A Wagner Matinee

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1904

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Literary Devices

Allusion

An allusion is a reference to another work of literature or art. Allusions are typically passing comments rather than detailed explorations, but they can nevertheless convey important information about a writer's intentions for his or her own work.

As a story in large part about music, "A Wagner Matinée" contains multiple allusions to various compositions, ranging from piano solos to full-length operas. The reference to Schumann's "Joyous Farmer," for instance, serves as ironic commentary: Clark mentions practicing it as a boy working on his uncle's land, where the physical laborinvolved in farming made it anything but happy.Perhaps the most significant allusion in Cather's story, however, is to a work of literature: John Keats's sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." This poem, which dates from the Romantic Era, celebrates the power of art to transport its audience to new worlds; the speaker compares the experience of reading Chapman's translation of Homer to the feelings Cortez must have had on first seeing the Pacific, when "all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—/ Silent, upon a peak in Darien." When Clark describes Georgiana as "[sitting] silent upon her peak in Darien," he is therefore alluding to the rapturous feelings the concert has woken in her, though in Georgiana's case, the (re)discovery of this transported state is bittersweet.

Analepsis (Flashback)

Analepsis is the formal term for a flashback: a moment where the narrative backtracks to describe an earlier event. Analepsis serves many different functions in literature. Although it can simply be a way of providing necessary background information, writers can also use it to do things like create a sense of anticipation: a flashback that shows the story's characters in very different circumstances will naturally spark curiosity about how and why those circumstances have changed. A narrative that deals heavily with the past or memory may also use analepsis as a way of structurally underscoring these themes.

Cather's use of flashbacks in "A Wagner Matinée" is similar to this last example. Although the narrator himself is a young man, his thoughts about his aunt consistently circle back to all that she has sacrificed or lost over the years—not just the music she loves, but also her physical health and her youth. Clark's frequent memories of life in Red Willow County are thus both a way of fleshing out the reader's understanding of Georgiana's past and a structural parallel to themes of loss and regret: the constant but elusive presence of the past creates a sense of longing for what is gone.

Simile

Similes are a form of figurative language thatcompare superficially dissimilar things by using "like" or "as." Although similes are a fairly common rhetorical device, Cather's use of them in "A Wagner Matinée" stands out for special mention. In this story, similes not only add interest and texture to the language, but also tend to introduce and develop motifs. For instance, Cather uses at least three different similes involving water imagery over the course of the concert: the first compares "violin bows" to "pelting streaks of rain," the second compares "the soul" to "that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again," and the third compares Georgiana's silent tears to "a shallow vessel overflow[ng] in a rain-storm." The repetition of similar comparisons is not only a hint that water holds symbolic significance in the story, but also a hint as to what that significance is; because images of water run through Cather's descriptions of the music itself, the music's effects on Georgiana, and the nature of the human soul, we sense that all these things must be interrelated (as they are, through Cather's exploration of what gives art its power and why that power is bittersweet).