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CHAPTER 1
"A Lot of Things"
The Value of the Vernacular In Shadows on the Rock
Diane Prenatt
Let us begin with a small scene in Willa Cather's novel Shadows on the Rock (1931). It is Christmas Eve, 1697, in the French Catholic colony of Quebec, and twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair is arranging a crèche, a Nativity scene, in the salon of the family home. The crèche, with its figures of the infant Jesus, Mary, Joseph, three kings, shepherds, and assorted animals housed in a stablelike structure suggested by the biblical story of Christ's birth, was sent some months before from France. Cécile and her father have been in grave consultation concerning its placement, and Euclide Auclair has built a shelf to extend from under a window-sill so "the scene could be arranged in two terraces, as was customary at home" (126). Cécile lines the sill and the shelf with fir branches and moss gathered from the woods around the Jesuits' buildings. She unpacks and arranges the figures with Blinker, the baker's helper, and little Jacques, the son of "a bad woman" (132). When neighbors drop by to view the crèche before midnight Mass, Jacques returns with a small wooden beaver that one of his mother's clients had carved for him, which he wants to place in the crèche. Cécile is "perplexed": does Jacques's toy belong in the biblical scene? But Mme Pommier, the devout elderly mother of the town cobbler, urges her to "put it there with the lambs, before the manger," reminding her, "Our Lord died for Canada, as well as for the world over there" (131).
The crèche scene, occurring at the close of Book II, foregrounds one of the most meaningful questions with which the novel is concerned. For, although Mme Pommier's response to Cécile affirms their shared Christian belief in the redemption of humankind, Cécile's question had arisen from confusion about the aesthetic value and the cultural function of the made object: the toy beaver "was so untraditional — what was she to do with him?" (131). Many of the objects depicted in Shadows on the Rock are, like Jacques's toy beaver, "untraditional"; they disrupt cultural and aesthetic taxonomies. The novel presents a series of confrontations, mediated through twelve-year-old Cécile's imagination, between objects associated with the French cultural tradition and more "untraditional" objects. While glancing back at the medieval origins of vernacular art, these encounters issue an essentially modernist directive: to look with new eyes, even naïve eyes, to revise our judgments about the value of vernacular objects.
As John Murphy and David Stouck write in their explanatory notes to the Scholarly Edition of Shadows on the Rock, Mildred Bennett told us some time ago that Cather based the scene with the toy beaver on a similar moment she herself witnessed when her young nephew Charles tried to place a toy cow in the family nativity scene (469). So it is from firsthand experience that Cather recognizes the impulse to engage with the crèche, so appealing with its miniature movable figures representing any child's favorite story: a family in a house. To the sheep, the donkey, the camels, which appear to be the pets of this family, why not add a cow, a beaver? Beyond Cather's personal anecdote — and those that many of us could tell about finding Legos or Matchbox cars in the crèche after a visit from children — the scene of Jacques at the crèche belongs to a tradition of Christmas stories depicting visitors (sometimes transported through time) who bring presents to the baby in Bethlehem, as did the biblical three kings, who brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh (Matt. 2:11). These stories range from the medieval Second Shepherds' Play, in which the shepherds bring cherries, a ball, and a bird to the infant Jesus, to the twentieth-century popular song "The Little Drummer Boy," in which the singer, stricken that he has "no gift for him," resolves, "I'll play my drum for him."
A similar mix of the sacred and the mundane defines the Christmas scene in My Ántonia (1918). For Jim Burden's first Christmas with his grandparents in Nebraska, the family decorates their Christmas tree with "a collection of brilliantly coloured paper figures" sent to the hired man Otto Fuchs by his mother in Austria, including the traditional Nativity participants: "the three kings, gorgeously appareled, and the ox and the ass and the shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and a group of angels singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the black slaves of the three kings" (80). Although this Nativity scene is hung on the tree rather than housed in a little stable like the Auclair crèche, it is equally sacred: "all the coloured figures from Austria stood out clear and full of meaning" in the candlelight, and Mr. Shimerda kneels and crosses himself in their presence (84). Under the tree, Jim says, "we put sheets of cotton wool ... for a snow-field, and Jake's pocket- mirror for a frozen lake" (80) — features of the Nebraska winter landscape that might "perplex" a Bethlehem native, but are meant to delight the bereft and displaced boy.
