Willa Cather’s Godfrey St. Peter: Idealist or Materialist?

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Most critics of The Professor’s House have tended to oversimplify the novel as being structured around a clear-cut opposition between St. Peter’s idealism and Marsellus’s materialism or as being a bitter record of the author’s personal anxiety imbued with her anti-Semitism. To some extent, I also share such critical view that the novel is centered upon a clash between idealism and materialism. I contend, however, that the conflict between these two opposites is dramatized less in terms of St. Peter against Marsellus than as a matter of St. Peter being divided against himself. To put it differently, the fundamental source of St. Peter’s despair and anxiety, which at the novel's end drives him to feel indifferent to his own life and death, resides not so much in Marsellus’s materialism as in St. Peter’s own aesthetic and Romantic idealism, which confronts a subversive, materialistic force from within. His aesthetic idealism is imbued with such an oppositional element largely because it cannot dispense with material support. Thus, St. Peter’s despair and frustration are consequences of the nature of his idealism. The Professor’s House is more a critique of the self-dividing nature of St. Peter’s idealism than a direct indictment of materialism and commercialism. While St. Peter is not an adequate proponent of idealism, Marsellus, the professor's Jewish son-in-law, transcends a mere stereotype as a materialistic villain. Indeed, this flamboyant figure shows some qualities of Tom Outland's idealism, generosity and adventurous sprit that St. Peter admires, and makes untenable a simple dichotomous approach to the novel as a site of two competing forces of idealism and materialism.

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