After The World Broke In Two: On Artistic Features In Willa Cather's The Professor's House

In The Professor's House (1925), a novel written in her middle period, Willa Cather presents the senses of alienation and disillusionment of Professor Godfrey St. Peter, who finds himself trapped in a break between his material life and spiritual life. The novel serves well to explain Cather's lamentation that"the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts."This thesis undertakes to examine the artistic features in this fiction. We argue that Cather has made pioneering and effective attempts at artistic techniques in form to serve thematic concerns of the novel; and, in so doing, the novel is endowed with a remarkable artistic effect through its unity of form and theme.The thesis consists of five parts. The introductory part gives an overview of Cather's literary career and the criticism about The Professor's House. The body part of the thesis is made up of three chapters exploring specifically three artistic features of the novel. First, the novel is unique in structure in that it is fractured into three sections by inserting Tom Outland's story into the narrative of the Professor and his family's life. Moreover, the narrative voice and narrative style of the middle section are entirely distinct from those of the framing sections. Such a formal split between the sections of the novel mirrors the broken world that tortures the Professor. Second, Cather sets contrasts and juxtapositions in characters to reveal the corrupting effect of money and materialism on people on the one hand and to reflect the Professor's profound alienation from and disillusionment with his physical world on the other. Third, Cather subtlely uses a number of symbols and images in the work which serve to provide spiritual refuge for the protagonist. The last part of the thesis is Conclusion, which reiterates the artistic features of the novel and offers some suggestion for further study.