47 pages • 1 hour read
The Professor's House
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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary
St. Peter reflects on the contingencies that have shaped his life and identity. Among all of these accidents, meeting Tom had been the most “fantastic” and unexpected, bringing what St. Peter now realizes was a “second youth.” Tom had helped St. Peter with his scholarly work on the Spanish Adventurers, lending his lived experience and insights to St. Peter’s research. They had even visited the Cliff City on the Blue Mesa together to retrieve Tom’s diary. They had planned a trip to Paris, but the war intervened. Father Duchene visited Hamilton on his way to serve in any capacity he could in Belgium. Four days later, Tom drew up his will and left with his teacher. St. Peter wonders what Tom would have been like had he not died so young, but he can’t picture Tom in the same “conventional” world as everybody else.
Part 3, Chapter 2 Summary
While his family is in France, St. Peter slowly annotates Tom’s Blue Mesa diary. He spends a lot of time admiring nature or daydreaming. In ruminating about Tom, St. Peter begins “cultivating a novel mental dissipation—and enjoying a new friendship” with “the boy the Professor had long ago left behind him in Kansas, in the Solomon Valley—the original, unmodified Godfrey St. Peter” (156). This is the side of St. Peter’s identity that disappeared when he married Lillian. St. Peter realizes that his most authentic self is the boy he used to be. Since marriage, St. Peter has changed because “there was Lillian, there must be marriage and a salary. Because there was marriage, there were children. Because there were children, and fervour in the blood and brain, books were born as well as daughters” (156). The boy version of St. Peter had only cared about the earth, about nature, and nothing about society, career, or goals. Therefore, the little boy version of St. Peter lived purely and happily. At the same time, St. Peter begins to believe that he is dying.
Part 3, Chapter 3 Summary
The doctor conducts tests on St. Peter but can’t find anything medically wrong with him. Even so, St. Peter is certain that he will die soon. Still, he goes swimming at the lake and feels satisfied that his family seems happy in France. They are already making plans for the following summer; if St. Peter is still alive, he thinks, he will go back to New Mexico.
Part 3, Chapter 4 Summary
When the fall term starts, St. Peter goes through the motions of his teaching work but is less invested than in the past. He continues to work in the old house, much to Scott’s amusement. St. Peter receives a letter from Lillian informing him that Rosamond is pregnant, so they are returning to Michigan early. St. Peter only has a few more days to himself. He realizes that he can no longer live with Lillian or in the new house. Falling out of love “for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed” (164). St. Peter feels exhausted and does not understand why he wants to flee everything he has ever loved. As a storm blows in from the lake, St. Peter lights the stove in his study and goes to sleep. When he awakes, the room is full of gas and the window has blown shut. He knows that he should get up and open the window, but wonders what would happen if he didn’t.
Part 3, Chapter 5 Summary
St. Peter wakes up at midnight to find Augusta in the study with him. She tells him he passed out from the gas fumes, and she arrived just in time to pull him out of the room. St. Peter is grateful to see Augusta and realizes she has always provided a “corrective” to the artificiality of so much of his life. As he reflects on his recent brush with death, St. Peter resolves to learn how to live without passion and delight. If nothing else, he feels himself to be on more solid ground than he has in a long time.
Part 3 Analysis
In Part 3, Cather returns the narrative focus on St. Peter, whose crisis of The Search for Meaning in a Changing World reaches a climax in his near-death experience. The section begins with St. Peter reflecting on the forces that have shaped his life—and realizing that, despite his dissatisfaction and exhaustion, he could be much worse off: “He wouldn’t choose to live his life over—he might not have such good luck again. […] Just when the morning brightness of the world was wearing off for him, along came Outland and brought him a kind of second youth” (152). Tom’s arrival had reminded St. Peter of The Allure of the Unknown and the Thrill of Discovery and had even, at least temporarily, alleviated his anxiety about The Comforts and Constraints of Domesticity by representing an alternative, masculine way of homemaking.
Alone in his old house, St. Peter once again registers the loss of Tom but also discovers a renewed connection to himself as a child:
Life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him (156).
St. Peter begins to find in himself—and in nature—the things that he had thought were gifts from Tom. Yet, the distance between the “Kansas boy” and St. Peter is profound: They are not really—or not simply—two versions of the same person.
Through most of the chapters in this concluding section, St. Peter is convinced that he is near death—a circumstance that is not corroborated by his physician. His exhaustion, the narrative implies, is mental—the result of his continuing struggle to ground himself in a fluctuating world. At first, his attic room in the old house appears to provide a refuge from uncertainty, as it has throughout so much of his life. But St. Peter’s refuge nearly becomes his grave. Through a combination of accident and inaction, he nearly perishes from carbon monoxide poisoning from the stove, whose dangerousness has been emphasized throughout earlier sections of the novel. Domesticity as such turns out not to be the thing that is “suffocating” St. Peter; his own isolation and search for “delight” is also implicated in his suffering. In coming to terms with the idea that his life was at its purest form in his childhood, St. Peter confronts the reality of his adulthood and incoming elderly years. This realization helps push St. Peter out of his depression and toward a resigned understanding that his life is not over, but it is different now that he is an older man. By the end of the novel, St. Peter has released himself from his existential crisis and revives his appreciation for his life and family, even if this means he leaves passion behind.
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By Willa Cather
