher’s letter and read it beforeher death. All three pieces of cor-,respondence are in the Fisher col-lection at the Guy W. Bailey Libraryat the University of Vermont inBurlington.

The matter was not droppedwith Cather’s death, either. Hous-man scholar William White pickedup on it and pursued it relentlesslythrough articles in Notes andQueries in June 1951 and July1957, in the Victorian Newsletter inSpring 1958, and again in the Sum-mer 1965 issue of PrairieSchooner.

Two other Cather letters werequoted from at some length in1947. In a one-page article of trib,ute titled "Willa Cather’s Spirit,"published in America, May 10,1947, Harold C. Gardiner quotesexcerpts from two of the letters hereceived from Cather "over a peri-od of some years." Gardiner doesnot include the dates of the letters,but he praises their writer as awoman of "sound and healthyspirituality." The one he cites firstreads as follows:

Naturally I am pleased byyour friendly reference to me,but I am much more pleasedby the way in which you takeup the question of the slenderrelation between the verymodern authors and the Eng-lish language .... Somebright boy on the New Yorkerfound that in The Grapes ofWrath the characters sit ontheir "hams" thirty-six times.Now there are so many othernames for that part of the hu-man body (some of them vul-gar enough to suit Stein-beck’s purpose, and less sug-gestive of the delicatessenshop), it is rather alarming tosee the magnificent reach ofthe language silent except forone octave, on which littleboys seem to be poundingthe same keys over and overwith one finger.

This kind of candid comment istypical of Cather, and it adds to ourunderstanding of her views on theart of writing. In that same letter,

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Gardiner tells us, she discussesSamuel Morison’s Admiral of.theOcean Sea as a contrastingexam-ple of sensitive use of language.He quotes this passage from her

-letter:Morison’s book, I think, oughtto be read by every scholarlyCatholic. His treatment (in-deed, his discovery) of thevery important part religionplayed in Columbus’ life is tome a revelation. I don’t knowwhat Mr. Morison’s personalreligion may be~ but certainlyhe has a great understandingof what a source of powerprofound faith .may be inanother man.In the second letter from which

Gardiner quotes, he indicates thatin "responding to a question whatshe thought might be the effect ofthe war on literature," Cather"would not venture a guess." Shegave this reason:

¯ . . how can we have anyopinion about a thing whichhas never happened before?Never before has war meantdestruction and enslavementof whole civilian populations,as effort to destroy all relig-ions -- and with them theideals of conduct which havefor two thousand years influ-enced societies in their up-ward struggle.

This letter sounds a note that isechoed in many Cather letters.

At least two other letters have.appeared in print since 1947, inspite of Cather’s testamentary re-strictions against such publication.One of them is undated and doesnot contain the name of the ad-dressee. Presumably, however, itwas written to Cyril Clemens,kinsman of Samuel L. Clemens andeditor of the Mark Twain Jour-nal, with whom Cather exchangedseveral letters until the exchangebecame distasteful to her. (Cle-mens, like Weber, began inquiringabout Cather’s visit to Housman, asubject that angered her becauseof public misrepresentation.) Aphotocopy of the letter appeared,in honor of the centenary of Ca-ther’s birth, on the back cover ofthe Mark Twain Journal 17 (Winter1973-74) under the title "Willa Ca-

ther’s Tribute to Mark Twain." It istypewritten, but handcorrectedand signed in Cather’s writing. Thisis the letter, or at least the part ofit, reprinted in the Journal:

Some eight years ago Imet, in Paris, a Russian vio-linist who had heard that Iwas "from the West". After afew moments of conversa-tion, he eagerly asked mewhether I was from "theMississippi". I asked himwhether he meant from theState of Mississippi. Helooked perplexed and put hishand to his forehead and saideagerly -- "But the river, theriver?." Oh yes, I told him, Ihad crossed the Mississippiriver many times. He said atonce that this river was thething in America that he mostwished to see: he, himself,was born and grew up onanother great river, in a littletown on the Volga. When hewas a little boy he had read aRussian translation of "Humkleberry Finn", and had al-ways thought that the Missis-sippi must be much morewonderful and romantic thanthe Volga. I questioned him .alittle about the book ~ heseemed to remember it per-fectly. But how in the worldcould the talk of Nigger Jimbe translated into Russian?And what would become ofthe seven shadings of South-ern dialect which the authorin his preface tells the readermust not be confounded onewith the other? It seemed tome that the most delightfulthings in "Huckleberry Finn"must disappear in a transla-tion. One could translateParkman or Emerson, cer-tainly: but how translate MarkTwain? The only answerseems to be that if a book hasvitality enough, it can livethrough even the brutalitiesof translators.

Willa CatherOne interesting aspect of this

letter, or part of a letter, is that Ca-ther apparently takes Twain seri-ously when he describes sevendialect shadings in a prefatory noteto his book. Most of us today

assume that Twain speaks withtongue in cheek at such moments.Cather’s assumption suggests thatshe regards an author’s introduc-tory apparatus as reliable and im-portant, something worth noting aswe read the epigraphs to her booksand her introductions to Alexan-der’s Bridge and My ~ntonia.

Cather’s last known publishedletter was written to KatherineFoote [Raffy] in 1937. Evidently,Raffy read a tribute to Cather inBrooks Atkinson’s column in theNew York Times on November 24,1961, and sent him a letter she hadreceived from Cather. Atkinsonpublished the letter in his Timescolumn December 29, 1961, andlater gave it to New York City’sPierpont Morgan Library. It also ap-pears in a collection of his columnstitled Tuesdays and Fridays (NewYork: Random House, 1963). Anostalgic letter, Cather expressesanguish as she sees the worldrumbling toward a second worldwar:

Dear Katherine Foote:What a joy to hear from

you ~ and how I wish wemight meet again in thisworld which is whirling todestruction so fast that wehave not time to breathe,much less do any work.

How much better timeswere, how much more hope-ful, that winter day when Idined with you and your dearfather in Brooklyn on the daybefore you set off on yourlong voyage to the GoldenHorn.

What wonder that oneturns back to those times?Who would not like to remem-ber a happy world, havingonce known it? I do want tosee you and to talk with youof those dear people whomwe used to know. Pleasesend me your permanent ad-dress so that I can telegraphyou when I go through Bostonon my way to Canada. Wemight meet at Mrs. Gardner’shouse? How wonderful!

