Abstract

HOW CONTEXT DETERMINES FACT: HISTORICISM IN WILLA CATHER’S A LOST LADY Joseph R. Urgo* Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady is a deceptive work that can be mistakenly read as a lament for a more glorious past, a kind of ode to the pioneer era in western American history. However, the novel itself does not repre­ sent a longing for a singular, objective past. Rather, it explores the process by which selective events are historicized, the process by which an era, for example, may become either historically known or escape understanding through ahistorical methods of narration. In Cather’s novel, an understand­ ing of the past is achieved once events and narratives are contextualized. The problem lies in the fact that there are a number of potential contexts through which past events are communicated, not all of which are historical. History is represented in Cather’s narrative in stories about the past told by her characters and in the figure and fate of Marian Forrester. In all three categories of representation, historical understanding competes with mythic images, or tableaus, from the past that capture the imagina­ tions of characters and narrators and stand in the way of historical knowledge. Cather’s title suggests this strategy perfectly. A LostLady shows that much of what actually occurred in the pioneer era has been lost in the context of mythic accounts generated by pioneers and their admirers. Specifically, one admirer, Niel Herbert, fails to see Marian Forrester in her own historical and biographical context and insists upon seeing her as a “lost” ideal. Idealized (and idolized) images—ladies and histories—are generated at the expense of historical knowledge. It is not the past that is lamented in Cather’s novel, a past which is shown to be far from heroic or exceptional. Rather, A Lost Lady presents the problematics of historical representation. In particular, Cather’s novel portrays the way in which the past is dehistoricized and turned into, as she puts it, “pleasant memory.” A good deal of Cather criticism argues that Willa Cather saw the pres­ ent as a falling off from the past, a great decline from the heroic pioneer era when men and women settled, colonized, and personified historical foundation. A Lost Lady is read through this lens, and conclusions about the novel reinforce critical visions of Cather’s romantic, historical nostalgia. Susan J. Rosowski concludes that the regrettable inability to maintain “a pioneer spirit of the land” gives A LostLady its tragic theme and that “hope for the future lies with the ability ofmen and women to translate this spirit *Joseph R. Urgo is an Assistant Professor of English at Bryant College. Among his publica­ tions is a recent book, Faulkner’s Apocrypha: “A Fable,” Snopes, and the Spirit of Human Rebellion, issued by the University Press of Mississippi (1989). into life.”1 More recently, Rosowski has reinforced her view of the novel as tragedy, with Ivy Peters playing the role of villain, and the land itself acting as victim.2 Rosowski’s reading is echoed frequently. Ann Douglas sees Marian Forrester as “an emblem of a fading vision of a special order” in history.3 John J. Murphy, in an intertextual study, concurs, and he recognizes a pattern employed by Cather to “frame the story of a downfall of the heroine.”4 Criticism ofA Lost Lady centers largely on Cather’s view of the past, her historical consciousness.3 The novel, however, poses difficulties in get­ ting at Cather’s view of a particular historical era because it depicts the making of history, or the understanding of the past, as an ideological struggle among contending interests in the present. There is less concern in A Lost Lady with presenting a definitive portrait of the past than there is in depicting a present in which many minds compete for historical authority. Involved in this historicist struggle are complexities and align­ ments arising from social class, gender, age, and relative powers of imagina­ tion, articulation, and comprehension. One thing, though, is clear. In A Lost Lady the past is depicted as anything but definitive or static. The novel makes it reductively simplistic, and actually ahistorical, to state that...

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