Essay: Brave Visionaries: Revisiting The Age of Innocence and The Song of the Lark

An essay by Olga Stein based on Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence and Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark

Photo by Stephanie Klepacki on Unsplash

No current streaming service series captures the social, political, and economic disruptions of the interregnum between America’s Reconstruction and the start of the Progressive Era like The Gilded Age. Perhaps, too, no bit of dialogue captures the central theme of the series as a whole so much as the exchange between Bertha and George Russell. It’s part of a conversation that takes place in the series’ first episode. The Russells and their adult children—whom we are meant to see as New York’s “new money”—have just moved into their recently completed Standford White-designed city mansion (the house is tellingly situated directly across from old New York’s van Rhin family). Bertha Russell informs George that she has “left cards” with a number of society ladies, including Mrs. Vanderbilt.

“So now they know we’re here,” she says. “We’re now settled where we should be, and that’s what I wanted to show them.”

“They don’t care,” George replies. “They don’t know we exist.”

“They will now,” Bertha tells him confidently. She’s eager and determined to move up the social ladder of New York’s genteel society.

It’s noteworthy that The Gilded Age features an “opera war.” On the surface, building a new opera house is an effort by New York’s newly moneyed commercial and industrial elite to counter the restricted seating at opera performances staged by the Academy of Music (run by old New York). However, funding the Metropolitan Opera House is about more than making tickets to the opera available to a broader segment of the well-to-do. The newly built venue is in essence a challenge to the establishment—nothing short of an attempt to impose a new social order, which begins with the democratizing of an exclusive art form.

Warbler Classics has just reissued Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (originally published in 1915 and 1920 respectively). These Warbler Classics editions come with valuable biographical timelines. Both novels seem as relevant today as they were when first published a century ago. Given that themes related to social status are addressed in each novel, and that both complement The Gilded Age (in fact, the series draws on Wharton’s work), both novels invite reflection once again on the ways social order (and hierarchy) is established, maintained, and eventually transformed.

In The Age of Innocence, there is a telling exchange between Madame (countess) Olenska and Newland Archer. Archer, who is part of New York’s upper crust, alludes to the intricacies of the mores and rules of propriety that define their elite milieu. The alluring Olenska responds with characteristic wit: “Is New York such a labyrinth? I thought it so straight up and down—like Fifth Avenue. And with all the cross streets numbered!” She then tempers her comment: “If you knew how I like it for just that—the straight-up-and-downness, and the big honest labels on everything!” (p. 40).

In Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, there is a comparable moment in which the spatial configuration of a Colorado town doubles as a catalogue of the people who live there:

The children in the primary grades were sometimes required to make relief-maps of Moonstone in sand….[T]hey could easily have indicated the social classifications of Moonstone, since these conformed to certain topographical boundaries, and every child understood them perfectly….To the west of [the main] street lived all the people who were, as Tillie Kronborg said, “in society.” Sylvester Street, the third parallel with Main Street on the west, was the longest in town, and the best dwellings were built along it…” (p.18)

Olenska’s remark is less about the neat arrangement of streets in New York than about the order it manifests. It captures an ethos that classifies, codifies, and preserves. “Everything may be labeled—but everybody is not,” Newland Archer answers defensively, a statement subsequently belied by the friction caused by Olenska’s presence at the house of Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, a woman Archer’s highly esteemed cousins, the van der Luydens, consider “common” (p. 46), and by Henry van der Luyden’s pointed reminder that unlike Europe’s more tolerant high society and courts, New York does have its “little republican distinctions” (p. 47).

The elder van der Luyden, in this instance, isn’t too different from Thea Kronborg’s sister Anna, whose “ideas about habit, character, duty, love, marriage, were grouped under heads, like a book of popular quotations.” Her mind, Thea thinks, “had really shocking habits of classification” (p. 80). Readers will observe that neither Fifth Avenue nor Moonstone’s Sylvester Street will assimilate every one.

Order, the social structure it preserves, are contrapuntal motifs, in both the Age of Innocence and The Song of the Lark. Both novels depict places and communities that seem to many of the people living there like intractable realities, unchanging and permanent. When viewed from another perspective, courtesy of Olenska’s prodding, New York takes on a different aspect for Archer: “[Olenska] was rendering what might prove the first of their mutual services by making [Archer] look at his native city objectively. Viewed thus, as through the wrong end of a telescope. It looked disconcertingly small and distant…” (p. 40).

