Cather fall 2000 · “The end is nothing, the road is all.” — J. Michelet FALL 2000, VOL. 1, ISSUE 1 DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, NORTHWEST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY Dedicated to promoting

Department of English800 University DriveMaryville, MO 64468-6001

CALL FOR PAPERS

Willa Cather and NatureThe Cather Foundation invites scholarly papers on the topic for presentation at the conference.

Papers on The Song of the Lark, to be broadcast this season on Mobil Masterpiece Theatre’s American Collection on PBS, and other aspects of Cather’s writing are also welcome.

Deadline for papers: March 15, 2001

Send papers to: Steve Shively Virgil Albertini Department of English 28293--282nd Street Northwest Missouri State University Maryville, MO 64468 Maryville, MO 64468-6001

Sponsored byThe Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation

326 North Webster StreetRed Cloud, NE 68970

(402) 746-2653www.willacather.org

CALL FOR PAPERSthe 46th Annual

Willa Cather Spring FestivalMay 18-19, 2001, Red Cloud, Nebraska

“The end is nothing, the road is all.”— J. Michelet

FALL 2000, VOL. 1, ISSUE 1DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH,NORTHWEST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY

Dedicated to promoting and improving the teaching of the works of Willa Cather

T E A C H I N G

FALL 2000, VOL. 1, ISSUE 1DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH,NORTHWEST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY

“The end is nothing,the road is all.”

— J. Michelet

FALL 2000, VOL. 1, ISSUE 1DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH,NORTHWEST MISSOURISTATE UNIVERSITY

Dedicated to promoting and improving the teaching of the works of Willa Cather

T E A C H I N G

FALL 2000, VOL. 1, ISSUE 1DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH,NORTHWEST MISSOURISTATE UNIVERSITY

ABOUT THE COVERThe quotation on the cover appears in Cather’s short story “Old Mrs. Harris.” By using

it here, we acknowledge its appropriateness for education. The railroad tracks, too,

suggest the educational journey, disappearing into the future, the traveler never sure

what new wonders await around the bend.

The illustration was produced by Stephanie Bolton, a graphic design major at North-

west Missouri State University. It is based on a photo by Beverly J. Cooper, Michael

Jean Impressions.

TEACHING CATHER is supported by a grant from the Culture of Quality, by the Depart-

ment of English at Northwest Missouri State University, and by your subscriptions.

FROM THE EDITORS

FALL 2000 VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1

CO-EDITOR: Steven ShivelyAssistant Professor of English, Northwest Missouri State University

CO-EDITOR: Virgil AlbertiniEmeritus Professor of English, Northwest Missouri State University

PHOTOGRAPHY: Beverly J. CooperMichael Jean Impressions, Hastings, Nebraska

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Donna Barmann, Carrie AllisonNorthwest Department of English

DESIGN: Colleen CookeNorthwest Publications Office

TEACHING CATHER is published biannually (fall and spring) by the Department of English at Northwest Missouri State University.

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATIONOne year: $10

SUBMISSION INFORMATIONThe editors of TEACHING CATHER are seeking articles, queries, syllabi, lesson plans, reviews, and news items connecting with the teaching of Willa Cather and her works in middle school, high school, college and university classes. We welcome submissions sharing how you as teachers successfully approach Cather in the classroom. New approaches and interdisciplinary work are especially invited. Please follow current MLA guidelines.

Send subscriptions and submissions to Steven Shively, Department of English, 800 University Drive, Maryville, MO 64468-6001.Direct inquires to Virgil Albertini, (660) 582-2676, or Steve Shively, (660) 562-1566, or [email protected]

T E A C H I N G

W Welcome to the inaugural issue of TEACHING CATHER , proudly sponsored by Northwest Missouri State University. Northwest has a strong tradition of supporting Cather studies through course offerings, library holdings, and service to the community of Cather teachers and scholars.

Broad ranging and fresh in approach, the essays in this issue—all writ-ten expressly for this journal—represent the teaching of Cather from five different perspectives. They demonstrate that TEACHING CATHER is based on diversity and range rather than on singularity of approach. The variety of these selections attests not so much to the dissimilarity of the contributors but rather to the inherent richness of what Cather’s writing offers to middle school, secondary, college, and university instructors. The approaches themselves are, in part at least, a testimony to Cather’s immense creativity, a creativity which teachers can approach in many divergent ways.

Since Cather is taught at a wide range of levels from middle school to graduate school, we hope that TEACHING CATHER proves to be a boon for those who are teaching and will teach her works in their classrooms. It is fitting that TEACHING CATHER was announced at a special session called “Cather and the Classroom” at the International Cather Seminar 2000 in Nebraska City, Nebraska, this past June. We thank the many participants who attended this seminar for their interest and encouragement. We are especially indebted to Susan J. Rosowski, Director of the International Seminar and Adele Hall Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who invited us to begin this publication and has sup-ported it in many ways.

We thank Beverly J. Cooper for her delightful photographs and Stephanie Bolton for the inspiring illustration on the cover; their artistic talents have enriched this issue. At Northwest Missouri State University, we also thank C. Taylor Barnes, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Beth Rich-ards, Chair of the Department of English, for their support, financial and otherwise. We are grateful for the encouragement offered by many friends and colleagues. We are privileged indeed for this opportunity to expand our work with the literature of Willa Cather and the dedicated scholars who teach her work. We welcome your comments and suggestions.

Steve ShivelyVirgil Albertini

CONTENTSBreaking Them In To Life: A Lost Lady in the High School Classroom ............ 4Mellanee Kvasnicka

Teaching “Claude Wheeler’s Story” .................................................................8Rebecca J. Faber

Sharing Reading of Cather ............................................................................13Don E. Connors

Place and Space: Literature Long-Distance, Students, and Me ...................... 16Linda H. Ross

Resources for Teachers ................................................................................. 21

Contributors ................................................................................................ 21

She Belongs Everywhere: A Commentary on Teaching Cather ..................... 22Bruce P. Baker II

The Willa Cather Memorial Prairie six miles south of Red Cloud, Nebraska.

TEACHING CATHER TEACHING CATHER

The large stone at center right marks the grave of Silas Garber, prototype for Captain Forrester.

WBreaking Them In To Life: A Lost Lady in the High School Classroom

BY MELLANEE KVASNICKA

When, near the end of Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, Niel Herbert remarks that he became glad that Marian had “had a hand in break-ing him in to life” (171), those of us who work with adolescents and literature understand what he meant. Teaching English to high school students holds enormous rewards in that regard. And for me, dealing with any literary text is a matter of initiation, of “break-ing” students in to life. Indeed, if the literary text does its job, it breaks us all in. It seems particularly appropriate, therefore, to consider A Lost Lady as a text that is extremely effective for use with high school students. For this purpose, there is much to recom-mend Cather’s novel: its brevity, its apparent simplicity, and, most significantly, its enormous range of possibility for teaching.

In a high school curriculum jammed with titles and tasks, A Lost Lady is especially welcome. Its brevity makes it easy to deal with in a relatively short time period; in my situation, we spend about two weeks on the novel, including discussion, essay writing, and unit exam. The novel is a fast read, and my students frequently complete the novel well ahead of schedule, unable, they tell me, to stop reading. So built into the experience is student attraction to the text. In short, they find it a fascinating piece and can’t wait to turn the page.

Early on, it becomes apparent that the novel is far more complex than it first appears. John Murphy has spoken of Cather’s “appar-ent simplicity” and “actual complexity” (6) in My Ántonia. I believe the same is true of A Lost Lady. This makes teaching My Ántonia or A Lost Lady an absolute joy because they provide easy access to the text while producing at the same time more complex, interesting possibilities for discussion and discovery. In my treatment of A Lost Lady in an Advanced Placement (honors) English class, I focus on the idea of initiation (Niel’s as well as the reader’s), Cather’s reasons for the shifting point of view, her literary style (we also read “The Novel Démeublé” from Not Under Forty), and the unforgettable characters against the larger backdrop of the closing of the frontier.

I believe very strongly that adolescents come to literature first with their emotions. If I can engage them on a personal level with the story and its characters, I can go on to discuss literary issues after that emotional attachment has been made. I ask my students to begin by reading only chapters one and two. I want them to react to Marian as I know they will; they adore her. She is “really cool,” she “loves kids,” “she’s somebody you’d really like to know.” We talk specifically about what there is that makes her so—her physical appearance, her kindness to the boys, her connection early on with flowers—all of these things illuminate Marian as a wonderful hu-man being.

Then they read the chapters which reveal Marian as a more com-

plex human being: the scene with Frank after the dinner party, her interaction with Captain Forrester, and the incident with the cedar boughs. They come to class outraged. They call Marian names, impugn her reputation, and speak of her faithlessness. “How could she do that?” they ask over and over again. In short, they feel almost a personal betrayal. I love it. It’s here that we begin our real work, looking first at Marian’s relationship with her husband. What do we know of it? It seems to be full of mutual respect. We arrive at this point after heated discussion. How could she respect Captain Forrester and sleep with Frank Ellinger? We speak of the fact that Marian and the Captain sleep not only in different beds, but in different rooms, suggesting that theirs is no longer a physical relationship. The Captain’s injury has ended the intimacy in their marriage. We speak of the difference in their ages and of the no-tion that each needs something different from the other. I am very careful never to excuse or condone Marian’s behavior; it is not, after all, my job to judge her. It is our responsibility as readers to try to understand Marian’s motives and personality.

