SOURCE: Downs, C. “Glasgow's Barren Ground and Cather's O Pioneers!: Changing the Paradigm.” Southern Quarterly 35, no. 4 (summer 1997): 51-8.

[In the following essay, Downs finds parallels between Cather's O Pioneers! and Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground.]

In the early twenties and twenties of the century Willa Cather and Ellen Glasgow embarked upon experiments in form in the novel. Like other early modernists, they reacted against the worn-out paradigms of a previous century. Within those paradigms, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis has pointed out, the novel ends in marriage. Marriage, for female characters, was the rest of the story. Cather's and Glasgow's novels of the soil, O Pioneers! (1913) and Barren Ground (1925), while retaining vestiges of nineteenth-century patterns, helped invent the twentieth-century novel.

Twentieth-century readers would like to lump together all of the things against which Cather, Glasgow and other modernists rebelled and call these “nineteenth-century fiction.” Fortunately, critics such as Nina Baym and others have prohibited us from creating any monumental categories. Early twentieth-century authors attempted to leave behind a whole collection of tropes, while at the same time cherishing up bits and pieces of their heritage, reconnecting old parts to new patterns.

One older paradigm controls the action in such works as The Story of Avis (1877) by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe and even later works such as Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain and The Heavenly Twins (1893) by Sarah Grand. These works all affirm, in one way or another, the innocence of children, their nearness to God, the holy bond between mother and child and the fulfillment every mother feels in mothering. These notions are from Swedenborg, as Josephine Donovan has shown.¹ We laugh at Huckleberry Finn's pranks because doings which in an adult would be unseemly or even immoral are seen as innocent and humorous in the child. When Huck (and in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Little Eva) muses about the unfairness of slavery, his words carry special moral power. We believe him because he is a child.

The stereotypical nineteenth-century novel ends in marriage for the good and death for the bad. “The bad,” in the hands of earlier writers, were women who stepped out of women's sphere. Heroines such as Hawthorne's Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance (1852), were typified by their dark hair. Often, the ending of their story was death (Annis Pratt). In later works, heroines such as Phelps's Dr. Zay, in the novel of the same name (1882), step out of women's sphere with no harm coming to her; however, at the end of the novel, she marries. E. D. E. N. Southworth, whose heroines are given to taking outrageous freedoms in the middle of her books, marries her characters off into happy couples at the end (see, e.g., The Hidden Hand [1859]). Southworth's books sold. The novel of courtship and marriage, by placing marriage at the end of a long series of adventures, emphasizes the idea that marriage is the pinnacle to be achieved. After that, it does not matter.

Concomitant with the idea of the happy couple is the notion of women's sphere. The women in marriage plots took up their duties as perfect housekeepers and childrearers. Their homes were often in picturesque meadows, where deer disported themselves, and the clamor of the city was far away. The home was a place of succor, and the woman of the house made it that way.² These ideas are easy to see in such works as Longfellow's The Seaside and the Fireside (1849) and in Alcott's Little Women (1868-69).

O Pioneers! and Barren Ground are both novels of the soil. As Annette Kolodny has shown in her—landmark—work, The Lay of the Land, paradigms of people and landscape are also part of America's literary heritage. From the earliest days, as Kolodny maintains, the land was gendered. The land was female, mother earth, to be worshipped by the son/pioneer at the same time he resented her controlling power, or, alternatively, the land was virgin, to be raped/husbanded by a bridegroom or a rake. O Pioneers! and Barren Ground inherit—and reinterpret—these traditions.

Consideration of these metaphorical and philosophical traditions that shaped nineteenth-century American fiction and appear later in Cather and Glasgow ignores one force which shaped nineteenth-century fiction (although it alone is probably what the twentieth century most rebelled against)—publishing houses. The paradigms that we have come to associate with nineteenth-century fiction sold well, while “experimental” fictions, whose characters' lives took alternate paths, were—and still are—risky business. Good sales of formula novels—the marriage plot—urged publishers to offer the first contracts and the first advances in American publishing history to writers whose endings turned out right, whose women were pure, whose children were innocent and in which evil-doers were punished. This is the trend that caused Hawthorne to damn in exasperation the scribbling women. His barb was ill-placed; he should have damned the publishing houses that urged upon writers and readers a conformity that became easier to parody as the century wore on.