The hand-carved beaver and the makeshift landscape features are made of ordinary materials but, like Otto's paper ornaments, are also "full of meaning." Despite their apparent naïveté, they illustrate essential theological truths. For the Christian Auclair and Burden families, the feast of Christmas celebrates the incarnation of God in Jesus. The gestures of these children — Cather's nephew, Jacques, Jim, and the hired men who are described as "unprotected ... defenceless ... boys" (81) — humanize the sacrality of the biblical Nativity story. They underscore the Christian belief in the humanity of Jesus, who, like Jacques and Jim, was a little boy who played with toys, as well as the God whose divine nature is acknowledged by the three kings' royal gifts. The children's inclusion of naïvely crafted objects in the sacred scene shifts the Christian doctrine of the incarnation from theological abstraction to literalized belief, from high academic discourse to folk culture.
The terms of cultural transmission, always a subject for Cather, inform both Christmas scenes. It is important that the Auclair crèche was made in France, where, as Mme Auclair has told Cécile, "we have learned to do all these things in the best way ... and that is why we are called the most civilized people in Europe" (32). It carries cultural authority, as does the altar of Notre-Dame de la Victoire, "made in France by people who knew ... just what Heaven looked like," Cécile believes (77). Like Cécile's silver cup and her mother's pot of parsley, the crèche is one of the totemic objects that represent the transmission of French culture to the wilds of Quebec. The introduction into the crèche of the "marvelous beaver [carved] out of wood ... its teeth [painted] white" (81) poses a question about the relationship of the Canadian vernacular to the French canon, a question underscored by the live evergreens that decorate the scene: the fir and moss that Cécile has gathered from the Jesuit woods make "a little cabine of branches, like those the first missionaries built down by Notre Dame des Anges," thus creating a rough New World shelter for the crèche figures from the Old World (128). In My Ántonia, the Austrian Nativity figures are hung from "a little cedar tree" that the hired man Jake has cut somewhere between the Burdens' farm and the Shimerdas' dugout (79). The little cedar reminds Jim of his family's Christmas trees in Virginia, as the paper ornaments must remind Otto of Austria (and Mr. Shimerda of his home in Bohemia), and Cécile and Euclide Auclair are reminded of France by arranging the crèche as it was "at home." In these scenes, Old World culture is transmitted to New World locations specifically identified by their indigenous trees — firs from the Jesuit woods, a cedar that had grown between the Burden and Shimerda properties.
The significance of the extremely local or vernacular in relation to canonical culture is affirmed in the well-known Virgilian allusion in My Ántonia. Studying Virgil in college, Jim learns — and insists that the reader understand — the precise meaning of the quotation that we take to be Cather's early avowal of her own writerly identity: "'Primus ego in patriam mecum ... deducam Musas'; 'For I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my own country.'" "'[P]atria' here meant not a nation or even a province," Jim goes on to explain, "but the little rural neighborhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. ... [Virgil hoped] that he might bring the Muse ... not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little 'country'; to his father's fields, 'sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops'" (256).
In Shadows on the Rock, then, Cather enlarges her fond memory of her nephew and the toy cow to construct the meaning of Cécile's confusion. Cécile is perplexed because she is uncertain about the relation of the vernacular — local, folk — to the dominant, official culture: does an artifact from North American folk culture belong in a crèche made by "the most civilized people in Europe," who "do all these things in the best way"? A related but different question is whether a North American animal belongs in Bethlehem — in other words, whether Jacques's toy beaver violates the representational accuracy of the crèche. Mme Pommier's catechetical response to Cécile sidesteps the question of mimesis to affirm the value of the Canadian vernacular, specifically in terms of the Christian (and French Catholic) tradition in which she and Cécile have been formed.
