Dangerous Crossings: Historical Dimensions of Landscape in Willa Cather's "My Ántonia,

The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop"

Author(s): CAROL STEINHAGEN
Source: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , Summer 1999, Vol. 6,
No. 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 63-82
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44085652

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 CAROL STEINHAGEN

Dangerous Crossin
Historical Dimensions of L
Willa Cather's My Antonia , T
House , and Death Comes for t
What must a man do to be at home in the wo
There must be times when he is here
as though absent , gone beyond words into th
of the grass and the flighty darknesses
of leaves shaking in the wind , . . .
- Wendell Berry, "The Silen

In The Professor's House (1925) both Tom Outla

against the danger of crossing the river to t
Tom's warning as trite, observing, "Danger
on signboards all over the world!" (223). Inde
of such signboards dominates this novel, an
major motif of Willa Cather's fiction. Her nov
by many dangerous crossings, including m
graphical region to another, movement from
tic rooms into society, movement from con
ment from life to death.
In exploring the primacy of intersections and crossings in Willa Cather
and the Myth of American Migration (1995), Joseph R. Urgo emphasizes
the cultural significance of Cather's depiction of inter- and transconti-
nental movement (193). In three of her novels, however, Willa Cather
extended her interest in crossing beyond the range of cultural and his-
torical examination of territorial migration. At key points in My Antonia
(1918), The Professor's House , and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927),

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64 ISLE

characters are b
concepts of th
step out of his
abled western
man designs. C
in the universe
but also the hu
words, the basi
out of historic
represent Willa
the inherent p
shape and desig
Landscape as it
tings of Willa
istic of her fic
Alfred Kazin c
was unusually
tions of charac
tal role played
"landscape was
character" (110
"where represe
But what is thi
not just the nat
scape is not to b
separate entity
a particular and
xviii). Landscap
"the very idea
borne out in the
language in the
nical term used
depicting natura
Only in the late
of the land itse
"landscape" acq
suggesting only
Two historical
cant bases for
Raymond Will
by seventeenth
led to consump
nature that ch

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 Dangerous Crossings 65

fluenced by the aesthetic concept of nature as commodity,

ity that is defined by both the perception of the producer a
sires of the consumer. Underlying this economic aspect of l
a more fundamental philosophy of the human relationship t
ral environment. As Judith Fryer observes, "The idea of lan
something separate from life ... is part of a new way of look
world in the seventeenth century, one which is rational " (3
tional assumption of the primacy of the human intellect disjoin
nature, commonly characterized as Cartesian dualism, enab
ern man" to recreate nature as the product and instrument of h
values, needs, and hopes. This product, too, is landscape. T
torical concepts of landscape define the territory wherein Cath
acters, like most people influenced by western culture, are
fortable.
So comfortable with dualism are most westerners that dualism comes
to seem like unity. The human power of perception, reinforced by the
power of individual and collective memory, encourages us to equate
perception and reality, seeing and scene. As Simon Schama argues in
his monumental work Landscape and Memory (1995),

For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human

perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it
can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the
mind. Its scenery is built up as much from the strata of memory as
from layers of rock. (6-7)

The landscape built of memory plays a significant role for Cather 's
characters who embark on dangerous crossings. It acclimates them to
new territories and it creates for them an approximation of a sense of
unity with all life.
Herman Melville, following Goethe, called this sense of unity the
"'all' feeling." "You must often have felt it," he wrote to Hawthorne in
1851,

lying on the grass on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to

send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon
your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with
the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a
temporary feeling or opinion. (Davis and Gilman 130-31)

For most westerners this experience of unity must remain temporary,

if it is achieved at all, because their sense of nature is shaped by the
historical forces that have given rise to the concept of landscape. In-
deed, the very idea of perfect harmony with nature has been shaped
for centuries by the pastoral tradition, making it a product of nurture

