Willa Cather's Last Four Books

Abstract

In her major novels Willa Cather explored the archetypal dimensions of the human imagination: 0 Pioneers!, with its vision of the new land and its heroic settlers, is written in the epic mode; My Antonia, with its quest into the author's personal memories, is a pastoral; The Professor's House, which chronicles an ugly tale of human greed, is largely satiric, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, with its saintly missionary priests, portrays the disciplined, timeless world of the paradisal imagination. But what of those books written after Death Comes for the Archbishop, particularly those last four volumes (Obscure Destinies, Lucy Gayheart, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, The Beauty and Others) which critics agree mark the decline of Miss Cather's art? Can these novels, from a writer of such depth, be as undistinguished and insignificant as has been suggested?' The answer is at once affirmative and negative. With the exception of the long story, Old Mrs. Harris, the later writing lacks the imaginative energy which found consummate expression in the earlier novels. But the vision which underlies these books is precisely one which discounts the urge to expression through art; for it was the author's conviction in later years that not art but only life truly matters in the end. Consequently Willa Cather's last fictions occupy that paradoxical, but not uncommon, position of works of art pointing to their own devaluation. As a romantic Willa Cather believed in the absoluteness of the artist's vocation.2 Her major novels were all written as egotistic expressions of an individual con-