O Pioneers!, Willa Cather - Sharon O'Brien (essay date autumn 1978)
Sharon O'Brien (essay date autumn 1978)
SOURCE: O'Brien, Sharon. “The Unity of Willa Cather's ‘Two-Part Pastoral’: Passion in O Pioneers!” Studies in American Fiction 6, no. 2 (autumn 1978): 157-71.
[In the following essay, O'Brien contends that the two sections of O Pioneers are linked by the theme of passion.]
Willa Cather formed her first successful novel, O Pioneers! (1913), by combining two previously written short stories: “Alexandra,” a 1911 version of Alexandra Bergson's taming of the wild Nebraska soil, and “The White Mulberry Tree,” a tragic tale written a year later in which a crazed Bohemian farmer kills his wife, Marie, and her young Swedish lover.1 Although Cather wrote the two stories separately, she experienced a “sudden inner explosion and enlightenment” when she realized that they belonged together.2 It was as if she had brought together two chemicals with a...
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