Love and Art in Willa Cather's Lucy Gayheart

Introduction: A Vision of Idealized Love

In the character of Lucy Gayheart, in the novel of the same name, Willa Cather embodies a vision of idealized romantic Love. This is such a vast Love that it requires a capital L. For Lucy, Love is intense, yearning, painful, and tragic. It offers escape, freedom, elevation, fire, passion, and pain. Love and Art — or music as art — and fiery passion are intimately intertwined in Lucy's vision. In fact they become identified as one, and for Lucy Gayheart these three are the essence of Life. Without this expanded Love, Lucy cannot have Life. In the absence of this Love, Lucy dies. In the character of Lucy Gayheart, Willa Cather unites Love and Life and Art and Passion into one all-encompassing concept of romantic liberation from the mundane.

Cather acknowledges within the artistic structure of her novel that her romantic portrayal of Love is ideal in the extreme. It exists on a plane that is far from practical reality and far from easy to attain. Yet for Lucy, this expanded Love is not only worth the striving — it is Life itself. One of the ways Cather shows that she realizes how extreme this view of Love is, is in her use of Harry Gordon as the contrasting, down-to-earth, realistic option that Lucy rejects in pursuit of her romantic dream. As a foil for Clement Sebastian, Cather does not make Harry a despicable, wholly unromantic materialist. Rather, he is solid, appealing, predictable, reliable, and only a little boring. Yet he is much too conventional to fit Lucy's quest for unconventional love.

Lucy's Character and Longing for More

From the earliest meetings with Lucy, Cather makes sure that the reader sees what is essential about her. There is no doubt that this heroine is full of life and has a striving spirit. There was "something in her nature that was like her movements, something direct and unhesitating and joyous," and in her golden-brown eyes flash "gold sparks" (4), revealing the first hint of the fire imagery that Cather builds throughout the novel. Cather underscores Lucy's passionate nature, emphasizing the warmth of her inner fire: "Her mouth was so warm and impulsive that every shadow of feeling made a change in it" (5). These beginnings grow into the contrasting fire and ice imagery that demonstrates this is an all-or-nothing life energy for Lucy.

This heroine exudes beauty, joy, and passion: "Life seemed to lie very near the surface in her. She had that singular brightness of young beauty: flower gardens have it for the first few hours after sunrise" (5). The intensity of this brightness indicates that Lucy will not be satisfied with a meager life. Very early in the book, riding home in Harry's sled after a skating party — warm, cozy, and sleepy — Lucy wakes to see the first star and has a "flash of understanding" of "another kind of life and feeling which did not belong here" (11). She experiences "the joy of saluting what is far above one" and knows that it is "an eternal thing" (12). This is a foretaste of the love she will feel for Sebastian, whom she idolizes and sees as a master who elevates her life.

Lucy is a person who needs more than basic human life offers. Her hometown in Nebraska, on the banks of the Platte, is lovely and idyllic, yet it is obvious that Lucy feels incarcerated there and seeks a broader scope for her life. The excitement of her studies in Chicago provides sharp contrast. Getting on the train is a metaphor for traveling toward this greater life. She moves from her "homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities" (24). The tuning fork provides the perfect image for the young Lucy vibrating with unimaginable possibilities. Chicago with Sebastian in it is a "city of feeling," rising out of "the city of fact." It is "beautiful because the rest" is "blotted out" (24). For Lucy, Sebastian blots out the realities of prosaic life. He is Art and Life and Love all wrapped in one. The metropolitan environment is a symbol for the vastness for which Lucy yearns. Toward the end of the novel, as Lucy envisions prospects of travelling to even farther reaches — New York and Europe — the reader feels how Lucy's heart aspires to leap from the common to the magnificent.

Sebastian, Music, and the Elevation of Love

When Lucy first hears Sebastian sing, it is more than love at first sight and even more than love at first sound. It is more than mere love. The aura of the experience is elevated far above the earthly. Among the first words she hears him sing are: "In your light I stand without fear, O august stars! I salute your eternity." Lucy's response is significant: "That was the feeling. Lucy had never heard anything sung with such elevation of style. In its calmness and serenity there was a kind of large enlightenment, like daybreak" (29–30). She has not yet met the man in person, yet her experience of Clement's art fits perfectly with her definition of love.

Yearning, longing, and reaching out for something she does not have are active parts of Lucy's concept of Love. Music is her art, yet she is not a great musician — she yearns to be more. Clement's artistry represents something far above the mundane. She becomes his accompanist, and her Love for him provides enlargement, enlightenment, and elevation. As Cather writes, "The air one breathed in that room was different from any other in the world. Lucy thought there was even a special kind of light there" (93). Lucy "began a new life on the night when she first heard Clement Sebastian" (94).

Lucy's attitude is constantly romantic, especially as she heads out to one of Sebastian's recitals: "Tonight there was a bitter wind blowing off the Lake. . . She liked the excitement of winding a soft, light cloak about her bare arms and shoulders and running out into a glacial cold. . . The thing to do was to make an overcoat of the cold; to feel one's self warm and awake at the heart of it, one's blood coursing unchilled in an air where roses froze instantly" (37). The Chicago cold only enlivens Lucy's passion. "The sharp air that blew off the water brought up all the fire of life in her: it was like drinking fire" (47). Here Cather emphasizes the fire and ice contrast, underscoring the identification of Love as Fire and Lucy's passionate longing for Love, Fire, and Art as unity. The novel's recurring imagery of warmth against cold captures the impossibility of sustaining such intensity in an ordinary world.