Abstract
How wonderful it would be, wrote Willa Cather in Novel DA©meublA© (1922) of contemporary narrative practice, if we could throw all the furniture out of the window (Cather, Not Under Forty 51). Vandalism was not Cather's intent but rather a radical act of literary house-cleaning in which the narrative stage would be stripped as bare as possible—accordingly, those events and objects remaining were to be functional, resonant, allusive. St. Peter's throwaway remark about Poe's Pit and the Pendulum (1843) in The Professor's House (1925), in reference to Crane's frequently coming under the surgeon's knife, typifies Cather's strategy of writing suggestion rather than by enumeration (Not Under Forty 48). Cather had already paid tribute to Poe in her college graduation speech in 1897; the echoes of Pit and the Pendulum in The Professor's House are in turn tribute to her enduring fascination with this master of the Gothic tale.1
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