Much of the plot of Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady turns on incidents of tragedy, loss, and brokenness. From cracked limbs to strokes to personal and financial breakdowns, the author uses these difficult events to reveal the depth and breadth of her characters. Through it all, Niel, arguably the novel’s primary character, must deal with the repercussions of his initial, idealized belief that Mrs. Forrester is a perfect example of womanhood. Cather draws everyone as very human, including Mrs. Forrester, something Niel comes to understand as he fully becomes an adult. An examination of how Cather depicts these dark incidents illuminates the reasons why Niel’s idealization is so key to the novel and what affect it has on both him and Mrs. Forrester.
Cather often uses calamity and misfortune to define characters in A Lost Lady. She first employs the concept of loss in Part One, Chapter I when describing Captain Forrester’s history and merits, then mentioning at the end that he had an accident that affected both him and Mrs. Forrester, his second wife. Referring to the couple’s house in Sweet Water, Cather writes, ‘‘He grew old there—and even she, alas! grew older.’’ Then, in Part One, Chapter II, Cather sets up another dynamic based on this idea. To prepare readers for how depraved and mean-spirited Ivy Peters is, Cather has the boys gathered for an outing on the Forrester property talk about how Ivy poisoned several local dogs he did not like. Ivy then uses a knife to slit the eyes of an innocent female woodpecker so that she cannot see or fly properly.
While Ivy’s actions define his character, the incident paves the way for Cather to introduce more brokenness. Demonstrating Niel’s sensitivity, he tries to get the woodpecker from her nest to put her out of her misery. In the process, he falls off the tree and breaks his arm. Niel becomes broken trying to do the honorable thing. Mrs. Forrester ensures he is taken care of by putting him in her bed and calling the doctor, adding to his idealization of her, but the break also provides a physical link between them. Near the end of A Lost Lady, at Mrs. Forrester’s awkward dinner party, Niel asks Mrs. Forrester to share with her young guests how she met Captain Forrester. She tells them how, while climbing down the face of Eagle Cliff in the Sierra Madres with mountain climber Fred Harney, their rope broke. Harney was killed while Mrs. Forrester suffered two broken legs and spent more than a day alone in pain before being rescued. The Captain helped find her, but she suffered even more pain as the fractures had started to heal and doctors had to break them again to re-set them.
These parallel breaks create an implicit bond between Niel and Mrs. Forrester: The Captain helped her walk again, and Mrs. Forrester nurtured Niel through recovery when he was still a boy. Cather links the characters through other tragedies in A Lost Lady as well. The Captain—who is twenty-five years older than his wife and the only family of her’s that is ever mentioned—can be viewed as not just a husband who gives her high social standing, but also a father figure. While the couple lives well during the early part of their marriage, the Captain suffers a riding accident in Colorado that essentially forces him to retire to Sweet Water. There, he can still care for and provide stability for his wife, but cannot work building railroads. This situation grows more grave after he loses nearly all of his fortune when he covers the deposits in a failed Denver-based bank in which he is a major investor. The Captain does not really lose his social position, at least in Sweet Water, until his last days when he is forced to lease the marsh to arrogant Ivy. However, by then Captain Forrester is a broken man who relies on his much-younger wife for everything.
Thus, over the course of A Lost Lady, Mrs. Forrester goes from a subservient daughter/wife to a mother/wife of a gravely ill man. Niel’s life is also implied to be littered with such tragedy. Cather talks about young Niel’s home life as sad. Describing his boyhood home in Sweet Water, Cather writes, ‘‘Home was not a pleasant place to go to; a frail egg-shell house, set off on the edge of the prairie where people of no consequence live.’’ Niel’s parents moved to Nebraska to better their lives. Unfortunately, his mother died there when he was five years old and his father, like Captain Forrester, lost his property except for his house. Niel’s father eventually took a job in which ‘‘he kept the county abstract books and made farm loans.’’ An impoverished family cousin, the spinster Sadie, maintains their household haphazardly. By the time Niel is an older teenager, his father has sent Sadie home, shut up his house, and moved to Denver to take a new office job. Niel is left in the care of his beloved, loving maternal uncle, Judge Pommeroy, who gives him a home, guidance, and social position in the community. The relationship between Niel and his uncle has a great deal in common with the Captain and Mrs. Forrester, especially before the Captain becomes seriously ill.
