Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 4, Fall 1984, pp. 264-69.
Abstract
When Willa Cather returned to the prairies of her childhood as a locale for her fiction in O Pioneers! in 1913, she returned to a number of other things as well. Among these were the religious faith and practice of her old neighbors and the importance of this faith to their lives. Cather's experience of rediscovery, struggle, and assimilation of the Christian faith is reflected throughout her Nebraska books and is particularly evident in Death Comes for the Archbishop, written after she, along with her parents, had been confirmed into the Episcopal Church at Grace Church, Red Cloud. Although the novel is set in the American Southwest, it has many deep roots in the Nebraska of Cather's early years.
THE ARCHBISHOP IN THE NOVEL
In a lengthy letter to Commonweal, Willa Cather explained that Death Comes for the Archbishop had developed gradually in her mind. She and her biographers later supplied other accounts of the inspiration of the story, but a look at her uses of the Southwest in fiction supports the accuracy of the gradual process recorded in Commonweal. As Cather told her literary agent in spring 1926 while she was working on the novel itself, the central character was based on the pioneer bishop of New Mexico, Jean Lamy, who had arrived during the days of the buffalo and the Indian massacres and had lived to see New Mexico crossed by the Santa Fe Railroad. In her fictional archbishop, Jean Marie Latour, Cather has given us an American saint. As Cather herself recognized, the novel has a "legendary atmosphere" that emerges from the portrayal of a life interpreted by faith. This quality is enhanced by the episodic nature of the work, which links it to traditional lives of the saints, and by the contrast between the flatness of the secondary characters and the complexity of the character of Jean Latour.
Cather's saint is a man who stands out among his fellow human beings, but he remains always fully and fallibly human. As D. H. Stewart has pointed out, Cather uses classical Christian theology, including the seven virtues, to sustain the image of saintliness that the archbishop projects. Faith, hope, charity, prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice are all practiced by the archbishop-although not in quite the orderly manner that Stewart suggests. Latour also has his sins, however. He is selfish in calling his friend Father Joseph back to Santa Fe. He is afflicted with acedia, that spiritual torpor which is the child of sloth (pp. 211, 225). Father Joseph's frequent absences bring anxiety and a fear of loss-both the offspring of covetousness. In his last few days the archbishop envies the early Christians their environment, for whatever they suffered, "it all happened in that safe little Mediterranean world, amid the old manners, the old landmarks. If they endured martyrdom, they died among their brethren, their relics were piously preserved, their names lived in the mouths of holy men" (p. 278).
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln