Throughout her writing, Willa Cather continually asks the question: What allows a civilization to thrive, and for a people to truly live? Not until “Shadows on the Rock,” one of her last three novels, does Cather delve most fully into this question.
Willa Cather’s tenth novel, Shadows on the Rock, published in 1931, has been largely unappreciated due to negative criticism and a general misunderstanding of the novel. One of the most prominent and lasting criticisms was that of Granville Hick, in his article “The Case Against Willa Cather,” published in 1933. He wrote that although her earlier works deserved praise, —considering O! Pioneers to be a “prophetic” work of art which, along with My Antonia, should be considered to have “importance in American literature”— Shadows on the Rock, in his opinion, was weak or: “the event more trivial, the style even more elegiac, [and] the characters even less credible” than her other novels. He argued that Cather in Shadows on the Rock, had “never once tried to see contemporary life as it is; she sees only that it lacks what the past, at least in her idealization of it, had.” To Hicks, Cather was stuck in the past because she could not face the present. Hicks considered this flight from the present as “destructive of artistic values” that Cather once displayed in her works—a criticism not just of Shadows on the Rock, but of Cather herself. Hicks was not alone in his disapproval, and over the years a flood of literary criticism descended upon Shadows on the Rock. According to Sharon O’Brien in her article “Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Cather,” many critics were “influenced by the economic and social collapse of the Depression as well as by Marxist political thought,” which pervaded the American atmosphere at that time and they “believed that art should grapple with the stern social, political, and economic realities of its time.” Critics did not think that Shadows on the Rock fit this political situation. If O’Brien is right, this may be the reason why Shadows on the Rocks has mostly been forgotten in the scholarly world. While other books such as O Pioneers and Death Comes to the Archbishop have article after article written about them Shadows on the Rock has relatively few in comparison. Many of the articles that have been written have not escaped the mindset that Shadows on the Rock is “lacking energy” and “disappointing,” left by critics like Hicks.
However, this criticism fails to see that Shadows on the Rock is actually the culmination of ideas present in several of Cather’s other novels and short stories. Throughout her writing, she continually asks the question: what allows a civilization to thrive, and for a people to truly live? Not until Shadows on the Rock, one of her last three novels, does Cather delve most fully into this question, making this work not an outlier, but the end of a thread which her literary mind had been exploring for over twenty years. In her work, she often uses a metaphor for human civilization as a giant “rock” where people live tenaciously, despite hostile environments. People who build their homes upon such a “rock,” as Cather wrote in Shadows on the Rock, are like the “sea birds” who made their homes in “mere ledges of rock standing up a little out of the sea,” where they “lay their eggs and rear their young in the caves and hollows,” despite the howling of the wind and the beating of the sea. The people she describes in her books who live on the rock, such as the people of Quebec who make up the story of Shadows on the Rock, were the same. They built their “nests in the rock and held fast” (226). The image of the giant rock, for Cather, represents a haven of safety and permanence for those who dare to cast their shadows upon it; but it is not the rock itself that holds the people together. As is seen most clearly in the Quebecois, faith as depicted in Shadows on the Rock holds the people to the rock. In their case, the Catholic Christian tradition transferred from France, which pervades everything they do and is lived out in their daily existence, creates a common culture which brings the Quebecois together as a community. Cather, though not a Catholic herself, had a deep appreciation for the Catholic faith and admired how it had created deeply rooted cultures for many different peoples. Cather saw how faith helps the Quebecois while they are “three thousand miles from home” to make “the best of things,” and to thrive even in potentially hostile situations (226). The idea of faith rooting a people to a solid foundation (the “rock”) is therefore a key element in Cather’s work. Before digging into Shadows on the Rock, we must look at earlier pieces of Cather’s literary thread displayed in her other works in which she explores this theme of faith, rootedness, and what these do for the individual and society (226).
In one of Cather’s most famous works, Death Comes to the Archbishop, the main character, Archbishop Latour, visits an ancient Indian town situated on the Acoma Mesa, which “had never been taken by a foe but once,—by Spaniards in armour.” For generations it has stood in defiance of all who would dare to attack it. All that sought refuge upon that “rock had found the hope of all suffering and tormented creatures.” As Latour stood there, contemplating this massive rock, he found that it was “different from a mountain fastness; more lonely, more stark and grim, more appealing to the imagination.” That imagination seemed to say to him that the rock “was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and friendship.” The rock represented safety for those who would seek refuge in it and a chance for a secure life within its walls. While musing, Latour recalled Christ’s proclamation that Peter was the rock on which He would build His church. Latour sees that like the great Mesa in front of him, the church was something so powerful that it could not be shaken or destroyed, though many would try. The church, like the Acoma’s rock, is a symbol of strength. Latour reflects that for the Acoma Indians “their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them.” Through this passage, Cather connects the Acoma’s civilization with Christianity. She is reflecting on how Christians also see themselves as rooted in a rock, which is the church. Later in Shadows on the Rock, Cather will re-use this image to describe a literal living out of this metaphor through the Quebecois rooting themselves to the rocks of the Canadian frontier. A person casting his shadow upon it would feel that he could create a home there. There, a people in their isolation could be left to pursue the highest things, for in the words of Saint Augustine in his work The City of God, the city of saints is in heaven but on earth heaven “produces citizens in whom it wanders as on a pilgrimage through time looking for the kingdom of eternity.”
