A Wagner Matinee

"A Wagner Matinée" is a short story by Willa Cather, an early 20th-century American writer known primarily for her novels of life on the frontier. Although the story, originally published in 1904, was one of Cather's first pieces of prose fiction, it anticipates much of Cather's later work, and, most notably, the novel My Ántonia, which also recounts the experiences of a frontier woman through the eyes of a man. The two works are stylistically similar as well; unlike many of her contemporaries, Cather avoided then-experimental techniques like stream-of-consciousness in favor of more grounded descriptions of people and thenatural world. Perhaps relatedly, there is a strongly nostalgic tone to many of Cather's works, with characters longing to return to an earlier era.

This is certainly true of "A Wagner Matinée," but it is also one place where the story diverges from much of Cather's later writing. Although Cather (who was herself from Nebraska) was not typically sentimental about the hardships of frontier life in her work, she did often juxtapose that hardship with images of the landscape's beauty and even sublimity. In "A Wagner Matinée," however, the farm in Red River County functionsalmost entirely as a place of deprivation and death: scratching out a living there is difficult, but even more to the point, the isolation and monotony prove all but intolerable for someone with Georgiana's artistic inclinations. In order to survive, she seems to have willed herself into a state of numbness, avoiding any discussion of music and only "waking" from her lifeless state when she attends the concert with Clark.

With all that said, it is likely too simplistic to see Cather's account of frontier life in "A Wagner Matinée" as wholly negative. For one, Clark's fondest memories seem to date from his time on the Nebraska farm; although the work itself was backbreaking, the relationship he formed there with Georgiana has clearly shaped his development into a reflective and sensitive young man. Even more importantly, however, the story suggests that Georgiana's regrets reflect a more general truth about human life: that all people are ultimately subject to aging and disillusionment, or what Clark calls "waste and wear." To some extent, then, it is not frontier life itself that Georgiana dreads returning to, but rather a world in which her youthful, romantic hopes have been stripped away. As Clark puts it, "For her, just outside the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs." The concert, in other words, has provided Georgiana with a brief window into a past she longs to return to, but which she can ultimately only catch glimpses of.