Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s name may also be a reference to another patron of the arts, the young Mrs. Florence Mayer who was married to one of the owners of the largest department store in Chicago in the decades before the twentieth century, Schlesinger and Mayer. The firm was so profitable that they hired Louis Sullivan to build a new department store building for the firm, at the corner of Madison and State streets in 1902. The building would eventually be leased to Carson, Pirie, Scott, and Company, whose name is still associated with it. Mayer was a student of Sarah Robinson Duff, a well-known voice teacher in Chicago. In a city already known to produce well-trained operatic voices, Duff had a particularly promising student: sixteen-year-old Mary Garden. Garden’s family had financed the move to Chicago for her training, but Duff felt that it was time for her promising pupil to begin training in Paris, something her family could not afford. Duff asked the Mayers to finance Garden’s training abroad. They agreed.74 Cather bases characters on Mary Garden in two stories set in New York that were published in the later collection Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920): “Coming, Aphrodite,” and “Scandal.” Despite Cather’s later references to Garden, her training in Chicago, and the closeness of Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s and Mrs. Mayer’s names, only James Woodress has suggested that Mary Garden may be one of the singers whose life Cather drew upon while constructing Thea.75 Most scholarship misses this connection because Thea is more generally read as a version of Olive Fremstad, whom Cather knew and adored as an artist.

  This oversight has prevented an understanding of the darker implications of Thea’s Chicago connections and the ways in which she must negotiate the complexities of patronage stemming from these connections. The relationship between Florence Mayer and her protégé was very complicated. Once abroad, Garden flitted between multiple personas: genteel lady whose manners matched those of her sponsor’s class, bohemian who wished only for liberty, and ill-mannered boor whose manners reflected badly on the Mayers. At this point, Garden’s talents clearly surpassed those of Mayer’s and Mayer’s realization that she would be nothing more than an amateur singer whose voice was aging just as Garden’s star was ascending surely produced tension.76 Susan Rutherford suspects that “eventually, the relationship between Garden and the Mayers snapped under the strain of clashing expectations and supposed duties.”77 Someone sent letters anonymously to Florence Mayer that suggested that Garden had a baby out of wedlock. An international scandal developed, where some thought Mayer was trying to destroy Garden’s career and others thought Garden was trying to destroy the Mayer’s reputation. Mayer even spoke to the Tribune to set the record straight that she did not start the rumor, nor did Garden have a baby. Cather drew on this struggle in her later stories about Garden.

  The novel draws Thea’s participation in patronage and her use of her Chicago connections and patrons as conflicted and even suggests it is vampiric. Thea lusts after fame and fortune and this causes her to be associated imagistically with the other female gold diggers in the novel. Fred Ottenburg’s mother declares his first wife Edith a “savage” when she does not divorce her son.78 Her word choice echoes an epigraph often connected to Thea in earlier chapters. Thea has “that unfortunate squint; it gives her that vacant Swede look, like an animal,”79 and is repeatedly called that “savage blonde” and “a fine young savage.”80 However, Thea inverts the connotations of the word savage when she smiles “with the natural contempt of strength for weakness, with the sense of physical security which makes the savage merciless.”81 Bram Dijkstra has shown that “by 1900 the vampire had come to represent woman as the personification of everything negative that linked sex, ownership and money.”82 It was the unnatural woman, the barren and childless woman, who lusted after gold and man’s essence and became identified with the vampire.

  The vampiric similarities between Thea and the other women foreshadow her own emergence as a metaphorical vampire in the novel’s last chapter. Perhaps, she, too, has been feeding off of Fred and Dr. Archie. Her last name, Kronborg, rings with sounds of money and wealth, as does the name of her future husband Frank. She spends the majority of the novel lambasting cheap things and cheap people, declaring, “To do any of the things one wants to do, one has to have lots and lots of money.”83 Stated to Dr. Archie, this elicits an immediate response from the Doctor who asks if she needs any. Thea may be read here and during other similar conversations as a gold digger, exactly like Edith and perhaps Belle Archie as well. The eruption of the gothic vampire into Cather’s realist novel causes what Judith Halberstam labels, “the disintegration in form and content” and should be seen as, therefore, a very modern device.84 Vampires do not seemingly have a place in a realistic novel and their presence calls every moment that appears realistic into question. In the last part of the novel, we must ask questions about Thea’s growth and artistic designs and whether it had been perverted by her access to Chicago’s club scene and the patrons she met there.

  In the last section, the third-person narrator bluntly informs us:

  The next time Dr. Archie came to Moonstone, he came to be a pallbearer at Mrs. Kronborg’s funeral. When he last looked at her, she was so serene and queenly that he went back to Denver feeling almost as if he had helped to bury Thea Kronborg herself. The handsome head in the coffin seemed to him much more really Thea than did the radiant young woman in the picture, looking about at the Gothic vaultings and greeting the Hall of Song.85

  Here, we are shown the ideal late-Victorian woman: serene, queenly, and dead. But, Dr. Archie’s premonition implies that Thea doesn’t survive the novel either. Her head replaces her mother’s and so the vision of the new woman or new female artist, who is about to appear before us, is cloaked in an image of death. The substitution of the female artist for her dead mother reveals Dr. Archie’s own difficulties with Thea’s revision of a proper woman’s place. She is quite alive and unmarried; but, the familiar Thea has been killed off and replaced by the haughty Diva Kronborg. The last section begins with this paradox because Dr. Archie must wrestle with the uncanny Kronborg for the remainder of the narrative.

