Hallowed Ground: Landscape as Hagiography in Willa Cather'sDeath Comes for the Archbishop

Abstract

Two fleeting glimpses of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop have eluded the critical attention of scholars. The first of these two epiphanies appears three-quarters of the way into the narrative, so we too will proceed to this revelation as though traipsing on mules with Cather during one of her pivotal visits to the Southwest. To begin, we will consider why the land is central to the novel's meaning and see how the text's mood is determined by the desert landscape. To appreciate Cather's art is to understand the sanctified nature of the land, which illuminates our own nature at the same time. The novel presents sangre de Cristo as a fact, as the ubiquitous undercurrent of existence. The land, like our nature, may have fallen, yet it has not been conquered but redeemed. The critical range of relevant scholarship encompasses both secular and religious readings, even secularized religious readings. Many critics argue that Cather's vision is purely secular, with origins and finality in the material realm. Sally Peltier Harvey identifies Cather's use of distinctive garden imagery in Death Comes for the Archbishop as symbolic of a healthy community, yet Harvey mentions this symbol only to supplement her sociopolitical reading of the novel as a text that shows how to establish a happy balance between personal and public needs. It redefines self-fulfillment in terms of service to and identification with community (101). her definition of self-fulfillment--the American Dream--Harvey uses the land as a symbol but omits reference to visions of a landscape imbued with sanctity, and consequently she fails to integrate the landscape into her model of a viable community. For Harvey the land is not spiritually transcendent but a humanist's symbol--the color of vibrant cultural identity--or epic stage for a questing hero. Other critics ask religious questions and find secular answers. After Eden: The of American Space in the Fiction of Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser, Conrad Eugene Ostwalt, Jr. analyzes how the influx of ideas from Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and G. W. F. Hegel, among others, shaped American culture as it entered the twentieth century. Once promising face-to-face encounters with the divine, America, like Eden, had fallen from grace, shifting from sacred to secular, and thus faced the need to redefine its spatial orientation to all that was lost: relationship with the land, relationship with the divine. Ostwalt argues that in Cather's fiction the frontier embodied otherness. Once this other was apprehended, it lost its ability to disclose the transcendent and sacred (49). When America became industrialized, the New World became profane: Secularization of American natural space occurs when characters attempt to reduce the otherness of nature and to control the natural world (55). place of a religious other, Ostwalt continues, the land in Cather's fiction embodies divine attributes of mystery, awesome power, beneficence, and ample providence that make human relationships possible. Depleted of transcendence, the land provides a forum for community. What became of religion? In Cather's secular world, human relationships replace what one loses from the destruction of the sacred environment, namely a relationship with deity (74). Other people substitute for divine otherness. Critics like Harvey and Ostwalt find Cather's religion--a relinking with a divine other--in human community. The land is merely the forum. contrast to Ostwalt's view of a desacralized earth, this essay will argue that the land in Cather's novel, by virtue of creation, is sacred and could no more be profaned than it could lose its properties as earth or the Southwest its distinctively red tint. Previous analyses have shortchanged the novel by over-looking one essential, indestructible component--sangre de Cristo. Death Comes for the Archbishop presents the land as having an irrevocable, redemptive quality: instated at creation, tainted by Eden's die/dye, restained by sangre de Cristo, and sealed by the cross. …