By Willa Sibert Cather
I RECEIVED one morning a letter, written in pale ink, on glassy, blue-lined note-paper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as though it had been carried for some days in a coat-pocket that was none too clean, was from my Uncle Howard. It informed me that his wife had been left a small legacy by a bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it had become necessary for her to come to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station, and render her whatever services might prove necessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival, I found it no later than to-morrow. He had characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether.
The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own figure, at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet a gulf of recollections so wide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the surroundings of my study. I became, in short, the gangling farmer-boy my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and raw from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her parlor organ, thumbing the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she beside me made canvas mittens for the huskers.
The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I set out for the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and when I got her into the carriage she looked not unlike one of those charred, smoked bodies that firemen lift from the débris of a burned building. She had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become black with soot and her black bonnet gray with dust during the journey. When we arrived at my boarding-house the landlady put her to bed at once, and I did not see her again until the next morning.
Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance she considerately concealed. Myself, I saw my aunt's misshapened figure with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef Land, or their health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a music-teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties. One summer, which she had spent in the little village in the Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those absurd and extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in a plain, angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her; and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticism of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who of course had no money, took a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the railroad. There they measured off their eighty acres by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates usually reverted to the conditions of primitive savagery. Their water they got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty years my aunt had not been farther than fifty miles from the homestead.
But Mrs. Springer knew nothing of all this, and must have been considerably shocked at what was left of my kinswoman. Beneath the soiled linen duster, which on her arrival was the most conspicuous feature of her costume, she wore a black stuff dress whose ornamentation showed that she had surrendered herself unquestioningly into the hands of a country dressmaker. My poor aunt's figure, however, would have presented astonishing difficulties to any dressmaker. Her skin was yellow as a Mongolian's from constant exposure to a pitiless wind, and to the alkaline water, which transforms the most transparent cuticle into a sort of flexible leather. She wore ill-fitting false teeth. The most striking thing about her physiognomy, however, was an incessant twitching of the mouth and eyebrows, a form of nervous disorder resulting from isolation and monotony, and from frequent physical suffering.
In my boyhood this affliction had possessed a sort of horrible fascination for me, of which I was secretly very much ashamed, for in those days I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way, and had a reverential affection for her. During the three winters when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking three meals for half a dozen farm-hands, and putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her ironing-board, hearing me at the kitchen table beside her recite Latin declensions and conjugations, and gently shaking me when my drowsy head sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing or mending, that I read my first Shakespere; and her old text-book of mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught me my scales and exercises, too, on the little parlor organ which her husband had bought her after fifteen years, during which she had not so much as seen any instrument except an accordion, that belonged to one of the Norwegian farm-hands. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and counting, while I struggled with the "Harmonious Blacksmith"; but she seldom talked to me about music, and I understood why. She was a pious woman; she had the consolation of religion; and to her at least her martyrdom was not wholly sordid. Once when I had been doggedly beating out some easy passages from an old score of "Euryanthe" I had found among her music-books, she came up to me and, putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying tremulously, "Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh! dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice be it is not that."
When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival, she was still in a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize that she was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place longed for hungrily half a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly train-sick throughout the journey that she had no recollection of anything but her discomfort, and, to all intents and purposes, there were but a few hours of nightmare between the farm in Red Willow County and my study on Newbury Street. I had planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon, to repay her for some of the glorious moments she had given me when we used to milk together in the straw-thatched cow-shed, and she, because I was more than usually tired, or because her husband had spoken sharply to me, would tell me of the splendid performance of Meyerbeer's "Huguenots" she had seen in Paris in her youth. At two o'clock the Boston Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner programme, and I intended to take my aunt, though as I conversed with her I grew doubtful about her enjoyment of it. Indeed, for her own sake, I could only wish her taste for such things quite dead, and the long struggle mercifully ended at last. I suggested our visiting the Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed altogether too timid to wish to venture out. She questioned me absently about various changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to a certain weakling calf, "Old Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she explained, evidently having forgotten how long I had been away. She was further troubled because she had neglected to tell her daughter about the freshly opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, that would spoil if it were not used directly.
I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas, and found that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their respective situations and had once possessed the piano score of "The Flying Dutchman." I began to think it would have been best to get her back to Red Willow County without waking her, and regretted having suggested the concert.
