Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1999
Abstract
When Willa Gather sent her publisher the manuscript for The Song of the Lark in March 1915, she wrote him that unless he had lived in the West, he couldn’t possibly understand how much of the region she had put into the novel. It expressed the “My country, ’tis of thee” feeling that the West always gave her, and, she concluded, when she grew old and couldn’t explore the desert anymore, all she need do to recapture the sense of place would be to lift the lid of the novel (Willa Gather to Ferris Greenslet, March 28, 1915—I paraphrase here because a stipulation to Gather’s will prevents the direct quotation of her letters). While ostensibly Gather’s book is about the rise of Wagnerian opera diva Thea Kronborg to stardom at the New York Met (hardly, one might think, the stuff of “real” Western literature), the book is indeed suffused with Western dreams of pioneering, Western values, Western heroics. In more than just the desert landscape of early chapters, The Song of the Lark is a Western book that asks questions fundamental to Gather’s thinking in the first half of her career: Can the highest aspirations of art find their genesis in the West, a place seemingly so hostile to high art? Can someone with the imagination and drive of a Thea translate her Western experiences into a meaningful artistic career that finds an audience outside of that region?
Recommended Citation
Funda, Evelyn. Reading Willa Cather's 'The Song of the Lark'. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1999. Digital. Western Writers Series, 137.