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\auteurcourant={\'ETUDES ANGLAISES}
\titrecourant={ANDROGYNY IN WILLA CATHER}
%\input tex8bits
\raggedbottom
\noindent
{\sl \'Etudes Anglaises}, vol. 52, no. 3, 1999, p. 275--285
\vglue 1.7cm
\parindent=12pt
\parskip=5pt
\centerline{\bf ARTISTIC REBIRTH AND THE IMAGES OF ANDROGYNY}
\smallskip
\centerline{\bf IN WILLA CATHER'S {\it THE SONG OF THE LARK\/}}

\bigskip\bigskip

{\it The Song of the Lark}, Willa Cather's 1915 {\it K\"unstlerroman} set in
the two decades that span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, takes a
second-generation Scandinavian immigrant girl from her native desert town of
Moonstone, Colorado, to the great operas of the Western World. In
the tradition of the {\it Bildungsromane} and of their male
heroes, Cather has her heroine, Thea Kronborg, go the hard way
from Moonstone to Chicago, and from there on to the musical
capitals of Germany, to come back to America, successful and
accomplished as one of the world famous Wagnerian sopranos of
the turn of the century.\footnote{$^1$}{The novel is divided into Parts and
chapters.  These will be indicated in the text of this article with the page
number of the Virago Press edition (London, 1982) which follows the
revised 1937 text and contains Cather's 1932 Preface. General
information about Cather is supplied by James Woodress's
biography of the novelist.}

In the Preface written in 1932 for a new printing of the novel,
however, Cather  finds fault with its title, borrowed from a painting
by Jules Breton in the Chicago Art Institute that had much impressed
her at the time of her first visit to Chicago during her student years
at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. The peaceful landscapes
painted by Millet, Breton, Th\'eodore Rousseau, and the other members
of the Barbizon School reminded her of her own Nebraska prairie
environment; their sturdy peasant girls and women were not
unlike the hard-working pioneer women she had seen
toiling about the farms around the town of Red Cloud where she
had arrived at nine from her native Virginia.\footnote{$^2$}{Cather
had made the pilgrimage to Barbizon during her first journey to
France, in 1902. She sent descriptions  of it to the {\it Nebraska
State Journal}.}

Jules Breton's painting shows a young peasant girl on her way
to the fields at early morning, looking up to listen to a lark.
The title, Cather writes, ``was meant to suggest a young girl's
awakening to something beautiful." She fears, however 
that ``readers take it for granted that the `lark song' refers to
the vocal accomplishments of the heroine," which she deems
``altogether a mistake," for ``her song," she contends, is not 
``of the skylark order."

Was it that the lark eventually came to look of too plain a
feather for the character of Thea and its song  too much of the
rustic kind?  Readers of the novel may not think so. The diva
they encounter in the last pages in the role of Siegelinde
in Richard Wagner's {\it The Valkyrie} in the full bloom of her
beauty and success may have shed the fierce awkwardness of
the young Moonstone girl, but some of the girl's healthy
sturdiness and earthy composure still clings to both
the diva she has become and to her various operatic
interpretations; and besides, what other bird could Cather have
chosen to represent her? The eagle does not sing, nor does the
swan (unless approaching death), and certainly Thea is no dove,
that traditional ultra-feminine cooer, the bird of sacred
Aphrodite/Venus whose part we read she occasionally sings
alternately with the more congenial Elizabeth in Wagner's {\it
Tannh\"auser}. The nightingale of course may come to mind, but
apart from her connoting a lighter soprano than Thea's rich
mezzo and the coloratura she does not possess, the
nightingale metaphor supposedly came too close the real Jenny
Lind (``the Swedish Nightingale") who, we know, was not Cather's
model for Thea.\footnote{$^3$}{Jenny Lind, however, is mentioned three times in the novel,
twice together with Henrietta Sontag as the two artists who
``opened a new world" to  Theodore Thomas, the real-life
conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in a conversation
with the fictive Harsanyi (I, 6, 260-61). The clich\'eed
nightingale metaphor, however, is to be found in a review Cather
wrote for the {\it Nebraska State Journal} of 25 January 1895 in
which she stated, at age  21, that "married nightingales seldom
sing," a bold pronouncement quite in keeping with the argument
of the present article (in {\it The Kingdom of Art}). On Olive Fremstad,
the Wagnerian soprano who is the model for Thea, see a  recent 
article in the October 1997 issue of the {\it Yale Review} by Peter G.
Davis.}


