Willa Cather: life and literary works

Willa Cather

Lost Lady" was written by Willa Cather as the fruit of her pondering the changes brought in by the extinction of the old society when facing the rise a of new order.

The action is taking place in a small and peaceful town in Virginia, named Sweet Water. We are introduced to the main characters in an almost heavenly set up of a property consisting of a house built on a hill in a lane. The owners are the Forresters, husband and wife: Marian Forrester and Captain Forrester.

The captain is the character who impersonates the old world with its old fashioned cavalry and sense of duty and honor. To this character, present during the whole story, the author opposes another type, representing the triumph of the new order: Ivy Peters. This is the new man who has all it takes in order to succeed in the new society where the sense of duty and the love for fair play are replaced by greed, lack of scruples, the will to win by any means. There is a single character caught up between these two worlds, struggling to survive by the means she had at the time. This woman-character is the best impersonation of the relationship between change and loss. Usually, change means evolution and is seen in a positive light. In this case, change meant loosing identity and commonsense.

The story unfolds little by little and the keys are given only by the end of the story. There are hints all over it, but only the explanations given in the last ten pages bring some light into the readers mind when it comes to understanding the meanings of the actions and the very existence of the characters. There is no doubt left when in chapter seven of part two, Captain Forrester's widow, by then, Mrs. Forrester is brought in the merciless light by the author's blade cutting all the way, sharply, handled with the precision of a surgeon, unveiling the plain truth: "It was Mrs. Forrester herself who had changed. Since her husband's death she seemed to have become another woman. For years, Neil and his uncle, the Dalzells and all her friends, had thought of the captain as a drag upon his wife; a care that drained her and dimmed her and kept her from being all that she might be. But without him she was like a ship without ballast, driven hither and thither by every wind. She was flighty and perverse. She seemed to have lost her faculty of discrimination; her power of easily and graciously keeping everyone in his proper place."(A Lost lady, pag. 56) These words are describing not only the main woman character, but also the society suffering big changes at the beginning of the 20th Century.

This book is all about changes. Mrs. Forrester's husband, the captain, the railroad contractor, the character who saves from death a stranger who letter becomes his wife, the man who chooses to loose his fortune rather than to see people loosing their poor life savings due to the failing of the Bank in Denver, is ironically helping the new world crush by building all those railroads that will change not only the face of the earth forever, but the society nationwide. Ivy peters and the like will travel across the country to make their scruple less business. Every loss brings along a change. And every change means a loss, among other things. The captain looses his strength in a horse riding accident and his life starts to change dramatically, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. From that point on, the Forrester's lives are gradually changing and the transformation is bringing a lot of unpleasant things to a household that once only new peace. Mrs. Forrester is the most affected of all.

Changes happen irremediably to the whole town. People remaining in the old word are further and further drawn apart from people going along with the new order, till there is no way of communication between the two left. Business is treated from a much broader angle, companies develop in a higher speed in terms of tome and space. "Cather's A Lost lady is written towards the end of the Age of Reform, as Hofstadter termed it. This is an age when the small-town gentry, the bankers and lawyers, are being swept aside by the inevitable growth of a national rather than a regional elite. They feel their status collapse during the 20th century as the national ceiling on wealth rises significantly."(Smith, J.N, (www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/lostlady/about.html)