Studying Update: Cather, Crane, Roméro
For orals reading so far this week, I completed a Willa Cather novel and selected works by five poets, Hart Crane, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, and e.e. cummings. I also read Lora Roméro's 1991 (rpt. 2003) essay, "Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism," which was serendipitously relevant to the Cather and Crane.
Now, I may or may not be able to post write-ups on all of these texts. I'm starting to feel things coming down to the wire, and although the processing necessary to write these posts will I hope be very useful for my qualifying exams, bringing my notes into coherent form consumes a lot of my time and energy. I think most people who take these exams read like crazy first (while taking notes) and wait to do such processing until the end, when they can make broader connections among the hundreds of texts they've read. Just wanted to put you on notice, because I feel bad that my posting here has been getting more and more sporadic. I do like posting this stuff, and feeling that I've done some real work (well, "real" to me), but I must be more careful of managing my time.
Anyway, here at least are some of my thoughts on Cather, and a little bit on Crane, with help from Lora Roméro.
- Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)
Set in a Mid-Western town next to Lake Michigan in the 1920s, the novel is divided into three parts, "The Family," "Tom Outland's Story," and "The Professor," each part shorter than the last. So Book One, "The Family," makes up over half of the novel and sets up what's currently happening in the family life of 52-year-old professor of European history, Godfrey St. Peter. Having won the Oxford Prize for his 8-volume work of history, Spanish Adventurers in North America, he's had a new house built for him and his wife, Lillian, because it seems the thing to do, especially with an ambitious wife and after so many years living in an inconvenient rented house. They have two daughters now married, Rosamond married to Louie Marsellus, a businessman and former electrical engineer; and Kathleen married to Scott McGregor, an aspiring poet and writer of a syndicated feel-good prose-poem column. There is tension between these two couples, delicately negotiated by Lillian, who nevertheless is closer to Rosamond than her younger daughter. The McGregors, as well as other members of the community, are jealous of the Marselluses' newfound wealth, which is due to the commercial application of a patented invention willed to Rosamond by her former fiancé, Tom Outland, who died fighting during the War (World War I). The money and Louie's generous, flashy influence have changed Rosamond so that she now has airs and seems to lord it over the other women in the town, including her own sister Kathleen. There is also a particular resentment against Louie because it doesn't seem right that an outsider, a stranger, should come in and benefit from Tom Outland's invention. But the sense of his strangeness, his foreignness, has something to with the fact that he's Jewish.
The book, in my estimation, seems to ruminate on two particular issues regarding society: the first is the nature of social relationships in relation to money (which is why I think it's important that there is a Jewish character in the novel), and the second is the nature of aging and life-phases. (I'm sure there are better ways to phrase this but I haven't figured it out yet.)- It seems that the Notorious B.I.G. was right to say, "Mo Money Mo Problems." That is basically what this novel is saying in regards to money. It seriously reconfigures social relationships as well as people's personalities. Here, more money makes Rosamond a snob and makes Kathleen jealous and envious whereas before she idolized and always supported her older sister's triumphs. When Rosamond suggests to her father, Godfrey, that she and Louie settle a generous annuity on him because of his close relationship to Tom Outland (who was Godfrey's student and probably best friend), he tells her,
"[...] there can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. I can't explain just how I feel about it, but it would somehow damage my recollections of him, would make that episode in my life commonplace like everything else. And that would be a great loss to me. I'm purely selfish in refusing your offer; my friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar language [i.e., money]."
Thus, even though Tom is dead, the professor does not want to change the relationship he has with his memories of Tom. The fact that he calls money the "vulgar language" reveals a contempt for society, given that money/property is the basis of society, according to Godfrey. He also disaggregates friendship from social bonds, as if true friendship between two people incurs no obligation on either part. (Extraordinary, and idealistic. Or perhaps the use of "vulgar" here is just matter-of-fact rather than judgmental?)
His daughter looked perplexed and a little resentful.
"Sometimes," she murmured, "I think you feel I oughtn't to have taken it, either."
