The Symbolism in Willa Cather’s ‘The Song of the Lark’

Introduction

Born in Virginia in 1873, Willa Cather enjoyed a literary career of over forty years. In this time, she published numerous novels and essays that literary scholars still examine today. The novel is considered one of Cather’s best works and an important addition to the American literary canon. 'The Song of the Lark' is a Bildungsroman, or a novel that depicts the protagonist’s growth and initiation. The novel features several powerful symbols. The moon and the desert offer solace to Thea throughout the narrative.

The blue pools represent magic and otherworldliness, which Thea needs to experience in order to accept who she is. The death theme throughout the first part of the novel foreshadows the symbolic deaths later in the novel. All of these motifs and themes help to guide the reader through the narrative, allowing attuned readers to understand the text more deeply. Published in 1915, 'The Song of the Lark' is a novel by Willa Cather. The novel follows the musical career of Thea Kronborg as she travels from her hometown to the stages of Europe. After the tragic accidental death of her mentor, Thea has an emotional breakdown and, at the novel’s close, ends her concerts before retiring to recover. However, she is ready to return and begin a new opera about women artists. The novel is broken into three large sections, each with several smaller chapters, and is written in a third-person omniscient narrative. It is steeped heavily in the cultural and historical divides present in the American Midwest into the southwestern United States at the turn of the century. Willa Cather’s identity, as the oldest child of a large and loving farming family who lived in a small town on the Great Plains during the last decades of the 19th century, is significant to her translation of these cultural identity themes to paper in her novels.

Symbolism of the Lark in the Novel

In The Song of the Lark, Cather establishes a powerful and resilient central character, one whose artistic ambitions transcend the trials and tribulations she confronts throughout. Like its protagonist, the novel is also inflected by a guiding and powerful symbol and a sense of a mythmaking enterprise that increases in intensity as it transmogrifies the symbol of the lark. From the page-long frontispiece that represents a cosmic lark breaking free of its fetters, we know already that Thea and the lark are joined in the narrative, with the former growing into the latter to produce a powerful entity that, as the story begins to break free of the constraints of its genre—that is, realistic fiction—becomes a broader, more universal, and timeless figure. The world is suffused with nature as a refuge and symbol of the transcendent spirit well before Thea reveals her own avian namesake to a newspaper: “As the lark intoned the ecstatic hymn of the Resurrection, she suddenly fell on her knees, freezing in the sudden song of the bird.”

The motif of the lark is introduced in the first part of the novel as an endorsement of Thea's connection with her innermost self, her yearning for freedom, and her nostalgia for a perhaps fresher, simpler self. At the same time, Thea loves music and art, and in her songs, she pours a glimpse of her individuality that reflects her independence. The lark is chosen as a symbol for the reasons we will state briefly throughout her career. The novel starts with the pastoral image of the lark and closes with the lark turning its winter into the early summer. The lark's song, following Thea's performance, ultimately becomes a metaphor for her artistic impact. Nature is often used to present the ballad.

In Thea Kronborg, emotion so fills and flushes the bird-girl that she interprets Lily as a friend calling to her. Although Thea discovers that Lily does not even listen for her, her song still has attracted her lover, Fred Ottenburg, the profound Dutchman—the owner of the “house that was built on granite” beyond the diversion of Dutch figures. Before Thea's song, Fred had reached a dark place in himself. After he hears her, he becomes intoxicated and jubilant in view of what, above all else ahead, embeds in Fred a hitherto unknown power of resilience—the conviction of the wisdom of life that hits him powerfully before incorporating in him a dramatic and extended silence.

Themes of Art, Ambition, and Identity

In The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather portrays the emotional, intellectual, and moral development of Thea Kronborg, a musician. The novel displays Cather’s belief in the transcendent power of art, and the protagonist’s determination is portrayed with relish. Thea’s ambition is to express the inexpressible through her artistic vision, giving her life. This principle, put into practice, transforms her emotional and intellectual responses and attitudes. Ambition is the keyword of the text, and the remainder of this analysis will analyze the complex and sometimes conflicting responses to Thea’s ambition. It is also an expression of the old conflict between societal constraints and the human being who yearns to achieve personal gratification. The Song of the Lark is also about the concept of identity, which is central to the life of the modern individual. The environment and education shape personal values, attitudes, and conduct, but the ego has a gender-based orientation that contributes to personal individuality. The self is also shaped by cultural influence, and part of becoming an artist is releasing the personality from external influences. This exploration discusses the structure and function of the various communities in the story and concludes that all the communities are associated with artistic creation. The sacrifices made in going from one stage or community to another reinforce the judgment about art life. The story basically argues for a situational or personal struggle for self-definition as one moves up the social hierarchy and becomes culturally powerful. In contrast to modern sociological theory, this conflict occurs when people feel free to move socially and seek meaning.

Character Analysis and Development

Thea Kronborg is the central character in this novel, and most of the time, her point of view dominates the narrative. Since Oswald has influenced the entire California phase of her life, having him also tell his version of what happened was intriguing. It is a measure of the gift for creating complex characters that the portrayal here of Thea, the most fully realized protagonist, is complicated in every respect. Her desire to flee Moonstone and become an artist is almost the only constant during her journey from small-town America to Europe, away from art and finally back to Moonstone. Thea is a creation shaped not only by her creator’s imagination but also by acute observations of people around her and their foibles and strengths.

The novel, in other words, is a study of its main character, a brilliant American artist named Thea Kronborg who began life in the town of Moonstone, Colorado—one of the beautiful but tedious small towns, virtually a mining town perched at the edge of the Great Plains. Yet the other characters, particularly Dr. Archie and her mother, are crucial to our understanding of Thea and her journey. Dr. Archie’s story is that of appreciated mediocrity, while Thea’s own mother manages to live only in the moment of her youth and beauty, just as Thea will when she gets to what will become the Alaska Hotel, hard by the Chicago Railroad tracks in Moonstone. Both of the women serve to emphasize that Thea’s story is about the struggle towards artistic perfection. Siblings reflect different aspects of ambition and the creation of identity. Fred Ottenburg is the most compellingly realized of the many visiting Europeans he is patterned after, yet all continually do the work of seeing Thea for us from the outside, reflecting her, and thus our journey. All of those around Thea provide her with important criteria for living a well-examined life. Full of subtlety, richness, and contradiction, those minor characters reflect an art fulfilled in all here and now deepened by endurance.

Conclusion

In the conclusion, the reader is reminded of the importance of Willa Cather's work, not only for literature but also for people, as her character Thea Kronborg is considered by many readers and writers to be a figure that has left a memorable impression. The themes of art, the artist's vocation, ambition, and identity have been explored within the context of the novel and the life of the artist protagonist who adorns its title. The conclusion imposes a new perspective, seen in its falsity, on the resonance and range of the themes, suggesting that a further appeal to introspection and subjective contemplation is inevitable. The universal question or preoccupation faced by different individuals at different points in time is the subject of Thea Kronborg's quest. The conclusion confirms in the novel an insight applicable to the human quest, suggesting a subject matter reflective of our common experiences, which could also be enacted, and seeks to act in the continual artistic creation and recreation of new experiences. Discovery is the ultimate incentive of the quest, regardless of the particular kind of quest. Life is not just a setting or backdrop against which the emotions of art are described as the quest takes on a predominant place. There is a natural parallel in the narrative of The Song of the Lark and its title as High Prairie in the appeal far and wide.

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