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Allyson Jones

Professor Anne Moseley

English 697

April 1, 2010

Shaping the Rock: The Communal Creation of an Archetype in “The Enchanted Bluff”

“The Enchanted Bluff” is about other worlds—idealized collective memories of the past

and dreams of the future located so remotely in time and space so that they exist primarily as

“endowment[s] of the imagination” (Wasserman 17). The six adolescent boys in the story shape

and define these worlds through communal imagining, conjuring up Platonic images of truth and

beauty that lurk beyond the fringes of what Ferguson calls “dull, prosaic life” (Meyering 88).

Poised on the twilight of their childhoods, the boys spend a summer’s night weaving legends of

the past and dreams about their futures around themselves, finally fixing on the Enchanted Bluff,

a rock image Cather invokes in at least four of her novels. The rock is a symbol of an ultimate

other world—a fallen utopia once populated by a tribe of peaceful ancients, an unattainable

destination locked in time and preserved in story. The only piece of writing Cather completed in

1909, “The Enchanted Bluff,” is a landmark in Cather’s growth as a writer, creating “in

embryonic form all that her writing would become in matured form and content” (Chaliff 64).

The tensions presented in the story between past and present, community and isolation, and the

inner world of the mind versus the immediate physical world become important themes in many

subsequent novels, arguably in less perfect incarnations than the simple archetype constructed in

“The Enchanted Bluff.”

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Six boys gather on a newly-formed sandbar island, “a little bit of new world,” (65) in the

middle of the turbulent, changeable river near their homes of which they claim “undisputed

possession,” to dream about distant places and hatch plans for the future before school resumes

(64). The night is particularly memorable for the story’s unnamed protagonist because he is

about to leave the small town of Sandstone and his boyhood behind to teach at a country school.

After much conversation about distant times and places, Tip Smith relates the story told to him

by his Uncle Bill about the Enchanted Bluff, a mesa jutting upward dramatically from the flat

New Mexico desert. A tribe of peaceful Indians once lived on top of the sheer bluff, sending its

hunters down a flight of wooden steps fixed to the vertical rock walls to hunt game and collect

water. One day when the hunters are at the base of the mesa, a storm tears the steps off of the

rock, leaving them stranded below where they are massacred by a warring tribe. The women,

children and old people trapped on top of the mesa slowly starve to death. The boys on the

island become fixated on the legend of the Enchanted Bluff, each eager to beat the others in the

race to scale the mesa, a hint of competitiveness infringing on their own peaceful island

community. Time passes, and the boys “lapse into dreamless adulthood in an unromantic prairie

town” (Arnold 83). None of them ever reach the bluff. Twenty years after the night on the

island, the protagonist meets Tip on the street and the two men “revive the romance of the lone

red rock and the extinct people” (73). Tip has passed the story on to his son, who he hopes to

take to the Enchanted Bluff one day.

The boys’ island in the stream is “a new Eden, like the peaceful, isolated, inviolable

mesa,” and it is the only utopia any of them will physically inhabit (Chaliff 65). Their

conversation on the island invokes a series of distant places and times; it is a collective

imagining that expands the boundaries of their own small world. O’Brien emphasizes the
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importance of human relationships in the story for “stimulat[ing] self-expression” (365), and

Arnold sees Cather “asserting the values of human ties, to one’s own progenitors and to the

human race” (75). Observation of the moon and stars lead to conversations about Columbus,

Napolean, Coronado, the Aztecs, and the Mound-Builders. For the small-town boys, these

mystical other worlds represent elevated modes of being, not unlike Plato’s forms. The dramas

of their daily lives are faint “shadows of true existence” (Plato Book VII), discrete happenings

enacted against the backdrop of infinity. The stories are social creations, but individual

perspectives remain unique. Otto Hassler tries to point out the Little Dipper to Percy Pound, but

despite the existence of the communally created symbols of the constellations, the two boys fail

to align their perspectives of the night sky. Even symbols of elevated ideals are fragile things,

perpetuated only by the imagination. When Percy declares that he can see the North Star, Otto

points out that even that “one won’t last always” (67). Although precession of the earth’s

rotational access could require the use of a different star to mark the North, the idea of the pole

star will not change.

