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To sanctify the world: Skyscapes in the fiction of Wilder, Guthrie, and Cather
Abstract
This study interprets selected western writers' treatments of sky, a subject overlooked by literary critics. Nineteenth-century Euro-Americans' reports provide a background: their few references to the sky are, like the skies of nineteenth-century landscape artists, perfunctory and conventional. Similarly, nineteenth-century plains novelists refer to it conventionally. Skyscapes in the fiction of twentieth-century western novelists, Laura Ingalls Wilder, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and Willa Cather, however, are essential to the idea of the West, becoming extensions of or alternatives to landscapes. In Wilder's Little House books, the sky offers Laura a promise of freedom analogous to the frontier for which her father yearns. She experiences her greatest freedom when she imagines floating through the sky like a bird or flying behind a team of racing horses. As Laura matures, she confronts gender and family restrictions and responds by internalizing the "felicitous space" that the sky represents. Guthrie also sees space as felicitous and the sky as freeing and redemptive. All of Guthrie's major characters experience transcendence under the reach of sky; only those, however, who accept their part in destroying that which they love are redeemed. In her short stories of 1892-1912, Cather began turning to the sky to redeem a barren frontier. In O Pioneers! and My Antonia, she invested her successful pioneers with the redemptive idea of light: Alexandra Bergson walks "straight out of the morning itself," awakening a desolate land by the power of her gaze; Antonia's children embody the future of a nation when, in an explosion of light, they burst from the dark earth of a fruit cellar. As Cather's disillusionment deepened over a modern landscape weighted with materialism, her gaze lifted, until, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, the life of the sky becomes the most vital reality. The world is not redeemed so much as left behind: "the prisoned spirit of man" is released "into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!"
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
Ross, Linda Hughson, "To sanctify the world: Skyscapes in the fiction of Wilder, Guthrie, and Cather" (1991). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9200150.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9200150