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 66 ISLE

rather than na
all-ness is dang
literary and hi
and allowed he
ated a shared s
self-destruction.
Even so, the author pulls her protagonists Jim Burden, Godfrey St.
Peter, and Jean Marie Latour backward in time, as it were, beyond land-
scaped nature. Willa Cather depicts in this experience not just the ex-
hilarating ephemeral state described by Melville, but also the potential
for another way of being: human consciousness within nature. The way
of the ancient Pueblos, as Leslie Marmon Silko notes, challenges the
concept of a viewer separate from nature (108). Cather saw this way of
being in the Natives of the American Southwest, and recognized in all
human beings the yearning "to be dissolved into something complete
and great" (My Antonia 18). Her examination of the tension between
maintaining and dissolving the boundaries of self and nature reflects
not only the historicity of the concept of landscape, but also the evolu-
tion of her thinking during the nine-year period, 1918 to 1927, in which
she published My Antonia, The Professor's House , and Death Comes for
the Archbishop.
The life history of Jim Burden in My Antonia recapitulates the his-
torical pattern that entailed the re-creation of land into landscape. The
dangerous crossing made by the ten-year-old Jim from Virginia to Ne-
braska is a psychic journey to the world's edge (16), a westward move-
ment that seems to reverse the course of history until he arrives at a
place where "there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the
material out of which countries are made" (7). The immediate effect on
the boy's selfhood is dramatic: "Between that earth and that sky I felt
erased, blotted out" (8). The word "erased" suggests not just a danger-
ous but a fatal crossing into a world without landscape. However,
Cather transforms her character's dissolution of self into "transcen-
dence rather than annihilation" (O'Brien 70). At this primitive stage in
his own life history Jim Burden is open to the opportunity for a "natu-
ral" cessation of consciousness, an effortless crossing into the realm of
all-ness that he experiences in his grandmother's garden.

Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was some-

thing that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did
not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel
like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether
it is sun or air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is hap-
piness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it
comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. (18)

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 Dangerous Crossings 67

As Jim begins to acquire historical experience, however,

with the prairie land that is imprinted with the marks of
tory, cannot replicate the "all" feeling. Unlike his symboli
Adam and Eve, he is not expelled from the garden of happin
he loses his capacity to be dissolved into the elements as h
construct barriers between self and surroundings. In tellin
of his growth and development, Jim Burden shapes the ma
which countries are made and becomes a maker of the coun
scapes
The defining act of Jim's development is, appropriately, the killing
of a snake. Although the snake's age and lethargy undercut the valor
of his deed, his friend Antonia celebrates him as a "big mans" (45). The
episode marks Jim's emergence into history in two ways. It dramati-
cally affirms the sexual differentiation that had begun to introduce ten-
sion into his relationship with Antonia (41), and establishes the
gendered basis of his selfhood. It also represents Jim's emerging his-
torical consciousness. The snake "seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil.
Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all warm-
blooded life" (45-46). Aware of the collective memory of humankind,
Jim Burden sees nature through the screen of shared experience.1
As Jim grows into history, he is increasingly aware of the historicity
of the land that surrounds him. Ántonia's stories help to integrate the
unmade country with Europe, serving as reminders that its flora and
fauna are not unique. Stories, too, account for the sunflowers that bor-
der prairie roads. The hired man Otto Fuchs reports that they were
seeded by Mormons to mark their trail west (27-28). When Jim says
that Otto's legend "has stuck in my mind" despite its dubious authen-
ticity, he affirms Simon Schama's tribute to the power of "inherited
landscape myths" to shape attitudes toward nature (15). This power is
also evident in the explanations of the great circle that emerges after
the first snowfall (60). In this case the legends of Grandfather Burden
and the hired man differ, though they agree that the circle marks the
site of Indian ritual. Such interpretations, says Stephen Fender reflect
the desire to historicize a land that seems to be without evidence of
history (55). As the story of Jim Burden's and the land's development
progresses, the marks of history, notably roads and crops, become more
pronounced. Grandfather Burden's "clear meditative eye" foresees in
the farm country not the produce of individual farmers but "the world's
cornfields" (132). At the novel's end, highways have overtaken all but
traces of the road that had brought Jim to the edge of the world. He
celebrates evidence of human transformation of the land in terms that
are appropriately anthropomorphic: "it was like watching the growth
of a great man or of a great idea" (298).

