BLOG 8: Cather

Willa Cather’s “A Wagner Matinée” concludes very well, at least comparatively to the rest of the story. It starts kind of slow and boring, but there is a strong ending that ties up well and makes it worth a read. The story is told from a boy named Clark’s perspective, but the main focus would have to be set on his Aunt, Georgiana. Georgiana is living in Nebraska, but she used to live in Boston, where Clark currently lives. She shows up, they go to a matinée, and she is basically succumbs to emotion from the music being played. It is short lived because “just outside the concert hall lay the black pond with cattle-tracked bluffs…” that is her home in Nebraska (Cather 526). It ends with a thought of the Aunt’s memories and alludes to what once was. Some of the main ideas seem to be about regret, sacrifice, music, choice, and consequences. The best fitting philosophy would be to live life without regrets.

Cather’s philosophy is easily related to Thoreau. In “Walden” he says “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Thoreau). Generally, he does not want to reach his last days of life and realize that he has regrets. It seems more like the Aunt in “A Wagner Matinée” has not heeded Thoreau’s warning and now has regrets in her life. Of course, it was not Cather who faced regrets, but she created a character from whom to learn a lesson.

Emerson said “How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements” (Emerson). Cather takes one of these elements, music, and puts large meaning behind it to ‘deify’ Aunt Georgiana. Both Emerson and Cather are similar in the way they portray emotion; Emerson toward nature and Cather toward music. The quote from Emerson that best fits is: “The lover of nature is he… who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood” (Emerson). Aunt Georgiana has retained her infantile love of music into her adulthood.

Willa, Cather. “A Wagner Matinée.” Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 521-526. Print.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature." Ralph Waldo Emerson Texts. Web. 06 Feb. 2012.

Thoreau, Henry David. "Thoreau's Walden - an Annotated Edition." The Thoreau Reader. Web. 21 Feb. 2012. .