A theoretical conflict in Cathers novel Pride and Prejudice - Essay Example

Draft In Pride and Prejudice, Cather’s novel introduces us to the hospitality which was being extended for about forty years in one famous house ranging from Omaha to Denver; hence they were respected so much. In that respect, they were the controllers of the land companies in the city. The Forrester family and the people who lived there made it to seem much finer and larger than it was there before (willa)(pg 1). More important, however, is the Novel’s literary purpose. Willa relates some of the most important information of the narrative through a third person and, by doing so, concisely presents key information about plot. At the same time, because the action is told through the writer’s point of view, she conveys characters’ attitudes toward events. In Willa Cather’s novel, a lost lady elegizes profoundly a radiance lost, a peculiar defeat of the American dream of grace, innocence and hope. The railroad is aristocracy of gross distortion hence in the opening chapter; a contrasting image is portrayed of the past against which measurements are being done for Neil’s (Smith, Finding Marian F orrester: A Rest orative Reading of). Captain Daniel Forrester made up the fortune in the old days for the track in the railroads. The portrayed picture in the novel depicts the fall he suffered from a horse and eventually he dies from a stroke. A theoretical conflict that has risen that sheds new light in this fundamental novel is that, Neil’s was a boy loved so much during Mrs. Foresters’ childhood and the main theme is to get him as he really was not like fiction in a standardized heroine. The influence of the captain over his wife is what Neil realizes at the end as a perception. Though the father of Neil was among the first people to fail and fooled to the wall, Neil Herbert grew up in the sweet water and as a result he witnesses the fall of Mrs. Foresters also (part 1, chapter 3 pg 1). The west disillusionment made George Adams and his family to go back to Massachusetts. This was however, after the sweet water had changed. The other families also followed the trend since there had been fewer visitors to the Forrester’s. The judge remained with his nephew who was nineteen, a tall, straight, deliberate boy and because of the critical look of the mind he seemed older than he seemed to be. (Part 1, chapter 3, pg 3). Through the book, A theoretical conflict has arises that sheds new light on this fundamental question. Mrs. Forrester carrying a tray of a decanter and sherry glasses, pours out a glass for Neil and also serves herself and perches the arm of one of the chairs where she pats sipping her sherry while stretching. Neil observes how the moods of the family mother and notices a strange behavior. Finally Mrs. Forrester welcomes him for a stay till after Christmas. Close analysis of the novel studies and comprehensive statistics shows that the hypocrisy of Mrs. Forrester and of the family, as well as the rigidity of the system, have no Prevention against the benefits of Neil from reaching the world’s richest family. At the same time, because the action is told orally, the writer’s point of view, she conveys characters’ attitudes toward events. Finally, the reactions the words evoke from the young man give information about the attitude of the people who are near them. The words Neil receives contain crucial information that leads to profound changes in her character-changes that make it possible for him to acknowledge her love for Mrs. Forrester and that lead to her marriage. (Part 1, chapter 3, pg 5). Pleasantly Judge Pommeroy walks to the Forrester’s’ and on the occasion of dinner he engages in a talk which ends up in a walk to one the town where a partly was being held. Suddenly in the town everybody becomes lively, the air warms, brightening from and the lamplight seemed to increase. The company draws nearer in one gathering even though Miss Constance seemed somehow dissatisfied (part 1, chapter 4 pg 2). The captain always toasted and always drank during dinner ,invocations, he uttered while with an old friend and whoever heard him say always he repeated the same sentiments and nobody would utter those words the way he usually did them better. As a sign of jovial moods which he wishes for all the participants in the room by saying happy days. Solemn moments like those ones, seemed to knock though happy days were usually hidden, fate was also knocking and the e future seemed so unfathomable. During the party Mrs. Ogden listened to the stories with sympathy since Neil liked her more than ever. The Constance seemed so much willing and able for another though. When she protested, the captain had already crossed the room to where the preoccupied Constance was chatting with