[In the following essay, Stouck considers O Pioneers! “in the light of its epic vision and in view of the author's imaginative origins in the Midwest.”]

Wright Morris introduces his collection of critical essays, The Territory Ahead (1963), by pointing to that tendency of American writers to “start well then peter out.” His observation is fully substantiated in a discussion of Melville, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway among others. His thesis, however, does not hold with regards to his fellow Nebraskan, Willa Cather, whose finest fiction, Death Comes for the Archbishop, was written relatively late in her career (the author was then fifty-three). Moreover, Willa Cather's imagination, unlike that of her more flamboyant contemporaries, was always in the process of evolving in terms of its emotional needs and aesthetic expression. Miss Cather's four most accomplished novels, O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), were each written in an essentially different imaginative mode. The epic vision of the land and its first people in O Pioneers! gives way to the personal quest of pastoral in My Ántonia; and the critical (frequently satiric) vision of American society in The Professor's House is ultimately transcended in the timeless, disciplined, paradisal world of Cather's saintly priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Indeed, very few American writers have explored the archetypal dimensions of the human imagination so fully. American culture has traditionally been obsessed by the yearning for pastoral and paradisal experience, and accordingly My Ántonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop have been discussed at great length. Here I have chosen instead to look at Miss Cather's early novel, O Pioneers!, in the light of its epic vision and in view of the author's imaginative origins in the Midwest.

The epic imagination expresses itself in the creation of public myths. Like other modes epic has its source in the alienation of the artist from his fellow man; but where pastoral and satire seek integration through individual critical awareness, the epic imagination accepts and affirms the values of the society, and the artist establishes his position within society by becoming its most eloquent spokesman. Epic is nationalistic because its appeal is to a whole people defined by means of a common enemy. Consequently, it tends to be simplistic in terms of both the struggle it presents and the moral values it affirms. The focus rests on the figure of the strong man (or woman) who defends the people against forces which threaten chaos and destruction. Such a figure tends to be one-dimensional because the imagination responds to him largely in terms of his strength as a leader. Sometimes the artist embodies himself in the work in the form of a weaker figure needing the guidance and protection of the strong leader, that need for protection being equally as urgent a motive in epic as the artist's desire to become the voice of the people. This weaker figure may suggest a depth of character and a measure of inner conflict, but the epic hero himself seldom develops or changes; the struggle in which he is engaged only serves to heighten our admiration for his strength and moral virtues.

Because its appeal is to people of every class (but particularly the common man) epic is highly rhetorical and conventional in style. Those fundamental human emotions sought in epic are most effectively aroused by heavily rhythmic patterns and by set pieces which call forth a familiar and uncritical response. The concrete physical realism of epic also derives from this demand for the familiar and uncomplicated, while the catalogues and repetitive enumeration (the single image multiplied) fulfil the vision of the identity and equality of a united people. Epic is of necessity a simplistic response to life, suppressing all critical distinctions; its tone is one of awe and humility, its vision sentimental.¹

Our popular idea is that epic is restricted to the earliest imaginative expressions of each culture. This generalization holds true in that the most effective epics have arisen in the early phases of any culture's development. This is doubtless because the artist at that point can only relate to and participate in the growth of his country (or the development of a new popular art form) by articulating in his work the society's most fundamental and cherished values, those values which are the source of its strength and growth. That urge to be a vital part of the dynamic, young American democracy informs all of Whitman's epic poetry. Similarly, it was in response both to a new society and to a new popular art form that Griffith and Eisenstein created their classic epics of the cinema. Yet no imaginative response is ever limited to a certain time or place—the epic imagination with its vision of a people united in purpose under a strong leader is always a possible response in art. Its realization, however, is likely to depend on the needs of the society, since the motivating force behind epic is to give voice to the quest and aspirations of a whole people. The struggle and hardships of large numbers of men during the 1930s Depression created the need for an epic voice; that need was filled by such diverse works of the imagination as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, a cinematic adulation of Hitler as the strong man and of National Socialism. But modern society seldom provides an outlet for the epic imagination on a scale commensurate to the early national epics such as The Iliad, Beowulf, etc.² The epic “feeling” (that uncritical longing to express a vision of national unity) continues to be explored in modern art, but the indifference of the modern sensibility, essentially an ironic one, limits its expression, and the individual artist, forced to turn inward (epic yielding to pastoral), is more likely to sound the epic note as a form of nostalgia.

