“The Bohemian Girl” is this month’s story for the Willa Cather Short Story Project. Have you read it? Read it over on the Willa Cather Archive: https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss004.
A son returns
“The Bohemian Girl” is about Nils Erickson returning home to farm country for the first time since he left twelve years ago. His parents were Norwegian immigrant farmers in Nebraska. The father was successful and gave six of his eight sons their own farms. (The wife/mother is not part of that equation.) Nils left the farm and America and returned to the Old World to make his mark, leaving the girl he loved, Clara Vavrika, who married one of his older brothers.
The Erickson’s are a hard-headed and stubborn family. Except for the youngest son, Eric, who, to his mother’s chagrin, is “handy about the house.”
He’s kind of a jerk
Nils lurks a lot as he watches Clara, his mother, and others. He is a jerkier version of a character type Cather creates in other stories: men who leave and then return to their hometown to obsess over a girl/woman they loved. Jim Burden in My Antonia and Niel Herbert in A Lost Lady come to mind.
Nils may still play the flute, but he lacks charm. When talking about a community member who had killed himself after all of his hogs died of cholera, Nils calls the man a “chump.” He would also ‘take a strap’ to his wife and refuse to tell Clara, or any woman, what she wants him to say.
He has the cold edge of a stereotypical American businessman of the period rather than an immigrant boy who returns to the Old World. This is confusing because, in Cather’s fiction, the Old World usually symbolizes a softer, artistic, and more feeling way of living (as represented by Clara’s father). I suppose Nils is a mash-up of the old and new: he feels, but instead of being communicative, he simply takes what he wants.
The path – and woman – taken
Clara is not an actor in her own life. She symbolizes what others want — their lost childhoods, the Bohemian vote, or a woman to compare oneself against. Her Aunt Johanna Vavrika “adored her niece because of her talent, because of her good looks and masterful ways, but most of all because of her selfishness.” This selfishness includes sleeping late in a family that rises with the sun and doing hardly any housework, both of which her aunt enables. Aunt Johanna has spoiled Clara her entire life, helping give her the life she never had.
Ultimately, the story is less about Clara, the titular Bohemian Girl, and more about the difference between Nils and Eric. Nils creates his own path, whereas even when the red carpet is rolled out for Eric, he can’t walk it.
I’ve been pondering the ending and wondering about Eric and what Cather was trying to say. Is it just that some men can seize what they want, and other men (the kind who help with the dishes of their own free will) simply cannot? It seems more an issue of temperament than character. Is Eric struggling with leaving because he genuinely doesn’t want to but feels he must out of hero worship of his old brother? Or does he have Stockholm syndrome? Eric returns home to a family that has bullied and abused him his entire life and even accuses him of being in on Clara’s running off with Nils.
The cherry trees in this story increased my pulse (if you’ve read O Pioneers! you know).
New to this blog? Learn more about the Willa Cather Short Story Project here. In a nutshell, we read one Cather short story a month. I remind everyone of what story we’re reading on the second Wednesday of the month and then share a response on the fourth Wednesday of the month. Jump in anytime!