Amidst all this misfortune and heartbreak, Niel—who has so much in common with Mrs. Forrester—idealizes her, making her seem like a rose blossoming in the snow of a winter’s day. Describing Niel’s feelings about her, Cather writes, ‘‘How strange that she should be here at all, a woman like her among common people! Not even in Denver had he ever seen another woman so elegant. . . . Compared with her, other women were heavy and dull.’’ Later, Cather has Niel reflecting on Mrs. Forrester’s egalitarian nature, a quality he seems to share in his dealings with others. Cather writes, ‘‘One could talk to her about the most trivial things, and go away with a high sense of elation. The secret of it, he supposed, was that she couldn’t help being interested in people, even very commonplace people.’’ By imagining that she is ideal, it gives Niel credence to his way of life. Mrs. Forrester provides a motherless boy, who had only a poor housekeeping spinster cousin for a female role model, an ideal of what women should be.
Yet, like Niel himself, Mrs. Forrester is not really an ideal, but a troubled, messy, human woman, which leads to tragedy for both of them. Niel has his illusions about her shattered life. First, he struggles when he learns that Mrs. Forrester has been having an affair with Frank Ellinger during the first years she is trapped in Sweet Water after the Captain’s accident and during his bank financial crisis. The affair ends badly when Mrs. Forrester, by then taking care of her husband after his first stroke, learns that Frank married Constance Ogden. Mrs. Forrester also over-consumes alcohol, leading to awkward situations with Niel and the Captain, among others. As the Captain gets sicker following his second stroke and dies, her behavior becomes even more erratic. She develops some kind of intimate relationship with Ivy Peters, alienating all who try to help her, including Judge Pommeroy and Niel himself. Niel does not fully grasp how she can be so self-destructive initially, but he comes to realize it was the Captain who grounded her—the Captain was not, as Niel initially believed, ‘‘a drag upon his wife’’— while she, to some degree, brought needed youth to the Captain.
In the end, the tragedies of Niel and Mrs. Forrester force them out of Sweet Water in one way or another. Niel does not want to be a lawyer like his uncle or, more accurately, the kind of lawyer men of his generation like Ivy Peters have turned out to be. The changes in Mrs. Forrester also give him no reason to stay. To be his own man and escape his tragic past, the one who witnessed ‘‘the sunset of the pioneer,’’ Niel goes away to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and become an architect. Although he gives up one year of school to help the Forresters and his uncle through their illnesses, there is nothing in the story to indicate that he does not complete his degree, move away permanently from Sweet Water, and have a successful career elsewhere. Niel has moved forward, and no further life tragedies are mentioned by Cather.
After Captain Forrester’s death, Niel witnesses Mrs. Forrester’s continued downward spiral and less than ideal behavior. Her emotional and social decline is evidenced by her inappropriate dinner parties, disloyalty to his uncle, and relationship with Ivy. Niel suggests she leave during this period, saying, ‘‘Mrs. Forrester, why don’t you go away? to California, to people of your own kind. You know this town is no place for you.’’ Mrs. Forrester admits to wanting to leave Sweet Water, but her inability to sell the house (with the alleged help of Ivy) keeps her in town for an extended period of time. Niel believes she needs the right man to ground her and provide a haven away from the tragedies of her life so she can be an ideal woman again. By the end of A Lost Lady, Niel learns that Mrs. Forrester did move away after selling the house to Ivy for his new wife, and she married well again. Upon learning of her marriage to an odd but wealthy Englishman until her death, Niel tells Ed Elliott, ‘‘So we may feel sure that she was well cared for, to the very end. Thank God for that!’’ It is clear at novel’s end that tragedies did not define the whole of their lives.
Source Credits:
A. Petruso, Critical Essay on A Lost Lady, in Novels for Students 33, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Sara Constantakis, Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels, Volume 33, Gale-Cengage Learning, 2010