Although life on the American frontier is a common topic in Cather's work, she does not romanticize the hardships associated with it. In fact, the portrait she paints in "A Wagner Matinée" suggests that physical survival in Red Willow County is a struggle in and of itself. The trees that grow there are stunted and crooked, the turkeys are thin and forced to pick among "refuse" for scraps of food, and Howard and Georgiana's "slender stock of provisions [is] always at the mercy of roving Indians."Because existence is so precarious, day-to-day life becomes a series of basic, subsistence-level activities; Clark, for instance, describes how his aunt would rise early to have breakfast ready by six, work through the day, and sometimes stay up as late as midnight stitching and ironing. This takes an inevitable toll on her physical health, so that by the time the story begins, she appears "battered" and prematurely aged.

Even more than these physical hardships, of course, it is the spiritual deprivation associated with life on the frontier that wears on Georgiana. The two are interrelated, however, in part because of the sheer nature of the Nebraska landscape, which is featureless and unchanging: "To the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to sunset.