Willa Cather Describes Erotics of Place in her Novel, A Lost Lady

Willa Cather Describes Erotics of Place in her Novel, A Lost Lady

To discover an erotics of place in Willa Cather's A Lost Lady, takes little preparation. One begins by simply allowing Sweet Water marsh to seep into one's consciousness through Cather's exquisite prose. Two paragraphs from the middle of the novel beckon us to follow Neil Herbert, now 20 years old, into the marsh that lies on the Forrester property. This passage, rich in pastoral beauty, embraces the heart of the novel-appearing not only at the novel's center point but enfolding ideas central to the novel's theme:

An impulse of affection and guardianship drew Niel up the poplar-bordered road in the early light [. . .] and on to the marsh. The sky was burning with the soft pink and silver of a cloudless summer dawn. The heavy, bowed grasses splashed him to the knees. All over the marsh, snow-on-the-mountain, globed with dew, made cool sheets of silver, and the swamp milk-weed spread its flat, raspberry-coloured clusters. There was an almost religious purity about the fresh morning air, the tender sky, the grass and flowers with the sheen of early dew upon them. There was in all living things something limpid and joyous-like the wet morning call of the birds, flying up through the unstained atmosphere. Out of the saffron east a thin, yellow, wine-like sunshine began to gild the fragrant meadows and the glistening tops of the grove. Neil wondered why he did not often come over like this, to see the day before men and their activities had spoiled it, while the morning star was still unsullied, like a gift handed down from the heroic ages.

Under the bluffs that overhung the marsh he came upon thickets of wild roses, with flaming buds, just beginning to open....

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...arsh. A final glimpse of marsh turned wheat field comes in the fourth chapter of the novel's Part Two. Heavy rains have come to the Sweet Water valley, lifting the river over its banks and swelling the creeks. Cather reports that "the stubble of Ivy Peters' wheat fields lay under water," (121) raising the hope that Peters' intrusion upon the land is merely temporary, that given respite from human meddling, the marsh will reassert itself. I admit that this is my hope more than it is Cather's. But even if this is so, it is Cather who arouses the desire that invites me to hope.

Works Cited

Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski with Kari Ronning, Charles W. Mignon and Frederick M. Link. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997.

Williams, Terry Tempest. An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field. New York: Vintage, 1994.