Tripartite Structure In The Professor's House

American author Willa Cather saw the vast change ushered in from the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century. This small town Nebraska girl traveled the world and became one of America’s most noted female authors. Although a fiction writer, she utilizes her own experiences to create pieces juxtaposing Romantic nature lovers of the past with materialistic entrepreneurs of contemporary times. The Professor’s House autobiographically explores the loss of idealized times and the resulting change as Cather experienced.
Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House reflects the protagonist’s personal battle in dealing with change. Regarding its tripartite structure, Cather rationalized it as “an experiment in inserting the nouvelle
Peter who, while building a family consisting of his wife and two daughters, spent years as a faculty member at a local university simultaneously writing an eight-volume series entitled Spanish Adventurers. The handsome “silky” haired and “tawny” skinned protagonist who was “built upon extremely good bones” and looked “like a Spaniard” possibly did so because he spent a great deal of time in Spain completing research for his series (The Professor’s House 104). Yale University Dean, Dr. Sarah Mahurin Mutter notes how “as a young man” St. Peter “leaves the United States to study for his doctorate in France-an act of expatriatism that severs him decisively from his past” and from the boy he once was back home in Kansas (59). Similarly, Cather left her childhood state of Nebraska traveling on literary pilgrimages to locations such as England and France finding “splendid fuel for creative fires” yet to come (The Woman 38). While home, however, the Professor had a place referred to as “the comfort of his life” that being his walled garden in which, after sending his family away
In this section readers learn of former poker player Rodney Blake’s relationship with Tom. The two men, along with an old “castaway Englishman, Henry Atkins” live and work together somewhat as a family unit in the American Southwest, probably the Arizona area (The Professor’s House 218). After “she had dreamed of exploring the Southwest,” Cather herself visited this area for the first time when she went to see her brother Douglass embarking on a new experience where everything was new to her including “the people, the scenery, the remains of the Cliff Dwellers’ early civilization” (The Woman 55). Not only a new experience, American literary critic and cultural historian at Columbia University Quentin Anderson clarifies, “the landscape of Arizona and New Mexico, the Indians and the Mexicans, the survivals of Aztec beauty were a shock and delight to her” and she had for the first time discovered “an American past that had significance to her” (164). Years later, Cather returned to the area and learned of a discovery of a cave which later became the story of Tom’s Cliff Dwellers. More specifically, Cather located the brother of Dick Wetherill who had discovered the Mesa Verde thirty years prior when, while on horseback looking for stray cattle, had swam the Mancos River, rode atop a “green tableland,” discovered a “huge cave opening in the