Among Gemstones and Potsherds
George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark both present us with a heroine who spends her life struggling to resolve the tension between the ideal and the real.
These women are great-souled idealists who yet must live in reality and work out their thirst for the transcendent among flesh and blood. The constraints each woman faces correspond to her place and time: Eliot’s Dorothea has the zeal and passion of St. Teresa of Avila, set in Georgian England, in an age “in which great feeling will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.” Cather’s modern heroine Thea, though living a century later in America and without the strictures of Georgian society, proves that no amount of social change can alter the human condition. Her trial lies in her desire to touch the transcendent through opera singing, while the ability to do so depends upon the interest and support of a paying audience, and her pursuit of success in the field alienates her from family and home. For idealists, the tension of life on earth is that we must thirst and strive for the ideal while loving and embracing reality. The success each woman achieves in grappling with her own personality and circumstances comes to depend upon her ability to resolve this tension by becoming, in some respect, an artist.
In each novel’s depiction of its heroine’s youth and maturation, the woman’s idealistic nature is apparent from the outset: both young women show a fascination with gemstones. Thea is described as “wanting every shining stone she saw,” while Dorothea must overcome her puritanical horror of ornament in order to admit her delight in an emerald. Any idealist can understand her desire to keep the stones nearby to “feed her eye at these little fountains of pure color.” Dorothea points to the connection between gemstones and idealism in her exclamation on seeing them for the first time: “They are like little fragments of heaven.” Gazing deeply into a stone takes one nearly ‘beyond the confines of this world,’[1] and humanity throughout the millennia has shared an agreement that these stones are valuable for their own sake. Everywhere on earth where they have been found, these natural yet otherworldly gifts of God have fed a common hunger for beauty.
The challenge for these two lovers of beauty is to become equally appreciative of the lesser, or more hidden, delights of reality. A life spent immersed in reality with no view to the transcendent would lead to despair, as it fails to fulfill man’s deepest needs for purpose and meaning. However, a life spent exclusively pursuing pure ideals would result in a life continually frustrated, as reality and its needs will intervene. Dorothea’s idealism manifests in a desire for great works of charity (in which she is impeded, despite her wealth, by societal constraints), and failing that, for intellectual achievement by supporting a scholarly husband. Once in the midst of such a marriage, however, Dorothea finds her hopes for both expansive Christian charity and academic renown disappointed by a decidedly small-souled husband, whose life-work of a thesis fails to amount to anything.
In Cather’s story, Thea finds that her innate musical talent, untempered by humility or compassion, makes her miserable when others do not measure up to her ideals. Thea harbors a deep hatred for a fellow singer who prospers due to her “gimmicky” singing, at the expense of accuracy in hitting the right notes. When questioned about her contempt, Thea can only say that she hates the woman “for the sake of what I used to think a singer might be.” Thea’s intolerance for imperfection and pettiness also leads her to sever her relationships to family and hometown when she finds the persons therein lacking. The love of the perfect must not lead to abhorrence of imperfection—especially when imperfection is so often found in the neighbors we are commanded to love (and of course, in oneself—surely another cause of Thea’s misery). Thea’s high standards keep her from and embracing and loving (and accepting love from) her family; only in the epilogue do we get a hint that in maturity she came to reconcile with one of her aunts. Despite the liberties and social mobility of 20th-century America which allowed her to attain her goal of becoming a prima donna, Thea ultimately has to reckon with her own idealism (with its uniquely modern and American twist of radical individualism) in order to attain integrity and joy.
Thea’s story illustrates another pitfall of idealism: contempt for the mundane duties of life. When hosting friends in her apartment, Thea provides the hospitality of serving coffee, but pours it “impatiently, as if it were a ceremony in which she did not believe.” To live sanely in this world, the duties and daily tasks of life must be embraced and delighted in, when possible, or offered as sacrifices, when impossible to take joy in for themselves. This is where the posture of the artist must be assumed: the artist stands in the breach between the ideal and the real to creatively resolve the tension.[2] The person who can take the everyday stuff of life and create a thing of beauty—for example, the cook who can make a delicious and delightfully presented dish from less-than-perfect ingredients—evokes the reaction, “That guy is an artist!” This expression is reserved for those who can craft a masterpiece from the mundane, and the first requirement of that capacity is an acceptance of the material with which one has to work, however imperfect it may be.
Despite Thea’s more obviously artistic role as an opera singer, it is in Dorothea’s story we see growth into the maturity that makes her an artist of her own life. She comes to accept that her greatness will not be on the grand, legendary scale, and through her trials of accepting a loveless marriage and other frustrations, Dorothea develops the artist and contemplative’s loving gaze towards other people, in place of the critical posture she often held towards them in her youth. This gaze allows her to save at least one man’s life from the brink: that of her friend Dr. Lydgate. She attains the capacity that Josef Pieper attributes to the artist: a “visual perception prompted by loving acceptance” of reality and persons, which allows them to “make visible what not everybody sees.”[3]
Dr. Lydgate, a fellow idealist whose worldly disillusionments (including a disappointing marriage and the loss of public approval) drive him to despair, gathers the strength to keep living from Dorothea’s believing conception of himself—from her gaze informed by love. When all of his friends and relations (as well as his wife) seem to have abandoned and condemned him, Lydgate claims that Dorothea’s noble nature allowed him “to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.” Charlotte Ostermann identifies this type of gaze with that of Christ, Who sees both “me-as-I-am” and “me as-He-created-me-to-be.”[4] When an idealist can embrace reality with this accepting and believing love, his ideals do the good work of raising others to dignity and hope rather than condemning their shortcomings.
Dorothea’s life did not attain the grandeur she imagined as a young woman, yet she managed to attain the highest goal we can have on this earth (indeed, the greatest commandment): as Eliot puts it in the Prelude to Middlemarch, “life beyond self.” In Dorothea, idealism accomplished its purpose of pulling her out of herself to serve God and neighbor. By assuming the posture of an artist towards her circumstances and the persons in her life, Dorothea is not only able to make a ‘virtue of necessity,’ but to make a masterpiece of it!
Cather illustrates this kind of masterpiece in her depiction of the pottery of the Arizonian Native Americans, which fascinates her heroine. These people relied on transporting water up from the river to their cliff homes for all their daily needs, and crafted jars in order to do so—yet Thea observes that the shards of these vessels that she discovers were beautifully decorated. Thea is deeply moved by this fact, as she reflects that they “could not hold food or water any better for the additional labor put upon them” in these flourishes. Thea feels bonded to these ancient women as artists through the remnants of their work, and the inheritance that she must learn to accept from them is that they bestowed their artistry on these humble, practical vessels. It is this craft of marrying necessity and delight, reality and beauty, which marked these ancient women not just as craftsmen, but as artists, and which made Dorothea’s “hidden life” a masterpiece.
[1] Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990), 76.
[2] Charlotte Ostermann, “The Role of Art in Human Formation” in Upschooling: Twelve Catholic Homeschool Keynotes (Motherheart Press, 2019), 170.
[3] Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990), 74.
[4] Charlotte Ostermann, Souls at Work (Angelico Press, 2014), 34.
Lindsay Bockwinkel has a BA in Theology from the University of Dallas. She teaches the Creighton Model FertilityCare System, homeschools her 4 young boys, and enjoys spending her free time contemplating the deeper realities found in things like nature, motherhood, and creativity.