Both Glasgow and Cather wrote novels that were “about” the marriage-and-children story; by doing so they tacitly acknowledged their debt to their predecessors. Instead of buying into traditional plots, however, they parodied them, showing the destructive tensions that existed within family structures.³

Both Cather and Glasgow attack the Swedenborgian notion of childhood innocence. In Glasgow's Barren Ground, Dorinda's mother, Eudora Oakley, adores her youngest son, Rufus, because she nursed him through an attack of scarlet fever (39). However, her devotion to him at the expense of her own happiness means not a whit to the boy. His selfishness at first has only small consequences: “Rufus frowned while he reached for the last scrap of butter. There would be none for his mother and Dorinda; but if this fact had occurred to him, and it probably had not, he would have dismissed it as an unpleasant reflection” (55). Later, however, in a drunken rage, he murders one of his companions and then asks his devoutly Presbyterian mother to provide him with an alibi—to perjure herself. She does so, but the effort kills her (315-55). Her son flees the state without a backward glance. Glasgow's ironic treatment of Rufus early in the novel, and her lingering on Eudora's selfless, constant labor—which ends in death, not utopia—tells the reader that the good mother/dutiful son paradigm has lost its power.

In Cather's O Pioneers!, although Emil is Alexandra's younger brother, in some ways she treats him like a son. She calls him “my boy” and provides for his schooling (54), and in the first chapter, it is Alexandra who must see to the rescue of Emil's kitten (7). If Emil represents the dutiful, good son, then Cather shows how this paradigm is broken by the son's maturation into independent manhood, and by the mother-figure's own sexuality. When Marie mentions to Emil that Alexandra might be in love with Carl, Emil scoffs (154, 179). He cannot envision Alexandra-the-mother as Alexandra-the-lover. The weakness in the mother-son paradigm works two ways—Alexandra can see Emil's moving away from the farm and beginning an independent life in the city—she can see him following the Bildungsroman—but she cannot envision her once-little boy consumed with sexual desire. After his death she says, “Emil was a good boy, and only bad boys ran after married women” (284). The mother-son paradigm cannot explain human desire, either the mother's or her son's.

Emphatically and repeatedly both Glasgow and Cather attack the paradigm of the perfect marriage. Some of their most pointed barbs are released in sub-plots, especially those that relate the history of Dorinda's and Alexandra's families. Dorinda's great-aunt and namesake, for instance, threw herself into the millrace for love. Dorinda's aunt Abigail had to be locked in a barred room to cool her ardor. Eudora Oakley's missionary-lover died, so she married a man beneath her in class and education. Suffocated by her life, Eudora sublimates her passion in half-mad religious devotion and in meaningless toil. Geneva Ellgood, married to Jason Greylock, goes mad and commits suicide. Lena, Dorinda's stepdaughter, has begun to use her attractiveness and her lies to snare a man (393), and thus the horrible cycle is perpetuated.

Likewise, in Cather, Alexandra's grandfather became infatuated with an unscrupulous woman who spent all of his money (23), and Alexandra's mother, dragged unwillingly to the West by the husband upon whom she was dependent, spent her life trying to scratch out of the western soil the order of her Swedish life. These subplots of love, death and madness are the consistent background against which Glasgow and Cather tell their more central, tragic romance-stories.⁴

In Barren Ground, Dorinda and Jason Greylock fall in love after Jason returns from medical school. Their romance shows how transient is romantic love. For Dorinda, love becomes the possibility that “glamour” will enter her otherwise humdrum routine (12). Like her mother, Dorinda unconsciously compares falling in love with saving grace (61-62)—both love and grace feel like “glowing ecstasy.” For Jason, the excitement of love temporarily eases his worries. Caught by the machinations of his father, a drunkard and a tyrant, Jason knows he is too weak to escape the situation (92). However, under coercion from Geneva's brothers, he marries Geneva, jilting Dorinda a week before their planned wedding. Dorinda, who had felt so secure in her engagement to Jason—so inevitable is the end of the romance plot—that she had yielded to desire, now finds herself pregnant. She ends the marriage plot by fleeing to New York to hide her shame.

In the central story of Emil and Marie, Cather shows the weakness of romance as a metaphor with which to envision human relationships. Marie, married to Frank, is Alexandra's neighbor. Frank jealously guards his wife's beauty—and indeed, even when she was very young, her uncle paraded her on his shoulders for the men in town to gaze at and to tease with their mock professions of love (11-12). Marie, a complex and wise figure—Cather devotes a chapter of the “Winter Memories” section to her introspections—is seen by men as only a lovely object.

