One Of Ours

As a coming of age story, One of Ours details Claude’s maturation into adulthood and into manhood. Over the course of the novel, he evolves from a self-doubting, self-loathing young man who feels ill at ease within his surroundings—like he has never been “one of ours”—to a self-confident and capable soldier fighting in a struggle that’s larger than him.

Claude often grapples with male identity, male behavior, and what makes a man “manly.” As a hybrid of Cather’s cousin, Grosvenor Cather, and Cather’s own traits, Claude also uniquely combines the lived experiences of a man with the analytical perspective of a woman. Thus, Claude embodies both a man’s reflections on American masculinity and meaning-making, and a woman’s deconstruction of American masculinity from the outside in.

Throughout the novel, Claude doesn’t equate manliness with brawniness, physical strength, or other stereotypically masculine characteristics so much as bravery and willingness to do the right thing, even when it is challenging. Early on, he judges overly religious people, such as Brother Weldon, to be “unmanly” because they use faith to recuse themselves from challenging philosophical questions. Likewise, Claude evolves in his own notions of manliness as he attends the Erlich family’s European-style salons and works through his own overly narrow ideas of masculine behavior. He challenges himself to move beyond the idea that “real men” don’t express their emotions and defend their opinions.

Claude’s marriage to Enid forces him to move beyond his naive, oversimplified ideas about masculine/feminine gender roles, such as his conviction that “marriage reduce[s] all women to a common denominator; change[s] a cool, self-satisfied girl into a loving and generous one” (294). While Cather does not overtly condemn Claude’s desire for a traditional home, wife, and family as chauvinistic or sexist, she suggests that his estimation of Enid’s character—and his own—is shortsighted. Claude is so distracted by notions of what he thinks the American dream is supposed to be that he fails to recognize how poorly he and Enid match, and how poorly his dream suits their mutual interests. When their marriage goes awry and Enid resists his intimacy in favor of her true dream, moving to China, Claude decides that the manliest response is to pursue his own destiny by enlisting in the army.

Claude’s journey aboard the Anchises is its own odyssey of male becoming. By helping others and working toward a greater purpose, he heals from his failed relationship with Enid and redeems himself as a man. When the ship reaches France, the shores symbolically align with Claude’s notions of his evolved manhood:

He had always thought of his destination as a country shattered and desolated—‘bleeding France’; but he had never seen anything that looked so strong, so self-sufficient, so fixed from the first foundation, as the coast that rose before him. It was like a pillar of eternity. The ocean lay submissive at its feet, and over it was the great meekness of early morning (522).

Where Claude previously thought of himself as broken and “bleeding”—unable to find meaning in his life on Lovely Creek, unable to connect with his wife—he now feels strong and self-sufficient.

Cather also explores manly purpose, duty, meaning-making, and masculine identity with David Gerhardt. Gerhardt ironically epitomizes Claude’s definition of manhood because he sacrifices many of his “feminine” and refined traits, like his violin playing and his delicate figure, to fight on the front lines of the war. Though Gerhardt is physically weak and slight, Claude and his fellow soldiers greatly respect him. They know that Gerhardt could’ve easily pursued much lighter duties in the war but instead made the choice to engage in difficult labor and face death firsthand.

By the end of the novel, Claude is put in charge of a trench unit and feels fully self-assured he is where he belongs. Even as he dies in battle, he feels “no weakness,” feeling “only one thing; that he commanded wonderful men” (745). Thus, Claude dies while fulfilling his own evolved definition of manhood and manliness.