Yet in view of Thea's consistent metaphorization in the novel,
the lark may serve as an appropriate substitute for the
non-singing eagle. Both sun birds, soaring high into the sky,
they are also male images in an homogeneous symbolical network
which makes Thea appear as the total being, both male and
female in its essence. The present essay's purpose is to draw
out the various representations of androgyny, and in doing so,
to complete and perhaps invert/subvert the more maternal
images of birth and matrilinearity set down by critics such as
Ellen Moers, Judith Fryer, Josephine Donovan, or Sharon O'Brien,
to name but a few.


\bigskip
``Every artist makes himself born," Harsanyi, the piano teacher
in Chicago, tells the seventeen-year-old Thea, but he also
warns her that ``it is very much harder than the other time, and
longer" (Part II, chap.~3, p.~221).  In {\it The Song of the Lark},
the process of Thea's (re)birth as an artist is being set off
when, as a twelve-year-old adolescent in a crowded family, she
is given  a room of her own in the attic of the house.  This little
``attic room" enables her to listen to the ``voice within 
herself" and to concentrate on her ``inner self."  Very
early in life, she is thus made aware that she is two persons leading a
``double life" and that only her ``inner voice" can restore to her a
``sense of wholenesss."  The room is her ``shell";  it is described
as a ``sunny cave," ``a little morning cave facing the sun" (II, 11,
300), but also as a snug cubbyhole drenched by moonlight during
the nights.  Thea's attic room is thus the first womb image in
the novel, the nest out of which the lark will be hatched.

The voice once openly recognized during her apprenticeship in
Chicago --- and there are distinct stages in this recognition
which are as many ``revelations" on Thea's epiphanic road to
artistic achievement --- puts an end to the double life Thea
had been living so far and by making her ``whole" also
determines her rebirth to the artistic life of an opera singer.

The scene of Thea's (re)birth is not Chicago, however, the
hustling, brawling, male city of skyscrapers and meat packers,
the ``hog butcher" of Carl Sandburg's poem, but the desert of
Arizona and the ruins of the ancient cliff-dwelling Indians in a
place Cather calls ``Panther Canyon."  Ellen Moers has dubbed
this landscape of tablelands and gorges ``the most thoroughly
elaborated female landscape in literature" (Moers 258), a statement
developed to quasi-formulaic proportion by later
female/feminist critics.

In light of the rebirth enacted in the ``folds" of Panther
Canyon, Thea's two years in Chicago are a ``wandering in the
desert," a time also compared to the period of Chaos before the
moment of Creation.  It is a time of doubts and frustrations,
when her goal seems as far away as God to the mystic lost in
{\it acedia}, when she feels submerged under what Henry James
in {\it The Portrait of the Lady\/} has called ``the bottomless
idiocy of the world" (which Cather perhaps remembered when she
entitled section III  of the novel ``Stupid Faces").

Thea is snapped out of it, however, by the ``revelation" that is
visited upon her in Panther Canyon, when in another ``sunny
cave" high up in the San Francisco mountains, the artist is
finally being born.  The nineteen-year-old Thea who emerges
from it has a clear image of her future priorities; she has integrated and transcended her past and
glimpsed the essential one-ness and continuity of Life, Nature and Art.
She no longer feels ``divided", her ``two selves" have become
one: Kronborg has been born.

The whole section IV of the novel, ``The Ancient People," is devoted to
those momentous two months of Thea's life. Here is a description of
Panther Canyon for which Moers, taking her cue from Freud's cautious
representation of the female reproductive organs as a most
``complicated topography,"\footnote{$^4$}{In his ``Tenth Introductory Lecture to
Psycho-analysis," cited by Moers (254).} would willingly have coined the term
``gynetopography," were it not prone, as she claims, to litter the ``air
of literary debate" with superfluous Greek words (Moers
257)."

