Question

For many years, scholars have regarded My Mortal Enemy as somewhat of an enigma. Written in only a few months during the early spring of 1925 and published in 1926, Willa Cather’s shortest novel was sandwiched in between The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). While the subject matter of these latter two works can be traced to Cather’s experience in the desert Southwest, My Mortal Enemy seemingly has nothing to do with these subjects or her Nebraska roots; it appears to have come out of nowhere, puzzling those who have tried to fit this rather irregular work into a logical progression of Cather’s artistic development. The question of what caused Cather to write such a novel at this point in her career, for example, has still not been answered definitively. One commonly held hypothesis (假說) was first voiced by Marcus Klein, who in his 1961 introduction to the novel wrote that for Cather, “The story of Myra Henshawe must have been a personal crisis”. Klein, though, acknowledged that he could not prove his theory, “because there is available no record other than the novel”. Emmy Stark Zitter has recently argued that in My Mortal Enemy and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) Cather exercises the autobiographical impulse (沖擊) by putting details of her own life into her fiction, but, like Klein, she is unable to name which “details” of her life Cather drew on in writing My Mortal Enemy.

As hinted (暗示) in the above statements by Klein and Zitter, much of the general uncertainty about the meaning of My Mortal Enemy can be traced to the absence of a persuasive theory as to who the real-life models for the novel’s characters were and what Cather’s relationship to them was. Cather herself wrote in a 1940 letter that, in James Woodress’s paraphrase, “she had known Myra’s real-life model very well, and the portrait drawn in the story was much as she remembered her”; Cather also added that the woman had died fifteen years before My Mortal Enemy was published, and that many relatives of this model later wrote to her to say that they recognized the “real” Myra from her description in the novel. Given such hints and Cather’s liking for drawing on her experiences in Nebraska for characters, settings, and plots, it is quite understandable that scholars have thus looked to Red Cloud and Lincoln for possible sources of the people and events depicted in My Mortal Enemy.

In light of the evidence presented in this article, though, I believe that Cather intended her comments about the model for Myra Henshawe to serve as red herrings (轉(zhuǎn)移注意力的言語) that would protect her relationship with the couple who were the prototypes (原型) for the Henshawes, both of whom were still alive in 1925. Mark Madigan has recently confirmed how Cather in 1905 had to hold off publishing “The Profile (傳略)” because of fears that the main character might recognize herself and commit suicide, and twenty years later Cather would have been well aware of how her description of the Henshawes might have affected both the real-life wife (who died in 1929) and husband (who died in 1949) if they had recognized themselves. It is my argument that the Henshawes were modeled after people Cather knew not in Nebraska but rather in New York: S. S. and Hattie McClure. Myra’s uncle, John Driscoll, was modeled after Hattie’s father, Professor Albert Hurd.

Possibly most important, identifying the Henshawes as the McClures allows us to more conclusively identify Cather herself with Nellie Birdseye. Nellie and Cather, both Midwestern onlookers and recorders, experienced four distinct stages in their relationships with the Henshawes and the McClures (especially with S. S.) My Mortal Enemy, I believe, was an extended attempt by Cather to deal with certain aspects of her own past and to move on in a world stripped of romantic illusion.

【小題１】The underlined word “enigma” in Paragraph 1 means “________”.

A. adaptationB. abstractC. best-sellerD. mystery

【小題２】Cather didn’t have My Mortal Enemy published immediately ________.

A. so as not to annoy the relatives of the prototype for Myra

B. for fear that the prototype for Myra should be badly hurt

C. because she meant to polish it by adding some new material

D. because she was forbidden to do so by the real-life couple

【小題３】We can infer from the passage that ________.

A. Myra Henshawe is particularly true to her prototype

B. Cather had a good relationship with the real-life model

C. the writer considers My Mortal Enemy as a great work

D. scholars will put an end to their argument about the novel

【小題４】In the passage, the writer ________.

A. restored the truth behind Myra

B. presented his own hypothesis

C. made a revision to Zitter’s idea

D. renewed part of Klein’s fiction

【小題５】The proper title for the passage is ______.

A. uncovering Cather’s personal secret

B. unlocking the scholars’ imagination

C. unfolding the plot of My Mortal Enemy

D. unmasking Cather’s “mortal enemy”

Answer 1