Cather’s characters often come across the remains of an ancient lost civilization in her stories, often at moments that, on the level of the stories, do not often appear to make sense. As her characters explore and consider these long-gone peoples, a deeper dive by the reader reveals juxtaposition of these ancient peoples’ civilization with the personal journeys of the main characters. In her novel The Song of the Lark, while spending the summer in Flagstaff, Arizona, protagonist Thea Kronburg spends her days exploring a long abandoned and untouched American Indian cliff village embedded in the walls of a canyon in Arizona. While she is there, a sense of “a dignified, unobtrusive sadness” comes upon her from “the ancient dwellings.” It seems to be a “voice out of the past, not very loud, that went on saying a few very simple things to the solitude eternally.” She catches on to an old song that was left behind by the creators of those cliff dwellings, a song that connects her to the past and made her feel the “hardness of human struggle or the sadness of human history” of which her cliff dwellers had surely known a great deal. It was a sadness that encapsulates, for Thea the loss of this once thriving people and also the struggles that they had endured when they were alive. Through this experience Thea realizes that she had to do her best for the memory of these long gone people who once strove so desperately for survival, life, and safety in a hostile world. Her job was to carry this song with her and to help it grow—because one day she too would just be a note or a line in the song of civilization.
Thea is not only inspired by the song but the remnants of artistry she finds among the ruins of the forgotten people. As she explores the old buildings, she discovers intricate paintings on walls and pottery. The care that went into creating these images strikes her heart because they were there for no other purpose than to add decoration which the artists “had not only expressed their desire, but they had expressed it beautifully as they could. Life for the Indians was more than just survival, and they cared about art for its own sake. All of this makes Thea feel as though she had an “obligation to do one’s best” and “to help fulfill some desire of the dust that slept there.” The Indian’s struggle to build a thriving civilization, which the land and the remains she found suggests to her, helps her to better understand the nature of civilization itself and her own role in it. She senses that “the wind had [once] whispered some promise to the sadness of the savage” which the walls of the canyon still echoed, and Thea’s soul heard. These remains, especially the potsherds, were like “fetters that bound one to a long chain of human endeavor.” They declared that just as Thea stood there now, living and breathing, so too did these ancient peoples, long ago. The Indians striving for more than mere survival reflects Thea’s own journey, as a small-town girl from the middle of nowhere Nebraska, dreaming of being a true artist. Their struggle inspired her desire to carry on their work. Thea and the lost Indians were linked in the same chain of human existence: the same need to find roots in the rock; to struggle for more than survival; and to carry on the song of civilization through artistic expression.
Willa Cather continues this theme of the “song” of civilization in her 1925 work, The Professor’s House, when her main character, Professor St. Peter recalls a story that his former pupil Tom Outland had told him many years before. Tom had recalled finding an undiscovered and abandoned ancient Indian village hidden in the middle of the Blue Mesa. Tom said that the “town hung like a bird’s nest in the cliff, looking off into the box canyon.” The ancient settlers made their home in the rock and clung to it with all they had. It seemed to Tom that the people who built it would have “the hardihood to build there” otherwise they could not have lived in a hazardous canyon with nothing but “an ocean of clear air” to keep them company. A life like that required endurance, but as Tom explored the remains more and more he found “evidence on every hand that they lived for something more than food and shelter.” They must have been “a provident” and “rather thoughtful people” who worked to make the “mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man.” It was not just a place for survival but for culture and art. The place seemed to be “a sacred spot” begun in the hardest of places, in which the people had been cut off from the “influence of example or emulation, with no incentive but some natural yearning for order and security.” The people had been left alone to create a culture entirely their own. Their struggle to live on that rock cut off from the rest of mankind and to build a thriving civilization gave that place a kind of holiness. Tom caught on to the same song that Thea had, though to a different part of it. Like Thea, Tom is forever marked by his experience. He becomes a bold, admirable, accomplished young man; everything that St. Peter wishes he could say of himself. Once again, Cather has utilized images of older human civilizations to illustrate the importance of rootedness and perseverance in her character’s journeys.
Thea Kronborg and Tom Outland both felt a connectedness to the past through the remains of the ancient, isolated peoples who, like birds, built their nests on rocks for safety. They caught a part of the song of civilization, and it moved them to the core of their being. But, both of these characters eventually leave the ruins and return to the modern world. In Shadows on the Rock, however, these ideas culminate, when Cather, instead of having her protagonist reflect on the remains of an ancient civilization, writes a story that exemplifies how ancient civilizations, even in the modern world, can provide a space where deep roots take hold, and where faith and culture can thrive. In this story, the “rock” itself is now a main character and not just a memory. And as Cather notices, this civilization, unlike the ones found by Thea and Tom, still existed in Cather’s time. Cather first visited Quebec in 1928 and fell immediately in love with it. Edith Lewis, Cather’s editor and best friend, wrote in her book Willa Cather Living, that Cather, from her first steps in Quebec, was “overwhelmed by the flood of memory, recognition, surmise it called up: by the sense of its extraordinary French character” which had been “kept intact through hundreds of years as if by some miracle on [a] great un-French continent” and a place which had “also managed to resist the trends of modernism and materialism which were sweeping in the United States.” French Catholic Quebec is Tom and Thea’s Indian villages—yet still living. Cather herself wrote in a letter in 1931 after years of frequently visiting Quebec that every time she visited, she could not help but feel that in that place there was “a certain loyalty to language and religion and tradition” whose qualities were very French and yet it was “more moving and rather more noble than France itself.” She felt that Quebec “was more like a period than place” and that the Rock she wrote about in Shadows on the Rock was still there “though so many generations [had] come and gone and cast their shadows in the sunlight for a little while.” In Cather’s mind, Quebec in its isolation and due to its enduring faith, had managed to retain its character and culture that it had developed during its birth and rise as a colony.
