Nancy’s Conclusions? The Myriad Complications of Historical, Subjective, and Narrative Identity in Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl – ENG 464

Willa Cather at her least Willa Cather

-For ENG 464: Willa Cather and Reading Queerly

Sapphira and the Slave Girl constantly attempts and tries to achieve a static ideal only to interrupt itself, to retract and redact, pulling its language or plot back into itself. Nancy, who may very well be The Slave Girl in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is a driver of plot, as a locus of desire, hope, and faith, and as mentioned, and stands out as a textual device of interruption. Nancy is a character who “didn’t tell falsehoods deliberately, to get something she wanted; it was always to escape from something;” Nancy’s escape through lying is interrupting less for its dishonesty and more for its desire to flee and escape from consequences—even if only for a moment (44). The inability to be honest makes the asymmetrical power dynamic of master and slave explicit—a conflict that is central to Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Nancy “caught at any pretext to keep off blame or punishment for an hour, a minute,” which interrupts a relationship predicated on the ability of Sapphira, the master, to control punishment and control the terms of the punishable for Nancy (44). Through lies, Nancy illustrates her desire to escape the power-dynamic for fleeting moments “before she had time to think or to tell herself that she would be found out” (44). Exposure is framed through the language of the inevitable within the text, something that can be deferred but that will ultimately be found out. But oddly enough, despite the language of exposure, lying, and deceit, the text makes no mention of truth or honesty, belying the text’s investment in leaving matters of truth and honesty largely unspoken for. The text seems to insinuate that the confusion bred from lies and half-truths may paint a more honest picture of the novel’s setting than attempting to relay the “truth” through the verisimilar. It hints at the inability to find truth in a system that places value in wildly disproportionate power structures where all participants lie to one another in order to maintain whatever aspects of control they are able.

The end of Book III, “Old Jezebel,” exemplifies the text’s use of lies and half-truths as an escape by fleeing, darting off as a means of gesturing towards the intersection of conflicting narratives. In chapter one of “Old Jezebel,” Sapphira reminisces that their time together, gardening “were good times” but then laments, “I’ve been house-bound for a long while now, like you” (87). Relayed through vague snapshots, and mediated exclusively by Sapphira with nodding affirmation from Jezebel, their past together truly does appear good; we are given very little information about their history but both women seem to agree that they worked together pleasantly. Simultaneously, Sapphira extends sympathy, blithely comparing their ailments, apparently unconcerned with the asymmetry of the comparison. It is clear that aspects of the sentiment are genuinely considerate of Jezebel but Sapphira’s sympathy serves a dual purpose since it forces Jezebel to accept the comparison and return the sympathy.

During Jezebel’s consideration of Sapphira’s condition, she begins to wheeze, signaling a moment of gasping interruption that is trying to burst forth, out of Jezebel’s mouth; the moment underscores that she spends her dying energy towards ensuring Sapphira’s well-being and peace-of-mind through sympathetic words. Even as Sapphira implores that Jezebel “musn’t talk” since “it “catches [her] breath” she continues, “We must take what comes to us and be resigned” reducing Jezebel’s words to a whisper and allowing herself to remain in control of the conversation (87). Jezebel’s coughing is only threatening to Sapphira in its ability to detract from her own sense of victimhood and proximity to death. Sapphira’s dropsy is crippling but she still exerts considerable control and ability through her power over others; one of her methods to maintain that power is to ensure that she is always perceived to be weak and in need of sympathy and care. None of this is to say that she isn’t weak or in need of sympathy and care; however, she certainly uses her dropsy as leverage to bolster her supremacy.

In chapter III of “Old Jezebel,” Sapphira’s perception of her own impotence explodes into a manic frenzy, illustrating how fragile her sense of power and ability appear to herself—helping to explain why she so desperately leverages, and clutches onto, what power she has. Sapphira glimpses Nancy and Henry “in deep conversation” after Jezebel’s funeral (103). She is incensed by the momentary intimacy they share with one another and the sight of it causes Sapphira to “put her handkerchief to her eyes, afraid that her face might show indignation” claiming she had never before “seen him expose himself like that” (103). Exposure returns as both an anxiety and inevitability with Nancy as its catalyst but Sapphira must maintain the appearance of composure and control—literally saving her face from exposure, lying to escape from, and mask the reality of, her embarrassment. Sapphira claims that Henry “had forgotten himself,” his forgetting to lie or veil his feelings and intimacies is an exposure of genuine emotion, not intentionally on display for others but observed nonetheless, and Sapphira considers this authenticity to be deeply embarrassing to her (103-4).

