Music and the Human Soul Theme Analysis

Music (and its absence) figures prominently in both Clark’s and Georgiana’s experiences of frontier life. Clark’s boyhood memories of Aunt Georgiana always involve her love of music, and often focus on the ways she used music to comfort Clark in an environment devoid of beauty. For him, music pointed to the promise of life beyond the frontier farm. For Georgiana, however, music comes to represent a path she chose not to take, and—especially now that modern music has outstripped her own study—becomes a source of grief. Throughout the story Cather argues that music expresses the soul’s longings because of its ability to transcend mundane existence.

Clark’s memories of Aunt Georgiana are all intimately tied to music—specifically to music’s ability to lift him beyond the deadening realities of life on the farm. Uncle Howard’s letter announcing Georgiana’s arrival opens “a gulf of recollection so wide and deep” that Clark feels himself once again a farm boy, fumbling with musical scales with his aunt at his side. Clark goes on to describe his “reverential affection” for the woman who not only managed the homestead, but also took time to coach him on the parlor organ when both were exhausted from a day’s work. Even mundane tasks around the farm were made “glorious” when Georgiana reminisced to Clark about seeing Meyerbeer’s Huguenots in Paris in her youth; a greater contrast to milking cows can hardly be imagined.

Clark also recalls Georgiana comforting him by singing Verdi’s “Home to our mountains” while he lay ill, thinking that her singing was “fit to break the heart of a Vermont boy near dead of home-sickness already.” He further remembers the particular joy, after leaving the farm, of seeing an orchestra performance for the first time: “fresh from ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a shadow of change.” After such endless, plodding toil, the violinists’ bow-strokes “seemed to draw the heart out of [him].”

For Georgiana, however, music represents the aspirations she has left behind. In contrast to the hope Clark found in music—a hope apparently realized by leaving the farm—music awakens desires that it is now too late for Georgiana to fulfill.

Georgiana “seldom talked to me about music,” Clark remembers, and when she did, she warned him not to love it too much, “or it may be taken from you.” This suggests that even when Clark was a boy, Georgiana already considered music—perhaps her greatest love—to have been lost to her. When Clark takes his aunt to see a Wagner matinée during her Boston visit, he is at first puzzled by her seeming detachment. He then sees that her mangled hands instinctively recall the score of The Flying Dutchman. When he sees her tears during the “Prize Song,” Clark begins to realize that despite her stoic appearance, the music has touched longings hidden underneath Georgiana’s rustic exterior.

When he questions Georgiana about her knowledge of the “Prize Song,” she haltingly shares the story of a drifting cowboy she had known on the farm, a German with operatic training. This improbable figure had brought her much joy—Georgiana had even pushed him to join the choir of the country church—until he spent a drunken holiday in town and disappeared as suddenly as he had come. He represents something of Georgiana’s own lost dreams; the incongruity of this figure, pressed into service as a choirboy despite rather dissolute habits, speaks to the desperation of Georgiana’s longing in her isolated situation.

As the concert proceeds, Clark seems to realize the depth of his aunt’s pain as her tears increase. He cannot fully comprehend it—“I never knew what she found in the shining current of [the music] … I could well believe that before the last number she had been carried out … where, from the beginning of the world, hope has lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept.” Yet he has come to realize that Georgiana’s longings involve a much deeper renunciation than his own boyhood sufferings. After the concert ends, Georgiana gives full voice to her grief, and Clark finally understands that, for her, the music has not simply evoked nostalgia or melancholy, but the imminent return to a place that has meant the death of her deepest desires.

Music is an incredibly potent force in Cather’s story. For Clark, it has been a source of youthful solace that not only lifted him momentarily beyond his circumstances, but also gave him hope that he would someday leave them behind for good. For Georgiana, however, music has a far more tragic undertone. In Nebraska, she fought for every chance to savor music amidst daily survival, but in Boston, Wagner’s music overpowers her with the realization that her soul’s thirst can never be fully quenched. This is because music is not only a resource for her survival, but a part of herself that she has lost.