How loved, how honoured once avails thee not,
A heap of dust is all remains of thee;
'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.
(Pope, Unfortunate Lady)
Each of the main characters in Willa Cather's A Lost Lady reflects a different set of meanings, values and beliefs. Niel Herbert, a young man of "good family" but little money, expressesthe inconsistencies and hypocrisies of conventional morality. The values of honor and duty that inform the view of Captain Daniel Forrester, builder, adventurer and explorer, are characteristic of the pioneering cavaliers who made settlement of the West possible. Mrs. Forrester, embodying the obligations of a "lady," glories in maintaining a show of gracious nobility. In the end, she must balance the duties of the lady against the demands of surviving as a woman. Just as her husband manifests the character and fate of the men who opened the West, Marian Forrester represents the fate of the Western land itself and of the society it nurtures.
Worshipped and exploited, Marian interacts with Niel, Captain Forrester, and other characters in ways that demonstrate her attempts to fulfill the inconsistent constructions of her life. A chronicle of the various stages through which Marian passes in her effort to resolve the complexities of her position, A Lost Lady describes both the struggle to maintain an illusion and the reaction to its loss. In A Lost Lady, Cather satisfied her goal of creating a wealth of emotional effect with a minimum of narrative machinery. Although each major element of the work, beginning with the title, generates a constellation of potentially competing interpretations, every constituent is made to serve the motivational structure of the whole. The central character, Marian Forrester, is at once the propelling force of the narrative and, in a sense, the ground upon which the action of the novel occurs. As the other characters o...