Ellinger and he repeated the same mature grave courtesy, “Is smoke offensive to you, Constance?” (Part 1, chapter 4). The party comes to an end and while Neil and his uncle were in the hall putting on their overcoats, Mrs. Forrester’s came up to them and whispered coaxingly to the boy and reminded him that he ought to be at her place by two since she was planning a drive, and she dint want to amuse Constance for the same. Both of them rolled away .the Ogden’s retired upstairs while Mrs. Forrester’s was keen to help the captain off his frock coat while preparing for a nap (Part 1, chapter 4). By vigorously advocating for more stringent environmental standards, the quality of her voice had changed, and change was known. Someday they all went spinning along the curves of the winding road, saying not a word. In so doing, environment exhibited values consistent with the tradition of civic mindedness, in which collective interests, rather than individual desires, represent the highest priority; Mrs. Forrester sits with the head bent forward, her face half hidden in her muff (Part 1, chapter 5). At the end of part five, the pale Blum boy rose from behind his log and followed the tracks up the ravine. When the orange moon rose over the bluffs, he was still sitting under the cedars, his gun on his knee. While Mrs. Forrester had been waiting there in the sleigh, with her eyes closed, feeling so safe, he could almost have touched her with his hand. He had never seen her before when her mocking eyes and lively manner were not between her and the entire world. If it had been Thad Grimes who lay behind that log, now, or Ivy Peters? But with Adolph Blum her secrets were safe. His mind was feudal; the rich and fortunate were also the privileged. These warm-blooded, quick-breathing people took chances, — followed impulses only dimly understandable to a boy who was wet and weather-chapped all the year; who waded in the mud fishing for cat, or lay in the marsh waiting for wild duck. Mrs. Forrester had never been too haughty to smile at him when he came to the back door with his fish. She never haggled about the price. She treated him like a human being. His little chats with her, her nod and smile when she passed him on the street were among the pleasantest things he had to remember. She bought game of him in the closed season, and didn’t give him away (Part 1, chapter 5). It was during that winter, the first one Mrs. Forrester had ever spent in the house on the hill, that Neil came to know her very well. For the Forrester’s that winter was a sort of isthmus between two estates; soon afterward came a change in their fortunes. And for Neil it was a natural turning-point, since in the autumn he was nineteen, and in the spring he was twenty, — a very great difference. After the Christmas festivities are over, the whist parties settled into a regular routine. Where Mrs. Forrester was, dullness was impossible, Neil believed. The charm of her conversation was not so much in what she said, though she was often witty, but in the quick recognition of her eyes, in the living quality of her voice itself (Part 1, chapter 6). The big storm of the winter comes later that year; it sweeps down over Sweet Water the first day of March and beat upon the town for three days and nights. Thirty inches of snow fall, and the cutting wind blew it into whirling drifts. The Forrester’s ere snowed in. Ben Keezer, their man of all work, does not attempt to break a road or even to come over to the town himself. On the third day Neil went to the post-office, gets the Captain’s leather mail sack with its accumulation of letters, and set off across the creek, plunging into drifts up to his middle, sometimes up to his arm-pits. The fences along the lane were covered, but he broke his trail by keeping between the two lines of poplars. When at last he reaches the front porch, Captain Forrester comes to the door and let him in (Part 1, chapter 6). Given her other charming attributes, her comprehension of a man like the railroad-builder, her loyalty to him, stamped her more than anything else, That, he feels, is quality; something that could never become worn or shabby; steel of Damascus. His admiration of Mrs. Forrester goes back to that, just as, he felt, she herself had gone back to it. He rather liked the stories, even the spiteful ones, about the gay life she led in Colorado, and the young men she kept dangling about her every winter (Part 1, chapter 6). One of the evenings when there was no whist at the Foresters, Neil usually sat in his room and read, but not law, as he was supposed to do. The winter before, when the Foresters were away, and one dull day dragged after another, Neil had come upon a copious diversion, an almost inexhaustible resource. The high, narrow bookcase in the back office, between