From the time we entered the concert-hall, however, she was a trifle less passive and inert, and seemed to begin to perceive her surroundings. I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware of the absurdities of her attire, or might experience some painful embarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had been dead for a quarter of a century. But again I found how superficially I had judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almost as stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a museum watches the froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal, separated from it by the lonely stretch of centuries. I have seen this same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown Hotel at Denver, their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard faces unshorn, and who stand in the thronged corridors as solitary as though they were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon, or in the yellow blaze of the Arizona desert, conscious that certain experiences have isolated them from their fellows by a gulf no haberdasher could conceal.
The audience was made up chiefly of women. One lost the contour of faces and figures, indeed any effect of line whatever, and there was only the color contrast of bodices past counting, the shimmer and shading of fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer, resisting and yielding: red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, écru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and there the dead black shadow of a frock-coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as though they had been so many daubs of tube paint on a palette.
When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little stir of anticipation, and looked with quickening interest down over the rail at that invariable grouping; perhaps the first wholly familiar thing that had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weakling calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh from ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a shadow of change in one's environment. I reminded myself of the impression made on me by the clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green-shaded stand-lamps on the smooth, varnished bellies of the 'cellos and the bass viols in the rear, the restless, wind-tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows; I recalled how, in the first orchestra I had ever heard, those long bow strokes seemed to draw the soul out of me, as a conjurer's stick reels out paper ribbon from a hat.
The first number was the Tannhäuser overture. When the violins drew out the first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus, my Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat-sleeve. Then it was that I first realized that for her this singing of basses and stinging frenzy of lighter strings broke a silence of thirty years, the inconceivable silence of the plains. With the battle between the two motifs, with the bitter frenzy of the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, came to me an overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat. I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, the rain-gullied clay about the naked house; the four dwarf ash-seedlings on which the dishcloths were always hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there is the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that stretched to sunset; between, the sordid conquests of peace, more merciless than those of war.
The overture closed. My aunt released my coat-sleeve, but she said nothing. She sat staring at the orchestra through a dullness of thirty years, through the films made little by little, by each of the three hundred and sixty-five days in every one of them. What, I wondered, did she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day, I knew, and her musical education had been broader than that of most music-teachers of a quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and Meyerbeer's, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago, certain melodies of Verdi's. When I had fallen ill with a fever she used to sit by my cot in the evening, while the cool night wind blew in through the faded mosquito-netting tacked over the window, and I lay watching a bright star that burned red above the cornfield, and sing "Home to our mountains, oh, let us return!" in a way fit to break the heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already.
I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, trying vainly to conjecture what that warfare of motifs, that seething turmoil of strings and winds, might mean to her. Had this music any message for her? Did or did not a new planet swim into her ken? Wagner had been a sealed book to Americans before the sixties. Had she anything left with which to comprehend this glory that had flashed around the world since she had gone from it? I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon her peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility throughout the numbers from the "Flying Dutchman," though her fingers worked mechanically upon her black dress, as though of themselves they were recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor old hands! They were stretched and pulled and twisted into mere tentacles to hold, and lift, and knead with; the palms unduly swollen, the fingers bent and knotted, on one of them a thin worn band that had once been a wedding-ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands, I remembered, with quivering eyelids, their services for me in other days.
Soon after the tenor began the Prize Song, I heard a quick-drawn breath, and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were glistening on her cheeks, and I think in a moment more they were in my eyes as well. It never really dies, then, the soul? It withers to the outward eye only, like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again. My aunt wept gently throughout the development and elaboration of the melody.
During the intermission before the second half of the concert, I questioned my aunt and found that the Prize Song was not new to her. Some years before there had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp cow-puncher, who had sung in the chorus at Baireuth, when he was a boy, along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a Sunday morning he used to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands' bedroom, which opened off the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle, and singing the Prize Song, while my aunt went about her work in the kitchen. She had hovered about him until she had prevailed upon him to join the country church, though his sole fitness for this step, so far as I could gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of this divine melody. Shortly afterward he had gone to town on the Fourth of July, been drunk for several days, lost his money at a faro-table, ridden a saddled Texan steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collar-bone.
"Well, we have come to better things than the old Trovatore at any rate, Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with well-meant jocularity.
Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth. From behind it she murmured, "And you have been hearing this ever since you left me, Clark?" Her question was the gentlest and saddest of reproaches.
"But do you get it, Aunt Georgiana, the astonishing structure of it all?" I persisted.
