Cather Studies, Volume 6: History, Memory, and War

Culture and the "Cathedral": Tourism as Potlatch in One of Ours

Culture and the ‘‘Cathedral’’ Tourism as Potlatch in One of Ours D E B R A R A E C O H E N A N T I T O U R I S M A N D C U L T U R A L P O S I T I O N I N G Early in the last section of Willa Cather’s One of Ours, Claude Wheeler experiences what seems to be a transcendent moment of orientation and meaning. Sitting in what he believes is the cathedral of Rouen, he tries to commune with his surroundings by summoning up what he knows about Gothic architecture: Gothic . . . that was a mere word; to him it suggested something very peaked and pointed, sharp arches, steep roofs. It had nothing to do with these slim white columns that rose so straight and far, or with the window, burning up there in its vault of gloom. . . . While he was vainly trying to think about architecture, some recollection of old astronomy lessons brushed across his brain, something about stars whose light travels through space for hundreds of years before it reaches the earth and the human eye. The purple and crimson and peacock-green of this window had been shining quite as long as that before it got to him. . . . He felt distinctly that it went through him and farther still . . . as if his mother were looking over his shoulder. (343) One of a series of blinkered epiphanies that dot the novel, enabling readers to plot the shifting distance between Cather and her protagonist (which critics of the book most often employ as the prime diagnostic measure of its political positioning),1 this scene attests to the complex and overdetermined nature of that distance. 184 185 Culture and the ‘‘Cathedral’’ On one level the scene functions as a classic moment of modernist irony, with Claude’s sense of almost Copernican centrality ironized by his disorientation—not only the lack of fit between his internalized models of ‘‘culture’’ and his immediate perceptions but also the fact that he is actually in the wrong church. Claude’s exaggerated reverence for the ‘‘cathedral’’ as exemplar of cultural authenticity —in Georges Bataille’s terms, the regulatory ‘‘ideal soul’’ (qtd. in Hollier 47) of an idealized France—thus can be read as calling into question that idealism itself. Indeed, in the maternal oversight that permeates Claude’s vision, the passage also prefigures the novel’s conclusion, in which Mrs. Wheeler’s disillusion leads her to treasure the dead Claude’s unsullied ‘‘bright faith’’ (458) as an anachronized relic. But the scene underscores as well the degree to which any American positioning within the war is mediated by notions of cultural belatedness to which Cather (who was capable of romanticizing an elderly Frenchwoman as ‘‘a mountain of memories’’ in which ‘‘lay most of one’s mental past’’ [Not Under Forty 16]) was herself vulnerable.2 By1914 the terms of this belatedness had both shaped and been shaped by the conventions of tourism; indeed, the rhetoric of tourist practice governed much of the discourse surrounding American entry into the war.3 As Christopher Endy has shown, arguments in favor of intervention, particularly those invoked by women, who had become the target consumers for cultural tourism , raised the specter of ‘‘the destruction of the traveler’s conception of the Old World as a museum showcasing refinement and civilization’’ (592). Noted traveler Edith Wharton marshaled her credentials of connoisseurship for the purposes of propaganda, invoking and transmuting the stylized conventions of her own earlier travel chronicles.4 Key to this discourse was the mobilization of the exclusionary rhetorical distinction between ‘‘tourist’’ and ‘‘real traveler’’ that Jonathan Culler has identified as itself ‘‘integral to [tourism] rather than outside it or beyond it’’ (156). By the end of the nineteenth century antitourism had become a reflexive mechanism for the construction of cultural distinctions and the testing of cultural representations , a tool for scripting the meanings of what Judith Adler has called ‘‘travel performance.’’ As adapted for propaganda, the 186 de b r a r a e c oh e n discourses of antitourism aligned the insensitive traveler by implication with the Germans, depicted by journalist and popular novelist Clara E. Laughlin—soon to launch her own postwar travelguide empire—as harboring ‘‘a long-cherished determination to supersede French civilization and to consign it to oblivion’’ (Martyred...