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Historical and Archetypal Intimations of the Grail Myth in Cather's One of Ours and The Professor's House

Among the best early examples of Willa Cather's enduring "affinity for romanticism" (Rosowski, ix), particularly her affinity for the spirit of the Age of Chivalry, is the last stanza of her poem "Then Back To Ancient France" (1899): "Lift high the cup of Old Romance, / And let us drain it to the lees, / Forgotten be the lies of life, / Fore these [chivalric ideals] are its realities!" (qtd. in Slote, "Willa Cather," xiv). The familiar image of the Grail as a vessel or cup makes it difficult not to think of the medieval Grail myth as somehow connected to Cather's toast and to her own "cups" of romance. In One of Ours (1922) and The Professor's House (1925), that myth's presence is neither vague nor coincidental, for these novels reflect most compellingly both her attraction to "a religious-chivalric framework" (Slote, "Kingdom of Art," 43) and her creative need for vestiges of myth in her efforts to reconstruct "the world [that] broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts" (Not Under Forty, v). In Cather's deliberations on art and life in both works, it would seem most natural for the Grail myth to become one of those undercurrents she prefers "felt upon the page without being specifically named" (Not Under Forty, 50). Cather's familiarity with the Grail motif itself was part of her enthusiasm for Wagner's operas, including Parsifal (see, e.g., Song of the Lark and Woodress, 254); it also appears to owe something to Tennyson's Idylls of the King (Brown, 39), Heine's Grail-related essays in his collection Germany (Slote, "Kingdom of Art," 38), Burne-Jones's mythic paintings, and to her love of France (see Willa Cather in Europe). Given Cather's fondness of "symbols, magic, suggestion, and myth" (Slote, "Kingdom of Art," 93) and her firm control over literary allusions (Skaggs, 187), one may well consider the Grail as one of those things she would return to more than once (see Slote, "Kingdom of Art," 35, 83, 93). While it may seem odd for her never to mention the word Grail itself in the novels