"Who could?" she said, absently; "why should one?"
The second half of the programme consisted of four numbers from the Ring. This was followed by the forest music from Siegfried, and the programme closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, but almost continuously. I was perplexed as to what measure of musical comprehension was left to her, to her who had heard nothing but the singing of gospel hymns in Methodist services at the square frame school-house on Section Thirteen. I was unable to gauge how much of it had been dissolved in soapsuds, or worked into bread, or milked into the bottom of a pail.
The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what happy islands, or under what skies. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that the Siegfried march, at least, carried her out where the myriad graves are, out into the gray, burying-grounds of the sea; or into some world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope has lain down with hope, and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept.
The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman made no effort to rise. I spoke gently to her. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly, "I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"
I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert-hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs, the tall, unpainted house, naked as a tower, with weather-curled boards; the crook-backed ash-seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry, the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.
https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss011
From Everybody's Magazine, 10 (March 1904): 325-328.
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The metaphor in this paragraph compares his recollections of his past to a vast gulf. This brings to mind a sense of resentment and alienation. This contrast goes to show the narrator’s detatchedness from Georgiana.
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You can never escape your past; it still lives inside you, even if it’s deep down.
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This sentence, which is metaphorical in that his aunt is being compared to a charred dead body, points to a point of view on the narrator’s part that his aunt’s lifestyle is somewhat pitiable. The fact that she has been blackened with soot is a fairly literal interpretation of this metaphor, however I feel that it does more to reveal his point of view than just showing that he notices that her traveling clothes are soiled. In likening her to a burned-up person, he is revealing that he thinks of her as used up and heavily beaten down by her lifestyle, as the hull of a fine thing that is left behind after a great disaster. The disaster, though, by the narrator’s estimation, is simply the events of her life that have left her misshapen and unpretty.
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This metaphor helps illustrate the narrator’s contempt and pity for his aunt condition. To the narrator, she is both feared and pitied after a fashion. To the Narrator, she is seen as a withered, soulless shell, not unlike a burned out corpse, grotesque and pitiful.
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The setting here just gives a introduction of what his aunt’s life was like. The background information though of her, use of being a music teacher really impacts the theme of the story. Once they get to the concert, which I could see in a way being a climax. It was clear on how the author relied on many things that they stated. This part of the setting, was no doubt one of the most important factors. Therefore, with her background information, the difference between the country and the city, and what happens at the concert. All of it makes me believe the theme is, a soul can never die. You can sometimes get lost, but the things you love, you will always come back to in one way or another, and it’s okay if you did get lost. Once you do find your way though, it is life changing.
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The metaphor shows how Clark sees his aunt- with respect for all she’s been through, but a near pity for her. This shows, too, that his Aunt’s time in the countryside was like some highly traumatic event for her.
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you can see that he respects his aunt, and looks behind the cover of the book, to see and respect a person behind their appearance.
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This demonstrates the recurring theme of things, parts of the self being left behind.
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the village is described as unchanging, being “idle and shiftless”
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Even though she was no less than 50 miles from home she has drastically changed. I think this shows that even when you are with or near people that you have been with your entire childhood; change is a part of life and distance does not create this change but rather the experiences you have encountered.
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The metaphor in this paragraph is the comparison of his aunt’s skin/overall appearance and the prairie. The vivid details of his aunt’s appearance help the audience imagine how life is like on the prairie. It also explains the narrator’s view of the prairie and his aunt. The narrator’s opinion is shaped by showing the harm the prairie has caused his aunt Georgina. He has a very negative opinion in this story so far.
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The nephew describes his aunt in her current state as lesser than what she was before she eloped to Nebraska. This is partly because she would be viewed as less sophisticated because she has been on a homestead for 25 years. Thus, she is seen as a shell of her former self. However, it may also be that she is viewed as lass feminine after years of hard labor as she assisted her husband on the homestead.
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The way the narrator talks about his aunt here reveals a lot about how he sees her. He focuses so much on these little details, and is under no illusions about how ugly he considers them so be. On the other hand, this sentence acknowledges that her affliction has come as a result as the life she has happened to live (see: “nervous disorder resulting from…”). That sentiment hearkens back to other things that the narrator has said revealing his point of view on physicalities and their intersection with life experience earlier, such as recalling his “hands cracked and raw from the corn husking.” These things combine to create meaning because it shows that although he may have some amount of disdain or morose fascination with his aunt’s physical “defects,” the narrator still does not seek to blame her for them.
