Asad Al-Ghalith, Century College, Minnesota
A noteworthy technique that the American writer Willa Cather (1873-1947) uses for effecting characterization is by having the character contain light within; light becomes a vital force, the élan vital, the essential spirit operating within. This becomes apparent to the sensitive observer through the features and the actions of the individual. Cather seems to capture the symbolic significance of light when she establishes light in the center of the individual. J. E. Cirlot claims that "light, traditionally, is equated with the spirit.... The superiority of the spirit is immediately recognizable by its luminous intensity."1 Light imagery has become a favorite technique of Cather's to depict characters. Focusing on examples of light imagery in some of her novels, I hope to show how this inner light, which flashes through her protagonists' eyes and features, corresponds to their states of mind as they go through the trials and triumphs of life.
The Song of the Lark (1943) is Willa Cather's depiction of the spirit, desire, and yearning of Thea Kronborg, who tries to realize her artistic personality.2 Cather apparently believed that the best way to define Thea's personal artistic struggle was to convey it through the image of a bright internal fire, the intensity of which fluctuates according to the intensity of the artistic endeavor. The Greeks are known to have represented the spirit as "a gust of incandescent air,"3 and light has traditionally been symbolic of the "creative force," of "cosmic energy," and of "irradiation."4 Cather's extensive use of light to picture Thea's artistic spirit and creativity is aesthetically justifiable, however much it is exploited.
Thea Kronborg's childhood is bathed in light. She loves the brilliant desert and the mountains surrounding Moonstone, the bright garden and rooms of the Kohlers (Thea's neighbors, who host her piano teacher), and the white illumination of the moon. At this early stage, her piano teacher perceives the special qualities of artistic sensitivity in her, and she seems to have "a face full of light and energy, of the unquestioning hopefulness of first youth. Yes, she was like a flower full of sun" (SL 122). However, the reader is not struck by the allusion to her internal fire until Thea matures and discovers her talent for singing. At this point, her internal light is made manifest through her features, which appear to emit the thermal glow of fire within. Until this point, Thea thinks she will realize her potential at the piano, but the day she sings for her music instructor, Harsanyi, he is "never quite sure where the light came from when her face suddenly flashed out at him in that way…. At such moments her hair was yellower, her skin whiter, her cheeks pinker, as if a lamp had suddenly been turned up inside of her" (SL 241). Going through periods of doubt concerning her potential to be an artist, Thea appears to her childhood friend, Dr. Archie, to be tormented: "a light seemed to break upon her face from far away-or perhaps from far within" (SL 307). Dr. Archie feels that he knows nothing about Thea during these times as she stands before him "and glittered like that all over" (SL 308). Thea receives the opportunity to sing before the professional scrutiny of Mrs. Nathanmeyer, an opera expert, and her escort Fred remembers how "remarkably brilliant and beautiful she had been when she sang at Mrs. Nathanmeyer's: flushed, gleaming, round and supple, something that couldn't be dimmed or downed" (SL 362). The striving artist in her has been awakened, and the fire within her is growing stronger.
Thea becomes fully illuminated (visually in addition to spiritually) to Fred's observant eyes at Panther Canyon. Watching Thea on a distant crag, he gets "the impression of…a kind of brilliancy of motion" (SL 397). When Thea kisses Fred, "he felt her flash into everything that she had ever suggested to him, as if she filled out her own shadow" (SL 402). (Similarly, Harry Gordon in Cather's novel Lucy Gayheart (1935) felt that Lucy had "that way of flashing with her whole self into one impulse,"5 and we get a vivid impression of light in motion.) Thea turns her "most glowing face" to Fred, but he feels her face is "coloured by a sunrise he could not see" (SL 412). About her personality he feels "you can't put out a sunrise" (SL 423).
When Thea attains her dreams and desires and becomes a great opera singer, her appearance on stage is perceived as a pure emanation of light. She has "that bright-and-morning look" (SL 511), "a shining beauty like the light of sunset on distant sails" (SL 538), and is "entirely illuminated" (SL 538). Her portrayal of an opera character, Fricka in Wagner's "Rheingold," is "so clear and sunny" that she redeems the part (SL 539). Thus, Thea's "brightness" increases and becomes most apparent just prior to and during the climax of her artistic achievement; her artistic progress is recorded by evidence of the internal fire showing through her features. This appearance of light provides additional support to Cather critic John Randall's contention that light precedes and accompanies climax in Cather's novels.
