The Geography of Desire in The Professor’s House
Near the end of Willa Cather’s novel, The Professor’s House, Godfrey St. Peter retreats
to the study of his abandoned house, ―his refuge from this ever-increasing fatigue‖ (247) that
marks his impeding and climatic emotional crisis of the text. The Professor, middle-aged and
middle-income, has spent the majority of his professional as well as personal life in this middle-
space. Beneath him lies the now empty space of his house where, barely noticed by the
Professor, the daily domestic drama of his family unfolded and from which St. Peter feels
increasingly alienated. However, the Professor’s study is also a room with a view. St. Peter’s
solitary window frames his view of the outside world and allows him to gaze selectively upon
spaces which are meaningful to the Professor: his formal garden, with it’s imposed order; Lake
Michigan, which evokes memories of an idyllic and simple childhood; and ultimately to savage
blue Mesa and the ―story of youthful defeat‖ (155) of a now deceased young man. Yet for St.
Peter, each space contains a potential for desire. ―Desire is creation, is the magical element of the
process,‖ (19) the Professor believes; yet desire also seems to create his notions of identity and
gender. St. Peter negotiates his notions of both as he negotiates the geography of the text.
According to Eve Sedgwick, Cather writes out two types of desires—one heterosexual and the
other homosocial—in the geography of the novel’s locations: the Professor’s study is a liminal
space that marks ―the crossing of the upstairs/downstairs vertical axis of heterosexual
domesticity by the space-clearing dash of male-male romance‖ (69). Thus, geography in The
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Professor’s House serves as a map of St. Peter’s social and sexual connections, delineating the
space of his heart and mind and diagramming the creations of the Professor’s desire.
For Godfrey St. Peter, the vertical space beneath his study represents the entirety of his
domestic concerns. Here is the site where his wife ran a well-ordered household, where the
Professor gave faculty dinner, and where his children were born and grew up. However, St. Peter
is leery of this domestic space and acts hesitant to interact with it. The Professor seems to believe
that entering into the domestic space will transform some inner quality that can only be
maintained while in his study. Upon going downstairs, his interest, for example, will be removed
from his studies and become riveted to what his wife or children are doing, or he will notice
some new repair required in the house. Perhaps descending into domestic space may have even
more drastic effects on the Professor’s mental condition: ―On that perilous journey down through
the human house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper‖ (18). St. Peter seems
fearful of a feminizing effect that travel into the domestic realm may impose, a transformation
that is deleterious to his ability to create and write. This fear can only be guarded against while in
the house by remaining in the safety of his ―work-room‖ (7), a far more masculinized (or
androgynous, as shall later be discussed) space.
St. Peter does not believe himself entirely opposed to entering into the feminine space
beneath his study. He asserts that he attended his children when they were sick and spent two
evenings of the week with his family (18). Later, the Professor remembers that ―he was not
insensible to the domestic drama that went on beneath him‖ (85), and wants to believe, like
Queen Matilda, that he has written incidences of the smaller, personal experience of the domestic
into the context of the larger, more dramatic, and more important narratives of his histories (85).
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However, even when the downstairs section of his house is empty, St. Peter seems to
dread having to descend from the safety of his study into the space of his former domestic life.
Again, Cather gives the sense that entering into the domestic realm presents an affront to St.
Peter’s conception of his own gender: ―He must plunge in, like a man, and get used to the feeling
that under his work-room there was a dead, empty house‖ (7, my emphasis).
Yet despite the Professor’s efforts to keep up appearances to the contrary, the dead house
is reflective of St. Peter’s dead feelings towards his family, marking an absence or withdrawal of
his domestic desire. He insists his emotional withdrawal is a result of his falling out of love with
his family and with his wife in particular. The Professor imagines his relationship to his family
as the basis of his relationship with all people; to withdraw from the former is to withdraw from
the latter: ―Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations,
out of his place in the human family‖ (250).
St. Peter’s physical and emotional movements away from his family and social
relationships thus mark his increasing confinement within the space of his study. As stated
earlier, the Professor’s room was ―one place in the house where he could get isolation, insulation
from the engaging drama of domestic life‖ (16). This tiny room is where the Professor’s greatest
professional desire has become creation, where the writing of Spanish Adventures of North
America has taken place.
Here, the feminine presence of his wife or daughters from the domestic space below have
been transferred into the female forms of his study. To the Professor, these forms recall ―certain
disappointments…or of cruel biological necessities‖ (13). One of the forms, the one Augusta
calls ―the bust,‖ may represent St. Peter’s reified conceptions of female sexuality; the Professor
notes how, though it looks soft to the touch‖ as if you might lay your head upon its deep-
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breathing softness and rest safe forever‖ (9), he is always ―shocked‖ at it’s
―disappointing…tactile sense‖ (9). Perhaps this form of symbolic of St. Peter’s own emotional
response to the touch of his callused and growingly intolerant wife (25), or perhaps represents his
own fear of the feminine touch. St. Peter is a bit warmer towards the second form. He describes
its bosom as resembling ―a strong wire bird cage‖ and even possessing a nervous system (10).