I ask them if their initial impression was entirely wrong, if Marian is indeed not the same woman they first saw in chapters one and two. Some will say yes; it’s all an act which she puts on to manipulate people. Others will suggest, as they read further, more fascinating possibilities: Marian is much younger than the Captain; she needs a kind of relationship which she can no longer have with the Captain. One class suggested that, in many ways, Marian is terrified—afraid of growing old but even more afraid of growing old alone. She is, also, they come to believe, used to playing a role, or as they suggest in a less than charitable semantic distinction, “put-ting on an act,” perhaps in response to what others expect. Here I ask what makes them think so. They mention the scene with the ladies of Sweetwater after the Captain’s collapse. The good women

MELLANEE KVASNICKA — A LOST LADY

4


Frank Ellinger, the Captain helps my students understand Marian, and, I think, the idea of what human relationships are all about. In actuality, it doesn’t matter one whit what any of us think about Marian’s relationship with the Captain. The only thing that matters is his attitude toward that “betrayal.” The next significant question about that scene is why he goes to the very obvious point of making Niel know that he knows about the affair. And by now, the answer is clear. Captain Forrester wants Niel to understand that the charac-ter of a human being is determined by many qualities. For a while, Niel seems to understand that his desire to shield Captain Forrester from the truth has been silly. The Captain has known all along. More important than his knowledge is his acceptance of that knowl-edge. The Captain remarks of Marian’s handwriting on the pale blue paper, suggesting, “It’s very exceptional” (116). The Captain may also be referring to Marian’s character. Niel seems to understand as well. Cather writes: “Now, as he [Niel] went down the hill, he felt sure that he [Captain Forrester] knew everything; more than anyone else; all there was to know about Marian Forrester” (117).

At this point in our discussion, I usually ask students the fol-


5

Grace Episcopal Church in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Lyra Garber, prototype for Marian Forrester, worshipped. Willa Cather and her parents were members here.

of the town discover that Marian’s sink is as smelly as their own, that the “curtains [were] faded,” and the “up-stairs bedrooms were full of dust and cobwebs” (138). Even though students may still be outraged about Marian’s sense of morality, they are even more dis-gusted by the women of Sweetwater, good women, but certainly without whatever it was that made Marian special, that made Adolph Blum keep her secret. The good women of the town have made certain assump-tions about Marian’s character based on what they ex-pected her to be. When she fails to live up to those expectations, however unfair, they are merciless.

So are my students regarding Marian’s morality. My students often exhibit a conventional, tradi-tional, conservative view of right and wrong. They expect adults they admire and respect to exhibit standards of conduct which may or may not be realistic. And so it is very difficult for them to for-give Marian. They like her: they expect her to do the right thing always, and when she doesn’t they are angry, even hurt.

It is at this point that we begin to penetrate Cather’s design. We speak of point of view. It seems to change, they say. Indeed, from chapter two with its intrusive first person, to the third person limited voice of Niel, to the omniscient voice of a narrator when Niel is not present, Cather seems to violate any notion of narrative continuity. We look closer. We talk briefly about My Ántonia, and Cather’s unusual point of view there. And I ask how it is that such an accomplished writer could make such an obvious blunder. They begin to smell a loaded question: “Well, it must not be a mistake. She must have planned it that way.” Indeed. But why? Why does Cather deliberately begin with an idyllic scene and an almost stereotypically perfect character, only to smash that illusion in the very next chapters? And, of course, they understand. We have already spoken about Cather’s remarks regarding Ántonia. Cather’s friend Elizabeth Sergeant remembers one afternoon when Cather came for tea. Cather leaned across the table and put an old Sicilian vase filled with flowers in the middle of the bare, round table, telling Sergeant: “I want my new heroine to be like this—like a rare object in the middle of a table which one may examine from all sides. [. . .] I want her to stand out—like this—like this—be-cause she is my story” (qtd. in Woodress 285). Someone finally makes the connection. “Maybe she wants us to see Marian from different points of view, like that vase-on-the-table thing.”

I ask what those different points of view might be. There is Marian at the beginning as Niel sees her. Then there’s Marian after the dinner party and in the woods with Frank. We see that scene without Niel’s eyes. We see instead through Adolph Blum—yet another personality who responds to Marian. And so it goes as we list the various portraits of Marian that emerge. Why, I ask, do the townswomen seem to hate Marian so much, while to Captain For-rester, she is everything? In that wonderful scene with the letter to


lowing rhetorical questions: “What’s the worst thing you have every done? If I were to know about that worst thing, should I cross you off my list, so to speak? Should you get another chance? Should I excommunicate you because you did not live up to my standards?” Students look around at each other sheepishly, grinning, covering their eyes, smiling secretly to themselves. And then I know I’ve got them. People are not perfect. Our notions about each other evolve

and develop as relationships grow. There are mistakes, sometimes serious ones, which we inflict on those around us. But there are also joys and pleasures. And we have to decide if we can forgive, if the blessings outweigh the sins. And here is exactly the point of A Lost Lady. Relationships exist between human beings, real people who face adversity, make decisions, and live with their consequences. In view of this, is Marian Forrester a cheap, easy woman or a very complex, complicated human being, in many ways like all of us?

We go on to talk about Niel. Who is this guy who determines so much of what we know about Marian? What does he expect of her? Are his expectations pos-sible? Students are quick to point out that Niel always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s at her house very early in the morning, at a time when any self-respecting woman would not be expecting callers. One student even suggested that Niel is a kind of peep-ing Tom, lurking outside windows, seeing and hearing

what is not his business, first with Frank Ellinger, then with Ivy Peters. With no parents or peers to support him, Niel adopts the Captain and Marian as his own; they send him off to school, advise him about friends and finances, look forward to his homecomings. But Marian, of course, has always been more to Niel, rather as Jim said to Ántonia, “I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man” (321). From the day Niel broke his arm and watched Marian’s “white throat rising and falling” (28) as he lay on her “white

bed with ruffled pillow shams” (28), Niel formed a picture of Mar-ian, a portrait of woman’s perfection and sensuality. (My students are shocked to discover that there is a lot of “s-s-s-e-x in this book,” stuttering as they say the word. In their view, yet another point to recommend it!) Students recognize Cather’s use of Marian’s bedroom later as a kind of symbolic representation of Niel’s disillusionment and displacement when he hears Frank’s laughter from inside that “holy” place. The temple, after all, has been desecrated.

How does Niel’s vision and/or disappointment change, I ask my students. They are thoughtful. Hesitantly, they begin to respond. He was never able to see her as a real human being, with warts and flaws and imperfections until perhaps at the end, when we get our final picture of Marian through yet another point of view. This time it is Ed Elliot, a childhood friend. Why in the world, I ask, would Cather give us a final picture of the main character through the eyes of someone virtually unimportant in the novel? And finally it begins to come to them. “Maybe to show that Marian influenced lots of people. She was a person they just can’t forget.” I suggest that it’s important what we hear of Marian. Ed tells us that her second husband, Henry Collins, sends money for the upkeep of Captain Forrester’s grave as a memorial to Marian. That seems important. What kind of love and devotion must Marian have inspired in her second husband to be so remembered?

At this point it becomes useful to look at characters beyond their specific personalities. I ask students to compare the two dinner par-ties—one close to the beginning, the other close to the end. How are they different? Students mention the kinds of people who are present. We make an informal list of characters who represent the old and new generations, having speculated about Cather’s state-ment that the “world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts, and the persons and prejudices recalled in these sketches slid back into yesterday’s seven thousand years [. . .]” (qtd. in Woodress 335). We look at the civilities of the first dinner party: conversation, manners, music—all presided over by Captain Forrester and perhaps symbol-ized by his elegiac toast, “Happy Days!” How different is the second party, whose guests are the shallow youngsters in town who have only food and its consumption on their minds. Here the meat is carved by Niel, a fact which makes students believe that Niel some-how bridges the gap between the old and new generations. The issue of the bank failure brings the differences between men of the old West and men of the new to the front. Most students feel a kind of proprietary pride in Captain Forrester, who bankrupts himself to save those who trusted him. By contrast is Ivy Peters who takes great pride in blinding woodpeckers in the Captain’s sanctuary, calling himself a “shyster,” and pulling down the old barn. We talk about this book as a kind of farewell to a way of life Cather believed was disappearing, a life in which progress became more important than principle, money more valuable than morality.

There are many other approaches one might want to include in a high school discussion of A Lost Lady. Taking an approach that focuses on gender issues, we might make a different observa-tion: Marian is an object; her role is to be beautiful, to take care of husband, and house, and friends, but not to be involved in financial


6

Cather understood

how it is with us poor,

pitiful human beings;

we struggle to learn

to live with the people

around us. And that

means coming to

terms with other

human beings,

accepting or rejecting

relationships based

on character

strengths and

weaknesses.


ʼ̓ʻ̒MELLANEE KVASNICKA — A LOST LADY

7

[Niel] was proud now that at the first moment he had recognized [Mrs. Forrester] as belonging to a different world from any that he had

ever known.— A Lost Lady

WORKS CITEDCather, Willa. A Lost Lady. New York: Knopf, 1923.

——. My Ántonia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.

Murphy, John J. My Ántonia: The Road Home. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Ne-braska P, 1987.

The road to the Garber place; the Garbers are prototypes for the Forresters.

affairs: “I never question your decisions in busi-ness, Mr. Forrester. I know nothing about such things” (89). Only when she is forced into a difficult situation by her husband’s death does she take control of her own life. She becomes a survivor, doing whatever she feels she must to exist, even going so far as to put her business affairs in the hands of Ivy Peters. We have talk-ed about Marian’s options in the novel. Why did she stay with him after his stroke? Why didn’t she get a job? How could she choose Ivy Peters? A fine companion piece is lbsen’s A Doll’s House. Similarities between Marian and Nora invite lively discussion.

Another interesting area of discussion is Cather’s use of symbols. Various motifs become apparent: snakes and gardens, moonlight, jewels, and music. One student investigated putting on and taking off jewelry. Another wrote that “Cather uses flowers skillfully and builds a tale that is more than it appears to be.” We read and discuss Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 94” where the “lil-ies-that-fester” quote appears. Another felt there was much to be learned about who was making and serving the drinks.

