I grew up in a small Pennsylvania steel mill
town in the 1960’s, a repressive atmosphere for self-expression, especially by
women. The individual artistic voice was
drowned by the sound of the train whistle passing by my bedroom window. Underneath that train’s song, though, underneath
my breath, stories and melodies lived and later found form as I revisited them
through my adult eyes. In my narrative
song, “The Rape of Leah,” I take the shocking early memory of watching my
sister being raped and coolly employ a Celtic lilt to deliver the tale in the
old style of the English and Scottish Child ballads. These songs describe unrequited love and
realized desire, as well as sordid tales of lies and murder. History lives and teaches through song. Relying on the third-person lyric, meter, and
modal melody, this approach to songwriting allows the listener to find her own sense of place within the song form,
with no “leading” by the singer, only a retelling of the story:
“She
was a child, a child of God;
The
Catholic Church had named her one.
She
lost her father as a youth,
Her
mother took the next man’s roof.
He
took her to his bedroom lair;
He
slapped her face and cut her hair.
He
told her what she was to say,
It
was the Rape of Leah.
O
Leah, Leah, where art thou?
Named
for the chaste sister of Rachel.
When
God said, “Honor mums and dads”
What
of the Rape of Leah?”
To present the story another way might invite a sympathetic,
emotionally-derived rage toward the rapist instead of a deeper questioning of
the conditions under which such a horrific trauma could occur. Once again, the role of the artist is to show
the
truth. Questions are presented: What century is this? Why did this “next man’s roof” replace Leah’s
father. Is the “mum” desperate or
poor? Why did the “mum” let this
happen? Does Leah, as namesake of a
Biblical chaste woman, have an archetypal role to break free of? Does the role of religion absolve, by
omission of its resistance, this rape? Ultimately,
the audience makes the judgments offered by this convention.
Similarly,
Cather utilizes this third-person narrative and strong dialogue style in The Song of the Lark in her effort to
define her characters in their own sense
of place. The gifted musican and
singer, Thea Kronborg, must transcend the relationships and life in this small
Moonstone, Colorado town. Thea’s physician, confidante and patron, Dr. Archie,
represents a deeper, hidden world she must break free of to emerge into her
true self. Nancy Gobatto, in her paper,
“Friends of Childhood:
Evidence of Childhood Sexual Abuse in Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark,” points out Cather’s narrative as Archie, her
doctor, examines the eleven year old Thea, who is sick with a fever:
“He had no children of his own. His marriage was a very
unhappy one. As he lifted and undressed
Thea, he thought to himself what a beautiful thing a little girl's body was—like
a flower. Doctor Archie could not help thinking how he would cherish a little
creature like this if she were his. Her hands, so
little and hot. (Cather 9)”
To view this
passage through the frame Gobatto suggests – that Archie has had or is having a
sexually-abusive relationship with Thea - is to understand why Thea is so driven to be an artist and leave the confining grips of
her hometown. Later, after Thea leaves
Moonstone for Chicago to study with Harsanyi, the narrator analyzes her sullen
nature and writes,
“…she
was not able to forget her own poverty in the richness of the world. Often, when he played for her, her face was
the picture of restless misery…Sometimes, when she listened, she would swallow
hard…and look nervously from left to right…as if she were naked and heard
someone coming. (Cather 164)
Cather
is clearly making references to a level of post-traumatic stress disorder often
present in victims of sexual abuse. This
kind of fight or flight mechanism can
crush or propel emotions, dreams and relationships. Cather propels Thea’s dreams, and claims,
“Only what I hold in my two hands is there for me” (Cather 163).
If
Cather found her voice after the allowance by Jewitt to “find your own quiet center of life and write from that,”
it begs the question whether Cather herself was propelled by the scourge of
childhood trauma
Cather originally attended college to pursue science and
medicine, but the call of the arts held more immediate and longer-lasting
rewards. This window gave Cather the
view by which she could deal with everything personal through her novels. She was
so guarded, in fact, that she ordered all her private letters, diaries and journals, destroyed upon her death.
In
her short story, “Coming, Aphrodite!,” Cather again uses a driven
musician/singer, Eden Bowers, as her female protagonist and the voyeuristic
painter, Don Hedger, as her male counterpart.
Generally under-inspired, Hedger’s own sense of joie de vive is awakened when he discovers this formidable, young,
and ambitious woman, who takes him for her lover. However, Hedger falls in love and forgets about his own
work entirely. Eden, though, is only
interested ultimately in her career.
This reversal of male and female stereotypical roles is a definitive
statement on Cather’s part. She, through
Eden, is taking control of herself, her career, and her relationships. Much like Thea and Cather, Eden knows what
she wants and approaches it with single-mindedness. Cather
establishes, through these characters, two very important assertions about
women. First, women are capable of
tremendous artistic vision and success; and second, women are capable of
negotiating the more subtle cunning and shrewd decision-making required when
operating in the world where the artistic goal is the raison d’être.
I
am an artist. I come from artists;
singers and musicians. I am compelled to
write and at times to paint. As a
child, I studied classical piano and played in church, like Thea, and decided
to be an artist very young, like Thea. I
also have never been able to sustain a love relationship for enough years to brag. As I read Willa Cather’s work, her stories of
women artists and their need for severe independence and a sense of place in the world, I wonder if my own artistic force
isn’t somehow fueled by the scene of rape I witnessed at age five. It is a safe vantage point to create characterizations that describe
personal events or feelings. Speaking
the truth through art allows the creator to stand separate while simultaneously
taking ownership and control of those events.
Ten
years ago, while revisiting the memory of this scene of rape and others like it
from my childhood, I pushed paint onto canvases impasto-style and ravaged the
recesses of my subconscious. I found myself painting like a child – stick
figures representing people and geometric shapes representing objects. My
emotional/neuro-muscular memories directed the paintbrush as I re-witnessed
these images. The painting “The Rape of
Leah,” which “appeared” prior to the song form, splats a red background with a
black isosceles triangle (phallus) pointing at the white-dressed girl with no
arms. At the bottom, closest to the
viewer, are two tiny feet and the skirt of MY nightgown. I can second Cather’s quote about artists
knowing the difficulty of truth. Whether
homosexuality or child rape, each carries a stigma of isolation and shame which
needs to be expressed. I place my
“issues” on canvas to exorcise them from my body; to stand back and look at
them from different angles, from outside of myself. In
this respect, I believe Cather used the prairie as her canvas.
Art
for love’s sake is visible throughout history in paint, prose, and music. From DiVinci’s “Mona Lisa” to Shakespeare’s
“Dark Lady” and Baez’s “Diamonds and Rust,” artists unfold, stretch, and
dissect this greatest of mysterious forces – human love. Cather, however, took this mystery and gave
it second chair in the orchestra pit.
First chair belonged to the compass of the inner eye – the experiential
internal power of alighting from within.
As she explained in “The Novel Demeuble:”
It
is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by
the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact of
the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel… drama…to poetry itself.(Cather 51)
It is with our natural impulses born not of interactive human relationships as
much as from relationship with our own
experience, from birth to death, that we touch this “inexplicable
presence.”
Cather’s
decision or calling to use her pen for this end has left the world a great
mystery in its own right. For,
undoubtedly, she is the firefly, the darkness, and the light, all at once; a
truly inexplicable presence.
copyright 2012 SajaMaka Publishing
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