The tone of “The Sculptor’s Funeral” is simultaneously compassionate and judgmental. The third-person narrator stays very close to Steavens’s experience throughout the story. While Steavens is a warm and considerate man, he does judge the people of Sand City who insult his former mentor, Harvey, at the man's funeral. The following passage captures both tones, as Steavens reflects on Harvey’s life, having learned more about his upbringing from Harvey’s childhood friend Jim:
Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master’s life; neither love nor wine, as many had conjectured; but a blow which had fallen earlier and cut deeper than anything else could have done—a shame not his, and yet so unescapably his, to hide in his heart from his very boyhood. And without—the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened and old, and noble with traditions.
Here, Steavens realizes, with a heavy heart, that it was not “love nor wine” that haunted Harvey but the “shame” that his family and Sand City community fostered in him for being different from them, specifically more interested in art and beauty than in frontier life. Steavens’s tone is aggrieved as he describes “the yearning” of his former mentor to escape his hometown.
At the same time, Steavens’s tone here comes off as judgmental, as he refers to the East Coast as “chastened” and “noble with traditions,” juxtaposing it with the “newness and ugliness and sordidness” of Sand City as a frontier community. There is an irony here, then, of Steavens wanting to defend Harvey from negative judgments from those who don’t understand him, while he negatively judges those he does not understand. It is possible that Cather inserted her own bias into the character of Steavens—some scholars have pointed out that her depiction of rural midwestern people as uncultured philistines is overly simplified and perhaps came from her own challenging experience of growing up in the Midwest.
