The Significance of Mother Eve in The Professor’s House

Book Two of The Professor’s House marks a significant departure from the beginning of the novel.  Not only do we have a new narrator and a new protagonist, but we have moved in time and space.  Tom Outland’s past takes us to the West and there we experience his adventures in Cliff City.  Cather included this departure for a reason.  She wanted the reader to get to know St. Peter and the future before Outland.  One of the images in Book Two that resonates with the rest of the novel is Mother Eve.  On page 191, Tom and Roddy “came upon one of the original inhabitants – not a skeleton, but a dried human body, a woman” (Cather 191).  Interestingly, she is referred to as an ‘original inhabitant’ which simultaneously gives the impression that she still has ownership over the mesa, and that she is somehow previous, and not currently in charge.  Tom also specifies that she had dried up because of the air, as if the mesa itself preserved her.  In this way she is still present, and not dead or gone the way that a skeleton would be.  She is not a shadow of a human, but a real human.  They name her Mother Eve, which matches the way that her existence is connected to nature and the mesa.  She is also found high above the rest of the mesa, as if she is watching over it.  I get the impression that Mother Eve is meant to be a guardian of Cliff City. However, Mother Eve had not just died, she was murdered.  Tom and Roddy see that she had been stabbed, and that her mouth was frozen in a perpetual scream.  Just as man had destroyed Mother Eve, Roddy destroys the mesa by selling it.  In the process Mother Eve falls off of a cliff.  Because she symbolizes the mesa, the loss of Mother Eve represents the way that the artifacts become lost once they are purchased.  They no longer hold the value that they once did.  Mother Eve becomes a significant image in the rest of the novel because she represents the way that human interaction with nature somehow causes a change in that nature.  St. Peter felt that autumn improved when a human intervenes and sculpts it.  However Mother Eve would argue that the intervention of humans ultimately destroys that which makes nature valuable in the first place.