In the novel My Ántonia (1918) Willa Cather provides an example of characterization achieved by the lack of that inner brilliancy.6 Cather uses light to indicate the weakness of Ántonia's father in dealing with the pioneer conditions on the prairie. We find that Cather uses light in a way that prefigures Ántonia's father's eventual death. Although his face is rugged, her father has a countenance that looks "like ashes-like something from which all the warmth and light had died out" (MA 24). When Ántonia and Jim encounter him walking home across the fields, he is only capable of giving them a "flicker of a smile" (MA 41), as if the flicker is all the energy he can produce out of the ashes of the burned-out fire within him. Visiting the Burdens (his neighbors), he is heartened by the atmosphere of the Christmas celebration, and "when a faint flush came up into his cheeks, his features might have been cut out of a shell, they were so transparent" (MA 86). A human being's features in death are often described as being transparent, and the reader gets an impression that death is impending for him. The father does die shortly afterwards, taking his own life in the dark barn.
More striking in Willa Cather's novels than the revelation of internal light through facial features or actions are the myriad ways in which the eyes convey the spirit and strivings of human endeavor by the light they reveal. Not only do the artists in Cather's novels contain this fire, but the pioneers in them do as well, for the frontier inspires the spirit of those people who are strong enough to contend with it: "As a positive energy, her frontier inspires idealistic quests, spiritual struggles, and religious awareness. It is, in short, as much a philosophical attitude as it is a physical reality."7 Like the artist, the pioneer also "undergoes the crises of self-discovery, struggle, and ultimate spiritual triumphs."8 The eyes of many of Willa Cather's characters convey the light of that internal spiritual fire, and the sensitive observer understands and appreciates those messages. The sensitive reader of an Ántonia, a Thea, or a Lucy can "see" the spirit, the fire, surfacing in the eyes. Jim Burden, the narrator and main character of My Ántonia, trying to get Ántonia to express herself in English, sees that her eyes are "fairly blazing with things she could not say" (MA 25). In Cather's novel Lucy Gayheart, Sebastian, Lucy's teacher, understands Lucy's flashing eyes: "When she gave him a quick shy look and the gold sparks flashed in her eyes, he read devotion there, and the fire of imagination; but no invitations, no appeal. In her companionship there was never the shadow of a claim. On the contrary, there was a spirit which disdained advantage" (LG 80-81).
In a Platonic sense, the eyes become windows to the soul. While Thea's friend Ray Kennedy lies dying, he and Thea come to recognize a common spirit of endeavor in each other's gaze: "The spark in his eye, which is one's very self, caught the spark in hers that was herself, and for a moment they looked into each other's natures. Thea realized how good and great-hearted he was, and he realized about her many things" (SL 187). Lucy Gayheart, the protagonist, believes that her sweetheart, Harry Gordon, "had some imagination," and "on occasion something flashed out of him…. If he should put his hand on her, or look directly into her eyes and flash the old signal, she believed it would waken something and start the machinery going to carry her along" (LG 175). Likewise, Harry knows she "never could conceal her feelings" (LG 216), and he knows it is only when she meets Harry that "her eyes lighted up with the present moment, and asked for something" (LG 215). Mrs. Wheeler, in the novel One of Ours (1922), could perceive a "singular light in his [Claude's] eyes" which revealed on good days that "all was well in his inner kingdom."9
In a comparison of Henry James with Willa Cather, Howard M. Jones makes a pertinent observation: "I have assumed that special light is shed on the nature of an artist's development...in the fiction of Willa Cather.... For James the problem is one of culture; for Miss Cather it is a problem of energy.... Culture, it is James' hope, will eventually lead into that study of perfection which is art; but in Miss Cather's world the initiates already recognize each other by signs too subtle for the multitude. Art for the one is wisdom; for the other it is radiance."10 In The Song of the Lark, for instance, the sensitive Dr. Archie, the music instructors Wunsch and Harsanyi, and her close friend Fred become those "initiates" who are capable of seeing creative energy and potential through the subtle signs of the eyes and body. If art is equated with radiance for Willa Cather, it is understandable that the eyes would be used to convey that radiance; the sun is the exemplar of radiance, and, as William Olcott states, "the most ancient and popular solar symbol seems to have been the eye…. The sun, in short, possessed to primitive minds all the attributes of a great eye gazing down upon the earth."11 In an early short story, "Death in the Desert" (1903), Cather reveals the dying artist's eyes to be like the sun: the artist's eyes "possessed a warm, life-giving quality like the sunlight: generous, fearless eyes, which glowed with sympathy and good cheer for all living things, a sort of perpetual salutat to the world."12 In her novel The Professor's House (1925), Professor St. Peter (her main character) has the kind of discriminating eyes that suggest the all-penetrating power of sunlight.13 His keen eyes can discriminate between friend or stranger "in a flash," and they have lost "none of their fire" (PH 13). In My Ántonia, Ántonia's eyes are "big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood" (MA 23). In The Song of the Lark, Harsanyi's single eye assumes the attributes of a great eye gazing down upon Thea's talent. He "turned the light of his wonderful eye" upon Thea as he gives her musical advice (SL 221), and his eye is described as "wonderful; full of light and fire when he was interested" (SL 230). Later, his eye, "shining like a tiger's in the dark," "followed Sieglinde [Thea] about the stage like a satellite" (SL 567).
