Death in the Desert by Willa Cather

• Text
• Criticism on Willa Cather's Short Stories
• Criticism on Cather as a Pineer

Excerpt from The International Fiction Review Vol. 32, No. 1 & 2, 2005 Willa Cather's Use of Inner Light Asad Al-Ghalith, Century College, Minnesota

Aim:

• What does the title "Death in the Desert" mean?
• How is Adriance described? Why is he the true protagonist instead of his bother, Everett?
• How can we describe Adriance's relation to Katherine?
• Critics commented, "Cather seems to capture the symbolic significance of light when she establishes light in the center of the individual". How does Cather capture such "light"  in her characters in "A Death in the Desert"?

Do Now:  What does J.E. Cirlot's  statement mean to you? Interpret.

"light, traditionally, is equated with the spirit.... The superiority of the spirit is immediately recognizable by its luminous intensity." by J.E. Cirlot

Procedures:

1. Select sentences that portray the main character, Adriance.(HW#13)
2. Describe Katherine's feelings for Andriance and Everret respectively.
3. How can we describe Adriance's relation to Katherine?
4. How does Cather capture the symbolic light in her characters in "A Death in the Desert"?
5. Explain the meaning of the title.
6. What changes does Katherine's death bring out in Everret?

Homework Assignment: (#14):

Use the Point of View Writing method to respond to the story-

Use the Point of View strategy to respond and analyze the story.

• Who else could tell the story?
  ---You could choose any character involved in the story including inanimate objects.
• What kind of story would they tell?
  ----You could expand an incident or event or retell the story from an original perspective by adding the contents to fill in the space that exists in many stories.
• In what form could the story be told?
  a. A speech or a sermon
  b. A first person narration
  c. A diary entry
  D. A letter
  e. A dialogue
  f. Different types of newspaper articles
  g. A  dream
  h. A soliloquy
  i. An essay
  j. A poem
  k. A story
  
   

Homework Assignment:

Choose a specific character from the WHO list and from his/her/its point of view, retell or respond to the story.

Text Excerpt

• florid man
• diamond solitaire
• bedraggled-looking girls
• its tardiness except
• phaeton stood
• was quite engrossed by his grief
• stenographer
• poignantly reminiscent
• camaraderie of her frank, confident eyes
• bravado of her smile
• perpetual salutat to the world
• imperatrix
• emaciated body
• tired to death of - solitude and the wrong kind of people
• patch up my peace with my conscience
• renunciation
• as though a crisis of some sort had been met and tided over
• I am sensitive about some of them even now.  But I was not so sophisticated as you imagined.  I saw my brother's pupils come and go, but that was about all.  Sometimes, I was called on to play accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part.  But they never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you speak of
• interchangeable individuality
• the suggestion of the other man's personality in your face
• uncanny
• Algerian suite
• He was of a larger build than Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy, while those of his brother were slender and rather girlish.  His face was of the same oval mould, but it was grey, and darkened about the mouth of continual shaving.  His eyes were of the same inconstant April colour, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance's were always points of high light, and always meaning another thing than the thing they meant yesterday
• contralto
• Vale of Tempe
• every turn to bump his nose against his own face - which, indeed, was not his own, but his brother's.  He was sure to find himself employed in his brother's business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining current of Adriance Hilgarde's.
• He felt Katherine Gaylord's need for him, and he accepted it as a commission from his brother to help this woman to die.  Day by day, he felt her demands on him grow more imperious, her need for him grow more acute and positive; and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her, his own individuality played a smaller and smaller part.  His power to minister to her comfort, he saw, lay solely in his link with his brother's life
• That it sent shudders of remembrance through her and that in the exhaustion which followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet, and dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine garden, and not of bitterness and death
• perfunctory compliment
• Adriance always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic suggestion of every situation.  Moreover, he usually did the right thing, the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing - except, when he did very cruel things - bent upon making people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insisted that his material environment and radiance of his rich nature, all the homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer near, forgetting - for that also was a part of Adriance's gift
• seances
• Adriance was tender with his valet and his stableboy, with his old gondolier and the beggar - women who prayed to the saints for him
• obsequious
• egotistical
• A strong realization of his brother's charm and intensity and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwind of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and himself even more resolutely than he consumed others
• It is the waste of himself that I mean; his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they take him at their own estimate.  He can kindle marble, strike fire from putty, but is it worth what it costs him?
• expostulated
• tragedies of passion
• tragedy of the soul
• words were not to tell me how ill he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the last strokes to the score of his 'Souvenirs d'Automne,' and he was, as I most like to remember him; so calm and happy and tired; not gay as he usually is, but just contented and tired with that heavenly tiredness that comes after a good work done at last
• The wind moaned for the pain of all the world and sobbed in the branches of the shivering olives and about the walls of that desolated old palace
• There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed upon the hard features of the bronze Dante like the reflection of purgatorial flames, and threw long black shadows about us; beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all.  Adriance sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one such life as his.  Somehow the wind with all its worldpain had got into the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in both of us a t once - that awful vague, universal pain, that cold fear of life and death and God and hope - and we were like two clinging together on a spar in mid-ocean after the ship-wreck of everything
• she had wrapped her weakness as in a glittering garment
• "You can't imagine what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is to be able to tell it to some one.  I used to want to shriek it out to the world in the long nights when I could not sleep.  It seemed to me that I could not die with it.  It demanded some sort of expression.  And now that you know, you would scarcely believe how much less sharp the anguish of it is
• At least, I feel now that he will know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion, for we meant, I should like him to know.  On the whole, I am not ashamed of it.  I have fought a good fight
• sermons
• It was his kindness that was hardest.  I have pretty well used my life up at standing punishment
• I drank my doom greedily enough
• smiling and debonair
• His face with eyes that seemed never to have wept or doubted.  "Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear," she whispered.