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 68 ISLE

The effects of
dent when Ji
Ántonia's invit
to the riverside
ence in the gar
of No Man's La
mates (226). Af
ness and by th
solved into the
by those condi
ception of the
Antonia share
ence of the yo
This scene end
equal to that o
Jim and the la
magnified agai
making. The p
out against th
(237). This mom
cess of landscap
Jim's perceptio
Travelling fur
Burden's yearn
sees the now-m
and returns to
of the earth" th
with no history
aries of time i
world of ideas"
into idea.
The effect of this idea-lyzing process is evident in the narrative strat-
egy of Jim's story: he imprints its landscape with references to paint-
ing, verbalizing, and writing. The process begins early in the narrative
when, at their first meeting, Antonia asks Jim the English words for
"tree" and "sky" (25). The images of the old snake and Mr. Shimerda at
prayer are presented as letters of the alphabet - W and S, respectively
(43, 84). The circle in the snow appears "like strokes of Chinese white
on canvas" (60). A cedar tree cut for Christmas becomes "the talking
tree of the fairy tale" after it is decorated (80). Most significantly, the
pen, the instrument of Jim's landscape-making, is compared to the
plough, the instrument of country-making. The image of the plough
against the sun is characterized as "picture writing on the sun" (237).

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 Dangerous Crossings 69

Jim expresses his affinity for Virgil by noting that in the

"the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the fu
Through these tropes Jim Burden emerges as an America
maker of the country describing the process of country-m
The outcome of the aesthetic and historical process of cou
ing is re-created landscape. The structure of My Ántonia r
beginning and end of this process in two symbolic scenes
nate the opening and closing of the novel: the garden scen
cent of God's creation and the scene on Antonia's farm, an
human re-creation (326-31). The farmyard of the Cuzak pla
nated by a windmill and a cave that serves as a fruit cellar.
culine and feminine symbols declare the Cuzaks' fertility a
tivity. They also express Jim's perception of Ántonia as an eart
part of the landscape he has made his own. The potential
female fecundity, however, is symbolically controlled by t
locust hedge that encloses the front yard and by the mimo
the gate. There is in Antonia's landscape none of the wildne
felt in the unlandscaped country of his youth. Her orchard
contrived to assure "the deepest peace," guarded as it is by
enclosure of wire fence, locust hedge, and mulberry hedge
of the enclosed orchard is different from the happiness of the
is achieved through a carefully designed re-creation of the
ments that enables them to serve human needs.
In Antonia's garden is not only an expression of a universal need for a
comforting link to nature, but also of Cather's respect for the power of
human creativity. She valued creativity in its most fundamental manifes-
tations: cooking, gardening, folk art - as well as in its more sophisticated
manifestations such as literature, music, and academic art. In a 1924 in-
terview she complained, hyperbolically, that no one made beautiful things
anymore because machinery had overtaken the individual's capacity to
make (Böhlke 71). Her respect for this capacity is one basis for the persis-
tence of hand imagery in her fiction. The hand that stirs, plants, and carves
also serves the higher purpose of consciously conceived design, and in
this endeavor improves upon nature. So Godfrey St. Peter realizes when
he admires his wife's decoration:

It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought

into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting,
and into poetry. The hand, fastidious and bold, which selected
and placed - it was that which made the difference. In Nature there
is no selection. (The Professor's House 61)