\medskip
{\eightpoint\parskip=0pt
\narrower\narrower
Panther {\it Canyon} was like a thousand others --- one of
those abrupt {\it fissures} with which the {\it earth} of the
Southwest is riddled [\dots] {\it it was accessible only at its
head.  The canyon walls}, for the first two hundred feet below
the surface, were {\it perpendicular cliffs}, striped with
even-running strata of rock.  From there on to the bottom the
sides were less abrupt, were shelving, and lightly fringed with
pinions and dwarf cedars. The effect was that of a {\it gentler
canyon} within a wilder one. The dead {\it city} lay at the point
where the perpendicular outer wall ceased and the V-shaped
{\it inner gorge} began. There a stratum of rock, softer than those
above, had been {\it hollowed out} by the action of time until it
was like a {\it deep groove} running along the sides of the
{\it canyon}.  In this {\it hollow} (like a {\it great fold} in the
rock) the Ancient People had built their {\it houses} of
yellowish stone and mortar.  The overhanging cliff above made a
{\it roof} two hundred feet thick. The hard stratum below was an
everlasting {\it floor}\dots

In both walls of the {\it canyon} the same streak of rock had
been washed out, and the long horizontal {\it groove} had been
built up with {\it houses}\dots\ The {\it canyon twisted and
wound} like a snake, and these two streets went on for four
miles or more, interrupted by the abrupt turnings of the
{\it gorge}, but beginning again within each turn\dots\
(IV, 2, 369-70; the {\it various womb images have been
italicized\/}).

}

\medskip
Further still, the canyon is ``this crack in the world," ``an open
gulf," a ``chasm," a ``cleft in the heart of the world".

In the middle of this ``female" landscape, in the snake-like
groove carved out of the rock, are the dwellings of the Ancient
People, the ancestors of the present Pueblo Indians who at the
time of the writing of {\it The Song of the Lark} were not yet
known by their present name of Anasazi (a Navajo term meaning
``ancient enemies").  Established from prehistoric time in the
area contiguous to the ``four corners states" of Colorado, Utah,
Arizona, and New Mexico, the Anasazi by successive waves along
the centuries had been driven out of their canyons, the last
ones leaving well before the ``discovery" of America by
Columbus.  It was thought for a time that they were killed
off in their incessant warfare with the Plain Indians, but it is
now established that they left after protracted periods of
severe drought to settle along the Rio Grande where they can
still be found.

There Thea appropriates one of the Indians' ``rock-rooms." It
is another ``sunny cave," another ``nest in a high cliff, full of
sun" (IV, 2, 371). In it she feels secure and in perfect
symbiosis with her environment, like an unborn child ``swimming
in the liquid gold of the sun."  She does not think or worry, she
becomes sheer sensation, her body converted into ``a mere
receptacle for heat," becoming \dots\ a colour\dots\ a continuous
repetition of sound" (IV, 2, 373).


\goodbreak
There also she experiences the temptation that was visited
upon many a mystic or a mythological hero before her --- and
who knows? the unborn child --- the temptation to dream her
life out in the blissful euphoria of some womb-like spot, away
from life and its entanglements.  Erich Neumann has called this a
state of ``uroboric incest," a (self-)gratifying lethargy akin to
death, and full of perils for the weak-hearted individual.

 The ``revelation" granted to Thea in
her little rock-room is the major epiphany of the novel; it is the
sudden intuition that grasps her of the true meaning of
the Ancient Indian women's art of pottery whose sherds still litter the
floors, and of its relation to her own.  The Indian women's precious
decorated bowls and jars, she understands in a flash of illumination,
are but ``the envelope and sheath" of water without which there is no
life, just as her throat is the vessel of her voice which, being
breath, is that other precious element without which life could
not be, air.

\medskip
{\eightpoint

\narrower\narrower
\noindent
The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an
effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to emprison for a
moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself -life
hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, to sweet
to lose?  The Indian women had held it in their jars.  In the
sculptures she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been
caught in a flash of arrested motion.  {\it In singing, one made a
vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath,
caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals"} 
(IV, 3, 378; {\it emphasis added\/}).

