SOURCE: “Willa Cather and the Literature of Christian Mystery,” in Religion & Literature, Vol. 24, No. 3, Autumn, 1992, pp. 39-56.

In the following excerpt, Murphy discusses Willa Cather and her belief in literature filled with mystery, free of “literalness.”

Contemporary literary climates seem alien to what I have to say about the writings of Willa Cather. There is a presumption of universal disbelief. The author of a recent book I was asked to review on rhetorical strategies of reticence in selected women novelists begins with the premise that the notion of silence as “a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours … has about it a ring of pious mustiness, the ring of a voice out of the past. And the reason for this is not trivial,” this “rhetorician” assures us. “It has to do, in part, with the shift from belief to disbelief that there is anywhere there beyond the point of...