Willa Cather by Hermione Lee

Author:Hermione Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

And he turns from his memory to look up at ‘the hollow, silver winter moon’. Like that protean goddess, Marian appears to Niel as an icon for worship, ‘all puffs and ruffles’, white petticoats, a shining slipper, an attitude of devotion and an air of distinction. She has no lines to speak. His attitude to this tableau is exactly like Cather’s youthful feeling about the theatre as a sacred place, separate from common life. Niel’s adult reactions to Marian – his refusal of her sexuality, his disappointment in her for not having ‘immolated’ herself on her husband’s pyre, and his last hope that if ‘the right man could save her’ [ALL, p.169] she might still be able to ‘play her old part’ – are all aspects of his wish to preserve an illusory sanctuary for aesthetic admiration.

He knows it is an illusion, and likes to know it. That her ‘elegantly wild’ charm, ‘seemingly so artless’, is ‘really the most finished artifice’ [ALL, p.109], gives him pleasure. This puts Niel at odds with his American contemporaries, democratic realists. Ivy Peters, who, when he gets his chance, just treats Marian like any woman he can have, takes pleasure in seeing through and taking possession of the Forrester traditions: ‘Good deal of bluff about all those old-timers’. [ALL, p.102] But Niel does not want to cross the footlights or see through the bluff. When Marian starts using rouge or telling the town boys she must go and powder her nose, he dislikes it partly out of sexual squeamishness, partly out of snobbery, but mainly because he doesn’t want the artifice to collapse. And so she must only speak the lines of ‘her old part’:

‘If you came to see me any oftener than you do, that would make talk. You are still younger than Ivy, – and better-looking! Did that never occur to you?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk to me like that,’ he said coldly. [ALL, p.156]

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