As readers we are inclined to sympathize with the handsome, smart Emil because Alexandra loves him. However, he, too objectifies Marie, seeing her as a lovely picture to be gazed at (135-36). “Sometimes I think that one boy does just as well as another for you,” says Emil to Marie, somewhat jealously (230). Susan Rosowski notes Emil's similarity to Frank: the love of both is ultimately selfish and destructive (58). Emil postures throughout his chapters with his masculine tool, the scythe (79, 164) while Marie picks red cherries. Emil also carries another phallic object—a gun—with which he kills the wild ducks (128), which for Alexandra symbolize the eternal and for old Ivar, the holy. In these scenes, Cather shows that even the handsome and learned man, when cast in the romance-plot, cannot treat a woman as a person, but only as a lover, and therefore as something that he must own.

The romance-plot traditionally ends in marriage or death. In Cather's hands, it ends in both: as Emil and Marie lie in each other's arms beneath the white mulberry tree, Frank kills them with his gun. A marriage in which the woman—or nature—is seen as something to possess can lead only to sterility or death.

In Barren Ground, Glasgow joins the tropes of marriage and ownership to a metaphor of the Christian church: marriage had long been a metaphor for the tie that bound people to the church. If Glasgow and Cather show the weakening of marriage bonds, then the bride-of-Christ metaphor fails for the same reason that the romance-plot fails: a story which encodes the bride as “faithful (read, unchanging, static, virginal) could not describe Alexandra and Dorinda, who grow to maturity, changing and learning.

Glasgow shows the poverty of any link between marriage and religion through irony; love, for instance, is often mistaken for religious ecstacy. Eudora Oakley's missionary dream does not sound like amazing grace. Instead, her vision of “blue skies, golden sands … palm trees on a river's bank, and … black babies thrown to crocodiles” conflates the beauty of what would have been her honeymoon trip with the violence of inexplicable murder. Similarly, the narrator tells that John Calvin Abernathy has planted Presbyterianism like a thistle in barren ground (8). Later, Dorinda dreams that she is plowing up acres and acres of thistles, she and the horse stamping them into the earth. At the thistles' centers, she imagines the likeness, not of the Christ, but of Jason Greylock, the man who jilted her. Dorinda persistently confuses grace with desire; she cannot see any difference in her existence within the paradigm of Christianity or the paradigm of romance. She grinds both into dust in her dream, and then, awakening, voices Glasgow's new ideas about the novel.

Cather defeats the bride-of-Christ paradigm no less completely. For instance, although Marie prays, her devotions are powerless to diminish either her love for Emil or her husband's jealousy. Emil, however, can sublimate his desire for Marie as he listens to holy music (255) because the “Ave Maria” becomes, not a hymn to the virgin-mother, but a love song to Marie. As soon as the notes die he races his mare to Marie's home and to his death. As Frank shoots his wife, he says her name over and over again, almost as if in prayer (Rosowski 56). Old Ivar reads Emil's and Marie's murders as divine retribution when he cries “Sin and death for the young ones!” (271) and when he imagines that Emil is now in hell (281).

Both Glasgow and Cather change nineteenth-century patterns through a sometimes heavy-handed irony. If their novels had ended in marriage or jilting (a punishment), they would have been only parodies of their predecessors. Both authors break old molds when they show their heroines grow to maturity, or when they break down the doors of domestic spaces and have their heroines walk into the out of doors.

Glasgow shows Dorinda's useful marriage to Nathan Pedlar as an alternative to romance or to a Calvinist code. The two adults, rather misused by life, contract together because it seems better than going it alone. Nathan Pedlar, for instance, can help Dorinda buy Five Oaks, the Greylock farm. After they marry, Nathan lives with Dorinda as a kind of handyman. By Dorinda's demand, their marriage is never consummated—but their friendship, their partnership, seems to fulfill them both. Their life together shows a marriage of equals. However, Glasgow does not allow even this happily-ever-after to stand. Nathan is killed in a train wreck, leaving Dorinda once again alone. The novel continues as Glasgow, in DuPlessis's terms, writes beyond the romance-ending, to tell, instead, a story of woman and landscape.

Glasgow's new relation between woman and landscape has religious overtones, like a traditional marriage, like Swedenborgian motherhood—but this is not an orthodox religion. Instead, it is a mixture of Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondences with the Darwinian idea of one species yielding to another, stronger one. The Swedenborgian view of nature gives Glasgow permission to attach particular moral or spiritual meanings to the changing natural world, whereas evolutionary theory, as Glasgow understood this through its popularizers, allows her to affirm that the brightest and the best does make it to the top.⁵ The solution is pictured in a metaphor of ecological succession: broomsedge covers barren ground, then grows scrub pine, then life everlasting—the titles of the different sections of Glasgow's novel.

