“The Sculptor’s Funeral” is set in the fictional rural Kansas town Sand City at the turn of the 20th century. The story takes place in a period of rapid industrialization in the United States. As more and more people flocked to cities for factory jobs, a divide began to grow between urban (primarily coastal) cities and rural communities. Though Cather grew up in the midwestern prairie state of Nebraska, she went to the East Coast for school and stayed there. Perhaps as a result, in “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” the East Coast represents sophistication and opportunity while the Midwest (where the story is set) represents stagnation and backwards values.
The following passage—in which Steavens remembers something Harvey told him about Sand City when he was still alive—captures the tension between rural and urban communities in the industrial area:
“It’s not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering,” he had said with a feeble smile, “but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from, in the end.”
In stating that Sand City is “not a pleasant place to be” when compared with other parts of the world that are “moving and doing and bettering,” Harvey hints that he believes Boston (where he lived and worked as an artist before he died) is one of these modernizing urban places. Even as Harvey judges Sand City negatively here, he notably asserts that people “ought to go back to the place we came from, in the end.”
Even though the people of Sand City pushed Harvey out—and his mother physically abused him—because he was a sensitive artist, Harvey still intentionally asks that his body be returned to the place from which he came. In this way, Cather hints that as much as people may want to escape where they came from, it will always be a part of them.
