SOURCE: Flannigan, John H. “Words and Music Made Flesh in Cather's ‘Eric Hermannson's Soul.’” Studies in Short Fiction 32, no. 2 (spring 1995): 209–16.

In the following essay, Flannigan argues that Cather's insertion of references to the opera Cavalleria Rusticana is a fundamental element to understand the title character of “Eric Hermannson's Soul.”

As the first story Willa Cather placed in a national magazine (Cosmopolitan, April 1900), “Eric Hermannson's Soul” represents an important milestone in her career. According to Cather's biographer James Woodress, it is “a very competent piece of fiction and marks a clear advance in her narrative skill” (144-45). Bruce Baker argues that the story also provides an important reminder of Cather's belief, at least early in her writing career, that Nebraska was a “cultural desert … a place indifferent if not actively hostile to man's creative spirit” (12).

The story is notable, too, for the quantity as well as the quality of...