In writing about the settling of the Midwest Willa Cather in O Pioneers! chose her subject, as Melville had earlier, from the classical matter for American epic—the struggle of man against nature. For as much as from revolution and civil war America came into being and achieved its identity from the struggle of the common man to subdue the lonely and terrifying wilderness around him. Miss Cather herself apparently referred to the novel as a “two-part pastoral” (Alexandra's story and the romance of “The Mulberry Tree”),³ but doubtless she meant simply to indicate the rural subject of her book. For her novel eschews the return to childhood and the self-analysis of pastoral writing; her focus is on the struggle of the earliest pioneer settlers of the prairie and on the embodiment of their most heroic gestures in the stalwart figure of Alexandra Bergson. That we respond to Alexandra as an epic heroine there can be little question. She is introduced to us in the first chapter as “a tall, strong girl” who “walked rapidly and resolutely, as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do next” (p. 6).⁴ Her character and her role are defined early in the novel where her dying father turns over the responsibility of the farm and the family to his daughter rather than to his two grown sons. Alexandra is not only strong in body (at one point she is described as “Amazonian”) but her father recognizes in her a strength of will and dependability as well which are wanting in his sons. That initial image of Alexandra taking up the burden of a man's life does not change during the course of the novel; she becomes the most successful landowner on the Divide, and the leader in effect of the Swedish pioneer community.

Epic focuses on the struggle of a people against a hostile force—here it is the “Genius” of the land, a force unfriendly to man, “like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces” (p. 22). Those with some imagination sense that “the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness” (p. 15). But from the beginning Alexandra is resolute in her determination to prevail over the wild country. She promises her father on his death bed that she will never lose the land, and she not only endures the harshness of its seasons, but three long years of drought and failure. Many families give up and move away, but Alexandra endures and ultimately triumphs, for those years were “the last struggle of a wild soil against the encroaching plowshare” (p. 47). Alexandra's vision is to do something big, and therewith the landscape and the heroine begin to merge in identification and purpose. Riding across the prairie she reflects on how beautiful, rich, and strong the land seems: “Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before” (p. 65). Later that same day she resolves to stay on in spite of the drought and her brothers' wish to move down by the river, realizing that her own destiny is one with that of the land.

While Alexandra as a woman is a particularized character, her struggle to prevail over the landscape and prepare the way for generations to come is representative of that race of early pioneers who settled the American prairie. We are reminded of the movements of a whole people in those conventional set-pieces (the French Church fair, the grain harvesting, the great confirmation service, the mourning of the people for Amédée Chevalier) which expand the novel's focus to include those joys and sorrows which are communal. A visually striking epic sequence (the multiplied image) describes the cavalcade of forty French boys riding across the plains to meet the bishop; it is charged with the extremes of fundamental human emotions, the ecstatic zeal of high animal spirits tempered by the somber fact of a young friend's death. But always in the foreground remains the figure of Alexandra whose valor and foresight embody the essence of the heroic spirit.

As epic heroine Alexandra's character never changes—her strength of purpose, her dependability and kindness are constant throughout. We are told that “her mind was slow, truthful, steadfast” (p. 61) and that she was without cleverness, perhaps like the heroic figures of the “Frithjof Saga” she has in part committed to memory. She is a woman who feels deeply (she is not without tears in her eyes at moments of crisis), but not one who can show or express her feelings very freely. Moreover, she is always able to control her emotions and proceed with the business of everyday life. When old Ivar finds her alone in the graveyard in the rain she reassures him immediately that everything is all right: “Tyst! Ivar. There's nothing to be worried about. I'm sorry if I've scared you all” (p. 280). But consequently Alexandra is essentially a flat, one-dimensional character. While she suffers through many disappointments and losses (most agonizing is the death of Emil and Marie) there is never any question as to how she will respond; her character is constant and predictable. It is to Alexandra that everyone else turns with his or her troubles: she protects the old people like Crazy Ivar and Mrs. Lee from the indifference of youth; she advises her family and neighbors in their struggles to tame the wild land; she gives guidance and love to the younger people around her—the Swedish working girls from the old country, Emil and Marie, her brothers' children. Her strength and depth of compassion are such that she instinctively forgives Frank Shabata who has destroyed almost everything she has loved. In the courtroom “her heart had grieved for him” (p. 285) and at the novel's close she goes to Lincoln to see what she can do to lighten his punishment. Alexandra wears a man's coat, but ultimately it is the maternal protection of a strong woman that she offers to those around her; and it is this quality—that of a larger-than-life mother figure—that is at the heart of the imaginative conception of her character.⁵ Alexandra is one-dimensional because as epic heroine she is idealized, and accordingly we can feel only a limited sense of identification with her. Her sorrows and her triumphs are those of someone stronger than we are. We hold her strength and virtue in high esteem and yet we cannot really share or emulate them. Rather our imaginative involvement is with that maternal protection she affords those around her.⁶

In epic the imagination (the central consciousness which has created the work of art) is seldom dramatized within the story itself. It is in the pastoral mode (in a book like My Ántonia) that the artist assumes the role of both creator and central figure in his art, for the urge to create in pastoral is born out of a desire to understand oneself and one's past experiences more fully. That need for understanding (an understanding which will ideally lead to more satisfying forms of experience in the present) is evaded in epic by the unquestioning acceptance of other men's values and by seeing internal conflict in the form of physical or cosmic moral struggle. In becoming the spokesman for the people the epic artist eliminates his own responses and assumes a sentimental, humble point of view, one which affirms the traditional values of human experience without question. There is no pervasive humor or irony in epic, for a comic response involves a critical judgment, an opposition of values which would fracture the vision of social unity. The perspective which controls the narration of O Pioneers! is a humble one which threatens to lapse into the maudlin, but at the same time this sentimental perspective is the source of the novel's peculiar effectiveness, for it is this point of view which bathes the humble subjects of the book and the simple facts of their lives with an enduring warmth and affection. Such a viewpoint was the means by which Miss Cather was most fully able to transmit her deep sympathy for the figures of her personal past, her almost childlike love and admiration for their humble, faithful lives.

The artist may not dramatize himself overtly in the creation of epic, but in the manner of narration and in some of the lesser characters of the story he (or she) invariably projects something of his (or her) intimate involvement in the story. In O Pioneers! that figure which most closely approximates the artist herself is Carl Linstrum, Alexandra's childhood neighbor and faithful admirer. Linstrum is the weak, sensitive, artistic man whose failure to find a meaningful and satisfying life looks forward to the dilemma of several of Miss Cather's disillusioned and peripatetic protagonists (e.g. Jim Burden of My Ántonia, Claude Wheeler in One of Ours, Niel Herbert in A Lost Lady).⁷ His memory of Alexandra focuses significantly on an image suggestive of maternal purity, one which seems to lie at the imaginative center of the book:

There he sat down and waited for the sun to rise. It was just there that he and Alexandra used to do their milking together, he on his side of the fence, she on hers. He could remember exactly how she looked when she came over the close-cropped grass, her skirts pinned up, her head bare, a bright tin pail in either hand, and the milky light of the early morning all about her. Even as a boy he used to feel, when he saw her coming with her free step, her upright head and calm shoulders, that she looked as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself. Since then, when he had happened to see the sun come up in the country or on the water, he had often remembered the young Swedish girl and her milking pails.

[p. 126]

The final possibility of a marriage between Carl and Alexandra is perhaps sheer wish-fulfilment on the author's part (that desire to be united with the eternal mother), but it is always held in perspective by the repeated account of Alexandra's dream wherein only the mightest of all lovers can carry her off, that lover being identified towards the end of the novel (p. 283) as none less than Death.⁸