  In case Dr. Archie’s premonition is overlooked, Cather sprinkles additional references to the new state of things for Kronborg/Thea. Her new name suggests both age and time and identifies her as a witchy Crone. She draws near to Kristeva’s descriptions of the female body as representing disorder and the taboo by being irregular, aged, and most of all grotesque.86 When she finally appears in front of Dr. Archie, it is unsettling: “She was standing in the middle of the room, in a white silk shirtwaist and a short black velvet skirt, which somehow suggested that they had ‘cut off her petticoats all round about.’ She looked distinctly clipped and plucked.”87 Dr. Archie considers, “She seemed to him inappropriately young and inappropriately old, shorn of her long tresses at one end and of her long robes at the other.”88 The doctor uses the metaphor again when he tells Fred Ottenburg her friend and suitor, at the dinner table, “I was thinking how tired she looked, plucked of all her fine feathers.”89 Thea, the songbird and lark of the title, looks distinctly like a bird, plucked and shorn and ready to be cooked for dinner.

  The movement of the last section connects these images together rather tightly. Dr. Archie spends his time waiting for and trying to meet the Diva, commenting on her appearance, hearing her sing, and eating a succession of meals with and without her. He has become part of her audience, pushing her to perform and so he has developed an appetite for her. In a frenzy caused by a last-minute bid to fill in for a sick performer, Thea rushes around the room and curses the heavy meal she ate with Dr. Archie and Frank: “If only you hadn’t made me eat—Damn that duck!”90 With the two men, she consumes her own kind, a bird, and drives home the metaphor of vampiric feasting that has been building throughout the last chapters of the novel. Fred consoles her, “You need strength” and seems to insinuate that Thea will gain strength by killing and eating other birds, metaphorically the other singers trying to claw their way to the top of the pecking order.
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  However, Thea does give signs that Dr. Archie, Frank, and her audience are metaphorically consuming her. Upon returning to her apartment following a grand performance, her words reveal her thorough consumption. She simply states, “Consider me dead until Saturday, Dr. Archie.”92 On that chosen day, she will rise for her performance, the walking dead who has been clipped and plucked. Then she announces, “Doctor Archie, I invite you both to dine with me on Saturday night, the night after ‘Rheingold.’”93 If she derives strength from eating others like herself, then like a vampire she rises to feast with and on the two men who have financially and emotionally supported her through the long years of training. Yet, performing does make her “dead,” and the two men dine as heavily on birds as she does.

  For Freud, doubling initially acts as preservation against extinction. Thea must become Kronborg, similar to her old self and yet entirely different as well, to stave off the dissolution of the self that threatens her as a female artist. On a structural level, the female artist is under threat because of the long tradition of killing or marrying off female protagonists at the end of novels. On a narrative level, she fights against bad patrons and destructive audiences. It seems that wherever Thea turns, she is threatened with sure death. In part, Thea’s backers back her as a kind of insurance for their own immortality. They will ride on her coattails, reaping the immortal success of the truly talented and attempting to prevent their own deaths. However, because they and Thea are able to see themselves replicated in another, they must recognize their own mortality. They become as fleeting and insubstantial as copies. What was once an “assurance of immortality” becomes “the ghostly harbinger of death.”94 The aspect of the double changes and it becomes the opposite of itself. Doubling, for Freud, is what happens in the face of abjection. To see one’s double is to be exposed to one’s own mortality and death. The bird imagery and description of Thea’s dead mother function in just this way. The premonition threatens Dr. Archie and Thea herself is under threat by the mere existence of so many other birds or opera singers. At the same time, the mere existence of the other wives, and opera singers, reminds Thea of her own association with feminine abjection.

  Even the eagle in Panther Canyon must struggle against the boys who try to snare it in nets. Thea sees “a watch-tower upon which the young men used to entice eagles and snare them with nets. Sometimes for a whole morning Thea could see the coppery breast and shoulders of an Indian youth there against the sky; see him throw the net, and watch the struggle with the eagle.”95 Because the novel does not end with Thea’s stay in Panther Canyon, her time spent there is not an escape from the Chicago clubs and patrons. Instead, it serves as a reminder of just how fully enmeshed her awakening is with her participation in the business of constructing a higher life for Chicago.

  At the novel’s end, Dr. Archie notices that Thea has successfully become a cliff dweller. He gazes at her top-floor apartment in New York: “The fourteen stories of the apartment hotel rose above him like a perpendicular cliff.”96 He also notices in the next paragraph that inside the Metropolitan Opera House “the height of the audience room, the rich color, and the sweep of the balconies were not without their effect upon him.”97 Even though Thea makes her debut in New York and has been trained in Europe, the particularly Chicagoan use of the metaphor of cliff dwelling cloaks her success and indicates that she has succeeded because of the Chicago business world: Theodore Thomas, the Nathanmeyers, the Chicago Club, and Fred, who had the entry into Chicago’s club scene to orchestrate it all. The metaphor also promises that Thea, like Madame Necker and the Anasazi Indians, will eventually disappear.

