"The Professor’s House" Centenary

An essay by Charlotte Stroud

To mark the centenary of The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, the splendid Charlotte Stroud has written a lovely piece in praise of the novel at Engelsberg Ideas.

In The Theory of the Novel, the Marxist critic György Lukács argues that what we call heroic in the modern novel is not action (as it was in the epic), but a struggle of consciousness. The modern hero, Lukács contends, is the alienated man who faces his loneliness without illusion. An exile even among his wife and daughters – all of whom embrace the tidings of modernity – St Peter, in this heroic sense, is the less deceived. Unlike his colleagues, he notices that the ‘quality’ of his students diminishes year on year, that the ‘cheap execution’ of university buildings leads to endless repairs. Unlike his family, he knows that the ‘glittering’ new house, bought with the prize money awarded to his book, is no compensation for work that gave him such ‘priceless’ joy. It is no wonder, then, that he feels ‘a diminution of ardour’, an ‘ever-increasing fatigue’. He is a hero without recourse to action, a man who must endure estrangement alone.

And—

In her manifesto-like essay ‘The Novel Démeublé’, Cather – though a critic of modernity – advances what can only be called a modernist argument: that art should proceed ‘by suggestion rather than enumeration’. In practice, she argues, this means the novelist must be selective with details, choosing only those that are ‘a part of the emotions of the people’ they describe. So, when Cather presents Outland’s hand, with its ‘beautifully shaped thumb that curved back from the rest of the hand as if it were it its own master’, she means it to stand for his whole character. A man with a thumb like this, we feel, will achieve great things; and so he does.

You can read the whole thing here.