The unfinished picture: Willa Cather's "The Marriage of Phaedra."

The Marriage of Phaedra," an early story published in Willa Cather's first collection, The Troll Garden, has never excited much critical or popular interest. Critics have condemned it as derivative, and readers have been put off by its stilted dialogue and unusually lifeless characters. Nevertheless, the story in some ways fights strongly against patriarchal ideas that underlie the rest of the stories of The Troll Garden, even as the painting that is at its heart suggests a new and revolutionary way of looking at men and women, at artists and non-artists alike. When she wrote the work, young Willa Cather was still very much under the spell of Henry James, and her almost slavish imitation of the Master--in her choice of a topic, in her use of a painting as the symbolic center of the story and in the perspective she chose for the story's narrative focus--is hinted at by such character names as "MacMaster" and "James."(1) Even the story's title derives from a work of art created by another artist, albeit an imaginary one.2 The Marriage of Phaedra is the eponymous unfinished painting central to the story that bears its name. Similarly, the subject of the story underlines the question of influence and creativity. Sir Hugh Treffinger has originated a school of art, one based on classical tales and medieval romance. These works, however, had not been taught to him in a British public school as part of a large history and tradition; they were, rather, stories to inspire and stir the imagination of an unlettered sign-painter's apprentice. On the other hand, MacMaster, who is the focalizer of "The Marriage of Phaedra," is an artist too, but he is clearly one who will follow an artistic tradition laid out before him, and, in fact, he will write a book setting out such traditions for future generations of artists.3

"The Marriage of Phaedra" begins with a pessimistic, almost naturalistic view of man's limited possibilities. "The sequence of events was such that MacMaster did not make his pilgrimage to Hugh Treffinger's studio until three years after that painter's death," the story opens, reflecting a decided lack of control in MacMaster himself; despite the "mastery" his name implies, the focalizer for most of this story is powerless in the grip of "events" (83). MacMaster, an "American of the Gallicized type," is an artist turned biographer, a student who has avoided meeting the master artist in person because "he felt himself singularly inadept in personal relations" (83). MacMaster's views about art and life, about men and women, are thoroughly conventional and rather shallow, and they color the story as completely as artist's brush ever colored an empty canvas.

The story of "The Marriage of Phaedra" is a simple one. MacMaster visits the late Sir Hugh Treffinger's studio to view his artistic legacy, especially the unfinished masterpiece, the Marriage of Phaedra. The young artist becomes increasingly obsessed with the painting and with Treffinger's servant, James, who he feels will give him "a cryptic index to the painter's personality" (86). He decides to write a biography and gets permission to do so from Lady Ellen Treffinger, the artist's widow.

Some time goes by, and James appears dramatically at MacMaster's hotel, with the Marriage of Phaedra hidden under a sheet. Had Treffinger lived to complete the work, the picture would have been his masterpiece; he had died, however, before finishing it, and, in fact, James feels that it "regular killed Sir 'Ugh," by bringing on his second stroke (86). James believes that it had been Treffinger's dying wish that the Marriage not be sold unfinished. Nevertheless, Lady Ellen, having announced her engagement to a Captain Gresham, decides to sell the Marriage of Phaedra to a Jewish dealer who will bring it to Australia and wait for its value to increase.

James wants MacMaster to help him steal and hide the painting rather than let it go "to H'australia, w'ere they send convic's," but MacMaster finds that he hasn't got "the right stuff in me for a pirate, or even a vulgar smuggler" (96-97). He does try to talk Lady Ellen out of her decision, but the final scene of "The Marriage of Phaedra" shows MacMaster to be as impotent and powerless as at its opening. As the story ends, MacMaster bows politely to Lady Ellen and her fiance, and "to all intents and purposes the Marriage of Phaedra was already entombed in a vague continent in the Pacific, somewhere on the other side of the world" (101).

When Willa Cather wrote the stories of The Troll Garden, she still believed that serious art was the province of men. In story after story in that work, Cather posits a dichotomy between men and women, artists and nonartists.(4) Some of the women she creates are shown to be ineffectual caretakers of male artists: Flavia in "Flavia and Her Artists" is a shallow woman who attempts unsuccessfully to make an "asylum for talent, the sanatorium of the arts" (10), and Mrs. Merrick of "The Sculptor's Funeral" is portrayed as the hellish mother of a celebrated, sensitive sculptor. Those women who could be artists themselves invariably have their talents belittled, stifled, or suppressed. "Jimmy" Broadwood, the comic actress of "Flavia and Her Artists," denies vehemently that she is an artist herself.(5) Caroline Noble of "The Garden Lodge" gives up her musical education after seeing the "sordid realities" to which her father's and her brother's artistic aspirations and "poetic ideals" lead (51). In "A Wagner Matinee" we meet Aunt Georgiana, a music teacher whose years away from civilization on a frontier farm have destroyed her talent, if not her musical appreciation. And in "'A Death in the Desert"' Cather portrays the ultimate suppression of the female voice, depicting the untimely death of singer Katherine Gaylord. The male/female dichotomy is especially dramatic in this story, in which Katherine dies in the Wyoming desert on the very night that Adriance Hilgarde, the male artist whom she had loved, opens yet another successful concert series in Paris.