TTR: I sort of lost track of reading times for awhile, due to the impending doom of my Thesis Defense (which I rocked, by the way). I believe it took me a couple of days to read, while juggling all of my other assignments.
Comments:
I read this book in conjunction with Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, and so a lot of my interpretation is based upon Bachelard's discussions of the home.
To be perfectly honest, if this had not been an assigned reading, I probably would not have read it. The narrative takes a long time to unfold, and there is no real plot to speak of. Plus, it lacks the obvious allure of some of Cather's other titles (such as Death Comes for the Archbishop). But there are some beautiful moments scattered throughout the text--the kind only Cather can really create--and so I am glad it was assigned. Here is an excerpt from one of my responses:
Read in the context of Bachelard's concept of moving as a way to access "motionless childhood", The
Professor’s House by Willa Cather is an exploration of the intimate
connection between a house and an identity, an interrogation of these
“fixations of happiness” and what they mean in terms of an increasingly mobile,
fluid (rather than fixed) society (6).
The text’s fascination with the always already absent Outland, whose
name signifies his perceived placelessness, further emphasizes these fixations
in terms of Motionless Childhood or the lack thereof. Although the Professor
envies Outland’s freedom of movement, the Professor’s fixity provides him a
literal living and Outland’s loss of place is what ultimately leads to his
death, he struggles to find place himself both in Washington and in Michigan
but ultimately finds only brief shelter (Cather 234, 260-1). While the
Professor supposes that Outland has escaped some horrible fate by dying young,
the fact remains that Tom’s death is “one great catastrophe” in which all of
Outland and the Professor’s hopes for the future are “swept away” (260). Without
a place of his own, Outland embodies loss, just as, without his house, the Professor is ultimately loss
or absence, elided by inhabiting his family’s place at the cost of his own. In
the final pages of the novel, the Professor succumbs to this placelessness, and
perhaps this loss is the embodiment of the foreboding he has, in the final chapters,
that “he was nearing the end of his life” (282-3). The Professor, however, does
not technically die at the end of the text; rather, he sinks into apathy—a
mentally, if not physically, absent father and husband. He concludes with the
thought, “if his apathy hurt them, they could not possibly be so much hurt as
he had already” (283).
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