The Song of the Lark

Song of the Lark

By Willa Cather

Published 1915

Free on Kindle

I previously wrote about another novel by Willa Cather (1873-1947), The Professor’s House, and cover her history a bit more in that one. She is one of the best American novelists, considered in the top 10 and won the Pulitzer Prize for  One of Ours in 1922, a novel set in World War 1.

The Song of the Lark was written in 1915 and the story takes place in 1890s Colorado. The area is still being settled and there are many different groups of people living together during the frontier days. The story follows a young musician, Thea Kronberg, as she develops as an artists.

Novels that follow a character from early youth to adulthood are called Bildungsroman, a German term meaning a “novel of education.” Other notable Bildungsromans are A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and my favorite novel Of Human Bondage. See my post.

I have started work on my Master’s Thesis and I am writing about The Song of the Lark using a postcolonial theory lens to analyze characters. The idea for this paper came about because of readings I was doing for an American literature class on Modernism. Thats the early 20th century. I was reading the book when I started to get a real positive portrayal of the Mexican characters. This stood out because I had finished a previous novel, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, where the Mexican characters were portrayed or described very negatively. I kept reading the novel and got a more complex approach, in that some of the white characters insult the Mexican characters and other are looked down upon for being friends with them. I thought that Cather was doing something interesting with the race relations in the novel and wanted to explore that a bit more.  I wanted to do an analysis of the characters so that I could understand more about what was going on with them and what Cather was saying implicitly and through the narration.

Cather is a very skilled writer and can put two sentences together to give meaning and complicate ideas without having to say anything. She did not want to be limited in her interpretation so she leaves things unsaid, using silence to leave open the many possible interpretations of the text.

The Song of the Lark is the latest novel I have read by Cather and is currently my favorite. This is the second book in her “Prairie Trilogy,” following O Pioneers! and preceding My Antonia. Both of which are free in ebook. Download some samples and start reading some of the best American Literature.

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