Growth In Willa Cather's A Lost Lady

In Willa Cather's A Lost Lady, we are confronted with many examples of love and personal growth, two themes that Cather seamlessly intertwines by utilizing her technique of elucidation of complex emotion through use of nature and landscape throughout the novel. In this essay, I argue that Cather defines love and personal growth of Marian Forrester through three distinct scenes: the drunken long distance call between Mrs.Forrester and Ellinger after she learns of his elopement, the story of how Mr. and Mrs.Forrester met and fell in love (told at the boys' dinner party after the death of Captain Forrester), and the scene where Neil discovers that Mrs.Forrester found a happily ever after, after all. I chose these specific scenes because they explicate
We follow her through three distinct life stages. At first, she is an idealistic young woman, who believes that she is attaining love and comfort in her choice of Captain Forrester. As her comforts slowly wear away to nothing, and her romance along with it, she discovers that she made the wrong choice in Captain Forrester. Her passionate mid-life encounter with Ellinger finalizes the blow that she received from Captain Forrester, and that is that love can be fickle and decietful, and cannot be trusted with something as important as the rest of one's life, sending her into a proverbial “night,” where she is clouded by darkness and feels miserable. At the end of her life, she learns to trust in something far more substantial – herself. She gives up her pursuit of love, and instead pursues only comfort in life. She finds what she is looking for, and with that, she is contented. Only with distant nostalgia does she look upon her life in Sweet Water, because she knows that it was a life as unsustainable as it was unsupportable. Just as Sweet Water is cleared away to make room for industrialization, Marian clears the ideals of romantic love from her existence. Though she learns to live practically, and to find happiness in her life without love, she never forgets the life she led before, and the love she knew. Through the encounter with Ed Elliot, where she states “if you ever meet Neil Herbert, give him my love, and tell him I often think of him,” and by her respect toward her husband, through the decoration of his grave, she reveals that she looks upon her life of love without regret (Cather 165). Through her personal growth, we find that Marian's ideals of love must evolve over her life based on the circumstances with which she is faced, and we come to understand her as an individual with both the power