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This sentence shows how the narrator both views his aunt positively and negatively. This creates meaning as it brings about the idea that even if something generally good is put in front of someone they’ll still be able to find and notice the bad. Even if one doesn’t want to one can still become overly aware of the bad.
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“Don’t love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you”.
Having something of that nature said to you can lead to many thoughts. This hits hard with meaning and confusion. Confusion sometimes makes the meaning even more powerful because of how much you think about it later on. The purpose of this is to teach a lesson about the luxuries you have now and how they can be taken away from you at any given moment. This gives an eye into his aunt’s life and brings up the question: what was taken away from her and why did that affect her in the future?
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Again, with this quote.
The theme this is presenting to the audience is the idea of luxuries. Not everyone has the same things you might. Or, some may have had the same opportunities you had/have, but they were suddenly taken away from them. It’s the overused central idea of “you must cherish what you have before it is gone”. This line also gives the audience sort of a spoiler or look into his aunt’s life and how the story will proceed.
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Georgiana had something she loved dearly taken from her, which was music. I think this idea touches on the immense importance the things that people care about have. Everybody loves something, and life becomes painful and even boring when that is taken from you. You could feel lost and dead inside. Georgiana was afraid to care about something because she was afraid that she would lose it again.
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This quote reveals that the city that the narrator (Clark) currently lives in was where his aunt grew up. This adds a layer to the fact that the city and the country have often been indirectly compared within this story, as these general categories can now be thought of as two specific locations. A possible theme that comes from this would be that the setting of one’s life can greatly sway one’s outcome. While Clark spent his youth in the country and now lives in the city, his aunt went the other way around, and each was affected by the location in which they spent their recent adult life. Even though his aunt apparently wanted to live in the city for “half a lifetime,” she was still affected more by where she did live (the country) than where she wanted to (the city).
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This gives the reader’s knowledge about how different the city has changed and the country has not. If his aunt has never seen it in a while, it tells us three things. One, it gives us a reminder that his aunt did not have the best life growing up and she had no free time. She did not recognize the city, because she never got the chance or reason to travel back over there. Second, I feel like because of this, her personality is different now than everyone else in the society. The aunt does not get excited for city things that city people do get excited about. For an example, the shows. The aunt is just worried and shock about how the city changed so much. I think with her being out of the city for so long, she does not really fit in. It’s like asking a country person when they visit the city, what Starbucks drink they want. Both would not know what’s going on; and the main character feels like he needs to fill her in. That’s the kind of relationship they have in this part of the story, because all of this started at the two very different settings. Thrid, the country symbolizes as depressed, confide, boring, and a dull place that creates an example of mentally where she has been stuck in. Whereas, the city is busy, bright, motivated, and so she has trouble getting used to it for a reason. The setting is what creates this story as it is, because it affects the characters, and therefore the plot. Which than helps us see theme of, it’s okay to be lost with yourself. The things you care about, the things you love will eventually come back to you, and for some people it just takes a longer time.
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she remembers the city but is still very focused on her life on the farm
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In this section, we see the theme of fitting in or, in this case, not fitting in. Society has made figurative boxes for which people are supposed to stay. If you step out of that box you are negatively labeled from that point on. His aunt, being used to the country, is stepping back into a scene she has not been in for a while. A scene that was taken away from her (hint hint to the quote I was talking about previously). Clark, embarrassed for her, is now seeing that she is not just the one person society has labeled her to be. She is much more however unconventional that may be.
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Comparing her aunts figure from 30 years prior to what she is now we understand that the narrator may have brought her here to revive her old self. The metaphor here is that her aunt has not actually been dead for a quarter of a century but rather solitary from society. This sentence also tells us that her aunt is oblivious to that fact that she looks ridiculous in the concert hall and that the narrator knows this.
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This shows the point of view because this shows that they have based their assumptions on what their aunt was like in their childhood, and how they perceived them when they saw them getting off the train. By using the word ‘again’, it shows that this is not the first time they have misjudged their aunt, setting up the rest of the story for what a quick Whitted (can recognize a ton of melodies and remembers a lot from her childhood) woman she is. This also sets up the idea that this woman is fully capable of being happy and independent for herself and the idea that she would not want to go back to that life later on because by misjudging her, it means that she has not been living up to her true potential on the farm and she knows it.