Affectionately always,Willa Cather

We should perhaps also notethat George Seibel, in "Miss Willa

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Cather from Nebraska," New Colo-phon 2 (September 1949): 207-208,quotes briefly from two letters Ca-ther wrote to him. He cites fromthem as proof that Cather intendedOswald Henshawe to be under-stood as Myra’s "mortal enemy"in her 1926 novel. Even so small asample of Cather’s "unpublished"letters provided here gives us avaluable glimpse of the woman be-hind the books. If we cannot haveall of the extant letters, we can at

least have readier access to thosefew that readers in the past haveseen. One thing is eminently clear:Cather had an extraordinary com-mand of the English language, andshe exercised it whenever andwherever she took pen (or type-writer) in hand,

-- Marilyn ArnoldProfessor of EnglishDean of Graduate StudiesBrigham Young UniversityProvo, Utah

The Language of Flowers in 0 Pioneers!Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! has

the confidence of a writer who hasfound her voice. Critics agree withCather that O Pioneers! is thenovel in which she "hit the homepasture" (1) as seen in its innova-tive subject (giving an immigrantfarm woman heroic stature) andstructure (interweaving two sep-arate stories). But there agreementstops. Early critics faulted the bookfor breaking in two; more recentones have recognized that Catheryoked the two parts together insubtle symbolic patterns. How-ever, emphasis on the novel as atwo part pastoral instead of a bookin five parts, (2) or on the literaryallusions (Pyramus and Thisbee,)(3) Romeo and Juliet, Canto V ofThe Inferno (4) does not accountfor Cather’s use of over eightyspecifically named flowers andplants. The Victorian’s code ofmeaning for specific plants, com-monly referred to as The Languageof Flowers, when applied to thenamed plants, flowers and trees in0 Pioneers! reveals a unifiedstructure that works as an under-ground river of imagery and sym-bol that surfaces systematically toemphasize theme, then retreats tofunction as an underlying currentthat connects theme as it movesthe novel to resolution. O Pio-neers/, a structurally innovativenovel, explores the necessity ofcreation of order from disorderthrough the juxtaposition of pas-sionate youth with the permanenceof age as revealed through the Vic-torian Language of Flowers.

That Cather was familiar withVictorian writers is clear. Slote ex-plains in "The Kingdom of Art" the

significance of the epigraph fromKingsley that appears in The TrollGarden and lists various Victorianwriters that serve as references forthe allusions in Cather’s work(Slote, p. 36). Many of these writerswere included in the Cather libraryor in the library of her childhoodneighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Wiener(Woodress, p. 55). Helen CatherSouthwick agrees that as a child,Cather would-have been familiarwith Victorian thought because heradored Grandmother Boak lived aVictorian lifestyle and may verywell have used The Language ofFlowers to communicate personalthoughts and feelings. (5) It wascommon practice during that timeto select specific flowers or plantsto send to someone to communi-cate an idea that would be inappro-priate to state directly. The Ameri-can authority on the various inter-pretations of the flowers and plantswas Mrs. E. W. Wirt of Virginia,who published her F/ora’s Diction-ary in 1837, (6) but the tradition ofsymbolic meaning for plants andflowers can be traced all the wayback to classical times. Most of theslim volumes of floral interpreta-tion that appeared in Americafrom 1850 to 1870 included selec-t.ions of poetry mostly from the Vic-torians and partly from the Roman-tics in England which were to besent along with the appropriateplant or flower when communicat-ing a secret message. The Victor-ians believed that the most gra-cious way to state elemental pas-sions was through hidden mean-ings. In Cather’s 1894 lambast ofthe reappearance of Vanity Fairshe states that "it is too bad that

when there are so many cleverways to say wicked things,-peoplewill insist on using the most offen-sive.". (7) Her attitude coincideswith Victorian sensibility,

"Prairie Spring," which pre-faces the novel, sets up the the-matic contrast between the orderand permanence of age versus thepassion of youth and introducesthe major plant imagery. The firstnine lines explore the somber flatland, filled with riches of wheat,and contrast this in the last ninelines with "Youth, flaming like wildroses". (8) Wheat, which symbol-izes prosperity, in the Victoriancode, (9) Cather associates withAlexandra throughout the novel.Wild roses, which symbolize thecoexistence of pleasure and pain,are associated with Marie and Emilonce the reader realizes their pas-sion for each other. Cather makesclear from the start that the stabil-ity of the wheat farmer opposesthe wild passion of youth and thatthe fruits of the land symbolicallyecho this struggle.

One does not overstate to saythat O Pioneers! abounds withflowers; Cather includes more thaneighty references to specificallynamed plants. Because so muchcritical attention has been cen-tered on Part IV, "The White Mul-berry Tree," and its symbolic im-portance in the novel, one mightexpect the majority of the plant ref-erences to occur there; but onefinds that Part I, "The Wild Land"has twenty-four and Part II,"Neighboring Fields," has thirty-nine, whereas Part IV has onlytwelve, eleven of which are intro-duced earlier in the novel. Catheruses the specific plants symbol-ically in the first two parts to esta-blish clearly the youth/age, disor-der/order themes. She then ex-tends those images through therest of the novel to emphasize thethemes at key points in the plot andto move the novel to a resolution ofthese opposite themes. The lastsentence of the book unites theorderly prosperity that the wheatsymbolizes with the pleasure andpain of youth as symbolized by wildroses, thus bringing the novel to asuccessful resolution.

Perhaps when Cather prefacesthe description of Alexandra in her

Page 29

garden in Part I, "The Wild Land,"by stating that the "pioneer shouldhave imagination, should be ableto enjoy the idea of things morethan the things themselves" (p.48), she is directing the reader tothe double meanings of the namedplants and flowers that follow. Theflowers in Alexandra’s gardenhave survived the drought whollydue to Mrs. Bergson’s diligentwatering. The zinnias, indicatingthoughts of absent friends, themarigolds, signifying grief, pain,and chagrin, and the scarlet sage,representing domestic virtue,make appropriate symbolicchoices in that they reveal Mrs.Bergson’s state of mind after herhusband’s death and the value sheplaces on domestic duties.

When one applies the codedmeanings to the plants in Alexan-dra’s garden, one sees her per-sonal feelings and position withinthe pioneer community. ConfidentAlexandra knows that her strengthand deep well of energy will carryher through the difficult mOnthsthat others find disheartening andthat the land will respond tO her ef-forts if she treats it with love andrespect. The pumpkins and citrons,representing bulkiness and zest re-spectively, echo Alexandra’s phys-ical qualities. The seed potatoesand gooseberries, representingbenevolence and anticipation, re-flect her belief in the goodness ofthe land and her hope for its fruit-fulness. Alexandm’s belief in theland encourages her neighbors,when they need help, to ask her foradvice which the rhubarb repre-sents, and to criticize her whenshe attempts something new,which the seed-cucumbers signify.Alexandra, at this early stage ofher life, would like to please every-one in her family, a sentiment rep-resented by currants, but will notbe able to do this as she strives toestablish order in the wild land.Carl, who has been a source ofstrength for Alexandra because heunderstands her, knows that hisabsence will be a hardship forAlexandra, so he eases her pain byreminiscing about making plumwine together. Domesticatedplums mean keep your promises,which idea echoes Carl’s impetu-ous promise to "write as long as I

live" (p. 53), whereas wild plumssignify independence, which willbe the quality that will direct themajority of Alexandra’s life fromthis point on. The remainder ofAlexandra’s youth disappears withCarl’s exit.

The youthful power inherent inair that has a "tonic... quality" (p.77) in Chapter I of "NeighboringFiel ds" prepares the reader for theintroduction of the adult Marie andher role in the subplot. When shefirst appears as an adult, the redpoppies that trim her wide hatshade her face, which "was ratherlike a poppy, round and brown, withrich color in her cheeks and lips"(p. 79), make her the picture ofyouth. For Victorians red poppiesmean evanescent pleasure, whichdescribes exactly not only Marie’sstate of mind, but her effect onthose around her. However, adarker symbolic image immediate-ly follows this picture -- an imagethat will continue to be used as theMarielEmil story unfolds.