the double doors and the wall filled from top to bottom with rows of solemn looking volumes bound in dark cloth, which were kept apart from the law library; an almost complete set of the Bohn classics, which Judge Pommeroy had bought long ago when he was a student at the University of Virginia. Philosophical works in the collection seemed to be part of the lot, but he did no more than open and glance at them. He had no curiosity about what men had thought; but about what they had felt and lived, he had a great deal. If anyone had told him that these were classics and represented the wisdom of the ages, he would doubtless have let them alone. . But ever since he had first found them for himself, he had been living a double life, with all its guilty enjoyments. He read the Heroides over and over, and felt that they were the most glowing love stories ever told. He did not think of these books as something invented to beguile the idle hour, but as living creatures, caught in the very behaviour of living. Spring comes and at last the Foresters come back. Niel finds himself at the foot of the hill on the wooden bridge, his face hot, his temples beating, and his eyes blind with anger. In his hand he still carried the prickly bunch of wild roses. He throws them over the wire fence into a mud-hole the cattle had trampled under the bank of the creek. He did not know whether he had left the house by the driveway or had come down through the shrubbery. In that instant between stooping to the window-sill and rising, he had lost one of the most beautiful things in his life. Before the dew dried, the morning had been wrecked for him; and all subsequent mornings, he told himself bitterly. This day saw the end of that admiration and loyalty that had been like a bloom on his existence. He could never recapture it. It was gone, like the morning freshness of the flowers (Part 1, chapter 7). Niel meets with his uncle and Captain Forrester when they alighted from the morning train and drive over to the house with them. The business on which they had gone to Denver is not referred to until they sit with Mrs. Forrester in the front parlour. Judge Pommeroy explains to Mrs. Forrester the situation they had faced in Denver. The bank, about which Mrs. Forrester knew nothing but its name, was one which paid good interest on small deposits. The depositors were wage-earners; railroad employees, mechanics, and day labourers, many of whom had at some time worked for Captain Forrester. At this part of his narrative the Judge rose and began to pace the floor, twisting the seals on his watch-chain. The depositors had put their savings into that bank because Captain Forrester was president. To those men with no capital but their back and their two hands, his name meant safety. As he tried to explain to the directors, those deposits were above price; money saved to buy a home, or to take care of a man in sickness, or to send a boy to school. And those young men, bright fellows, well thought of in the community, sat there and looked down their noses and let your husband strip himself down to pledging his life insurance. Tears flashed into her eyes. In her voice there was the heart-breaking sweetness one sometimes hears in lovely, gentle old songs (Part 1, chapter 7). Part two Two years before Niel Herbert comes home again, and when he came the first acquaintance he met was Ivy Peters. Ivy gets on the train at one of the little stations east of Sweet Water, where he had been trying a case. As he strolls through the Pullman he noticed among the passengers a young man in a grey flannel suit, with a silk shirt of one shade of blue and a necktie of another. After regarding this urban figure from the rear for a few seconds, Ivy glanced down at his own clothes with gloating satisfaction. Niel remembered these remarks dully, through the buzz of an idea. He felt that Ivy had drained the marsh quite as much to spite him and Mrs. Forrester as to reclaim the land. Moreover, he seemed to know that until this moment Ivy himself had not realized how much that consideration weighed with him. He and Ivy had disliked each other from childhood, blindly, instinctively, recognizing each other through antipathy, as hostile insects do. By draining the marsh Ivy had obliterated a few acres of something he hated, though he could not name it, and had asserted his power over the people who had loved those unproductive meadows for their idleness and silvery beauty. After Ivy had gone on into the smoker, Niel sat looking out at the windings of the Sweet Water and playing with his idea. The Old West had been settled by dreamers, great-hearted adventurers who were unpractical to the point of magnificence; a courteous brotherhood, strong in attack but weak in defence, who could conquer but could not hold. Now