Willa Cather as Soulmate of the Land

O Pioneer by Willa Cather

I just finished Willa Cather’s (1873-1947)  O Pioneer, the story of Alexandra Bergstrom who at a young age took the reins of their Nebraska farm as her father died. Supported by 3 brothers, 2 of them became farmers under her guidance just as their father had wished. The 3^rd brother became Alexandra’s charge and was educated at university and became something other than a farmer, which was her goal.

The story takes place between about 1880 and 1910, as the first settlers handed off the future to Alexandra’s generation. She navigates agriculture successfully and builds a wealthy farming operation and helps her 2 brothers achieve success in spite of themselves. Meanwhile there are love interests between characters while Alexandra’s remains unfulfilled for most of the book.

Originally published in 1913, my copy is a more recent Norton Critical Edition, which means it contains a lot of background information about Cather and the times she was writing about as well as reviews and opinions of the book, both during her time and more recently. Given the plot and main character, there is a strong group of recent critics that discuss its clear contemporary  aspect on the role of women and what Cather may have been going for in relation to feminist writing.

Yet it feels more like a tribute to the land than to women per se (however, there is much to be garnered from a feminist point of view.) Cather’s description of the part of Nebraska that has hilly (the Divide found in Southern Nebraska) with its scenic aspect takes on near religious fervor, both lyrical and pastoral as in:

“All sorts of weeds and herbs and flowers had grown up there; splotches of wild larkspur, pale green and white spikes of hoarhound, plantations of wild cotton, tangles of foxtail and wild wheat… and yellow butterflies were always fluttering above…” (P 67)

“…the sun was hanging low over the wheat-field. Long fingers of light reached through the apple branches as though a net; the orchard was riddled and shot with gold; light was the reality, the trees were merely interferences that reflected and refracted light.” (P 106)

Perhaps my interpretation is because my own novel Too Many Stones (TMS) takes on the same sensibility. It is also lyrical and pastoral, at least according to 2 of the reviewers who have read it. Suffice it to say that I have found in Cather a literary soul mate when it comes to the land: its beauty, its role as meaning and metaphor, and simply the joy of turning the landscape into something approaching a religious-poetic experience.

O Pioneers is a short (137 pages) novel that covers approximately 40 years. It skips periods of time as does my novel Too Many Stones. She does this well, and we lose little by the leaps in time. Cather was first praised for the novel, then a period of hard-fiction-as-genre began to deem it too sentimental for its neat ending (comments from the Norton Critical Edition,) which I avoided in TMS. Since that time, however, it has come back and is clearly recognized as part of the Great American novel tradition.

O Pioneers is one of 3 novels about Nebraska that Cather penned, including Song of the Lark, and My Antonia, but it is the place to go for a quick and satisfying look into Willa Cather, and perhaps a glimpse into your own soul.