The Professor's House and the Incorporation of America

Abstract

My Ántonia and O Pioneers! demonstrated Cather's willingness to represent the varieties of American experience. The clearest form that this variety takes is racial and cultural heterogeneity: the cosmopolitan European peoples on the Nebraskan prairies, the varied languages of the pioneer settlements. It is tempting to read Cather as a liberal multiculturalist attuned to the American plethora, sympathetic to difference in all its forms; but we must also recognise the dangers of this diversity – incoherence, fragmentation, disunity. Cather's problem is a recurrent dilemma in American culture: how to create coherence out of diversity? In The Professor's House and Death Comes for the Archbishop Cather tried to reconcile the competing, if not centrifugal, tendencies in her culture. The next two chapters investigate the ways in which these novels attempt to incorporate or harmonise conflicting aspects of America and its past: the Pueblo's ancient culture and modern science; business and art; religious ritual and pioneer settlement. The settings of The Professor's House reveal a patchwork diversity: mesa settlement and university campus; the home of the title and the Smithsonian Institute; the West discovered by the explorer, Coronado, and contemporary commercial suburbia. And diversity is also present, most strikingly, in the notorious narrative shape of the novel: the text consists of a third-person narrative which frames an interpolated first-person section, ‘Tom Outland's Story’. Even the narrative point-of-view is varied.