}

\medskip
Decorated pots and bowls to contain water, the singer's throat
to sheathe her voice which is air, the fire to harden the clay
and steel an artist's temperament, produce Art which is Life
itself, a moment snatched off our common mortality.  Art is ``the
seed" created by the conjunction of female (the sheath, vessel,
receptacle) and male (air, fire, and for Cather,
water),\footnote{$^5$}{I am perfectly aware that water is more universally
an element related to the moon, and thus to femaleness, but in its
constant comparison to air, it seems Cather makes it a male
element. Water, the undifferentiated matter of the Origins in
many cosmologies, may also be seen in its male avatar of the
Heavenly rain fecundating the Earth in the first act of
Creation, similar to the Breath or Spirit of God in
the Book of Genesis in the Bible. Yahv\'e, for instance, is
compared to rain (Hosea: 6, 3), to dew ({\it idem}: 14, 6); in
Greek mythology, to give but one example, Zeus impregnates
Danae through a golden shower. It is this male aspect of
fecundating semen bursting forth and creating life in the womb
that Cather seems to have privileged 
.} the necessary combination of womb and
semen for a life to be born.

Thea contains both male and female elements in herself, the
sheath\footnote{$^6$}{ Ellen Moers very appropriately reminds us of the
Latin meaning of vagina, which is but the sheath or scabbard of the
male organ (256).} of her throat, larynx\dots\ the physical
apparatus of her singing, and her beautiful, natural voice, a
voice she had always dimly known she possessed. Her Moonstone
teacher had discerned it (``a nature voice\dots\ breathed from
the creature and apart from language, like the sound of the
wind in the trees, or the murmur of water," I, 11, 97)), Harsanyi
stood in awe of it when he discovered it in Chicago (see the
end of chap.~3, III, 237-38). With her final revelation in
Panther Canyon Thea is indeed made ``whole," the entire
creature contained within its androgynous self.

For the womb-like landscape of Panther  Canyon to produce life,
to deliver a new Thea, as, ``far back in the night of the past," it
had produced the art of the Ancient Indians, it must needs
contain the many fecundating male elements that Moers and
the feminist critics in her wake have failed to notice.  These
stand out in the blaring sun- and moonlight, inescapable for who
reads Cather's description of the canyon landscape with an
alerted eye.  Some of these elements in turn symbolize the
intruding maleness of Fred Ottenburg, Thea's patron,
short-time lover and later-life husband whose ever-faithful
presence at the side of the self-sufficient androgynous Thea
will make of his life a ``heroic discipline" (as he tells her
himself when the reader meets him again some ten years later.
``But loving you is a heroic discipline.  It wears a man out" (VI,
10, 559)).

In Panther Canyon, however, Fred undoubtedly is Thea's sexual
awakener, his masculinity represented by all the phallic
elements that stand up in an aggressive way in the bowl-like
landscape of the canyon: 

{\parindent=0pt
the ``clump of sharp bayonet leaves"
of the yuccas, out of which rises ``a tall stalk hung with
greenish white bells with thick, fleshy petals" (IV, 5, 383), an
adequate representation, if any, of male genitalia;  

the ``niggerhead cactus\dots\ thrusting its crimson blooms out
of every crevice in the rock" ({\it idem}); 

the jutting rocks, the
tall pine trees on top of the mesa, the cedars and pinions that
stand ``dark and rigid, like bronze" (7-401) on the slopes and
assert their presence in the ``coppery fire" of the sun; 

and, of
course, the hard blazing sun itself, the pervasive impregnator,
and the spermatic fluid of the stream winding its way on the
floor of the canyon, compared all through Section IV to the air
between the canyon walls, the ``blue-air river," the ``open gulf"
in which ``arrow-shaped" swallows ``swim all day long."

}

Thea's fierce awkward womanhood is aroused by Fred, the
``savage blonde" (as one of her fellow students called her in
Chicago) is awakened to the stirrings of sexual desire.  She
``delights" in ``the pleasant vigour~of~his person," she feels an
invigorating ``life in the air\dots\ something coming and going, a
rhythm of feeling and action" (6, 392). ``Never," the reader is
told, had she ``felt this pleasant excitement about any man
before" (7,~399).  And the perceptive Fred pays homage to her
new loveliness and feminity.

