[In the following excerpt, Titus discusses how Willa Cather's Song of the Lark is indebted to Du Maurier's Trilby in its portrayal of male and female characters.]

… In its sustained attention to male authority and use of masculine approbation, The Song of the Lark represents more a continuity with than a break from Willa Cather's early writing. Although the novel traces the achievement of a woman artist, it does so from a masculine point of view, moving from male spectator to male spectator, exploring as much the critical acumen and communal relations of these men as it does the heroine's ascent. In fact the novel is indebted to a particular portrait of a woman artist and her male admirers that Willa Cather enthusiastically reviewed quite early in her career—George DuMaurier's extraordinarily popular 1894 novel, Trilby.Years after reading Trilby, when Cather shaped her kunstlerroman, as well as the contemporaneous story, “The Diamond Mine,” DuMaurier's novel was clearly on her mind. In their focus on masculine relations surrounding a charismatic female performer, both texts recall—and in the case of “The Diamond Mine” make direct reference to—DuMaurier's Trilby. Reading The Song of the Lark next to Trilby illuminates connections between Cather's early critical views and her portrayal of female creativity and complicates any argument for a triumphantly female-identified Willa Cather.

Overwhelmingly successful in the United States, Trilby provoked a craze, “Trilby programs were worked up in many cities and towns, with readings and music and ‘living pictures’.” A play and a burlesque opera “Thrillby,” both enormously successful, were performed in New York theaters and by a touring company across the continent between 1895 and 1900. “A new town in Florida was named Trilby. … A new three dollar shoe was named the Trilby, and there were Trilby hams, Trilby sausages, and a Trilby hearth brush” (Mott 189). Overall the book raised a chorus of national enthusiasm, and one of its most vocal admirers was Willa Cather. Writing at the time for the Nebraska State Journal, she described DuMaurier's title character in September 1894 as an emotional and moral ideal, so ideal that adoration could serve as character reference: “We all of us loved her so dearly that she was an experience in our lives. The strange part of it was that it was the good people who loved her the most. The people who were really and greatly good … loved her” most of all (Kingdom 362). Cather's enthusiasm reappeared in October 1894 when she praised Trilby as “unquestionably the great book of the year” (Kingdom 142). In December, 1894, she wrote again, even more rhapsodically, describing the novel as an inspiration for a writer. It is striking, although perhaps characteristic of her male-identified criticism at this time, that she locates the novel's central value in its author's paternalism. In Cather's words, “It is the most gentle and fatherly of books. … Always you feel behind the book the strong, tender personality of a man. … That is the great charm of the book, the wise, gentle, sympathetic man, whom every sentence brings you closer to” (Kingdom 363-64). To write like such a man would be an achievement indeed. She concludes, Trilby “has won for itself a place in the hearts of the people. Most of us would write books if we could do that” (Kingdom 365).

What are the charms of Trilby? And how did this extraordinarily popular novel influence Willa Cather's own thinking about female creativity? For it did—Trilby returned to Cather's mind around 1915 when she was working on stories later collected in Youth and the Bright Medusa and writing her novel of the female artist, The Song of the Lark.¹ For present-day readers long past the Trilby phenomenon, a brief summary of DuMaurier's novel may prove helpful. Trilby tells the story of three young men, aspiring artists, living in bohemian Paris. The dapper Laird, the robust Taffy, and the adorable Little Billee all fall in love with Trilby, a very large, very beautiful, rustic, rough spoken and golden hearted model with a particularly exquisite foot. After a full course of romantic speeches, hearty masculine moments, sentimental tears and at least one wasting illness, Trilby leaves Paris, breaking an engagement with Little Billee under pressure from his mother, who found their liason socially unacceptable. Little Billee suffers a decline and slow recovery, and Trilby eventually reappears as a famous singer touring Europe. Although tone deaf, Trilby possesses an exquisite, natural voice when she is hypnotized by the charismatic but unpleasant Svengali, a man of dark powers from the “mysterious East.” However, Svengali dies during one of her performances, struck down by repressed rage and the labors of hypnosis, and in a final scene of the novel—after Trilby and then Little Billee have both died of sorrow, stress and thwarted love, and been extensively mourned—Taffy and another Trilby admirer, Monsieur Gecko, discuss her talent over cigars: “And how she looked singing! do you remember? her hands behind her—her dear, sweet, slender foot on a little stool—her thick hair lying down all along her back! And that good smile like the Madonna's, so soft and bright and kind! … it was to make you weep for love, merely to see her” (456).