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being alone, or in a monotone life, is terrible for human beings.
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The narrator mentions that “those long bow strokes seemed to draw the soul out of me.” Of course the soul isn’t drawn out of the body, but music does create feeling. This quote contributes to the point of view because the narrator assumes that Georgiana would be having a similar experience after being away from society after 25 years. He expects her to be completely blown away by the opera.
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She feels at home in this place, despite how long she has spent steeped in the location and social milieu surrounding the country. This points to the theme that familiarity is a versatile thing. Someone can be familiar with things from their distant past, things that have hardly influenced them for years and years. Despite this gaping distance, metaphorical and literal, between Aunt Georgiana and city pleasure such as this one, she is still able to feel a sort of familiarity which shows that anything can spark that feeling.
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The narrator uses a metaphor to compare their experiences on the homestead to a treadmill which one walks on continuously with no notice to their environment. This gets contrasted by the narrator saying that all the details of the concert hall were sunk into their soul. For the reader, this highlights how from the narrator’s point of view the concert hall and music is much more interesting and affecting as the image of sinking makes the reader think of the details having a very deep effect. Also, one’s soul is essentially the core of a person, further pushing the idea that the effect was very impactful. The idea of a monotonous treadmill and obliviousness to one’s surroundings shows the reader that the narrator disliked their life on the homestead and found the details so boring and unaffecting that they paid them no mind. In all the metaphor allows the reader to get a better understanding of the narrator’s point of view on music and the homestead.
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This metaphor of feeling the details sinking into her soul illustrates that she is taking everything in and absorbing it; memorizing it and the person telling the story can sense it. This builds on the point of view of the story because the person immediately compares her experience in the concert hall to the First-person experience of the storyteller. This continues into the next line of connecting fields of corn to a treadmill because it tells us from a firsthand experience how new this once was to the storyteller and connects it back to how it is now suddenly new for the woman again.
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it calls back in detail to his aunt’s life with music
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Music can positively impact anyone, no matter how long it has been.
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The theme in this line has to do with where you are in life, figuratively and literally. You do not always choose where you will end up in life, it sort of just happens. This was apparent to her when the concert was over. Her choices persuaded her life away from where she once was and she missed her old life. Her passion for music was always there inside of her, it just took a waterfall of feelings for her to remember and actually feel again what she used to love and obsess over. Going back to the prairie, her present life, now seems like a step in the wrong direction.
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This sentence relates to the story’s theme of how the wear and tear of time and life affects a person. This theme is shown throughout the story by the aunt. The aunt is both physically and mentally shown to have been worn down by her 30 years on the homestead and the story explores the idea of how deep and how permanent the wear was.
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This illustrates a theme of comparing the country to the city because the author talks about how they went to see an orchestra in a concert hall in Boston, a very big city with a lot going on in it. Yet when the music started, the writer said they felt like they were back on the farm again, and begins to describe what that feels like. By talking about the farm while in a big, bustling city, the author is trying to say that they are not as different as they seem.
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In this sentence we understand just how tunneled the narrator is on understanding her aunt. After all these years does her appreciation for music remain. Since the point of view resides in the narrator this creates curiosity. Since we do not know whether she is enjoying the music either. However we do realize how focused she is on finding out that fact.
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Due to this story being a first person perspective, we only know what the main character is thinking. We do not get any information about what the aunt’s really thinking about, we only see her emotions like the main character. It impacts the main character AND the readers, because it not only makes him curious, it makes us as readers curious to. We like him, just know his aunt life background, but we don’t get why or what she thinking about until the end of the story. Which I think is a very clever way to also hook the readers in the journey as well.
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This sentence shows a theme in the story of the persistence of the feelings of the soul through time. Here, the narrator’s aunt although removed from music for 30 years has her appreciation for it remain. This shows the idea that things that people find close to their souls persists forever.
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In this sentence we see that her feelings have remained intact and that her love for music never died but was rather tucked away. The theme here is that if you truly love something no matter what happens you or how long you have been withdrawn from that thing your attachment with it will endure
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In this sentence, Cather tries to get across the idea that someone’s love for something never fades. In this case, Georgiana’s soul is music and her love of it. Some things are part of you forever, even if you are separated from it for 30 years
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Once again, the author is connecting the city to the country and its people in the same way. The orchestra played a piece that the woman clearly knew, and then the author says that music was this woman’s soul, because she clearly had not heard this piece in a very long time, since she had lived in Boston, and yet when she heard it again, her soul ‘bloomed’. In this scenario, the soul of this woman seems to thrive listening to music in a big city, but the soul itself is described as nature.