Willa Cather sometimes describes a physiological response of the eyes that normally is produced by reaction to light. Thea's restless misery at the piano would show in her eyes, which grew very small, "reduced to mere pinpoints of cold, piercing light" (SL 224). In her novel Shadows on the Rock (1931), Cecile's mood of excitement produces what appears to be a dilation of her pupils-her eyes, normally dark blue in color, become almost black when she is excited and "so dark when her heart was touched."14 In the candlelight they become "no longer blue, but black" (SR 150). Furthermore, when Doña Isabella becomes angry in the novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), her eyes "focused and gathered light."15 Willa Cather's concern for the functioning of the eye in relation to light emphasizes J. W. Goethe's remark: "The eye may be said to owe its existence to light, which calls forth, as it were, a sense that is akin to itself; the eye, in short, is formed with reference to light, to be fit for the action of light."16
In addition, insensitivity and callousness in a character are frequently indicated by the kind or intensity of brightness in the eyes. In Shadows on the Rock, Cather's protagonist Auclair, who is perceptive of the character of others, notices a "shallow brilliance" in Bishop Saint Vallier's eyes that makes him antagonistic toward the bishop (SR 119). In Lucy Gayheart, Fairy Blair, envious of the attention that Harry has lavished on Lucy, has eyes that "were so lit up and reckless that one thought she might have been drinking" (LG 13). "Something restless" in Mockford's "sparkling green" eyes made him distasteful to Lucy (LG 57). Mrs. Cutter, the frightening, chronically bitter wife of Wick Cutter, had "a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full, intense eyes" (MA 211). (Lunacy is traditionally associated with a full, intense moon.) In The Song of the Lark, when Thea receives one of many malicious comments from the overbearing Mrs. Livery Johnson, she notices that Mrs. Johnson's eyes "glittered more than the Ancient Mariner's" (SL 75). Thea also notices that Mrs. Archie always keeps the shades down in her house. She likes to keep her house "clean, empty, dark, locked, and to be out of it" (SL 42). Thea feels that "such little, mean natures are among the darkest and most baffling of created things" (SL 42). When Thea goes to pick her strawberries, Mrs. Archie leads her to them, "squinting and shading her eyes with her hand" (SL 45). Like her house, her soul is dark and fireless, and she desires to keep the light of moral goodness from entering.
For many of Willa Cather's characters, the human body becomes a living vessel that contains the light of a burning fire. It is as if Willa Cather's characters were embodying Bernice Slote's notion that "the creation of life was fundamental in art, and of course everything came from that primeval fire."17 Indeed, that "primeval fire" (or lack of it) can be readily observed through the features, actions, and eyes of her characters.
Notes
1. J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Saye (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962) 188.
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2. Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation SL.
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3. Cirlot 108.
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4. Cirlot 108.
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5. Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart (New York: Knopf, 1935) 221. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation LG.
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6. Willa Cather, My Ántonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation MA.
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7. Edward and Lillian Bloom, Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962) 22.
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8. Bloom 116-17.
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9. Willa Cather, One of Ours (New York: Knopf, 1979) 69.
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10. Howard Mumford Jones, "Excerpt from The Bright Medusa," Willa Cather and Her Critics, ed. James Schroeter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967) 248.
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11. William Tyler Olcott, Sun Lore of All Ages (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1914) 288.
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12. Willa Cather, "Death in the Desert," in Collected Short Fiction. 1892-1912, ed. Virginia Faulkner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970) 204.
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13. Willa Cather, The Professor's House (New York: Knopf, 1925). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation PH.
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14. Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock (New York: Knopf, 1931) 25. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation SR.
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15. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Knopf, 1980) 190.
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16. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Eastlake (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970) liii.
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17. Bernice Slote, ed., The Kingdom of Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975) 48.
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