Cather Studies, Volume 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination

Willa Cather's Great Emersonian Environmental Quartet

Willa Cather’s Great Emersonian Environmental Quartet M E R R I L L M A G U I R E S K A G G S “There are many ways of handling environment—most of them bad,” Willa Cather declared in her 1899 review of Frank Norris (Stories 922). Yet when used correctly, she added, environmental description can be “a positive and active force, stimulating the reader’s imagination, giving him an actual command, a realizing sense of this world into which he is suddenly transplanted” (922). A quarter-century later, when Cather realized four versions of this world as she scrutinized four modes of knowing, she produced a tetralogy designed around environments. Her four works cohered like the four autonomous movements of Dvořák’s American quartet—its rhythms half American, half European.1 To achieve a wide relevance, she focused on gender. Starting with The Professor’s House, Cather used environmental keys to denote every important thematic or characterizing element in her four varied worlds. And because Ralph Waldo Emerson had authoritatively described nature on this continent, as well as because she loved him, she played with and against riffs of Emersonian music throughout.2 What she sought was enduring definitions. First she trenchantly critiqued the abstracting, objectifying, linear-thinking, phallocentric culture of the West in The Professor’s House; then she flayed the feeling-wracked narcissism and gynocentric projections of My Mortal Enemy. Having settled the hash of both sexes, as well as their stereotypical ways of knowing the world, she turned to affirm myth-shaping and institution-building church fathers in Death Comes for the Archbishop . Then having accomplished in secular 1927 this astonish199 200 merrill maguire skaggs ing tour de force, she faced her most daunting challenge: how to depict a dominantly feminine culture or lifestyle positively— in the absence of convincing historical models. I believe she had already begun to outline the story she alternately titled “Three Women” when, in 1928, she first spotted Quebec and realized that in it she could successfully represent a matrifocal moment in time.3 But when she finished the Quebec novel Shadows on the Rock, she immediately returned to her gestating story and therein produced an alternate ending for a gendered quartet. Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter, holding the keys to the kingdoms of patriarchal, linear-thinking Western cultures in his hands, name, and character, has lived much of his productive life as the embodiment of Emerson’s “American Scholar”—man thinking (65). He has built therefore his own world, as Emerson charged him to do at the end of Nature (Selections 56). He has done so by reordering history to emphasize Spanish Adventurers in North America, men “free and brave,” full of Emersonian selftrust in which “all the virtues are comprehended” (74). Beyond embodying the Canadian and American ancestral bloodlines of continental forefathers, Godfrey has made Spanish adventurers his life’s work. He therefore covers the whole continent, French top to Spanish bottom. He has concomitantly headed European History at his university (Professor’s House 56). Thus he serves as purveyor of transatlantic Western thought-styles. He has accomplished his professional work through conscious design—a word sacred to Emerson.4 The fun of that effort—moving like Aristotle from beginning through middle to end—has produced an Emersonian delight.5 This delight, appropriately for an Emerson man, encompasses Neoplatonic abstract ideas and forms.6 He is, in short, the best of the West, the male who has fulfilled every Emersonian injunction and embodied every productive impulse of Western culture. The problem in the novel, in the Professor, and in Western cultures, however, is laid out clearly in the first sentence: “The moving was over and done.” St. Peter got along very well as long as his control, his design, and therefore his delight, lasted—that is, as long as he kept on moving. But now he’s finished. In spite of his “powerful reaching arms” (71), St. Peter has no 201 Great Emersonian Environmental Quartet place to go but within. He is tired of his family, none of whom he understands; he has no intimate friends left in his university; he can see that “Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course)” (69), but he has no access to either high art or deep religion.7 He is thus reduced to acedia, depression—that sinful condition...