  It is unclear whether Thea recognizes the significance of the Chicago phase of her training and whether she even understands the multiple connotations of the phrase “cliff dweller” in Chicago. But for Cather, the multiple meanings of the phrase allow her to construct a subtle yet biting critique of the Chicago art scene. She pushes back against their belief that art and artists are commodities to be bought, sold, and traded. In doing so, Cather examines the threat of extinction for the artist contained in the notion of cultural uplift.

  Fanny Butcher and the crass commercialism of the book market

  Cather became friends with Fanny Butcher in the years following the publication of The Song of the Lark. Butcher had been working full time at the Tribune since 1913. She got the job by joining the Illinois Woman’s Press Association. Mary O’Donnell, who was a women’s editor at the Chicago Tribune and also a member, asked her to write a column for women. Butcher branched out into almost every department at the paper, but she wanted to eventually land a book column. Elia Peattie followed by Burton Roscoe were the head literary critics of the Tribune’s Saturday book page and Butcher suggested to the Sunday editor, Mary King, that she could write a tabloid book column. Her column would be quite unlike the cerebral discussions of books in Peattie’s and Roscoe’s Saturday columns and would instead focus on bestsellers and discussions with writers about the publishing world. King agreed and Butcher was now well set up to write about the newest books, become known to the literary world and get her name out to a reading public.98 She would become a good friend to Cather who would draw on her help in navigating the literary world.

  In February of 1916, Cather tells Butcher she was so glad to hear she was going into the book business and that “I’d be proud to have my picture in your shop” and “If I can get a few hours in Chicago I will go to your shop.”99 Fanny Butcher’s Chicago Book Shop opened its doors that year and they stayed open until 1927, when the conflict between her position at the Tribune and the bookshop became too apparent. The bookstore became a salon for visiting writers, including Cather, and she would visit Butcher whenever she was in town or had something to promote. She writes on March 9 of that same year that she hopes Butcher will like the book. She hoped: “It will make friends in Chicago and in the West,” and she declares: “The Western audience is the only one I care much about.”100 She handles Butcher as she would a publisher or an editor, enthusiastically promoting her next manuscript or book. In 1922, when Burton Roscoe was fired, Butcher became the Saturday literary critic. She would remain at the Tribune for the rest of her career, spending almost fifty years there.101

  The connection between Butcher and Cather was at first professional, following the lines of the other contemporaneous writers, like Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, who wrote her extensive thank you notes for her good reviews.102 Butcher was involved twofold in the project of uplift, constructing alongside the critic H. L. Mencken an American literature rooted in the work of Chicago writers and commercially helping those writers by reviewing their books, opening a bookstore to sell their literature, and giving advice on the book trade to writers who thought of their work as art that existed apart from the crass commercialism of the book business. The modernist writers knew she needed to be courted because her reviews mattered, and produced bestsellers, even if they sometimes disagreed with them vehemently. She was a favorite of the Tribune’s publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, and he featured her in advertisements. Whenever she appeared in an advertisement, books sales would skyrocket and Carl Sandburg anointed her “Lady Midwest.”103

  Cather often visited with Butcher on her way through Chicago, although she never stayed with her as she did with her old and good friend, Irene Miner Weisz. On March 4, 1920, she wrote a letter to Weisz telling her to “Please go to Fanny Butcher’s shop …. Tell her that Antonia is based on you and Carrie and see how nice she is to you! I want Fanny Butcher to know one of my friends from home.”104 Six years later, on March 18, 1926, Butcher wrote, “Your friend, Mrs Carrie Miner … was in the other day and we proudly looked at the dedication of ‘My Antonia’ together. She said that it always amazed them to find that after all of the ‘wonderful people she must meet and see, she still seems to like her old friends best.’”105 This distinction is an important one because her letters to Weisz during the period after The Song of the Lark ar
e filled with mentions of seeing Butcher and stopping by bookstores at her behest to sell books. On November 14, 1922, Cather writes to Weisz that she will be in Chicago Monday morning, the 27th, because she wants to spend Monday night with Weisz. She said, “I have one or two errands at bookstores, the rest of the time I can be with you.”106 Presumably, one of those bookstore “errands” was at Butcher’s bookstore, which is not the language of great friendship. She writes to Weisz on November 10, 1929, “My two days in Chicago were almost as crowded as those in Omaha. After speaking at the College Club I went to a dinner given for me by several old University classmates whom I was delighted to see again. Next day Fanny Butcher made me go to call upon the heads of all the big book businesses in Chicago—awfully exhausting, but very good policy.”107

  Her complaint about how exhausting the rounds are in Chicago recalls Thea’s exhaustion in the same place. Cather never liked the commercial business of art and though she admits to Butcher having good judgment in these matters, she rebels against the Chicago method of mixing art and business. She complains to Butcher from the train on November 5, 1921: