Losing the Whole in the Parts: Identity in The Professor's House

TLDR: Michaels argues that Cather's 1925 novel The Professor's House is a reaction to the threat posed to American identity by the influx of immigrants in the early twentieth century, a threat dramatized by the marriage between the “unusual and exotic” (64) Jewish entrepreneur Louie Marsellus and Cather as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: A the heart of walter benn michaels’s study of American modernism, Our America, is the contention that Willa Cather’s 1925 novel The Professor’s House imagines “identity [as] a function of inheritance” (37).1 Michaels argues that this logic aligns the novel with the highly restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Bill of 1924, which “transform[ed] American identity from the sort of thing that could be acquired (through naturalization) into the sort of thing that had to be inherited (from one’s parents)” (8). What Americans were believed to inherit, however, was “not just a biology, [but] a culture” (37). Michaels offers as an example of this cultural inheritance the central event in Cather’s text: the discovery by a young American boy, Tom Outland, of a long-abandoned Indian cliff city at the top of a mesa in New Mexico. Tom imagines this discovery in terms of the acquisition of a long-lost family, speaking fondly of his “poor grandmothers” who died “a thousand years ago” (The Professor’s House 219). This unlikely conversion of dead Native Americans into family ancestors is a reaction, Michaels suggests, to the threat posed to American identity by the influx of immigrants in the early twentieth century, a threat dramatized in The Professor’s House by the marriage between the “unusual and exotic” (64) Jewish entrepreneur Louie Marsellus and