Returning to the place of one’s birth is a common theme in literature. However, Cather deviates from that identity-seeking narrative by having the sculptor’s return home occur after his death. Rather than have the eponymous sculptor tell his own story about his upbringing and its effects, the reader hears about Harvey’s life through the perspective of others. Harvey’s childhood included its fair share of familial trauma, a bizarre parental dynamic, and a town that could not understand his interests or values—all things he returns to, in death, at the end of the story. Through this variant of the homecoming theme, Cather suggests that sometimes the pull of home—even if it was an unhappy one—is too powerful to resist.
Harvey’s family is not awaiting his body at the train station. Instead, members of the town are there to receive the coffin and send it up to the house. Cather uses this strange detail to begin weaving the miserable tale of Harvey’s boyhood, as well as to assert the importance of the townspeople in that childhood. Showing the most genuine grief at the funeral, Roxy, the Merricks’ servant, “was weeping silently […] occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob.” By having the sculptor’s apprentice, Steavens, stand next to her at the funeral, Cather illustrates the emotional distance between Harvey and his family. Steavens understandably feels more comfortable next to the only person outwardly expressing their grief about Harvey’s passing. While not stating outright that Roxy was a maternal figure in Harvey’s life, Cather presents her in a much more sympathetic light than Harvey’s actual mother.
Harvey experienced a traumatic childhood that included an unhealthy relationship dynamic between his abusive mother and subservient father. This dynamic between mother and father repeats itself at Harvey’s funeral demonstrating that, even in death, Harvey is drawn into the interpersonal whirlpool present in Sand City. Theatrical and repulsive, Mrs. Merrick puts on a show of violent grief at her son’s death. Mrs. Merrick “filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in angry water…” Through this simile and subversion of gender stereotypes, Cather asserts that Harvey did not have a nurturing mother that might have been capable of supporting his art. Mr. Merrick looks at his wife “with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the whip.” While the previous simile compares Mrs. Merrick to a man-destroying force of nature, Cather uses this simile to both pity Mr. Merrick’s inferior position and demonize his wife’s treatment of him. Laird expresses to Steavens that Harvey’s mother made his “life a hell.” Impressively resilient, his childhood friend cannot fathom “how he kept himself sweet.” Cather includes this dialogue to support the notion that Harvey was able to separate himself from what he experienced as a child.
Returning to one’s place of origin is significant in “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” because it demonstrates that the sculptor sees the poetic nature of concluding one’s life at its beginning. The genesis of Harvey Merrick occurred amidst terrible trauma and pain. Harvey explains to Steavens on the day he dies, “It rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from, in the end.” It seems odd that someone would willingly return to a family and town that have harshly judged him his entire life. However, by having Harvey state his final wishes to his apprentice, Cather demonstrates his final acceptance of the people who raised him and the inevitability of his homecoming.
Though he had no desire to return to Sand City while he was alive, with death approaching rapidly, Harvey surmises that his body should be buried there. While Harvey’s family and the townspeople were something he had to escape in order to fulfill his purpose as a sculptor, in death, the pull of home is more powerful than the memories of a brutal boyhood. Asserting life’s cyclical nature, Cather implicates that Harvey Merrick was bound to return home after his death.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Homecoming ThemeTracker
Homecoming 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.
A number of lanky boys, of all ages, appeared as suddenly and slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder […] They straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and a flash of momentary animation kindled in their dull eyes at that cold, vibrant scream, the world-wide call for men. It stirred them like the note of a trumpet; just as it had often stirred the man who was coming home tonight, in his boyhood.
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.
There was a kind of power about her face—a kind of brutal handsomeness, even; but it was scarred and furrowed by violence, and so coloured and coarsened by fiercer passions that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her forehead, her teeth were large and square, and set far apart—teeth that could tear. She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into the whirlpool.
Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail, odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept gray hair and a dingy beard, tobacco-stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly. He went slowly up to the coffin and stood rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between his hands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief that he had no consciousness of anything else.
"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so," he quavered timidly, putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow. She turned and sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he tottered a little. He did not even glance toward the coffin, but continued to look at her with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the whip. His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable shame.
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 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!”
