Home > The Diamond Mine Summary & Study Guide > Essays and Criticism > Artist's Personal and Professional Conflict

The Diamond Mine | Artist's Personal and Professional Conflict

In the following essay excerpt, Gerber offers a brief overview of ‘‘The Diamond Mine,’’ focusing on the conflict between an artist's personal and professional lives.

All of the four new stories collected in Youth and the Bright Medusa concern the problems of professional musicians—singers—and as a group they develop the theme of the artist as celebrity, the relationship to society resulting from the pressure of popular fame, and the personal cost to the artist exacted by a life devoted to pleasing one's ‘‘public.’’ It was a theme that was gaining currency swiftly in Cather' s life, as her books became ever more widely sold and openly praised, making demands on her privacy she had not wholly anticipated. It was also a major strand...

[The entire page is 790 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

Summary and Analysis – Themes – Characters – And much more...