A re-created landscape like Antonia's orchard becomes a built object

that, as described by Judith Fryer, "organizes space, transforms it into

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 70 ISLE

place." Moreov
timeless space i
Just so, Jim Bu
western prairi
history.
Jim's role as artist-historian is most evident when he describes him-
self studying in his room, whose open window allows the earthy prai-
rie wind and setting sun to invade his isolated quarters. Recalling his
vantage point on the external world, he first describes the sky with a
nature simile - "turquoise blue, like a lake," but then employs an aes-
thetic simile - "like a lamp suspended by silver chains" - to character-
ize the evening star. He goes on to identify the lamp as that "engraved
upon the title-page of old Latin texts" and then implies the connection
between himself and Virgil (255). The scene is a telling indication of
Jim's growing intellectual separation from and aesthetic interest in
nature. It also gives him the same perspective on nature as that as-
sumed more deliberately by Godfrey St. Peter. The protagonist of The
Professor's House has created a study/sanctuary in the attic of a house
formerly occupied by his family. From the attic's dormer window "he
could see, far away, just on the horizon, a long, blue, hazy smear -
Lake Michigan, the inland sea of his childhood" (20). For St. Peter, much
further advanced than Jim into intellectual separation from nature, the
lake is reduced to a smear.
Both scenes place the characters in the conventional pose of figures
in Dutch paintings, whose open window lets into a crowded interior a
glimpse of the world outside. Cather has described such a painterly
convention as an inspiration for the structure of The Professor's House
(Tennant 30-32). Her stated intention was to offer her protagonist a
means of letting fresh air into a stifling atmosphere. In light of the sig-
nificant contribution of Dutch painters to the history of landscape paint-
ing, however, it is tempting to find a subtext in her explanation. The
landscapes of her sources, like the landscapes viewed by Jim Burden
and Godfrey St. Peter, are more evident as seen than scene; the per-
spective is more important than what is observed.
The emphasis on observation aptly characterizes St. Peter, who has
not only created a physical vantage point on the life around him but is
a historian of the life that has come before. Unlike Jim Burden, whose
narrative takes him into history, Godfrey St. Peter is at the start of his
story immersed in history. Underscoring this position, the structure of
The Professor's House is a reverse image of My Ántonia's structure: it
begins with a re-created landscape and ends with the protagonist's
attempt to cross over into the realm of all-ness.
The professor's re-created landscape is, like Ántonia's, a garden (5-

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 Dangerous Crossings 71

7). His garden is more highly contrived than hers, however

enclave, it is surrounded by a wall and covered with gravel;
been banished. Its trees and flowers are arranged in the m
French garden, alluding to the place where St. Peter has spe
piest years. Here he works off his discontent. Here, during
when he has sent his wife and daughters on vacation, he liv
a bachelor, attempting to deny his social and familial attach
sense St. Peter, who is called Mephistopheles by his student
snake in his own garden. While his landscaping design rigor
trols natural growth, he cannot control his own growth from a
nal ego" into the "secondary social man, the lover" who ha
enmeshed in a web of relationships that Willa Cather called
necessity of human life" ( The Professor's House 240; Tennant 1
Just as sexual and gender differentiation is an important stag
Burden's emergence into history, so it has been for Godfrey
He knows "that the complexion of a man's life was largely
by how well or ill his original self and his nature as modif
rubbed on together" (242). The professor's attic retreat ind
how badly his sex-modified nature "rubbed on" with his or
The only female granted a place in the attic is the sewing-w
gusta, a "spinster" whose sewing equipment serves as a cou
to St. Peter's bachelor accoutrements, his smoking paraphe
scholarly manuscripts (8, 13). But Augusta's dress forms a
indispensable part of his meager furnishings that he will
move what he calls "my women" to the new house (13). Th
symbolize the only kind of femaleness with which St. Peter
fortable: fragmented body parts suggestive of sexual appe
bidding. The "bust," whose ample bosom has been the subj
professor's "risque" banter, is headless and armless. Its inv
severely shocks anyone who ventures to touch it, even thoug
consists of "a dead, opaque, lumpy solidity" (9). The skirte
likewise fragmentary, lacking legs and viscera. Though teasi
vincing in her pose as a woman of light behaviour," she doe
the professor (10). These icons diminish the female sexualit
fears to isolated caricatured body parts.2
Although the women in Godfrey St. Peter's family are dep
marily as representatives of the social and domestic realms f
he shrinks, they are more subtly presented as representati
life force he has denied. While he retreats to his garden an
daughters Rosamond and Kathleen and his wife Lillian m
evolve as circumstances demand. St. Peter even expresses r
of Lillian's interest in the future and her readiness to adapt.
"One must go on living, Godfrey," is a realistic assessment