The cherry tree in the Victorianinterpretation has two conflictingmeanings, The wild cherry treesymbolizes deception. The tamed,cultivated cherry tree that wouldoccur in an orchard representseducation, because one must beknowledgeable to turn the wild treeinto a fruitbearing tree. The sym-bolic difference between the wildand the cultivated cherry tree be-came blurred during the laterstages of the Victorian period sothat the cherry tree came to meanmore generally that knowledge willnot always prevent deception. Thisinterpretation points up the relationin the Marie/Emil story because itemphasizes the view of the loversas victims of youthful passions thatthey know are destructive, but can-not control.

Youthful passion contrasts atthe end of this chapter with "theorder and fine arrangement mani-fest all over" (p. 84) Alexandra’sprosperous farm. The scrub wil-lows, signifying freedom, and thewalnut tree, representing intellectand strategem reflect the qualitiesthat have aided Alexandra in gain-ing a measure of affluence. Theosage orange hedges, symbolizingluxury, line either side of the roadleading to her house. Seemingly

nothing can threaten Alexandra orher farm. Order rests securely inprosperity. The juxtaposition of thepoppy/cherry tree with the willow,walnut and osage orange tree em-phasize the struggle betweenyouth and age and function here asintroduction to Part II.

In the next three chapters, Ca-ther further develops Alexandra’srole within her community and thepersonal consequences she mustsuffer due to that role. She com-pares Alexandra’s head to "one ofthe big sunflowers that fringe hervegetable garden" (p. 88). The in-troduction of this new flower sym-bol shows that Alexandra’s suc-cess has given her personal confi-dence, but has made her neigh-bors and brothers see her ashaughty, a quality which the sun-flower represents. Alexandra’shaughtiness, which comes partlyfrom her superior vision and partlyfrom the perception of jealousneighbors, will make her unable tosee Marie and Emil’s plight andtherefore-will cause her anguish.

Cather develops well the refer-ences to the Victorian code in theopening scene of Chapter IX. Thewild roses mentioned in "PrairieSpring" appear with no other plantso they signify the coexistence ofpleasure and pain. To this pointMarie has been nothing but asource of pleasure to Alexandra,so to associate wild roses with heras she, Carl, and Alexandra enjoy alively conversation in Marie’s or-chard would be inaccurate. In-stead Cather notes in this scenethat the "wild roses were flamingin the tufts of bunch grass" (p. 135)thus changing the meaning frompleasure and pain to them is every-thing to be gained by good com-pany, the message intended whenthe Victorians sent a rose in a tuftof grass. But as in Chapter I of"Neighboring Fields," Catherfollows these pleasure-filled sym-bols with ones that foreshadow thetragic end of the Marie/Emil story.Cather names three trees, the ap-ple tree, representing temptation,the apricot tree, indicating doubt,and the white mulberry tree, whichmeans I will not survive you; andshe connects Marie most closelywith the mulberry tree. ObviouslyMarie will become a source of

P~ge 3O

temptation for Emil. Carl Lind-strum, who receives Marie’s gift ofa branch from an apricot tree,alone doubts Marie’s innocence.But most significantly, the intro-duction of the white mulberry treehere indicates not only an earlydeath for Marie, but alludes to thetragic death that will come from illi-cit love. The Victorian interpreta-tion of the white mulberry treecomes from the Pyramus and This-bee legend and from the legendthat the person who plants a mul-berry tree would never live to tasteits fruit because the tree maturesslowly. The Victorian s always con-nected the white mulberry treewith secret love and early death.

When the river of flowers sym-bolism resurfaces in Chapter VIII,Cather introduces additionalplants. Marie’s orchard, which inChapter VIII has become "a neg-lected wilderness" (p. 151) servesas an appropriate setting for Emil’sadmission of love. The cherry treeand the wild rose, the first plantsnamed in this chapter, mean de-ception and pleasure/pain respec-tively in the wild state. The wildlarkspur, signifying swiftness, andthe hoarhound, representing fire,would not exist in a carefullytended orchard, their presenceemphasizes the passion that drivesMarie and Emil. The picture ofMarie "sitting under her white mul-berry tree, the pailful of cherriesbeside her, looking off at the gen-tle, tireless swelling of the wheat"(p. 152) reveals the deception thatwill be the basis of the lovers’death and the prosperity, repre-sented by the distant wheat, thatthey will never enjoy.

Trees have more than just sym-bolic meaning in the chapter;Marie reveals her belief that treeshave power and meaning and thather old world ancestors were treeworshippers. When Emil asks herwhich trees are the lucky ones, sherelates a tale about the old worldlinden trees that folk planted topurify the forest by doing awaywith spells cast by other trees.Particularly interesting this choicebecause the linden, which rep-resents matrimony and conjugallove, does not physically exist inMarie’s orchard. If it did, herancestors would have believed, it

could nullify the deception anddeath that the cherry tree andmulberry tree represent. Butbecause Marie has no conjugallove in her marriage, the lindentree is legendary, not actual. Thefire of the lover’s passion will beall-consuming, and the spells castby the cherry and mulberry treeswill be inevitable.

Cather carries the application ofthese interpretations one step fur-ther by having Emil pick "thesweet, insipid fruit" (p. 153) of themulberry tree (I will not surviveyou) and "drop a handful into herlap" (p. 153) thereby foreshadow-ing the order of the lovers’ deaths.Because the actual gift of plantsconveyed the intended message inthe Victorian code, symbolicallyEmil is telling Marie that he will diefirst. Cather intensifies the impor-tance of this action since it is thelast reference in relation to Marieand Emil in Part I1.

Not until Marie’s reaction toAm~le~’s death in Chapter V, of"The White Mulberry Tree", doesCather reintroduce the wild rosesymbol and add one new plantsymbol that serves to prepare thereader for the climax in Chapter VI.As she walks in the moonlit coun-tryside amid wild roses, Marie pon-ders Am~de~’s fate, then decidesthat once Emil has left "she couldlet everything else go and live anew life of perfect love" (p. 249).Emil’s absence will be both painfuland pleasurable to her as empha-sized by the wild roses throughwhich she walks. The ashes-of-rose plant, the common milkweed,represents thoughts of heaven inthe Victorian code and appearsalong with the wild roses in thischapter to help make Marie seemother-worldly as she plans herfuture. As she considers Am~de~’sfate alongside Emil’s and her own,she concludes that she "wanted tolove and dream.., as long as thissweetness welled up in her heart,as long as her breast could holdthis treasure of pain!" (p. 250). Shedoes not feel tied to the earth, butlike the ashes-of-rose, her thoughtsare of the heavens.

