Neighbour Rosicky (Criticism)

Criticism

Bonnie Burns

Burns is a writing specialist at Emmanuel College, and her areas of special studies include film studies and nineteenth-century British literature as well as gay and lesbian studies. In the following essay, she discusses the balances between life and death in Cather’s “Neighbour Rosicky.”

With her portrayal of Anton Rosicky, a Bohemian farmer on the Nebraska prairie in the 1920s, Willa Cather returns to the settings and themes of her early fiction. Like O Pioneers! and My Antonia,“Neighbour Rosicky” explores both the literal and symbolic importance of the land to the people who settled on the plains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Cather’s sympathetic interest in the struggles and triumphs of the immigrants who domesticated the great prairies of the Midwest is keenly alive in this story about one farmer’s gentle cultivation of his land and his home. Though

“Neighbour Rosicky” marks Cather’s return to the great themes of her early fiction, critics agree that the story displays a new maturity of vision.

Cather’s biographer, E. K. Brown, attributes Cather’s mature vision to the fact that she wrote “Neighbour Rosicky” shortly after her father’s death. Cather had always been attracted to the elegiac mode. An elegy is a poem of mourning and reflection written on the occasion of someone’s death. Cather can be called “elegiac” because she often used her fiction to reflect on the meaning of death and separation. In “Neighbour Rosicky,” Anton Rosicky faces his own impending death after the doctor tells him he has a bad heart. The knowledge that he soon will be leaving behind everything that he cherishes causes him to reflect on the important events that have marked his life. Though she is writing a story about death, Cather’s deft handling of her subject matter transforms sorrow into celebration; the permanence of the land makes the brevity of life meaningful.

Critics have almost unanimously pointed to the story’s careful balancing of life and death. In her book Willa Cather’s Short Fiction, for instance,

Marilyn Arnold observes that “[d]eath is neither a great calamity nor a final surrender to despair, but rather, a benign presence, anticipated and even graciously entertained. It is the other side of life, and comes . . . as a natural consequence of ‘having lived.’ It is a reunion with the earth for one like Rosicky who has lived close to the land.” Indeed, at the end of the story Dr. Burleigh observes, after Rosicky’s death, that “Rosicky’s life seemed to him complete and beautiful.” Since the story’s publication, critics have attempted to define precisely what contributes to this sense of completeness. Many critics consider Cather’s attention to the defining power of agricultural cycles to be central to the story’s measured acceptance of death. In Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction, David Daiches argues that “the relation of the action to its context in agricultural life gives the story an elemental quality.” However, Arnold points out that unity in “Neighbour Rosicky” is also “defined in human terms, a wholeness and completeness that derives from human harmony and caring.”

In “Neighbour Rosicky,” Cather establishes an accord between the natural world and the human one, between the inflexible facts of material existence and the human ability to transcend them. Cather strikingly illustrates the intimate connection between the human and the natural world through the image of the graveyard which occurs twice in “Neighbour Rosicky”: once at the beginning of the story and once at its conclusion. When Rosicky first learns that he has “a bad heart,” he stops by the graveyard on the way home from town and considers its finer points:

It was a nice graveyard, Rosicky reflected, sort of snug and homelike, not cramped or mournful, — a big sweep all round it. A man could lie down in the long grass and see the complete arch of the sky over him, hear the wagons go by; in summer the mowing-machine rattled right up to the wire fence. And it was so near home. Over there across the cornstalks his own roof and windmill looked so good to him that he promised himself to mind the Doctor and take care of himself. He was awful fond of his place, he admitted. He wasn’t anxious to leave it. And it was a comfort to think that he would never have to go farther than the edge of his own hayfield. The snow, falling over his barnyard and the graveyard, seemed to draw things together like. And they were all old neighbours in the graveyard, most of them friends; there was nothing to feel awkward or embarrassed about.