Cather sensed in Quebec the same ancient song of civilization that she wrote about in The Professor’s House and The Song of the Lark, but unlike those stories, in Shadows on the Rock the song was not a mere echo, but a song that was still being played. It was the same song that Quebec had been singing since its birth. This song brought Cather to write Shadows on the Rock, which she started almost immediately after seeing Quebec in 1928 but was unable to complete until 1931 because of the loss of her father, and her mother suffering a debilitating stroke soon after. She wrote in a letter responding to Governor Cross’s review of Shadows on the Rock that Quebec was “a curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite.” She found in that town “a kind of feeling about life and human fate that I could not accept, wholly, but which I could not but admire.” This feeling was “like an old song, incomplete but uncorrupted” and she tried in her book to capture a bit of that song. She took it and attempted to turn it into a story “not too conclusive, not too definite: a series of pictures remembered rather than experienced” along with a “kind of thinking” which had been “left over from the past, lacking in robustness and full of pious resignation.” These quotes explain her desire in writing Shadows on the Rock to more fully explore the song of civilization, and how it endures in hostile conditions. She wrote of some of the first people to cast their shadows on the Rock of Quebec and centered her story around all the different people of Quebec as they went through their daily lives and tried to live life as well as they could. In this novel she once again asks her question of what it takes for man to really live and to live well, but this time, she offers an answer to this question—faith.
The people of Quebec that she writes about are deeply religious. They live out their faith in their everyday activities, and faith is the lens through which they see the world and is the means by which they endure suffering and other threats. Cather in Shadows on the Rock describes the colony of Quebec as being surrounded by a “dead, sealed world of the vegetable kingdom,” which stretched as far as the eye could see and held many unknown dangers (6). Despite these potential dangers, the Quebecois mostly live in peace and tranquility. They feel safe on their rock. The greatest danger that threatens them is the sin of despair. The ships docking in the port of Quebec during the summer months often brought letters, news, and supplies to them from Europe and the other colonies, but the port was closed for the rest of the year, and the nearest colony was many miles away. For months, they were completely cut off from the outside world: “there might be new wars, floods, conflagrations, epidemics, but the colonists would never know” until summer rolled around (4). They were virtually beyond the touch of the happenings in Europe. Because of this their culture, which was established by the missionaries and explorers who founded Quebec about ninety years before Cather’s story takes place, did not change all that much. They were the same faithful French Catholics. The tradition of their faith which pervades all parts of their culture and their daily lives, and keeps the people of Quebec going and thriving, keeping them from living in fear and from falling into despair. Faith holds life together for them. It also helps them to preserve the traditions of the French Catholic culture.
In Cather’s novel, the Catholic faith creates a common culture which binds the people of Quebec together and provides order in their lives. They live and breathe the Catholic Church’s liturgical calendar. Their days are marked by the seasons and feasts of the church. Every morning the old Bishop Laval awoke at four in the morning to ring the church bells “for the early Mass for the working people” (74). Many of those Christians who heard the call of the bell “clanging out under the black sky where there was not yet even a hint of daybreak” had no desire to go to Mass in the morning or to get out of bed earlier than they had to, but the thought of “the old Bishop at the end of the bell-rope” brought them to Mass. (74). The Bishop’s constancy and determinedness brought them to church. They could not leave the call of the shepherd to his flock unheeded, for “his will was stronger than theirs” (74). Even if they disagreed with him on many things, he was their bishop and they, his flock. They trusted, loved, and followed their Bishop where he would lead them because they knew that he was leading them towards Christ. This was how the town of Quebec, as long as Bishop Laval was their bishop, started their day with Mass. They often felt “as if there must be powerful protection for Kebec in such steadfastness” which the Bishop displayed, as though he was providing extra protection for them (105). They thought that every day was “beginning as it should” with the “punctual bell and the stern old Bishop” and this “held life together on the rock, though the winds lashed it and the billows of snow drove over it” (105). This orderly procession continued throughout the rest of their day. This culture of faith had been established by the French missionaries and clergy members who first came to Quebec, carrying the Eucharist on their backs. Faith lived out in such a way is a kind of liturgy which gives everyday life an aspect of sacredness.
Cather focuses most of her story upon the Auclair family. Euclid Auclair, the town Apothecary, and his twelve-year-old daughter lives on the one street that connects both the Lower and Upper parts of the town. Upper Quebec is the home of the rich Quebecois as well as most of the religious orders. The poorer and working classes of Quebec live in the Lower part, where they are closer to the ports. Therefore, the Auclairs serve as a bridge between the worlds of faith and ordinary life. They serve as a metaphor of the Christian ideal of living in the world, but not of the world. Mr. Auclair, his wife and their little daughter, Cecile, had come to Quebec at the behest of Count Frontenac, who was the appointed Governor of Quebec. He was their patron and had allowed them to bring anything they wanted to the New World. Sadly, Mrs. Auclair had died a few years after their arrival. While she lived, Mrs. Auclair “tried to make the new life as much as possible like the old” and she taught her daughter to “carry on this life and this order after she was gone” (23). She passed on to her daughter “a feeling about life that had come down to her through so many centuries,” which Mrs. Auclair hoped Cecile would day pass on to her children (25). Perhaps the Auclairs themselves could not fully describe in words this “feeling,” but it was a “feeling” that highly valued tradition and order. According to Mrs. Auclair, order and tradition contained “all the little shades of feeling which make the common fine” and kept life civilized (25). She taught Cecile to change sheets on the bed every two weeks, to have the washing done only in soft rainwater every April, to carefully prepare every meal for her father because of his delicate appetite, and so much more. Mary Ryder in her book Willa Cather and Classic Myth: The Search for Mount Parnassus, argued that the “Auclair household [maintained] stability defined by religion.” Cecile and Euclid spend much of their free time praying in the various churches, attending mass, and visiting with various religious orders of Quebec. Madame Auclair pressed on Cecile the idea that without these things, especially in the New World, their lives would fall into chaos and that would be the end of her father’s happiness, for “[without] order [their] lives would be disgusting” (24). Years after Mrs. Auclair’s death, the father and daughter had kept their home and their way of life the exact same, bridging the past with the present by ritual and tradition. People often stopped by their house “upon the slightest pretext” just to see the house whose “interior was like home to the French-born” (22). It brought them comfort and cheer to see a place that reminded them so much of home.