Passion and death are just as in-timately connected for Emil asthey are for Marie, but to Emil "theheart, when it is too much alive,

aches for that brown earth" (p.257). As he leaves Am~de~’s fu-neral, he yields to his passion forMarie and goes to her for one lastgoodbye. At this point Cather in-cludes plants with appropriatesymbolic meanings to emphasizethe youth/age, disorder/ordertheme. Emil storms through fieldsfilled with ripe corn (riches), wheat(prosperity), and sweet clover (in-dustry), but these things "passedhim like pleasant things in adream" (p. 258). The order andprosperity that Alexandra has esta-blished in the fields by sacrificingher youth to: industry, meansnothing to Emil. Only the appletrees (temptation), cherry trees(deception), and the mulberry tree(I will not survive you) of Marie’sorchard reach his consciousness.When he awakens Marie under hermulberry tree and consumatestheir love, he can see only his ownface, the orchard, and the sun asthey are reflected in Marie’s eyes.

When in the next chapter, Frankcreeps through a mulberry hedge,discovers the lovers, and thenshoots blindly, he fulfills the Vic-torian interpretation of the mul-berry tree, I will not survive you.But Cather makes it clear thattragic death is not the whole storynor is the legend of Pyramus andThisbee the sole allusion. "Thestained, slippery grass, the dark-ened mulberries told only half thestory" (p. 270). The pleasure andpain of the wild rose demonstratesthat youthful passion and tragicdeath are connected, but Marieand Emil’s illicit love destroys notonly their lives, but threatens theorder and prosperity of Alexan-dra’s life. As set up thematically in"Prairie Spring" at the beginningof the novel, youthful passion, "inits insupportable sweetness,""flaming like wild roses" (preface)opposes the prosperity andstrength of "the growing wheat"(preface), the center of Alexan-dra’s life. Alexandra’s response tothe tragedy and the resolution ofthe opposing themes, remains forexploration.

In Part V, "Alexandra", Carl andAlexandra walk through Mrs. Hil-ler’s garden as Carl explains Marieand Emil’s love, but Cather doesnot yet refer to any specific plants.

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Once Alexandra accepts their love,Cather unites the two themes,youthful passion/stable age, dis-order/order, together in her by us-ing the plant symbolism to empha-size Alexandra’s rebirth. It is "for-tunate country, that is one day toreceive hearts like Alexandra’sinto its bosom, to give them outagain in the shining eyes ofyouth!" (p. 309). The country re-turns riches and prosperity andyouthful enthusiasm to future gen-erations because of hearts likeAlexandra’s. She is complete, now,as she was not before the tragedy.Where the passion of youth andthe order of age were in oppositionthroughout the novel, now they areconnected in Alexandra and canbe given to future generationsthrough the bounty of the land.

Willa Cather wanted the peopleof Nebraska to like O Pioneers!.(10) She may have assumed theseplant references and their secretmeanings would be apparent to thecasual reader because The Lan-guage of Flowers was not a toolused just by aristocratic ladies andgentlemen, but was part of mosthouseholds in Cather’s grand-mother’s day. As Slote pointed out,"one need not have expectednotes from the novelist" (11) tohelp the reader make these con-nections. Cather’s early criticsassumed O Pioneers! told thestory of the pioneer woman in Ne-braska predominately because thesetting and major plot lines wereunique in the literature of 1913.While recent critics have stressedthe wealth of literary allusions inCather’s work, they may haveoverlooked the floral interpreta-tions in O Pioneers!. This fact doesnot surprise us; we no longer usethe Victorian code of meanings forfloral gifts. But as Slote explains,"around 1908 Willa Cather seemsto have made a deliberate effort touse primary experience in a mythi-cal or allusive structure" (Kingdomof Art, p. 103). In a novel that hasover eighty references to specifi-cally named plants, it becomes ap-parent that these references areby design and that they function asallusive structural tools thatorganize and emphasize the the-matic contrast of youth and age.

-- Cynthia K. BriggsCincinnati, Ohio

(Paper given at Western Litera-ture Association meeting in St.Paul, Minnesota, 1983.)

Notes(1) Mildred Bennett, The World

of Willa Cather, (Lincoln: Universityof Nebraska Press, 1961), illustra-tion.

(2) Bruce Baker, "O Pioneers!:The Problem of Structure", GreatPlains Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4, p.222.

(3) Bernice Slote, "The King-dom of Art" in The Kingdom of ArtWilla Cather’s First Principles andCritical Statements, 1893-1896,ed. Bernice Slote, (Lincoln: Univer-sity of Nebraska Press, 1966), p.100. Subsequent references to thisessay will appear within the text.

(4) James Woodress, "Willa Ca-ther: American and European Tra-dition", in The Art of Willa Cather,ed. Bernice Slote and VirginiaFaulkner, (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1977), p. 55.

(5) Interview with Helen CatherSouthwick, "Willa Cather Today: ANational Conference" held in Has-tings, Nebraska, June 19-25, 1983.

(6) Mrs. E. W. Wirt of Viriginia,Floras Dictionary, (Baltimore: Field-ing Lucas, Jr., 1873).

(7) Willa Cather, The Kingdomof Art Willa Cather’s First Princi-ples and Critical Statements, 1893-1896, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press,1966), p. 58. Subsequent refer-ences to this collection will appearwithin the text.

(8) Willa Cather, O Pioneers!,(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Co.,1941). Subsequent references tothis edition will appear within thetext.

(9) Floral interpretations usedthroughout the paper were deter-mined by checking the AmericanVictorian Dictionaries as listed inthe bibliography, against the Eng-.lish authorities and applying themost commonly accepted interpre-tation. A recent publication byClaire Powell, The Meaning ofFlowers (Boulder." Shambhala Pub-lications, Inc., 1979) presents anexcellent history of plant interpre-tations, literary uses of the trans-lated meanings and an accurateglossary of plants, many of whichdisappeared after the Victorian

period, with the most common Vic-torian interpretation for each plant.Some plants in O Pioneers!,named by a local common term, donot appear in the Victorian FloralDictionaries by that name. Thebotanical name of those plantswas determined by consultingJohn Madson, Where the Sky Be-gan: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Co.,1982). Some plants in O Pioneers!were not commonly used in theVictorian code and many appear inonly one of the works listed in thebibliography. All interpretations ofplants that appear within this paperwere determined in this fashion.

(10) This fact is common withinmost of the biographical work onCather. It is most clearly stated inElizabeth Shepley Sargeant’smemoir.

(11) Bernice Slote, "An Explora-tion of Cather’s Early Writing,"Great Plains Quarterly, Vol. 2, No.4, p. 211.

BlbllographyPRIMARY SOURCES

Cather, Wilia. O Pioneers!, Bos-ton: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1941.

The Kingdom of Art Willa Ca-ther’s First Principles and CriticalStatements, 1893-1896. Ed. Ber-nice Slote. Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1966.

SECONDARY SOURCESBaker, Bruce P. "O Pioneers!

The Problem of Structure". GreatPlains Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp.218-223.

Dumont, Henrietta. The Lan-guage of Flowers. The FloralOffering: A Token of Affection andEsteem; Comprising the Languageand Poetry of Flowers. Philadel-phia: H. C. Peck and Theo. Bliss,1852.