Like the North Star, The Enchanted Bluff is an archetype, a superior space that guides

individual conceptions of the universal order in the same way the North Star once guided ships at

sea. The story of the wrecked utopia is preserved by its inaccessibility; it is unlikely that anyone

will ever reach the mesa’s peak to decipher its ruins. On another level, the mesa is unsustainable

even for the tribe who was rumored to populate it. Only the idea of the mesa remains, kindled by

imagination and nurtured by conversation. Dialogues between the story’s keepers generate spin-

offs of the tale, fixing it in history and entrenching it in the collective consciousness. Tip’s

Uncle Bill, thinks the mesa is “a boulder the glaciers left,” a detail that clarifies the mesa’s past

(71). Tip also reveals that “some hunters tried to cut steps in the rock once, but they didn’t get
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higher than a man can reach,” (71) a contemporary story that renders the mesa’s unattainable

secrets even more intriguing. The men keep the tail circulating, passing it on to the successive

generations, ensuring that the Enchanted Bluff will remain a mark of “true existence,” a product

of “the universal author” (Plato Book VII).

Chaliff sees the bluff as “a symbol of the idealism, romanticism, and unfulfillable goals

of youth” (64). Childhood may be the creator and incubator of such romantic symbols, but the

“ultimate destination promising fulfillment” is a universal instinct that “give[s] meaning and

direction across gulfs of time” (Wasserman 17). The story of the bluff accompanies the boys

into adulthood intact, relocated from the status of a place that one might physically enter to a

created world sustained by the imagination, elaborated upon by religion and philosophy. It exists

in the imaginings that pass from person to person, although, the other world itself is defined by

its isolation from society, the bluff’s seclusion, like the seclusion of the island, gives the

“microcosm the chance to develop, untroubled by outside interference” (Gerber 155). Doubly

removed by two pasts, “that of the personal boyhood past of the narrator and that of the historical

past that belongs to every human being” (Arnold 83), the bluff speaks of the future, beckoning its

followers toward the “affirmative virtues of character, fidelity, idealism, civilization, culture,

religion, ethics and order” (Gerber 157).

Chaliff remarks that “certain themes…appealed to something deep in [Cather’s]

subconscious, and she kept them with her for years, brooding over them and developing them,

fairly obsessed by them (62). The image of the rock is repeated in The Song of the Lark, The

Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and finally Shadows on the Rock, in which

the rock becomes “the central figure” of the novel (Gerber 155). The rock represents elevation

above the dreary motions of everyday life. Ancient people typically populate this elevated space
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and enjoy a golden age of peace, art, and intellectual pursuit beyond the reach of the twentieth

century’s “agony of blatant commercialism and shallow artistic talents” Cather so detested

(Gerber 154). Cather’s novelistic depictions of the rock subsequent to “The Enchanted Bluff”

add to and complicate this simple story of desire juxtaposed against reality. “The Enchanted

Bluff” is compelling because it is a self-contained parable— simple and brief but infinitely

expansive in its thematic scope.

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Works Cited

Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986. Print.

Cather, Willa. “The Enchanted Bluff.” Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings. New

York: The Library of America, 1992. 64-73. Print

Chaliff, Cynthia. “The Art of Willa Cather’s Craft.” Papers on Language & Literature. 14

Winter (1978): 61-73. Web. 31 Mar. 2010.

Gerber, Philip L. “Willa Cather and the Big Red Rock.” College English. 19 (1958): 152-57.

Web. 31 Mar. 2010.

Meyering, Sheryl L. “The Enchanted Bluff.” A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Willa

Cather. New York: G.K. Hall, 1994. Print.

O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Project Gutenberg. 27 Aug. 2008. Web. 31 Mar.

2019.

Wasserman, Loretta. Willa Cather: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991.

Print.
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Selected Bibliography

Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986. Print.

Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather’s Short Fiction. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1986. Print

Cather, Willa. “The Enchanted Bluff.” Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings. New

York: The Library of America, 1992. 64-73. Print

Chaliff, Cynthia. “The Art of Willa Cather’s Craft.” Papers on Language & Literature. 14

Winter (1978): 61-73. Web. 31 Mar. 2010.

Gerber, Philip L. “Willa Cather and the Big Red Rock.” College English. 19 (1958): 152-57.

Web. 31 Mar. 2010.

Meyering, Sheryl L. “The Enchanted Bluff.” A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Willa

Cather. New York: G.K. Hall, 1994. Print.

Murphey, John J. “An American Tradition in ‘The Enchanted Bluff’ and ‘Before Breakfast.’”

Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter. 38.3 Fall (1994): 47; 49. Web. 31 Mar.

2010.

O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Project Gutenberg. 27 Aug. 2008. Web. 31 Mar.

2019.
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Rosowski, Susan J. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism. Lincoln: U of Neb. P,

1986. Print.

Stout, Janis. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia,

2000. Print.

Wasserman, Loretta. Willa Cather: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991.

Print.