I kept a mental notebook one year detailing the issues I over-heard my students talk about during our study of A Lost Lady: ro-mantic betrayal (“He’s such a player; I wouldn’t go to Homecoming with him if he begged me”), disloyalty from a friend (“She used to be my best friend, but she’s been saying things behind my back”), trouble with parents (“My mom used to be cool, but now she needs to ‘chill out’”). And it came to me how much Cather understood about the sometimes awful process of growing up. In A Lost Lady we encounter a remarkable human being who touches forever those lives around her. Sometimes Marian’s inexplicable charm fascinates us. Sometimes her choices repel those of us who love her most. Cather understood how it is with us poor, pitiful human beings; we struggle to learn to live with the people around us. And that means coming to terms with other human beings, accepting or rejecting relationships based on character strengths and weaknesses. Some-times that’s incredibly difficult, even painful. Sometimes, like Niel, we stumble on our own arrogance and choke on our own words. But, if we’re lucky, like Niel, we come to understand, and forgive, and love, as long as we have the right people who take a hand at breaking us in to life.


Teaching “Claude Wheeler’s Story”

Oates. This time the novel worked; as a matter of fact, it succeeded so well that several of the students listed it as one of their favorite works for the semester. The different responses from two different classes have encouraged me that students can find value in One of Ours. The key to success—for me, at least—is in the approach.

Now that the novel has “worked” for me, I can see more clearly why it “failed” the first time. It didn’t work the first time because of my approach. When I first taught One of Ours, I used it in a thematic context—pairing it as one of two novels relating to war. Therein lay my big mistake because despite the cover of the book and some critical contents, One of Ours is not a war novel. Cather herself expressed that she had not set out to write a war novel and that it was “the story of a Nebraska boy presented in an entirely new way” (Willa Cather in Person 29), a boy she described as “just a red-

REBECCA J. FABER — ONE OF OURS

8

Grave marker for G.P. Cather in Bladen, Nebraska.

IBY REBECCA J. FABER

“By the banks of Lovely Creek, where it began, Claude Wheeler’s story still goes on.”

In a 1931 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, Willa Cather gave her opinion about her stories being taught in the classroom: “I like my stories to be read because people like them. I didn’t want to be ‘assigned reading’ for university classes, a duty, a target for information vampires. Why should anyone try to teach con-temporary literature, anyway? Stories are to be read.” (Willa Cather in Person 111) Cather’s emphatic feelings about hav-ing her works studied in the classroom have not been heeded. As scholars and teachers, we try to bring those works to the classroom that will invite discussion and generate ideas, hoping to incite the type of energetic response from our students that Claude Wheeler exhibited in his European history class.

Twice I have taught One of Ours. At the risk of being labeled an “information vampire,” I believe that Cather’s novel lends itself well to enabling students to explore a number of issues about their own country and culture. Also, most students have little background in critical analysis, so using this novel allows me to show students a number of ways to look at a literary text.

I first taught One of Ours in a 100-level Literature and Composition class, a course for first-year students that explores both the novel and drama, and attempts to show students how to read, think, and write critically about literature. The results were abysmal. Most of the students struggled with the length of the book, and those who did finish it were split in their response to it. The few who liked it couldn’t engage sufficient response from their peers to sustain a solid discussion. And as for me, I just kept trying to figure out what went wrong, why so few students had been able to finish the book or even to talk about it on any level. I thought that I had done a good job of introducing the novel—giv-ing background on both Willa and G.P. Cather, using handouts and visual aids to show my students Lincoln at the turn of the century, providing a copy of G.P. and Myrtle Cather’s wedding picture, and researching scenes from World War I. My efforts, however, did not ensure success. By the time we finished the novel, few students had any sympathy for any of the characters, many had stopped read-ing midway through the book, and some were even confused as to which World War was being fought.

Obviously, something went wrong. At first, I promised myself that I would never try to teach One of Ours again, that one bad expe-rience with the book was enough. Luckily, that attitude didn’t last long. I tried again, the second time using One of Ours in a 300-level Introduction to Late American Literature class, a course primarily for juniors, and covering various genres of American literature, de-veloped in chronological fashion from Walt Whitman to Joyce Carol



headed prairie boy” (39). A more broadly based American novel, One of Ours reflects the values of American society, has an American historical and literary context, and is a modern American novel.

In my second experience teaching the novel, I approached it in three parts—first a general introduction to the novel with Book I, then Books II and III together, then Books IV and V. I used this ap-proach because the novel itself is developed in clear and progressive units. I wanted the students to be aware of the individual books of the novel rather than focusing on a prescribed number of assigned pages. I wanted them to notice Cather’s exacting development of the story.

The first part was great fun for us because, as teacher and stu-dents at UN-L, we had access and insight into Claude’s college expe-rience. I provided students with early photographs of Lincoln, the University of Nebraska, and Nebraska Wesleyan University (which G.P. Cather did not attend, but with which most of my students are familiar and which I believe may have been a part of Cather’s prototype for Temple College in the novel). We matched these photographs with quotes from the novel such as Mrs. Wheeler’s argument with Claude when he wishes to transfer from Temple College to the State Uni-versity. She says that she has heard that “many of the professors at the State University are not Christian men; they even boast of it” (23) and suggests that at the University,

how can there be any serious study where they give so much time to athletics and frivolity? They pay their football coach a larger salary than their President. And those fraternity houses are places where boys learn all sorts of evil. I’ve heard that dreadful things go on in them sometimes. (22)

These quotes brought gales of laughter, which then subsided and led into a discussion of the kind of person Claude is, what he’s in-terested in, what he wants to do with his life, who or what prevents him from success, and whether we could find him believable. Most students did. While they might not have understood or appreciated the Chapins or even the Erlichs, they could believe Claude. They could list why he was self conscious, the extremes of both of his parents, and why he didn’t fit in. When we discussed the section about Claude’s new suit of “checked trousers and a blue serge coat” (29-30), one young man in the class blurted out, “I know how it feels to be a ‘hick’ here in Lincoln.” That comment gave us the starting point for talking about Claude’s worlds—in Lincoln, where he is stimulated by his studies and the Erlichs; in Frankfort, where he is stifled by his family and environment; and on the train where he dreams as he moves between these two worlds. We could find Claude’s successes—on the football field, at the Erlichs’, and in a European history class—and also where he failed—in understand-ing the sexually aggressive Peachy Millmore, in asserting himself

with others (even the hired men), and in being what my students called “a Wheeler man.”

Once we had this kind of insight into Claude, then we were ready to look at the broader scope of American values, particularly materialism. The characters of Ralph and Bayliss prompted us to talk about what the Wheeler values were, especially as they con-trasted with Claude’s values. One helpful exercise with this idea was to ask what Ralph would be buying if he were real and alive today. When the students could look at materialism as a part of modern American society, then they more seriously considered the novel as modern, especially with lines like “With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in” (85). Then we began to look at old values vs. modern values, European traditionalism vs. American modernism and Ernest Havel vs. Claude, Ralph, and Bayliss Wheeler. The

novel served as a looking glass for the change in America from rustic to modern, from nineteenth century to twentieth. Claude became “one of ours” as we, the class, examined this materialis-tic perspective. We recited the sacrificial stories of our parents that always begin with “When I was your age,” analyzed the impacts on our society of advertising that continuously shows us what we “need” to buy, and contemplated the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality of America. We discussed just what the American Dream is, who is entitled to it, and how it is achieved.

As we moved on to Books II and III, “Enid” and “Sunrise on the Prairie,” we expanded our look at American social values. The initial scene of Claude in Denver brought us to what we would do in these segments—examine the world around Claude and where he will have to go to find that something “splendid” for which

he continues to search. By this point, the students have figured out that “splendid” is a tag word. We talked a bit about the use of the word—how it seems awkward in our vocabularies and what “splen-did” might mean to the troubled Claude who is so aware of his own inadequacies.

Book II also introduced us to the character of Enid and the con-cept of feminist issues. Students found it all too easy to like Gladys and hate Enid, but Enid deserves more attention than students initially want to pay her. So, again, we stopped to consider social context. We discussed the WCTU movement and women’s suffrage issues, recognizing that One of Ours takes place during a time when women were active and vocal. Women’s social movements were integral to modern American change, so Enid’s desire to be a mis-sionary—first with Claude and then in China—is not inconsistent with the women of her time. We discussed her vegetarianism, how that makes her stand out in a community of beef, pork, and poultry producers. Surprisingly, this was the key to Enid. Many of my students had come from rural backgrounds where meat-eating is an established part of their home culture. However, once they have

9

Enid offered them a

female viewpoint of

Claude’s situation

and some sense of

the pathetic

marriage that

follows.

TEACHING CATHER TEACHING CATHERʼ̓ʻ̒

mixed in a university environment (or “the Birkenstock area,” as one of my students put it), they are exposed to differing lifestyles, including vegetarianism. Some have chosen to become vegetarians, and they know how hard it is for their farm families to accept this choice. Consequently, they have become like Enid—a bit odd in a world where the norm is defined by others. And once they could see such a connection, then they could see Enid encountering some of the same problems as Claude—how to find the purpose for one’s life when trapped in a small and patriarchal community. Enid of-fered them a female viewpoint of Claude’s situation and some sense of the pathetic marriage that follows.

Here is where the literary context proved valuable. Prior to reading One of Ours, they had read “A New England Nun,” where a woman, happy in her singleness, chooses not to marry; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, where a woman’s life is shaped completely by her environment; “The Yellow Wallpaper,” where a woman is controlled physically and emotionally by her husband; and The Awakening, where a woman suffers in an unhappy marriage as she tries to grow as a person. The students could then place Cather’s development of Enid within a landscape of American female literary characters who have made (or been forced into making) difficult life choices. They could also more easily understand Mrs. Wheeler’s passive submission to her husband and Gladys Farmer’s economic and professional plight. The literature of the late nineteenth century had prepared them to accept Enid as a believable character, something that a reader reading out of literary context might not be able to do. But students who have seen emerging female characters in American literature can accept the narrator’s comment that “it occurred to Claude that it was a hard destiny to be the exceptional person in a community, to be more gifted or more intelligent than the rest. For a girl it must be doubly hard” (148). Lines like these make readers examine Enid and Gladys more intently rather than responding to them as quickly and emotionally as Leonard and Susie Dawson do.