Esling, Catherine H. Floras Lexi-con: An Interpretation of the Lan-guage and Sentiment of Flowers:With an Outline of Botany, and aPoetical Introduction. Boston:Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1855.

Hale, Sarah J. Flora Interpreterand Fortuna Flora. Boston: Ben-jamin B. Mussey and Co., 1854.

Hooper, Lucy. The Lady’s Bookof Flowers and Poetry: to whichare added a Botanical Introduc-

tion, a Complete Floral Dictionaryand a Chapter on Plants in Rooms.New York: Derby and Jackson,1858.

Jacks, L. V. "The Classics andWilla Cather", Prairie Schooner 35(Winter 1961162): 292.

Madson, John. Where the SkyBegan: Land of the Tallgrass Prai-rie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,1982.

Miller, Thomas. The PoeticalLanguage of Flowers or the Pil-grimage of Love. London: Griffin,Bohn and Co., 1862.

Powell, Claire. The Meaning ofFlowers. Boulder: Shambhala Pub-lication, Inc., 1979.

Slote, Bernice. "An Explorationof Cather’s Early Writing". GreatPlains Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp.210-217.

Sutherland, Donald. "Willa Ca-ther: The Classic Voice". The Artof Willa Cather. Ed. Bernice Sloteand Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: Uni-versity of Nebraska Press, 1977.

Welty, Eudora. "The House ofWilla Cather". The Art of Willa Ca-ther. Ed. Bernice Slote and VirginiaFaulkner. Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1977.

Wirt, Mrs. E. W. of Virginia.Floras Dictionary. Baltimore: Field-ing Lucas, Jr., 1873.

Woodress, James. "Willa Ca-ther: American and European Tra-dition". The Art of Willa Cather. Ed.Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulk-ner. Lincoln: University of Nebras-ka Press, 1977.

Jim Burden, Willa Catherand the Introductions to My , ntonia

Critics have often discussed thetechnical aspects of Jim Burden’srole as narrator in Willa Cather’sMy ,4ntonia. Despite David Dai-ches’ dismissal of the introductionto the novel as relatively unimpor-tant (Willa Cather: A Critical Intro-duction, 1951), as various criticshave asserted, a realization ofwhat Willa Cather accomplishes inthat section becomes essential toan understanding of the tone andstructure of the novel as a whole.There seems, however, to havebeen little reference to the intro-duction as it describes and reflectsthe personality of Jim Burden.There were, in fact, several ver-sions of the introduction, the mostimportant being the original ver-sion of 1918 and the revised ver-sion of 1926. (1) When discussingthe novel, it has been critical com-monplace to refer to the 1926 in-troduction: but while an author iscertainly entitled to have his workjudged as it appears in its finalform, a comparison of the two ver-sions of the introduction revealssome interesting and significantchanges.

The writing of My ,~ntonia hadactually begun over thirty yearsbefore Cather put words down on

paper, when Willa Cather movedfrom Virginia to Nebraska. Thestories of the poor immigrantfarmers struggling to adjust to andto master the wild country and theaccounts of their energy, will, andendurance in carving out a new life’~n a new land had "teased" WillaCather for three decades. Sometime in 1916, returning to NewYork from a trip to the Southwest,she stopped and stayed severalweeks in her hometown, RedCloud. One day she drove out ontothe Divide to see Annie SadilekPavelka, the Bohemian immigrantwoman who had been one of herclosest childhood friends. In theworn face of the still energeticwoman, now surrounded by hermany children, Willa Cather sawreflected the whole history of theimmigrant experience in the Mid-west, the struggle and the triumphof the early Nebraska pioneer. Shehad wanted to tell the pioneerwoman’s story for years, and shedecided at that moment that hernext novel would recreate the lifeof this stalwart old friend. The sightof Annie Pavelka and all her chil-dren was a profoundly moving ex-perience for Wilia Cather andseems to have left her with a sense

of great satisfaction, even elation.Edith Lewis says Cather was so af-fected by the reunion that whenshe returned to New York she al-ready had the first few chapters ofthe novel written.(2). Cather wrote The Professor’s

House (1925) and the revised intro-duction to My ,4ntonia (1926),under much different conditions.Miss Lewis calls The Professor’sHouse "the most personal of WillaCather’s novels." (3) Nowhere elsein her fiction does one sense lossand disillusionment so profoundlyas in the character of ProfessorGodfrey St. Pe, ter. Like him, WillaCather had by 1926, become "oneof the backward" b one of thosepersons whose affinities and asso-ciations cling to a past world,undermined and destroyed by timeand "progress." Like St. Peter,"tremendously tired," Willa Catherfound herself increasingly unableto accept or cope with the worldaround her.

The two versions of the introduc-tion to My ,4ntonia clearly reflectthe changes in Willa Cather’s atti-tudes that took place between1918 and 1926. Although Jim Bur-den’s narrative remains virtuallyunchanged, various differencesbetween the two introductions af-fect the picture we get of him.First, in the 1918 edition Cathergives a somewhat detailed de-.scription of his wife’s backgroundand personality, in the 1926 ver-sion one sees only a short descrip-tion of her. Secondly, where in theoriginal introduction one reads anagreement between Jim Burdenand the author that they will bothwrite about/~ntonia, in the revisedintroduction one finds no suchagreement. While the two are talk-ing on the train, Jim remarks to theauthor that from time to time hehas been writing ,down what he re-members about Antonia, and sev-eral months later he brings theauthor his account to read.

As E. K. Brown states, thischange improves the effect of thenovel: "Jim’s concern with Jkntoniaseems more profound when thedecision to record his memoriesstems not from a meeting with aprofessional writer but from hisown inward impulse." (4) But theconversation about this original

agreement, which Cather omits inthe 1926 version, gives a signifi-cant picture of Jim Burden:

"1 can’t see," he said im-petuously, "why you havenever written anything about/~.ntonia."

I told him I had always feltthat other people -- he him-self, for one -- knew hermuch better than I. I wasready, however, to make anagreement with him; I wouldset down on pap, er all that Iremembered of Antonia if hewould do the same. Wemight, in this way, get a pic-ture of her.

He rumpled his hair with aquick, excited gesture, whichwith him often announces anew determination, and Icould see that my suggestiontook hold of him. "Maybe Iwill, maybe I will!" he de-clared. He stared out of thewindow for a few moments,and when he turned to meagain his eyes had the sud-den clearness that comesfrom something the mind it-self sees [italics mine]. (5)A further comparison of the in-

troductions reveals two additionalchanges made in the 1926 edition:in the first the omission of threewords, in the second the deletionof a long description of Jim:

1918: As for Jim, no disap-pointments have been severeenough to chill his naturallyromantic and ardent disposi-tion. This disposition, thoughit often made him seem veryfunny when he was a boy, hasbeen one of the strongest ele-ments in his success [italicsmine] (p. xi).

