The Professor's Commencement

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The Professor's Commencement is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in New England Magazine in June 1902 [1]

Short story Brief work of literature, usually written in narrative prose

A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a "single effect" or mood, however there are many exceptions to this.

Willa Cather American writer and novelist

Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.

Contents

Plot introduction

A Pittsburgh high school teacher spends his last day at work before retiring.

Plot summary

Early in the morning, the Professor wakes up and reads; his sister tells him she wishes he had been more ambitious with his life. On his way to the high school where he teaches, he is unnerved by the grimness and ugliness of industrialisation. Similarly, when he asks one of the students to read aloud, he is annoyed at the noise from the nearby factory that mars the reading. He then proceeds to pick up his stuff and join his colleagues for a retirement party. However, he bungles up the speech he gives there; his sister says it doesn't matter.

Industrialisation period of social and economic change from agrarian to industrial society

Industrialisation is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial society, involving the extensive re-organisation of an economy for the purpose of manufacturing.

Retirement point where a person ceases employment permanently

Retirement is the withdrawal from one's position or occupation or from one's active working life. A person may also semi-retire by reducing work hours.

Characters

Allusions to other works

Edward Burne-Jones 19th-century English artist

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was an English artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Burne-Jones was closely involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition of stained glass art in Britain; his stained-glass include windows in St. Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham, St Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham, Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, Chelsea, St Peter and St Paul parish church in Cromer, St Martin's Church in Brampton, Cumbria, St Michael's Church, Brighton, All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, St Edmund Hall and Christ Church, two colleges of the University of Oxford. His stained glass works also feature in St. Anne's Church, Brown Edge, Staffordshire Moorlands and St.Edward the Confessor church at Cheddleton Staffordshire. Burne-Jones's early paintings show the heavy inspiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by the 1860s Burne-Jones was discovering his own artistic "voice". In 1877, he was persuaded to show eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery. These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right, and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti English poet, illustrator, painter and translator

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was a British poet, illustrator, painter and translator, and a member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot 19th-century French landscape painter and printmaker

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

Literary significance and criticism

It has been suggested that the story was spurred by Cather's own experience as a high school teacher in Pittsburgh in 1901. [2]

Pittsburgh City in western Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States, and is the county seat of Allegheny County. As of 2017, a population of 305,704 lives within the city limits, making it the 63rd-largest city in the U.S. The metropolitan population of 2,353,045 is the largest in both the Ohio Valley and Appalachia, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, and the 26th-largest in the U.S.

It has been noted that the professor is more feminine, whilst his sister is more masculine. [3]

Moreover, it has been argued that the story follows in the wake of the "pedagogic eros of the Greeks", with Emerson's affection for his "pupil with the gentle eyes and manner of a girl". [4]

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References

  1. ↑ Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, University of Nebraska Press; Rev Ed edition, 1 Nov 1970, page 291
  2. ↑ James Leslie Woodress, Willa Cather - A Literary Life, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, page 152
  3. ↑ Johnathan Goldberg, 'Strange Brothers', Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, Duke University Press, 1997, page 468
  4. ↑ John P. Anders, Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition, University of Nebraska Press, 1999, pages 98-99
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