Sheaths, Molds, and Shards: The Formation of an Anthropological Aesthetics in Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark

Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915) critically revises late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology to form an aesthetics of materiality. The works of anthropologists such as Otis Mason and Lewis Henry Morgan presumed cultures, especially those they defined as primitive, to be bounded, static wholes, totalities expressed through a people and their material objects, both constrained by the determinants of race and environment. The Song of the Lark engages with such anthropological discourses in its passages representing the material remains of those labelled "Cliff Dwellers." However, the novel opens a gap between object and anthropology by figuring the remains as aesthetic objects, markers of transformation, loss, and incompletion. In contrast to Cather's better known aesthetic statement, the essay "The Novel Demeuble" (1922), The Song of the Lark's dialectical responses to anthropology offer ways to understand aesthetic creation and reception in everyday experiences.