Metropolitan New York and small-town Moonstone are both, to a large extent, products of happenstance; they’re cultural outgrowths to which the historical processes of immigration, resettlement, and nation-building contributed. Both Cather and Wharton employ larger historical and ethnographic lenses—referencing both rootedness and transience—to describe American cities and towns. A surface comparison of Cather and Wharton may not make this obvious. Yet close readings reveal that both novels explore the ways that order and stability—that is, coherence and even a corresponding aesthetic—are at odds with the various forces that bring about change. Central to both narratives is the lesson that no culture, no single civilization, is permanent, for better or worse.

Both Cather and Wharton turn order and resistance to change into a thematic anchor or, better yet, source of tension. A collective faith in order and stability undergirds Moonstone and old New York (as well as cities like Chicago, where Cather’s heroine, Thea Kronborg, takes music lessons and trains to become an opera singer). Both authors pit societal preference for stasis against individual desires. In New York, Archer’s and Olenska’s personal desires are preempted and overruled by their enclave’s disapproval of a relationship between a woman seeking a divorce and a married man. Similarly, the extraordinarily gifted Thea has no choice but to abandon Moonstone. Her own family cannot accommodate her outsized talent and the radical change in social status it bodes for her.

To be precise, the sudden or gradual erosion of established order, or what we think of as change, aren’t simple value-laden formulations for either Cather or Wharton. Given the larger historical canvas to which both authors often allude, collective and individual aims are often inextricably linked, as they are in any nation building project, or any collective effort to contain the worst kinds of intemperance.

For Cather especially, the founding of community and, moreover, the forging of a national spirit or ideology, is spearheaded by individuals whose talents and corresponding ambitions reflect or reinforce shared aspirations, and articulate visions of a better life. In the US, pioneers were propelled west by the longing for a new order, a new Jerusalem. As a little girl, visiting Laramie Plain, Thea is moved to tears by the sight of the old wagon-trails made by the “forty-niners and the Mormons” bound for California (p. 32). On that same day, she learns that the first telegraph message to be heard in Brownsville, Nebraska, was, “Westward the course of Empire.” Afterwards, “Thea remembered that message when she sighted down the wagon-tracks toward the blue mountains. She told herself she would never, never forget it. The spirit of human courage seemed to live up there with the eagles” (p. 32).

It isn’t “Empire” that moves Thea so much as the “spirit” that propels people into the unknown and the possibility of fashioning something new. Heroic individuals, men and women of exceptional drive and tenacity, went westward. Such men and women may have faced resistance on a local level, just as Thea’s talent makes “natural enemies” of her own siblings and engenders in her an antipathy toward Moonstone. Yet as Cather reminds readers, individual passion and action transforms communities and nations. Joseph R. Urgo, expert on American Civilization and Literature, referenced American scholar Tom Quirk in his book-length study, Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration, with a passage that weaves Thea’s story into an overarching narrative of national formation:

[Tom] Quirk, acknowledging the novel’s status as an American success story, points out that Cather “sought…to connect the resources and achievements of her artist to the life of the republic.” By paralleling Thea Kronberg’s individual ascent with national aspiration, by grounding her consciousness thoroughly in “the spirit of human courage” that “seemed to live up there with the eagles,” Cather’s text suggests that this story be regarded as an epic of imperial design. (pp. 134-35)

I’d suggest that for Cather, the story of America is made up of more—and not more—than the sum of its parts. The scale weighing individual and collective contributions to the making of a “republic” tips toward the individual in Cather’s work. Urgo does not comment on the imbalance between “individual ascent” and “the development of a new world imperial force,” but such imbalance is of consequence for a nuanced understanding of the ways personal passions are privileged in Cather’s work. Crucially, this highlights the difference between Song of the Lark and Age of Innocence: in Wharton’s novel, unlike Cather’s, individual aims, ideas, and capacities are overwhelmingly subject to the repressive and homogenizing influences of New York’s genteel society, its rigid conventions, and ethos.

Reading Cather and Wharton’s novels side by side enables us see that their authors agree on the dangers this poses to the “spirit.” As writers, both women pursued vocations not considered proper in all respectable circles (however one accounts for differences in their backgrounds, both Cather and Wharton came from families that were old stock Americans). Wharton gives us Adeline Archer’s opinion concerning ‘writers’ and other artists for a reason.

Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer’s world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians and “people who wrote.”…Mrs. Archer and her group felt a certain timidity concerning these persons. They were odd, they were were uncertain, they had things one didn’t know about in the background of their lives and minds. Literature and art were deeply respected in the Archer set….The most celebrated authors of [Washington Irving’s] generation had been “gentlemen”; perhaps the unknown persons who succeeded them had gentlemanly sentiments, but their origin, their appearance, their hair, their intimacy with the stage and the Opera, made any old New York criterion inapplicable to them. (p. 54)

Wharton wants readers to appreciate that the social order she’s writing about is inflexible even when it comes to exceptional people. It won’t accommodate indefinability, especially where lineage is concerned.

At the same time, it’s noteworthy that neither author dispenses with social order and the moral constraints for which conventional standards advocate. Archer is a man of genteel refinement, and, ultimately, one capable of principled action because of the people who raised him. Genteel society may be censorious, even “pharisaical,” according to Archer, in its attitude toward Olenska. Yet it also prizes virtue, probity in business affairs, and family harmony. Old New York may appear stifling to the Europeanized Olenska (an impression the unhappily married and later divorced Wharton may have shared with her protagonist), but it nevertheless deserves credit for placing high value on civility, self-discipline, dutifulness, and good taste. This is precisely why in the final analysis, Age of Innocence is not a tragic but merely poignant depiction of thwarted desire. Whatever spark or colour is absent from Archer’s life after Olenska’s departure is compensated for by the arrival of his children, the recognition he earns for his public service, and by the attainment of a dignified and serene maturity.

Wharton’s last word on Archer and the world he represents remains nuanced, however. After May’s death, he surveys his life and sees that the “worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else…The trenchant divisions between right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen” (p. 188). Archer’s life is emblematic of the limitations, or perhaps trade-offs, required in being a member of his milieu. The choices he makes are those of a good man, just not a great man like Theodore Roosevelt, whom Archer admires for the reforms he brought about. Archer is unheroic or ordinary by his own metric (one by which he adjudges his wife as decent through and through, but frustratingly “unimaginative”). This is also Wharton’s pricking verdict concerning Archer.

Archer resembles Dr. Archie in Song of the Lark. The doctor cuts a distinguished figure in Moonstone, and is admired by all for his skills and dedication. Yet he’s too ‘conservative’ to save himself from an unhappy marriage. Speaking of him, Thea Kronborg accounts for his innate timidity in the face of common expectations: “You see, he’s just tremendously good, and tremendously afraid of things—of some things” (p. 213). In stark contrast, Thea is unfettered, a daunting, self-reliant force of nature. Dr. Archie, who has known Thea since her childhood, recognizes that she’s different when she’s barely a teen. “And then I got the idea,” he tells Fred Ottenburg, her patron and admirer, “that she would not live like other people: that, for better or worse, she had uncommon gifts” (p. 218). Later on, Fred observes when standing a little apart from Thea after climbing Arizona’s Panther Canyon: “Thea was one of those people who emerge, unexpectedly, larger than we are accustomed to see them. Even at this distance one got the impression of muscular energy and audacity—a kind of brilliancy of motion—of a personality that carried across spaces and expanded among big things” (pp. 187-88).

The problem with old New York, as Wharton shows us, is not that it lacks merit—but that it’s stagnant; it’s incestuous, cliquish, insular, and too inert and complacent. Old New York doesn’t fashion or attempt to do anything new or different. Ned Winsett captures this unflattering aspect in conversation with Archer:

“Culture! Yes—if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of—well, hoeing and cross-fertilizing: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you’re in a pitiful little minority: you’ve got no centre, no competition, no audience….You’ll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck.” (67)

Henry van der Luyden’s elderly wife, Luisa, is a member of an old New York family that had “faded into a kind of super-terrestrial twilight.” She strikes Archer in a moment of harsh lucidity “as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death” (p. 27). This is the fossilized state of New York’s elite, Wharton intimates acerbically.

Like Cather, Wharton draws on history and the (at that time) newly-popularized field of cultural anthropology. For instance, Adeline Archer dwells on the fact that New York society reaches back to the 17^th century, and is firmly rooted in the founding of New England by English and Dutch merchant families, as well as a small number of colonists with ties to English and French aristocracy (p. 25). This picture of an old, exclusive community, usually conjured by those comfortably ensconced in it, is often accompanied by the phrase “little tribe,” so listeners won’t miss the import of genealogical and cultural distinctiveness. Wharton’s point, however, is that such instances of elite culture are preserved over and against the social and political dynamic of the rest of America. She satirizes social rituals so outdated that only those on the inside can recall their purpose: “Mrs. Welland, who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter’s engagement at the Beaufort ball…, yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having had her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that people of advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents’ tent” (p. 23).

