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

Character, Compromise, and Idealism in Willa Cather's Gardens

Character, Compromise, and Idealism in Willa Cather’s Gardens M A R K A . R . F A C K N I T Z In the early pages of The Song of the Lark Willa Cather establishes the garden, that intensively humanized parcel of nature , as a deeply informative figure. Here it appears to the novel’s protagonist: As Thea approached the house she peeped between the pink sprays of the tamarisk hedge and saw the professor and Mrs. Kohler in the garden, spading and raking. The garden looked like a relief-map now, and gave no indication of what it would be in August; such a jungle! Pole beans and potatoes and corn and leeks and kale and red cabbage—there would even be vegetables for which there is no American name. Mrs. Kohler was always getting by mail packages of seeds from Freeport and from the old country. Then the flowers! There were big sunflowers for the canary bird, tiger lilies and phlox and zinnias and lady’s slippers and portulaca and hollyhocks—giant hollyhocks. Besides the fruit trees there was a great umbrella-shaped catalpa, and a balm-of-Gilead, two lindens, and even a ginkgo—a rigid, pointed tree with leaves shaped like butterflies, which shivered, but never bent to the wind. (23) The Kohlers’ garden, packed as it is with plants and flowers from Europe, Asia, and northeastern America, prospers at the margins of the great southwestern desert through dint of a human— partially deranged—desire. The relief map that Cather’s garden provides for her readers charts the contours of sensibility, narra291 292 mark a. r. facknitz tive poetics, and besieged idealism, particularly during Cather’s emergence as an American great, from the moment of One of Ours through The Professor’s House to Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather’s already strong notions of nature, landscape, and the human presence in each are sophisticated and clarified in this phase. Nature as antagonist (the hostile winds and belittling horizons of the prairie novels) is replaced by a nature that gives either in proportion to human greed or takes in proportion to our neglect. Nature as benefactor (the springs and bountiful harvests of the prairie novels) is replaced by a nature that can represent the boundless human capacity to despoil and pervert the good or, if the soul of the gardener is modest and true, demonstrate the magnificence, perhaps even the divinity, of the idealized garden, or the garden in the mind. Garden is a far more complex and laded notion than we ordinarily recognize. For example, when we use the word garden do we intend its ideal state, referring ultimately to Eden as a made place, either static and perfect or, after the fall, as stable and forever lost? Or is the garden in the gardening, in the efforts of the gardener and the changes of growth and decay, rain and drought, which she experiences? Such gardens are never finished , except in the imagination, which provides the desire to keep weeding and watering. Such gardens are as perennially demanding as raising children or keeping accounts. So why not sit still and simply dream Eden? Cather knows that we mean both at once; the contradiction reveals ambivalence we feel in our relationship to nature, to whom as Mother we assign our origins, and toward which, in our mortality, we feel resentment. In other words, gardens depend on nature and while in them we recognize our acute need to create human spaces, in nature improbable, yet they are signs of our desire to pull level and replace nature’s hold over us with products of our willfulness. Thus, an effort to define garden opens a paradox for which Cather’s work provides many analogues. Consider how deeply our reading of Cather’s protagonists depends on a continuously unresolved conflict between character—as inner nature, or the ground of self—and others—the outward culture, those who exist for the character in the space of action. For example, is it 293 Character, Compromise, and Idealism wholly clear that the four men who help Thea Kronborg are altruists , uncorrupted by any trace of a desire to exploit her? Is Claude Wheeler—as brother, husband, lieutenant—a stoical hero and idealist, or is he a doormat who justifies himself with a spurious and finally suicidal belief in high ideals and golden...