There is no lovemaking, however, in the expected sense.  Thea
and Fred spend their days horse-riding on top of the mesa,
climbing up and down the canyon slopes, challenging each other
at throwing rocks into the open gulf of the canyon, fencing with
single-sticks in lieu of foils, untiringly exploring the
rock houses in their winding groove on both sides of the
canyon.  From afar they ``look[\ ] like two boys" (5, 384).  When
they kiss, since kiss they eventually must, Thea does not hide
her face on Fred's shoulder, as any maiden was expected to do,
``she  [rises]  a little on her toes, and   [stands]  straight and
free"; she ``[rises] to meet him" and  ``[kisses] him without
constraint and embarrassement" (7, 404-405).  With the same
rising movement, she ``[springs]" to her feet and ``[stands] rigid"
on the edge of the rock to salute a golden eagle that comes
``sailing  over the cleft in which she lay", ``full of warmth,
lassitude and physical content" as after an embrace (6,
398).\footnote{$^7$}{The very first kissing episode is rather a fight,
a taming of wild horses, reminding one of one of Thea's mythological
etymologies: the daughter of the centaur Chiron, transformed
into a mare by Poseidon and later into the Horse constellation
(J. E. Zimmermann. {\it Dictionary of Classical Mythology}. New York:
Bantam, 1964; 262).}

The reborn Thea is no maiden awaiting a man to be furnished
with a destiny.  As her father already knew in Moonstone, she is
not ``the marrying kind" and for Fred certainly she is no
``nest-building bird" either.  He won't propose to her in the
traditional way, offer her ``a comfortable flat in Chicago, a
summer camp up in the woods, musical evenings, and a family to
bring up" (6, 393-94).  He merely promises to himself to ``keep
an eye on her" ({\it idem\/}), ``make it his business in life to
get her on" (7,~413),\footnote{$^8$}{Fred Ottenburg is a rich brewer's son,
well introduced in the world of music and culture in both Europe and
America.} well aware of, and acquiescent to, being ``an instrument" and not
the worshipped ``Apollo of a homey flat" (6, 391). And in still another
reversal of the traditional betrothal scene, it is Fred and not the
tremulous future bride who asks the ritual question: ``Are you
going to play fair?" hoping she ``will want  him  around" for
better reasons than ``to play with" (7, 403).

That marriage, as Fred perceives, would never be an ``end" for
Thea but merely an ``incident" is predicated by the various
male/female images found in the novel which, singly or
compounded, underpin Thea's essential androgyny.

Thea's voice (a male element similar to breath and air as we
have seen above) is like ``a wild bird that had flown into his
studio," the first time Harsanyi hears her sing (II, 3, 232). It
is the great tawny eagle that comes sailing over the rim of
Panther Canyon, which is both her own striving self and the proposing
Fred and which Thea salutes as a symbol of ``endeavour,
achievement, desire, glorious striving of human art"
(IV, 6, 399). The lark is a more modest achiever, but soaring
high into the sky from the flat lands Thea is crossing on her
way from Chicago to Moonstone, it ``sings a new song" on a 
``young and fresh and kindly" land where immigrants ``from
old, sad countries [are] given another chance" (II, 8, 276-277). An
appropriate symbol for the daughter of Norwegian-Swedish immigrants who
``makes good" on American soil, the lark, like the eagle, is a
solar image, but nesting as it does in the rich furrows of the bountiful
earth,  it associates sky, sun and earth in yet another image of
androgyny. Such~are also the ``arrow-shaped"  swallows that cruise
the blue air gulf between the Canyon walls, which combine the male
graphic of their shape with the maternal image of their
``nest-building" capacity  (explicitly  compared in the text with the
ancient cliff-dwellers' (IV, 3, 375). The arrow, besides, connotes the
undeviating determination of Thea's dedication to a career out of the
ordinary, felt by all ever since she was ``two feet high," and
similarly metaphorized as the trajectory of a ``rifle ball" by Fred.
Eagle, lark, arrow-shaped swallow, anything but the dove cooing her
sentimental stuff in the traditional dovecotes of femaleness. 