Two aspects of DuMaurier's novel are most pertinent to Willa Cather's later portraits of the female artist: its representation of female creative power and its depiction of relations between men. In Trilby men are the artists; it is Svengali's own musical genius that fills Trilby, flowing through the channel of his hypnotic gaze. Trilby herself is an empty vessel, inarticulate, unlettered, of humble birth; she serves as inspirational model and medium for the men's creative labors. According to Nina Auerbach, Trilby represents a late Victorian ideal, “the alluring vacuum of uncultured womanhood waiting for the artist-male to fill her” (20). Yet at the same time, Trilby possesses compelling power. She is physically very large, looming over the men who repeatedly gather to paint, discuss, or simply gaze at her. In the endless variety of forms her voice and identity can take, she possesses a “boundless capacity for mutability” (Auerbach 20). “Finally the role of magus and mythmaker passes to her,” Auerbach argues, “Her ability under hypnosis to ring endless variations upon familiar tunes is the power of her character to transform itself endlessly, and in so doing, to endlessly renew the world around her” (20). Like other mythic women in the late Victorian imagination, Trilby is simultaneously an empty vessel to be filled with the genius of the male imagination and a powerful, endlessly mutable medium for the expression of some spiritual or creative power.

Despite DuMaurier's title, however, Trilby is more about men than about a woman. The joys and trials of men's relationships with men lie close to if not at the novel's heart. In fact the men's attraction to Trilby feeds their affections for each other. In an intimate, emotional bedroom confession, for example, after Laird and Little Billee declare their love for the mighty model, they confess their love for each other. Shared admiration of a woman provides a safe context for expressions of male affection. The scene closes with Little Billee's confession of comradely love—“Taffy, I can’t tell you what a trump you are. All I’ve ever thought of you—and God knows that’s enough—will be nothing to what I shall think of you after this.” To which Taffy affectionately rejoins, “All right, old chap” (343).

That Trilby serves to solidify men's relationships is not surprising. As Eve Sedgwick argues in English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, women have historically functioned as an “exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men” (25). Fraser Harrison pushes those bonds further when he argues that Trilby has a “homosexual note” (128). Taffy and Laird both adore emotional Little Billee. At the same time they are all infatuated with Trilby, whose massive physique DuMaurier often describes in masculine terms:

On her first appearance—in a French infantry soldier's greatcoat—the reader is told that Trilby has a portentous voice of great volume that ‘could have belonged to either sex’, that her feet are ‘uncompromising and inexorable as boot trees’, her chin is ‘massive’, her teeth are big and British, and that her height was equal to a gendarme's—she was not a giantess, the author hastens to add, just very tall. Taffy declares her to be a trump, and confides his admiration for her to the Laird, ‘Why, she’s as upright and straight and honorable as a man.’ (Harrison 128)

Whether Trilby depicts homosexual desire safely routed through heterosexual attraction to a woman who is “like a man” or whether the novel simply depicts men forming social bonds through shared pleasure in a woman—whose relation to them is at least initially debased and economic—remains open to debate. It is irresistable, however, to note the attractions of Trilby's exquisite foot within the psychoanalytic theory emerging around the time of the novel. Certainly relevant is Freud's suggestion that a fetish averts the threat represented by female sexuality. Standing in for the missing penis, the fetish denies the fact of castration; “it also,” according to Freud, “saves the fetishist from being a homosexual by endowing women with the attribute that makes them acceptable as sexual objects” (216). In the eyes of DuMaurier's Little Billee, Trilby's foot, “all made up of delicate lengths and subtly modulated curves and noble straightnesses,” clarifies her otherwise threatening, indeterminate sexual status, lending “an antique and Olympian dignity to a figure that seemed … rather grotesque in its mixed attire of military overcoat and female petticoat and nothing else!” (18).

George DuMaurier's attention to the homosocial relations of male spectators bonding through shared admiration of female spectacle reappears in Willa Cather's own portraits of the female artist, as does direct acknowledgement of the power of male patronage and indirect expression of male sexual anxiety in the face of female creative power that is simultaneously compelling and monstrous. Between approximately 1915 and 1916, when she wrote both “The Diamond Mine” (1916) and her kunstlerroman, The Song of the Lark (1915), Cather clearly recalled DuMaurier's novel, for which she had expressed so much admiration almost twenty years earlier. In “The Diamond Mine,” Cressida Garnet, a “big handsome girl … who took with her to Germany the raw material of a great voice” and returned an “accomplished artist,” achieved this transformation “largely [through] the work of Miletus Poppas,” a mysterious Easterner who, like Svengali, can mold her natural female medium into a consummate vessel of song. Cressida reads DuMaurier's Trilby sometime after her success, and falls “into a fright.” Her response, the narrator tells us, gives “an intimation of what [her] relationship [with Poppas] had actually become” (Youth 100-101). Written at almost the same time as The Song of the Lark, “The Diamond Mine,” is interested in questions of the artist as a commodity, and creates its plot out of intersecting economic and emotional desires. It is striking that the Svengali-like Poppas—his name recalling the paternalism Cather admired in DuMaurier—represents one of the more positive figures in the story. His steady loyalty to the great-hearted Cressida overbalances his unpleasant, simultaneously Pygmalion-like and parasitical attachment to the female artist.