With a better understanding of the social mood of the day, students were ready for the inevitable—Claude’s enlistment in the War. Cather is subtle in her movement toward this action, noting the war’s economic impact on Nebraska farmers, having the war news appear via the local newspaper, and showing the characters in need of a map to make the concepts of world and war tangible. Cather gives us two Wheeler men strongly involved in the war con-cept—Bayliss as a Pacifist and his father, Nat Wheeler, as the man who foresees economic benefit in the European turbulence. At this

point, the novel invited response from readers who remembered the media-infested Persian Gulf War or who had relatives who fought in Vietnam or in World War II. For them, regardless of their ages, the concept of war had some meaning because they knew someone who left home to fight for an American cause. When we could discuss Desert Storm T-shirts, Army generals as national heroes, and the patriotism that spurs someone to join the armed forces, cross an ocean, and fight the enemy, then Claude’s enlistment paralleled what they had seen their friends and families do, and they could anticipate that his decision might lead him closer to his something “splendid.” We debated whether going to war could be “splendid” for someone. As we began Book IV, even the most historically chal-lenged student understood the troop send-off for the AEF. They knew why and how Claude was headed to France. They realized that Claude was doing what he felt he must do, and that the waves of patriotism and adventure can carry young people into new situa-tions at crucial points in their lives.

Again, their knowledge of American literature helped them with Book IV, “The Voyage of the Anchises.” They saw it as an extension of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, a coming-of-age story with the journey motif. They compared youth and experience as Claude meets Victor Morse, saw the beginning of war-related fatalities as an epidemic moved through the troop ship, and realized corruption within an institution as the steward is caught stealing. They saw Claude as an older, more modern Huck, and how both changed and learned dur-ing their voyages.

They were then ready for the Fifth Book, “Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On,” and I think that this is the most difficult book to teach. We took it slowly. I tossed out questions to get them started: How does Claude feel about France? Why? What does this have to do with his life in Nebraska? What is the value of David’s charac-ter? Where do we see Claude as naive? What changes do we see in Claude? How does he remain the same? Does he find something “splendid”? Does Cather give us a full view of war? Why does Cather take us back to the Wheeler farm at the end? What does this novel tell us about the American experience in the early part of this century?

They—my students—talked. They couldn’t (or wouldn’t) stop. Their knowledge of history came back to them; they talked of World War I mottoes and uniforms, of military tactics and weapons, and then of the wars that followed in which America has been involved. They talked about Claude as one of them—a Nebraska boy with the


10

According to [Mrs. Wheeler’s] conception of education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must not enquire.

— One of Ours


at the top. Their comments included remarks like “the novel was believable and realistic”; “the anti-materialism issue is important to me [. . .], especially high tech, bigger, better, faster, newer mate-rialism”; and “I didn’t like the first part of the book much, but I ended up feeling it was splendid writing!!” One especially insightful response was that Cather

creates such vivid pictures of the beauty of the plains landscape that reading it is like wrapping a warm blanket around one’s self. And added to this is her complex-ity and honesty in her portrayal of the plains people. Although the landscape continually retains its beauty, there exists a dark side to its people.

While the students did see Claude as idealistic—the most common criticism of the novel leveled by both Cather’s contemporaries and by modern critics—my students could understand the idealism that comes with youth—all youth—and instead of finding that as a fault of the novel, they saw it to Cather’s credit that she could capture so clearly this aspect of being young and naive. They could also comprehend the correlation between Claude’s ideal-ism and the idealism of our young country as it (and Claude) went to war in a new and horrifying way. Claude came of age in the same way that the nation did. Claude’s loss of innocence and his death parallel the emergence of a new age, that time in the late teens and early twenties when, for our nation, “the world broke in two.” I think that my students would have agreed with Cather, who defended the novel, saying,

I like best of my books the one that all the high-brow critics


11

universal insecurity of youth who went looking for his life, and in finding it, also found his death. They talked about our having read Hamlin Garland’s “The Return of a Private,” where we saw soldiers return home from the Civil War to rural Wisconsin, where “there were no bands greeting them at the station, no banks of gayly (sic) dressed ladies waving handkerchiefs and shouting ‘Bravo!’” (626); and Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which examined a man who was “ardently devoted to the Southern cause” (621) during the Civil War and who dies the unpleasant death of a man committed to a cause. After One of Ours we read John Dos Passos’ “The Body of an American,” and a deeper understanding of Claude came to them. When Dos Passos describes the death of an unknown soldier and notes that “The blood ran into the ground, the brains oozed out of the cracked skull and were licked up by the trenchrats, the belly swelled and raised a generation of bluebottle flies” (1071), the students immediately referred to Cather’s descrip-tion of the trenches:

Claude and David tried to feel their way about and get some idea of the condition the place was in. The stench was the worst they had yet encountered, but it was less disgusting than the flies; when they inadvertently touched a dead body, clouds of wet, buzzing flies flew up into their faces, into their eyes and nostrils. Under their feet the earth worked and moved as if boa constrictors were wriggling down there—soft bodies, lightly covered. When they had found their way up to the Snout they came upon a pile of corpses, a dozen or more, thrown one on top of another like sacks of flour, faintly discernible in the darkness. While the two officers stood there, rumbling, squirting sounds began to come from this heap, first from one body, then from another—gases, swelling in the liquefying entrails of the dead men. (359-60)

With Cather’s words ringing in their ears as we read Dos Passos, they buried all of those unknown soldiers while finding a new part of the American literary tradition. Dos Passos uses a line from President Warren Harding’s speech at the services for the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery in November of 1921, quoting Harding’s look at the Unknown Soldier as “him whose body lies before us took flight with his imperishable soul . . . as a typical soldier of this representative democracy he fought and died believ-ing in the indisputable justice of his country’s cause” (1069).

My students saw in Harding’s quote the echo of Cather who says of Claude that “He died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country can ever be” (370). Here they saw the literary and historical contexts merge. These students weren’t blind to Dos Passos’ “pacifist radical tendency” (1062); they could see the difference in tone between his work and Cather’s. But they could also see Dos Passos’ lines of “Say feller tell me how I can get back to my outfit” and “Say buddy can’t you tell me how I can get back to my outfit?” (1070) as realistic situations that Cather’s young Nebraska and Kansas soldiers might have encountered.

When I polled the students in the 300-level class about their favorite works of the semester, many students listed One of Ours

... Cather creates

such vivid pictures

of the beauty of the

plains landscape

that reading it is like

wrapping a warm

blanket around one’s

self. And added to

this is her

complexity and

honesty in her

portrayal of the

plains people.

Although the

landscape retains its

beauty, there exists

a dark side to its

people.


knock. [. . .] In my opinion, One of Ours has more value in it than any one of the others. I don’t think it has as few faults perhaps as My Ántonia or A Lost Lady, but any story of youth, struggle, and defeat can’t be as smooth in outline and perfect in form as just a portrait. When you have an inarticulate young man butting his way thru the world you can’t pay that much attention to form. (Willa Cather in Person 78)

Two young men in my class wrote these responses after we fin-ished One of Ours: “The novel was believable and realistic and held my interest throughout the book. I could relate to Claude’s feeling of being lost and not knowing for sure what he wanted out of life” and “It seemed more realistic than the other stories. The characters could be someone I could know whereas in other books, the charac-ters are often in settings, positions, or lifestyles that I can’t relate to.”

It seems to me that “Claude Wheeler’s story still goes on.” Young readers, coming to this novel seventy-eight years after its publi-cation, appreciated it on a number of levels. Their methodologies gave them ways to explore the novel and to ask the questions that an alert reader should ask. Many of their initial comments were basic reader response, but then they began to ask the questions on deeper levels rather than my having to do it. How much of this book is about Willa Cather? Is it really the story of her cousin? Was Enid a real person? Did Nebraska really have Prohibition? Did very many young men from Nebraska go to Europe during the war? What was Nebraska like in 1917? Where did Cather get her information about the war? What was war like then? Why is telling Claude’s story important? How does this fit with the other writers that we’ve read from this period? Why did it win the Pulitzer Prize? What else did Cather write? Are they novels like this one?

While Cather might have seen this as literary vampirism, what I saw were new, young literary critics who approached the novel from different directions and articulated ways in which it could be analyzed. In doing so, they found the many levels of richness in this book, a keener view of how literature reflects society, and an appreciation for the way a writer works at her craft. As one student said, “One of Ours is a part of my heritage.”


12

WORKS CITEDBierce, Ambrose. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Anthol-

ogy of American Literature: Realism to the Present. Ed. George McMichael, et al. New York: Macmillan, 1989. 618-625.

Cather, Willa. One of Ours. 1922. New York: Vintage, 1991.

——. Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Ed. L. Brent Bohlke. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.

Dos Passos, John. “The Body of an American.” Anthology of Ameri-can Literature: Realism to the Present. Ed. George McMichael, et al. New York: Macmillan, 1989. 1068-1071.

Garland, Hamlin. “The Return of a Private.” Anthology of American Literature: Realism to the Present. Ed. George McMichael, et al. New York: Macmillan, 1989. 625-636.


I

DON E. CONNORS — SHARING CATHER

Sharing Reading of Cather

13

The Willa Cather Memorial Prairie.

Oftentimes one can find the March 19, 1951, Life magazine, which has a photographic essay of the Nebraska area of which Cather wrote as well as photographs of the Southwest and of the Quebec, Canada, area.

