Abstract

How does narrative literature as a medium map the representational elusiveness of the voice? What are the typical narratives revolving around the singer? Does her performance of scores and libretti turn her into the medium of voices other than her own? Or does she transform the operatic stage into a vehicle of self-expression? My discussion of The Song of the Lark focuses on the ways in which Willa Cather’s Künstlerroman uses the voice as a trope of self-discovery. The singing of its exceptional protagonist, Thea Kronborg, appears to emanate from her unique self, her distinct ‘voice’. While the novel thus emphasises, and in fact valorises, her self-sufficiency, it can simultaneously be seen to foreground the notion that the voice always mediates between the individual and the collective. Thea Kronborg emerges not only as the textual effect of a multiplicity of ‘voices’, namely the myriad descriptions offered both by the narrator and other focalising figures. Her voice also absorbs American landscapes and dreams so as to expand into a song that has both individual and universal resonances.