In Cecile’s own character development, she first practiced the rituals of her heritage, but she does not truly love them until she experiences life without them. In the early springtime, Cecile paid a visit to family friends, the Harnois, who lived by themselves on an island on the river. After a few days with the Harnois, however, Cecile was ready to go home. She was disgusted by the way that the Harnois live their lives. In Cecile’s eyes, there seemed to be no order in the house and the children had no manners. Everything they did “about cooking, eating, sleeping, living seemed repulsive” to her (192). The Harnois, although Cecile thought that they were kind people, did not have any semblance of the “feeling about life” that her mother had passed down to her, in other words they lacked the “stability defined by religion” which had always maintained the Auclair household. When Cecile returned home she took up her household work again, but as she did so “everything seemed a little different;” what once was mere habit had become intentional (197). She did the housework just as much for herself as she did for the sake of her family. She realized that she, like every other person, was responsible for how they each lived their lives, for one made “a climate within a climate” and “one made the days” for themselves (198). In many ways she was responsible in her attitude and attentions, of making her life and the lives of the people around her beautiful. She had a hand in controlling “the complexion, the special flavour, special happiness of each day as it passed” (198). Through these things “one made life” for one’s self (198). A life did not just happen to be beautiful even though one may be surrounded by many beauties; a person had to continually work to complete the everyday rituals including everyday practices of faith, house-hold routines, and a charitable disposition to serve others which all add up to make life beautiful. This took mindful intention to accomplish. Cecile had finally come into and developed the “feeling about life” which turns the liturgical living out of the everyday into something sacred—a life lived in the liturgy of the everyday.
In living out this “feeling of life,” Cecile, as her ancestors had before and as her children would one day, was creating a kind of art. Willa Cather said in an interview said that real art “should include all activities of life” and is to be found in the most ordinary of things. As long as a person does these tasks with love and care, they are making art. Cather in this interview said that a mother taking care of her family while running a farmers market stand and taking care of her garden, “who thoroughly enjoys doing it all, and doing it well, contributes more to art than all culture clubs” because she has turned her own life into a piece of art; for Cather art “must spring out from the fullness and the richness of life.” Cather thought that this way of looking at life was fascinating, and she tried especially in Shadows on the Rock to capture that idea. This at least in part is the “feeling about life” that Cecile catches onto after her stay with the Harnois family. Cather wrote in a letter to Governor Cross that “an orderly French household that went on to live decently” was more interesting to her” than Indian raids or wildlife in the forest” because art came from them. From the art that comes from tradition, so too comes civilization, for “a new society begins with the salad dressing more than with the destruction of Indian villages.” Civilization does not exist without a culture. Aristotle wrote that the beginning of the polis was the family. Stories and myths can be created around battles and wars, but culture begins with families creating a way of life for themselves and making their own traditions, such as how to make the salad dressing, which is something that the Auclair family understood very well.
Six years before Shadows on the Rock, in the forementioned novel, The Professor’s House, Cather paints a picture of what it is like for a people to live without community or faith. The main character, Godfrey St. Peter, who has essentially no faith life, has lost almost all connection to his family. His marriage is slowly falling apart, but neither he nor his wife are willing to address their problems. They dance around the subject every time it is vaguely brought up. His eldest daughter has grown extremely cruel over the years, which the Professor sees but does not correct, and so fails in fatherly duty. He and his family are incapable of talking about or facing the hard truths of their lives. They would rather live in denial, but this denial has a cost, for he “never learned to live without delight.” The Professor was eaten away at by his feelings of isolation and despair, which led him to attempt suicide, but he was saved by Augusta, his devoutly Catholic maid. As she sat with him while he recovered, he realized that “he would rather have Augusta with him just now than anyone he could think of” because she was kind, loyal, and full of “matter-of-factness and hard-handedness.” She was known for “watching and sitting up with people” in the community when they needed her. Unlike the Professor and his family, she did not stray away from hardship which, Cather seems to suggest, is due to her deeply rooted and earnest Catholic faith. The Professor had a sense that she was indeed more real and grounded than anyone else he knew and because of that he felt “a sense of obligation toward her.” He believed that unlike the ties that still held his family together, this tie was more “real” and because of this the Professor felt hope again. He realized that Augusta’s saintly ways were worth following to the ends of the earth and worth emulating. If he followed her path, he knew that he would have to face the hardships of the world but there still would be joy, though perhaps not of the earthly kind to which he was so accustomed. He knew he was “outward bound” towards Augusta and those like her and that that would be the better path for him. It is the realization that he still had community which brings the Professor out of his despair. This is the note that Willa Cather chose to end her book on. Though Cather never explicitly says what happens to the Professor, she hints that through his “outward bound” journey towards Augusta and those like her, he would eventually be led to the Christian faith and most presumedly the Catholic faith, because that is what Augusta practiced. In this book we see the results of a life lived without community and faith. Such a life is empty, isolating, and often leads to despair, which Cather tries to warn her audience against.
Cecile and Euclid Auclair, by contrast, were surrounded by a sort of liturgy in almost every aspect of their lives. They, like most of the people of Quebec, lived by the Liturgical Calendar of the Catholic Church. For, as argued by Mary Ryder in her book, Willa Cather and Classical Myth: The Search for Mount Parnassus, “cultural heritage and faith order life” on the rock of Quebec. They follow very closely the seasons and the feast days of the church. These days such as All Saints Day, All Souls Day, the feast day of Saint Nicholas, and Christmas are a fixture in their lives. They also attend daily Mass. All Soul’s Day for the people is a day of remembrance of not only those that they have lost but also what they have survived and what they have left behind. The bells of the cathedral, rung every hour, seemed to be constantly singing out a prayer for the dead which echoed throughout the town, reminding all the townspeople of their own duty to pray for the dearly departed on this day. Cecile, however, could not feel solemn, for her mind was focused on the great wonders that God had done for the Quebec: the miracles performed, the monasteries and nunneries that “seemed sentinelled by a glorious company of martyrs, martyrs who were explorers and heroes as well,” the missionaries, the victory by the Holy Family that had been granted to Quebec when it was being bombarded, and many other things (95). These things excited her and made her love her home even more. The stories of the heroes and saints that populated Quebec at one time or another surrounded the people of Quebec, especially Cecile, with a kind of Christian Mythos.
