Free English Literature Essays - "How Far Does The Story Of Mrs Forester Reflect The Evolution From The Old Order To The New?"
A Lost Lady by Willa Cather is a novel that centres around its contradictory heroine, Mrs Marian Forrester. It charts the transitional period between the pioneering days of the Burlington railroad and the ushering in of the new generation of young people with their new methods of doing business and their equally new ways of living. Early on in the novel, the reader is told that Mrs. Forrester mocked outrageously at the proprieties she observed, and inherited the magic of contradiction. It is this description that seems to explain the difficulties of Mrs. Forrester's position in the novel as she belongs neither to the generation of pioneers that her husband, Captain Forrester, represents, nor the generation that is to follow because she carries elements of this past with her. As such, she embodies a kind of in-between state that, in some respects, suggests to the reader that she is firmly of the old order and yet, in other respects, suggests that she is set upon establishing herself within the new order of things. The very descriptions of Mrs. Forrester in the novel are often in direct comparison to those of Mr. Forrester as she is so often presented as lively and full of passion whereas Captain Forrester progresses into old age and infirmity. However, the language Mrs. Forrester uses and the social customs she maintains mark her out as belonging to a different and older set of values as do her often traditional opinions on the roles of men and women. Nevertheless, her love affair with Frank Ellinger is perhaps the greatest indication that Mrs. Forrester is not content to grow old and outdated like her husband and in her disloyalty to him she is simultaneously disloyal to the world he represents. It is not until after her husband's death that this disloyalty comes to the fore and highlights her abandonment of the old order but her flailing and pathetic inability to enter into the new.
When the reader is introduced to Mrs. Forrester it is as part of a picture that has been established by the narrator of Captain Forrester's dream. The house that he built with the money from his lucrative railroad days as a pioneer is coupled with a beautiful wife to entertain visitors. The reader is immediately aware of Captain Forrester's standing in the community and that he is a successful man:
Captain Forrester was himself a railroad man, a contractor, who had built hundreds of miles of road for the Burlington, - over the sage brush and cattle country, and on up into the Black Hills.
However, one of the first facts the reader is told about Mrs. Forrester is that she is twenty-five years younger than her husband which instantly alerts the reader to the disparity in their ages and the fact that they belong to separate generations. No sooner has this brief story of Captain Forrester's achievement and his marriage (his second) to Mrs. Forrester been divulged than the novel begins to relegate this to the past:
But later, after the Captain's terrible fall with his horse in the mountains, which broke him so that he could no longer build railroads, he and his wife retired to the house on the hill.
Mr. Forrester is hereafter described as a man that once achieved something and is already old and past his prime. Indeed, the novel is as much a story about Mr. Forrester's steady yet persistent decline into ever worsening ill health and eventual death as it is about Mrs. Forrester's entrapment between two worlds. While Captain Forrester's portrait is painted as an increasingly ageing and incapacitated old man whose ideals nevertheless spark the imaginations of the young with his stories and philosophies, Mrs. Forrester is an altogether more complex character who is often seen through the eyes of Niel Herbert. For the young Niel, Mrs. Forrester represents the idyllic nature of his childhood. The image of her bringing cookies to the young boys is one of youth, femininity and a slight sense of the rebelliousness she displays later in the novel:
Mrs. Forrester, bareheaded, a basket on her arm, her blue-black hair shining in the sun.
In this scene she is bareheaded which signals a break from the accepted norm of the past when women always wore hats outside. Earlier on in the novel she is said to have been known to rush to the door in her dressing-gown, brush in hand and her long black hair rippling over her shoulders which, rather than being viewed as a sign of new values, was considered her particular brand of lady-like behaviour. However, the title of the novel itself, A Lost Lady, is suggestive of several meanings. The language of the time would have been such that a lost lady could refer to a woman whose reputation had been damaged by her reckless sexual behaviour such as having extra-marital affairs. This is certainly true of Mrs. Forrester as the reader becomes aware of her affair with Frank Ellinger later in the text. However, lost also has a more general meaning of not belonging. Mrs. Forrester does not belong within a particular set of values or social mores and is, therefore, in this sense also lost. Returning to the idyllic scene mentioned above, it is significant that shortly after Mrs. Forrester's visit to the boys in the grove Ivy Peters arrives and disturbs the idyll with his cruel treatment of the woodpecker. This is surely symbolic of the fact that Ivy Peters will later come to represent the ushering in of the new order and the death of the old order and how he will prove to be so influential in Mrs. Forrester's life later on.
