Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 4, Fall 1984, pp. 220-30.
Abstract
Willa Cather's plains novels provide the lens through which readers approach her canon. Starting with O Pioneers!, My Àntonia, A Lost Lady, and the other Nebraska novels, critics have identified her major themes (the noble pioneer, the frontier, the creative imagination) and described her development (generally some version of an initial optimism over the frontier period followed by an elegiac lament for the pioneer past). From such a viewpoint, Cather's last book, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, seems an aberration, which, if treated at all, is seen as an escape into a pre-Civil War southern setting, remote from Cather's major writing (that is, the plains writing). It is time, I believe, to give our attention to this, the most neglected novel by Willa Cather, and recognize that Sapphira and the Slave Girl, far from being in a class by itself, is the culmination of ideas that run through the earlier books, capable of standing with other major novels by Cather.
Reexamination of Sapphira and the Slave Girl begins with the consideration of certain similarities found throughout Cather's writing, one of which is a romantic celebration of the imagination as a means of reconciling dualities of human existence. The most memorable passages of Cather's novels present moments of transcendence, which affirm that universal truths exist and that through the imagination we can experience them: Alexandra Bergson joining with the Genius of the Divide, Thea Kronborg with art in Panther Canyon, and Jim Burden recognizing Àntonia as a mythic earth mother. In the single scene most widely recognized as Cather's, when Àntonia emerges from a fruit cave with her children, Jim does not see her simply as she appears-a woman with grizzled hair, calloused hands, and missing teeth; he sees her also as a symbol of fertility and goodness. Later Jim reflects that such an experience is one "we recognize by instinct as universal and true," in which "a look or a gesture ... somehow revealed the meaning in common things."
But the extreme intensity of the romantic impulse toward resolution suggests a fear that final revelations may be denied and universal truths unattainable. These two impulses comprise two sides of romanticism-the optimistic movement toward resolution in a higher order, and the pessimistic impulse, seen when resolution is thwarted and irrecondlables triumph. As G. Richard Thompson notes, "The Gothic is the dark counterforce to optimistic Romanticism" because it "begins with irreconcilable dualities and, as a form, acknowledges the triumph of paradox and ambiguity-the impossibility of ultimate synthesis." Acknowledgment of irresolution underlies the classic Gothic effect of reversal, which appears in the claptrap of low Gothic as well as in the high Gothic of Bronte, Poe, and James: apparent safety is revealed to be illusory, beauty to be grotesque, and good to be evil. The heroine of the Gothic romance, fleeing from the dark villain, sees ahead the cloak of a rescuer and runs toward him in relief, only to see him turn (or drop his hood). She then realizes that she has approached the villain in disguise. The spectator of a medieval church sees carving that from a distance appears graceful, but on closer view realizes it consists of writhing snakes and demons. The viewer of a Piranesi prison scene sees stairs that appear to offer· escape, but upon following them, realizes they lead nowhere.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln