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Article: "Love is home-sickness": Nostalgia and lesbian desire in Sapphira and the Slave Girl
- Article from:
- Novel
- Article date:
- January 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Novel, Inc. Winter 1996. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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The Letter "S"
The narrator of Willa Cather's last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), describes a doubled "S" of rock and road cutting through the Virginia landscape. This passage yearns for a past time and place and testifies to a resistance to change:
The winding country road which climbed from the post office to Timber Ridge was then, and for sixty years afterward, the most beautiful stretch in the northwestern turnpike.... The road followed the ravine, climbing all the way, until at the "Double S" it swung out in four great loops round hills of solid rock; rock which the destroying armament of modern road-building has not yet succeeded in blasting away. The four loops are now ...