The Song of the Lark

In The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather draws a connection between Sacrifice and Ambition. She infuses this connection throughout Thea’s character development. Sacrifice and ambition are necessary for Thea to become the artist she is meant to be.

Thea’s ambition to become an artist is evident even when she is a child in the rural Colorado town of Moonstone, where most girls dream of becoming mothers, wives, and homemakers. Thea is too young to identify her feelings as ambition, but even at a young age, she knows she has a distinctive attribute:

“[I]t was more like a friendly spirit than like anything that was a part of herself. She thought everything to it, and it answered her; happiness consisted of that backward and forward movement of herself. The something came and went; she never knew how” (39).

In personifying ambition, Cather sets up a dynamic between Thea and her abstract ambition in which sacrifice will be necessary. Just as people make sacrifices for their friends, so too must Thea make sacrifices for her ambition.

Cather’s novel highlights the necessity of personal costs in the pursuit of ambition. Thea’s first sacrifice is to give up many childhood delights in favor of practicing her technique.