all the vast territory they had won was to be at the mercy of men like Ivy Peters, who had never dared anything, never risked anything. They would drink up the mirage, dispel the morning freshness, and root out the great brooding spirit of freedom, the generous, easy life of the great land-holders .The Captain sat with the soles of his boots together, his legs bowed out. Everything about him seemed to have grown heavier and weaker. His face was fatter and smoother; as if the features were running into each other, as when a wax face melts in the heat (Part 2, chapter 1). One night in the first week of July, a night of glorious moonlight, Niel found himself unable to read, or to stay indoors at all. He walked aimlessly down the wide, empty street, and crossed the first creek by the footbridge. The wide ripe fields, the whole country, seemed like a sleeping garden. One trod the dusty roads softly, not to disturb the deep slumber of the world. In the Forrester lane the scent of sweet clover hung heavy. It had always grown tall and green here ever since Niel could remember; the Captain would never let it be cut until the weeds ere mowed in the fall. “But he has a lease for five years, and he could make it very disagreeable for us, don’t you see? Besides, she speaks hurriedly, “there’s more than that. He’s invested a little money for me in Wyoming, in land. He gets splendid land from the Indians some way, for next to nothing. Don’t tell your uncle; I’ve no doubt it’s crooked. But the Judge is like Mr. Forrester; his methods don’t work nowadays (Part 2, chapter 3). Pretence at this point spurs up envoy till publication is thought to be done in the newspaper rather than being telephoned through Mrs. Beasley. Mrs. Forrester pays no heed to him, does not look at him, and sits staring at the wall (Part 2, chapter 4). Even after their misfortunes had begun to come upon them, she had maintained her old reserve. She had asked nothing and accepted nothing. Her demeanour toward the townspeople was always the same; easy, cordial, and impersonal. But the Captain was helpless, everything had changed. She could hold off the curious no longer. The townswomen brought soups and custards for the invalid. When they came to sit out the night with him, she turned the house over to them. She was worn out; so exhausted that she was dull to what went on about her. The Mrs. Beasleys and Molly Tuckers had their chance at last. They went in and out of Mrs. Forrester’s kitchen as familiarly as they did out of one another’s. Finally, this leads to Captain Forrester’s death which occurs in December. The funeral was large. Old settlers and farmer folk came from all over the county to follow the pioneer’s body to the grave (Part 2, chapter 5 & 6). Mercy drops around on morning which is a grace time bound period for some goodies. Niel left the house without further argument, and though that was three weeks ago, he had not been back since. Mrs. Forrester had called to see his uncle in the meantime. The Judge was as courtly as ever in his manner toward her, but he was deeply hurt by her defection, and his cherishing care for her would never be revived. He had attended to all Captain Forrester’s business for twenty years, and since the failure of the Denver bank had never deducted a penny for fees from the money entrusted to him. Mrs. Forrester had treated him very badly. She had given him no warning. One day Ivy Peters had come into the office with a written order from her, requesting that an accounting, and all funds and securities, be turned over to him. Since then she had never spoken of the matter to the Judge, or to Niel, save in that conversation about the sale of the property (Part 2, chapter 7 & 8). One morning when a warm May wind was whirling the dust up the street, Mrs. Forrester came smiling into Judge Pommeroy’s office, wearing a new spring bonnet, and a short black velvet cape, fastened at the neck with a bunch of violets Although betrayed, victimized, Marian Forrester wrests bitter sweet triumph from her refusal to assume the role of victim. Her musical laugh dominates the novel; years after he has left Sweetwater, Certainly in A Lost Lady, the time is out of joint and there was something rotten in the land. Moreover, in A Lost Lady, a sin Hamlet, women are victims of masculine heroics, self-interest, and ignorance. In 1891Cather perceived Hamlets inability to accept his mother as a woman," committing an error common to women of her day, because he would limit her scope to motherhood (Smith, Finding Marian F orrester: A Rest orative Reading of). Works Cited Smith, Anneliese H. Finding Marian F orrester: A Rest orative Reading of. u.s.: Digital Commons, 1978. Finding Marian F orrester: A Rest orative Reading of. U.S., 1978. willa, cathrs. a lady lost. U.S, 1923. Read More