Yet if the central consciousness of the novel is embodied in Carl rather than Alexandra, then the narration is more complex than it would seem; for Carl's experience in the world and his disillusionment have given him an awareness that far surpasses that of his old neighbors on the Divide. That awareness, however, is repressed in order to preserve (or, more accurately, re-capture) an innocent vision of life. In this novel there is little glamour associated with far-away places and people. The one exception is the “Old Country” which is an extension emotionally of the idea of home. Carl's disillusionment with the wanderer's life is evident when he describes himself and his kind to Alexandra: “We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our kind and shudder” (p. 123). One cannot help but catch a glimpse here of Willa Cather herself—the writer living in eastern cities making annual pilgrimages to her home in Nebraska. The emotion out of which the novel has been created stems from that desire to return home to the heartland of America and to those strong, heroic figures, the pioneers. The actual distance of the narrator from that longed-for retreat is suggested at points in the narration. In the opening of Parts II and III the narration changes from past to present tense to give an overview of what has happened since the conclusion of the preceding part. We become very conscious for a moment that someone is telling us a story, for this technique briefly detaches the teller from the tale. The actual measure of that narrative distance is suggested at one point when the narrator says of the Bergson family absorbed in reading The Swiss Family Robinson, “They were all big children together …” (p. 63). If the artist in writing epic is attempting to go back to a simpler, more unified mode of existence, then throughout epic there will inevitably run this chord of nostalgia.

In any work of art certain images more than others stand out and remain fixed in our memory—these images have clearly involved the imagination of the artist most deeply. In O Pioneers! the image of Alexandra Bergson taking up the heroic task of cultivating the stubborn soil is at the center of our response to the novel—that epic response being reinforced by the Whitman title of the book with its rhetorical challenge to conquer the wild country. But almost equally engaging is the image of the garden, the enclosed, safe place which is most fully dramatized in Marie Shabata's orchard with its protective mulberry hedge. The illicit romance between the spritely Bohemian girl and Alexandra's youngest brother, Emil, in effect constitutes a kind of subplot in the novel, the second part of Miss Cather's “two-part pastoral.” This part of the book does come closer to fitting the author's generic designation; its setting is an enclosed garden, its drama is romantic and idealized. Indeed the idyllic description of the orchard after the rain (with its ripe cherries, its fragrant wild roses, the butterflies in the weed blossoms, the waving fields of ripening grain outside the hedge) and the description of the young lovers themselves (Emil with his scythe and Marie with the sparkling glint in her beautiful brown eyes) are suggestive of the conventions of medieval art—like scenes from a “Book of Hours” or the sad, poignant “lais” of Marie de France.

The story of the lovers and the pathos of their untimely end distract us from the epic theme for long sections in the middle and latter part of the book. The expansion of the novel by developing the love story (Miss Cather clearly felt Alexandra's story was not dramatic enough) may seem a gratuitous and unconvincing digression from the central theme of Alexandra and the land. And yet the image of the garden is as integral a part of the novel's imaginative structure as the figure of its stalwart heroine, for it is that desire for a safe, enclosed retreat, with its guarantee of maternal protection, which draws the imagination in this novel to its epic heroine. Significantly Miss Cather dedicated O Pioneers! to the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, a writer whose work was similarly motivated by a search for a green, protected place—realized fictionally in The Country of the Pointed Firs with its half-forgotten village of Dunnet Landing presided over by the maternal, sybil-like figure of the herb-gatherer, Mrs. Todd. Much of our instinctive pleasure in reading O Pioneers! must derive from our sharing in that wish to find a sheltered place, a refuge carved out of a hostile terrain. Mrs. Bergson's house and garden in which she tries to retain the order and routine of her life in the old country is an image of such a refuge maintained against formidable odds. Her garden survives the long drought because of the water she carries to the plants despite the prohibition of her sons. Part III of the novel, “Winter Memories,” is conceived of almost entirely as a kind of refuge—as an image of physical refuge against the cold of winter, and as an emotional refuge for those women whose men are far away. In one sequence Alexandra takes old Mrs. Lee for an afternoon's visit with Marie Shabata; the fuchsias and geraniums in bloom on the window sill, the coffee and sweet cakes, the exchange of crochet patterns are all redolent of the cozy domesticity of women together. Although Emil is in Mexico and Carl in the Far North, the scene is imaginatively complete, for the refuge desired is a maternal and innocent one. Perhaps this is why the central garden of the novel—Marie's orchard—is ultimately spoiled: because it moves beyond being a romantic medieval set piece and becomes a place of erotic fulfilment, whereas the erotic vision of epic, with its apotheosis in the “mother country,” must remain maternal and innocent.