Wharton uses Olenska’s more cosmopolitan perspective to sharpen her critique of the old tribal ways: Olenska makes Archer “conscious of the curious way in which she reversed his values” (p. 55). Here, too, Wharton’s allusions to ancient civilizations renders New York’s genteel class both anachronistic and pretentious: “In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented a set of arbitrary signs….” (p.23). Wharton extends the reader’s perspective backward and forward in time and across countries and continents to diminish the relative importance of old New York and suggest that, like so many others in past, this ossified enclave is bound to disappear, or, at best, continue in a significantly altered form.

Wharton’s narrative, then, is about an order that resists change. Other people—the newly moneyed, writers, artists, and immigrants—remain, for Archer and those who think like him, on the margins of real society and his awareness: “[T]he country,” Archer says, “was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture” (p. 67). Cather, on the other hand, privileges the kinds of people who can be counted as agents of change—those reshaping America, irrespective of their backgrounds. This difference between the two novels cannot be understated. Thea, whose artistic contributions transform the still-developing opera scene in America, is the daughter of Swedish immigrants. Along with Dr. Archer and the enterprising, musically inclined Fred Ottenburg, she’s part of a demographic that is redefining America.

Urgo draws attention to Susan Rosowski’s assertion, in The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism, that Cather was “the first to give immigrants heroic stature in serious American literature” (Rosowski, p. 45). For Urgo, the centrality of immigrants (and the changes brought about by immigration) in Cather’s fiction, underscores her implicit belief in the long-term benefits of immigration and their impact on the national zeitgeist. The following passage from Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration sums up the “poetics of migration” and the “migratory consciousness” that permeates Cather’s work:

What Cather creates is a poetics of migration as it is incorporated into the fabric of the culture. It is not a clash of languages,…or even the accurate tracking of Bohemian, German, Czech, and Norwegian settlers that makes Cather so vital to knowing these poetics. Rather, it is the process of crossing cast in its historic and spatial significance, as physical fact and as intellectual legacy. Cather’s migrations take place in space and time, and crossings both continental and intellectual work into her texts of transmission….The logic of a migratory culture reinvents the relationship between people and country, reinvents “nation,” by rooting citizens in their movements across the landscape rather than in their establishment on it. (p. 62)

It must be added here that migration, for Cather, isn’t just about arriving in any one place and staying put. It’s perpetual motion within America—people moving across the country, from the East to West—that forges a “migratory culture.” This same cultural phenomena has no place in The Age of Innocence. Archer tells himself, “A gentleman simply stayed at home” (p. 67). It’s not because Wharton fails to grasp that the American West continually reinvests itself in the East through marriage, or capital investment and industry; it’s because Wharton knows that old New York doesn’t embrace a certain category of labour and experience. What sets Cather’s and Wharton’s novels apart is a difference in the kind of psychic domain each explores—the experience of arriving and leaving again, of being in transition or unsettled, of a longing to reinvent oneself and one’s surroundings, and of working to achieve this. All of this and more defines “migratory consciousness.”

In attuning herself to the new reality of movement across the continent in both directions (“There were so many trains dashing east and west on the face of the continent…, and they all carried young people who meant to have things…” [p. 130]), Cather departs from the “frontier thesis” articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner, the first American historian to describe a national identity he theorized as emerging from the fusion of old and new cultures in the American West. In The Song of the Lark, we see a somewhat different kind of cultural transmission at work, however. It lends gravitas to “The Cather thesis,” a chapter Urgo contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather:

Those who left cities to settle in frontier lands, never to return, did important work spreading American institutions….[But t]hose who exerted more direct and more immediate influence were those who did not remain in the West, but who moved back and forth from one area to another. It is these, the great masses of unsettled people, writers, railroad lawyers, schoolteachers, land speculators, missionaries, fame-seekers, tourists—among many others—who embody Cather’s version of the frontier thesis. (pp.39-40)

The Age of Innocence doesn’t take note of those who embody “migratory consciousness”; there’s little movement in old New York apart from aristocrats arriving from Europe for a bit of socializing with the suitably well-connected. Yet Wharton’s representation of American culture, and Old New York in particular, isn’t a picture of perfect stasis either. Archer’s daughter Mary is symbolically larger-waisted, the narrator informs us: “the mother’s life had been as closely girt as her figure,” whereas “Mary, who was no less conventional, and no more intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views. There was good in the new order too” (p.288). Mary belongs to a new age, a newer way of thinking. At the novel’s conclusion, Archer is aware that the world has gone ahead—only without him.

