Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2000
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2000, pp. 35-54.
Abstract
Willa Cather's high regard for French traditions and culture is reflected in many of her writings, including the novels O Pioneers! (1913), One of Ours (1922), The Professor's House (1925), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Shadows on the Rock (1931), and her last, unfinished narrative set in Avignon. Of these works, readers sometimes think of Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock as her French Catholic novels because of the heritage and faith of their main characters. Edith Lewis, Cather's long-time companion, recorded that, for Cather herself, writing the second of these two books served as a kind of continuation of the "Catholic feeling and tradition" of the first.2
French culture can be seen not only in the religious beliefs of the characters and the architecture of their churches but in the domestic: life Cather portrays in these two works. The devotion of the main characters to their families and to the traditional arts of gardening, preparing food, and keeping well-ordered households, and the zest with which they share food, wine, stories, and celebrations with friends and neighbors, reveal the influence of their Gallic background.
Along with their descriptions of French Catholicism and culture, Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock are similar in that both appear to be exceptions to Cather's well-known statement that "most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."3 It seems that the subjects and settings of these novels derive entirely from sources Cather encountered and places she visited after leaving Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1890 at age sixteen: from historical texts, from her study of literature, art, and music, and from her adult travels in France, Quebec, and the southwestern United States.
Therefore, it is something of a puzzle that Cather referred to writing Death Comes for the Archbishop as "like a happy vacation from life, a return to childhood, to early memories"4 and that Edith Lewis, in describing the genesis of Shadows on the Rock, recalled that at her first view of Quebec Cather was "overwhelmed by the flood of memory, recognition, surmise it called Up."5 To what memories and recognitions do these accounts refer?
The architecture of Quebec no doubt reminded Cather of that of northern France, but there are other possible interpretations of Lewis's remarks. Cather biographers E.K. Brown and James Woodress have noted that both Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock reflect Cather's continuing interest in pioneer experience such as she first encountered in Nebraska, what Brown calls "the story of man's capacity to establish dominion over the immutable."6 Brown also feels that Cather's depiction of Quebec and its inhabitants in Shadows on the Rock is colored by her nostalgia for the family life she had known as a child, that the "novel in which Willa Cather traveled farthest from Red Cloud drew most of its emotional power from her memories of life there."7
Comments
Copyright 2000 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln