Willa Cather's Sapphira and the slave girl: Extending the boundaries of the body

Willa Cather's powerful final novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) remains read and in print, despite being subject to periods of critical neglect, followed by intermittent attempts to redefine its essence and purpose in Cather's canon.2 A vivid evocation of the ante-bellum Tidewater area of Virginia, Sapphira and the Slave Girl has been described variously as "A Winter's Tale," a gothic tale, and a clever subversion of readers' expectations.3 The novel elicits vigorous responses on the part of readers and critics one hundred and fifty years after its action takes place, and more than half a century after its publication. It also provokes harshly critical responses from readers who view Cather's constructions of racial and gender issues as dated; Toni Morrison's lengthy and persuasive comments in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination come to mind. And yet, once we reflect upon these issues, we can see that in Sapphira and the Slave Girl Cather does raise and face many of the complexities surrounding race, gender, authority, ethics and equality still facing our culture.

The quality and tone of critical response to the novel reveal a passionate, invested need to understand it. Readers do not want to look away, or to let this text keep its secrets; we want to know why Sapphira would plot against the young slave girl Nancy and why everyone around Sapphira could be so complicit in her plot. Even as Cather herself shifts the ground beneath our feet, we seek answers about this novel of desperation, abuse, and culpability. Is Sapphira, marginalized by age, illness and gender, actually the center of the tale? How can she be both impotent and all-powerful? A white slaveholder, Sapphira owns and manipulates other human beings; how then, can we negotiate her own sense of powerlessness and what it causes her to become?4 The novel is simultaneously about Sapphira's efforts to assert her authority against her powerless bodily condition and about the manner in which she turns others into abstractions-characters in a play she is producing-in order to make that assertion. An irony of Sapphira's condition and of her response to it is that she never notices the manner in which her bodily powerlessness mirrors the powerlessness of the people, most particularly the women, she enslaves; her bodily frustrations do not engender in Sapphira any empathy for the people she exploits.

The main action of Sapphira and the Slave Girl takes place in 1856. Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, a proud aristocrat now in her sixties,5 and doomed to die of dropsy, having overheard her cook's erroneous suggestion that Henry Colbert, her husband, is sexually involved with Nancy, decides to get rid of the slave. Sapphira wants to sell the beautiful and innocent slave, but despite being the "master" of the Mill House, cannot, since by law a woman cannot sell prop erty without her husband's consent. Thus Sapphira invites Martin Colbert, one of Henry's wastrel nephews, to visit, so that he might seduce or rape Nancy and put an end to Henry's attraction to her. Nancy and some of the slave men do what they can to outmaneuver Martin, but reach the limits of their power; Nancy then enlists assistance from Sapphira's abolitionist daughter, Rachel, who effects Nancy's escape via the Underground Railroad. The Epilogue of the novel takes place twenty years later, when Nancy returns to Back Creek for the first time since her escape. Readers learn that the story of Sapphira and her attempt to ruin a young slave woman is one of the stories of Willa Cather's youth, and that it is a story with a happy ending; Nancy and her mother, Till, those most wronged by Sapphira, assent that Sapphira was a unique person who, although capable of doing harm, was not evil.6

One strategy for reading Sapphira's actions is in light of a model offered by Elaine Scarry. In her landmark study The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World, Scarry writes of other fictional characters undergoing a process similar to Sapphira's:

Stravinsky once described aging as: "the ever-shrinking perimeter of pleasure." This constantly diminishing world ground is almost a given in representations of old age. As Ibbieta's bench dissolves beneath him, so the ground beneath the old grows insubstantial, ceases to belong to them. Sophocles's Oedipus, forbidden from entering his homeland, Thebes, is also a violator and trespasser of the ground at Colonus. Shakespeare's Lear, having at last after long humiliation consented to enter the small but sharable space of a cage, stands instead alone on the narrow edge of a country and a cliff; Beckett's Winnie, the most literal victim of Stravinsky's ever-shrinking perimeter, is caught by a piece of ground that has snapped shut around her waist ....Each of these plays . . . is in part the dramatization of the struggle to stay alive, to stay a little, to maintain one's extension out into the world ....For each of the three, the voice becomes a final source of self-extension; so long as one is speaking, the self extends out beyond the boundaries of the body, occupies a space much larger than the body ....Their ceaseless talk articulates their unspoken understanding that only in silence do the edges of the self become coterminous with the edges of the body it will die with. (33)