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I really loved the comparison a person’s soul to a moss. Both can get very old and lost. However, it takes just one thing that they love to turn colorful again. The whole time the main character was curious if he can make his aunt fall in love with the city. Once he stated “It never really dies, then, the soul?” He learned that he made her at least a little happy, after being bored for so long and most likely lonely in the country. With music, which from the very start of this story, we found out she loves to the point she made her income from that. That’s what made her fall back in love again, no she did not stop loving it actually. She has just forgotten the magical elements to it, because it was 30 years on a farm.
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Here Aunt Georgiana responds to Clark’s question of if she understands the music they listened to. She responds asking who could understand and why. This shows the theme of whether one can truly understand all the emotions and ideas music can bring, and even if one should. Clark focuses a lot of time trying to figure out what his aunt was understanding from the music, but was unable to. He says later that “I never knew what she found in the shining current of it”, so the effort he put in did not pay off. Her exact thinking and whether she understood it all did not matter in the end because either way the music clearly had a strong impact on her.
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This demonstrates the fact that Georgiana has found a place where she can be happy, thus demonstrating the theme of rediscovery of new homes.
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The concert hall has brought something special to Clarks aunt, it is something that can only be appreciated at the hall. Since Boston has changed so much she does not want to leave, knowing that when she walks outside it will be foreign land. In a way you could call music her home and the hall was simply the place that brought it to her.
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she misses her life in the city, even though she is past it, and chose not to continue with that life. She used to be self-sustained, and she misses it.
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People want to hold on to the things that the love and never let go because they fear they will lose it forever. This feeling is even more intense for Georgiana because she lost what she loved, music, only to briefly reunite with it. The same is true for families who are separated and reunited because they never want to leave each other again.
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This brings all of the parts of this story to make one last big impact on the theme. I’ve gone over about the difference between the country and the city and how that impact the aunt’s personality, how the background information was a must needed aspect, but this part right here creates the whole conclusion. The main character and the reader like I mention in my point of view comment finally gets to see what was in her mind, the curiosity stopped, and now we know what the theme of the story is. The difference between where you live should not change what you love and who you are. The aunt got lost, and once she finally came to the town again and heard the orchestra playing she was at peace with herself, she cried because she forgot the feeling of hearing the music. She did not want to go back, because it takes her back to a dull place. Music for her and the main character creates an escape place where there no thinking about the difference of the country and the city life. After 30 years, she found what she loves again, and the theme here is quite obvious to the readers now. No matter where you go, you should be you, do what you love, enjoy where you are at, but also travel because it can help you grow, because your soul never dies. What you love, will come back to you.
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This point of view that the farm was bland, sad, and overall soulless creates meaning in its comparison to the rich culture of the concert hall. The Aunt’s entrapment in the bleak farm led to her being deprived of music, and of herself.
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Home and comfort is not a place, but an idea, or in this case music; showing how while they are sitting in the concert hall in Boston, for the Aunt, outside of the concert hall is not the city of Boston, but the house she has been living in in the country for years. This symbolizes that she sees music as her home, and specifically the music of Boston/cities. This means that she does not see the country as her home, but this also shows that she doesn’t see the city as ehr home, just music.
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This demonstrates the theme of people being forced out of their ideal paradises (or fleeing them) and rediscovering them
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General Document Comments 0
Read “A Wagner Matinée” and make 5 comments:
Locate one metaphor within “A Wagner Matinée” and base a comment on it: How does that metaphor create point of view in the story?
Base one comment a sentence that demonstrates the point of view in “A Wagner Matinée” (Voice telling the story that controls the information)? How does that point of view create meaning in the story?
Base three comments on locations that demonstrate possible themes (topic + judgement) for “A Wagner Matinée”.
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This final, very clear comparison between society in the city and the hard-living in the country, points to the theme that different locations can act as entirely different worlds. Also, that sometimes where a person is is not where a person belongs. The orchestra feels like Aunt Georgie’s home, although it is not her home at all. She feels this inherent connection to it, though it differs so greatly from her place in life—maybe because it differs so greatly from her place in life.
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