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2 / Possessing Culture: Willa Cather’s Aesthetic of Culture in The Song of the Lark and The Professor’s House Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. . . . That afternoon nothing new came to Thea Kronborg, no enlightenment, no inspiration. She merely came into full possession of things she had been refining and perfecting for so long. —Song of the Lark (1915) That was the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all—the first night all of me was there. This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole. . . . Something had happened in me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession. —The Professor’s House (1925) In 1923, Willa Cather’s essay “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle” appeared in The Nation as part of the journal’s series “These United States.” Despite the editors’ possible intention, Cather’s description of the “great cosmopolitan country known as the Middle-West” was less a contribution to a unifying vision of “these United States,” and more a description of a transnational, polyglot region defined by its differences from the rest of the country. Reflecting what I have been arguing are emerging modernist versions of cultural pluralism—articulated in various ways by humanist critics like Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, and Horace Kallen, and literary-minded anthropologists like Edward Sapir—Cather describes the “early population of Nebraska” as “largely transatlantic,” with “colonies of European people, Slavonic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Latin, spread across our bronze prairies like the daubs of color on a painter’s palette.” Each of these “colonies,” she describes, had its own arts and traditions, and all were populated by “cultivated, restless young men.”1 In this description, Cather does not describe a unified Nebraskan culture or way of life, but celebrates a mix of unassimilated, variegated cultures. 58 / COMPOSING CULTURES Moreover, the titular cycle is a cycle of culture. While Cather sees culture as plural, varying across space with the nationality of each “colony,” she also, like Edward Sapir, sees it varying across time: in Sapir’s words, “culture comes and goes.”2 For Cather, the “end of the cycle” means the European “cultures” of the early settlements have faded: while the “thrift and intelligence” of these early pioneers made the State prosper, that well-being is threatened by the “ugly crest of materialism, which has set its seal upon all of our most productive commonwealths,” making the second generation “very much interested in material comfort, in buying whatever is expensive and ugly . . . instead of making anything” (“Nebraska,” 238). Like Brooks and Sapir, Cather’s terms link anthropology and aesthetics, the making of artifacts and art: each group has “a culture” or a way of “making” meaningful artifacts, which are implicitly beautiful (because meaningful); the absence of culture is marked by buying things that are “ugly.” Cather goes on to hope that future generations will “revolt against all the heaped-up, machine-made materialism about them . . . [to] . . . go back to the old sources of culture and wisdom.” She imagines this culture being transmitted through literal cultivation of the soil: visiting the “graveyards of my own country,” reading “on the headstones the names of fine old men I used to know”—names that are significantly Norwegian and Bohemian—Cather hopes that “something went into the ground with those pioneers that will one day come out again . . . not only in sturdy traits of character, but in elasticity of mind, in an honest attitude toward the realities of life, in certain qualities of feeling and imagination” (237). In imagining that “something” to be both plural (in that several different groups have it in different ways) and universal (it is also a general “elasticity of mind”), both regional (located in discrete “colonies”) and “cosmopolitan,” both ethnographic and aesthetic, both the mark of civilization and the sign of modernity’s decline, Cather situates herself within the tensions of the debates over culture that are central to this period. In the previous chapters I have argued that, beginning around 1915 with the publication of Brooks’s America’s Coming-of-Age, the concept of culture emerges as central for American intellectuals from a wide variety of disciplines. New definitions of culture as ways of life that are plural, relative, and above all “whole” and “meaningful” arise in complex tension with nineteenth...

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