Willa Cather's transforming vision

Gary Brienzo

Willa Cather's Transforming Vision: New France and the American Northeast explores Cather's search for meaning and a domestic center, in particular as her search was influenced by her feelings for New France and the American Northeast. Including biography, critical overview, and primary research into both Cather's writing and some of her most unusual historical sources, this study focuses on Shadows on the Rock, while incorporating this pivotal novel into the larger pattern of Cather's growing need for belonging and order. Shadows on the Rock, set in the city of Quebec ("Kebec") at the end of the seventeenth century, is Cather's fullest expression of love for French culture and its adaptation to New World soil. But more than a mere extolling of what Mme. Auclair in Shadows proudly calls "our way" - a skill with all things domestic that, she boasts, renders the French "the most civilized people in Europe" - this novel is a statement of faith in the ability of both individuals and larger societal orders to work together for the creation of an all-encompassing whole. Writing at mid-life, after the recent illnesses and deaths of her parents, Cather could posit in her story of New France a familial order much larger than the domestic heart of her earlier masterpiece, My Antonia. In all of Quebec, as in the incomplete but fruitful home of the widowed apothecary Euclide Auclair and his daughter Cecile, life is sustained by a merging of gender and social roles, as a bishop can become the symbolic head of an entire church as well as of a troubled family, and a bellicose count can play as warm and nurturing a role as the gentlest of parents.