『교수의 집』에 나타난 세인트 피터/캐더의 분리된 세상에서 살아가기

Abstract

Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House was written when she was in a deep depression after her popular success and favorable critical reception for One of Ours and A Lost Lady. She had been well known as a prairie writer till then. While she secured fame and money with her popular works, she felt exhausted both physically and psychologically by that time. When she returned from her trip to France, she felt the world was divided into two. America in the 1920s was under heavy influence of materialism due to economic boom and she lost her confidence in confronting such a world where old ideals lost their values. The Professor’s House reflects her own anxiety as an artist who should live out in this hostile world. St. Peter’s prize granted for his academic achievement is spent for a new house and immerses his wife into mammonism. Tom Outland’s patent fee spoils Rosamond and evokes greed and jealousy in the McGregors and the Cranes. Avoiding them, he secludes in the attic of the old house and attempts to recover his vitality through his memory of Tom and his childhood in Kansas. His final realization that he cannot recover his lost innocence leads to his resolution to live the remaining life without joy, which also shows Cather’s condition as a writer who should restart in the changed time.