Sapphira remains committed to the stasis and equilibrium of her own, carefully constructed reality, something that this indiscretion interrupts; she is not as in control of her husband as she likes to outwardly have herself and others perceive, which leads to her sudden, frantic outburst at the end of the chapter. Sapphira obsesses over the details of Henry’s exposure, feeling “wretched and lonely and injured” relenting, “The thought of being befooled, hoodwinked in any way, was unendurable;” these sentiments quickly morph into a suspicion that every person she knows is complicit in a conspiracy against her and she frets, “unable to lie still any longer” and rises out of bed (105). Lying takes on a dual meaning within this sentence. Sapphira feels inactive, inside of her own head, fearing the exposure, the “shattered and treacherous” disclosures that gossip, hearsay, and misconceptions produce when she is not the one maintaining perception (107). She has to rise, no longer comfortable in bed; she is agitated. And she is unable to defer the lies and lying any longer; she cannot maintain her deceptions when she herself is deceived.

This energy and mania builds until she nearly faints from overstimulation, ringing the bell to usher Nancy into her room (105). Nancy is summoned to either interrupt or confirm the worries Sapphira has; Nancy enters as evidence that Sapphira’s anxiety is unfounded, that her worst suspicions remain unrealized, and that Nancy remains under her control—available for her to call upon when needed. Sapphira relies upon the perception and words of others for information but “her house [stands] safe around her,” as long as it is in her control (107). And while Nancy does not lie to escape explicitly or verbally, she allows the lies to continue by entering the room, the careful fantasies of the house remain in-tact since she stands as evidence that everything is still under control. It’s a near catastrophe, but one that can be deferred and pushed away by Nancy’s interrupting presence.

This extended conflict, from the moment of exposure to its deferred resolution underscores Nancy’s interrupting presence and illustrates how it both serves as a driving force of progress and as a suspension and cessation. She has the ability to interrupt Sapphira’s notion of control through simple, innocuous, and deeply personal gestures, signaling an intimacy, affection, and authentic emotion that is indecent between master and slave. But she has the ability to postpone and suspend any further implications by entering the room as evidence and an exposure of innocence. And yet, Nancy is described as the character who lies despite how innocent, honest, and authentically she behaves throughout the entire novel. Oddly, it appears Nancy lies because she characteristically will not lie in a system predicated upon lies; and that is precisely what an interrupting force is. In the same manner that both Sapphira and Henry “were talking about Bluebell” but were actually “thinking all the while about Nancy” the narration displaces lying onto Nancy, calling Nancy a liar when in fact the narration is thinking about everyone else in the novel and specifically, Sapphira (53). The narration and Sapphira recognize Nancy as an earnest force that indiscreetly and recklessly breaks the veneer of untruth through innocence and authenticity; she is someone who does not fully understand that she is a pawn, whose purpose is to be manipulated by Sapphira. And yet still serves Sapphira to maintain aspects of balance through her innocence and well-meaning.

Martin Colbert’s enters into the narrative as a pawn of corruption by Sapphira and Nancy’s innocence becomes fragile at the very least, broken at worst, all the while still remaining virginal. Martin’s attempts to rape Nancy are never explicitly named as such; Sapphira describes it as “going wrong” or “demeaning himself,” Henry calls it “demoralizing,” and Sampson calls it “foolin round” but the threat is clear and it’s sexual (199, 190). The threat forces Nancy to flee, no longer in the mental or figurative sense, from Sapphira’s house. Henry feels that “something disturbing had come between” him and Nancy once he is alerted to Martin’s advances by Sampson (192). He no longer views her as “an influence,” instead seeing her as “a person”; if she can be perceived to be sexual and desirable then her presence as a force of interruption is made explicit and exposed to Henry, who now feels repulsed by her (192-3).

Nancy interrupts Henry’s self-control as much as she does Sapphira’s; Sapphira’s self-control manifests in her ability to control Henry and others and Henry’s self-control manifests in his ability to regulate himself. Even as Martin’s rape attempts play directly into Sapphira’s machinations, Henry now feels manipulated by his own desire and susceptible to Nancy. And since Henry cannot force Martin to leave, he passively helps Nancy escape—unwilling to embarrass Sapphira through his actions—he enables Rachel to steal the money she needs to get Nancy to Montreal (226-9).

Nancy’s shattered innocence within the text is made clear when the text re-acknowledges that she “had come into the world by accident,” acknowledging her very existence as something that is outside of the Sapphira’s plans (219). Nancy, simply by being a product of slave rape, is ultimately a symbol for the mixture of black and white, a never-ending interruption to “the order of the household” (219).

