Willa Cather brings the Muse to her country - her use of Classical myth

Several years ago I wrote something about Willa Cather’s use of mythology, about how incidents in her novel made specific but subtle references to classical stories.  What is going on in those comments?  Cather loved Classical literature and mythology and somehow figured out how to mix it into the regional fiction that she was at first reluctant to write.  She discovered she could Write What She Knew in more than one way, and include the things she knew and loved (Ovid, Virgil) and the things about which she was more ambivalent (Nebraska).

It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those [the Danish and Bohemian servants] and the poetry of Virgil.  If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.  I understood that clearly, for the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious.  I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.  (My Ántonia, III.ii)

Jim Burden is now a college student at the University of Nebraska, escaping Red Cloud – sorry, Black Hawk – for good.  Like the actual Willa Cather, he has become a diligent student of Greek and Latin literature.  As Cather does with his fiction, I suspect he packs his memoir with references to myths.

In I.vii., young Jim, in the presence of the admiring Ántonia, slays a dragon, or Nebraska’s equivalent, a huge rattlesnake.  Is this a generic dragon-slaying adventure, mythical enough, or something more specific?  Apollo slaying Python?  And if so, which version?  Or is this one of the snakes in Virgil’s Georgics, his long poem about farming.  Where Ovid’s Metamorphoses was a guiding poem of O Pioneers!, the Georgics may (or may not) diffuse through My Ántonia:

…[Virgil’s] mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, “I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.” (III.ii)

That could be Cather’s own manifesto.  At some point I had the suspicion, or fear, that Cather was working her way through Georgics, episode by episode, but now I don’t think that is true.  But I do not know Georgics that well.

A Lost Lady is governed by Ovid rather than Virgil.  “He read the Heroides over and over, and felt that they were the most glowing love stories ever told” (I.vii).  Cather specifically tells me what I ought to be reading!  I am pretty sure that I need the Phaedra letter (the young man is Hippolytus, the lost lady Phaedra, the retired railroad man Theseus), but I will bet that there is even more to it.

This, gesturing vaguely, is there, but how much and exactly where, good question.  Most readers, I think, do not care at all.  I think they are – I am – missing something.  Maybe someday I will do the requisite work.

The story of what had happened was written plainly - some Willa Cather mythology

O Pioneers! is pretty good as novelistic sociology – the mix of immigrant groups in late 19th century Nebraska, their speech patterns, their habits.  But Cather is also up to something else.  She is myth-making.

The protagonist is a kind of earth goddess, for example, in tune with the land, prophetic about the weather.  She is visited in recurring dreams by some sort of male corn god (“he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him”).  After the dreams, “angry with herself,” she gives her “gleaming white body” a good scrub with “cold well-water” (III, 2 for all of this).  Hmm.  Maybe this is why I was not assigned the novel in high school – too much sex.

The minor character Crazy Ivar speaks only Norwegian, goes barefoot, knows the language of the birds, and, to top it off, lives in a hole in the ground (“Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank”) in a part of the country where the “wild flowers disappeared,” (I, 3)  Yesterday I called him a symbolic link to the Old Country, but he also appears to be a genuine troll, one of many who will appear at Wuthering Expectations this year.

Long ago I took a course in Greek and Roman mythology.  The professor at one point described his admiration for Willa Cather, based in part on her deep love of myth.  For example, he said, in one of her novels she borrows the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid (Book IV of Metamorphoses), in which two nitwit lovers kill themselves for no good reason, in the process staining a mulberry bush with their blood:

With that, his body on his sword he threw:
Which, from the reaking wound, he dying drew.
Now, on his back, vp-spun the blood in smoke:
As when a Spring-conducting pipe is broke,
The waters at a little breach breake out,
And hissing, through the aëry Region spout.
The Mulberryes their former white forsake;
And from his sprinkling blood their crimson take.  (from the great George Sandys translation, 1632)

The great Ovidian touch here is the ridiculous and sublime comparison of the jet of blood to the broken pipe.  And here it was, in O Pioneers!.

Cather borrows not the story, exactly, or only does so with a lot of distance, but the mulberries, and the blood:

While Ivar was hurrying across the fields, the first long rays of the sun were reaching down between the orchard boughs to those two dew-drenched figures.  The story of what had happened was written plainly on the orchard grass, and on the white mulberries that had fallen in the night and were covered with dark stain.  (IV, 8) 

In the next paragraph, the stained berries are mentioned again.  The slain lovers have been transformed:

two white butterflies from Frank's alfalfa-field were fluttering in and out among the interlacing shadows; diving and soaring, now close together, now far apart; and in the long grass by the fence the last wild roses of the year opened their pink hearts to die.

Those roses may go a bit too far.  This is what I meant by the foregrounding of symbolism.  How can you miss the interlaced shadows and pink hearts?  You are not meant to miss them.

Yet Cather merely brushes against Ovid’s mulberries.  No arrow points at them – “classical reference here.”  There is no need at all for the reader to recognize the story, and no hint that it is there.  None of the characters have any idea of it.  It is not worked in to the novel but just there, in a few lines.

What else did Cather hide?