Like the Greeks and the Romans with their great myths of old told over the hearths of many homes, passed down from generation to generation, so too did the Christian myths spread through the hearths of the Quebecois through oral retelling and recorded writings. These stories gave the Quebecois comfort and inspiration on the long lonely nights of their separation from the old world and as they were besieged by the “vegetable kingdom” which threatened to one day swallow them whole. It was not a new mythology but an old one that kept growing as new shadows were cast upon the Rock upon which the Quebecois continued to build their civilization. As Mary Ryder put it, for Cather, art “brought together both classical and religious ideals of order” which included art of “the humblest kind.” The stories of the missionaries, clergy, and the martyrs of Quebec become are part of this collection of stories. All of them created a Christian Mythos which pervaded the very air of Quebec. It is in the nature of a people, especially when in the beginning of a civilization, to create and collect stories of who they are and what they aspire to become, to tell each other and their children. For as Count Frontenac reflected, the American Indians “had to make a story to account for something in their lives that did not come out of their appetites,” such as loyalty, love, courage, hope, and other things which “this world did not explain” (247). All peoples knew that such things formed some of the deepest parts of their lives. They are what C. S. Lewis referred to in his Abolition of Man as the Tao. From these stories came myths that explained the world around them, which are not scientifically true and yet truer than true. The Christian Mythos of Quebec culture was made of true stories, and many of the Quebecois personally knew some of the people these stories were about. They loved the stories even more because they had put their faith that the words of Christ and all that He had inspired were true.
To the Quebecois, the lives of the saints were an especial comfort, especially those of the Holy Family. When Cecile and Jacques, the “unkept and uncared for” child of a local prostitute whom Cecile has adopted in many ways, visit the shoemaker to collect Jacques’ new shoes, Madame Pommier, the shoemaker’s crippled mother, talks to them about the love of the Quebecois for the Holy Family (49). She tells them that upon arriving in the colony, she was “struck by the veneration in which the Holy Family was held in Kebec,” which she found to be the same “through [out] the distant parishes” (101). The love she saw in Quebec was unlike anything she had seen at home. She herself was especially devoted to the Holy Family and had put together a chapel in her home dedicated to them. The old Bishop had once told her that “there [was] no other place in the world where people are so devoted to the Holy family” as they were in Canada (101). The Holy Family were their patron saints and the Quebecois held on to them very dearly.
The physical layout of the town of Quebec and the mountains that surround it also shows the rock’s love for the Holy Family. At the very beginning of the book, Cather describes the “rock-set town” as looking “like nothing so much as one of those artificial mountains” placed in the churches in Europe at Christmas “to present a theatric scene of the Nativity,” the first home of the Holy Family (4-5). The city of Quebec itself in which missionaries had “brought to Canada the Holy Family, the saints and martyrs, the glorious company of the Apostles, [and] the heavenly host,” had declared itself a dwelling place for the Holy Family (97). This devotion had only been amplified when Quebec had withstood besiegement by England in 1690. Count Frontenac and his men had managed to drive off the assailants while the women and children were hiding in the Ursaline convent. The people believed that it was the “protection which Our Lady had afforded” them that had allowed Frontenac to succeed because even though “every heretic gun was aimed at it” during the bombardment, the Church of the Infant Jesus “stood untouched” with “the banner of the Virgin floating from its steeple” (64, 95). This victory, which seemed proof of the patronage of the Holy Family over Quebec, caused people’s devotion to grow even more. Afterwards the Church of the Infant Jesus was renamed Notre Dame de La Victoire in remembrance. The people took courage from such events because it meant that even out on the frontier God was at work among them.
The inside of the church Notre Dame de La Victoire, which was once called the church of the Infant Jesus, forms a microcosmic image of the themes of the entire book. On a cold and rainy deep fall night, Cecile and Jacques ran into the church, which had been always considered special by the residents of Quebec. This church was Cecile and Jacques’ particular favorite in the whole of the town for they felt at home, and it seemed “peculiarly [to be] the church of childhood” because clothes were still laid out for the Infant Jesus (63). The high altar was simply decorated but beautiful. The altar looked like a feudal castle with different terraces and within “the arched gateway’ at the center, “the Host was kept” (64). Cecile in her youth believed that this was exactly what Heaven looked like “from the outside and was surrounded by such walls” and she taught Jacques to believe the same thing (64). It was a portrait of Heaven just like “the statues of the saints and the Holy Family were portraits” (65). Within these walls there was comfort and safety for the kingdom of Heaven, just like the castle on the altar was “strong and unassailable, wherever it was set among the stars” (65). To know what Heaven looked like “was very comforting” to both of the children (65). It gave them something definite to think of when they contemplated Heaven. Within those gates they knew that nothing bad could ever happen to them and they were safe and loved. The description of the altar reminds one of the description of the town of Quebec with its great walls and terraces and also hearkens back to the Indian cliff-dwellers of the previously referred to novels. In Quebec, the altar, too is a place of safety and refuge from a foreign and hostile world to all who live there—a “rock.”