1926: As for Jim, disap-pointments have not changedhim. The romantic dispositionwhich often made him seemvery funny as a boy, has beenone of the strongest elementsin his success. (6)

1918: He loves with a per-sonal passion the great coun-try through which his .railwayruns and branches. His faithin it and his knowledge of ithave played .an importantpart in its development. He is

always able to raise capitalfor new enterprises in Wyom-ing or Montana, and hashelped young men out thereto do remarkable things inmines and timber and oil. If ayoung man with an idea canonce get Jim Burden’s atten-tion, can manage to accom-pany him when he goes offinto the wilds hunting for lostparks or exploring new can-yons, then the money whichmeans action is usually forth-coming. Jim is still able tolose himself in those bigWestern dreams. Though heis over forty now, he meetsnew people and new enter-prises with the impulsivenessby which his boyhood friendsremember him. He neverseems to me to grow older.His fresh color and sandyhair and quick-changing blueeyes are those of a youngman, and his sympathetic,solicitous interest in womenis as youthful as it is Westernand American [italics mine](pp. xi-xii).

1926: He loves with a per-sonal passion the great coun-try through which his railwayruns and branches. His faithin it and his knowledge of ithave played an importantpart in its development (p. x).In the 1918 introduction, then,

Jim Burden, though forty years old,is still a very youthful, energetiC,and impulsive man. In the.1926 in-troduction he seems much lessyouthful and energetic, morereflective and wistfully nostalgic.While in the 1918 introduction helives as a character who stillpossess,es a vitality comparable tothat of Antonia, in Willa Cather’sfinal version he appears as a manwho has regretfully taken onWordsworth’s "inevitable¯ yoke,"who is, as opposed to Antonia, ra-ther battered and diminished.

While Willa Cather, an authorwho prided herself on what shecould leave out (see, for example,her essay, "The Novel D~meubW’),the revisions, mainly in the form ofdeletions, made from the 1918 tothe 1926 introduction seem morethan merely stylistic. Significantemotional and psychological

changes that had occurred in WillaCather herself between 1918 and1926 seem to manifest themselvesin the two descriptions of JimBurden. By 1926 Willa Cather’soriginal elation at her reunion withAnnie Pavelka had died, the glor-ious days of the nineteenth-centuryMidwest had ended, the world forher had broken apart, and she feltherself both battered and dimin-~nhed. The two introductions to My

tonia provide interesting evi-dence of the changes she hadundergone in eight years and per-haps suggest that her sense of JimBurden’s relationship to .~ntoniaand the past had also changed.

-- Richard C. HarrisAssociate ProfessorHumanities Dept.SUNY Maritime CollegeBronx, New York

Notes(1) The important substantive

changes occur in these two edi-tions. The other versions generallycontain mechanical variations,e.g., in punctuation.

(2) Wi//a Cather Living: A Per-sonal Record, Edith Lewis (NewYork: Alfred A..Knopf, 1953), p.102.

(3) Ibid., p. 137.(4) Wi//a Cather: A Critical Biog-

raphy, completed by Brown & Edel(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953),pp. 200-201.

(5) My/~ntonia, with illustrationsby W. T. Benda (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1918), pp. xii-xiii. Subse-quent references to this edition areplaced in the text.

(6) My/~ntonia (Boston: Hough-ton Mifflin, 1926), p. x. Subsequentreferences to this edition areplaced in the text.

Willa Catherand the Nebraska Frontier

In a lecture delivered in 1920 atOmaha, Sinclair Lewis said of WillaCather that she was Nebraska’sforemost citizen and that theUnited States knew Nebraska be-cause of her books¯ Nebraska in-deed is present as material orbackground not only in-many of hershort stories, but also in several ofher novels such as O Pioneers!,One of Ours, A Lost Lady and LucyGayheart. Even in the novels shesituates in other regions, such asThe Song of the Lark or The Pro-fessor’s House, one feels she isstill referring to the land where shespent the greater part of her child-hood.

Yet it took her a long time beforeshe fully realized how much shedepended upon Nebraska for thecore of her inspiration. Her firstnovel to deal in an affirmative waywith the Prairie was O Pioneers!, in1913, and by then she was alreadyforty. For several years she hadbeen living in New York where shehad secured a position as editor ofthe famous muckraking McClure’smagazine. At that time she was adevotee of Henry James and cos-mopolitan values. In fact, her firstfull-length novel, Alexander’sBridge, published in 1912, re-flected Willa Cather’s ambition toconform to the Jamesian stand-ards in subject if not in treatment.Later, she was to compare thatEastern novel with O Pioneers!,the Western novel, in an attempt toexplain the reasons for her evolu-tion:

My first novel Alexander’sBridge was very like whatpainters call a studio picture¯.. I still find people who likethat book because it followsthe most conventional pat-tern and because it is more orless laid in London. London issupposed to be more engag-ing than, let us say, GopherPrairie . . . Soon after thebook was published, I wentfor six months to Arizona andNew Mexico. The longer Istayed in a country .... themore unnecessary and su-perficial a book like Alexan-

der’s Bridge seemed to me... I recovered from the con-ventional editorial point ofview (1).It undoubtedly took courage on

the part of that literary woman whowas pursuing a brilliant career in aleading New York magazine todare return for her inspiration tothe bare land of her youth, not thistime to deride it, as she had donein some earlier stories of hatredand frustration, but to celebrate itwith fervor and love. About O Pio-neers/ she said afterwards that"she did not at all expect that otherpeople would see anything in aslow moving story.., concernedsolely with heavy farming people,with cornfields and pasture landsand pigyards, D set in Nebraska,of all places~ .... As everyoneknows," she went on, "Nebraskais distinctly ’d~class~’ as a literarybackground... A New York criticvoiced a very general opinionwhen he said: ’1 simply don’t give adamn what happens in Nebraska,no matter who writes about it.’ "(2)

Sarah O. Jewett had once toldWilla Cather: "Of course, one day,you will write about your own coun-try. In the meantime get all youcan. One must know the world sowell before one can know theparish." (3) After years of variedand exciting experiences, travelsin the States and abroad, especial-ly in France, encounters with fa-mous authors, musicians, artists,after considerable literary experi-ments and journalistic activities,Willa Cather felt she could at lastfollow the advice of the New Eng-land novelist. She had acquiredenough detachmsnt, she was ma-ture enough to write about that"shaggy country" which, she said,had "gripped" her "with a pas-sion" she "had,never been able toshake." (4) The latter statementcontains the implicit admissionthat she tried to resist Nebraska’shold on her, but that in the end shehad been defeated. After graduat-ing from the University of Nebras-ka at Lincoln, she fled from RedCloud, the small prairie townwhere she grew up, in an attempt

to escape its drabness and fulfillher dreams of literary achieve-ment. After she left for Pittsburghin June, 1896, to work for some ob-scure ladies’ magazine, she wroteto a friend in Nebraska that whenher train got East of Chicago, shefelt so elated that the conductor,seeing her look of glee, asked herif she was getting back home.However, after having settled inthe City of Dreadful Dirt, as shecalled Pittsburgh, she had fits ofnostalgia, and in a moment ofdespondency she wrote to herfriend Mariel Gere that she couldnot be happy .so far away fromhome. Though she never settledagain in Nebraska, she often re-turned there for prolonged stays.About the way she felt on suchoccasions she wrote: "Whenever Icrossed the Missouri River, com-ing into Nebraska, the very smell ofthe soil tore me to pieces."