Imagining this small cemetery as “snug and homelike,” and finding consolation in its nearness to his own farm, Rosicky dwells on the pleasures of domestic life. Unwilling as yet to leave the home he has made for himself and his family, Rosicky is comforted by the fact that the graveyard is just at “the edge of his own hayfield.” As he watches, the falling snow seems to draw his farm and the cemetery even closer together. He considers those who have been buried there “old neighbours.” Rosicky’s vision of death is softened by his ability to imagine it as a part of his domestic world — the world of family and neighbors, of comfort and pleasure.

This initial vision of death as a kind of homecoming helps Rosicky, and the reader, cope with the story’s impending conclusion: Rosicky’s death. Cather returns to the image of the graveyard at the end of the story when Dr. Burleigh stops there after Rosicky’s death to contemplate the cemetery’s beauty:

[T]his was open and free, this little square of long grass which the wind for ever stirred. Nothing but the sky overhead, and the many-coloured fields running

on until they met that sky. The horses worked here in the summer; the neighbours passed on their way to town; and over yonder, in the cornfield, Rosicky’s own cattle would be eating fodder as winter came on. Nothing could be more undeathlike than this place.

As Arnold points out, “this particular graveyard . . . is not a place where things end, but where they are completed.” This sense of completion, however, depends on relinquishing the comforts of domestic tranquility for the transcendence of the natural world. The image of the graveyard at the end of “Neighbour Rosicky” remains slightly wild, “open and free.” Rosicky has left his home and family behind him and has returned to the “grass which the wind for ever stirred.” In her book The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism, Susan J. Rosowski observes that Cather’s ability to connect the human and the natural in these scenes depends on her capacity to join “one person’s life” to something “universal.” Rosowski points out that in this final passage “one family’s fields run into endless sky; a single man has merged with all of nature.” This vision of the graveyard as a place of transcendence seems quite different from Rosicky’s vision of the graveyard as “snug and homelike.” Cather begins and concludes “Neighbour Rosicky” with these two images because she would like her readers to see the connections between the human and the transcendent. In her analysis of the story’s concluding images, Rosowski observes that “this is a graveyard that is a part of life, where the fence separating the living from the dead is hidden with grass, where some neighbors lie inside and other neighbors pass on their way to town.” The delicate balance between the human world and the natural one has been maintained, even, or perhaps especially, in death.

Other images throughout “Neighbour Rosicky” suggest that the “snug” boundaries of a single human life and the unboundedness of a transcendent natural world are deeply interconnected. In “The Agrarian Mode in Cather’s ‘Neighbour Rosicky’,” Edward J. Piacentino argues that Rosicky symbolizes “the land, agricultural life, and agrarian values.” He notes that even Rosicky’s hands are described as warm and brown and observes that “[w]armth, in this sense, relates to the vital heat needed by the brownish-red soil in the developmental process of the vegetative cycle.” Rosicky’s hands are mentioned in many different contexts throughout the story. Rosicky’s “reassuring grip” on Polly’s elbows as he insists that she leave the duty of cleaning her kitchen to him and enjoy herself in town is one example among many of Rosicky’s almost magical ability to touch the lives of those around him.

Another way that Rosicky expresses his generosity through his hands is by sewing. A tailor in his youth, Rosicky often patches his sons’ clothes while musing over his past life. A domestic activity usually associated with female labor, sewing in “Neighbour Rosicky” is related to the other activity Rosicky performs with his hands, his labor as a farmer. The resonances between “sewing,” using a needle to stitch together fabric, and “sowing,” planting a field with seed, bring together quite forcefully the domestic and the natural worlds.

Perhaps because Rosicky is at the end of his life, we never see him actually sowing a field. Rather, as Piacentino and others have pointed out, we see him laboring to protect the fields he has already planted. Piacentino argues that “Rosicky’s death comes after he overexerts himself cutting thistles that have grown up in his son Rudolph’s alfalfa field. His death . . . can be seen as a labor of love for restoring the proper conditions for productive vegetation.” Rosicky’s sewing signals his desire to reflect and reminisce, sewing together the details of his previous experiences into a whole cloth — an entire picture. In a sense, his sewing restores “the proper conditions” for remembering a life. Both activities, sowing and sewing, producing and remembering, are vital to the human. And both of these activities are performed by the human hand.