Broomsedge is the sign of the old methods of farming: the impoverished soil, after so many crops of tobacco, grows broomsedge. However, in the section entitled “Broomsedge” Glasgow tells the story of Dorinda's engagement and jilting by Jason—broomsedge represents as well the impoverishment of the marriage paradigm.

Scrub pine later reclaims the fields of broomsedge—thus it, too, is a sign of poverty. As it grows, however, a pine becomes, not only a valuable commodity, but a thing of beauty: as Dorinda listens to Beethoven's “Pathétique” and “Appassionata,” she finds that the music whips through her mind like the wind in the pines, playing on her emotions as if she were an aeolian harp (238-39). Finally, for Dorinda, one old pine, shaped like a harp and standing over her father's grave, is a sign of rugged endurance and of kinship. In the “Pine” section Dorinda both affirms tradition when she returns to her. parents' farm and reinvigorates the land with new farming methods.

Dorinda connects the herb called life everlasting with her memories of her dead mother—Eudora had used it to scent her purse. But the plant's name also connotes transcendence, and she puts her transcendent vision into words: Dorinda “had worked relentlessly through the years; but it was work that she had enjoyed, and above all it was work that had created anew the surroundings amid which she had lived. In a changed form her mother's frustrated passion to redeem the world was finding concrete expression” (346).⁶ The soil is the soul, and Dorinda, its faithful missionary. However, her orthodoxy encodes a tradition, not of a thoughtless conservatism, but of a thoughtful change, of harmony with early twentieth-century conceptions of “nature.”

The end of Cather's story likewise posits a new relation between woman and landscape—and between woman and man as well. To Alexandra, the land has a dual nature, and she has two different responses to it. In her youth, she conceives a love for the land and an appreciation for its beauty. In turn, the Genius of the land—a male personification—bows down to her (65), rather like a knight before his lady. And, indeed, Cather's story follows this romance plot—the only difference between it and the traditional one is that the sex roles are reversed, and the land is male. The traditional knights-and-ladies story was one of Cather's favorites when she was growing up. During the 1890s her newspaper reviews show that she was reading The Three Guardsmen and The Count of Monte Cristo. In Alexandra's early relation with the western landscape, therefore, Cather inserts a female hero into what had been a largely male plot. Gender roles are fluid (Alexandra the swashbuckler, Alexandra the lady).

In later years, the Genius comes to her in her dreams and carries her off (206). In Alexandra's last encounter with the Genius, she realizes that he is the “mightiest of all lovers” (282)—perhaps deathless death itself, since the last paragraph apostrophizes “Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom” (309). The Genius of the land, who is so huge that it dwarfs human inhabitants, is very much a Cather invention. The Genius is Swedenborgian in that he is powerful but innocent; and he is realistic in that the great monuments of the West, the prairie, mountains and sky, do indeed dwarf their inhabitants.⁷

However, Cather posits another relation of the woman—and, possibly the man—toward the land. When the Genius bows to her, she writes the land's history in her heart (65). The plows of her father's generation have left marks “like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races” (20). But Alexandra plowing is different, for the narrator says of her that “it is in the soil that she expresses herself best” (84). As Alexandra ages, she, her family and her neighbors tell the same two or three human stories (119) with their own lives (307). The civilizing moment is not violent like that of nineteenth-century adventure novels-instead, it is the inscription of story. For Cather, the relation between human being and landscape creates art.⁸

Carl—Alexandra's friend, and later, her fiancé—can at the end of O Pioneers! become an artist—an aspiration, which, as an engraver, a copier of other's art, he could have never achieved (Woodress 245). When Carl becomes Alexandra's husband, his labor becomes both his art and his story. Alexandra and Carl can still be separated by death, but Alexandra has come to view death as another kind of marriage with landscape—a marriage which she awaits passively, like a nineteenth-century novel-bride. Instead of a house, the new couple, Alexandra and the Genius, will share the prairie. Their sharing does not seem to appropriate this space as a utopia, but rather accepts it as a place of endless change.⁹

Glasgow also has her woman-pioneer, in the end, accompanied by a man: John-Abner comforts his stepmother to form a mother-son pair—a relationship that has been troublesome in this novel. However, Dorinda does not read her connection with men as the primary story of her life. Her life story, instead, is written in terms of transcendent values that grow between the woman and the land.

Cather and Glasgow helped popularize places which became more “storied” as the years passed. Although they were not the first to write about rural America (Hamlin Garland published Main-Travelled Roads in 1891), they wrote about it sympathetically. Gertrude Stein, in her 1935 Geographical History of America, wrote, “In the United States, there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.” Between these two, Garland and Stein, lie a host of others, Sarah Orne Jewett, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Mary Austin, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, each of whom “storied” a place, and did so sympathetically.