On top of the altar stood statues of Saint Anne holding the Virgin Mary as a child and another statue of the grown up Virgin Mary carrying Jesus in her arms. The face of St. Anne looked “like a great lady of the world” but “her delicately featured face was rather worn by life, and sad” as if she knew “beforehand of all the sorrows of her own family, and of the world it was to succour” (65). Her face bore the marks of one who knew much of suffering and did her best to prepare her family as much as she could. When one reads this description of Saint Anne, one cannot help but be reminded of Madame Auclair, who knew that she was dying and perceived the hardships that her family would face without her. Though we only get stories of Madame Auclair, her memory shines through the entire novel. Unlike the statue of St. Anne, the Virgin Mary is the picture of “young motherhood” and she is “radiantly happy” (65). In the darkness of the storm outside, Cecile and Jacques could not see her face clearly, but “the children thought they saw her, because they knew her face so well” (65). They knew that she was beautiful and radiantly happy. Mary also knew what the future had in store for her and her son, but she did not show it on her face. She was not a fine lady of this world like her mother, but a queen of the next. In her arms the child Jesus looked so “intelligent and gay, a child in bright and joyful mood” with his arms stretched out “in a gesture of welcome” to all those who came into the church, like “he were giving a fete for his little friends and was in the act of receiving them” (65-66). He is a friend to all and looks as if he is ready to jump from his mother’s loving arms so that he may go play with His friends. This depiction of Jesus makes Him more relatable to Jacques and Cecile and makes them feel that they could be Jesus’ playfellows. The statue assures them that Christ loves children like them because “He was a child Himself” and can understand what it is to be a child (67). Thus, Cecile and Jacques in many ways are a reflection of Mary the young mother and the child Jesus. Cecile, in other scenes of the book, plays the part of Mary, and Jacques the part of Christ for others. Susan Roscowki’s argued in her book The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism as “the virgin Mother is a mediator for all living, Cecile is a mediator for the boy.”
We see Cecile as a Marian figure most clearly in the novel’s Christmas nativity scene. In this scene Willa Cather recreates the Nativity of Christ. On Christmas Eve, Cecile is finally allowed to open the box that her aunts sent her for Christmas, which contains beautiful paper figures for her nativity scene, handmade by her aunt. The little paper Virgin Mary who had no halo or anything to show that she was the mother of the Savior of the world, bears a striking resemblance to Cecile. Mary looked like “a country girl, very naïve, seated on a stool with her knees well apart under her full skirt and very large feet” (109). She is not seated like a proper young lady who knows how to keep her knees together nor does she have dainty feet as a lady is often thought to have. She looks like an ordinary young girl, probably around the age of thirteen or fourteen. For the setting up of the nativity, Cecile allowed her friends Jacques and Blinker, two of the town’s outcasts, to watch her set up the Nativity set. As she does this, she retold them the story of the three magi who brought gifts to the baby Jesus. Jacques, who had never heard this part of the Nativity before, was enraptured by it and is inspired to bring a gift of his own for Jesus. He ran home and returned with his most treasured possession, a little hand carved beaver made by one of his sailor friends. He thought the beaver “could keep the baby warm” as it often kept him warm (111). At first Cecile was hesitant to allow Jacques to put his gift into the Manger because “the animal was so untraditional” (111). But a family friend, who was visiting at that moment, told Cecile to let him, for it was fitting that the son of the town prostitute brings a gift to his Savior because “Our Lord died for Canada as well as the world over there” (111). The beaver having a place in the nativity is proper, even if not historically accurate. In many medieval paintings of the nativity and other events in the life of Jesus, the artists would paint into the scene their patrons and saints, some of whom would not be born until hundreds of years after Christ’s death. Or they would put the biblical characters into gorgeous medieval clothing and have the background of the painting be in Rome or some other place, because it showed that all people are a part of this story and that Christ came for all. The beaver represents Canada, or at least the town of Quebec, and is placed in the nativity showing that Quebec is also part of this larger story that points back to Christ. The people of Quebec as they live out their everyday lives are as much a part of this story as the Hebrews or the Medievals were. They are all part of the same song of civilization, like the people of Acoma and the Blue Mesa.
Jacques acts as one of the Three Kings in this scene. He was ecstatic with joy at being able to give Jesus his small treasure. Cecile reassures Jacques that he will get it back when Christmastime is over, but this comment makes Jacques sad. His gift was meant for no one other than Christ. He did not want Jesus to borrow it for a time, but to have it always. He could not give Jesus frankincense, myrrh, and gold as the Wise Men had done, but in way he gave Jesus something of much more value. For a six year-old boy who did not have many toys and was not well taken care of by his prostitute mother or given any sort of education, except a little from Cecile, that little beaver was the most precious thing he owned, yet he willingly and gladly gave it to Jesus. Like the widow’s mite in the Gospels, or the woman who bathed Jesus’ feet with precious oils and with her own hair, Jacques too gave to Jesus all that he had and the best that he had. Jacques not only plays the part of one of the wisemen, he and Blinker also represent the shepherds in this picture. They were the outcasts of the town, much like the shepherds, who at the time of the Nativity would have been seen as some of the lowest of the low in Jewish society. The shepherds were often of the youngest sons, not expected to add to the prosperity of the family. Their presence shows that even the lowest of the low are welcome before Christ. So also Cecile, much like Mary during Christ’s nativity, invites the poor and lowly to witness and participate, out of her love for them. Cather recreates through these characters on both the “rock” that is the church and the rock of Quebec, one of the most important moments in all of History.