Wharton’s vantage point in The Age of Innocence is that of an observer peering into old New York’s cultural fish bowl. She’s sufficiently detached from what goes on inside to appraise it and find it wanting. What exists outside the fish bowl is beyond her purview, however. Wharton’s gaze, like Archer’s, is firmly fixed on the forms of life inside this small, insular community.

Compare Wharton’s New York with Cather’s America, the latter peopled by newly arrived or first-generation Germans, Hungarians, Swedes, and Mexicans, among other immigrants. Cather’s is a world of restless internal resettlement: some immigrants, like Mrs. Kohler, move from Freeport, Illinois, to Moonstone, Colorado, while others, including the Reverend Lars Larsen, move from Kansas (where the Homestead Act enabled Larsen’s Swedish parents to acquire land) to Chicago, or, like the Hungarian pianist, Andor Harsanyi, from Pennsylvania to Chicago and then on to New York. Likewise, at the start of the The Song of the Lark, we read that Fritz Kohler, Moonstone’s German tailor, has three sons working for the railroad and living in “distant cities. One of them had gone to work for the Santa Fé, and lived in New Mexico” (pp. 12-13). Immigrants or their offspring are carried by trains to every part of America. Here and there, the railroad, like a river carrying mineral-rich silt, produces new geographies and cultural strata.

For this reasons, Cather’s work, her vision of culture in general, is more expansive and relevant to us today than Wharton’s. It is more inclusive and assumes—rightly—permeability at diverse levels of American life. Unlike Turner’s theory, Cather’s thesis accounts for a high degree of fluidity and cross-cultural influence. As she sees it, an immense pool of ambitious people of diverse backgrounds combined with physical mobility (made possible by the railroad) means continuous small- and large-scale transformations. Artistic life in particular is open to influences from other national and ethnic groups, indigenous cultures, and from the landscape itself. Returning to Moonstone after her first year in Chicago, Thea becomes aware of the degree to which the openness of the prairies affects her: “The mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind of amiability and generosity, and the absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a wider range” (p. 131).

The Song of the Lark is also a story about classical and folk music, and art as threads connecting different cultures and eras. Professor Wunch, Thea’s German music teacher, has the Swedish Thea sing a portion from 18^th century Bohemian-German composer Christoph W. Gluck’s opera Orpheus. He recalls afterward that he had heard only one female lead who could do it justice, a Spaniard. Denver-born Ray Kennedy and Mexican Spanish Johnny sing Mexican songs and “railroad ditties that are usually born on the Southern Pacific and run the length of the Santa Fé and the ‘Q’ system before they die to give place to a new one” (p. 32) (this is to say that the rail line maintains the musical thread connecting all of the Southwest). In Chicago, Thea is introduced by Fred Ottenburg, an opera aficionado and scion of a German-American St. Louis-based brewer, to the wealthy patroness, Mrs. Henry Nathanmeyer, who has lived in Chicago for twenty years, and has artistic standards that have “nothing to do with Chicago [because] her perceptions—or her grandmother’s, which is the same thing—were keen when [Chicago] was an Indian village” (p.163). As Fred explains, “We may have a musical public in this country some day, but as yet there are only the Germans and the Jews” (p. 163).

An understanding of music, passed on through generations of cultivated Europeans, is an essential part of the cultural capital people like the Nathanmeyers bring to America. Immigrants educate the next generation of musicians in the US, thereby shaping and refining the artistic character of American cities. Music and art in general are aspects of culture that become part of social and political life. In The Song of the Lark, Cather affords readers a glimpse of the new America, and the fraternity that unites diverse Americans in a shared appreciation for music.

Art is order in both The Age of Innocence and The Song of the Lark. Only in the latter novel, however, does art give birth to new culture (instead of maintaining the old) and new national identity/ies. Music and lyrics, from railroad ditties to opera librettos, assemble subjective experience into language and musical compositions (like Antonín Dvořák’s symphony, From the New World, which resonates with Thea); these create and recreate the essential elements of local and national culture. Evident in The Song of the Lark is Cather’s awareness that order and culture are in crucial ways aggregates of creative activity and the aesthetics they generate.