At one of their meetings during the time Cather was composing her
profile of ``Three American Singers" for the December 1913 issue of
{\it McClure's}, Olive Fremstad had told Cather a piece of sober truth
that she would remember when she wrote {\it The Song of the Lark}. 
Fremstad had said: ``We are born alone, we make our way alone, we die
alone."  This of course may be true for anybody, and is not entirely
so for Thea who has never lacked dedicated friends and supporters
all through her years of apprenticeship and after.  But it
characterizes the fundamental loneliness of the artist vis-\`a-vis
her art and its exacting demands.  The diva Thea turns into has not
much of a personal life indeed, not to mention a normal married life
and children. The images for this state of proud loneliness in the
novel are the great pine trees that dot the Navajo tableland of the
Panther Canyon area at the beginning of ``The Ancient People" section.

\medskip
{\eightpoint
\narrower\narrower

\noindent
The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each
other.  Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. 
They do not intrude upon each other. [\dots\thinspace] 
Each tree has its
exalted power to bear." (IV, 1, 367)  

}
\medskip

The {\it Ur}-androgyny at the
outset of many mythical cosmogonies where  it joins Heaven and
Earth together to initiate the very first act  of Creation, the
tree combines the male erectness of its shape and the female
abundance of its fruit.  The pine, moreover, was the tree
dedicated to Cybele, the Great Phrygian Mother, and it was 
Attis himself, her slain youthful lover. And male/female are
likewise the lesser trees that cling to the slopes of the
canyon, the wild pinions, cedars and chokecherries that embody
Thea's obstinate will and endurance, the cottonwood seedlings
that shade her ritualistic bathing in the canyon stream.

At the close of the  novel, when the readers leave  Thea during a
performance of {\it The Valkyrie} at the Met, they behold a
beautiful soprano who  has come  into ``full possession of
things she had been refining and perfecting for so long" (VI, 11,
571). Usurping her character's consciousness, Cather leaves her
``feel[ing]  like a tree bursting into bloom" ({\it idem\/}), in a
powerful image   joining  both male and female in the orgasmic 
celebration of life (and art).

It may not be fortuitious either if the diegesis proper of the
novel  (barring the short proleptic Epilogue that sums up
Thea's career for another eight years from the vantage point of
Moonstone and her aunt Tilly) closes on Thea singing Siegelinde
in that very opera. Siegmund and Siegelinde, the Volsung pair,
the twin brother and sister of Germanic mythology, are, like so
many twins in mythology, the two faces of the same coin of
androgyny, ``the identity-in-essence of the
separate-in-form," as Southern writer Andrew Lytle has
called the brother/sister pair in a novel much concerned with
the striving towards wholeness.

Thea certainly is no ``maiden flower" as her Moonstone teacher
perceives it so early in her life, no lissom seductress of men
like the Kundry in Wagner's {\it Parsifal} which will undoubtedly
be part of her operatic repertoire.  To Professor Wunsch she
appears like ``a flower full of sun\dots\ like the prickly-pear
blossoms that open there in the desert; thorn[y] and sturd[y],
but wonderful" (I, 13, 122).

The sunflower image by its constant association in the novel
with the moonflowers of Thea's Mexican neighbours' garden
echoes the pervasive sun/moon symbolism of {\it The Song}.  It
overlays all the individual male/female images that shape
Thea's identity.

``Moonstone," her native Colorado town, is a ``desert
town," scorched by the sun and surrounded by stretches of hard
glittering sand dunes that turn white or lavender in the summer
nights of full moon.  These will for ever make up the inner
landscape of her soul, as does Panther Canyon ``swimming in the
liquid gold" of the blazing sun.

As much, however, as Thea appears a child of the sun,
throbbing with solar life and energy, as much do we see her
``pulsing with ardour and anticipation" in her attic room at
night, drenched by moonlight.  The restless adolescent roams
the moonlit streets of her town, watches wild rabbits (an
archetypal model of fertility for which she can muster but tepid
enthusiasm) cavorting under the full moon and decides to live
only for ``impossible" things.  Braving small town propriety, she
spends nights singing and dancing in nearby Mexican Town, when
``the moon itself looked like a great pale flower in the sky"
(II, 10, 291).  Later, she will remember the moonflowers of Mrs
Tellamantez's garden, the sand ridges turning lavender in the
light of the moon and these too will overflow into her music and
become part of her artistic self.