If Cecile acts a Marian archetype in the novel, then Jacques as her “son” is the child Christ figure of the novel. Jacques represents Christ as a child in many ways. Though she is very young, Cecile acts as a kind of mother figure to Jacques. She teaches Jacques his catechism, feeds him, makes sure that he has good shoes for the winter, and gives him all the love that his own mother cannot. Bishop Laval also sees Christ’s presence through Jacques. One winter night, the coldest night of the year, at least two years before Shadows on the Rock took place, four-year-old Jacques awoke to find that his mother had left to entertain some trappers. He went into the freezing night without a coat to search for her and as he wandered the streets he stumbled into the Old Bishop and some of his assistants, who had just come from administering to a sick woman. Upon seeing Jacques, and not knowing who the child was, the Bishop immediately picked him up and brought him to his house where the Bishop “lived in naked poverty” (73). Once inside Jacques was fed and the Bishop himself rubbed “Jacque’s feet and legs very softly with a towel” (73). Then he “took [Jacques] foot and kissed it” and the other foot as well (74). Readers are in this scene are reminded of Christ’s words in the Bible when told he told his followers that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Bishop Laval did not reject Christ when he appeared to him through Jacques. He could have let one of his assistants take care of the child, but he did not and he who lives in “naked poverty,” gives the little that he has to Jacques. He cares deeply for each member of his flock no matter how small or where they come from. This scene also draws readers to the story of Christ washing the feet of his disciples at the last supper. As the Bishop looks at this little boy, he is given a “reminder of his Infant Saviour” whom he found on the steps of the house of the new Bishop who was a constant “thorn in [the old Bishop’s] flesh” (71). The new Bishop, who the Bishop Laval had hand-picked, had done everything in his power to undo much of the good work that the old Bishop had accomplished, and yet there was an image of Christ on the doorstep of the home of the man who had betrayed him. Laval was not sure what it meant, but he wondered if it was a sign that perhaps he had become too focused on the administrative duties of a bishop while he was “fixing his church upon this rock” of Quebec and that he had neglected the “mystical devotion” he once devoted to “mediation and prayer” (75). Perhaps he had fallen into the habits of his rigorous daily life and had forgotten to wonder and look for the divine. The Infant Christ represented by Jacques had been a reminder for him of the gift that Christ is to the world along with the joy and wonder that gift brings.
Another character in Shadows on the Rock who personifies the Christian Mythos of the Quebecois, is Jeanne, the recluse of Montreal. Inspired by her love of Christ and a desire to give her whole life to Him like missionaries did, Jeanne decided to leave her wealthy parents and live as recluse in an alcove behind the altar of the chapel of the Sisters of the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin. Once there she took a vow of silence, speaking to no one and seeing no one, not even her family. She spent her days in almost complete solitude, eating only a little food to keep her sustained, and while she prayed she wove beautiful vestments and altar clothes for other churches. One night an angel appeared to her and fixed her broken spinning wheel. The story of Jeanne and the angel spread throughout Canada like a wildfire and it brought great pleasure to whoever heard it, “as if the recluse herself had sent to all those families whom she did not know some living beauty” (137). In the midst of repeated stories of “Indian massacres and lost hunters and the almost human intelligence of the beaver,” her tale was a reprieve which brought light and comfort to those Canadian homes (137). Most had no doubt that it was real. The miracle was “the actual flowering of desire” and in it “the vague worship and devotion” of one woman had assumed an actual form (137). God had taken repetitive “dumb rapture” and turned it into a beautiful “melody that can be remembered and repeated” (137). He had converted Jeanne’s daily worship, which otherwise would have been lost into the happenings of her everyday life, into a song which others could catch the notes of. Jeanne’s miracle was not proof to the Quebecois that God was real, but rather a reminder that God was with them and at work among them. The miracle also showed them the possibilities of what their “vague worship and devotion” could become (137). Cather, when she explained Shadows on the Rock to Governor Cross, explained that in writing this book she was attempting to catch the melody that she heard while she was in Quebec. Cather too attempted to catch and repeat the miracle that was Quebec with her book.
Additionally, Cather uses the relationship between two other characters, Euclid and Count Frontenac, to further establish the importance of cultural roots connecting one to a larger tradition. The Quebecois were for many months of the year utterly separated from the rest of the world, putting them in a bubble where passing time had almost no effect on them. As stated by Bishop Saint-Vallier at the end of the novel to Euclid Auclair, they lived in a land “where nothing changes” (277). Laws in France are passed, new fads pop up, a king dies and a new king is named, wars are fought in France and the rest of Europe, but Quebec stays virtually the same. It was almost completely isolated and because of this, the Quebec culture which is that of the France of the late 1600s, had not changed. The Quebecois were in a new land but still living as best as they could in the tradition of the old world. They prided themselves on being French. They came from a deeply rooted culture and faith and that is how they would continue to live. Quebec and the other French-Canadian Colonies were inheritors of the tradition of that old world and yet also something new as well. This tradition endures partly due to the leadership of men like Count Frontenac and the Bishop who were part of “the old order” (261). They “cherished those beneath [them] and rendered [their] duty to those above [them], but flattered nobody, not the king himself” (261). Euclid Auclair, the apothecary, at one part of the novel reflects to himself that he was not like these men, though he was from the same age as them. Yet, he had given all his loyalty to men like the old Bishop and the Count because they “fought for no gain but renown, merciful to the conquered, charitable to the poor, haughty to the rich and overbearing” (262). To Euclid, these were true men of the Old World. In return for this loyalty the Count gave his protection and aid. This is the patronage relationship that was meant to exist between a lord and his men, which the French Aristocracy, as they moved into Versailles, began to neglect; but the Count still lived out during all of his governorship in Quebec. The Count, like Bishop Laval, was part of a larger tradition that had once was the norm of society, and when done well, had brought stability and safety to people. It is for these reasons that Euclid left his ancestral home with his family and followed the Count all the way to Quebec. The Count exemplifies everything that a leader who takes care of his people should be, but such men are slowly fading away. To Euclid, then, his master represents France as he remembers to it, a world he longs to return to, but he would not to return to France without the Count. The Auclair family had been serving the Frontenac family for many generations; Euclid’s loyalty ran deep within his veins. When the Count died, for the first time Auclair felt “wholly and entirely cut off from France” (263). With the Count’s death, so died the France that Auclair knew and loved. Even if he could have returned to France someday, he knew nothing would ever be the same. A new age was at hand, but he wished that he would not “outlive [his] time” but die with the rest of his age (261). Euclid despaired at the thought of being cut off completely from his ancestral heritage.
