The Professor's House by Willa Cather

First published: 1925

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: A few years after World War I

Locale: Hamilton, near Lake Michigan

Principal characters

• Godfrey St. Peter, a middle-aged teacher and historian
• Lillian St. Peter, his wife
• Rosamond and Kathleen, their daughters
• Louie Marcellus, Rosamond’s husband
• Scott McGregor, Kathleen’s husband
• Tom Outland, a former student at Hamilton
• Augusta, a seamstress

The Story:

The Oxford prize for history brings Professor Godfrey St. Peter not only a certain international reputation but also the sum of five thousand pounds. The five thousand pounds, in turn, helps the St. Peter family build a new house, into which the professor is frankly reluctant to move.

For half a lifetime, the attic of the old house has been his favorite spot—it was there that he had done his best writing, with his daughters’ dress forms for his only company—and it is in this workroom that Augusta, the family sewing woman, finds him when she arrives to transfer the dress forms to the new house. To her astonishment, the professor declares quizzically that she cannot have them; he intends to retain the old house to preserve his workroom intact, and everything must be left as it is.

Nevertheless, the new house makes its own claims. That same evening the professor hosts a small dinner party for a visiting Englishman. The professor’s daughters and their husbands are present, and during dinner, the conversation turns to the new country house being built by Rosamond and Louie. Louie explains to the visitor why the name Outland had been selected for the estate. Tom Outland had been a brilliant scientific student at Hamilton, as well as the professor’s protégé. Before being killed in the war, he had been engaged to Rosamond. His will had left everything to her, including control of his revolutionary invention, the Outland vacuum. Later, Louie Marcellus married Rosamond and successfully marketed Tom’s invention. The new house, Louie had concluded, would serve in some measure as a memorial to Outland.

Louie’s lack of reserve visibly irritates the McGregors, and the professor maintains a cool silence. The next morning, his wife takes him to task for it. Lillian has been fiercely jealous of her husband’s interest in Tom Outland. The professor finds himself reflecting that people who fall in love, and who go on being in love, always meet with something that suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Oddly enough, in the case of Lillian and her husband, it had seemed to be his pupil, Tom Outland.

More and more, the professor seeks the refuge of his study in the old house, where he can insulate himself against increasing family strain. Even there, however, there are interruptions. Once it is Rosamond, self-conscious about accepting all the benefits of the Outland invention. Her father refuses to share her good fortune but suggests that she aid cancer-ridden Professor Crane, who had collaborated with Tom in his experiments. Rosamond stiffens immediately, for outside the family, she recognizes no obligations.

Soon there is more evidence that the family is drifting apart. Kathleen confesses to her father her violent reaction to Rosamond’s arrogance. It becomes known that Louie, attempting to join the Arts and Letters Club, had been blackballed by his brother-in-law. The professor is distressed by the rift between his daughters, both of whom he loves, although he has a special affection for Kathleen.

Louie’s real fondness for the St. Peters is demonstrated when the time comes for the professor to fill a lecture date in Chicago. Louie and Rosamond, paying all bills, take them to Chicago, install them in a luxurious hotel suite, and tempt them with diversions. During a performance of Mignon, Lillian, softened by memories aroused by the opera, confirms the professor’s impression that her resentment of Tom has affected their marriage.

Louie’s next plan is even more elaborate: He and Rosamond will take the professor and Lillian to France for the summer. The professor loves France, but he recognizes the futility of trying to compromise his and Louie’s ideas of a European vacation. He begs off, pleading the pressure of work, and eventually the others depart without him.

The professor moves back into the old house and luxuriates in independence. He decides to edit for publication Tom’s youthful diary, and constantly he turns over in his mind the events in Tom’s dramatic history. Years before, Tom had appeared on the professor’s doorstep as a sunburned young man who was obviously unaccustomed to the ways of society. Tom wanted to go to college, although his only previous instruction had come from a priest in New Mexico. Interested and curious, the professor saw to it that Tom had a chance to make up his deficiencies and enter the university. The St. Peter house became the boy’s second home, and the little girls were endlessly fascinated by his tales of the Southwest. To them, he confided that his parents had died during their wagon journey westward and that he had been adopted by a kindly worker on the Santa Fe Railroad.

