Women & the Environment in Cather's Work
The Story of Woman and the Story of H
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One of Cather's major interests is the long, slow story of various human societies working to create a stable human life in a beautiful, harsh, unwelcoming physical environment, and the role of women in that process. Cather examines the place that women find for themselves as they participate in these struggles, which result in the making of their cultures. Their place in the history of the struggle that Cather concerns herself with in her novels is manifold, a function of their individual wants, capabilities, and needs as well as of social and cultural norms that affect (or govern) their lives. In stories that describe with bleak simplicity the harsh world shared by many human types and cultures, she shows an America emerging from rude beginnings and progressing, now certainly and now haphazardly, toward a compromise between the power of nature and the assertions of (sometimes small minded) social norms and the higher aims of civilization, and between history and modernity. There are the Indian cultures of the American Southwest in novels as diverse as The Professor's House, The Song of the Lark, A Lost Lady, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, the diverse cultures of American immigrants as inflected by nature and circumstance in O Pioneers, The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia, the European culture that appears in the music Thea Kronborg learns as operatic repertoire in The Song of the Lark. Taking a jaundiced view of the narrow mindedness of society which freque
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ays that "violence and poignancy are part of the story" in The Song of the Lark" (Grumbach xxi), and Ray's death has elements of both. But the dramatic accident that kills Ray Kennedy is not only a realistic rendering of the harshness of life on the frontier but an important catalyst serving to heighten Thea's consciousness that she does not belong in an environment that puts human destiny at the whim of freak accident. If she stayed in Moonstone, a permanent connection with the railroad would be inescapable, and if Ray had lived, her own life would have been far different. Instead of becoming the toast of the world's artistic community, she would be the wife of a brakeman, or at best of a railroad executive. Ironically, his legacy finances her journey to Chicago, providing by his death what he could never give her in life, access to the bright lights of the world.
In a broad sense, A Lost Lady tells the story of a Thea who, gifted as hostess rather than artist, has made the wrong choice and who pays the price for it, partly in the form of a bleak existence on the frontier that she must endure rather than conquer or otherwise come to terms with. What Marian Forrester may initially have thought would be life as the wife of
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Professor's House, Slave Girl, Lost Lady, Marian Forrester, Comes Archbishop, Virginia Cather, Alexandra Bergson, Bergson Swede, Song Lark, Mother Eve, song lark, professor's house, lost lady, slave girl, sapphira slave, sapphira slave girl, marian forrester, panther canyon, death comes archbishop, comes archbishop, death comes, thea kronborg, york alfred knopf, holy mother church, bantam books 1989,
Approximate Word count = 9264
Approximate Pages = 37 (250 words per page)
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