The Professor's House

Tom is a character who exists mostly in memory, as an ephemeral idea as opposed to a real person. In death, it can be easy to idealize someone as more than human. This is what happens with St. Peter, whose connection to Tom represents everything that St. Peter believes is lacking in his own life. Without the real flesh-and-blood Tom, St. Peter projects his unhappiness onto the loss of someone so special. The reader can see how important Tom is to others in the ways that people defend his memory, such as when St. Peter declares:

Nothing hurts me so much as to have any member of my family talk as if we had done something fine for that young man, brought him out, produced him. In a lifetime of teaching, I’ve encountered just one remarkable mind; but for that, I’d consider my good years largely wasted (33).

Tom is special because of his “remarkable mind,” but he is so special that St. Peter doesn’t want to take any credit for the man Tom was. Tom therefore exists without influence; he is the one who influences others.

Tom is characterized as the ideal man, which exacerbates the posthumous image of perfection he can’t battle because he is dead. But Cather does offer a physical description:

[Tom had a] manly, mature voice—low, calm, experienced, very different from the thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus […] [and a] strong line of contrast below the young man‘s sandy hair—the very fair forehead which had been protected by his hat, and the reddish brown of his face, which had evidently been exposed to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton (65).

Tom’s physical masculinity is indicative, to St. Peter and others, of his goodness. But Tom is not only handsome and manly, he is also intelligent, creative, and forward-thinking: “The boy‘s mind had the superabundance of heat which is always present where there is rich germination. To share his thoughts was to see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light” (152). Tom’s intelligence inspires others to think differently about the world. Thus, in both his physical and mental self, Tom is an ideal. In life, this makes him easy to love. In death, this makes it easy for characters like St. Peter to hold on to the idealistic image of a perfect man and compare everyone else to him. But Tom’s special qualities are precisely what set him apart from others, drawing an impossible and unfair comparison.

In Part 2, Cather reveals Tom’s voice and internal thoughts, adding more substance to his character. In Part 2, Tom is characterized as thoughtful, considerate, caring, and inspired by life. Tom’s unearthing and preservation of an ancient and lost indigenous civilization position him as a hero. Tom is a protector of the natural world, which puts him in juxtaposition with characters like Rodney or St. Peter who are immersed in the modern world and its abusive society.

As the ideal image of the perfect man, who is handsome, intelligent, generous, courageous, and ethical, Tom is the foil to every other character in the novel. His character is the symbol of an impossible standard for human behavior.

Lillian is St. Peter’s wife, who consistently demonstrates the “worldliness” that St. Peter lacks. They had met and fallen in love as young students in Paris, but since then, their minds and their roles had developed in different, implicitly gendered, directions. More than two decades into their marriage, St. Peter now has a more complicated sense of his wife:

With her really radiant charm, she had a very interesting mind—but it was quite wrong to call it mind, the connotation was false. What she had was a richly endowed nature that responded strongly to life and art, and very vehement likes and dislikes which were often quite out of all proportion to the trivial object or person that aroused them (25).

This comment reveals as much—if not more—about St. Peter than it does about Lillian, demonstrating that he finds his own preferences and reactions to be much more appropriate. Cather neither endorses nor negates this view; rather, she uses Lillian as a point of connection with the world outside of St. Peter’s study and narrow circle of contacts. Whether St. Peter recognizes it or not, Lillian is a moderating force.

The distance between St. Peter and his wife is emblematized by their different views on the young men who have come into their lives: Tom Outland, Louie Marsellus, and Scott McGregor. While Lillian initially welcomed Tom into their home, she later regretted that decision, sensing that Tom had displaced her from certain forms of intimacy with her husband—a dynamic that St. Peter himself only dimly understands. Lillian also objected to Tom’s selective storytelling, believing that he owed the family a more full accounting of his past. By contrast, she is friendly and even flirtatious with her sons-in-law in ways that St. Peter finds, at best, perplexing. She urges him to accept Louie’s hospitality and, when St. Peter demurs, she accompanies the Marselluses to Europe without him. This last fact demonstrates that Lillian possesses more independence and strength of mind than St. Peter credits her with. The difference between the two of them is, again, one of gender. With a much more limited scope for her talents, Lillian chooses to embrace her role as a mother and wife that does not allow her to escape into a study.

Louie Marsellus, an engineer, is married to St. Peter’s elder daughter, Rosamond, who had previously been engaged to Tom Outland. Louie never knew Tom, having arrived in Hamilton after Tom was killed in combat, but he is Tom’s most vocal and enthusiastic public champion. Louie is wealthy and has become wealthier thanks to the patents that Rosamond inherited from Tom; he is known for his generosity and good taste, even though he can never entirely escape the suspicion that he is overcompensating for his outsider status. (In Chapter 7, a brief conversation between Kathleen and St. Peter suggests broader rumors that Louie is concealing Jewish heritage.) If nothing else, Louie is desperate to be liked and accepted by his wife’s father, not realizing that certain acts of generosity, such as insisting on St. Peter and Lillian staying at a fancy hotel in Chicago at his expense, are experienced by St. Peter as impositions and obligations. Indeed, St. Peter firmly rejects Louie’s offers to share some of the profits from the Outland Engine with him.

However, Louie’s ambition and generosity, even if occasionally overbearing, offer a marked contrast with his wife. During her marriage, Rosamond has become, at least in the eyes of her father and sister, too comfortable with her wealth and apt to flaunt it at inappropriate times. Much to Kathleen’s annoyance, Rosamond refuses to compensate Augusta for what was—to Augusta—a substantial loss in the stock market incurred by following Louie’s advice. St. Peter confesses that he does not understand her at all. That she had been engaged to Tom Outland implies a romantic relationship, but that—as well as whatever she and her father did or did not discuss as she transferred her affections to Louie—remains unarticulated in the text.

On the whole, Scott McGregor, the husband of Kathleen St. Peter, maintains a closer and more congenial relationship with his father-in-law. Like St. Peter, Scott was a friend of Tom Outland’s, and both he and Kathleen take a dim view of Louie’s efforts to lionize him. Where Louie and Rosamond insist on taking St. Peter for drives to the lavish country house they are building (named, of course, for Tom Outland), Scott goes swimming with him, an activity they both enjoy, and asks questions that help St. Peter clarify his own feelings. Although St. Peter privately believes that Scott is underemployed as a writer of inspirational newspaper stories and poetry, he nonetheless respects his mind.

Similarly, St. Peter remains closer to Kathleen than to Rosamond, largely because Kathleen has long been able to be vulnerable with her father. He fondly recalls a summer they spent together while Lillian and Rosamond were in Colorado, and he is sympathetic to her frustrations with her older sister’s displays of wealth. Perhaps most importantly, St. Peter and Kathleen value similar aspects of Tom’s character—they both reminisce about the man they knew in the early years before he graduated from college, and his stories are still embedded in Kathleen’s imagination.