Success, Money, and Materialism Theme Analysis

When Steavens, Harvey’s apprentice, first enters the childhood home of his late master, looking “for some mark of identification,” he can’t fathom that any of this home could belong to Harvey. Cather describes the sculptor’s childhood home as markedly materialistic and chintzy, displaying none of Harvey’s artwork. Like Harvey’s family, the inhabitants of Sand City, view money as the only real measure of success. Through the townspeople’s anecdotes about Harvey during his funeral, Cather posits the figure of the artist as fundamentally at odds with the rampant materialism present in parts of the Western United States in the early 20th century.

Cather uses vivid imagery throughout the story to illuminate the greed-fueled materialism driving Sand City, making it difficult for the townspeople to view success as anything but a synonym for wealth. While using an ostentatious “pearl-handled pocket-knife,” one of the two bankers, Phelps, laughs at the question of Harvey’s will. Even though the sculptor was a widely praised artist, the townspeople would always view his lack of material wealth as reason to slander him. Phelps’s outright dismissal that there could even be a will indicates the town’s inability to redefine their narrow notion of success to include great artistic fame. The irony here is that the townspeople clearly are in no position to judge the quality of Harvey’s character, let alone his success as an artist and how that success should present.

Harvey’s success as a sculptor is not diminished by his hometown’s inability to acknowledge his life’s work as an artist a success. The palm leaf on Harvey Merrick’s coffin symbolizes his achievement as an artist, regardless of what Sand City thinks of him. After listening to the town’s endless criticism of his master, Steavens is in disbelief that “the palm on the coffin meant nothing to them.” By forcing interpretation of the palm leaf, Cather assumes the reader will relate more with the educated elite of the East than the uncultured townsfolk of Sand City who are ignorant of the palm leaf’s significance. The palm leaf historically has been a symbol of achievement. Early Christians adopted it as a symbol of triumph over sin—use of the palm leaf on a tomb let other Christians know that a martyr was interred there. Cather invokes the traditional meaning of this symbol to confirm Harvey’s great accomplishment as an artist—an accomplishment untouchable even by the harshest repudiation by his hometown.

Even though Harvey’s success as a sculptor doesn’t align with the townspeople’s definition, he is still incredibly successful in his own right. Jim Laird’s tirade about the town confirms what the reader might have been suspecting—Harvey was much better off for having left Sand City. Staying behind, Jim became the “shyster,” or fraudulent lawyer, the townspeople wanted him to be to suit their needs, and while he was successful (perhaps even respected), he was miserable. Jim reminds the town that he wasn’t the only man they ruined, reproaching them about their behavior at past funerals, “[sitting] by the coffins of boys born and raised in this town; and, if I remember rightly, you were never too well satisfied when you checked them up.” After a series of rhetorical questions illuminating the fates of a few unfortunate boys who didn’t leave Sand City, Jim claims the reason for their downfall is that the town “drummed nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the time they wore knickerbockers.” Cather uses Laird’s diatribe against the townspeople to exemplify how a backwards town like Sand City can ruin a man’s potential entirely. Even though both Laird and Harvey had the intention of becoming “great men,” only Harvey was able to climb the “big, clean up-grade” and escape the town’s expectations. The other young men’s deaths at the hand of their vices—one who “[took] to drinking and forge[d] a check and shot himself” and another who was shot in a gambling house—indicate that the town’s greed rubbed off on them, which ultimately ruined their lives. Harvey’s commitment to his art, and thereby his own version of success, spared him a similar fate.

At a base level, the town and Harvey have drastically different values, especially regarding art, education, and what it means to be successful. The other banker in the parlor discusses how Harvey’s father mortgaged some of his farms to be able to afford Harvey’s continued education. Instead of viewing him as a father supporting his son’s passion, the townspeople view Harvey’s reliance on his father’s finances as a kind of filial betrayal. To the fictional people of Sand City, Kansas, there is no value to an arts- or humanities-focused education. Phelps claims, “Where the old man made his mistake was sending the boy East to school… What Harvey needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas City business college.” Not only does Phelps’ retelling give Mr. Merrick all the power over the trajectory of Harvey’s life, he argues that Harvey would have turned out better had he pursued a more practical education. They can’t comprehend the value of Harvey’s arts education, because they don’t see the utility of it in their own lives.

This narrow-minded, small-town stereotype creates a dichotomy of perceived intelligence between the Western U.S. and New England. Cather seems to be asserting a problematic view of the Western U.S. as plagued by money-grubbing philistines, while elevating the educated, cultured elite in the East. The Western frontier, which should be a place of prosperity, is portrayed as a corrupt wasteland when compared to the Eastern U.S., rich with its traditions and history. In “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” Cather posits art as the only true refuge from a materialistic, greedy world.