Summary
Writer
Writer Willa Cather often portrayed friendship as nourishing and romantic love as destructive. These themes are evident in 'My Antonia,' 'Shadows on the Rock' and 'The Song of the Lark' and 'The Professor's House.See the full content of this document
Extract
The prosaic Willa Cather.
In Willa Cather's fiction, friendship nourishes and protects while romantic love leads to disillusion or death. Jim Burden of My Antonia cares for Antonia Shimerda all his life because when he was young he dreamed about Lena Lingard, not Antonia. Antonia's own marriage to Anton Cuzak is secure, because the two are not romantic lovers but live together on "terms of easy friendliness, touched with humour." When Niel Herbert in A Lost Lady discovers that Marian Forrester has slept with Frank Ellinger while her husband is far away in Denver, he loses "one of the most beautiful things in his life," a romantic vision that constituted "an aesthetic ideal." Myra Henshawe's elopement seems the height of romance, but the question she whispers on her deathbed as her husband sits nearby pronounces "a terrible judgment" on their love: "Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?" Emil Bergson and Marie Tovesky Shabata become lovers in 0 Pioneers! and are shot a few hours later by Frank Shabata when he finds them together under the white mulberry tree. Emil's older s...
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