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  • Buried in Plain Sight: Unearthing Willa Cather’s Allusion to Thomas William Parsons’s “The Sculptor’s Funeral”
  • Melissa J. Homestead (bio)

In January 1905, Willa Cather’s story “The Sculptor’s Funeral” appeared in McClure’s Magazine and shortly thereafter in her first book of fiction, The Troll Garden, a collection of stories about art and artists. In the story, the body of sculptor Harvey Merrick arrives in his hometown of Sand City, Kansas, on a train from Boston, accompanied by his friend and former student, Henry Steavens. Cather criticism has long been concerned with identifying real-world prototypes for characters and situations in her fiction, and two such prototypes have been unearthed for “The Sculptor’s Funeral.” First, the return by train of the body of a young man who died elsewhere to her childhood home of Red Cloud, Nebraska, an event commemorated in her poem “The Night Express,” first published in The Youth’s Companion in 1902 and republished in her first book, the collection of poems April Twilights (1903). Second, the situation of Pittsburgh-born painter and illustrator Charles Stanley Reinhart, who died in 1896 in New York and whose funeral in Pittsburgh Cather attended, writing a newspaper column about the erection of a memorial at his grave in 1897.1 While the case for these prototypes is clear, no one has accounted for the title of Cather’s story and her decision to make her dead artist a sculptor—that is, her story is not “The Painter’s Funeral.”

In this essay, I propose a literary source for Cather’s title and the situation of her story, a nineteenth-century poem by the same title. In January 1858, Boston poet and dentist Thomas William Parsons published in the Atlantic Monthly a poem entitled “The Sculptor’s Funeral.” The occasion of the poem was the December 5, 1857, New York City funeral of American sculptor Thomas Crawford. He had died in London in October 1857 [End Page 207] after a long illness, and his body had been sealed in a lead-lined oak coffin for transport back to his native New York for burial.2 For many years before his death, Crawford had lived and worked in Italy, and Parsons himself, who had met Crawford in Italy, is the “mourner” in the striking opening of his poem about the funeral at St. John’s Episcopal Chapel in Varick Street:

AMID the aisle, apart, there stood   A mourner like the rest; And while the solemn rites were said, He fashioned into verse his mood,   That would not be repressed.

  Why did they bring him home, Bright jewel set in lead?   Oh, bear the sculptor back to Rome, And lay him with the mighty dead,—3

In her early career, Cather considered herself both a poet and a fiction writer, and she read poetry avidly. She saturated The Troll Garden stories with quotations from and references to nineteenth-century poems and poets, from the volume’s epigraph from Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” to nineteenth-century opera lyrics. Robert Browning’s poem “A Death in the Desert” has long been recognized as an ironic intertext for Cather’s Troll Garden story of the same title4—Cather’s title appeared without quotation marks in Scribner’s Magazine in 1903, but in The Troll Garden Cather signals that her title quoted Browning’s by putting her own in quotation marks. Properly, her title is “‘A Death in the Desert’,” with two sets of quotation marks. Cather’s “Sculptor’s Funeral” title is, I argue, an unmarked quotation of Parsons’s title designed to frame the reading of her story on a strongly similar theme. In order to advance this argument, I introduce Parsons and his poem (including his subject, sculptor Thomas Crawford), make a case for Cather’s access to the poem at the pertinent time in her career, and suggest how recognizing Parsons’s poem as an intertext adds a layer of meaning to Cather’s story.

Why has this prominently-placed allusion gone unnoticed for more than a century? During that period, Cather’s story has been widely anthologized and taught, in part because it was one...

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