Comparing The Novel Demeuble And The Professor's House

In literature, it is evident that each author has their own technique of writing. Although many authors are inspired by other writers, no two authors are alike. Each writer offers something to literature that is unique and their own. As a result, each author has their own view on what successful writings should do. Willa Cather explains in her essay, “The Novel Demeuble” her thoughts of what a successful novel consists of, and includes a few authors who represent both successful and non successful novels and in her novel, The Professors House helps meet the criteria she delineates. In the essay “The Novel Demeuble” Willa Cather introduces the artistry of a novel. Cather begins to explain authors who she agrees with and others who she does not. She believes that certain authors including David Herbert Richards Lawrence and Honoré de Balzac do not leave anything unnamed, therefore, taking away many emotions from in a story. Willa Cather states in her essay, “A novel crowed with physical sensations is no less a catalogue than one crowded with furniture” (Essay). By adding pointless details about material things that aren’t important, takes away from a novel and essentially affects characters. Cather uses Mr. Lawrence’s book The Rainbow as an example of how too much detail can “dehumanize”

St. Peter one of them- standing there just as if they’d been left yesterday. In the back court we found a great many things besides jars and bowls: a row of grinding-stones, and several clay ovens, very much like those the Mexicans use to-day. There were charred bones and charcoal, and the roof was thick with soot all the way along.... There were corncobs everywhere, and ears of corn with the kernels still on them-little, like popcorn. We found dried beans, too, and strings of pumpkin seeds, and plum seeds, and a cupboard full of little implements made of turkey bones. (Cather