iate, and has meanwhile accumulated excess
persons who he discovers are not in the least important to him.
Thea's experience of others in her life is a function in part of the
sociological fact that because she is a woman with a career she
relinquishes connections of family and friendship in favor of that
career; she has had to choose. St. Peter's experience, on the other
hand, reflects that, as a man, his career has been consonant with
his duties as family provider upon whom others will inevitably
depend for material and emotional support. A comparison of these
novels suggests that Cather realizes the career woman is likely to
live a solitary family life, while the career man is likely to be
On the whole, the narrative mood differs dramatically from one
story to the other. Philip Gerber comments that Cather's "enthu(
siasm" for (The Song of the Lark( "increased as she worked; she felt
herself to be an explorer who had discovered not a new country . . .
but something rarer, a new kind of human being."(1( In contrast, Ger(
ber describes it as "among Cather's most pessimistic books" (Ger(ber
117). The years between the publication of (The Song of the Lark( and
(The Professor's House( appear to have given Cather a dramatically
different perspective of the world. Woodress cites her 1936 comment
in the preface to a collection of her essays entitled (Not Under For(
ty(, in which she stated that "the world broke in two in 1922 [the
year in which (The Professor's House( is set] or thereabouts,"(2( and
Schroeter, alluding to the same comment, adds that Cather sought an
"ironic" tone for (The Professor's House(. Cather herself compares (The
Professor's House( to the sonata form "in which the academic sonata
form was handled somewhat freely."(3( This may be taken as a literary
effort that develops one, then another theme, and finally resol...