Despite Mrs. Forrester's youthful laughter and the fact that she had a nice way of talking to boys, light and confidential there are suggestions throughout the novel that she is not so forward thinking as the young people she often appears to share so much affinity with. Here again, the contradictory nature of where she stands in the great scheme of generational shift comes into play as there seems to be a certain amount of confusion in her opinions of male and female roles. Early on in the novel when she is talking to the boys in the grove and is still a young woman she responds to one of the boys' statement that most women are unable to swim with a defiant statement of her own:
Oh yes, they can! In California everybody swims.
She, herself, is clinging to the past she once knew in California which is referred to throughout the novel as a place that is far more advanced and freer than Sweet Water. However, this longing for a place is a form of nostalgia in itself and does not convince the reader that Mrs. Forrester wants to fully embrace the new order of things. This is further highlighted in various opinions she gives in the novel that firmly maintain the traditional and segregated roles of women and men. The references to carving meat in the novel is just one such example. This is an example that speaks to many readers and not only those who are familiar with the historical boundaries of time and place in which A Lost Lady is set. It has come to represent an almost stereotypical image of separate female and male roles with the woman serving the food to the table and the man carving the meat at the head of the table. Captain Forrester's aptitude for this activity is heralded in the novel:
Captain Forrester still made a commanding figure at the head of his own table, with his napkin tucked under his chin and the work of carving well in hand. Nobody could lay bare the bones of a brace of duck or a twenty-pound turkey more deftly.
Later in the novel when Captain Forrester is dead and Mrs. Forrester is hosting a dinner, she asks Niel to take the head of the table and carve the ducks. When Niel declares that he is not so apt as his uncle Mrs. Forrester says, Nor as Mr. Forrester did? I don't ask that. Nobody can carve now as men used to. There is the sense that Niel belongs to the new generation that does not expect to carry on these stringent traditions and be so able to take on such traditional male roles as carving. However, rather than embrace this freer notion of what men and women's roles should and should not be, Mrs. Forrester's tone is one of nostalgia for a world that is fast disappearing. In an earlier passage Mrs. Forrester and Niel are discussing modern women. Mrs. Forrester's questioning exposes how entrenched her views are on the roles of men and women and how she cannot understand the new notion of equality between the sexes. She asks: Don't men like women to be different from themselves? They used to. Niel laughed. Yes, that was certainly the idea of Mrs. Forrester's generation. For all her apparent mockery of the world she is married to, Mrs. Forrester is still very much a part of it.
It is perhaps her affair with Frank Ellinger that is the greatest symbol of Mrs. Forrester's inability to remain shackled to the respectable old order that her husband represents. However, Ellinger himself is not so much of the new order but of the morally questionable order that once existed. The novel informs the reader about Ellinger's relationship with a prostitute and that he was considered a terribly fast young man. It is perhaps this sense of danger and high-spiritedness that attracts Mrs. Forrester. She cannot remain merely a loyal, faithful wife to the Captain but must also be true to the youthful passion that has been denied her. There are clear indications that, at least following her husband's accident, there is no sexual relationship between Mr. Forrester and Mrs. Forrester. Rather, she is often described as his carer tucking him into bed very much as a mother might do her helpless child:
Ever since he was hurt he had to be propped high on pillows at night, and he slept in a narrow iron bed, in the alcove which had formerly been his wife's dressing-room.
In comparison to this sexless image of her as a devoted wife taking care of her older, sick husband, Mrs. Forrester is often conveyed as a woman who is conscious of her sexuality and attractiveness to the opposite sex. The sexual tension that exists between Mrs. Forrester and Ellinger is immediately apparent when they find themselves alone after a dinner party. The rings that symbolise Mrs. Forrester's marriage to Captain Forrester are removed and with them the belief in an order that sees jewellery as a sign of wealth and social standing as much as love. Mr. Forrester is said to belong to this set of values:
They must be costly; they must show that he was able to buy them, and that she was worthy to wear them.
However, she is not entirely free of the rings and what they represent and does not enter into the affair with Ellinger wholeheartedly whether she wishes to or not. Their illicit trip out in the sleigh exposes her reluctance to allow Ellinger to write her love letters and the symbolism of the rings comes in once more:
Be careful, Frank. My rings! You hurt me!
Then why didn't you take them off? You used to.
There is a suggestion that in her younger days Mrs. Forrester was more willing to wilfully engage in a love affair with Ellinger but that, as time has elapsed, she has lost some of her determination to disobey social mores. This spirit returns now and again throughout the novel and is sometimes verbalised by Mrs. Forrester. When it is time for the lovers to return to the house in the sleigh one of these sparks of rebellion and passion escape from Mrs. Forrester's lips:
Drive slowly," she murmured, as if she were talking in her sleep. It doesn't matter if we are late for dinner. Nothing matters.