Tom’s diary is chiefly concerned with his strangest boyhood adventure. To regain his strength after an attack of pneumonia, he became a herd rider on the summer range. With him was his closest friend, Roddie Blake. On the range, Tom and Roddie were challenged by the nearness of the mysterious Blue Mesa, hitherto unclimbed and unexplored. They saved their wages and made plans; when their job was finished, they set out to conquer Blue Mesa.

They had made a striking discovery. In the remote canyons of the mesa are Indian rock villages, undisturbed for three hundred years and in a miraculous state of preservation. This gift of history had stirred Tom to a strong decision. His find should be presented to his country; the relics must not be exploited for profit. With Roddie’s consent, he took six hundred dollars, boarded a train, and left for Washington. Weeks later he returned, worn out by red tape and indifference, only to learn that Roddie had finally weakened and sold the Indian treasures to a foreign scientist. In a climax of bitterness, he quarreled with Roddie. A year later, he walked into the professor’s garden.

Recalling Tom has always brought the professor a kind of second youth. Tom is the type of person the professor had started out to be—vigorous, unspoiled, and ambitious. Marrying Lillian had brought happiness, nonetheless real for having now faded; but it has chained him as well, he feels, and diverted the true course of his life. Now, reviewing the past, the professor suddenly feels tired and old. At the news that the travelers will soon return, he feels he cannot again assume a family role that had become meaningless.

When Augusta comes for the keys to reopen the new house, she finds the professor lying unconscious on the floor of his den. Its one window had blown shut and the unvented gas stove had done the rest. Augusta sends for the doctor, and the professor is revived. His temporary release from consciousness had cleared his mind. He is ready not only to face his family but also himself and a problem that came too late for him to flee.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Willa Cather. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. A collection of essays about Cather. Two important and very different interpretations of The Professor’s House appear in essays by David Daiches and E. K. Brown. A good place to start research on Cather.

De Roche, Linda. Student Companion to Willa Cather. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006. An introductory overview of Cather’s life and work aimed at high school and college students and general readers. Discusses the character development, themes, and plots of six novels, with chapter 7 focusing on The Professor’s House.

Leddy, Michael. “The Professor’s House: The Sense of an Ending.” Studies in the Novel 23 (Winter, 1991): 443-451. Leddy maintains that the novel’s ending makes a valid, although vague, point. The professor’s rediscovery of his boyhood home in Kansas points to a renewal or rebirth at the end of the story.

Lindermann, Marilee. The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Thirteen essays, including those that examine Cather’s politics, sexuality, and modernism. One of the essays focuses on The Professor’s House.

Love, Glen A. “Place, Style, and Human Nature in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House.” In Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Interprets the novel from the perspective of ecocriticism, or the application of ideas about ecology and the environment to literary works.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Professor’s House: Cather, Hemingway, and the Chastening of American Prose Style.” Western American Literature 24 (February, 1990): 295-311. Love argues that Cather’s writing style is closer to the modern style because of her economy and lack of emotion. Uses The Professor’s House as an example of this prose style.

O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. O’Brien maintains that the character of the professor in the novel is the alter ego of Cather.

Stout, Janis P., ed. Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Essays examine the objects—or material culture—in Cather’s life and the objects about which she wrote. Other topics include the symbolism of quilts as well as consumerism in “’An Orgy of Acquisition’: The Female Consumer, Infidelity, and Commodity Culture in A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House.”

Trout, Steven. Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Analyzes Cather’s career and work during and after World War I, including a reappraisal of The Professor’s House. Trout argues this novel is “haunted” by the presence of the war.