In one of the most moving passages in “Neighbour Rosicky,” Cather celebrates the capacity of the human hand to perform the tasks necessary to sustain both the human and the natural world. When Rosicky suffers a heart attack, Polly, his American daughter-in-law, finds him between the barn and the house and helps him back into the comfort of a domestic setting where she nurses him until his pain subsides. Throughout the story Polly has been reserved and wary, unwilling to get too close to Rosicky even though she cares for him deeply. In “Character and Observation in Willa Cather’s Obscure Destinies” Michael Leddy has pointed out that “it would be impossible to imagine Rosicky’s life as complete and beautiful if he were to die without coming close to his daughter-in-law, without the assurance that Polly has ‘a tender heart.’” What touches Polly finally is, of course, Rosicky’s hand:

After he dropped off to sleep, she sat holding his warm, broad, flexible brown hand. She had never seen another in the least like it. She wondered if it wasn’t a kind of gypsy hand, it was so alive and quick and light in its communications. . . . Rosicky’s [hand] was like quicksilver, flexible, muscular, about the colour of a pale cigar, with deep, deep creases across the palm. . . . [I]t was a warm brown human hand, with some cleverness in it, a great deal of generosity, and something else which Polly could only call “gypsy-like,” — something nimble and lively and sure, in the way that animals are.

Polly remembered that hour long afterwards; it had been like an awakening to her. It seemed to her that she had never learned so much about life from anything as from old Rosicky’s hand. It brought her to herself; it communicated some direct and untranslatable message.

Though he dies because he labors to save an alfalfa field, Rosicky continues to live in the legacy, “direct and untranslatable,” that he leaves to Polly. It is a legacy of tenderness and determination, of hope and realism. Rosicky’s life is complete — especially since Polly’s life can now begin.

Source: Bonnie Burns, “Overview of ‘Neighbour Rosicky,’” for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• O Pioneers!, Cather’s second novel, was written in 1913. Set in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century, the novel tells the story of a group of immigrants who settled there and met, loved, and parted. The novel provides a rich and detailed look at pioneer life.
• My Antonia, Cather’s fourth novel, written in 1918, anticipates the themes that dominate “Neighbour Rosicky.” Narrated by Jim Burden, a farm boy on the Nebraska plains at the end of the nineteenth century, the novel recounts his memories of Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian farm girl who survives various hardships to thrive in the new land.
• The Professor’s House, which Cather wrote in 1925, tells the story of a middle-aged professor at a Midwestern university who must come to terms with the melancholy that has haunted his life. Embedded in the professor’s story is the story of Tom Outland’s adventures on the mesa in the American southwest.
• Death Comes for the Archbishop was written the year before “Neighbour Rosicky,” in 1927. In this novel, Cather turns to the landscapes, myths, and histories of the southwestern United States to weave an episodic tale of the French missionary Archbishop Lamy, who came to America in the mid-nineteenth century. Though a departure from her early novels, it is considered one of Cather’s finest achievements.
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (published 1939; Pulitzer Prize, 1940), is set in the Great Depression and traces the migration of an Oklahoma farming family from their Dust Bowl-ravaged farm to California. There the family faces hardships of an exploitive migrant farm worker system.
• Winesburg, Ohio (1919), by Sherwood Anderson, is a novel comprising many interconnected short stories which tell of the hopes, defeated ambitions, earnest attempts at genuine communication, and sweetness of life in a small Midwestern farming town.
• Main Street (1920), by Sinclair Lewis, is set in a Scandinavian-settled small town in Minnesota during the early twentieth century. This groundbreaking novel, called by many critics the foremost literary work to express the “revolt from the village” in American literature, is a scathing treatment of small-town materialism and dullness.
• The poem “East Coker,” by T. S. Eliot, is part of the poet’s acclaimed Four Quartets (1943). This poem is a meditation upon the cyclical nature of life, the nature of religious belief, and the approach of death, with the poem informed by Eliot’s Christian vision.