Summary
The narrator recounts how he received a letter one morning, in pale ink on blue-lined notepaper, all the way from Nebraska. The letter was worn and rubbed. It was from the narrator's Uncle Howard, telling him that his wife had received a small legacy from a recently deceased bachelor relative and she was coming to Boston to settle the estate. He asked the narrator to meet her at the station and to take care of her during her stay. The letter indicated that she was to arrive the very next day. Aunt Georgiana's name in the letter brought up a rush of memories for the narrator. He remembered what it was like to be a shy young boy, hands red with chilblains and made raw from corn husking, living with his aunt in Nebraska.
The next morning, the narrator met his aunt at the station. She was one of the last passengers to disembark and her clothes were black with soot and her bonnet made gray by dust. He could hardly recognize her. When they arrived at his boarding house, his landlady, Mrs. Springer, put her straight to bed. The narrator imagined that Mrs. Springer must have been shocked by Aunt Georgiana's pathetic appearance, and he was, too. His aunt had been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory in the 1860's. One summer, at a family home in the Green Mountains in Vermont, she and a younger village boy named Howard Carpenter fell in love. The narrator describes Carpenter as idle, and since he had no money, the couple eloped to Red Willow County, Nebraska, where he could afford a homestead and where they would be far away from the criticisms of her family and friends.
In Nebraska, they measured eighty acres of prairie in their wagon and built a dugout for shelter. They had lived there now for thirty years, possessions at the mercy of bands of Indians, and the narrator's aunt had not left the area in that whole time. As a result, the narrator's aunt's black dress was coarse, her skin turned yellow from wind and sun, she wore false teeth, and she suffered from a disorder born of isolation in which her eyebrows and mouth twitched constantly.
During the narrator's three years working for his uncle in Nebraska, the narrator developed great affection for his Aunt Georgiana. She would help him with his Latin lessons after a long day of work, lend him Shakespeare and mythology to read, and taught him scales and exercises on her parlor organ. During that time, she did not talk to him about music or about her suffering; she was comfortable with her sense of martyrdom. Addressing the narrator as Clark, she would simply wish that he would never have to lose something like music that is so dear to him as it was to her.
Clark had planned to take Aunt Georgiana to a Boston Symphony Orchestra matinée of a Wagner program. She was so tired and distracted when she arrived, however, that he doubted she would enjoy the concert. She was preoccupied with concerns back on the prairie: forgetting to leave instructions about how to feed a weakling calf, for example, and about a freshly opened tin of mackerel that needed to be eaten before it spoiled. Clark asked her if she had ever heard any of the Wagner operas, and she responded that she had not. He was convinced it was a mistake to bring her to the concert, but as they walked into the symphony hall, she seemed a bit more alive. Clark then became nervous that she might feel embarrassed or out of place, but he had misjudged her. She sat looking stoically around her, aloof and separate from the rest of the audience. All around Clark and Aunt Georgiana were women in beautiful dresses of many colors and fabrics.
As the musicians took their places, Clark watched Aunt Georgiana stir with anticipation. He imagined how much of a contrast it must be to her from the Nebraska prairie, remembering how it felt to him when he returned to Boston and what an impression the image of the symphony made. The first piece was the Tannhäuser overture. Aunt Georgiana clutched Clark's sleeve as it started and he pictured the Nebraska farm house in his mind, imagining again the contrast. As the piece ended, Clark wondered what of his aunt's musical education remained, and what she took from the music. He kept observing her through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, The Flying Dutchman pieces, and the "Prize Song." She sat immobile other than twisting her knotted fingers in her lap. During intermission, Clark questioned his aunt and found out that she was familiar with the music. She once knew a German farm boy who worked on her farm, who sang the "Prize Song" well. He left the farm after getting drunk and breaking his collarbone on a steer. Aunt Georgiana asked Clark if he had been hearing this music ever since she left, a question he took as a reproach.
The second half of the program was four numbers from the Ring, and two by Siegfried. Aunt Georgiana wept quietly throughout its entirety. As they listened, Clark wondered again what the music meant to her. As the concert ended, and all around them, the audience chatted and got out of their seats, Aunt Georgiana remained firmly planted. She burst into tears and said to Clark, "I don't want to go!" Clark thought that he understood, imagining the desolate Nebraska plains that awaited her.
Analysis
Cather's oeuvre is known for bringing to life the Nebraskan prairie; yet her admiration for this landscape is less than evident in "A Wagner Matinée." Clark, the narrator of the story, has fond memories of his childhood years on Red Cloud, but he describes their effect on Aunt Georgina harshly. Nebraska's "pitiless wind," he notes, has yellowed and hardened her skin. The "alkaline water" that her family draws from the buffalo lagoons has transformed her "cuticle[s] into a sort of flexible leather." Worse is the effect of the prairie's "isolation and monotony" on her spirit: it has resulted in a nervous disorder and, Clark incorrectly assumes, an inability to enjoy the music she once loved. When the story was published, editor of the Nebraska State Journal Will Owen Jones wrote a damning critique in his journal, accusing Cather of taking "pleasure in using the forbidding material furnished by the struggles of the pioneers" and making Nebraska look bad. Indeed, in some ways it is hard to read this story as anything but damning of life outside East Coast centers of culture.
Yet in "A Wagner Matinée," the narrator is not a third-party outsider, but Clark himself. Thus these passages do not reflect Aunt Georgiana's experience on the homestead; they only depict what Clark thinks about her experience, and are influenced by his own subjectivity and memories. For example, when the music begins, he remembers the "inconceivable silence of the plains" from his own experience. Images from his past of the "naked house... the black pond where I had learned to swim...an overwhelming sense of the waste and wear." Instead of recognizing these memories as his own, Clark simply ascribes his own reactions to his aunt.
As another example, when the musicians take their place on the concert hall stage, he arrogantly states, "I could feel how all those details sank into her soul." Did he ask her what she was feeling? No, he simply recalled the "impression" that the impressive scene in all its detail had on him, when he "came fresh from ploughing forever and forever" as if on a Nebraskan "treadmill."
Further, although the text states that he observes her closely, Clark forms judgments of his aunt's feelings with very little evidence. For example, when they enter the concert hall, he notes that Aunt Georgiana regards the audience of beautifully dressed women "stonily." From this small observation, he concludes that she regards them as pretty but unaffecting, irrelevant to her as if they were "daubs of tube-paint on a palette." He makes what is essentially a leap of imagination, and is comforted by it, no longer worried that his aunt may feel embarrassed amid high society. Thus the emotional content of the story entirely depends on Clark's analysis of Aunt Georgina's feelings.
What might Cather be trying to communicate with this mixture of perspectives? One possibility is a critique of the gendered divide between Clark and Aunt Georgiana. He arrogantly assumes that he understands her experience, but Aunt Georgiana has been subject to an entirely different set of social pressures over the course of her life than Clark has. Clark has the luxury to live alone in Boston, studying, his whole life as he wishes. However, Aunt Georgiana faced the pressure to marry that cut off her career as a music teacher. It is possible that Clark understands very little of the responsibilities she now holds as a wife and mother on the Nebraskan prairie.
Further, "A Wagner Matinée" has been thought to illustrate the cultural and aesthetic divide of Cather's time between Boston's cultured urbanism and Wagner's music on one hand, and the desolate, isolated plains of Nebraska on the other. But perhaps Cather was truly critiquing the perspective of young Bostonians like Clark, who thought they understood all there was to know about life in Nebraska, and directed their full pity towards all those who lived far away from Boston without inquiring as to the nuances of their experience.