Shadows on the Rock charts the tension between Canadian folk culture and French canonical culture, between Canadians content to eat "dogs boiled with blueberries" (216) and the representatives of high French culture like Euclide Auclair, who prefers a conserve of gooseberries after his roast chicken (18). The Auclair ménage is informed by the instructions of Cécile's dying mother, who was concerned with maintaining traditional French cultural practices to protect her family from the "disgusting" savagery of the New World (32). "The food here is coarse," Mme Auclair cautions her daughter (31), and a market woman reminds Euclide Auclair that winter hunters "carry nothing but cold grease to fill their bellies. ... Here grease is meat" (59); the fur trader Pierre Charron was reduced to such hunger on a hunting trip that he ate boiled moss and roasted bear skin (216). Auclair's dinner is a defense against such degradation, "the thing that kept him a civilized man and a Frenchman" (23) and, unlike the local Québecois, he dines in the evening "as he was used to do in Paris" (15). During the long Canadian winter, "careless people" in Quebec survived on "smoked eels and frozen venison," but Auclair can rely on six dozen wood doves he has preserved en confit (57). The Jesuits and the Récollet friars tend indoor vegetable gardens in their warm cellars. Auclair keeps a wine cellar and, along with his apothecary stock, imports bay leaves, cloves, and saffron from France for cooking. These domestic practices assert the cultural identity of the French colonists and coexist in some tension with the indigenous Canadian culture.
Like food preparation, the crèche scene in Shadows and the Christmas tree scene in My Ántonia depict domestic rituals that affirm group identity, as Ann Romines has demonstrated. The identity of the group depicted in Shadows is still in formation, and the crèche scene tells us it will not be simply French; the French origins of the community are indicated by the custom of the crèche, but its assimilation to the New World is suggested by the Canadian greenery and wooden beaver that have been added to the French artifact. Richard Millington has identified Shadows as an "anthropological novel" that "draw[s] our attention to the meaning-life of objects" (35, 29). The meaning-life of the crèche with Jacques's toy beaver has to do with the accommodation of the vernacular by people long accustomed to considering themselves "the most civilized in Europe." The meaning-life of Auclair's gooseberry conserve, of his confit of wood doves and his wine cellar, like that of the pot of parsley Cécile tends, "which had never frozen in her mother's time, and ... should not freeze in hers" (34), assert refined French domestic values in the "coarse" New World.
Jacques's little toy beaver is a vernacular artifact, an object of local folk culture, certainly, but it is worth noting that the Auclair crèche itself is described in terms that distinguish it from high art. The crèche figures are not idealized; they do not conform to academically arbitrated taste. "The Blessed Virgin wore no halo, but a white scarf over her head. She looked like a country girl, very naïve, seated on a stool, with her knees well apart under her full skirt, and very large feet" (127). This figure is very different from the holy women depicted in the church of Notre-Dame de la Victoire: Sainte Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, "regally clad like a great lady of this world, with a jeweled coronet upon her head [and] ... noble in bearing," and a figure of the Virgin Mary, "radiantly happy, with a stately crown," holding the child Jesus who looked like "a little Lord indeed" (78). Gold ornamentation enhances the aristocratic character of these figures: the gold flowers on Sainte Anne's cloak glow in the candlelight "like a glistening liquid," bathing the statue "in a rich, oily, yellow light" (80). The altar in the French Ursuline chapel, another site for the display of sacred images, is decorated with "delicate gold-work" (77).
