In “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” Cather pays close attention to capturing how people in rural Kansas in the early 20th century spoke. While not all the characters speak in dialect, some of the older townspeople have more notable rural midwestern accents, as seen in the following passage:
“That’s Harve for you,” approved the Grand Army man. “I kin hear him howlin’ yet, when he was a big feller in long pants and his mother used to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin’ the cows git foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin’ ’em home from pasture. He killed a cow of mine that-a-way onct—a pure Jersey and the best milker I had, an’ the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was watchin’ the sun set acrost the marshes when the anamile got away.”
Here, the Grand Army man—a minor character in the story—speaks poorly about Harvey at his own funeral, describing to the other funeral-goers how, as a young man, Harvey was responsible for losing one of his cows because Harvey was watching the sunset rather than the herd. (A sign from his youth that Harvey was far more interested in art and beauty than in physical labor and earning money.)
Of course, it may be hard for some readers to understand exactly what the man is saying here, given that Cather changes much of the spelling and grammar in his speech in order to have his rural Kansan accent come across. For example, she changes “can” to “kin,” “fellow” to “feller,” “once” to “onct,” and “animal” to “anamile.” She also drops the “g” at the end of a lot of his words (such as “drivin’” and “watchin’”). These changes to the Grand Army man’s speaking style adds to the realism of the story and also the sense that as someone who grew up in the rural frontier state of Nebraska, Cather intimately knows the types of people and communities she is depicting in the story.