Also, the Cather Foundation has two books concerning the teaching of My Ántonia, one by Susan J. Rosowski, Approaches to Teaching My Ántonia, and one by John J. Murphy, My Ántonia: The Road Home. These two Cather scholars serve on the Board of Gover-nors of the Cather Foundation. Yet another source of value includes Mildred R. Bennett’s Cliff’s Notes on My Ántonia. Originally, when Cliff Hillegass published his booklets, he did not include authorial attribution, but she authored the first and original.

There are some things I had to tell my fellow readers, for they probably would not have had access to the material

easily. For example, when Houghton Mifflin pub-

lished My Ántonia in 1918, the “Introduction” spoke of two manuscripts, one by Willa Cather and one by Jim Burden. From 1926 on, Miss Cather changed the “Intro-duction” so that the only manuscript which existed belonged to Jim Burden. After revealing that change, I always asked for an explana-tion. It seems that all of us like puzzling kinds of challenges.

Another piece of enlighten-ing information comes from reading “The Novel Démeublé” essay in the collection Willa Cather on Writing. She speaks of her theory of not spelling everything out but rather creating situations which allow the reader to flesh things out on his own by virtue of her words. For instance, when Jim Burden returns to Black Hawk after many years, he goes to visit the Widow Steavens, who has moved into Grandmother and Grandfather Burden’s home, and he stays overnight in the room where he slept as a child. At once the reader relives the earlier scenes in the novel when Jim first came to live with his grandparents. Those kinds of scenes also become a chal-lenge to the readers who seem eager to find parallel situations.

In thinking about sharing the reading of My Ántonia , it be-comes incumbent to have involvement in the somewhat technical area—development of vocabulary. Usually, you can do so without becoming the ogre who kills literature. Miss Cather provides great opportunity in this area. One of the words I always liked—disap-probation. You have a plethora from which to choose.

BY DON E. CONNORS

If you have the willingness to endure a non-traditional approach, I have the willingness to share some random ramblings concerning some of the things I learned while reading Willa Cather’s writings with students and others.

For nearly forty years I read along with my students Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. Early on, I had the great good fortune to teach in the English Department of Central High School in Omaha, Nebraska. I discovered that Josephine Frisbie, one of my col-leagues, came from the Red Cloud, Nebraska, area where Willa Cather grew up. Luckily, Jo had some photographs of some of the prototypes of some of the characters in the novel. Today, these and other photographs appear in a group titled, “Photographs to Enhance the Reading of My Ántonia,” a packet avail-able from the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Edu-cational Foundation, 326 North Webster Street, Red Cloud, Nebraska, 68970 (402-746-2653). These photographs always have a great appeal to readers of both My Ántonia and the short story “Neighbour Rosicky” from the collection Obscure Destinies. I think that we all have a sense of good feeling when we can put a face to a name.

I had the good fortune to make a trip to Red Cloud, some two hundred miles from Omaha in April 1959, an era before interstate highways. As a part of this journey, my students and I had the op-portunity to meet Mildred R. Bennett, author of The World of Willa Cather and the President of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation. She had arranged to have Mary Miner Creighton and Carrie Miner Sherwood to lunch with the students who had traveled from Central High School in Omaha. You no doubt recall that Miss Cather dedicated My Ántonia to “Carrie and Irene Miner In Memory of Affections Old and True.” The Miner family served as prototypes of the Harling family in the novel with Carrie Miner serving as Frances Harling. We took the country tour, which has many of the landmark areas which appear in My Ántonia and “Neighbour Rosicky” and other writings of Miss Cather. Seeing the places brought even more life to the writings. If you have the chance to make that journey, you will find it a most worthwhile venture. If you cannot, you can find maps and slides and tapes available from the Cather Foundation in Red Cloud.


Another technique of the writer of fiction involves framing or boxing a story. The writer does utilize this format under two condi-tions. First, if the story seems to have too much personal horror, to get one step away, the author frames or boxes the story by creating a fictional narrator to tell the story. Secondly, if the writer remains too close emotionally to the story, he or she boxes or frames it to step back one pace from his personal involvement. Hence, in Miss Cather’s case, she created Jim Burden to narrate the story.

As we know, Sarah Orne Jewett recommended to Willa Cather that Cather not use male narrators. You can discuss this matter and estimate how well readers believe Miss Cather succeeded in her choice. Further, I believe Miss Jewett also did not like Willa Cather’s choice of the title for one chapter, “The Hired Girls.” How-ever, Willa Cather stuck by her choice, and rightly so, I believe, for people used that term in actuality. My grandmother had a hired girl during much of my childhood.

It seems to me that My Án-tonia provides any number of areas to produce meaningful discussions. For instance, Mr. Shimerda cannot bring himself to handle the pioneer experience and commits suicide. Here one can review the Homestead Act and some of the reasons people immigrated to our country. Further, no one ever in my public education mentioned some of the ramifications of the pioneer experience. I had no idea of the rate of alcohol-ism, insanity, suicide, and incest on the plains. Readers may need some imagination

to realize the isolation and desolation of the settlers.

I almost always think of “Neighbour Rosicky” as a kind of sequel to My Ántonia . Here we find a couple of the problems which faced the “foreigners.” And coupled with the “foreigner” label rides the no-tion that the family did not quite measure up because they lived in the country, not the city. When I think of that story, only one word comes to my mind to describe it —tender.

A major problem involving the immigrant includes the whole arena of amalgamation. How much of one’s former culture does one overthrow; how much does he try to retain? That cultural situa-tion, of course, exists today in almost every part of our country. This problem becomes a rich source as a springboard for discus-sion. Readers will always have opinions and insights. The territory involves language, religion, customs, beliefs, and so much more.

One other area of something bordering on the technical which you probably want to share with your fellow readers involves creat-ing foils. For instance, the third book of My Ántonia deals mainly

with Lena Lingard. Cather presents this very different woman to be-come the contrast and foil to Ántonia herself. We readers gain even more insight into the person of Ántonia because of this contrast. In fact, much later in the novel we learn that both Lena Lingard and Tiny Soderball have lost their zest for life; at the same time, Ántonia emerges as “a rich mine of life.”

As we read My Ántonia, we must take cognizance of Miss Cather’s use of color and her use of seasons as well. In the latter case, for ex-ample, Ántonia, after the suicide of the tramp, wonders how anyone could kill himself in the summer. Save the birth of her illegitimate baby, almost all the good things happen in the other seasons, the bad things in the winter. Seasons, of course, have played a tradi-tional role in much of literature. And the colors of the Midwest, especially, have a powerful effect on the citizenry. Who could ever forget the beautiful gold of the wheat at harvest time?

In the works of Willa Cather, we see all kinds of relationships between and among people. Cather gives us clues through, for instance, choices of names: the feminine versions of Alexander and Anton, signifying in advance the inherent strength of these women. The name Claude in the novel One of Ours means the crippled one. Readers of the novel will sense the appropriateness. In the case of Ántonia and Anton Cuzak, she proposes the question of whether the life for one ever seemed right for the second in a marriage. Ántonia wanted the country life; Anton would have preferred the city life. And we have some insight into the dynamics of family life. How, for example, do the Grandfather and Grandmother parent in My Ánto-nia ? What a great scene and philosophy we find at Christmas time in their home when we have Grandfather observing that prayers of all good men are good. And we see the easiness of Anton with his family in “Neighbour Rosicky.” He has the way with them which we might expect to see in a grandfather rather than a father, yet we see his enormous success. Also, we see the strength, not always pretty, of Mrs. Shimerda. She seems to have the real leadership qualities and seems to furnish the driving force in wanting her family to im-migrate and to succeed.

One other thing that matters with your fellow readers concerns the illegitimate daughter of Ántonia. Only you can delineate the delicacy with which Miss Cather wrote. In a rural community al-most everyone knows almost everything about his neighbors. Here we have a young, unmarried, Roman Catholic girl pregnant out of wedlock, not a pretty picture in 1918, the time of the publication of the novel. Cather has already stepped back one pace from the story in creating Jim Burden as the narrator. In learning of the birth of Ántonia’s baby, Cather steps back one more pace—she has the Widow Steavens tell the story. In fact, Anna Pavelka, the prototype of Ántonia, never objected that her story came out for all the world to read. Neither did Lucille Pavelka, the prototype of Martha, the illegitimate daughter, have any objections to her background being shared by all the world.

In weaving together My Ántonia, Willa Cather has created a series of vignettes. In fact, the novel contains more than fifty characters. In essence, each of these contributes to the reader’s understanding of and insight into the character of Ántonia. Cather has created, then,

DON E. CONNORS— SHARING CATHER

14

In the works of Willa

Cather, we see all

kinds of

relationships

between and among

people.


ʼ̓ʻ̒DON E. CONNORS — SHARING CATHER

a kind of mosaic or tapestry. And the colors all appear to create en-during reactions and memories. How could any reader even forget the red, the white, and the black which appear in the story of the two Russians? The blood, the snow, and the night remain indelibly etched.

The relationship of the characters to the land sometimes repre-sents a paradox. In 0 Pioneers! Alexandra remains on the land and loves the land, yet she wishes for her brother an easier life away from the land. She affords him the opportunity to attend the state university. (Two of the first state institutions included the university and an insane asylum—what a paradox, again.) In Ántonia’s case she preferred life on the land with all its rewards rather than choos-ing life away from the land. Her husband’s love for her made it rela-tively easy for him to remain on the land. In “Neighbour Rosicky” Anton preferred city life to that of the country. You may not find it exactly easy to share these insights with readers who know only life in a megalopolis.

As a mark of our professionalism, I believe that all teachers should take pride in belonging to the National Council of Teachers of English. The organization has several useful publications. In years past the English Journal, which is directed to the secondary level, has had remarkably helpful articles concerning such novels as The Pearl and To Kill a Mockingbird. Unfortunately, Mary Jo Schaars’ article “Teaching My Ántonia with Guidance from Rosenblatt,” disappointed me because it contains some serious errors such as the misspelling of the names of several of the characters in the novel and gives the wrong publication date. In addition, the writer em-phasizes the love story aspect of My Ántonia too much. Contrarily, teachers of Cather should read the fine article by Susan Rosowski titled “Discovering Symbolic Meaning: Teaching with Willa Cather.” Rosowski treats the work of Cather as providing an excellent bridge into literature for students oriented to visual rather than printed media.

