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The Observant Eye, the Art of Illustration
- University of Nebraska Press
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The Observant Eye, the Art of Illustration, and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia J A N I S P . S T O U T In early 1919 Willa Cather wrote to her friend from childhood, Carrie Miner Sherwood, inquiring whether Carrie had received the gift she had sent her for Christmas, a print of Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor of a hare.1 The painting shows a single animal on an empty white ground. It is rendered with such clarity that one can distinguish individual hairs in the animal’s coat (see fig. 1). Cather’s choice of this particular painting for her gift was, it seems to me, entirely characteristic of her way of seeing the world, which was also her way of rendering the world in her fiction. Like Dürer’s painting, her writing was focused, finely but selectively detailed, and freed of background clutter. As Eudora Welty discerningly pointed out a number of years ago, Cather’s fiction typically occupies either far panoramas or a clear foreground, while tending to be vacant in the middle distance. Again like the hare in Dürer’s watercolor (with opaque white touches), her selected details are characteristically surrounded by blankness, the unsaid or the disregarded. Throwing the bulk of the furniture out the window, as she proclaimed a desire to do in “The Novel Démeublé” (42), she allows the reader’s eye along with her own to focus on the few selected pieces that are kept in the room. It is largely this isolation of individual details against an uncluttered middle ground—perhaps like the microscopic views she would have experienced as a budding scientist in her adolescent years— that accounts for the effect of visual acuity in Cather’s writing. 128 129 The Observant Eye Fig. 1. Dürer’s hare. Courtesy Albertina, Wien, Austria As Welty’s remark about the locus of Cather’s vision, either in the far perspective or in close focus, implies, she does not so much amass details as focus on a few specific details one at a time. For example: • In Ántonia, out of what must have been a prairieful of grasshoppers, we see one specific grasshopper up close as Ántonia cups it in her hand, then slips it into her hair for safekeeping (40). • In A Lost Lady, we see the “pointed tip” of the last poplar in a row—just that last one, and not the whole poplar but only its tip, with the “hollow, silver winter moon” poised above it (40). • In Lucy Gayheart, the “point of silver light” of the evening ’s one first star (10). There are many other examples that could be cited. Critics have often noted that these specific, isolated presences gain a luminous significance. They also gain visual clarity from being set alone against a blankness. When Cather wished to convey to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant the sense of her new heroine as she [3.236.55.137] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:16 GMT) 130 janis p. stout was beginning My Ántonia, she reached for a single glazed jar and placed it by itself on the clear space of Elsie’s desk (149). In this anecdote illustrating the visual nature of Cather’s thought processes, the concrete image of the jar established in the reader’s mind becomes emblematic of the abstract idea of the heroine’s centrality in the novel. It makes the idea real. Cather’s own association of reality with visual experience is evident in letters that she wrote to Dorothy Canfield in 1902 during her first trip to England. Writing from Ludlow, in Shropshire , she said that she had been tracking A. E. Housman through the scenes of his poetry and had seen with her own eyes the Severn River reflecting nearby steeples, the “lads” playing football, the nearness of the jail to the railroad switchyard in Shrewsbury, precisely as these details are reported in “Is my team ploughing” and “On moonlit heath and lonesome bank.” Having seen these things, she said, she now realized that Housman’s poetry was even truer than she had previously thought. Truth is linked with seeing. What made Housman’s poetry truer for her was visual verification. She had seen the specific details recorded in his poems , verified poem against sight, and on that basis judged the poems true.2 Visual accuracy makes truth. What this means for the...