-Graham S. The timeline below shows where the character Clark appears in A Wagner Matinée. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance. One morning, Clark, the narrator, receives a letter postmarked from “a little Nebraska village.”
In ''A Wagner Matinee,'' author Willa Cather details the journey of a once-cultured woman who has been beaten down by frontier life. As she returns to Boston, she is a shell of the woman she used to be.
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Wagner Matinée, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. Civilization vs. The Frontier One morning, Clark, the narrator, receives a letter postmarked from “a little Nebraska village.”
After realizing that his uncle intends for him to attend to his aunt's pleasure and comfort during her stay in Boston, Clark starts to feel nervous. He finds himself ill at ease at the thought of meeting his aunt.
Georgiana ultimately eloped with him to the Nebraska frontier, fleeing the protests of her family and friends, and they established a homestead in Red Willow County.
'A Wagner Matinée' is a moving story about isolation, loss, and the distance between frontier life versus the metropolitan life of the American city.
What lesson does Clark draw from Aunt Georgiana's final statement declaring, "I don't want to go!" in "A Wagner Matinee"? Clark realizes that Aunt Georgiana is not satisfied, and does not want to go back to her plain life in the country, where she had to give up her dream, to live a much simpler life.
At the end, Aunt Georgiana told Clark that she did not want to leave. Having experienced the world of music again did not want to return to the world of cows, corn, and snakes. She had received a taste of the music and now she wanted more.
One of the central conflicts of the story is between the hard life on the Nebraska frontier and the cultured world of Boston. At first, Clark regrets his plans to take Aunt Georgiana to the concert because he is doubtful that, after so many years, she will enjoy the concert.
Climax. The climax is the concert when Aunt Georgiana becomes emotional listening to the music.
How did Aunt Georgiana end up in Nebraska? At age 30, an age at which most women are pressured into getting married quickly, she met a 20-year-old handsome farm boy while visiting the Green Mountains in NA. She fell in love with him and moved to Nebraska so they could start a family.
Cather takes away the romanticized freedom of the western life by showing the depression of Aunt Georgiana and the description of her cave and the physical and mental toll it takes on her. What specific images create this feeling?
Clark decided to take her to a Wagner Matinee, and orchestra concert and she is enchanted because she has been apart from the music for a very long time, at the end of the concert Aunt Georgiana starts crying and say, “I don't want to go!” because she know that she must leave music behind and return to the silent …
How do Clark and his aunt respond to the concert? His aunt said that she did not want leave Boston.
Clark’s and Georgiana’s awkward reunion underscores the contrast between frontier and city life. Georgiana’s disoriented and disheveled appearance after her exhausting, stressful journey further makes her seem a stranger to Clark and to Boston. Clark is shocked by his aunt ’s battered appearance.
Civilization vs. The Frontier. One morning, Clark, the narrator, receives a letter postmarked from “a little Nebraska village.”. The letter, which looks “worn” and “none too clean,” is from his Uncle Howard, informing Clark that Howard’s wife, Clark’s Aunt Georgiana, must travel to Boston to attend to legal matters.
The matinée audience is made up mostly of women, hardly distinguishable except for the different fabrics and wide array of colors of their dresses — “all the colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape.”. Georgiana looks at them “as though they had been so many daubs of tube-paint on a palette.”.
Georgiana’s eyes are drawn to the other concertgoers’ dresses as if she is seeing fine art. In contrast to her own drab apparel, associated with the drudgery of the farm, the women’s dresses quench some of Georgiana’s thirst for the livelier, more varied world she has left behind.
The condition of Howard’s letter suggests that it has weathered a long journey, hailing from a world very different from its destination. In this way, it prefigures Georgiana’s own arrival from Nebraska. The suddenness of Georgiana’s impending arrival also reinforces the sense of an imminent culture clash.
As Clark tells us, his aunt is, herself, a Boston native many years removed: a woman who was musically talented and a teacher at the Boston Conservatory.
In ''A Wagner Matinee,'' author Willa Cather details the journey of a once-cultured woman who has been beaten down by frontier life. As she returns to Boston, she is a shell of the woman she used to be.
We see the painting of three different Georgianas in the story: the vibrant and cultured music teacher who lived in Boston, the hardworking wife of a frontiersman, and the shell of the woman who arrives back in Boston to visit with Clark.
Upon meeting his aunt at the train station, Clark is appalled at the woman's appearance: she wears a ''soiled linen duster,'' ''ill-fitting false teeth,'' and her skin as ''yellow as a Mongolian's from constant exposure to a pitiless wind.''. Her years on the Nebraska prairie have not been kind to her.
He decides to take her to the symphony performing the songs of Richard Wagner, to give her a taste of her former life. She dresses in her modest farm attire, looking out of place among the more luxuriously-clad women.
In Cather's writing, we see the author using several themes, including hardship, loss, and regret. Hardship is woven throughout the short story, from the time that Georgiana steps off the train and shows her haggard appearance to the moment when she begs not to leave the symphony and return to her difficult life.
A quote attributed to Queen Elizabeth I shows that even those blessed with royalty and fortune may experience the pains of regret: ''All my possessions for a moment of time.''.
A Wagner Matinée Summary. Clark, who lives in Boston, receives word from his Uncle Howard that his Aunt Georgiana is coming to visit from rural Nebraska—in fact, she is due to arrive the following day.
Clark worries that the matinée was a bad idea and that his aunt will feel embarrassed at reentering a cultured environment.
After long days of farm work, he studied Latin, literature, and music while his aunt did chores and offered him encouragement. Now Clark hopes to repay her for her kindness by taking her to the Symphony’s Wagner concert.
Clark has not seen Georgiana since his youth, and he is immediately pulled into vivid recollections of practicing music at her side. The next day, at the train station, Georgiana arrives dusty and disoriented, and Clark is shocked by her weathered appearance.
By the time “A Wagner Matinée” was written, Americans were a decade or two removed from the settling of the Great Plains and were beginning to look back with nostalgia on the pioneer generation, especially in light of increased industrialization in urban areas. The hardworking pioneer wife, vital to the all-consuming work of maintaining a homestead, was an especially romanticized figure. It is worth noting that, in 1904, the Homestead Act was amended in hopes of repopulating western Nebraska, which had seen decline following the initial settlement boom of the 1870s and 1880s; the provision allowed for homesteaders to claim ownership over a new section of Nebraskan counties free of charge, and, as such, homesteading and land use were still live issues at the time Cather wrote. The operatic works of German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883), hugely influential on modern classical music, would also have been relatively fresh to American audiences at this time.
She also delivered her high school graduation speech from its stage in 1890. Operatic Inspiration. Cather’s lifelong love of opera is also reflected in the second novel of her prairie trilogy, The Song of the Lark, whose heroine, Thea Kronborg, is based on the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad.
In 1923 she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel of World War I. By the 1920s, Cather had established herself as a leading American novelist, turning to historical subjects with Death Comes for the Archbishop (1928) and the bestselling Shadows on the Rock (1931).