Perhaps here, feminine presence and power have been conveniently caged and contained within a
feminine semblance that is not threatening to the Professor. Rather, feminine presence has been
reified within a socially accepted and utilitarian shape: ―It seemed just on the point of tripping
downstairs‖ – back toward the feminine space where it came –―…or on tiptoe, waiting for the
waltz to begin‖ (9), where it can be safely displayed in a social context.
The study is also the site where the feminine qualities of the lower domestic space,
seeping up from the floorboards, and the masculine qualities of the exterior space, infiltrating
through the study’s single window, co-mingle in interesting ways. First, the study itself functions
as a sewing-room, a space for a traditionally female activity, but it is also the site of St. Peter’s
work. Here, Augusta sews side-by-side with the Professor and his writing activities. This room
cannot be adequately heated: the furnace heat, emanating from the domestic space below, does
not reach the third floor study. To heat the room, an old gas stove—an object from the feminine
space below—must be turned on and window kept open, letting in the cold air from that exterior
space to co-mingle with the heat within the space of the Professor’s study.
The room also contains a box which holds belongings of both St. Peter and Augusta: on
one end of the box lie the Professor’s old manuscripts of his Adventures, on the other end are
Augusta’s rolls of patterns. These objects represent the creations of each person’s ―life work‖
(14), embodied desire that have been clearly gender-marked. The old note-books are
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representations of St. Peter’s imagination, creations that assume qualities of his own progeny.
His manuscripts are bound with mason’s chord, significant in this context because of the
masculine associations with this fraternal organization. Augusta’s patterns are also gender-
marked as feminine: physically, they mark the changes over time of the Misses St. Peters,
reifications of the female characters of the text. Likewise, these bundles of patterns are bound
with material that is clearly associated with the soft and traditionally feminine: ―bits of ribbon,
gingham, silk, georgette‖ (13). In the middle of the box, these two are described as
―interpenetrating‖ (13), a provocative intermingling of the feminine and the masculine in the
liminal space of the study.
The reference to Queen Matilda also serves as another vehicle where notions of gender
differences become blurred. As stated earlier, St. Peters associates his Adventures with the
Bayeux tapestries; both are the writings of grand, important epics. In each, the more mundane
domestic dramas are interwoven into the context of the exterior drama. The image of St. Peter,
sequestered in his lonely cell by an open window and working on his own ―tapestries‖ seems to
be an obvious allusion to Tennyson’s ―The Lady of Shalott.‖ If so, St. Peter becomes a rather
feminized, passive character, banished from the exterior space of masculine action, and dreamily
weaving the reflected memories of this exterior space into his tapestry. Sitting by his single
window, St. Peter seems to be waiting for his own Lancelot to rescue him from his isolated
tower, longfully glancing out into the exterior space of Tom Outland and into the presence of his
remarkable story.
The first scene visible in exterior space from St. Peter’s window is his formal garden.
Here wild chthonic nature, that mysterious space of feminine procreative power, had been
subdued, cropped, and groomed by the forceful male hands of the Professor. No hint of the
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ecstatic or Dionysian here; instead, nature has been carefully controlled and forced into neat
symmetry and order: ―There was not a blade of grass; it was a tidy half-acre of glistening shrubs
and bright flowers…and in the middle, two symmetrical, round-topped linden-trees‖ (6). In his
garden, the Professor can escape from the demands of his professional life. It is also a place
where he can escape from the bonds of his domestic life; with his wife and children safely sent
away to Colorado, St. Peter can label himself a bachelor again, and he is able to move his writing
project out of the interior space of his house and into this safe, controlled exterior space. Most
importantly, the Professor’s garden is also the site for the transaction of homosocial desire. Here
is where the Professor first remembers seeing Tom, and ―it was here he and Tom Outland used to
sit and talk half through the warm, soft nights‖ (7).
Beyond the Professor’s garden lies the blue smear of Lake Michigan. This geographic
locations marks out a restorative space for St. Peter, an ―inland sea of his childhood‖ (20) where
the Professor can escape into a kind of recreated childhood: ―[he] spent a day on the lake with
sail boat; jumping out to swim, floating on his back along side, then climbing into his boat
again‖ (20). For St. Peter, Lake Michigan is a distillation of those unaffected and unassuming
qualities—―il est toujours plus naïf‖ (21)— of childhood that are now lacking in his adult life.
