SOURCE: Zitter, Emmy Stark. “The Unfinished Picture: Willa Cather's ‘The Marriage of Phaedra.’” Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 2 (spring 1993): 153–60.

In the following essay, Zitter perceives the main female character of “The Marriage of Phaedra” as a precursor to Cather's later women protagonists.

“The Marriage of Phaedra,” an early story published in Willa Cather's first collection, The Troll Garden, has never excited much critical or popular interest. Critics have condemned it as derivative, and readers have been put off by its stilted dialogue and unusually lifeless characters. Nevertheless, the story in some ways fights strongly against patriarchal ideas that underlie the rest of the stories of The Troll Garden, even as the painting that is at its heart suggests a new and revolutionary way of looking at men and women, at artists and non-artists alike. When she wrote the work, young Willa Cather was still very much under the...