15

Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

— My Ántonia

Thanks for listening. No doubt others also have fine ideas concerning the sharing of Miss Cather’s works. And I have without shame come by some of my notions because of my relationships with many other readers of Miss Cather’s works, especially my dear friend, Mildred R. Bennett. She relished sharing her insights and concepts freely with anyone who also found himself or herself a devotee of Cather’s writing. I hope that you have as much fun read-ing and sharing with others as I have had.

WORKS CITEDRosowski, Susan J. “Discovering Symbolic Meaning: Teaching with

Willa Cather.” English Journal 71 (December 1982): 14-17.

Schaars, Mary Jo. “Teaching My Ántonia, with Guidance from Rosenblatt.” English Journal 77 (January 1988): 54-58.

The Red Cloud, Nebraska, Opera House, where Willa Cather gave a commencement address in 1890.


Place and Space: Literature Long-Distance, Students, and Me

P

LINDA H. ROSS — PLACE AND SPACE

16

BY LINDA H. ROSS

Place is where we live geographically, our home, where we sit at the table, our office, or our classroom; place is also our lot in life, and sometimes people put us in our place. If we can identify our place, or have others identify it for us, place can either create a sense of insecurity or a sense of security, of belonging, of knowing who we are. However we define or identify place, we must locate ourselves and learn to adapt to that place. And place usually means that we must learn to abide in and adapt to space, a word that is sometimes used synonymously with place, but one that is not so easily definable. It may be that space which surrounds us right now, that space we would prefer not to have invaded in psychological terms; it may be that space that stretches before us from the windows of our home or the windows of our car, whether that space is enclosure or expanse. Whatever that space is for each of us, we must learn to adapt in ways we never expected to our place in that space, a space on the Great Plains that is made larger by the sky.

Finding our place in this land/sky space is essential for those who live on the Great Plains because that space may inhibit, terrify, debilitate, invigorate, exhilarate, or liberate. Authors who set their fiction on the Great Plains recognize these responses to space and they show the characters exhibiting these responses. Beret in Giants in the Earth is terrified by the space, for in it “there was nothing even to hide behind!” (Rölvaag 36). This vast prairie expanse which is made vaster by the sky becomes debilitating to her, for when she looks at the prairie as evening falls, she feels desolate and sees nothing but “grim and awful darkness.” To relieve that feeling, she threw herself back in the grass and looked up into the heavens. But darkness and infinitude lay there, also—the sense of utter desolation still remained” (38). She begins to hang blankets over the windows of their sod house and the vast expanse surrounding this house in the flat land becomes “a magic ring” through which no one can pass (123). Everything about this place, this space, makes her feel des-perate “in the empty, desolate, endless wastes of green and blue. [. . .] How could existence go on, she thought desperately? If life is to thrive and endure, it must at least have something to hide behind!” (37). This space frightens her because “[i]t’s all so big and open [. . .] so empty [. . .]” (42).

If this place and space terrify and debilitate Beret, they invigorate and exhilarate Per Hansa, giving him an “indomitable, conquering mood” and filling him with “a driving force” (41). He arises early

in the morning to work the land, he is invigorated by the openness and expanse of the prairie, and he is enthusiastic about the pos-sibility of establishing and building a place in this space. When he looks over the land on which he will file, he says, “This kingdom is going to be mine” (35). While the land sometimes intimidates Per Hansa and ultimately defeats him, it most often fills him with awe and a sense of renewal. He manages to find his place in space.

Just as Beret found the space terrifying and overwhelming so too does Lutie Brewton in Conrad Richter’s The Sea of Grass. When she first arrives in Salt Fork, New Mexico, and sees the sea of grass—“the vast, brown, empty plain” stretching before her “she stopped as if she had run into barbed wire” (13). She marries the Colonel but never adapts to the open expanses of the prairie, surrounding herself with guests from nearby Salt Fork for midday and evening meals and parties and having the ranch hands plant trees around the house (30-31). Hal, the narrator, comes to realize that she did not have the trees planted to provide shade from the summer heat, but to shield her from “the wide sea of grass,” an expanse that was like “the plague” to her (33). Hal and Colonel Brewton, however, feel liberated by that expanse, an expanse that becomes for them a “lost sea of grass” (26 my emphasis) when the land is settled by home-steaders. That place for them, however, is one in which they have found their place in space, something Lutie was never able to do.

For them, as for A. B. Guthrie, Jr., place provides “the specialty of space” (“The West” 93). While space might “diminish a man, mak[ing] him a mite against immensity,” it could also “enlarge and liberate him” (Guthrie, “Why Write” 168). That space, however, does not liberate everyone. In his fiction, Guthrie often shows that space makes a person feel like that mite against immensity. Such is

The depot in Red Cloud, Nebraska.



of the happiness and most of the curse. They focus on the vast distances and hardships that emphasize the desolation and isolation of the inhabitants and of the place. In “On the Divide,” she reveals the hell-like atmosphere of this place and space. Canute Canuteson is the product of this hellish environment. He drinks to forget the “awful loneliness and level of the Divide” (496). He is intimately familiar with the area around his shack where there is nothing to see “in the miles of red shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin” (494); only a “few stunted cottonwoods and elms” (493) are his stay against suicide.

To emphasize its hell-like qualities, the narrator indicates that Milton erred “when he put mountains in hell,” for they “postulate faith and aspiration” (496), whereas the level plains are “cursed of God” because of “their lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their vice” (496). This mad caprice is illustrated in the crude carv-ings on his windowsills. The carvings are filled with “little horned imps” and demons and serpents (494). If the carved images rep-resent Canute’s imaginative response to the land, then his imagina-tion is demon-driven and envisions a hell of loneliness, “of eternal futileness and of eternal hate” (496). He finds nothing redemptive, beautiful, or spiritual about this place. It is a vast nothingness. He cannot find his place in this space.

Exactly when Cather redeems this land is not explicitly clear in her short fiction, but that redemption seems to come from the sky: from the flitting cloud shadows playing across the plains, from the gleaming sun and moonlight, from “the stars glisten[ing] like crystal globes” (“Enchanted Bluff” 76). These cloud shadows and the per-vasive light suggest an imaginative transcendence over a previously bleak, sterile, hostile land. It is a place and space that becomes invigorating, exhilarating, liberating in both her life and her fiction.

17

the case with Joyce Sheridan in Guthrie’s These Thousand Hills. She is intimidated “by the great shape and scope of [the] land because in such space and expanse there’s no place to go.”’ Instead of feeling freed by space, she feels “crowded by the distance” (239-240). Like Beret in O.E. Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth, like Lutie Brewton in The Sea of Grass, Joyce needs “trees [. . .] the sense of protection” they provide (240).

Her husband Lat, on the other hand, is freed by that space. When he comes out of the mountains, he is struck by what he sees, for the land

had opened like the Promised Land. [. . .] This giant spread of land. [. . .] Everywhere but to the mountained west it flowed forever. Farther than a man could think, beyond buttes blued by distance, floating in it, the earth line lipped the sky. [. . .] Just emptiness and open sky. Air like tonic, days like unclaimed gold. And grass and grass and grass. Grass beyond the earth line, which wasn’t any line but the farthest reach of eye. World without end, that was it. (44)

Here, “space had no beginning and no end” and everything “floated tiny, rocked by the wind, in the billows of space” (133). Under “the great arch of sky,” in this space, Lat feels a unity with “the gods of the sun and the sky and the empty land’ (129), and they come to have “intrinsic spiritual value” for him (Ford 101). In this vast expanse, Lat had found his place in space.

It is into this Great Plains space that Willa Cather moved when she was nine years old, and it was to that space she had to adapt and find her place, but it took her time to do so. Initially, Cather saw the plains as a vacancy. Having been torn from the close, secure confines of her childhood home and the enclosing trees in Virginia, she felt that in moving to Nebraska she had been “thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron,” that she “had come to the end of everything” (Slote 448). This move created in Cather a feel-ing of spiritual annihilation, “a kind of erasure of personality” (448). She expresses these feelings in her first two prairie novels. “[T]he absence of human landmarks” in 0 Pioneers! “is depressing and dis-heartening” (19); it’s a land where men are “too weak to make any mark” (15). For Jim Burden arriving in Nebraska, there is “nothing to see” (MÁ 7). For Cather, the place/space which was comfortable and secure is gone on the Great Plains; she feels exposed, intimi-dated, annihilated, “blotted out between that earth and that sky” (8).

While Cather said she found her place in this space between earth and sky in the autumn of her first year in Nebraska, a place and space that was both “the happiness and curse of [her] life” (Bennett 140), it took her much longer to find such reconciliation in her fiction. The early short stories set on The Divide reveal little

Outbuildings at the Pavelka Homestead, setting for “Neighbour Rosicky” and part of My Ántonia.


That physical place was important to Cather is evident in her novels. When she came to know a place, she revealed it to her readers. Even without our ever having been in these places, we can see them-the Back Creek country of Vir-ginia. the mesas and red conical hills and golden bluffs of the Southwest, the rocky promontory of Quebec, the land on the Divide, and Red Cloud in all its manifest-ations and various locations. She puts us in these places, but she could do so only when she had learned to deal with the space-both inner and outer-and found her place in that space.

In her first two prairie novels 0 Pioneers! and My Ántonia, she shows her characters finding their place in that space. The land is initially depicted as “depressing and disheartening” because of “the absence of human landmarks.” Man-made marks of road and plow are only “feeble scratches” (OP 19), and the small town of Hanover seems overwhelmed and lost in this featureless landscape. Jim Burden’s first impression of the Nebraska prairie was that “there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries were made. No, there was nothing but land” (MÁ 17). Awed and alienated by the vastness, Jim feels that he “had got over the edge of the world” where man’s laws counted for nothing (17), where he was “erased, blotted out” by the landscape (8).