The impressions she had gath-ered as a child uprooted from hernative Virginia and taken to theWestern Frontier when she wasnine, were intense and were neverto be forgotten. They came to life,fresh and vivid, particularly ,innovels like O Pioneers!, My Amtonia and The Song of the Lark.About the genesis of O Pioneers!she declared:

I knew every farm, every tree,every field in the regionaround my home and theycalled out to me. My deepestfeelings were rooted in thiscountry because one’sstrongest emotions and one’smost vivid mental picturesare acquired before one is fif-teen. I had searched forbooks about the beauty of thecountry I loved: its romance,the heroism and strength andcourage of its people.., andI did not find them. And so Iwrote O Pioneers! (5).Willa Cather indeed thought that

the subject-matter she used in thatnovel was original to a great extentbecause, among other reasons,"no American writer had usedSwedish immigrants for any butcomic purpose." Of course, eversince James Fenimore Cooper’sThe Pioneers, published in 1823,the conquest of a new country hadbeen the subject of many stories.

Page35

Hamlin Garland had described theplight of German and Norwegianimmigrants in Iowa or Wisconsin.Nevertheless, if Willa Cather wasnot the first to write about pio-neers, it was in her novels that thepioneers’ struggle to settle theland was first raised to the level ofhigh art as R. Meyer observes inThe Midd/e-West Farm NovelWhen one considers how conven-tional most of the Western ro-mances had been before Willa Ca-ther, Meyer’s judgment is perfectlyvalid. The same critic very aptlynotes that Willa Cather was aboveall interested in individual person-alities and subordinated the exter-nal story of pioneering to the studyof their development. For example,in O Pioneers! Alexandra’s relationto the land is not that of a merepioneer woman. She becomes anearth goddess making the wholePrairie tame and frui!ful. Similarly,the heroine in My Antonia is thenew Eve of America, "a rich mineof life, like the founders of earlyraces," as Willa Cather writes to-wards the end of the novel./~nton-ia, the mother of eleven beautifulchildren and the founder of a fertilehomestead, represents a symbolof fecundity, as suggested in thisevocation:

She had only to stand in theorchard, to put her hand on alittle crabtree and look up atthe apples to make you feelthe goodness of planting andtending and. harvesting atlast.In her books about the pioneers,

Willa Cather expounded her viewsof human nature, a philosophy oflife and a criticism of Americancivilization which invest the pio-neer venture with implicationsreaching far beyond the narrowframe of the farm novel and eventhe more ample chronicle of theNebraska Frontier. In O Pioneers!and in My ,~ntonia she made itquite clear that it was not in thematerial achievements of the pio-neers that she was interested, butin their outstanding moral traits, inthe way they endured hardshipsand eventually triumphed over thesoil. Quoting Michelet "le but n’estden, le chemin est tout," she de-clared that success did not matterso much as struggle. In an article

on Nebraska which she wrote in1923, she praised "the sturdytraits of character of the pioneers"but also "their elasticity of mind"and "qualities of feeling and imagi-nation" which to her were basic-ally the same as those the artistought to possess in order to betruly creative. Of Annie Sadilek, theBohemian girl who served asmodel for ,~ntonia, she said: "shewas one of the truest artists I everknew in the keenness and sensi-tiveness of her enjoyment, in herlove of people and in her willing-ness to take pains." (6)

At the same time, while telling"the splendid story of the pio-neers," to use her own words, sheimplied that the children of those"giants who subdued the land"were not worthy of them. Accord-ing to her, the America of her timewas heading towards what shecalled "machine-made material-ism" which was rapidly destroyingthe values of the Frontier. In thesame article, she declared that forthe pioneers "material prosperitywas a moral victory," but that fortheir sons, it meant merely materi-al comfort and the desire to liveeasily. She talked about "the uglycrest of materialism setting its sealall over the country." (7)

As she grew older, she increas-ingly looked towards the past forthe values she cherished. Criticswere prompt to denounce her es-capism, accusing her of retreatinginto the past in order to flee fromthe realities of the present. They,of course, failed to realize thatWilla Cather was essentially a"novelist of memory", as E.Wagenknecht remarked in Caval-cade of the American Novel. Theepigraph fro,m Virgil on the titlepage of My Antonia illustrates thenovelist’s nostalgia: "Optima dies¯.. prima fugit." Echoing the mel-ancholy of the Latin poet, Jim Bur-den, the narrator, says at the endof the novel: "For Antonia and forme this had been the road of Des-tiny.., whatever we had missed,we possessed together the pre-cious, the incommunicable past."In 1918, shortly after the publica-tion of the book, Randolph Bournein the "Dial" had perceived theelegiac charm of the story:

Here at last is an Americannovel, redolent of the West,ern Prairie... My,~ntonia hasthe indestructible fragranceof youth, the prairie girls andthe dances.., the rich flow-ered prairie, with its drowsyheats and stinging colds...This story lives with the hope-fulness of the West. It is poig-nant and beautiful, but it isnot sad. It is richly interpret-ing the spirit of youth.Willa Cather herself pointed out,

as she had already done with OPioneers! the role of memory inher second Nebraska novel. Shehad treasured up recollections thatlay hidden in her mind and hadbeen slowly maturing until theywere ready to expand and take theshape of fiction: "My ~ntoniacame along, quite of itself and withno direction from me... the bookhad all been lived many times be-fore it was written, and the happymood in which I began it neverpaled." The critic Joseph Krutchonce remarked that one of theweaknesses of the novels of the1920’s was that they could easilybe summarized in abstract intellec-tual terms. However he made anexception in the case of Willa Ca-ther, saying that she never starteda novel with an intellectual convic-tion but with an emotional reactionwhich she tried to recapture in herbooks. She could not write con-vincingly about what she did notfeel strongly. That statementdefines at once the nature of herart and its limits¯ With her Nebras-ka novels, Willa Cather gave thebest of herself. Although some ofher later novels showed greaterskill, they had less vitality. Theylost color, movement and warmthin a manner reminiscent of thepale and delicate frescoes of Puvisde Chavannes whom she admired,conveying a sense of insubstantial-ity rather than life itself. It was as ifthe free genius of the Prairie whichshe had formerly extolled had de-serted her. However, she recap-tured it in Obscure Destinies (1932)when in three perfect short storiesshe dealt again with her Red Cloudmemories.

To her the Nebraska of heryouth represented heroism andimagination. She told the story of a

Page 36

land once barren and then sub-duedby the first generation pio-neers, most of them immigrantsfrom Europe in whom she saw"men of faith and vision."

.In her novels set in the highplains of Nebraska, she displayedher greatest gift, the gift of sym-pathy. "The artist," she wrote,"fades away into the land and peo-ple of his heart, he dies of love onlyto be born again." (8)

-- Reprinted by permission ofMichel GervaudUniversit~ de Provence(Aix)

Footnotes(1) Willa Cather, "My First Nov-

els (There Were Two)," The Colo-phon, 1931.

(2) Ibid.(3) Cited by Willa Cather in 1922

preface to Alexander’s Bridge.

