Chiyoko started living with her and her husband before her husband. He had a good relationship with his son-in-law and was happy in his peaceful days. However, for Chiyoko, who is still active as a woman, the loneliness of her retirement life was
In one section Latour meets the old Mexican woman Sada, who has been prevented from entering the local church by her Protestant Anglo master (the unflattering picture of Protestantism continues Cather's early satires). Latour takes Sada into the church: "Never, as he afterward told Father Vaillant, had it been permitted him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion as on that pale December night. He was able to feel, kneeling beside her, the preciousness of the things of the altar to her who was without possessions; the tapers, the image of the Virgin, the figures of the saints, the Cross that took away indignity from suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with Christ" (217).
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Thus, exemplifying what Irene Mahoney (herself a member of the Ursuline community) calls an "implacable determination for total consecration," Marie Guyart Martin sundered ties with her son and her father to embark on a life of austerity and prayer (L'incarnation, Selected Writings 5). Influenced by the teaching of Pierre de Bérulle, who advocated a severe asceticism as a way of assimilating the mysteries of Christ, she dedicated herself to Christ as Incarnate Word-hence her religious name. During her years in Canada she was very much a practical woman as well as a mystic. (Mahoney describes her as an "active/contemplative" both in France and in Quebec [15].) As her letters-many of them to her son, who became a Benedictine monk-report, she drew up contracts for the construction of the Ursuline convent, did it a second time after the convent burned in 1650, took an interest in mines and salt pits, had wells dug, and even tried to interest merchants in exporting porpoise oil. In his extensive study of New France, written almost a century ago, James Douglas considered Marie's letters to be "more valuable as sources of contemporary history than even the Relations of the Jesuits" (438). Aditionally, Marie learned Indian languages and produced French-Anglonquin and Algonquin-French dictionaries and even an Iroquois catechism. Bishop Laval she held in high regard. But when Laval approved a new constitution for the Ursulines (written largely by the Jesuit missionary Père Lalemont), Marie refused to accept the parts she did not like (L'Incarnation, Selected Writing 28-29).
Precisely how Cather feels about Jeanne Le Ber is difficult to say, but if we follow the old adage of trusting the tale we might make a tentative distinction between the popular consequences of Jeanne's actions and the actions themselves. The text of Shadows leaves no doubt that Jeanne's parents grieved at her self-imposed seclusion and that the story of angels fixing her spinning wheel brings "an incomparable gift" to many families in Quebec. To that passage Cather adds the following statement: "The people have loved miracles for so many hundred years, not as proof or evidence, but because they are the actual flowering of desire. In them the vague worship and devotion of the simple-hearted assumes a form. From being a shapeless longing, it becomes a beautiful image; a dumb rapture becomes a melody that can be remembered and repeated; and the experience of a moment, which might have been a lost ecstasy, is made an actual possession and can be bequeathed to another" (136-37). Strong language this-privileged, impossible to confute. It conveys a profound appreciation of the effect of miracles, evoked and validated by the story of this recent one. Jeanne Le Ber brings beauty to the lives of "the people." In doing so, however, the woman who desired "the absolute solitariness of the hermit's life" ironically becomes, and not for the first time, the talk of Quebec (132). And since all available evidence points to Jeanne as the source of the wondrous story, the adamant recluse must be seen as the creator of her own legend. Granting the depth of her spiritual commitment to suffer for the sins of Canada, Jeanne Le Bar may be the most reflexive figure in American literature since Arthur Dimmesdale.
