Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Student ID: 630000682
“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now
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Large, and without mercy” - Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael: A
Study of Melville (1947)
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In order to iterate its importance, it is crucial to clarify what one means by “space”
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Charles Olson refers to Folsom cave, a vast open quarry on the outskirts of
Folsom, New Mexico
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It is through this reference that, I believe, Olson draws our attention to elements of space that
are often overlooked: what it preserves, contains and displaces; how it is inhabited, protected and
interacted with
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Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House is certainly a product of
the space from which it evolved; America’s post World War One attitude of displacement and
protectiveness is prevalent throughout the novel, shaping the fictional literary space and how spaces
within The Professor’s House are perceived by the reader
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Perhaps the most important function of space in The Professor’s House is its relationship
with the temporal
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Gullón explores this idea further in his journal On Space in the Novel,
identifying that “intemporalised, space would lack any distinguishable elements
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This concept is ingrained in Cather’s writing, particularly in the
development of St Peter’s character in Book One of The Professor’s House
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Cather makes the significance of the old house and its relationship to time evident
through her unflattering description of it
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As a historian, this attachment to the past and spaces that embody the past is perhaps
simply fitting to his character
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It is a physical space that represents a period of time; “when the whole plan of his
narrative was coming clearer and clearer all the time, when he could feel his hand growing easier
with his material… and his relation with his work was becoming every day more simple, natural,
and happy” (21)
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The old house may be considered as a symbol of “those golden days” (22) that money did buy; a
space that is integral to the perception and development of St Peter’s character
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A further crucial notion of space in The Professor’s House is that of gendered space, which

Student ID: 630000682
is particularly impactful on how the reader perceives the relationship between St Peter and his
family
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One naturally assumes St Peter’s study as the “male” space; “the one
place in the house where he could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic
life” (15)
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It is described as “the most
inconvenient study a man could possibly have”, yet St Peter deliberately encloses it as a scholarly
and predominantly male space to avoid becoming “interested in what the children were doing, or in
what his wife was doing” (16)
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His fond,
anthropomorphised description of the sewing forms, “ample and billowy (as if you might lay your
head upon its deep-breathing softness and rest safe forever)” (9), can perhaps most obviously be
equated to a representation of his wife and daughters, but, in his solitary and gendered space, they
exist with “no legs, as one could see all too well, no viscera behind its glistening ribs” (9)
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It presented the most unsympathetic
surface image imaginable” (9)
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I believe that the presence of
only a “dead, opaque” (9) female figure in St Peter’s study space serves to foreshadow St Peter’s
dwindling sense of obligation to his wife and family outside of his gendered working space; they
are a reminder of “the best years of his life… and joyful years they had been… but they were
gone” (235), and can only exist outside of the domestic, feminine space as limbless, lifeless

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memory
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Furthermore, Cather uses space as a structural device in The Professor’s House through her
emphasis upon open and closed spaces
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To cite Cather’s
own reflections upon the function of an open window, she recalls viewing Dutch genre paintings in
Paris, which presented “a living-room warmly furnished, or a kitchen full of food and coppers…
there was a square window, open… the feeling of the sea that one got through those square
windows was remarkable” (Willa Cather on Writing 30-32)
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Much like the Dutch genre painting’s
open window, Tom Outland’s Story provokes a sense of context beyond the actual objects
presented, expanding the geographical, temporal and literary space of the novel
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Its “low ceiling sloped down on three sides, the slant being
interrupted on the east by a single square window, swinging outward on hinges and held ajar” (7);
“from the window he could see, far away, just on the horizon, a long, blue, hazy smear - Lake
Michigan” (18)
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It creates a space that is both integral
to temporality (“he could see… the inland sea of his childhood” 18) and to the human condition
(“this was the sole opening for light and air” 7)
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The open window features
in Book One, but disappears in Book Two, perhaps because Book Two is set in a time previous to
that of the framing narrative, and is therefore outside of the spatial-temporal literary space that
Cather has created
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However, that perhaps alone is
only a surface reading
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As the “sole opening for light and air”, the open space of the window is relied
upon; without it, “the air would speedily become unfit to breathe” (15)
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In
Book 3, however, this "series of frames, narrative open windows… promise something real, but…
once entered reveal disorder and emptiness" (Rosowski 151)
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With no more to contribute to his work and
a family that had “outgrown any great need of him” (235), the transition from open to closed space
represents that “he had let something go - and it was gone” (237)
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Literary notions of space construct “an increasingly complex and
lifelike image of the world” (1), particularly when paired with temporality, which Cather

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successfully executed through the associations of space and time in the old house
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“Each writer’s own
distinct ‘geography’ is made up of multiple, heterogeneous stations… through which characters
travel”, and it is through this movement that a novel gains “the very expression of will, choice, and
personal disposition” (228)
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I would further assert that space is not only important to The Professor’s
House, but to the American novel as a whole
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To assert that the
many notions of space in The Professor’s House are anything but of paramount importance seems to
me to be denying the novel of its American identity, when there was no other geographical space
from which the text could have arisen
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(1920) Space, Time and Deity, the Gifford lectures at Glasgow, 1916-1918
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Arnold, M
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3, Article 8
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and Tennant, S
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United States: University of Nebraska Press
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(2013) The Professor’s House
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Gomel, E
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United Kingdom: Routledge
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(1975) ‘On Space In The Novel ’, Critical Inquiry, Vol 2, No
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Mucignat, R
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United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing Limited
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J
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Lincoln: Lincoln  :
University of Nebraska Press, c1986
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M
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United
States: University Press of Virginia
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(2010) Melting-pot Modernism
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