To speak of the woe that is in marriage:

Abstract

The Professor’s House is a very strange book for a woman to have written; not because the central character is a man but because he is a man besieged by difficult women. The Professor suffers because he is alive, because he has reached the time of life when death becomes a reality, casting an ironic perspective on all that has gone before; but beyond this existential pain he suffers particularly, as a man. The underlying theme of the novel is the relation between the sexes and its collapse: by the end of the novel the Professor has been completely estranged from his wife and daughters, having been rejected, humiliated and disappointed by each of them in turn. Conventionally, the subject is part of male territory; indeed, it has become something of an American male speciality. The middle-aged man, driven to manic distraction or lonely despair by the modern world, and particularly the women in it, is a major theme for writers otherwise as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. It is the fictional equivalent of the bar-room drunk crying that his wife doesn’t understand him and is as tedious as it is ubiquitous. It will not, I hope, be necessary to go on a pub crawl to appreciate that Cather’s treatment of this theme is rather different.