"You had no choice. For you it was settled by his own hand. Your bond with him was social, and it follows the laws of society, and they are based on property. Mine wasn't, and there was no material clause in it. [...]" (Chapter 4 in Book One, "The Family," 50)
But note how his speech in some ways does reprimand Rosamond's benefitting monetarily from Tom's invention; of course, as Godfrey suggests, she might have been rich anyway had Tom lived and figured out the commercial application of his invention himself. But the fact that she chose to marry someone else who could take advantage of the invention and in the process appropriate the memory of Tom as if he had been a good and generous friend -- or an "older brother," as Louie once says, thereby bringing him into an imagined "social" relation that can be based on property -- makes Rosamond seem mercenary to the reader. Her father's relationship to Tom seems purer than hers used to be. (Of course, Godfrey ends up liking Louie anyway, because Louie is quite generous and resilient.) - In Book Three, "The Professor," Godfrey realizes what's been making him withdraw from his family and the rest of society: his old personality, from before he went through puberty and became a "lover" (which necessitated social and sexual relations with another person, thereby creating a family and the need to make a living according to the rule of his society), has come back into his life and taken over again. This personality of the preteen boy has a deep affinity with Tom, who had such wonderful adventures and died before he could change into a "lover" and become married and have to deal with society.
[...] the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy [his young self], little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all of the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. (Chapter 2 in Book Three, "The Professor," 240)
These realizations, however, are aided by comparison with the Other, in this case Indians, who figure largely in the previous section, Book Two, "Tom Outland's Story."
the complexion of a man's life was largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature as modified by sex rubbed on together. (242)The Kansas boy who had come back to [Godfrey] St. Peter this summer was not a scholar. He was a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods and water. Wherever the sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him. He was not nearly so cultivated as Tom's old cliff-dwellers must have been -- and yet he was terribly wise. [...] He was earth, and would return to earth. (241)
Despite the slight distance between his "primitive" self and the long-dead cliff-dwellers, the nostalgia for a more simple way of life, which is brought on by comparison with them, is still a powerful engine for his "self-knowledge." In that ancient civilization, there was no complicated relationship to property and money.
To me, these realizations are more about his deepest desires than self-revelation (though of course such desires do reveal something of himself). I think about the fact that his primitive self, who is "only interested in earth and woods and water," doesn't worry about violence at all, and what may have caused the cliff-dwellers to die out. In a sense, he evacuates that part of Tom's story -- the violence -- from his own understanding of himself.
That's where Lora Roméro comes in.
- It seems that the Notorious B.I.G. was right to say, "Mo Money Mo Problems." That is basically what this novel is saying in regards to money. It seriously reconfigures social relationships as well as people's personalities. Here, more money makes Rosamond a snob and makes Kathleen jealous and envious whereas before she idolized and always supported her older sister's triumphs. When Rosamond suggests to her father, Godfrey, that she and Louie settle a generous annuity on him because of his close relationship to Tom Outland (who was Godfrey's student and probably best friend), he tells her,
- The Indian question: Cather, Crane, and Roméro
But first, let's talk about Crane. I don't know why I decided to read Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930) right after Cather's The Professor's House, but it ended up being justified because they both prominently featured long-dead Indians, as in Native Americans who only exist in their works as corpses or vague ghosts from the past or metaphorically embodying the land. And I'm kind of glad I read them one right after the other because it made me really think of what the Native body (disembodied, really) is doing in the texts.
The racialism is of course a product of the authors' time, so they didn't have discourses of color-blindness or political correctness to worry about, but it's still valid to interrogate their use of the Other here, especially since it might illuminate something about the anxiety over property and complicated social relationships in Cather's case. In The Professor's House, property refers to two different types of relationships: 1) a social relationship based on money and 2) a less tangible, less describable relationship that marks the professor's friendship for Tom as well as Tom's feeling of being the spiritual offspring of the ancient cliff-dwellers. In Book Two, Tom is devastated to find out that his best friend and fellow excavator, Rodney Blake, has sold all of the Indian artifacts and mummified corpses for a small fortune, $4,000 (which in 2005 would have been worth from between $37,000-$44,000), to a German curiosity-collector who takes what have become fungible "relics" to Germany. When Tom tries to explain the problem to Rodney, he says,"But I never thought of selling them, because they weren't mine to sell -- nor yours! They belonged to this country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit from. [Both Tom and Rodney are orphans.] You've gone and sold them to a country that's got plenty of relics of its own. You've gone and sold your country's secrets. (Chapter 6 in Book Two, "Tom Outland's Story," 219)
Later in the argument, the two have this exchange:[Tom says, "...] did you ever think I was digging those things up for what I could sell them for?"
