Euripides' Hippolytus and Cather's A Lost Lady

Abstract

e-4RInIcS have long acknowledged that Willa Cather often looked L to the classics for inspiration and have noted her familiarity with classical sources: she began reading Latin at ten, took two years of Latin and three of Greek at the University of Nebraska, participated in and reviewed university productions of Greek tragedy, and taught Latin for several years in a Pittsburgh high school.1 L. V. Jacks' conclusion is typical, that it seems beyond question that she derived many of her inspirations and even some of her scenes and situations from Greek and Latin sources.2 For example, in the early story The Marriage of she used the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth as the subject of a suffering artist's painting.3 In more important ways, significant elements of A Lost Lady indicate that Cather had Euripides' Hippolytus in mind when she wrote the novel. Parallels and similarities abound. For instance, like his Catherian counterparts Jim Burden and Claude Wheeler, Niel Herbert, the principal pointof-view figure in A Lost Lady, resembles Hippolytus in temperament