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 72 ISLE

(78). The larger

scene, a discuss
urgy and the M
the mother of
phors for Mary
and daughter: M
maternity is in
Rosamond's pre
productions, hi
women, as his
Godfrey wrote
Denying and be
tempts to revers
tive self that ex
imagines this sel
interested in ea
for the fifty-tw
that is more viv
the attic windo
of the lake itse
sidering it "a pa
ows memories of
move from the
scape of memo
alike," when in
wheat lands (24
rian must alter the facts.

The recovery of the primitive self is a dangerous as well as difficult

crossing in that it entails a longing for dissolution of ego. In this disso-
lution is not only the exhilaration of the "all" feeling but also intima-
tions of death. Recognizing that the re-created primitive self "was earth,
and would return to earth" (241), St. Peter begins the drift toward non-
being that almost causes his death when he falls asleep in his poorly
ventilated attic. Had he not escaped asphyxiation from gas fumes by
the timely intervention of Augusta, the professor's sanctuary would
have become his coffin.

St. Peter's decision "to live without delight" (257) and relinquish his
landscape of memory is a realistic recognition of his secondary social
nature, but it also reflects his reluctance to cross the boundary into a
realm of pre-landscaped nature. This reluctance is symbolized by his
swimming apparatus. In the lake he professes to love he wears brightly
colored rubber visors that make his head look sheathed like the heads
of warriors on the Parthenon frieze (57). In this manner he aggressively

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 Dangerous Crossings 73

isolates himself from the natural environment and associates himself

with the created environment. As a swimmer he embodies the sugges-
tions of his full name, Napoleon Godfrey, the warrior and seeker of
God's peace. The professor is, above all, an intellectual who interprets
rather than lives within nature. He needs to have his attic space to
think (41); "the habit of living with ideas" has grown on him (141). The
division between his mind and body, suggested in his attitude toward
the dress forms, is projected in its most blatant guise onto another pro-
fessor, Dr. Crane, who studies the physics of space while his disease-
ridden body is progressively carved away by surgeons (72, 114). Crane
is a caricature of St. Peter's separation from physical nature.
Godfrey St. Peter's association with Tom Outland, the student who
introduces him to the cliff dwellers of the Blue Mesa, serves in the novel
as another view through the window onto open landscape, or out-land.
In the second of the novel's three books the window of the professor's
memory opens to reveal Outland's story - one that attracts him, as does
the memory of his primitive self, because of its reversal of history. Tom
has discovered evidence of an ancient people who built themselves
into the cliffs of the mesa. Rather than depicting them as human be-
ings in harmony with the natural environment, however, he character-
izes them as artists whose ruins seem more than anything like sculp-
ture (180) and who had a "feeling for design" (182, 197). In Outland's
view of the cliff-dwellers is the mark of the novelist's reverence for
human powers of creativity. As David Harrell observes, "Cather de-
signed the Blue Mesa to be the tangible yet mystical locale for her King-
dom of Art" (132).3 The perspective on pre-history that St. Peter gains
from Tom Outland is a perspective on re-created landscape, what Tom's
mentor Father Duchene calls the "humanized" mesa (199). As Laura
Winters notes, "For both St. Peter and Outland, places come to stand
for the self" (48).
Despite his youth and unorthodox education, Outland is, like
Godfrey St. Peter, a man of intellect, a man of history. His experience
on the mesa has inspired the capacity to feel stirrings of the "all" feel-
ing, of simply "being on the mesa, in a world above the world ... it was
like breathing the sun, breathing the colour of the sky" (217). How-
ever, his epiphanic sense of being completely at one with the mesa is a
work of the mind that he compares to the outcome of a series of experi-
ments: "Something had happened in me that made it possible for me
to coordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind,
brought with it great happiness. It was possession" (226). How differ-
ent is Tom Outland's happiness from the happiness of Jim Burden in
the garden! Yet it is similar to the proximate happiness Jim feels when
he comes to possess his Antonia as part of a re-created landscape. This

