Home and Estrangement Theme Analysis

Georgiana’s history is one of deepening estrangement. Despite having grown up in the city, she reappears in Boston like an anachronism and struggles to get a solid grip on her surroundings until she enters the familiar world of the concert hall. Yet during the concert Georgiana experiences a deeper estrangement still, realizing she can neither return to Nebraska the same as before. Having left one home to establish another, Georgiana has sacrificed a sense of belonging—and in trying, in a way, to go home again, is painfully reminded of her distance from once-familiar surroundings. Cather’s story argues for the notion of “home” as an incredible source of grounding and comfort, and the loss of home—even when actively left behind—as a source of poignant displacement.

As a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory in the 1860s, Georgiana occupied an unusually public and elite role for a woman of her era. Her elopement with Howard Carpenter, a man who seems to have been her opposite in ambition and temperament, was already a surprising departure from expectation. Her accompanying him to the prairie to establish a homestead set her apart even more drastically from her ancestral home, her upbringing, and the path she had already set for her life.

Georgiana’s ensuing years on the prairie represent a losing battle to hang on to aspects of home. She endures fifteen years without an instrument, and only upon Clark’s arrival can she once again exercise her teaching skill and share her love of music. The extent of this practice is limited to late-night tutelage and occasional conversations in the cowshed.

By the time she visits Boston, Georgiana’s battered appearance is a “shock,” making Clark think of an explorer who has sacrificed her health. She is no longer the woman she was when Clark lived with her as a boy, and the contrast with her own life in Boston many years earlier could hardly be more extreme. In agreeing to move to the frontier with Howard, she has become a stranger to the society that was once her home.

Far from being a homecoming, Georgiana’s return to Boston only further estranges her from her past. The journey has itself been somewhat traumatic—she “had become black with soot” and suffered train sickness. Upon awakening the day after her arrival, she is “still in a semi-somnambulent state.” She is so disoriented that Clark says it seems as if only “a few hours of nightmare” separated her from Red Willow County and his Newbury Street lodgings. Georgiana seems not to recognize that she is in “the place longed for hungrily half a lifetime.” Indeed, she is so timid that she seems disinclined to venture out and is preoccupied by tasks forgotten back home. She seems to Clark to be caught between worlds, and all of this leads Clark to wonder whether her visit, to say nothing of bringing her to the concert, has been a mistake.

Attending the concert seems to reawaken Georgiana, however, by bringing her back to an environment in which she feels at home. As the musicians come onstage, she “looked with quickening interest over the rail at … perhaps the first wholly familiar thing that had greeted her eye since” her arrival. With the opening notes, she clutches Clark’s sleeve, and he realizes that “for her this broke a silence of thirty years.” For all intents and purposes, Boston is no longer home to her, but the concert hall remains a haven.

Superficially, Georgiana doesn’t “belong,” but she somehow transcends the scene. While her dowdy dress marks her as a relic of another era, she stands aloof from such outward trappings, admiring the crowd of concertgoers like “so many daubs of tube-paint on a palette” and unbothered by the “froth and fret that ebbs and flows” around her. Her musical knowledge stops short of Wagner’s era as well, leading Clark to wonder, “Had this music any message for her? Had she enough left to at all comprehend this power which had kindled the world since she had left it?”

Even so, the music elicits a visceral reaction, suggesting the depth of Georgiana’s longing for this world left behind. Seeing his aunt’s tears, Clark reflects that the soul “which can suffer so excruciatingly … withers to the outward eye only; like that strange moss which … if placed in water, grows green again.” Though it had not been clear to him that Georgiana could enjoy such sophisticated music, he now realizes that her soul is resilient and responds to such beauty, even after many years without it.

Although the music seems to touch something timeless in Georgiana’s soul, her fitness for both this world—and for Nebraska—is left in question. Georgiana’s tears are ambiguous, suggesting that she grieves her estrangement from this world even as she enjoys it for the first time in many years. When Clark attempts to make light of the moment, she responds, “And you have been hearing this ever since you left me?” He realizes the music has taken his aunt somewhere he cannot follow (“I never knew how far it bore her, or past what happy islands”); that she is, in fact, a stranger to him again. Georgiana’s sobs in the emptying concert hall suggest that she will be forever a stranger to both worlds. She knows there is nothing waiting for her but the “black,” “unpainted” homestead, and that returning “home” is perhaps all the harder now that she has been awakened to what is beyond it.

One of the most poignant scenes in the story is Clark’s memory of his aunt singing Verdi’s “‘Home to our mountains, O, let us return’ in a way fit to break the heart of a Vermont boy near dead of home-sickness already.” But Georgiana’s homesickness proves to be the more intractable case, as she discovers that there is no longer a fit “home” for her anywhere. Through the figure of this formidable woman, Cather makes a case that the pioneer generation forever finds itself caught between worlds, too—sacrificing much for the sake of “progress,” yet never again able to keep pace with the world left behind.