There’s this too to admire in The Song of the Lark: an interest in landscape, ecology, and Indigenous peoples. Cather shows us that Americans, those who are new to the country, as well as the descendants of Europeans who arrived in the 17th century, harvest the histories—and significantly, the artifacts (and artistry)—of the land’s indigenous peoples. Ray Kennedy’s account of a discovered native American woman, buried in gorgeous attire speaks of an aesthetics and, importantly, a social structure: “She was preserved as perfect as any mummy that ever came out of the pyramids. She had a big string of turquoises around her neck, and she was wrapped in a fox-fur cloak, lined with yellow feather that must have come off wild canaries” (p.108). This native American is not at all like the image of Luisa van der Luyden that strikes Archer as “gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere” of old New York. For Ray and Thea, the past infuses the present with its own surviving spirit and beauty.

Like Ray, Thea imaginatively reconstructs the lives of the cliff-dwelling people whose abandoned homes she explores in Arizona’s Panther Canyon (Cather draws on actual histories of the Sinagua people of Walnut Canyon in Arizona, and the ancestral Pueblo people who lived in what is known today as the Mesa Verde National Park). The past, alive to Thea, fills her with insights about the work of making art: “It seemed to Thea that a certain understanding of those old people came up to her out of the rock-shelf on which she lay; that certain feelings were transmitted to her, suggestions that were simply, insistent, and monotonous, like the beating of Indian drums. They were not expressible in words, but seemed rather to translate themselves into attitudes of body, into degrees of muscular tension or relaxation…” (p.177) Thea’s insights into the lives of ‘ancient’ women is less factual and more creative or imaginative anthropology. Nevertheless, it leads Thea to an epiphany about the relationship between the demands of every day life and art.

A resident expert on the Pueblo Indians, Henry Biltmer, explains the inventiveness of Cliff-Dwellers: “[T]he Ancient People had developed masonry and pottery far beyond any other crafts” because they needed to “house the precious water…; the cleverer [women] made the vessels to hold it….The strongest Indian need was expressed in those graceful jars, fashioned slowly by hand, without the aid of a wheel” (p.178). Thea realizes, as she examines pottery fragments, that the ancients’ artistry attests to a creative urge; it validates and guides her own artistic impulse: “There were jars done in a delicate overlay, like pine cones; and there were many patters in a low relief, like basket-work. Some of the pottery was decorated in color, red and brown, black and white, in graceful geometrical patterns…These potsherds were like fetters that bound one to a long chain of human endeavour. Thea’s discovery made “the world seem older and richer” (p.179).

Meaning is constructed in The Song of the Lark from snapshots of people and places one wouldn’t expect to find in a Wharton novel. The fascinating and touching aspect of Cather’s brand of anthropology is the curiosity and respect she clearly sees as necessary for an understanding ancient people and their practices. More importantly, Cather’s novel teaches that culture itself—of diverse people in the past and in the present—can be an infinite source of creative inspiration. It’s through acts of empathetic, imaginative reconstruction, that all cultures can be viewed as being always part of a process of becoming—of lending themselves to extractions of deeper meaning, and of enriching others, whether across communities, languages, or eons.

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Works Cited

Cather, Willa. The Song of the Lark. Warbler Classics. New York: Warbler Press, 2022.

Quirk, Tom. Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace

Stevens. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960: 143.

Rosowski, Susan J. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism. Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1986: 45

Urgo, Joseph R. “The Cather Thesis.” The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather.

Ed. Marille Lindermann, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005: 39-40

— Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration. Chicago: University of Illinois

Press. 1995: 62.

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. Warbler Classics. New York: Warbler Press, 2024.

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About the Author

Olga Stein is an academic, writer, editor, and university and college instructor. She was born in Moscow, the capital city of the former Soviet Union. She immigrated to Canada with her parents as a child, and has lived in Toronto her entire adult life. Stein earned her BA and MA at the University of Toronto. She studied philosophy, political science, literature, and languages. After serving for two decades in medical and literary publishing, including as chief editor of the literary book review magazine, Books in Canada, she returned to academe, and completed a PhD in contemporary Canadian literature and cultural institutions.

Stein has been writing literary essays and cultural commentary for nearly two decades. Since completing her PhD, she has also been writing short fiction and poetry. She has three children. Love Songs: Prayers to gods, not men is her debut collection of poems.