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74 ISLE

I-centered conce
dissolves the bo
notes, artistic
standing of the
ation" (144). To
to the Blue Mes
power to creat
In The Profess
bedded in hist
Outland nor G
tudes toward na
Comes for the A
reverse the cou
historical recor
century migrat
can Southwest.
takes her prot
found by Jim
The Prologue a
designed to dra
scene in Rome
is a garden at s
(3-4). Four majo
to the shape of
re-created land
cuisineof the so
by evidence of
"the beginning
of which they
with repetitive
mare" without

had an appeara
with all the m
had desisted, g
brought toget
plain, plateau.
landscape. (94
Conceived by E
history, the Ne
reminiscent of
Unlike Jim Bu
ence a dissoluti

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 Dangerous Crossings 75

his mid-thirties when appointed, he confesses to being "not ver

in heart" (91). Moreover, he cannot surrender his attachmen
ries, shaped by his religion and by his youth in France, that en
to historicize and spiritualize the pre-historic land. When h
the featureless country, he is re-oriented by perceiving a junip
Christ's cross (18). Rock formations appear to him Gothic
(94, 127). Sounds and scents draw his memory eastward, of
dens in France (ex. 43). The landscapes of memory that Lato
on the American Southwest reflect a cultural as well as a per
the French disposition to arrange, "to discover the logical r
things" (9). Bishop Latour has the outlook of a French lands
Like Godfrey St. Peter and the adult Jim Burden, Jean Marie
an intellectual, "always a little cold - un pedant " (260). He i
periodic bouts of doubt that challenge his spirituality and a
from his environment (210). The contrast drawn between Latou
impulsive, credulous friend Father Vaillant emphasizes the exte
intellectualizing is fundamental to his being. Their opposing co
miracle illustrate the difference between the two men. Vaillant believes
in divine intervention; Latour sees apparitions as a matter of "our per-
ceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our
ears can hear what is there about us always" (50).
In the environment of the Southwest, however, it is difficult for Bishop
Latour to maintain belief in a fixed external reality. The effect of cloud
shadows on the deserts, mountains, and mesas is to make "the whole
country [seem] fluid to the eye" (95-96). The landscape of Latour 's cul-
tural and spiritual memory is not imprinted so deeply on his mind
that he can ignore the pre-landscaped environment of which he is a
part. In its lack of design and fluidity, this environment resists the in-
terpretive power that a landscaper gains from achieving a sense of "the
logical relation of things."
The mission that is at the core of Bishop Latour 's dangerous cross-
ing, affirmation of Native Americans' conversion to Catholicism, is the
very mission that most threatens his power to historicize and re-create
the landscape. In the Natives' land he feels alienated from self, cast out
of history, "a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to home-
sickness for his own kind." In these people who seem not to have
changed over time he feels "something reptilian" (103). Among these
people whose condition he endeavors to better (35-36) Jean Latour ex-
periences a journey into a heart of darkness that echoes the pattern of
the classic journey-into-the- wilderness archetype and causes him to
lose, for a time, the intellectual perspective of the landscaper.
This dangerous crossing occurs in Book Four, "Snake Root," when
Jacinto, his guide from the pueblo of Pecos, finds them shelter from a

