Hagiographical Style in Death Comes for the Archbishop

Abstract

In almost every novel she wrote Willa Cather experimented with a new mode or form of writing: the pastoral in My Antonia, the naturalistic novel, with its wealth of material and psychological detail, in One of Ours, the musical sonata form in The Professor's House, a Jamesian diptych in My Mortal Enemy, the historical novel in Shadows on the Rock. The most successful of these formal experiments is her use of the saint's legend in Death Comes for the Archbishop. In a letter to the editor of The Commonweal she explains that she had wanted for a long time to try something that would be the equivalent in prose of the frescoes of a saint's life, a narrative which, like the non-dramatic stories of the Golden Legend, would have none of the artificial elements of composition. She also explains that for several years she had wanted to write a novel about the Southwest, and that the one subject that particularly captured her imaginative interest there was the story of the Catholic Church. In the saint's legend she found an aesthetic form which provided her, a non-Catholic, with an approach to her subject. But doubtless the real attraction of the saint's legend was that it was a non-dramatic form of narrative which would allow full play to her considerable powers of deSCriptive writing (she had little talent for dramatization). No longer restricted by the necessity of organizing action in terms of plot, or by the need to realize character in terms of psychological cause and effect, she was free to develop her descriptive writing as a mode of reflection upon some of the aesthetic and moral problems with which she was most concerned.