The Specter of Tom Outland- The Good, The Bad and The Evil

In The Professor’s House, Cather weaves a web of interlocking relationships that dominates the novel, emanating from a single character who so significantly affects all the lives he touches. In his central role, Tom Outland seems to be a specter, arriving out of thin air from another land, bearing gifts and tales and developing scintillating and fulfilling relationships within the St. Peter family, only to be the cause of the erosion of the entire family with his just as sudden disappearance out of their lives to another land from which he never returns.

Tom’s relationship starts with Professor St. Peter who speaks of two romances he has had in his life. The first was of the heart with his wife Lillian whose interest in art and life as well as her charm and intellect enthralled him. They rushed to marry and built a fulfilling life for their family in Hamilton. Tom’s arrival marks his second romance, and this latter one completely eclipses his marriage. Initially Tom is a welcome protégé of the St. Peter family. Lillian never finds fault with him and takes care of his boarding and clothing needs, and Rosamond and Kathleen play with him and live out his adventures. Later Rosamond and Tom become romantically involved and engaged. All is good, and Godfrey gets much pleasure from seeing Tom as part of his family.

The situation turns bad two years later when Lillian’s jealousy of the special connection between her husband and Tom starts to grow. When Godfrey makes Tom his private companion, secluding them in his study, Lillian withdraws her favor, and Tom eventually stops coming to the house. During the summer after Tom’s graduation, he and the professor are sole and constant companions, bonding in their stories and daily activities. Tom’s tale of his early life and adventures on the mesa provides the richness and authenticity for Godfrey’s volumes. In this romance of the mind, the professor’s vicarious experiences and pleasure in Tom’s story gives him a renewal of youth and infatuation with his student. Two years later they spend the summer together, solidifying their relationship through their exploration of the Southwest, followed by a third summer in Old Mexico. Plans for the summer of 1914 are delayed, the war comes, and Tom is gone, forever, leaving an aching hole in the Professor’s heart and unrealized dreams in his mind. After two good relationships in his life, St. Peter loses one and has permanently spoiled the other.

Tom’s negative effect on the St. Peter family is felt even from his grave. Before he left for the war Tom willed all his rights from his patent to Rosamond. The new wealth that its profits bring to the Marselluses wreaks havoc on the St. Peter family. As children, Kathleen always adored her older sister, and this feeling remained until Louie became engaged to Rosamond, who, in Kathleen’s opinion, forgot their Tom too quickly. Rosamond also becomes estranged from her sister who still preserves Tom’s memory, as does her father, from the innocent and fantastic time in their lives. Kitty accuses her sister of viewing Tom as chemicals and dollars and cents, and their ever widening social and economic situations create great tension on both sides. Rosamond angrily refuses to give any of her unwanted furnishings to her sister, and Scott blackballs Louie for the Arts and Letters club. Godfrey is pained and disillusioned by Rosamond’s extravagances in Chicago and her failing to offer to pay his way on the trip she insisted he accompany her on. Her lack of fairness and empathy in refusing to share any of her profits with the needy and ill Professor Crane pains him greatly. He despairs that Tom’s fortune has become an evil that has corrupted his family. After a solitary summer daydreaming about his past, the professor is rudely reawakened to the return of his family. In his pain he feels that he has fallen out of his place within his family and must get away from everything he had once cared for so intensely. When his half-hearted attempt to commit suicide is foiled, he resolves to live his life without the joy he knew long ago.

In structuring the book, it is symbolic that Cather placed the three parts of the story as she did. In Book One, “The Family”, we are told the moving was over and done. It soon becomes apparent that more than moving to a new home has occurred, that there was a major change in their once happy lives that has caused them to move on from what they once had. While introduced within this first book, it is not until Book Two, “Tom Outland’s Story”, that we learn the full tale of his past. Through their relationships with Tom, so much pleasure and profit were brought to some, yet pain and emptiness to others, all at different times in their mutual lives. Tom’s Book Two breaks the chronology of the story from Book One to Book Three, just as his part in their lives breaks the St. Peter family apart. In the final book, “The Professor”, Godfrey is all alone, broken off from his family of the first part by Tom who appears in the middle. He is at the edge of suicidal despair, the result of the loss of the good relationships he once had in his life and their replacement by the bad feelings of apathy he now has for his family and the evil influences of materialism in their lives.