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 76 ISLE

snowstorm in a
of primitive or
Jacinto is no m
brought his cha
comfort with t
heightened by
ship and infant
rience in light o
The "remote, b
his historically
as well as his C
ports, Latour is
sound of a grea
earth." His only
exclamation, "Th
Latour has not surrendered like Kurtz to the most base instincts of
humankind, but he has recognized a power of nature beyond the com-
prehension of the historically shaped intellect. Like Kurtz, he cannot
summon the power of language to articulate and interpret his experi-
ence. After he leaves the cave behind, recollections of its "horror" be-
come part of the landscape of his memory (133).
Such an archetypal scene as "Snake Root" almost begs for interpre-
tation. The circumstances of the Bishop's descent into the cave with its
"two great stone lips" (126) create a strong parallel to the underground
descent legends discussed by Mircea Eliade in Birth and Rebirth (1958).
Noting this parallel, Steven P. Ryan observes that "mythic heroes the
world over undergo" the ordeal of descending into the belly of a mon-
ster or the devouring mouth (vagina dentata) of Mother Earth. "Both
scenarios involve the hero's . . . return to the womb" (34). From the
religious perspective described by Eliade and assumed by Ryan, the
Bishop's descent into the cave "symbolizes a decisive battle against
the precosmic forces of chaos, darkness, and death," a battle conducted
with the weapon of prayer (34). However, as his lingering memories of
the dark landscape's horror indicate, the Bishop is not a clear victor in
this battle. The novel's depiction of the impenetrable mystery of pri-
mal nature undermines a conventional Christian understanding of the
defeat of satanic forces. Indeed, Cather's respectful portrayal of Na-
tive Americans credits an alternative interpretation of the reptilian as-
pect of the cave. This view is found in the Navajo chant "Beauty Way,"
where a crevice near Canyon de Chelly is the entrance to the under-
ground world of the Snake People. They are associated with weather
and offer earth people knowledge of the spirit world (Smith and Allen
179-81). In crossing into the territory of snake-worshipping Indians,

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 Dangerous Crossings 77

Bishop Latour has encountered a land and a people that mus

spected on their own terms.
Bishop Latour 's inability to comprehend the cave and Jacin
there marks a fundamental difference between the portrayal
Americans in Death Comes for the Archbishop and that in The P
House. In the later novel Indians are not presented as artists
re-created their natural environment. They are, rather, livin
mony with an unrefined environment. In the description of
ritual in the cave, which has him "standing on some invisib
hold," "listening with supersensual ear" at the hole he has r
covered, is an image of the Natives' extra-sensory relations
the earth (131). Their acceptance of nature's mystery as "som
be met and spoken with rather than confronted" (Smith and
is embodied in Jacinto's behavior. The Bishop, despite his rep
wishes "to study a little the curious hole," but his guide's v
prevents him from doing so (131). Had he been granted his
"study" would surely have employed the sensory and analyti
ods of knowing in which he had been educated. Lacking Jacin
of meeting nature on its own terms, the Bishop must remai
about the mystery that lies beyond the border he could not
The Bishop often finds the Natives' "strange literalness" "
and disconcerting" (97). However, the symbol of this literal
rock, is something Latour can appreciate, for it represents "t
sal human yearning for something permanent" (98). Moreove
appreciate, even if he cannot share, their relationship to the land
seemed to have none of the European's desire to 'master' na
arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the oth
tion; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which th
themselves" (233). The embodiment of this attitude is Latour
friend Eusabio, who travels as if he were "the landscape
man" (232).
This respectful view of the Native American oneness with the natu-
ral environment, contrasted with the white man's way of "assert[ing]
himself in any landscape" (232), suggests the possibility of a European
like Jean Marie Latour crossing over to the New World, not just physi-
cally but spiritually as well: adopting the Natives' way of passing
through a country and leaving no trace (233). Such a crossing, how-
ever, is not possible. "There was no way" Latour could comprehend
the Indian tradition, nor any way he could make an Indian understand
the mind of a European (92, 133). The instrument of language, so im-
portant in carrying out the priests' mission that Latour and Vaillant
speak their native language only on special occasions (39), is inadequate
to bridge the cultural and spiritual gap between Europeans and Na-

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78 ISLE

tives. Jacinto is
the Laguna nam
he knows that
names like Sang
with language
sense of the sur
The most dram
the Archbishop
ing this project
and French arc
Sandia Mountain
created landsc
planning the pro
from a thinkin
sign (202) to a m
cathedral in mu
Mesa (Doane 66
The cathedral re
threatened by h
" antediluvian"
down into unfa
out of a mount
It has earthly s
such a building,
himself and his
hill, Blanchet, i
the enlarging o
comes, like Jim
sessor of re-cr
izing Mount R
The Bishop adm
gratified his va
enacts Christ's
historicizing th
Yet there is in L
seem "to start d
Natives' manner
they found the
the Bishop reco
World. He seem
cave into his co
In his seventies
moves beyond

