Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

WILLA CATHER'S THE PROFESSOR'S HOUSE : SLEEPING WITH THE DEAD

1999; University of Texas Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1534-7303

Lisa Marie Lucenti,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Willa Cather's The Professor's House is perhaps her most mournful and elegiac novel in a body of work where the mournful and elegiac are inextricable from the everyday. Its protagonist, the Professor St. Peter, is, as well, one of the most profoundly exiled of all her many characters.1 His story opens with an image of two houses: the old house which has borne witness to the development of St. Peter's professional life as well as to the parallel disintegration of his personal life, and the new, modern house that is, perhaps, the end result of both of those paths. Critical interpretations of this novel have thus suggested, for the most part, that the professor's alienation from himself is a product of his familial conflicts and spatial dislocations. Yet one could argue that there is an even more profound displacement in the novel, one which has garnered far less critical attention. While it is certainly true that St. Peter is dislocated from his home and family, it may be even more significant that he is displaced from time: his homelessness is, fundamentally, temporal rather than spatial. This temporal disjunction is not, moreover, simply one among many, but is, instead, the very cause and root of the professor's subsequent loss of himself, his family, and his community. St. Peter's profound nostalgia for the dead Tom Outland and for his own lost youth ultimately separates him from self, others, and home and, in the end, nearly separates him from life itself.2 St. Peter is, moreover, not alone in his nostalgic longing. Once one focuses more particularly on the workings of memory and nostalgia in this novel, it is difficult to determine whether the protagonist is a living man or a dead one Professor St. Peter or the ghost of Tom Outland. Whether they loved him, envied him, or never even knew him, almost all of the characters in The Professor's House are engaged in various attempts to cover over or repair the loss that opened up at Tom Outland's death. They seek to re-possess not only the material legacy that Tom left behind the monetary returns from his inventions but the immaterial