English > The Professor’s House: Professor St. Peter and His Cave

The protagonist of the novel, The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, is Professor St. Peter, who has what at firsts seems a happy marriage to his wife of thirty years. The novel confronts the appearances of two worlds that the Professor lives in, one that is devoted to his family and daughters, and one that exists in his solitude and is shared with his only friend, the late Tom Outland. St. Peter, indirectly though, compares himself to Euripides, but unlike the misunderstood Greek tragedian, the Professor is unable to desert the civilized world for an extended period of time. He likes to know that he has a refuge where he can hide away from the world when he needs to, but at the same time he is a creature of habits and pleasures who always goes back to his comfortable home at the end. Euripides lived and worked in a dark cave, away from civilization, much like the third-floor study in the old house where the Professor wrote his history of ”The Spanish Adventurers” in eight volumes. Both Euripides and St. Peter are underappreciated writers, but it is the Professor who, in spite of his disillusionment with the world, is incapable of leaving it all behind.

The first time we find an actual reference to Euripides is when the Professor comes home from his disappointing shopping trip in Chicago and sits smiling by the fireplace. We don’t exactly know what is in his head, and when his wife asks him, the answer is all but clear. He is smiling, maybe for the first time since the story began, and his motives are confusing to the reader. We might have a sense that St. Peter finds his life, and especially the women in it, distant from the picture of an ideal family he always nursed in his mind; they became something that he wanted to keep away, have nothing to do with, and nothing in common. The present situation is just too ironic for him. Professor St. Peter, the great historian and scholar, who grew up in what he considers the cradle of culture, France, has to now live a life that he utterly despises, yet can’t escape.

The Professor often reflects on what he considers the best years of all, when Tom had yet discovered nothing, and they all lived like a big, happy family. His daughters and wife were still innocent, not contaminated with the money that came posthumously from Tom Outland’s inventions. But now, years later, the Professor has to wonder where this happy family has gone, what has become of them: “When a man had lovely children in his house, fragrant and happy, full of pretty fancies and generous impulses, why couldn’t he keep them?” (107). He thinks that maybe all of this is his fault. The Professor understands clearly that their money hunger and jealousy is what drove his wife and daughters to this condition, and he sees no way of changing them: “Was there no way but Medea’s, he wondered?” (107). Euripides’s great drama, Medea, portrays a woman and mother, who, in order to save her children from devastation, has to kill them, and it is her deed that raises her above the others.

Medea is a murderer with a higher cause, and Euripides makes us believe that we would all do the same thing in such circumstances. The powerlessness of the Professor regarding his relationship with his family therefore seems rather pathetic. He isn’t thinking of doing anything near as drastic as Medea was, but the real tragedy is that he doesn’t consider doing anything at all. He lives a life that he can’t, but maybe doesn’t really want to escape. Euripides was the first dramatist who showed women in a non-idealized, maybe in an overly realistic way on the stage, probably as a result of his personal experiences. There seems to be a close connection between the Professor’s and Euripides’s views of women; they both see them as something of a negative force that they’re unable to live without.

St. Peter wonders what makes him go back again and again to his old house. His best excuse is the peace and quiet of the empty house, without which he’s unable to do his work. But at some point it all becomes clear to him, and he tells his wife that he was thinking “about Euripides; how when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer, at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him” (136). He adds, maybe as one of his most illuminated statements in the entire novel, “I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life” (136). The Professor receives no answer to his question, nor is Euripides mentioned anymore in the book, but the reader is left with the understanding of the sources of tension within the St. Peter family.

The parallel between the Greek dramatist, Euripides, and the main character of The Professor’s House, Godfrey St. Peter, lends itself to an easy comparison of the two men. Both were writers and misunderstood by the majority of their peers, critics and the general public. Their only escape, in lack of a happy family and loving wife, was the abandoned caves and rooms in which they hid from the world. But while Euripides was able to completely separate himself from his surroundings, St. Peter feels the need and urge to keep going home, back to his estranged wife and children.