NOTES ON WILLA CATHER'S "COMING APHRODITE"

If there is any doubt about the role of respectability in the transcendent drama, Cather clarifies it with her argument about surveillance. The searcher can engage in eavesdropping even in its most depraved form, the voyeuristic invasion, as long as the viewpoint is eventually redeemed by a transcendent gesture. The illicit nature of the transcendent is underlined by the circumstances of Donald's "gloomy room" The story makes a contrasting cursory reference: In one of the corners was a clothes closet" For Donald the dog, Caesar is the mark of his animal nature, his unbridled desire:" There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog's bed, and often a bone or two for his comfort." When he first comes into contact with Eden he notices her as "young, fresh, unguarded, confident". He later sees her in lavender: "[S]he wore a lavender cloth suit and carried in her arms a big bunch of fresh lilacs." But he seems destined for her rejection: "Her slowly curving upper lip and half-closed eyes seemed to say: 'You're gay, you're exciting, you are quite the right sort of thing; but you're none too fine for me!'" She associates him with the dog and its smell left behind in the tub; he notices her smelling of lilacs: "Hedger caught the warm perfume of lilacs just brought in out of the sun." He first hears singing when he is lost in a night sky: "On this blue May night there was a slender, girlish looking young moon in the west, playing with a whole company of silver stars. Now and then one of them darted away from the group and shot off into the gauzy blue with a soft little trail of light, like laughter. Hedger and his dog were delighted when a star did this. They were quite lost in watching the glittering game, when they were suddenly diverted by a sound, -- not from the stars, though it was music." The trail and the glitter only offer him glimpses. He enjoys the humor, but it somewhat alienates him from the source of radiance. After she complains about Caesar, he feels a desire to "get back at her." This is the occasion of his voyeuristic adventure. His passion is entwined with a desire to dominate. He lets this vengeance give way to his art, but this "prison" still motivates his art.

The gloom of his room gives way to the treasure of the closet: When he took his overcoat from its place against the partition, a long ray of yellow light shot across the dark enclosure, -- a knot hole, evidently, in the high wainscoting of the west room. He had never noticed it before, and without realizing what he was doing, he stooped and squinted through it. Yonder, in a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad, doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror." This is the revelation by which he cannot help but be overcome. Cather's qualification only demands the necessity of his peering in. "Hedger did not happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her." He can of course receive forgiveness for his exalted motive. After all, Cather tells us that he is an artist: "Nudity was not improper to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and he continued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman's body so beautiful as this one, -positively glorious in action. As she swung her arms and changed from one pivot of motion to another, muscular energy seemed to flow through her from her toes to her finger-tips." The poses of the exercise are kinetic, and offer a plasticity to his artistic impulse. Even the image retains a trace of this excitement. Beauty then is a remembrance and an anticipation of the movement. " The soft flush of exercise and the gold of afternoon sun played over her flesh together, enveloped her in a luminous mist which, as she turned and twisted, made now an arm, now a shoulder, now a thigh, dissolve in pure light and instantly recover its outline with the next gesture." The realization that accompanies the image provides the gilded luster. Only as watched does she attain an integrity that is only suggested by the actual motion. Under such terms, Hedger cannot help but join the experience. "Hedger's fingers curved as if he were holding a crayon; mentally he was doing the whole figure in a single running line, and the charcoal seemed to explode in his hand at the point where the energy of each gesture was discharged into the whirling disc of light, from a foot or shoulder, from the up-thrust chin or the lifted breasts. " His lines provide sense to the gestures. The place of detonation is the intersection between what is represented and his artistic intention. The intensity reflects his viewpoint. He is almost more vital to the scene than she is, and this is somewhat the scandal that Cather advances. "He could not have told whether he watched her for six minutes or sixteen. When her gymnastics were over, she paused to catch up a lock of hair that had come down, and examined with solicitude a little reddish mole that grew under her left arm-pit. Then, with her hand on her hip, she walked unconcernedly across the room and disappeared through the door into her bedchamber." The image becomes so private and hidden even before her disappearance. Hedger surrounds the image by his appetite. He satiates but still needs more. Hence, he projects beyond the present moment. He needs to continue to search after the same intensity, to relive the experience.

Cather does not equivocate about the lapse. He enters a culture of domination: "Disappeared -- Don Hedger was crouching on his knees, staring at the golden shower which poured in through the west windows, at the lake of gold sleeping on the faded Turkish carpet. The spot was enchanted; a vision out of Alexandria, out of the remote pagan past, had bathed itself there in Helianthine fire. The full quality of his artistic understanding is only captured by this enchanted vision. This is the dynamic of the European art as it has influenced Hedger-the cultural imperialism. The rudeness of the everyday is brought starkly to the fore by the subsequent imagery. In the midst of his aspiration, his surrounding present utter denial. "When he crawled out of his closet, he stood blinking at the grey sheet stuffed with laundry, not knowing what had happened to him. He felt a little sick as he contemplated the bundle. Everything here was different; he hated the disorder of the place, the grey prison light, his old shoes and himself and all his slovenly habits. The black calico curtains that ran on wires over his big window were white with dust. There were three greasy frying pans in the sink, and the sink itself -- He felt desperate. He couldn't stand this another minute. He took up an armful of winter clothes and ran down four flights into the basement. " Once he confronts his circumstances, his psychology is undone by the "laundry list". He is well off but hardly the artist of his dreams. He seeks to surpass his hovel. But she is a reminder of his expectations.

