Modernism in Willa Cather's a Lost Lady

Modernism in Willa Cather's A LOST LADY Lost Lady, by Willa Cather, like other modernist novels describes a society in transition from one culture to another, and the idealization of the past that occurs as individuals struggle with new mores and times. This was, in fact, Cather's first modernist novel. It is a classic novel about life in on the Great Plains, and about the materialistic world that supplanted the old frontier. It is about nostalgia for a world that is dying.

In the novel, which is set in the small railroad town of Sweet Water, the finest family is that of the Forresters. Mrs. Marian Forrester is renowned as a wonderful hostess. She and her husband represent the old culture. Mr. Forrester is a retired, wealthy railway man, and Mrs. Forrester is his beautiful, much younger wife. She is a strong, beautiful woman in a pastoral setting. Her husband boasts that she is able to act like a lady even when being chased like a bull.

As aristocratic as the Forresters are, Mr. Forrester is already retired -- he is described in terms of what he once did and was. The new culture is represented by Ivy Peters, a man who travels all over the country. We first see Ivy when a group of "little boys from the town" are playing together. Ivy shoots a female woodpecker, then slits both its eyes with a tiny blade and the boys watch it flounder blindly in the air. Clearly he is unsentimental, even cruel.

The boys take pity on the bird, and one boy, Niel Herbert, in trying to rescue the bird breaks his arm and is taken to the Forrester home. Throughout the novel, we see Mrs. Forrester and her changing circumstances through Niel's eyes. At this point, she seems a caring, aristocratic lady; he sees her through the romantic innocence of a boy's eyes. "He was proud now that at the first moment he had recognized her as belonging to a different world from any he had ever known." (33).

This is a romanticized, idealized world, a world gone by. Captain Forrester took his land from the Indians; and now his land will be taken from him. This is presaged in the line: "Something forbidden had come into his voice, the lonely, defiant note that is so often heard in the voices of old Indians." (45). The next time Niel meets her, times have changed. She, like the town of Sweet Water, is under financial constraint. Most of the gentleman ranchers have left the area, and Mrs.

Forrester notes that she can't go on vacation this year and that her husband is beginning to suffer from health problems. Not everything is right in Mrs. Forrester's world. Niel realizes that Mrs. Forrester is lovers with Frank Ellinger, a 40-year-old bachelor. She is not quite the lady she seemed, just as the world she represents is not as ideal as it might seem. As the novel progresses, Mrs. Forrester's husband suffers a financial setback; has a stroke and then another, and she begins to drink excessively.

Her lover abandons her. Yet with an amazing resilience, she doesn't die along with her way of life. She adjusts to the new. In this modernist novel, like others of the period, money and health are intimately bound. Money holds up the artifice of the old, idealized world; when it goes, so does health. The ruin of the Forresters represents the end of a certain type of life in regional America. The success of young Ivy Peters represents the new world, where business interests are national, not regional. Finally Mrs.

Forrester comes to depend on Ivy himself. She is no longer playing the part of the lady or upholding the dignity of the old traditions. In fact, when her husband dies she uses Ivy to launch herself straight into the new world -- moving to California, its.