The abrupt end of this affair that culminates in Ellinger's marriage to Constance Ogden serves to highlight the extent to which Mrs. Forrester has come to feel suffocated by her existence with Captain Forrester and how strong her love for Ellinger was. This, in turn, highlights her increasing dissatisfaction with the values represented by the old pioneer generation. Her rejection by Ellinger who, himself, belongs to an old although markedly different set of values sets her bitterly against the old order and this is emphasised following the death of her husband.
When Mr. Forrester dies Mrs. Forrester is free to embrace the new order and yet when the funeral is over she requests that Niel move the things back as we always have them as if it is the status quo that comforts her. The loss of the Captain's money while he was still alive made it necessary to rent out some of the Forrester land to Ivy Peters who is a symbol of ruthless business acumen that the Captain and his lawyer, Judge Pommeroy, were unacquainted with. While Mrs. Forrester, true to her stated opinions on the traditional roles of men and women, had no influence over the handling of business matters while her husband was alive, as soon as he dies she puts all her trust in what she believes are the new methods. She tells Niel:
But the Judge is like Mr. Forrester; his methods don't work nowadays. He will never get us out of debt, dear man! He can't get himself out. Ivy Peters is terribly smart, you know. He owns half the town already.
The crumbling fortunes of the older generation stand as a symbol of both their crumbling hold on a world that is moving on and progressing and Mrs. Forrester's crumbling faith in the old order to be of any use to her. In particular, Niel tells Mr Ogden about her decision to stop dealing with his uncle, the Judge, who had been Mr. Forrester's lawyer for twenty years:
She didn't treat him with much consideration. She transferred her business very abruptly.
It is this that signals the change in Mrs. Forrester that highlights the greatest extent to which she can leave behind the old values and take on the new. However, this is more difficult to achieve than perhaps she believed it to be as she plays hostess to the young men from the town giving rise to gossip. It is the way in which she attempts to teach the young men the etiquette of gentlemanly behaviour that belongs to Mr. Forrester's generation as well as social background that demonstrates her inability to remove herself entirely from this world. Attempting to glean conversation from them as they eat and training them to stand up when women walk into the room in addition to her old-fashioned notion that men should be left alone after dinner expose her as a strange amalgamation of both worlds with a strange mixture of values that often contradict one another. Perhaps the shattering of Niel's illusion of her is most telling:
It was what he most held against Mrs. Forrester; that she was not willing to immolate herself, like the widow of all these great men, and die with the pioneer period to which she belonged; that she preferred life on any terms.
Attempting to pigeonhole Mrs. Forrester in either the old or new orders is futile as this passage demonstrates. While she does belong to a transitionary period of evolution from one set of values to another she does not embody either. She is, therefore, not extinct nor entirely evolved. It is what Niel considers to be her desire for life on any terms that characterises her as, throughout the novel, she is never completely broken by the transitionary position she must adopt but the sense of her liveliness is present even when the reader expects the passion and youthful spirit in her to have disappeared. Niel's nostalgia for the pioneer period that he wishes Mrs. Forrester would stake her allegiance to is that of a generation more removed from it than Mrs. Forrester, a generation that can look back on it through the eyes of childhood and idealism. This is highlighted by the passages towards the end of the novel which are tinged with a melancholy nostalgia:
It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, - these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, - and this would always be his.
Despite Mrs. Forrester's choice to move on from the dying world of the pioneer, the fact that she always sends a cheque each year for flowers to be put on Mr. Forrester's grave and made provisions for his grave to be tended after her death poignantly emphasises her respect for what her husband achieved and stood for.
It is clear, therefore, that Mrs. Forrester represents the shaky, uncertain middle ground between two very different sets of values and ways of living. In her youthfulness and joy she heralds a new era like the coming of spring and in her observance of old standards of propriety and social mores she demonstrates a respect for the old world that made the new one possible. However, more than simply representing a transitionary era, Mrs. Forrester is also a character in her own right and not merely a mouthpiece for the moral and social codes that make up her world. It is this that makes her such a complex literary creation that defies being labelled as one thing or the other. Throughout the novel, this complexity is shown in the way in which she speaks, the seemingly contradictory opinions she holds, her determination to be loyal to her usband's needs and to her own sense of self, and ultimately to her sense of being caught between an established order and an emerging one.
