Willa Cather’s short story “The Sculptor’s Funeral” explores the relationship between the artist and society. Cather portrays the townspeople of fictional Sand City, Kansas, as unrefined and amoral. Initially, it seems that Cather’s scathing descriptions of the townsfolk rely on rural, Western stereotypes. However, as the story progresses, Cather uses the townspeople to represent the “whirlpool” of societal expectations, vice, and greed from which Harvey Merrick, a sculptor, escaped to pursue his unconventional passion. By depicting Harvey’s funeral as a series of judgments on his character, Cather demonstrates the alienation of the artist by a society incapable of understanding him or her and suggests that it is often necessary to escape a negative, judgmental environment in order for an artist to reach his or her true potential.
Cather characterizes the townspeople as a homogeneous collective in order to demonstrate the harsh societal judgment Harvey receives when his body returns home. Awaiting Harvey Merrick’s corpse, the townspeople of Sand City, Kansas are initially described as a singular entity: “The men on the siding stood first on one foot then on the other, their hands thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, their shoulders screwed up with the cold.” Moving in unison, “the company” of men is presented like a disheveled military. While “company” can simply mean a group, it does have militaristic connotations and can refer to a squadron or battalion of troops. Cather chooses this word in order to show the unified front that the sculptor must face in Sand City, even after his death. The townspeople not only move in unison, they also think in unison, “convers[ing] in low tones […] seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them.” By having a throng of judgmental townspeople, rather than family or close friends, waiting for Harvey’s body, Cather highlights just how alienated Harvey was in life, and how he remains so in death. He is coming home, not to the warmth and grief one would expect from a family funeral, but to the continued denunciation of his life’s work as a sculptor.
In contrast to the people of Sand City, Henry Steavens, Harvey’s apprentice, represents the educated elite in the Eastern United States who appreciated and recognized the artist’s worth. Cather employs a sculpting metaphor to demonstrate that genius can spring from unlikely places—like the unrefined, rough-and-tumble town of Sand City. Steavens contemplates “what link there had been between the porcelain vessel and so sooty a lump of potter’s clay.” This metaphor eloquently articulates the relationship between an artist and his background—he is the refined vessel and the crude clay is the unsophisticated foundation from which he was formed—especially when that background involves individuals committed to misunderstanding him.
Watching the “sunset over the marshes” in Sand City as a child, Harvey was able to “keep himself sweet” because he dedicated himself to the pursuit of beauty. Had he gotten swept up in the greed and materialism plaguing Sand City, he might not have flourished as an artist. By moving to the Eastern U.S., Harvey freed himself of the judgments of his hometown and fully committed himself to his art. In this sense, Cather portrays the artist’s background (especially in relationship to societal expectations) as something to escape rather than a source of inspiration.
As the only character who spent much time with Harvey as an adult, Steavens is even more amazed that such a spectacular artist “whose mind was to become an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions” could come from “all this raw, biting ugliness.” Through Steavens’s observations at the funeral that the people of Sand City, rather than Harvey, are the misguided ones, Cather clarifies her view that society often wrongly devalues artists and can hinder their potential to create.
Through vivid imagery describing the townspeople alongside Steavens’s keen observations, Cather paints the path of Harvey Merrick’s life—one that takes him from being an overlooked outcast in Sand City, Kansas, to a celebrated sculptor in the Eastern U.S. It is not that the artist has no place in society at large; it is a particular kind of society, according to Cather, that denies art its value and denies its artists’ worth. Escaping these societal limitations is what allows Harvey to follow his passion and create meaningful work, regardless of if these accomplishments will ever be appreciated by his hometown.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Artist vs. Society ThemeTracker
Artist vs. Society Quotes in The Sculptor’s Funeral
The men on the siding stood first on one foot and then on the other, their hands thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, their shoulders screwed up with the cold […] There was but one of the company who looked as if he knew exactly why he was there, and he kept conspicuously apart.
The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into a large, unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish, and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass prisms and before a "Rogers group" of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathed with smilax. Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickening conviction that there had been some horrible mistake, and that he had somehow arrived at the wrong destination. He looked painfully about over the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery; among the hand-painted china plaques and panels and vases, for some mark of identification, for something that might once conceivably have belonged to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he recognized his friend in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls, hanging above the piano, that he felt willing to let any of these people approach the coffin.
The sculptor’s splendid head seemed even more noble in its rigid stillness than in life […] It was as though the strain of life had been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once relax the tension and smooth the countenance into perfect peace—as though he were still guarding something precious, which might even yet be wrested from him.
He could not help but wonder what link there had been between the porcelain vessel and so sooty a lump of potter’s clay.
“Was he always a good deal of an oyster?” he asked abruptly. “He was terribly shy as a boy.”
“Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so,” rejoined Steavens. “Although he could be very fond of people, he always gave one the impression of being detached. He disliked violent emotion; he was reflective and rather distrustful of himself—except, of course, as regarded his work. He was sure enough there. He distrusted men pretty thoroughly and women even more, yet somehow without believing ill of them. He was determined, indeed, to believe the best; but he seemed afraid to investigate.”
“A burnt dog dreads the fire,” said the lawyer grimly, and closed his eyes.
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.
“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 once—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.”
Was it possible that these men did not understand, that the palm leaf on the coffin meant nothing to them? The very name of their town would have remained for ever buried in the postal guide had it not been now and again, mentioned in the world in connection with Harvey Merrick’s.
He remembered what his master had said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked his pupil to send his body home. “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. The townspeople will come in for a look at me; and after they have had their say, I shan’t have much to fear from the judgment of God!”
“[…] you all hated Harvey Merrick more for winning out than you hated all the other boys who got under the wheels. […] Phelps, here, is fond of saying that he could buy and sell us all out any time he’s a mind to; but he knew Harve wouldn’t have given a tinker’s damn for his bank and all his cattlefarms put together […]
Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the hold man’s money—fell short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember the very tone in which brother Elder swore his own father was a liar, in the county court […]
Harvey Merrick and I […] were dead in earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We meant to be great men. […] I came back here to practice, and I found you didn’t in the least want me to be a great man. You wanted me to be a shrewd lawyer—oh yes! Our veteran here wanted me to get him an increase of pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new county survey that would put the widow Wilson’s little bottom farm inside his south line […]”
