Reward By Willa Cather: An Analysis

Cather herself had spent some time in Washington, D.C. while working for the Nebraska State Journal and the Index of Pittsburgh Life writing criticism and interviews with comments on the Washington cultural and social scenes (Willa 102). In an effort to supplement her income while there, Cather took a job as a translator in a government office identifying the slaving clerks her fictional Tom later encounters (Willa 102). In the novel, discouraged by Tom’s inability to obtain governmental support, Roddy sells the remaining artifacts which later ends the friendship and dissolves their makeshift family structure, especially since the death of Henry. The inclusion of the excavations turning up beautiful Native American objects and later sell of …show more content…
Tom does, however, eventually come to terms with the intrusion of “the commercial into the idealized world of the mesa” and spends a summer alone there only to find “a unification of the world and of the self” leaving him with almost a spiritual feeling similar to that of St. Peter in his special places (his study and garden), as well as Cather in her friend’s former sewing room (Baker 262). The inclusion of this Second Book detailing Outland’s background elicits great debate among scholars in that some find it effective whereas others consider it …show more content…
Peter “loses” himself in the third, shortest, and final section of the novel. Simply stated, St. Peter lost his purpose and felt it was the end. The building of his family, his career, and his series was done leaving him without motivation. In awe of the natural environment he created (trees, brier, and herbs) during the springtime when his depression, homesickness and fret overtook him, the Professor would bring “down his books and papers” and work off his discontent (The Professor’s House 105). Once his family travels to France and similar to Tom who found his spiritual self while alone on the mesa, St. Peter returns to his garden finding his primitive self who “was only interested in earth and woods and water” resulting in a “sad pleasure” (The Professor’s House 260). Chaliff asserts that the dissatisfaction with the present situation leads the professor to “seek the extermination of his personality in two ways” the first being “he begins to regress to the presexual days of his Kansas boyhood” and simultaneously “becomes convinced that he will die shortly” (71). Although Tom Outland would never “come back again through the garden door,” another one had: “the boy the Professor had long ago left behind him in Kansas, in the Solomon Valley-the original, unmodified Godfrey St. Peter” (The Professor’s House 259). That boy, according to the aged St. Peter, was forgotten once he met