Trilby remains equally present in Cather's The Song of the Lark, and reading the novels in conjunction enormously complicates the significance of Cather's portrait of the female artist. Unlike tone deaf Trilby, whose creative genius comes through Svengali's hypnotic inspiration, Thea truly does possess great talent. Yet she is enormously indebted to men, for in The Song of the Lark it is men that recognize and nourish female creative potential. Although none of her sequenced admirers hypnotize Thea, their eyes are constantly upon her, and the book obsessively describes their gaze. Looking, seeing, watching, admiring: the doctor “went over her with a quizzical eye, as he nearly always did” (29); Ray's “glance was never so intimate or penetrating as Doctor Archie's” (99); Harsanyi “looked at his pupil intently with that one eye which sometimes seemed to see deeper than two eyes” (190) and so on. Looking at Thea represents a central activity in the novel.² …

Her value recognized and promoted if not entirely created by men, Cather's Thea does resemble DuMaurier's Trilby. Both novels closely bind female creativity to male support. Cather's novel also resembles DuMaurier's in its depiction of relations between men. Just as being “like a man” made Trilby desirable—passion for her a displaced, socially approved means for expressing male homosocial bonds if not homosexual desire—so being “like a man” makes Thea desirable. Her courtship with Fred is rather gladiatorial; they wrestle, pitch stones, wish they could fence a bit. From a distance, Cather tells us, “They looked like two boys” (278). Thea's masculine lines hold Fred's attention. He repeatedly admires her back, is glad she has “No sag” (287), and enjoys her company because she is “all brain and muscle” (284). In Panther Canyon, where ostensibly she is deep within a female landscape, in touch with her own female creative power, Thea is physically becoming more masculine. It is from this buoyant muscularity—as much as from the vessel of her throat—that her voice emerges: “when her body bounded like a rubber ball away from its hardness, then she could sing” (276). …

The men, brought together by their admiration and exchange of Thea, enjoy a comfortable, exclusively male world. They can now be “delightful chums”—in a phrase from DuMaurier (159). Their comfortable pleasure recalls that of the Laird, Taffy and Little Billee after watching Trilby perform:

They went arm in arm, as usual; but this time Little Billee was in the middle. He wished to feel on each side of him the warm and genial contact of his two beloved old friends. … He could have hugged them both in the open street, before the whole world; and the delight of it was that this was no dream; … and he owed it all to Trilby!

And what did he feel for Trilby? He couldn’t tell yet. It was too vast as yet to be measured. (335) …

When The Song of the Lark is read next to George DuMaurier's Trilby, it is apparent that Willa Cather's imagination of female creative power was much influenced by the representations of that power in the authors she admired in the 1890's, notably George DuMaurier and Rudyard Kipling. Vessel, mutable medium, or monster, Thea simultaneously and paradoxically is passive medium and potent goddess. Her artistic talent is facilitated if not created by the men who admire her; she is both female artist and figure of the male imagination; and she serves as a means for men to cement their relationships with men. As the men share their admiration for Thea they share their affection for each other. Although Cather's The Song of the Lark does acknowledge one woman's creative power—as many readers have rightly insisted—it does so through powerful men as patrons and spectators, and thus through the power of the male establishment. In its approving portrayal of male authority and male homosocial relations, and in its suggestion of male anxiety in response to female creativity, the novel is deeply indebted to the writers Cather so heartily endorsed in her early critical writing. …

Notes

1. Besides “The Diamond Mine” and The Song of the Lark, Trilby likely also influenced another of Cather's portraits of the female artist, “Coming, Eden Bower!” published in Youth and the Bright Medusa in 1920—later revised with the new title, “Coming, Aphrodite!”

2. The predominance of the gaze throughout Cather's novel may be likened to the fetishistic function of Trilby's exquisite foot. Both activities are linked in psychoanalytic theory to the fear and fascination of female castration. For an influential adaptation of Freud's discussion of fetishistic scopophilia to female performance see Laura Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975). Cather more explicitly explores the male voyeur and female performer in another story of the female artist, “Coming, Aphrodite!”

Works Consulted

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Cather, Willa. The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896. Ed. Bernice Slote. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1966.

———. The Song of the Lark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915.

———. Youth and the Bright Medusa. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920.

DuMaurier, George. Trilby. NY: Harper and Brothers, 1894.

Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” (1927) Rpt. in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. NY: Macmillan, 1963. 214-19.

Harrison, Fraser. The Dark Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality. NY: Universe, 1977.

Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States, NY: Macmillan, 1947.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, NY: Columbia UP, 1985.