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 Dangerous Crossings 79

[sits] in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his form

of mind [are] lost or outgrown" (288).
The measure of the Bishop's reconciliation is his garden. It
tinctly historical landscape, conceived to introduce to Mexic
dietary merits of fruits and to demonstrate the axiom of Latour
tryman Pascal: "that man was lost and saved in a garden." Its
bears the fruits of Europe; however, its flowers are native to the
(265). Despite the imprint of the French landscape on his me
in his heart, the Bishop prefers the American land that retain
it pre-landscaped character. Only when he wakes to "those light-
mornings of the desert" can Latour retain the spirit of youth
this remote region that has as yet escaped the invasion of th
could "the prisoned spirit of man" be released into the wind
Bishop's Euro- American garden and its desert environment
comfort of landscape and, at least in the morning, the exhil
the "all" feeling.
The ending of Death Comes for the Archbishop , for all its appar
mony and resolution of temporal conflicts, is a dramatic si
unresolved tensions created by Willa Cather 's reverence for n
for the human capacity to possess and alter nature. In many
the characterization of Jean Marie Latour reinforces those of
den and Godfrey St. Peter. He makes the dangerous crossin
unlandscaped environment, experiences the ego suspension
render to such an environment entails, and recovers the ego
that comes with psychic possession of the landscape. The lan
Latour 's experience, however, goes further than that of Bur
Peter to challenge conventional historical understandings of
man place in the environment. The garden that seems to rec
European and American perspectives has a malign aspect, bei
niscent of the garden of the evil sybarite Fray Baltazar, who
the women of Ácoma to care for his fruit trees.5 The plough
valorized and associated with the pen in My Antonia is, from
spective of the dying bishop, an invasive, destructive force
though the imperialistic aspects of Cather 's apparent ap
Latour 's mission have been noted by numerous readers, th
critique of the taming of the land and its natives is less evid
Comes for the Archbishop , more than any of Cather 's novels, c
the attitudes that enabled the American land to become lan
What distinguishes this novel in Cather 's oeuvre is its ack
ment of an environment that cannot be landscaped and of the in
of the Native Americans who preserve that environment. In Deat
for the Archbishop , Cather has made the dangerous crossing
territory of a place and a people that seem not to belong to

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 80 ISLE

Having overcom
try and its indi
the Bishop assen
land of living"
created momen
the revitalizing
quality in the a
man and made
from history, C
The novel that f
the Rock (1931
unqualified trib
wilderness. The
sils, are seen no
(198). After he
returned to ter
create a countr

NOTES

1. In this as in other scenes a reader may wonder

is imposing understanding on his depiction of r
ence. Surely the language is that of an adult, a
scious memories. The perception of evil, however
is the explanation of the snake's historical asso
there when white men first came, left on from
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's explanation of the d
and "focalization," a "cognitive, emotive, and ide
in character, helps to account for the varying d
Jim Burden the adult narrator and Jim Burden
tive Fiction , Chapter 6).
2. Fragmentation of the female body in this n
gusta and St. Peter's banter about women who bu
appraisal of his daughter Rosamond's body parts
remains (192).
3. In a 1916 essay, Cather revealed a similarly a
dwellers of Mesa Verde, the prototype of the Bl
ciation of these villages as "a successful evasion
place for human consciousness, beauty, and orde
4. Laura Winters makes a case for the Roman l
New World, noting, among other clues, a paral
den" and the hidden sacred place in the New Wo
ever, ignores the association between gardens an
5. A subtle juxtaposition of chapters links Balta
The Friar's legend is interjected immediately af
feels like an alien among the "antediluvian" inha

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 Dangerous Crossings 81

and longs for his own kind of people, "European man and his glor
of desire and dreams" (103). The legend of Baltazar casts these d
dreams in a highly negative light.

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