Mother Eve and making meaning on the mesa: feminist silences in Willa Cather’s The professor's house

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue for a deeper reading of Mother Eve, a central though silent character at the heart of Willa Cather’s 1925 novel, The Professor’s House. Mother Eve is a skeleton, uncovered by men during an archeological excavation, and I read her corpse as the necessarily silent core of Cather’s tale, which ponders how to speak for the past, for the dead, and for others through narrative. As the men attempt to tell her story, the novel simultaneously records and resists their interpretations. Ultimately, it is what a story does not say, Cather suggests, that makes it worth reading — and, I argue, what makes it perfect for a feminist reading.