The Professor's House

In The Professor’s House, Cather depicts her protagonist in the midst of an identity crisis. He has enjoyed a successful career as a college history professor and has completed an eight-volume work on the history of Spanish exploration in North America. Although he is far from a popular writer, his work is well-regarded enough to bring a financial windfall that enables him to build a new house. He has raised two daughters who are themselves married and have embarked on adult lives. Yet, while his wife has embraced these life changes and the possibilities they bring, St. Peter remains at loose ends, unsure of what his role should be now. His personal crises are set against the context of World War I—an event broadly considered to have contributed to a crisis in Western values—in which his friend and student Tom Outland lost his life. St. Peter struggles to make Outland’s death meaningful, but he has trouble doing so; his legacy, both personal and financial, remains unsettled and a source of conflict in St. Peter’s family. Even the setting of the university no longer provides the security he expected. Despite his many years of service, the presence of younger colleagues reminds him of his own replaceability, and he is keenly aware of the pressure to teach marketable skills instead of seeking knowledge for its own sake.

At least in the beginning of the novel, St. Peter continues to seek meaning in individual academic work, in the reflection on history and aesthetics: “[T]hat’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives. […] Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had” (38). Finding meaning in art is one way of navigating his existential crisis, but it also takes him further away from happiness in his domestic life. He dives into the “mystery and importance” of his own individual life because he no longer recognizes any meaning in a life lived with others.

When St. Peter works on his annotations of Tom’s diary, he reads a life well lived, full of meaning. In juxtaposition with Tom’s adventures, St. Peter’s life is isolated and stagnant. Therefore, Cather rearticulates St. Peter’s existential crisis in Part 3 as a reaction to facing the facts of his quieter and older life. A major shift occurs in which St. Peter begins to enjoy the search for meaning, and the lack of meaning in his life:

All his life his mind had behaved in a positive fashion. When he was not at work, or being actively amused, he went to sleep. He had no twilight stage. But now he enjoyed this half-awake loafing with his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth (155).

St. Peter lets go of the societal pressures and expectations that he has always lived up to. He discovers, as existentialists declare, that these expectations actually gave no meaning or importance to his life. As a cog in the machine of the modern world, St. Peter has lived a life devoid of the kind of meaning Tom found in the Blue Mesa. In the depths of his existential crisis, St. Peter plays with the idea that death would be enjoyable: “But now he thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness; as a release from every obligation, from every form of effort. It was the Truth” (163).