Here in the space of his recreated childhood, St. Peter can escape the monotony and routine of
his adult life, safe from the ―land and all its dreariness‖ (20), including the dead house in which
he now lives. The lake also represents the traditional American myth of the autonomous agent
moving through empty space, with its promise of unrestricted movement and an immunity from
external connection: ―You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free‖
(20). Thus, the images of the Professor’s youth spent on the lake permeated both his conscious
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and unconscious; from his study’s window, the re-vision of these images kindles the Professor’s
desire for both a recreated childhood and for unrestricted freedom.
St. Peter’s dream of moving through exterior space seems to be the beginning point of his
homosocial desire. When he imagines escaping to some point in time and space where he could
avoid the ―mistake…of having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged‖ (78), the
Professor imagines himself in a ―picturesque shipwreck‖ (79), transported to a location in his
imaginative landscape. Oddly, his wife is absent from this scene and has been replaced by a
―weather-dried little sea captain from the Hautes-Pyrénées‖ (79). This imaginative fantasy is
apparently a page torn directly from St. Peter’s own biography, for he later reveals he had
actually sailed with just such a captain and several seamen from Provence. It is during this
homosocial adventuring that St. Peter first conceptualizes his writing project: ―the design of his
book unfolded in the air about him, just as definitely as the mountain ranges themselves‖ (89).
The Professor’s homosocial desire thus seems to be driving energy behind the creation of written
work.
St. Peter and Tom Outland conduct their own homosocial adventure to the blue mesa.
The mesa and the ancient city within represents a sacred space, a site that cannot be exposed to
―vulgar curiosity‖ (183). This space has been made holy by the presence of an extinct race of
people whose culture raised itself above the savage wilds of chthonic nature: ―wherever
humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a scared
spot,‖ explains Father Duchene to young Tom (199). Duchene asserts that there was something
special about the original inhabitants of this space, whose ―yearning for order and security‖ has
left an indelible presence upon the landscape: ―they built themselves into this mesa and
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humanized it (199). Here, the Professor and Tom retrieve Outland’s writings, themselves
creations of Tom’s earlier homosocial adventurings and desire with Rodney Blake.
However, Tom’s physical presence has been removed by the war; St. Peter’s homosocial
desire is left with only the memories of the blue mesa and Tom’s writings. The mesa, like all
mythic American wildernesses, becomes another retreat from the failures and defeats of his
personal life (246). Yet St. Peter’s lingers over Tom’s writings as if they represented Outland
himself and manifested the presence of both his body an voice: ―through this austerity [of Tom’s
writings], one felt the kindling imagination, like ardour and excitement of the boy, like the
vibration in a voice‖ (238). Here, the work of Tom’s hand begins to subvert and transform desire
into the more problematic realm of the homoerotic.
The hand thus becomes another site in St. Peter’s landscape of desire. On several
occasions, Tom’s hands are lovingly examined and described by the Professor:
the muscular, many-line palm, the long, strong finders with soft ends, the straight
little finger, the flexible, beautifully shaped thumb that curved from the rest of the
hand as is it were its own master. What a hand! (103).
Like Tennyson in In Memoriam, the trope of the hand acts as metonymic device for the now
absent beloved, the touch of the hand a reification of the beloved’s displaced homoerotic desire
that is too scandalous for speech: ―Descend, and touch, and enter; hear/ The wish too strong for
words to name‖ (Tennyson XCIII. 13-4). To the Professor, Tom’s blanket has become a
reminder of the young’s man’s own skin (111); touching Tom’s blanket now proffers the
Professor’s only opportunity for homosexual communion.
Yet unlike Tennyson, Cather does not offer Christ’s embrace as a metaphysical substitute
for the absent beloved. Instead, the Professor must transfer his desire away from the physical and
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into the realm of the Platonic ideal; this displacement of desire serves as a defense mechanism,
saving St. Peter from confronting the physical and erotic nature on his homosocial desire. The
Professor tries to convince himself that Tom’s hands were incapable of the physical embrace,
could ―never handled things that were not the symbols of ideas‖ (236). The Professor must learn
to let go of the physical Tom and embrace the young man’s ideal. Similarly, Godfrey St. Peter’s
movement through the geography of the text represents his negotiation with his various kinds of
desire. Beneath the Professor’s study is the now empty space which once represented his
domestic desires. Outside his window are the expanses of his male homosocial desire,
terminating with the now absent body of Tom Outland. St. Peter must learn to ―let go with heart‖
and come to terms with the absence at the terminus of each geographical axis of desire.
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Selected Bibliography
Cather, Willa. The Professor’s House. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. ―Across Gender, Across Sexuality: Willa Cather and Others.‖ South
Atlantic Quarterly. 88 (1989): 53-72.
—. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985.
Skaggs, Merill Maguire. After the World Broke in Two: The Later Novels of Willa Cather.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. Victorian Prose and Poetry. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling,
Eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. 440-466.