The essential feeling of both "The White Mulberry Tree" and Tristan and Isolde is not rapture, however, but yearning. Hall terms the yearning tragic "because it is a thirst which from the nature of things admits of no satisfaction upon the earth we know" (265). Cather, like Hall, and in strikingly similar passages, explores that thirst-how it feels, what it means. To do so, both employ the altered time of opera, in which emotions are thoroughly explored, demanding equal or greater time than narrative action. In both pairs of lovers, one of the pair envisions the possibility of a lifetime of unrequited yearning. Says a wandering Tristan, "The ancient air, which has asked me before this, and asks me again in this hour, to what possible end, what destiny I was born into the world? . . . To what destiny? The ancient song tells me over again: To spend myself in longing and to die!" (Hall 303, ellipses added). Marie, in her wandering, has a similar reflection: "The years seem to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, winter, autumn, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain-until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman who might cautiously be released" (O Pioneers! 248). Inevitably, the alternative to a lifetime of longing is death. The intricate interplay of dark and light portends death in both opera and story, as splendor becomes the only reality and the doomed lovers themselves become aware that earthly paradise will elude them. Thus, Tristan and Isolde offer their invocation to night, "Oh!, close around us night of love! Give us forgetfulness of life! Gather us up in your arms, release us from the world!" (Hall 292). And Emil rushing to Marie invokes death: "As he rode past the graveyard he looked at the brown hole in the earth where Amedee was to lie and felt no horror. That, too was beautiful, that simple doorway into forgetfulness. The heart when it is too much alive aches for the brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death" (O Pioneers! 257).
We should expect that in 1926, the year between the faith crisis in The Professor's House and the pilgrimage that is Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather would explore religious complexities; however, critics are increasingly troubled by them. Hermione Lee finds "the religious feeling of My Mortal Enemy . . . disconcerting" (221), and Merrill Skaggs finds "Myra's latter-day Catholicism . . . not especially convincing" (108). Lee is disturbed by Myra's theatrics, "that nothing is real for her, not even her own death, unless it is dramatized" (z16), adding that religion operates as a form of determinism and emerges as superstition and vindictiveness (221-22). David Stouck fails to make religion central but recognizes this movement toward Christian reckoning (121-22) in judging Myra and her uncle unregenerate sinners (i126-27). Other critics encourage a religious approach but fail to follow one: E. K. Brown affirms that Myra's prototype was a woman "whose life and nature could be understood only by one whose religious sense had become acute" (248), and in their introductions to My Mortal Enemy Marcus Klein and A. S. Byatt acknowledge the essential religious mystery of Myra's story.
Ironically, some of the critics who focus on the novel's religious issues are overly judgmental. Stephen Tanner perceptively sees as "the primary problem of interpretation . . . the evaluation of Myra's religious conversion" but accuses Myra of failure to demonstrate "essential" Christian qualities (30). He accepts Nellie's gloss of Myra's definition of religion as Myra's meaning and uses Paul Tillich to discredit it (34). In order to conclude that Myra's deathbed conversion is a travesty, Tanner is forced to dismiss the young priest as "'boyish,' impressionable, and consequently pliable" (33). Eugene England offers a tag to the Tanner reading and, with the help of René Girard, arrives at Tanner's conclusion that Myra's religion is the antithesis of Christ's (129). However, Dalma Brunauer and June Klamecki consider Myra's mortal-enemy question as paralleling "the anguished cry of Jesus in Gethsemane" (34). The best treatment of religion in My Mortal Enemy is by Michael Murphy, who alone stresses the importance of the tension caused by marriage outside the church (42). He commends Cather's unusual sophistication in viewing the spiritual struggles of an older Catholic woman from the perspective of a young and impressionable Protestant observer- who only dimly perceives. Myra is not modern, in that she challenges sentimental American approaches to mortality (48) and "hopes to regain some dignity in Roman rituals that acknowledge mortality and consecrate suffering and death" (46). Murphy reminds us that Myra refuses to deny her guilty past and responsibility for abandoning her faith for romantic love.
In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis reiterates the needs of natural loves to be guided by "something more, and other" (55), in order to serve as "preparatory imitations of . . . the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put to a higher service" (24). Discussing sex (Venus) in love (Eros), Lewis cautions against worship of either or their combination. Sex is a "Pagan sacrament" in which the participants represent "forces older and less personal" than themselves: "the masculinity and femininity of the world.... The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the Earth-Mother.... But we must give full value to the word Play" (103). "St. John's saying that God is love," continues Lewis, "has long been balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author (M. Denis de Rougemont) that 'love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god'; which of course can be restated in the form 'begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.' This balance seems . . . an indispensable safeguard" (6-7). Platonic romanticism canonizing "falling in love" as "the mutual recognition of earth souls . . . singled out for one another in a previous and celestial existence" cannot help Christians, who must use Eros merely as an approach, "a paradigm . . . built into our natures, of the love we ought to exercise toward God and Man" (107-8).
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