Eventually, both Alexandra and Jim come to find their place in this vastness of space. When Alexandra enters Ivar’s house, dug out of a clay bank and part of the earth itself, Alexandra joins with that land; she begins to understand and empathize with the land; she can come to look “toward it with love and yearning” (OP 65). Jim, too, achieves unity with the land. As he and Ántonia nestle in the grass, feeling safe and secure in this environment (MÁ 26), he experiences complete happiness. In becoming part of the land, he is “dissolved into something complete and great” (18).

Just as Alexandra and Jim come to adapt to place and space, so, too, do some of Cather’s other characters. Thea in The Song of the Lark finds herself and her vocation in Panther Canyon; Bishop La-tour in Death Comes for the Archbishop learns to locate himself in the vastness of the Southwestern desert, finding in that place and space both his faith and his cathedral; even Myra Henshawe finds renewal and spiritual peace on the “bare headland” above the Pacific Ocean where she feels the sunlight coming up over the ocean, giving the earth pardon and absolution (MME 73). These characters have found their place in space within themselves.

Finding place in any space, however, is problematical for other Cather characters. Claude Wheeler in One of Ours can’t seem to find himself anywhere, not in the abundant natural world, not in his family, not in his marriage, not in himself. All is barrenness to him. He sees the environment—all of it—as laughing at him. In A Lost Lady, Marian Forrester cannot seem to find her place in the space of her house or in the outer environment; without a social life, a man to make her feel that she has a place, she becomes bereft. Tom

Outland, in The Professor’s House, finds his on the Blue Mesa, where he lives one glorious summer; here he feels revitalized, receiving on top of that mesa a spiritual revelation; that experience, however, is short-lived, and while Godfrey St. Peter tries to recapture Tom’s experience through Tom’s journals and his own trips into the mesa country, he cannot sus-tain the experience in his enclosed,

stifling, materialistic, academic life and study. If Tom Outland experiences “a religious emotion” (251) atop the mesa, a life “high and blue, a life in itself” (253), St. Peter returns to an emotional and spiritual vacancy. He may be able to live in his place, but he has seemingly not found himself or his place in either space.

Just as Cather had to adjust to place and space, so too have my students and I. Since 1986, I have taught classes in Western American literature. Most of those classes have been in a traditional classroom environment. I have always stressed place and space and what those mean; consequently, I lined the classroom walls with posters and maps so that students could identify the places geographically and orient themselves to the distances of space that are inherent in the West and in much Western literature. Since 1994, however, I have had to deal with space in another dimension because I have been teaching across space, outside the confines of a traditional classroom. My students have been as close as Sheridan, Wyoming, and as far away as California and Tennessee. Because I do all of this teaching via the telephone, I cannot use visual aids like posters and maps, but I still teach about place and space. I use questions to help my students orient themselves to the places and spaces in the books and to prompt their reactions to place and space in the books and in their lives. I try, consequently, to tailor the reading to help students identify emotionally, psychologically, and physically with place and space and to help them identify with the characters’ reactions. (A list of books I’ve used in these classes is included in the Appendix.)

Some books and authors, of course, are easier to teach across space than others, but so far my choices have been mostly suc-cessful. While A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Agnes Morley Cleveland create a sense of place/space and are, therefore, very teachable, the author most effective in creating both place and space is Willa Cather. My students, whether confined to a room in their house or sitting in a small classroom talking on the phone, can feel the confines of Professor St. Peter’s study and the liberation of Tom Outland’s mesa; they sense the initial depressing landscape of 0 Pioneers! as well as the “garden” that Alexandra creates, the marsh, the sundial, the lane in A Lost Lady. They recognize and relate to the emptiness of the landscape Jim feels in My Ántonia, but they always experience the “explosion of light out of the dark cave into the sunlight” (MÁ 328).

The students’ reactions to these places and spaces in the books reinforce the characters’ reactions. Some students are intimidated


18

I grew up in space, but as

a child, I was really only

aware of place . . .


by the space and feel comfortable only in more confined places; some are liberated by the space. Those students who moved to the Great Plains West from urban areas feel exposed, insignificant, and isolated in the West’s open spaces but energized by urban spaces. Others who have moved from the Great Plains/Rocky Mountain West to Tennessee or urban areas in California feel claustrophobic and confined; because of the trees and people, they feel that they have no room to breathe. For others, space and place do not really seem to matter; while they might miss the mountains or the expansive vistas space provides, they always feel at home where they are, the place they have made for them-selves regardless of surroundings.

I, too, have had to adjust to space in a way I never imagined. I have had to adjust to long-distance teach-ing, teaching across those Western spaces I have long known and appreciated. Whereas I’ve never found space really frightening, frustrating, or intimidating, I often find teaching long-distance both frustrating and intimidating. Unless the students send me a picture, I know them only by their voices, their participation, their papers. After 34 years of knowing students by face and recognizing them both in the classroom and the hall and calling them by name, I’m frustrated by not being able to put a face with a name. The technology is also sometimes frustrating. Gen-erally, there are no problems, but when they occur, they are as disruptive and annoying as having students walk in late to class. During the spring semester of 1999, the phone lines went dead four times. The fourth time I canceled class 25 minutes early even though it was the next to last session of the semester. We lost valuable class time. The technology of teaching across space can be alienating and annoying.

Long-distance teaching, however, does have advantages, espe-cially for the students. Most of them are non-traditional students with full time jobs and families. They cannot afford the time or money to move to a four-year college town to finish their degrees. Even though they are bound to place, they can get an education and a degree or just renewal across space. Some students have been bound by more than jobs and family; one semester two of my students were in the Wyoming State Penitentiary, one of them only a semester from receiving his degree! Totally bound by place, he had achieved an education across space. Another advantage is that stu-dents don’t have to miss class if they go on vacation or travel in their jobs. Since I do my teaching via the telephone, the students need only notify the bridge operator of their phone number to “attend” and participate in class.

Long-distance teaching has also had advantages for me. Even though I began teaching long-distance classes before I retired in May 1999, now 1 can continue to teach on a part-time basis, and I don’t have to drive 76 miles daily. In addition, I know that I am helping people achieve a goal. The biggest asset of the last three semesters is that I could teach from my home via my speaker phone. From my study window, I can see the stars, watch the full-moon rising,

and experience the distance which helps me discuss space, a space I took for granted long before I truly understood space and what it meant to me.

I grew up in space, but as a child, I was really only aware of place: the house in which I grew up, my place at the dining room table and in the family pecking order, my desk at the one-room country school house, and the ranch. The ranch where I grew up in Western Nebraska was located in a valley surrounded on three sides by hills. It was a special place and provided space. From our kitchen window we could see 25 miles to Scottsbluff National Monument. From the top of the hill west of the house, we could see Laramie Peak 100 miles away. I walked through space on my way home from school or rode through it checking windmills or cattle. This space was as familiar to me as was the house. The only time I felt intimidated by it was during a blizzard or a thunder and lightning storm when I was confined to place.

My rather automatic acceptance of that space changed the sum-mer after my first year in college when I spent three months on the East Coast. Living in an environment dominated by concrete and people, trees and traffic, with the horizon only an arm’s length


19

Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska.


away, I found that I felt most comfortable when we were sailing on the South River or spending time on the beach where I spent hours staring at the ocean. I realized that I, who could not swim, felt com-fortable in those places because I could see. That realization came to me to a dramatic way. As my brother and I were driving through the Sandhills at 3 a.m. following my return to Nebraska, I experi-enced a feeling of exhilaration and freedom. This feeling was so overpowering that I forced my brother to stop the car so that I could look at the sky, the stars, the dark distant horizon. I truly felt at that moment that I had come “home.” It was a revelatory experience.

Today I live in Buffalo, Wyoming, so I still live in space, and sometimes it is intimidating and frightening, particularly during se-vere snow storms. For 21 years I drove 76 miles to and from Sheri-dan College where I taught. I remember one trip being particularly frightening. Because of the wind and snow, I could see nothing; I wanted to turn around, but I couldn’t find any of the interchange ramps that would put me on the road back to Buffalo; I could only follow the middle, striped line. I’m not sure whether I was fright-ened by space so much as by my inability to orient myself in space.

I often get the same feeling when I’m in the mountains that rise to the west. They are beautiful to see, but I don’t like to be in them for any length of time because I feel bound, claustrophobic. I feel much more comfortable when I turn the curve coming out of the mountains and see the Clear Creek valley stretching before me, the Red Hills rising to the east, both of which give me a panoramic vista.

I need, as do some of my students, as did Willa Cather, a horizon that stands off in the distance, where the sky arches unencumbered over a great, wide land that tilts and rolls and stretches almost endlessly in an expanse of grass and distance, where one feels both humbled and liberated by that expanse and that distance. It is in this space that I have found my place; it is in this space over which I teach that I try to help my students find their place both in and across space.

WORKS CITEDBennett, Mildred R. The World of Willa Cather. Lincoln: U of Ne-

braska P, 19

Cather, Willa. “The Enchanted Bluff.” Willa Cather’s Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912. Ed. Virginia Faulkner. Rev. ed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970. 69-77.

——. The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Criti-cal Statements, 1893-1896. Ed. Bernice Slote. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970.

——. My Ántonia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.

——. My Mortal Enemy. 1926. New York: Vintage, 1990.

——. “On the Divide. Willa Cather’s Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912. Ed. Virginia Faulkner. Rev. ed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970. 493-504.

——. 0 Pioneers! Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913.

——. The Professor’s House. 1925. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Ford, Thomas W. A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1981.


20

Alderson, Nannie T. and Helen Huntington Smith. A Bride Goes West.

Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady.

——. 0 Pioneers!.

——. The Professor’s House.

