The Ancient People
RESPONDING TO THE ANCIENT PEOPLE BY WILLA CATHER
In Willa Cather’s “the Ancient People” a meaningful topography is created by the writer that ends up having profound effects on her main character, Thea Kronberg. The place is Panther Canyon near the San Francisco Mountains of Arizona. Not only does Thea’s experience in the canyon change her, it also acts to drive the narration forward, as evidenced by the connection she makes in the canyon with Fred Ottenburg, and their subsequent experience upon leaving the canyon together. The space of Panther Canyon we are presented with (through its connection with Thea) has many of the same humanistic and phenomenological elements discussed by both Tim Cresswell in his discussion of place as well as Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space.
When Thea first arrives at the Ottenburg ranch in the San Francisco Mountains we quickly learn that she has reached a point of stagnation in her life and career as an opera student singer. We are told that her “student life [had] closed behind her like a forest” in the city of Chicago. Soon we discover what has brought Thea to this particular place when we learn that “she was getting back to the earliest sources of gladness that she could remember. She had loved the sun, and the brilliant solitudes of sand and sun.” This desire points to a hope for some kind of restorative power that the canyon might provide. It also suggests a hope for discovering an unmediated experience that transcends the confines and framing imposed by cultural construction. In this sense the place experience Thea is hoping for is fundamentally linked to the humanistic phenomenology described by both Creswell and Bachelard.
That Thea’s experience of place in Panther Canyon is linked to the type of phenomenology espoused by Bachelard can be seen in descriptions of her time spent in Panther Canyon. We are told that “here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding pleasant and incomplete thoughts in her mind.” Furthermore, these thoughts “were scarcely clear enough to be called ideas. They had…almost nothing to do with words…it was much more like a sensation than like an idea, or an act of remembering.” This intimate, deep connection and the “wordless thoughts” it generates in Thea (born in the immensity of Panther Canyon and its abandoned cliff dwellings) falls very much in line with the phenomenological project outlined by Bachelard.
Bachelard’s discussion of the deep human yearning and need for nested space takes on special resonance when Thea makes a temporary nested home high in the Anasazi cliff dwellings of the canyon. This nesting behavior is deepened by the wide variety of birds that appear throughout the narration. And just as birdsongs is an essential part of the sonic canyon space created by Cather, so does Thea’s own voice (her own birdsong) grow stronger. We are told that “she had not been singing much, but she knew that her voice was more interesting than it had ever been before…voice was, first of all, vitality; a lightness in the body and a driving power in the blood. If she had, she could sing.” Thus, the space of Panther Canyon has acted to change Thea in a core, meaningful way.
More evidence of the space of Panther Canyon fundamentally changing Thea comes through her interactions with Fred Ottenburg. Through his observations we learn that Thea (much like the twisting canyon and water that runs through it) relies heavily on instinct and impulse. She has a “big nature” that Fred feels only he truly knows and can cultivate (perhaps from the shared power of their experiences together in Panther Canyon). This is drawn out even further by Cather in contrasting Thea with Fred’s first wife, Edith Beers. Whereas Thea (the canyon dweller and opera singer) is described as “impulsive,” “jovial,” “merry,” and “spontaneous” the socialite Edith is described with words like “childish,” “scornful,” “mobile,” and “disconnected.” In this way a clear binary has been established between the restorative and healing powers of nature (as seen through Thea) and the crippling, cruel life created in an urban setting (as evidenced by the description we are given of Edith). Through this contrast, and the fact that Fred clearly loves Thea and her “nature” more than Edith who lives half a continent away from him in California, we are given further evidence of the deep and meaningful connection to place that has acted to restore and expand the life of Thea Kronberg.