A+Wagner+Matinee

Willa Cather (1873-1947) grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska and it is the setting for many of her stories.

Loss of the Aesthetic By: Krista Craig

Links: Group H Main Page "Trifles" "The Chrysanthemums"

Modernist artists and writers tackled many issues of modern life in America. With industrialization brought many changes to every Americans life and one of the issues that Modernists writers were concerned with was the loss of the aesthetic in everyday life. Art, music and literature were “issues of free expression with which many Modernist writers were concerned were thus related to deeply conflicted questions of social policy and cultural norms” (Lauter 842). Willa Cather was one Modernist writer that explored this issue of free expression and cultural norms in “A Wagner Matinee”, and she also challenged these issues in her own life. “A Wagner Matinee” is one such story that explores the loss of the aesthetic, specifically music, in the life of a former music teacher and the effect that this loss had on her life not only as a music lover, but as a woman also.

“My Aunt Georgiana had been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties” (Cather 1036). But now she was the wife of a farmer and “for thirty years my aunt had not been farther than fifty miles from the homestead” (1036). The narrator Clark, who is her nephew, has memories of summers spent on the farm with his aunt and uncle and how she introduced him to Shakespeare, mythology and how to play the piano. But she warns him about his interest in the arts; “don’t love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you” because she knew from experience. (1036) Once she was married and moved to the frontier in Nebraska, the music ended until she returned to Boston, thirty years later, to visit Clark. He feels that he owes Aunt Georgiana for “all the good that ever came my way” and he feels a close connection to her. (1036) So he wants to repay her for the affect that she had on his life by taking her to “A Wagner Matinee”.

Clark immediately notices how the long and hard years spent on the prairie had affected her. He notes that “she seemed not to realize that she was in the city where she has spent her youth, the place longed for hungrily half a lifetime” ago and that the train ride into the city had made her sick. (Cather 1037) He also says that “she questioned me absently about the various changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to a certain weakling calf” (Cather 1037). This poor woman has been completely disconnected from her past, specifically music, and has lost her identity due to this disconnect from the aesthetic. And Clark observes the effect that this disconnection has on Aunt Georgiana when he takes her to see the symphony orchestra perform a Wagner program.

When the music began “Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat sleeve” and “then it was I first realized that for her this broke a silence of thirty years” (Cather 1038). She continues to have physical responses to the music. She worked “her fingers mechanically upon her black dress” as if recalling the piano score she used to play and she closed her eyes, “but the tears were glistening on her cheeks” (1038). Clark realizes that even though she has been separated from music for so long that “it never really died, then—the soul which can suffer so excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only” (1039). At the intermission she asks Clark “you have been hearing this ever since you left me, Clark?” (1039). And throughout the second half of the performance she continued to weep “quietly, but almost continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows in a rain-storm” (1039). She was so moved by the end of the performance that “she burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly, ‘I don’t want to go, Clark!’” (1039). In one afternoon, Aunt Georgiana rediscovered what she had been missing in her life and what she had given up in order to fulfill her duties as a wife of a farmer.

Aunt Georgiana had sacrificed her love of music, art and literature in order to accept her cultural role as a woman in a male dominated society. Willa Cather was quiet the opposite; she was “a tomboy who fought the restrictions placed on “young ladies” in the American version of the Victorian era in which she grew up” (O’Connor 1034). A recent biographer Sharon O’Brien “finds her early rebellion against conventional behavior in dress and demeanor a sign of the assertiveness that gave Cather the confidence she needed to succeed in a culture that was so repressive to women who did not accept their culturally assigned roles” (1034). Aunt Georgiana fell in love and found that she had to give up her life as a music teacher in order to fulfill her wifely duties. But what recourse would she of have had in those days? None. Divorce was not an option and so Aunt Georgiana did the only thing that she could do; she accepted her fate and lost herself and her identity as a musician and teacher, and as a woman. Cather on the other hand, avoided “binding romantic entanglements with either the men or the women in her life in order to devote all her energies to her writing” (1035). She was unwilling to give up or to give in to the demands of being a “real woman” in a man’s world, and “A Wagner Matinee” explores how the sacrifice and the loss of the aesthetic can truly affect someone’s life.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) is the composer of the music that Cather uses in "A Wagner Matinee".

Sources for paper:

Cather, Willa. “A Wagner Matinee.” __The Heath Anthology of American Literature.__ __Volume D.__ Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2006. 842, 1034-1039.

Internet Sources:

· http://cather.unl.edu/ Access to information on Willa Cather and her writings. · http://www.online-literature.com/willa-cather/1594/ Another site to access the story and information about Willa Cather · http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/Cather.htm Literary criticism of Cather’s works. · http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_willa_cather.htm Information on Cather and women’s history. · http://www.trell.org/wagner/ Information on Richard Wagner and the music that Cather uses in the story. · http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/composer/wagner.html History on Richard Wagner and samples of some of his operas. · http://www.mfiles.co.uk/composers/Richard-Wagner.htm More information on Wagner and his music.