Cleveland, Agnes Morley. No Life for a Lady.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night.

Guthrie, Jr., A. B. These Thousand Hills.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises.

Hudson, Lois Phillips. The Bones of Plenty.

Jordan, Teresa. Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Fam-ily Album.

Malamud, Bernard. The Stories of Bernard Malamud.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses.

O’Connor, Flannery. 3 by Flannery O’Connor: Wise Blood, The Violent Bent It Away, Everything That Rises Must Converge.

Richter, Conrad. The Sea of Grass.

Rölvaag, 0.E. Giants in the Earth.

Sandoz, Mari. Old Jules.

——. Slogum House.

Stewart, Elinore Pruitt. Letters of a Woman Homesteader.

Stratton, Joanna L. Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier.

Sykes, Hope Williams. Second Hoeing.

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence.

Wilder, Laura Ingalls. By the Shores of Silver Lake.

APPENDIXAPPENDIX

Guthrie, Jr. A. B. These Thousand Hills. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956.

——. “The West Is Our Great Adventure of the Spirit.” Life 13 Apr. 1959: 79-98.

——. “Why Write about the West.” Western American Literature 7 (Fall 1972): 163-169.

Richter, Conrad. The Sea of Grass. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1937.

Rölvaag, 0. E. Giants in the Earth. Trans. Lincoln Colcord and O.E. Rölvaag. New York: Harper and Row, 1927.


CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION AND RESOURCES

21

RESOURCES FOR TEACHING The Willa Cather Electronic Archive

www.unl.edu/Cather

This site describes itself as a hypermedia archive sponsored by the University of Nebraska Press and supported by Text Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Although the site is a work in progress and will grow in the months to come, much valuable information for teachers is already available. The site is divided into three main sections: Cather’s Writing (text and supplementary materials), Cather’s World (her life and times), and Cather Today (current events). This site will include much of the material prepared by the staff of the Cather Scholarly Editions. At this time the focus of this site is on My Ántonia, but information about other works will be added later.

The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial andEducational Foundation

326 North Webster Red Cloud, NE 68970 (402) 746-2653

[email protected]

The WCPM, in existence since 1955, is the premier organiz-ation for scholars and teachers interested in Willa Cather. Ac-cording to its website, the WCPM “encourages and promotes increased understanding and appreciation of the life, time, settings, and work of Willa Cather.” With headquarters in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the WCPM was responsible for preserving and restoring many sites related to Cather’s life and works; the organization continues to be involved in maintaining and interpreting these sites. The WCPM also sponsors seminars and workshops on Cather, conducts tours, publishes a newsletter, and operates a book-store and art gallery. Student memberships are $15 and basic memberships are $30, payable at the above address.

The Website of the Willa Cather PioneerMemorial and Educational Foundation

www.willacather.org

This site is packed with helpful information for teachers and other Cather aficionados. Among its features are news from the WCPM, biographical information about Cather, Cather texts online, links to other Cather material including several teaching resources. Some teachers may be especially inter-ested in the opportunities this site offers for online publica-tion of student work.

CONTRIBUTORSBruce P. Baker II, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Nebraska-Omaha, taught the first graduate seminar devoted entirely to Willa Cather at any university. After graduating from Harvard in 1957, he received his M.A. in English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where he taught for 39 years. His disser-tation at Texas Christian University, where he completed his doctorate in 1968, turned away from the biographical approach to Cather by calling attention to her art: using image and symbol to convey “what was often thought but not expressed.” His scholarly work on Cather is extensive, and he is a long-time member of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation Board of Governors. Teaching has always been his first love, and sharing with students the art of Willa Cather has been among his most satisfying experiences in the classroom.

Don E. Connors spent 34 years teaching secondary school Eng-lish and also taught at various community colleges in Arizona and California and at the University of California-Los Angeles and the University of California-Irvine. He holds a B.A. in English from Morningside College and an M.A. in English from the Univer-sity of South Dakota. He has given many presentations on Willa Cather and is the first instructor to teach a course concerning Cather west of the Rockies. He has served for many years on the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation Board of Governors.

Rebecca J. Faber received the Ph.D. in English from the Uni-versity of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is active in presenting and pub-lishing on Cather, and her principal academic interest centers on American women writers from the first half of the 20th century. She is currently the Assistant Director-Education for the Office of Career Services at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Mellanee Kvasnicka has been the department chair in English at Omaha South High School in Omaha, Nebraska, for 17 years, and she has taught at South for 31 years. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and her dis-sertation deals with Willa Cather and the educational tradition. Her essays on Cather are numerous and include “‘Paul’s Case’ in the High School Classroom.” She was awarded the Alice Buffet Outstanding Educator Award and was recognized by Phi Delta Kappa as a Showcase Teacher and by the Optimists International for Excellence in Teaching. She is also a member of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation Board of Governors.

Linda H. Ross received the Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is active in the Western Literature Asso-ciation and has given many presentations at the association’s con-ferences. She has been the Cather bibliographer for the scholarly journal Western American Literature. She has taught secondary school English and is a retired instructor from Sheridan College in Sheridan, Wyoming. She now serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wyoming-Laramie.

TEACHING CATHER

BRUCE P. BAKER II — CATHER’S PLACE IN THE CLASSROOM

She Belongs Everywhere: A Commentary on Teaching Cather

WBRUCE P. BAKER II

When I first proposed a graduate seminar devoted exclusively to the works of Willa Cather many (I’ve forgotten how many) years ago, my department’s Curriculum Committee accepted my syl-labus with enthusiasm, and I was pleased, indeed, because the only single author seminars we had were devoted to Hawthorne, Melville, Shakespeare, or Twain. But then I found the reading list to be prohibitive in cost because all of Cather’s works were then available only in hardback and the total was several hundred dol-lars! I therefore postponed my plans but began lobbying Alfred Knopf, who was then executor of Cather’s estate, to somehow make Cather’s work available in paperback. I am sure that he had such pleas from a number of others, but, for whatever reason, the novels began coming out in Vintage Editions, and I was elated. My delayed seminar came to fruition, and I began giving that course devoted to all the works—from The Troll Garden to Sapphira and the Slave Girl—and the course filled every time I gave it in spite of the lengthy reading list.

As time went on, I found, however, that I wanted to teach Cather’s works more frequently than offering a seminar would al-low. I soon found that it was not only possible but appropriate to teach Cather in a variety of venues and courses. That discovery has continued even into the days of my retirement from active teaching; for example, I recently did a one-day workshop on Willa Cather for third-graders in a Lincoln, Nebraska, public school! Let me share a few of the courses and approaches I have enjoyed.

One experiment that proved especially stimulating and suc-cessful was a more limited seminar called “Willa Cather: The Nebraska Works,” where we studied her first short story “Peter” through her last “The Best Years.” My geographic location made possible a week-long study in residence in Red Cloud, where we stayed at the Green Acres Motel and had picnics at Ántonia’s farmhouse, the prairie, the setting for the plow in the sun scene, and dinner at the Palace, a “family tavern” as the sign says, in Red Cloud. The format of this seminar was three weeks in a special summer session where we spent the first week in all-day sessions in our university’s classroom, went for the residence in Red Cloud for the second week, and returned to UNO for the third week to have available library resources for students’ seminar papers. I had, of course, distributed the reading list to enrollees a couple of months in advance because there wasn’t time to do all the read-ing in the three-week session. This experiment proved especially popular with high school teachers, particularly because I suggested that students might prepare a teaching unit on some short story or novel that could be used in their own classroom; such units were to

include discussion questions, paper assignments (both critical and research-oriented), examinations, and annotated bibliographies. It was a successful and stimulating experiment.

A variety of other courses came to mind as the years progressed. “Classic Women Authors: Jewett, Cather, and Wharton” enrolled a number of Women’s Studies students as well as English majors. “Authors and Place” used the same three writers while emphasizing their use of diverse physical settings to explore universal themes. In a special course for the American Bicentennial titled “Our American Heritage,” I used Cather for the section on “The Immi-grant Experience,” concentrating, of course, on O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, but including “Peter” and “Neighbour Rosicky.” “Cather’s Short Stories” proved to be a very popular night school course, appealing to general readers as well as to students looking for a humanities course wherein the reading list seemed less intimidating than “The Contemporary Novel.” (Little did they know that Cather had written so many short stories!) A seminar in the short stories from the first (“Peter”) to the last (“The Best Years”) gave students a look at the development of an author in that genre as well as the possibilities of experimentation in that genre. A colleague’s “Litera-ture and Film” course included “Paul’s Case,” where I was guest for a discussion of the differences and strengths and weaknesses of the short story and film versions of this classic story that is included in many anthologies. The possibilities are limitless!

Most recently, I was invited to do a one-day workshop on Willa Cather for third-graders in a Lincoln Public School where my daughter-in-law teaches. I was terrified! What would I do? What approaches would be appropriate? But my daughter-in-law was in charge of a series on “Famous Nebraskans,” so I could hardly refuse. As usual, upon reviewing the canon and contemplating the possibilities, I found in Cather what I thought might work, both in the biography and in the texts. I concentrated on the nine-year-old Cather (about the same age as many third graders) being uprooted from her home in Virginia to the plains of Nebraska. After telling them the story of the Cather family’s experience, I asked “Have you ever moved?” Many had. “How did you feel about that?” And the hands kept going up. After putting on the board some of those feelings, I read the passage from My Ántonia where Jim describes his feelings upon first arriving in Nebraska and shared with them some passages describing young Ántonia’s experiences. It worked! I was relieved and reminded again of the incredible richness and universality in Cather’s work. She belongs everywhere: from graduate seminars to third-grade classrooms. It is little wonder that her work has retained my interest and enthusiasm for these many years.

22

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Documents

Cather fall 2000 · “The end is nothing, the road is all.” — J. Michelet FALL 2000, VOL. 1, ISSUE 1 DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, NORTHWEST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY Dedicated to promoting