Once Donald has been invited into this place, he cannot let go of his find. he feels the need to return to his paradise. She is less and less part of the vision. There are no qualms on his part. He has already crossed a threshold that protected her: "A strange chapter began for Don Hedger. Day after day, at that hour in the afternoon, the hour before his neighbour dressed for dinner, he crouched down in his closet to watch her go through her mysterious exercises. It did not occur to him that his conduct was detestable; there was nothing shy or retreating about this unclad girl, -- a bold body, studying itself quite coolly and evidently well pleased with itself, doing all this for a purpose." He takes her confidence for his permission. Cather sidesteps around the actual intent despite her moralistic protestations. " Hedger scarcely regarded his action as conduct at all; it was something that had happened to him. More than once he went out and tried to stay away for the whole afternoon, but at about five o'clock he was sure to find himself among his old shoes in the dark. The pull of that aperture was stronger than his will, -- and he had always considered his will the strongest thing about him." His will emnerges in this apparent split in the self. It must have its gratification. His addiction only reflects a social reality that is sketched by his performance. He cannot resist his contact with the luminous detail. By its very definition, his art seeks permanently to hold the objects of desire. The desire is always excessive: When she threw herself upon the divan and lay resting, he still stared, holding his breath. His nerves were so on edge that a sudden noise made him start and brought out the sweat on his forehead." His addiction lay deep in his psyche; he would not surrender this vitality.

Cather allows Hedger to view a revelation too deep for his previous art. It paralyzes him by its power and its dominance of his previous vision: "When Hedger came slinking out of his closet, he sat down on the edge of the couch, sat for hours without moving. He was not painting at all now. This thing, whatever it was, drank him up as ideas had sometimes done, and he sank into a stupor of idleness as deep and dark as the stupor of work. He could not understand it; he was no boy, he had worked from models for years, and a woman's body was no mystery to him. Yet now he did nothing but sit and think about one. He slept very little, and with the first light of morning he awoke as completely possessed by this woman as if he had been with her all the night before. The unconscious operations of life went on in him only to perpetuate this excitement. His brain held but one image now -- vibrated, burned with it. It was a heathenish feeling; without friendliness, almost without tenderness." Here is his demon, and it detaches and floats above him. He gives to the possession. Her generosity of movement cannot be reduced to his previous sketches. She both completes and surpasses all before her apparition. Hedger wants to partake in the surplus. But he recognizes that she cannot engage in the same pursuit.

Cather offers a meager psychology. The experience has already transcended even that tale: "Women had come and gone in Hedger's life. Not having had a mother to begin with, his relations with them, whether amorous or friendly, had been casual. He got on well with janitresses and wash-women, with Indians and with the peasant women of foreign countries. He had friends among the silk-shirt factory girls who came to eat their lunch in Washington Square, and he sometimes took a model for a day in the country. He felt an unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed women he saw coming out of big shops, or driving in the Park. If, on his way to the Art Museum, he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses on upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders hunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls, or heard them talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but he believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted. He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles, effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in embroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities. They were enough, he thought, to make one almost forget woman as she existed in art, in thought, and in the universe." So he appears dismissive of Eden Bowers. She needs material reassurance for her art where his art eschews the material. But he has used the acceleration of her dance to attain his own recognition of tranquility. He recognizes because the vision has given him to a hopeless fluctuation. In a sense, he is beginning to appreciate another art, the art of the rejected. But he even casts off Eden in this view: He had no desire to know the woman who had, for the time at least, so broken up his life, -- no curiosity about her every-day personality. He shunned any revelation of it, and he listened for Miss Bower's coming and going, not to encounter, but to avoid her."

Once he transgresses her night, he has become part of her world and will actually come into contact with her.

"Hedger went back to his studio. The light was shining from her transom. For the first time he violated her privacy at night, and peered through that fatal aperture. She was sitting, fully dressed, in the window, smoking a cigarette and looking out over the housetops. He watched her until she rose, looked about her with a disdainful, crafty smile, and turned out the light."

Cather elaborates the details of Eden's career. But the terms seems less provoking than those of Hedger's. She perfects her craft as an actress, and this corresponds with her youthful ambitions. But coinciding with this path is its complement, a line of seduction to fund her success. Her name change reflects this intention. "Her first name, when she lived in Huntington, Illinois, was Edna, but Mr. Jones had persuaded her to change it to one which he felt would be worthy of her future. She was quick to take suggestions, though she told him she "didn't see what was the matter with 'Edna.'""

"Not very. I'd be glad to show them to you. Is your name really Eden Bower? I've seen your letters on the table."

"Well, it's the name I'm going to sing under. My father's name is Bowers, but my friend Mr. Jones, a Chicago newspaper man who writes about music, told me to drop the 's.' He's crazy about my voice."