This last quote opens up a whole can of worms, frankly, which I'm not going to touch. But what I wanted to note was that Tom evinces a proprietariness here in relation to the cliff-dwellers that is about a national feeling, which is equated in some ways with the lofty feeling of friendship that Godfrey feels towards Tom. The money relationship ruins such feelings, and indeed this argument between Tom and Rodney -- over their conceptions of their national heritage and money -- ends their friendship.
Rodney explained that he knew [Tom] cared about the things, and was proud of them, but he'd always supposed [Tom] meant to "realize" on them, just as he did, and that it would come to money in the end. "Everything does," he added.
"If that nice young Frenchman I met had come down here with me, and offered me four million instead of four thousand, I'd have refused him. There never was any question of money with me, where this mesa and its people were concerned. They were something that had been preserved through the ages by a miracle, and handed on to you and me, two poor cow-punchers, rough and ignorant, but I thought we were men enough to keep a trust. I'd as soon have sold my own grandmother as Mother Eve [one of the mummies] -- I'd have sold any living woman first." (220-221)
This mixture of national feeling and proprietary feeling in relation to Indians is also very present in Crane's long poem, which is basically a national narrative celebrating America à la Walt Whitman (whom Crane invokes specifically in section IV, "Cape Hatteras"), though with a Modernist form and sensibility. A large part of the poem imagines Pocahontas as the mother of America (see section II, "Powhatan's Daughter"), and the land is her body: "our native clay / Whose depth of red, eternal flesh of Pocahontas" (section IV, "Cape Hatteras," 85). Notice the use of "red" and the "clay" here, which are stereotypically associated with Natives.
This use of Natives/Indians in Cather or Crane isn't hateful, but it's all about the national Self as delineated through temporal distance from the Other as a person who also lives within the same geographical bounds. Through his/her imagined demise, the Other is transmogrified into earth or spirit. In effect, Indians are dead and gone. In Cather, the preservation of these bones is more important to Tom Outland than the welfare of living Indians. Crane, meanwhile, doesn't feature living Indians either but focuses on the legend of Pocahontas. So the result is that Indians here function as an Other that delineates the individual American.
Lora Roméro argues that in the American antebellum period (early 19th century), novels like James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) imagined the Indians as a vanishing people basically in order to metaphysically clear the frontier for civilized men who are trying to escape the strictures of the maternally-ruled Victorian household. This is ironic because it is paternal rule that has circumscribed women to the domestic sphere, yet the rules and regulations of such a sphere also affect men as well. According to Roméro's reading of the novel and other historical material contemporaneous with the novel, Cooper suggests that men desire to escape the "discipline" of the household that affects the mind and to instead live by the rule of "punishment" or the rule of force that affects only the body and is therefore more simple and honest. This latter Roméro calls "the myth of simple brute force in antebellum discourse," which "generates what Renato Rosaldo calls 'imperialist nostalgia'" (57).
In Mohicans, the Natives are represented as living by this rule of force, which is nostalgically understood to have been superannuated or succeeded by the rule of domesticity in society. The problem, though, as Roméro argues, is that the novel, through the "elegiac mode" (or an "imperialist nostalgia"), "performs the historical sleight-of-hand crucial to the topos of the aboriginal: it represents the disappearance of the native as not just natural but as having already happened" (45). And indeed, we witness the "precipitous" deaths of most of the Natives in the novel.
While in Cooper's novel, "the racial other [is] an earlier and now irretrievably lost version of the self" (50), in Cather's novel, the "primitive" returns to Godfrey as the "Kansas boy" version of himself. Yet there seems to be something similar happening in Cather's novel, in which the native body, definitely depicted as already gone, is a representation of Godfrey's desire to escape the society he has become tired of, to the point where he doesn't care if he lives or dies.
I'm not so clear about how the trope of the "vanishing Americans" is relevant to Crane's long poem, partly because I didn't read it as closely as I did Cather's novel, but I think that the poem speaks to the general displacement of racial others that occurs in the history of American letters and in the project of American exceptionalism in historiography, a displacement that Roméro, Amy Kaplan (see "Romancing the Empire" and her introduction to Cultures of United States Imperialism), and other literary scholars attentive to race, minority cultures, border studies, and transnationalism have been studying.
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