Nancy’s absence provides a narrative gap of almost twenty five years, offering details that inform how little has changed without her there; however, the narration surveys the lack of change in tandem with those details and aspects that have changed. Together, they illustrate a world that is very little altered while still having endured the onslaught of the Civil War and the passage of time, pointing to a portrait of the South that suggests an odd static dynamism. The civil war enters the concluding book immediately, the narration reports that it “came on so soon after Nancy ran away” which implicitly connects the two into a relation of cause-and-effect (273). Nancy’s absence, as is her presence, interrupting—while Nancy’s departure may prevent interrupting conflicts within Sapphira’s home, her escape and her very identity is still placed into relation with conflict through comparison to the Civil War. While this could otherwise be considered a simple connection bred from proximity, the text’s heavy use of insinuation and diffusion of untruth informs a more dubious reading.

The text continues on the Civil War, suggesting that despite the many deaths and loss of livestock, “Defeat was not new to [the men of Back Creek]. Almost every season brought defeat of some kind” (275-6). And so, the text portrays the Virginia backwoods folk as inoculated against change, able to return to the way it was through their perseverance. But it also acknowledges that “though the outward scene was little changed, [Nancy] came back to a different world” (277). The narration cannot quite decide what has changed and what hasn’t—at once, very little and very much. It makes note that appearances haven’t changed but that something akin to the atmosphere has changed, noting that the new generation is “gayer and more carefree,” taken to “picnics and camp-meetings…and dancing parties” (277).

The first-person narrator that interjects into the final book is the offspring of this generation, and seems to relate to the new energy dynamism, while still showing investment in the more static, inherited histories of the older generations. Within the first paragraph of the new narrative voice, the “I,” comments upon “the limp cordage of the great willow trees in the yard” getting “whipped and tossed furiously by the wind” but concludes, “It was the last day I would have chosen to stay indoors” (279). Quickly, it is worth noting that this storm ushers Nancy’s entrance, another implicitly insinuated connection between Nancy and conflict. The narrative voices desires to be out in the storm, they are drawn to the squall and feel shut in against their will.

At the same time, the narrative “I” believes, “The actual scene of the meeting had been arranged for [their] benefit” suggesting that there is a layer of mediation from the adults, and an attempt to make an auspicious setting for the reunion—all the while the narrator would rather be playing in the storm. This mediation is odd, since we are given few hints about who this narrator is: they’re a five year-old child, their parents are friends with the cast of characters that the narrative has followed. But we don’t know the purpose of the stage set before the narrator, why it is so meticulously controlled? We know it is informing the narrator and therefore, the reader and we know, following the logic of the text, that the adults are a product of a generation that desires to promote artifice and untruth; to lie to escape and defer until later.

As Nancy returns, these familiar characters seem to want to broadcast that all is well to the narrator—and the reader, by proxy—and insist that Nancy can return and reconcile with the novel and the setting. And for a while, the idyllic mediation, the stagecraft, the artifice holds up as they reminisce of the time passed; the narrator is “allowed to sit with [the adults] and sew the patchwork” (287). But Nancy’s power of interruption creeps into the narrative shortly after, our narrative “I” reflects “I soon learned that it was best never to interrupt with questions—it seemed to break the spell. Nancy wanted to know what happened…and so did I” (288). The narrator’s curiosity and Nancy’s are joined, as is their ability to question and interrupt. The narrator feels solidarity with Nancy, who has earned the ability to question through her growth and absence—the adults see her as one of them and trust her to be complicit in their act. However, Nancy disturbs the stunt “with a smile” as she asks Rachel “what had become of Martin Colbert;” this reintroduction puzzles the narrative “I” who has “never heard of him” but instills a curiosity and disallows the Martin’s violence to be erased from the narrative. The narrative “I” knew Nancy was returning but never express that they know why she left. The reintroduction of Martin into the narrative complicates the narrator’s perspective, forces questions to linger and ultimately, interrupts any neat or tidy conclusions the text may attempt to make.

And then Sapphira and the Slave Girl ends in a stupefying manner, continuing after the annotated “The End,” with a reflection upon Fredrick County surnames and finally finished with a flourish of the name “Willa Cather” (295). With the introduction of the author’s name as the end note, the reader is left to question whether they should bridge the potentially autobiographical implications of this sign-off and the introduction of the narrative “I”. The narrative complications of auto-biography verses the narrative “I” work in-tandem to complicate the already complicated majority of the novel, written from the third-person perspective. Quickly—all in the course of twenty pages these narrative moves build towards a crescendo that questions the previous narrations in hindsight.