We may conclude this tentative essay on the various representations of
androgyny in {\it The Song} by going back to the figure of
Siegelinde in the last chapter of the novel, Siegelinde at last
reunited with Siegmund and lost in a swooning ecstasy of love
during a night so soaked in moonlight that they think a sunny
spring day has dawned upon them. Or rather, we might conclude
with the ``seed" of that precious night and with Siegfried evoke
that other ``savage blonde" of Germanic mythology, both
heroic male and submissive female, the Valkyrie Brunhild
herself.  We do not actually see Thea sing the role, but all of
Thea's career leads to it, the crowning role of all Wagnerian
sopranos, and so we close the novel not so much in suspense as
in expectation of it.

With the figure of the Valkyrie, we leave Thea as she has
appeared all through her story of apprenticeship and success,
``a personality\dots\ larger than we are accustomed to see
them\dots\ that carrie[s]  across big spaces and expound[s]
among big things," as she is seen by Fred in Panther Canyon
(IV, 6, 397). And, in the full light of her Greek name, remember, as
Cather well knew,\footnote{$^{9}$}{Cather had studied Latin and Greek with
a Red Cloud neighbour but had to take a whole year of cramming in those
two languages in order to be allowed to enter the 
University of Nebraska where they were part of her four-year
cursus (Woodress, 43, 53, 71-72).} that Hesiod in his {\it
Theogony} made her a Titan who, forced by her brother Hyperion,
became the mother of golden Helios and fair Selene, and also of rosy
Dawn where Sun and Moon ever so briefly come together.

If a voice ``simply is the mind and is the heart," as Cather has
Fred Ottenburg declare near the end of the novel (VI, 5, 509),
then Thea, both male intellect and female sensibility, truly
appears as that self-contained mythic creature, the
``imperishable daughter of music" of Cather 1932 Preface.



\bigskip
\rightline{\vbox{\halign{\hfil#\hfil\cr
Anne FOATA\cr
{\it Universit\'e Marc Bloch, Strasbourg}\cr}}\qquad}
\medskip
{\eightpoint
{\it Note added in proof}. On the subject of androgyny in general
{\it cf.} the book by Marie-Claude Perrin-Chenour in the collection
``Voix Am\'ericaines" published by Belin in 1998 (especially
chap.\kern2pt 3) which came to my notice after submitting the
present paper.

}
\vfill\eject


\null\vfill

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%reference pour Etudes Anglaises
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    {{\noindent
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      #1\par}}


\centerline{\bf BIBLIOGRAPHY}
 
\bigskip

\article
Anasazi (The). Books and brochures collected at the
various cliff-dwelling sites of the Southwest; e.g. Richard J.
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\article
Cather, Willa. {\it The Song of the Lark}.  Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1915. Revised edition, 1932. Reprint by the University of
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\article
\vrule height .4pt depth 0pt width 2cm\ {\it The Kingdom of Art.
Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements
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\article
Donovan, Josephine. {\it After the Fall.  The
Demeter-Persephone Myth in Cather, Wharton, and Glasgow}. 
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\article
Eliade, Mircea. {\it Trait\'e d'Histoire des Religions}.  Paris:
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\article
Fryer, Judith.  {\it Felicitous Space.  The Imaginative Structures
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\article
Graves, Robert. {\it The Greek Myths}, rev. ed. Penguin, 1960.

\article
Hesiod. {\it Theogony}. Translated into English by Dorothea
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\article
Jung, Carl G. {\it Psychologie et Alchimie}. French ed.; Paris:
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\article
\vrule height .4pt depth 0pt width 2cm\ {\it Mysterium Conjunctionis}
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\article
Lytle, Andrew.  {\it The Velvet Horn}.  New York: McDowell,
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\article
Moers, Ellen. {\it Literary Women}.  New York: Doubleday, 1976; p.
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\article
Neumann, Erich.  {\it The Origins and History of Consciousness.}
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\article
\vrule height .4pt depth 0pt width 2cm\ {\it The Great Mother}. 
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\article
O'Brien, Sharon.  {\it Willa Cather. The Emerging Voice}.  New
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\article
Woodress. James. {\it Willa Cather. A Literary Life}.  Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1987. 



}

\eject

\bye