In contrast to these aristocratic figures of Baroque art, the figure of Mary in the Auclair crèche seems to have much in common with the barefoot farm girl of Jules Breton's The Song of the Lark. Both Mary and Joseph, "a grave old man in brown, with a bald head and wrinkled brow" (127), appear more like the santos of the Southwest that Archbishop Latour admired in contrast to the "factory-made plaster images" he found in Ohio churches (Archbishop 28). The Auclair crèche figures, like the Southwestern santos, are consistent with the aesthetic preferences asserted throughout Cather's fiction: they not only evoke the extremely local Virgilian patria; they also exhibit that "irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand" that Archbishop Latour notices in the adobe walls of his Southwestern home (35) and the natural state of Tom Outland's turquoises "before the jewelers have tampered with them" (Professor's House 119).
The irregular and natural quality of Mary and Joseph underscores the vernacular origins of the crèche tradition. Although paintings and some relief sculptures depicting the Nativity had existed since early Christian times, the assembled and moveable crèche of the Auclairs' tradition developed from the living crèche first enacted under the direction of St. Francis of Assisi. In 1223 at Greccio, Italy, Francis coordinated a performance of the biblical Nativity scene by people and animals as a kind of tableau vivant (Sabatier 122). Unlike a painting or a sculpture of the biblical scene in a church, the Franciscan crèche invited the participation of ordinary people, attended — one assumes — by all the vagaries of human and animal behavior familiar to anyone who has watched a children's Christmas play. The crèche with sculptural figures rather than human and animal actors developed from these enactments in the century after Francis of Assisi. The Neapolitan presepe and the French crèche — most strikingly in the Provençal santon tradition — increasingly incorporated figures representing such figures of everyday life as the fishmonger, the laundrywoman, and the baker, as well as the objects associated with them (Art Institute, L'Almanach 362). An eighteenth-century Neapolitan presepe, for example, a "thrilling new ... once-in- a-lifetime acquisition" of the Art Institute of Chicago, "features over 200 figures — including no less than 50 animals and 41 items of food and drink" (Art Institute).
The "meaning-life" of Jacques's toy beaver thus increases in complexity: it figures in a realistic rendering of a child's behavior; it is a symbolic gesture of culture-making; it illuminates the theological doctrine represented by the crèche; and it reclaims the vernacular origins of the crèche tradition, which calls for participation and enactment. The Franciscan charism with its attention to the ordinary, the concrete, and the indigenous is often identified with the source of Western vernacular art — "vernacular," in the case of visual art, meaning that the content not only depicts what is local and native, but does so with new verisimilitude that corresponds to common human experience. The Italian painter Giotto (1266–1337) is credited with the development of this more realistic pictorial style, which reflected the rise of humanism in the early Renaissance and contrasted with the Byzantine tradition of symbolic gesture and static physicality, to depict "figures ... in ways that are ... recognizable and experiential" (Stubblebine 92). In the new vernacular art, like Giotto's frescoes of the life of St. Francis in the basilica at Assisi, "furnishings of interiors, costumes, animals, even work tools became themselves the objects of artistic interest" (Stubblebine 90), an interest we also see developing throughout the centuries in the crèche tradition. Giotto's St. Francis frescoes at Assisi have enraptured viewers for centuries with their attention to individualized clothing and facial expressions and to the realistic positioning of the human body in architecturally defined space. "These scenes," remarks Stubblebine, "have an immediacy that magnifies inversely to the untutored state of the viewer" (1). We might think of Blinker's thrilled response to the unwrapping of the Auclair crèche. Giotto's frescos in the Scrovigni (or Arena) Chapel in Padua (identified with the Franciscan St. Anthony, whose statue Cécile and Jacques notice in the church of Notre-Dame de la Victoire [76]) also depict recognizable human behavior: in the Nativity fresco, for example, Mary is shown lying down, as we might expect of a woman who has just given birth, rather than kneeling in adoration before the infant Jesus; in the Presentation in the Temple, the infant Jesus reaches back to his mother as he is handed to an unfamiliar elder.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Willa Cather and the Arts"
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