Regionalism and the Humanities

11. Transcending the Urban-Rural Divide: Willa Cather's Thea Kronborg Goes to Chicago

11. Transcending the Urban-Rural Divide Willa Cather’s Thea Kronborg Goes to Chicago mark a. robison Two young women are traveling by train to Chicago—country girls off to the big city. Caroline Meeber leaves Columbia City, Wisconsin , carrying a box lunch, a small trunk, a fake alligator-skin satchel, and “a yellow leather snap purse,” which holds her ticket, her sister’s Chicago address, and four dollars.1 Thea Kronborg leaves Moonstone, Colorado, carrying a trunk, a telescoping canvas suitcase, and a large handbag, which holds “her trunk-key and all of her money that was not in an envelope pinned to her chemise.”2 In going to Chicago, both of these travelers cross a divide that separates their rural roots from their urban futures. Carrie Meeber, eighteen years old, does not return to Wisconsin. Thea Kronborg, sixteen, sees Moonstone only once more before leaving for good. Both women eventually quit Chicago to attain success on New York City stages. Carrie, with a modicum of talent and much luck, rises from chorus girl to headliner on Broadway while Thea, with burgeoning artistry and a modicum of luck, triumphs with the Metropolitan Opera Company. Before realizing such success, however, both meet adversity on the streets of Chicago. Indeed, the dissonance created by a rural character’s arrival in a large city propels more than a few novels of the early twentieth century . Upton Sinclair gives this fundamental conflict one of its rawest depictions in his 1906 novel, The Jungle; his protagonist Jurgis Transcending the Urban-Rural Divide 191 Rudkus epitomizes the rural newcomer to the city, having come to Chicago from “half a dozen acres of cleared land in the midst of a wilderness .”3 This eastern European immigrant’s penetration of the city, especially his ability to sustain employment, is made even more difficult by barriers of language and culture. Though Jurgis survives Chicago ’s urban jungle, many of his compatriots cannot escape Darwinian forces that batter and destroy them. But not every city novel is so darkly junglelike. In Willa Cather’s hands, Chicago is much more benignant toward her protagonist Thea Kronborg than that city is toward Jurgis Rudkus or even Carrie Meeber. Through her depiction of the relative ease with which Thea transfers to the city, Cather reduces conceptual distance between rural and urban spaces and, in so doing, bids readers to reconfigure concepts of region. The protagonist of Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie finds the city economically inhospitable to an unskilled female laborer . Her low-paying job in a shoe factory barely pays her rent, inadequately supplies clothing, and affords none of the city’s alluring pleasures. Without a coat to protect her, Carrie soon becomes ill, loses her position, and despairs of finding another. Faced with imminent return to her rural hometown, Carrie “rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue,” parlaying her beauty into a situation as mistress to a traveling salesman.4 It is only by abandoning a rural-based morality and surrendering herself to male economic protection that Carrie remains in Chicago to enjoy its attractions, and she partakes of these largely on terms dictated by her lovers. Susan J. Rosowski finds in Willa Cather’s treatment of cities a dual binary of “male/city versus female/country,” noting that “whereas the classic city novel grants full development to a male protagonist . . . Cather divides experience by gender,” writing “of country and city as two opposing movements, like the diastolic/systolic rhythm of a heartbeat.”5 Varying the classic pattern only slightly, Dreiser presents a female protagonist beholden to an unfettered male—Carrie waits idly in her urban apartment while her lover Charles Drouet mediates seamlessly between city supplier and country retailer. On the other hand, Willa Cather, in her 1915 novel The Song of the 192 pl ace is a rel ationship Lark, constructs a cityscape that is considerably friendlier to her female protagonist, creating what Rosowski calls “Cather’s fullest and most positive version of the female city novel.”6 While Thea Kronborg at first finds a bewildering urban bleakness in Chicago, she experiences much less difficulty than does Carrie Meeber in situating herself within Chicago’s urban economy. She soon secures employment as a musician, an arrangement that gives Thea the financial foundation to remain in the metropolis. To be sure, Thea’s socioeconomic footing is decidedly middle class, and her...