The Professor's House

The opening chapters of The Professor’s House depict the protagonist, Godfrey St. Peter, as someone who must newly embark upon The Search for Meaning in a Changing World. St. Peter is an accomplished historian whose work, if not widely read, has nonetheless gained him a measure of professional and financial stability—allowing him and his wife to move to a newly constructed house. However, having published his eight-volume history on the Spanish in North America, St. Peter finds himself unsure of what to do next. His two daughters are married and have their own lives, and his wife’s interests are increasingly divergent from his own. Even the university can no longer be entirely trusted as a site of stability. St. Peter’s brief encounter with his rival in the history department, Horace Langtry, reminds him of the underlying precarity of his situation and the materialistic values of many of his colleagues.

Despite having no clear direction for his future scholarship, St. Peter gestures toward the theme of The Allure of the Unknown and the Thrill of Discovery in the way he talks about his scholarly work and in his approaches to teaching:

[He] had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very intense. He would willingly have cut down on his university work, would willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust—many instructors had nothing else to give them and got on very well—but his misfortune was that he loved youth—he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant (11).

Each semester brings the possibility of having one or two students who demonstrate a true passion for knowledge, and this has been enough to keep St. Peter involved in university life, despite the fact that most of his students are “fat-faced boys” who have no idea what he’s talking about.

The detached nature of St. Peter’s emotional and intellectual life is mirrored by the description of St. Peter as being “alone in the dismantled house where he had lived ever since his marriage, where he had worked out his career and brought up his two daughters” (1). Everyone else in his family has, quite literally, moved on, while he remains attached to his study in the attic. No matter where else he travels, St. Peter reflects that “the notes and the records and the ideas always came back to this room. It was here they were digested and sorted, and woven into their proper place in his history” (9). While his family inhabited the rest of the house, the study also represented a compromise between his work and family life, ensuring that he could remain in proximity to his wife and daughters while also maintaining his privacy and intellectual detachment. St. Peter’s reflections on the time spent in this house initiate the theme of The Comforts and Constraints of Domesticity. Now that his family has abandoned the rest of the house, St. Peter continues to visit his study, though now it is in the process of becoming a site of greater isolation—and a place where St. Peter can deliberately distance himself from the domestic world represented by his wife and daughters.

In this context, at once both fluctuating and stagnant, St. Peter feels the absence of his friend and student, Tom Outland, more keenly than ever. St. Peter believes in the power of individual will to accomplish something and that “[d]esire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. He had been able to measure it, roughly, just once, in his student Tom Outland” (11-12). Tom had been a once-in-a-lifetime kind of student, an individual whose will, intelligence, and hard work proved St. Peter’s belief in the power of the human mind. Yet, he had also been a close friend—close enough, in fact, that Tom’s presence was a disruptive force in St. Peter’s marriage. Even now, Lillian accuses her husband of being unfair to his living sons-in-law by comparing them unfairly to the almost-mythical Tom. That Tom died in World War I, before he could truly engage with the broader world, only adds to the mythology: Tom, in his absence, stands for everything that St. Peter’s life could have been.

Paradoxically, however, Tom is everywhere in St. Peter’s life. St. Peter’s older daughter, Rosamond, and her husband are full of plans to build a country house named for Tom that will preserve his archives and honor his achievements in physics and engineering. Rosamond’s husband, Louie, talks incessantly about Tom, whom he had never met. The profits from Tom’s patent on an engine crucial to aviation fund Rosamond and Louie’s lifestyle: Rosamond had been engaged to Tom when he went to war and inherited his patent. While Kathleen and her husband resent the Marcelluses’ role in shaping Tom’s public legacy, St. Peter takes a more circumspect approach, avowing that “my friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue” (34). As someone who understands the importance of language, St. Peter’s refusal to talk about his friendship underlies a deep intimacy that transcends the domestic and social interactions that characterize the rest of St. Peter’s life. However, because the profits from Tom’s patent remain a source of contention between the St. Peter sisters and others, St. Peter cannot fully avoid having conversations about “vulgar” matters.

The first and third books of the novel are narrated in the third person. The narrator’s perspective hews closely to St. Peter’s stream of consciousness, which moves between past and present while leaving many details and feelings unarticulated. At the same time, it also imposes a certain distance between the narrative and its protagonist, examining him as if he were himself an artifact. Cather’s modernist technique demonstrates both the breadth and the limits of St. Peter’s perspective, reinforcing his sense that he does not always understand what is happening around him—to say nothing of what other people are thinking.