Euclid’s despair after the death of Count Frontenac leads him to contemplate the reason that “the Latin poets insisted that thrice and four times blessed were those to whom it befell to die in the land of their fathers” (263). Euclid’s contemplation in this passage suggests another important aspect of Cather’s achievement in Shadow on the Rock. In its connections to themes found in the Latin poets, specifically Virgil, it is constantly hearkening back to Virgil’s Aeneid. In many ways, Cather in this novel creates an echo of the Aeneid: she appears in some small way to be “baptizing” Virgil. The Aeneid ends with Aeneas thrusting his sword straight through Turnus and into the ground. The Roman civilization is founded in blood with Turnus as the first sacrifice to their pagan culture. The story of Aeneas ends there. We know a little about the future that Aeneas and his crew created afterwards through the prophecies that he is told, but we as readers do not actually get to see the society that he builds. Willa Cather, a lover of the classics who even taught Latin while she was a schoolteacher, in her book Shadows on the Rock, attempted to create, through the setting of the French colony of Quebec of the late 1700s, the living out of Aeneas’ civilization. The colony that she depicts is one that, like Aeneas, has carried its religion with it into the wilderness. She wrote in the novel that when “an adventurer” brings their gods into “a remote savage country, the colony [founded] will, from the beginning have graces, traditions, riches of the mind and spirit” which will allow it to thrive (98). It would be a civilization with “bright incidents, slight, perhaps, but precious” nonetheless (98). This society may not have great deeds attached to its name, but it would thrive in its daily rhythms. These are the kinds of incidents we see lived out among the characters of Quebec throughout Shadows on the Rock. However, it is not the blood of Turnus that creates the Quebec world but rather the sacrificial blood of Christ. The French missionaries who came to Canada and settled it brought with them the Eucharist. The Quebecois faith, which imbues every aspect of their lives, is what allows them to thrive.
Cather’s use of echoes of classical, Virgilian myth is further carried out in the character of Pierre Charon, a young trapper and adventurer, “hero of the fur trade and the coureurs de bois,” who was “quick as an otter and always sure of himself” (170). If Shadows on the Rock is the living out of the society that Aeneas establishes, Pierre Charon, who is both a man of the frontier and a man of Quebec, is Aeneas. Cather wrote that Euclid loved Pierre for the “same reason he had loved the Count,” because they both had the qualities that he admired in men but which he himself did not have (266). Pierre was a man of the “old order” like the Count, but at the same time, like Aeneas, he bridges the old and the new. He was a frontiersman who grew up in Montreal, making a child both of France and the frontier. He was one of the first true Canadians. Pierre’s mere presence is enough to prove to Euclid that men such as the count and the Old Bishop still existed and this gave him hope. Pierre’s successes in taming the wilderness of Canada in Shadows on the Rock is the living out of the story of Aeneas and the conquering of Latium after the events of the Aeneid took place. Readers of the Aeneid do not get to see how the civilization that he establishes lives out, but we know that one day Aeneas’ descendants will found Rome. In the epilogue of the novel, Willa Cather reveals that Pierre marries Cecile and together they have four boys, “the Canadians of the future,” as said by Euclid (278). So, just as Aeneas and Lavinia establishes a new Roman people, Cecile and Pierre, in a sense, establish a new Canadian people. As a “founding father” of sorts, then, Pierre is also the Saint Joseph figure of the novel. Saint Joseph is only mentioned once in the novel: he appears as a little painting in the shoemaker’s little home chapel. But, as stated several times, the Quebecois have a special devotion to the Holy Family. If Cecile stands as the Marian figure of the novel and Pierre becomes her husband and the strong protector of the Auclair family, he is the Joseph figure of the novel as well as the Aeneas figure. Through these character’s Christian and Classical analogues, we can better understand and appreciate the thoughtful and purposeful structure of Shadows on the Rock which many critics have failed to appreciate. Cather has skillfully echoed both Christian and Roman stories to tell a tale of how that civilization has continued in French Canada.
As described earlier, Willa Cather saw the simple saintly life of common people is a kind of art. Art does not have to involve great battles or harrowing deeds. It can be as simple as a husband and a wife trying to live well and intentionally. For the civilization of Quebec was, as Saint Augustine said in City of God, “founded, not for its own sake, but as the shadow of another substance,” one which fore shadowed something greater—the Heavenly city. Shadows on the Rock is essentially a manual for how to live the every-day Christian life. Mary Ryder argued that this was “Cather’s role as a novelist – to revitalize the human spirit and to redefine contemporary society’s place in the larger scheme of human history.”
Cather’s Shadows on the Rock then, can be seen as an artistic illustration of western, Christian civilization, analogous to the ornamental decorations on the great medieval cathedrals, which sought to depict the story of Christian salvation. One of the most famous is the Cathedral of Chartres which was built as a Romanesque Cathedral but after several fires much of the church had to be rebuilt and in the Gothic style. One of the additions that was added to the Cathedral was the Royal Façade which depicts the triumphs of Christ, including his birth, resurrection, and second coming. Encircling these stories and forming a halo around them are the representations of the seven liberal arts and the seven labors. These depictions are meant to show that whether through the daily tasks and jobs that ordinary people undertake, or through the study of beautiful things, man can reach Christ. All of these parts of man’s life are part of the story of civilization, and of Salvation. Christ has redeemed the whole world which gives a sanctity to everyday life and to the life of man. The life of ordinary people is sanctified by Christ and is holy. There is holiness to be found in everyday life, which sanctifies man. Willa Cather in her book Shadows on the Rock, perfectly captures this idea of the sanctity of the everyday, within a strong faith-filled culture, rooted in the past. The lives of saints, the Holy Family, and even Classical heroes are lived out in the characters she so vividly creates. Therefore, Shadows on the Rocks, as the culmination of themes that Cather for much of her writing career, is a work that deserves further study, and greater appreciation.
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The featured image is “River Between Steep Rocks” (June 1825), by Johan Christian Dahl, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
