Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 4, Fall 1984, pp. 238-44.
Abstract
Near the end of her career-and her life-in the conclusion to the story "Before Breakfast," Willa Cather described the "first amphibious frog-toad" who, when he "found his water-hole dried up behind him," undauntedly "jumped out to hop along till he could find another" and in doing so, "started on a long hop."l At first glance, this little parable might appear to be a misplaced curiosity in a story by a Midwesterner about a frazzled businessman seeking refuge on an island off the North Atlantic sea coast. Closer scrutiny reveals it to be essential to the meaning of the story and crucial to the meaning of Cather's work. This "first amphibious frog-toad" is a survivor; he finds a way to live in spite of changed circumstances and environmental opposition. The emphatic concluding position of this frog in Cather's next to last story is significant. More than that, all three stories in the posthumous collection, The Old Beauty and Others (1948), reinforce this emphasis on adaptability and survival.
The stories in the Old Beauty collection could not have been written in Cather's early or middle career. They are the product of many years of struggle between the will to face life straight on and the wish to escape from life and the painful changes brought inevitably by the passing of time. Cather felt deeply that life is infinitely precious and yet infinitely difficult. She seems always to have placed a high premium on life-and for a time, life on any terms, at any cost. One need only remember how an artist like Thea Kronborg (The Song of the Lark) strove for it, or how characters like Clara Vavrika ("The Bohemian Girl"), Marie Shabata (O Pioneers!), and Marian Forrester (A Lost Lady) were willing to sacrifice almost anything to their need to feel alive. Cather's sympathy with this desire for life and with the ache that accompanies a diminishing of life runs long and deep, from some very early stories through Sapphira and the Slave Girl and the last stories.
But at the same time, with A Lost Lady (1923) Cather's expression of her feeling toward life began to take on a new dimension. For example, even though Marian Forrester and Marie Shabata are both adulterers, they can hardly be judged on the same moral grounds. Marie falls because she is young and terribly in love; the older Marian consciously chooses to be unfaithful. Marian is not only a woman who pulses with life, who must have it, but also one who must and will survive. Marie lacks that kind of toughness. More and more in Cather's later work, to live is less to vibrate with energy and desire than to endure, no matter what befalls one. Cather never lost her admiration for youth and the fire of life that seems to motivate it, as the late book Lucy Gayheart (1935) attests, but as her own perspective matured, she coupled that admiration with an increased regard for the capacity to absorb the shock of change without breaking, to look ahead as well as behind. She seemed increasingly to admire the survivor, and the theme of endurance, of survival, is central to her last three stories.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln