A Wagner Matinee - Lesson Possibilities
Willa CatherOnline version of the story: http://www.online-literature.com/willa-cather/1594/
Have you ever had to choose between two things that were both very important to you? It’s not fun, is it? In this story Aunt Georgiana makes a choice that determines the direction of the rest of her life. Do you think that she made the right choice? Does she? Willa Cather based this story on a real-life person--her aunt Franc, and her family criticized her for the harsh portrayal.
Although the setting of this story is in Boston, the reader is often reminded of Aunt Georgiana’s hard life on the plains of Nebraska. You may recall from a history lesson that the Homestead Act was passed in 1862 to encourage families to go West. The plan worked because Nebraska’s population increased by 92,000 in just 10 years. The Homestead Act gave families 160 acres of land in exchange for a small fee, but to claim the land, the settlers had to live there and work it for at least five years. The settlers faced Indian attacks, blizzards, insects, and a number of other hardships. When a swarm of grasshoppers invaded the area, many homesteaders gave up and returned East. Of course, someone always came and took their place.
I doubt that Aunt Georgiana was one who gave up. Her work was backbreaking for certain. Did it also break her spirit? Notice the words that describe the homestead: “tall, naked house”; “black and grim as a wooden fortress”; “black pond”; “pitted with sun-dried cattle tracks”; “rain gullied clay banks”; “flat world.” How does this picture contrast with the description of the concert hall?
Willa Cather obituary
Prarie Settlement: Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters (1862-1912) Library of Congress American Memory Collection
Soloman D. Butcher: Photographs of the Nebraska Homestead (Nebraska State Historical Society)
Who was Wagner? Listen to an excerpt from Tristan and Isolde (through chromatic melodies and unresolving harmonies that prevent the music from ever feeling centered, fully expressing the late Romantic obsession with the yearing for the unattainable ideal. . .
Reader responses from college students after reading the story
Before listening to the play, have students discuss issues of voice and diction. In a play that draws such stark oppositions between “Eastern” attitudes and values and “Western” ones, how are these differences expressed in the speaking voices of the characters? In the language they use? What values do we associate with these voices?
Define ‘vernacular’ speech for the students. Encourage them to give examples from their own experience.
Discuss literary terms like ‘Interior Monologue’ and ‘Flashback.’ Alert your students that these techniques are important to the structure of the play.
Have students listen to the play and make notes about who is speaking and how they speak. Ask them to distinguish among the characters on the basis of their speech patterns and diction.
Divide characters into four groups. All of the students in each group will write a journal entry, a character analysis of one of the following figures: Clark Hamilton, Aunt Georgiana, Mrs. Springer, Uncle Howard.
Students will reassemble into their groups and share their journal entries in order to prepare a collective presentation to the class.
Students will report to the class from their groups.
After the students have listened to the play, begin discussion by asking for words and phrases that need to be explained. Create one group of students to write explanations for five or six of the expressions that the class has identified.
Ask the students to volunteer statements they have picked out which help to identify the play’s themes and clues to meanings. Create groups for 3-5 of the identified statements ["Scourged with chilblains,” “My hands had grown soft and white,” “I had assumed the manners and demeanor of a true Boston Brahmin,” “a green boy"] Students in each group will link the quotations to other details from the play in order to come up with an argument for a major theme. http://www.scribblingwomen.org/wclesson1.cfm#objectives
Homework assignment: students will find __ number of facts that relate to any aspect of life during the time period (May 1896) and places (Boston and the Nebraska frontier) that relate to the play. Encourage them to find illustrations of objects, scenes, etc. Their group work will continue next time.
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