The paradigm of the rural American landscape wore out—just as its predecessor had—in the 1940s. By then, ruralness had come to be seen as picturesque comfort food for the mind. Before it became worn out, however, this paradigm birthed others in other media: Mabel Dodge Luhan became the paradigm herself, when she moved west and set up an artist colony in Taos. Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams rendered the landscape in paint and photography in mythic proportions, much as Cather had when she personified the prairie as the Genius.

The story of women outside of the marriage plot continues to be told. Its writers form a litany of modernist women writers: H. D., Nella Larsen, Virginia Woolf; and beyond: Eudora Welty, Tillie Olsen. These are all “high-culture” figures. However, the new paradigm also influenced popular culture as well: stormy Scarlett O'Hara could be seen as the grateful child of hard-working Dorinda, and Scarlett's story is one of women and land.

Notes

1. Donovan's article tracks the flow of Swedenborgian thought through many nineteenth-century women's fictions. The pertinent doctrine is that holy people are more childlike (69). People seeking moral advice need only observe the more childlike around them so that they, also, can become more perfect. Since country people were (patronizingly) seen as being childlike to city people, Donovan argues that writers like Sarah Orne Jewett told stories of the lives of country people for didactic purposes (65).

   Likewise, writers included anecdotes about children and descriptions of nature because nature and children (being more “childlike”) were closer to God. Nature and children taught one what it was like in heaven. This teaching was called the “doctrine of correspondence” (Donovan 60). These Swedenborgian ideas influenced Cather's and Glasgow's choices of setting and narrator in their fiction.

2. The house became a home only in the nineteenth century. Kirk Jeffrey compares the nineteenth-century middle-class Protestant home to the utopia being erected both in fact and in fiction (e.g., Brook Farm and The Blithedale Romance). Creators of home utopias believed that, since the will was free (Swedenborg), the clean house, perfectly run by the strong-willed house-keeper, could bring its inhabitants good health and moral perfection.

3. Debra D. Munn, noting the likenesses between Cather's and Glasgow's novels, has gone so far as to say that Glasgow modeled Barren Ground on Cather's earlier novel.

4. Blanche Gelfant notes that there are gentler subpots concerning women's friendships which counter those which chronicle disastrous male-female relations (xxvii). Women visit women, showing each other their embroidery and bringing food and company. A most important character in this web of women's friendships is Mrs. Hiller—whom we never meet. Likewise, Dorinda has, at least briefly, a fulfilling friendship with Rose Emily Pedlar, Nathan's first wife. Dorinda mothers Rose Emily's children after the death of their mother.

5. Glasgow was introduced to Darwin by Walter McCormack, her sister's husband. For Glasgow the very fact that Darwin's books in her hands angered her strictly Calvinist (and philandering) father was enough to convince her that Darwin held a kind of truth and power. This idea was brought home to her when she showed her Darwinian novel, The Descendant (1897), to her New York publisher; his surprised comment indicated how different her writing was from that of conventional “scribbling women” (how different from publisher-imposed formulas). In Glasgow's poem, “The Vision of Hell,” hell is populated by the weaker and heaven by the stronger. Darwinian thought heavily influenced Glasgow throughout her writing career. Both Virginia (1913) and The Sheltered Life (1932) show southern heroines leading existences that were “predetermined” for them by custom—a force then thought by Glasgow to be Darwinian.

6. For another interpretation of these natural metaphors, see Schmidt (125-29). Schmidt says that broomsedge is the symbol of evolutionary forces acting on the landscape and instinct acting upon people, and life-everlasting is associated with Dorinda's memories of Nathan's unselfish, heroic acts. From beyond the grave Nathan becomes a model of compassion.

7. Donovan notes how Sarah Orne Jewett was influenced—both by William Dean Howells to be a mimetic writer and by Theophilus Parsons, the popularizer of Swedenborg in America, to be a symbolic writer. Jewett was one of Cather's greatest mentors.

8. Woodress notes the theme of the inscription of art in many of Cather's works. For instance, Thea Kronberg, the opera-singer protagonist in Song of the Lark (1915), forms a sculpture or a vessel with her mouth and throat when she sings in the opera. Woodress says that “the same principle applied to literature. One made a sheath with words to capture the rushing flow of life. The structural principle of fiction must be organic; form must follow function” (232). He quotes Cather as saying that O Pioneers! has an organic form because the soil, too, is formless (238). In My Antonia (1918) a plow becomes a hieroglyphic against the sun (245).

9. See Gelfant's discussion of Cather and Whitman and their feelings about death (xiv).

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