Temporally, this conclusion compounds the layers of narrative mediation the reader must unpack in order to interpret the story as it is presented to them. The novel, seemingly about a discrete timeline in 1856, is refracted through a lens of the recent past, then twenty-five years removed, and then to Cahter’s Era, an additional sixty years later. These complications and their continuation, the transferal of narrative mediation from third person, to first person, to a signed Willa Cather provides an explicit, textual attempt to confuse the reader’s sense of narration, truth, and time as if it were throwing its hands into the readers face in a manic flurry. This mystifying, stupefying gesturing both distracts and obfuscates but ultimately seeks to inform a readerly conception of inability and failure to unify or concretize within its parameters.

Temporality and narrative voice has always already been complicated just a few pages back throughout Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Within the final book, the newly-introduced first person narrator admits that Nancy “had been gone now for twenty-five years” which confirms the subtitle of Book IX “Nancy’s Return,” “(Epilogue—Twenty-five years later)” (281, 271). The confirmation of the passage of time suggests that this first-person may in-fact be the previous third-person that has mediated the majority of the novel thus far, and establishes and complicates these now-multiple narrators as a potential, unified author/narrator. Within a few pages, the potential, comfortable unity is once again made insecure by the interjection of Willa Cather herself, which advocates that the narrator-as-author suggestion is true—and even autobiographical—while also making these conclusions problematic by investigating the troubles with hearsay and naming that Cather has encountered through recalling past memories of stories told about others.

These allusions to acquaintances of Cather’s parents, “often talked about” from afar are gossip, the names and people are both “unknown” and “a lively fascination” for Cather; a fascination bred from ambiguity, making the names “especially delightful” in how unusual and distant they sound (295). As Judith Butler points out in “Dangerous Crossings,” there’s a lot of psychic energy latent within names in Cather’s work, a “dynamic of identification” that acts as “an occasion for the retheorizing of cross-identification” and crossings that themselves seem “at work in every identificatory practice” (Butler 143). The dynamism that Butler asserts is not entirely self-evident in Sapphira’s concluding paragraphs; however, the novel’s autobiographical reflections upon a fascination with naming seems to winkingly re-separate Willa Cather from the narrative voice by creating a sense of distance through time and langauge—all the while still insisting that they are not entirely different by sheer matter of discombobulated context.

The narrator both is and isn’t author due to the complications that Cather details and Butler enriches—we’ll essentially never see the person who bore the name Willa Cather and to this day we don’t know how to spell it out (295). We don’t know how to introduce the name as a unity of an autobiographical author and narrator, which is just the way Willa Cather may have liked it and/or understood herself to be a site of such complication (but we’ll never actually know the truth in its entirety). Butler is pointing towards a suggestion that, yes, Cather sees the name as an occasion for necessary confusion and something that is always already an unstable foundation. Thus, Cather exposes the narrator’s and narration’s zig-zagging identity to variance and multitude, enriching its possibilities and muddling its certainty.

These complications underscore and illuminate how the text has always already been obfuscating its multiplicity of identities throughout its timespan and narration: in parentheticals, in asides, the by-gone histories of people, and in references to futures not yet realized with in the established time-frame, all among other pricking temporal inconsistencies. And in fact, the novel begins, “The Breakfast Table, 1856 [period],” establishing an incredibly distinct, specific—maddeningly vague—punctuated setting, both in time and place; however, despite this localization, the text continues in past-tense, “Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted….beyond that he appeared irregularly” already acknowledging that it is discussing something that has already happened and simultaneously referencing a pattern of past and future behavior (3).

All of these cursory textual details are banal to the point of being unremarkable in the introductory pages of a novel—the reader very much understands that there is a past, present, and future and that a rich novel exists in a multitude of these temporalities. However, once re-read with Sapphira’s conclusion in-mind, temporal details mark a very different narrative device within the novel, that of compartmentalization: the text suggests, from the beginning, that it should be read as a punctuated, specific snap-shot moment of place and time—“The Breakfast Table, 1856.”—without the influence of a past or future but it cannot escape the descriptive language of alternative tenses. Compellingly, the profound amount of lingering questions that the text provides—at its end and throughout—forces a methodology of interpretive hindsight, layering previous readings with compounding, frustrating, interrupting and contradicting information—all of which suggests that this novel embodies the project of history and identity as Willa Cather understands it.