Willa Cather

[SFG75]

I'm currently reading The Troll Garden, which is a collection of some short stories that deal with life on the plains and people who aspired to something higher. The Sculptor's Funeral is about a man who went on to accomplish great things and who became highly talented in the arts. While he's laid out in a room after arriving in the small town from a train, some of the old codgers began to tear him down over his life's decisions to not live life in the stultifying city and to do the *practical* things that *real* people should do.

"Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to school," said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate, judicial tone. "There was where he got his head full of traipsing to Paris and all such folly. What Harve needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas City business college.

In the final pages, a lawyer takes on the codgers and the community at large, and assigns blame for what ultimately happened to many young men who unlike the sculptor, were unable to make it out of the small-town intellectual suck-pit that was known as their community. The values taught by the community included little other than becoming rich as best as one can, being machiavellian in business and other matters, as well as an overall disrespect for the arts and other *impractical* matters, which ultimately lead to cynicism and loss of hope. The stories of bright workers ending up with alcohol related tremors and of taking their own lives is mentioned by the lawyer as he dresses down the codgers who dare to criticize those who can't speak for themselves, the dead.

It's a sad short story as Cather draws you into empathizing for those who did other things rather than to pursue their own dreams. It was also very realistics as you could see people in the situation, critiquing the life choices that others have made.

 

[SFG75]

Currently enjoying One of Ours, a novel set around WWI. From looking around the net, I'm finding a lot of material on criticisms of Cather. One of the bigger things mentioned, is her lack of social criticism. Not every author is to have a brazenly straight-forward agenda like Ayn Rand or the socialist Upton Sinclair, but in reading this work, such criticism...any criticism..relating to the events of the world are totally absent. Yes, it's nice to read about the plains and that type of thing, but in One of Ours, I'm finding the same plains individualist mentality. I'm really enjoying this work, but it could use some more teeth.