Cather notes the confluence of these somewhat divergent paths: "People like Eden Bower are inexplicable." Her sense of destiny is tied to this mystery : "Before she was out of short dresses she had made up her mind that she was going to be an actress, that she would live far away in great cities, that she would be much admired by men and would have everything she wanted."

It is on these terms that Cather offers Eden's embellishments of character. It is as if her stage persona is simply an extension of her daily stage. "He could not know, of course, that he was merely the first to fall under a fascination which was to be disastrous to a few men and pleasantly stimulating to many thousands." The challenge of a balloon ride provides Eden to contrast her view of risk with Hedger's.

"Wouldn't you like to go up with her?"

"I? Of course not. I'm not fond of taking foolish risks."

Eden sniffed. "I shouldn't think sensible risks would be very much fun."

Eden later castigates him for taking too much risk in his career. The balloon ride offer the illusion of surrender to the creative forces that seem to drive her. "'Yes, it's fun. I'm mad about it,' [Molly Welch] said in reply to Eden's questions. 'I always want to let go, when I come down on the bar. You don't feel your weight at all, as you would on a stationary trapeze.'" The support of the trapeze depends on will and not totally on touch. This is the territory of the explorer.

Eden appears to thread a career together by embarking into the wilderness, but her view of art is much more conventional:

"What's the use of being a great painter if nobody knows about you?" Eden went on persuasively. "Why don't you paint the kind of pictures people can understand, and then, after you're successful, do whatever you like?"

"As I look at it," said Hedger brusquely, "I am successful."

Eden glanced about. "Well, I don't see any evidences of it," she said, biting her lip. "He has a Japanese servant and a wine cellar, and keeps a riding horse."

Hedger melted a little. "My dear, I have the most expensive luxury in the world, and I am much more extravagant than Burton Ives, for I work to please nobody but myself."

"You mean you could make money and don't? That you don't try to get a public?"

"Exactly. A public only wants what has been done over and over. I'm painting for painters, -- who haven't been born."

Somewhat precipitated by the argument, she leaves him. She had previously noted to Donald. "'You are the only one who knows anything about me.'" He somewhat minimizes the importance of his realization. But Cather needs to further enlarge the story about Eden's career. She uses authorial intervention to guarantee this fictional development: "Eden Bower was, at twenty, very much the same person that we all know her to be at forty, except that she knew a great deal less. But one thing she knew: that she was to be Eden Bower." This imposition somewhat contradicts the weight of the portrait that she offers prior to Eden's exit. Hedger has a contrary view of time that extends the magnificence of the scenes of her dance: "'I'm painting for painters, -- who haven't been born.'"

Her departure appears to validate a sense of destiny: "The note was written with a lead pencil, in haste: She was sorry that he was angry, but she still didn't know just what she had done. She had thought Mr. Ives would be useful to him; she guessed he was too proud. She wanted awfully to see him again, but Fate came knocking at her door after he had left her. She believed in Fate. She would never forget him, and she knew he would become the greatest painter in the world. Now she must pack. She hoped he wouldn't mind her leaving the dressing gown; somehow, she could never wear it again." For Hedger, the event seems to demarcate a profound understanding in his career. "He was hard hit. Tonight he had to bear the loneliness of a whole lifetime. Knowing himself so well, he could hardly believe that such a thing had ever happened to him, that such a woman had lain happy and contented in his arms. And now it was over." Again, the narration weakly captures the very tensions that Donald has perceived. He would resist much stronger against this "loneliness of a whole lifetime". Eden's observation never remotely achieve the breadth of what is shown in her dance. Donald could easily absorb the contradiction. Or it would at least offer more dynamic than indicated here.

Eden later returns to recapitulate the terms of her earlier argument. She remains on the outside of these events in order to preserve her new persona:

"'She held up her hand. "No, no. I've no time to go to exhibitions. Is he a man of any importance?"

'Certainly. He is one of the first men among the moderns. That is to say, among the very moderns. He is always coming up with something different. He often exhibits in Paris, you must have seen -- '

'No, I tell you I don't go to exhibitions. Has he had great success? That is what I want to know.'

M. Jules pulled at his short grey moustache. 'But, Madame, there are many kinds of success,' he began cautiously.

Madame gave a dry laugh. 'Yes, so he used to say. We once quarrelled on that issue. And how would you define his particular kind?'

M. Jules grew thoughtful. 'He is a great name with all the young men, and he is decidedly an influence in art. But one can't definitely place a man who is original, erratic, and who is changing all the time.'"

Cather's judgement is much more severe in the irony of the "cast of the orange light".

"Leaning back in the cushions, Eden Bower closed her eyes, and her face, as the street lamps flashed their ugly orange light upon it, became hard and settled, like a plaster cast; so a sail, that has been filled by a strong breeze, behaves when the wind suddenly dies. Tomorrow night the wind would blow again, and this mask would be the golden face of Aphrodite. But a "big" career takes its toll, even with the best of luck." Cather is still very reverential in the sharp irony. She seems divided between the "erratic" commitment of the artist and the clear rewards of the "big career"