(4) Quoted from an interviewby Eva Mahoney, Omaha SundayWorld-Herald, November 27, Ig21.

(5) Ibid.(6) Latrobe Carroll, "Willa Si.

bert Cather," The Bookman, May1921,

(7) Willa Cather, "Nebraska:The End of the First Cycle," TheNation, September 1923.

(8) Willa Cather’s preface to"The Best Stories of Sarah OrneJewett," collected in On Writing(New York, 1968), p. 51.

Special Edition AuthorsJohn Murphy, professor of English

at Brigham Young University,Provo, Utah.

Marilyn Arnold, Dean of GraduateStudies, Brigham Young Univer-sity, Provo, Utah.

Cynthia Briggs, English teacher,Wyoming High School, Cincin-nati, Ohio.

Merrill Skaggs, professor of Eng-lish, Drew University, Madison,New Jersey.

Kathryn T. Stofer, English teacher,Northwest High School, GrandIsland, Nebraska.

John March, former Research Con-sultant for Collier’s Encyclope-dia, New York, New York.

Dr. Richard C. Harris, Departmentof Humanities, State Universityof New York Maritime College,Fort Schuyler, Bronx, New York.

Jean Tsien, Department of Eng-lish, Foreign Languages Insti-tute, Beijing, The Peoples’ Re-public of China.

Gervaud, Michel, Professor of Eng-lish, Universit~ de Provence(Aix), France.

First Scholarly Cather Volumesto Be Produced

A major grant to the Universityof Nebraska-Lincoln will result inthe first scholarly editions everpublished of Willa Cather’s novels.

The Woods Charitable Fund willprovide $36,000 for the first year ofa 10-year project, which the Depart-ment of English and the Center forGreat Plains Studies co-sponsor.

The UNL Chancellor’s Officeand UNL Research Council alsohave provided grants for the proj-ect, which has been endorsed bythe Willa Cather Pioneer Memorialand Educational Foundation.

Until now, copyright restrictionshave prevented publication ofscholarly editions of Cather’sworks, said project director SueRosowski, associate professor ofEnglish who teaches Cather stud-ies at UNL. The restrictions werelifted because of the outstandingresearch on Cather completed atUNL and the reputation of the Uni-versity of Nebraska Press for GreatPlains literature, Rosowski said.

Rosowski will be general editorfor the project together with James

(Continued on Page 38)

Cather Inspires PoetWilla Cather wrote the young

author, a letter (second stanza ofpoem taken from the letter). Hetook her advice and achieved whatshe inspired. His lines

"How shall you act the naturalman in this invented city, neitherRome nor home?"are chiseled into the new WesternPlaza in Washington, D.C. Al-though the management had a "noliving author’s rule" Ernest Krolllearned his poetry had been usedwhen he attended a party in D.C.

At the Grave of Willa Cather(Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire)

Ernest Kroll

After halfa life’s oddshifts arrivedbefore yourfootboard, MountMonadnock,I thank youfor the shockof candor

("Nobodycan teach youanythingabout it.You have tolearn it allby yourself")

shatteringthe postmarkeddream of one"Eureka!"formula

("How does onelearn to write?")

Ithankyouand invokeMonadnockfor witness:

"This dust onceshook my youthup out ofstuffing andstiffened itwith the truth."

(Used by permission of KansasQuarterly winter ’84-’85 and bypermission of Ernest Kroll.)

Page 37

Woodress, professor of English atthe University of California-Davis.UNL English Professor CharlesMignon will oversee the textualediting with Rosowski.

The project has major signifi-cance for Nebraska, Rosowski said.

"Willa Cather was the first towrite in serious literature about thebeauty of the Midwest, and herwriting remains the primary meansby which the world knows the re-gion and the state. For persons liv-ing in Nebraska, and especiallyLincoln," she said, "Willa Catherprovides a window to the world."

The grant will establish an edi-torial center for the project and has

provided a two-day workshop fortextual and volume editors.

The scholarly editions will pre-sent the first comprehensive infor-mation about revisions Cathermade and the first comprehensiveexplanatory information to accom-pany the texts, including identifica-tion of locations, literary refer-ences, persons, historical events,flora, and ethnic customs.

The first editions will consist ofwork produced in and about Ne-braska.

Available from CatherFoundation Book Store

The University of NebraskaPress will publish Dr. Susan J.Rosowski’s book: The Voyage Per-ilous: Wi/la Cather’s Romanticismin December, 1986.

The University of NebraskaPress has reissued Wi/la Cather: APictoria/ Memoir, photographs byLucia Woods and others. Text byBernice Slote. $27.95 plus $2.50postage and handling.

Unc/e Va/entine and OtherStories, Willa Cather’s uncollectedfiction, 1915-1929 is now availablein paperback, $6.95 plus $1.50postage and handling.

YOU CAN PARTICIPATE IN THE LIFE AND GROWTHOF THE ORGANIZATION

¯ By being a Cather Memorial Member and financial contri-butor:BENEFACTOR ........................ $1,000.00 and over

ANNUAL MEMBERSHIPSPatron ........................ $100.00Sustaining ..................... 25.00Family ........................ 15.00Individual ..................... 10.00

WCPM memuers receive:Newsletter subscriptionFree guided tour to restored buildings

¯ By contributing your Wills Cather artifacts, letters papers,and publications to the Museum.

¯ By contributing your ideas and suggestions to the Board ofGovernors.

ALL MEMBERSHIPS, CONTRIBUTIONS ANDBEQUESTS ARE TAX DEDUCTIBLE

Under Section 170 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1965

Special group memberships (such as clubs or businesses) areavailable. Write to the Wills Cather Pioneer Memorial for details.

AIMS OF THE WCPM¯ To promote and assist in the development and preservation

of the art, literary, and historical collection relating to the life,time, and work of Wills Cather, in association with the Ne-braska State Historical Society.

¯ To cooperate with the Nebraska State Historical Society incontinuing to identify, restore to their original condition, andpreserve places made famous by the writing of Wills Cather.

¯ To provide for Willa Cather a living memorial, through theFoundation, by encouraging and assisting scholarship in thefield of the humanities.

¯ To perpetuate an interest throughout the world in the workof Willa Cather.

For Newsletter Donatior Only ........................$5.00Foreign Mailing ....................................6.00

BOARD OF GOVERNORSKetth Albers Robert E. Knoll Ronald W. RoskensWilliam "r~omes Auld. M.D Ella Cather Lewis Susan J. RosowskiBruce P. Baker. II Lucia Woods Lindley David E. SchermanMildred R. Bennett Catherine Cather Lowell C. Bertrand SchultzW. K. Bennett. M.D John March Marian SchultzVi Borton Date McDole Margaret Cather ShannonDon E. Connors Miriam Mountford Betty SherwoodJosephine Frisbie John J. Murphy Helen Cather SouthwickDavid Garwood Harry Obitz Marcella Van Meternon Hull Jennie Reiher

Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial326 North Webster Red Cloud, Nebraska 68970

Nonprofit OrganizationU. S. POSTAGE

PAIDREDCLOUD, NE 68970

Permit No. 10