29 pages • 58 minutes read
Willa CatherThe Sculptor's Funeral
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1905A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Setting
The setting is the place and time in which the story takes place. “The Sculptor’s Funeral” is set in Sand City, a fictional frontier town in Kansas, in the late 19th century. The action takes place within the parlor of Merrick’s childhood home. Willa Cather’s works typically have frontier and domestic settings. In this story, she contrasts the family’s musty parlor with the surrounding environment of the Great Plains, which is threatening in scope and size. The vastness and unpredictability of the frontier discourages individualism and encourages its people to seek the protection and security of a group. This creates a collective identity and expectations of conformity that were impossible for Merrick to meet. The tension between his artistic sensibilities and the town’s pragmatic, normative social structure shapes the conflict of the story. The resentment and the hostility that this conflict creates in the townspeople become apparent in the setting of the Merrick household. The frontier setting shapes the situation, while the domestic setting illustrates the conflict and themes within a more confined and intimate context.
Metaphor
Metaphor is a literary device that allows one thing to represent another to create meaningful comparisons in a work of literature. While watching Laird look at Merrick’s body, Steavens compares the body to a “porcelain vessel,” calling attention to Merrick’s refinement and exalting him as a work of art. At the same time, Steavens compares Laird to a “lump of potter’s clay” to suggest his coarseness and lack of polish (322), as well as his potential to be sculpted into something more refined and beautiful. These metaphors work alongside one another to encourage readers to make connections between Merrick and Laird. A similar metaphor compares the mind of Merrick to an art “gallery of beautiful impressions” (333). Recurring patterns rooted in these metaphors support the theme of The Artist Against Society.
Allusion
Literary allusions are indirect references in a work of literature that call something to mind without direct identifying it to draw attention to certain motifs and themes. The palm leaf on Merrick’s casket is a biblical allusion to both Christ’s triumphant return to Jerusalem just before his crucifixion and to his resurrection. The palm leaf also alludes to resurrection and victory, tying it to the sculptor’s work titled Victory, in addition to evoking a spiritual context. Similar to metaphors, allusions may build from one to another to create motifs. When Steavens describes the face of Merrick, noting that it holds lines of tension even in death “as though he were still guarding something precious and holy” (331), he alludes to the sculptor’s soul. This supports the text’s description of his soul as uniquely “holy.”
Dialect
Authors employ dialect to associate characters with identifiers such as a specific geographic location or setting, social class, education level, or era based on the way a character’s speech is represented on the page. Dialect is indicated through misspellings and other printed techniques. This is a common technique within the social realism for which Cather is well known. In “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” the townspeople are the only characters who speak in dialect; this is another method for grouping the townspeople in a way that excludes outsiders. For example, the Grand Army man notes, “Harve, he was watchin’ the sun set acrost the marshes when the anamile got away; he argued that sunset was oncommon fine” (334). The apostrophe in watchin’ apocopates the word to reflect local speech, as do the misspellings of animal and uncommon. In this instance, the dialect is also paired with a memory that highlights Merrick’s artistic refinement, in contrast to the utilitarian perspective of the townspeople. This further develops the theme of The Artist Against Society.
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