However, for the novel's epic theme—and it is the epic note which prevails at the end—the death of the lovers is necessary to give Alexandra's story a tragic depth and to allow her old antagonist, nature, to reassert its power. Marie's garden represents in one sense that order of life that Alexandra has worked so arduously to create out of the uncultivated landscape. Alexandra thinks of her struggle on the Divide as ensuring a better life for her brother, her “boy”; she loves both Emil and Marie and without looking ahead to the possible consequences she encourages their friendship, much as if they were still young children. Their death gives Alexandra's life a tragic quality because they represent essentially everything for which she has lived and fought. At the novel's close she consents to marry Carl and yet it is the land which still has possession over her. Carl agrees that they must come back to the Divide after they are married: “‘You belong to the land,’ Carl murmured, ‘as you have always said. Now more than ever’” (p. 307). Alexandra, looking out over the great plains under an autumn sunset, concedes that in their struggle with the land there has been only a truce, that it is she who will ultimately be the one possessed: “‘We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while’” (p. 308). However, there is a sober triumph in the novel's conclusion for here the epic view of nature as universal foe gives way to a cyclical and reassuring vision of mutability, and here the author can express once more those feelings of love and admiration for her heroine and for her people:

They went into the house together, leaving the Divide behind them, under the evening star. Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!

[p. 309]

Notes

1. It may seem presumptuous in making generic distinctions neither to evoke nor to refute the authority of Northrop Frye whose Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) is one of the most essential works on the subject. However, Professor Frye does not analyze the emotional qualities of the aesthetic response, and in order to appreciate more fully the nature of Miss Cather’s individual style as an epic writer it is necessary to expand our understanding of genre to include its emotional as well as literary and historical imaginative origins.

2. Rock festival films such as Monterey Pop and Woodstock are probably the most significant manifestations of the epic vision in our contemporary culture.

3. See Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1958; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), p. 11.

4. All quotations are from the Sentry edition of O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

5. Leon Edel has put forth this idea as a general thesis relating to all of Willa Cather’s writing. His first essay on Willa Cather (aside from the completion of the E. K. Brown biography of Miss Cather) was published initially in an early number of Literature and Psychology (November 1954) and reprinted in slightly altered form in the more readily available Literary Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957). See also Leon Edel, Willa Cather and the Paradox of Success (Washington: Library of Congress, 1960).

6. The question of “identification” is always a thorny one for it depends on the reader’s particular nature. For the artist, there is a degree of imaginative involvement possible with the epic protagonist, because, like the artist, he is a figure set apart from other men and his values are those of individual creativity. But the epic hero lives in the world of action whereas the artist (and presumably) his readers are essentially reflective and passive. Any further identification must therefore confuse art and life.

7. Josephine Luric Jessup in The Faith of Our Feminists (New York: R. R. Smith, 1960) sees Willa Cather viewing the men of her novels “through the eyes of kindly tutor or warm-hearted elder sister” (p. 54). To Mrs. Jessup this explains not only the strength of the Cather heroines but the sympathetic attitude towards the essentially emasculate heroes as well. Mrs. Jessup, however, ignores the fact of the central consciousness or point of view taken in Willa Cather’s novels, which is of course a masculine one. Miss Cather never identifies with her heroines (Thea Kronborg, perhaps, excepted), but rather sees them from the viewpoint of a man whose admiration and love for these women can never be fully realized or experienced. Mrs. Jessup’s thesis leads her into making some unfortunate aesthetic judgments. In her feminist ardor she says that Jim Burden of My Antonia “contributes nothing to the action and his point of view as spectator could be spared” (p. 60). But this is to ask for quite another book than the one Willa Cather has written, for Jim Burden is the central figure in My Antonia; it is his consciousness which defines the world of the novel.

8. In her sensitive reading of Willa Cather’s novels Dorothy Van Ghent identifies the dream lover as a kind of vegetation and weather god whose divinity is the principle of the unconscious. See Dorothy Van Ghent, Willa Cather, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964), pp. 16-18. Mrs. Van Ghent’s suggestion here is very helpful for at the novel’s close death and the land are identified as one in a vision of cyclical mutability. Though Carl is to marry Alexandra, they both recognize that it is the land which truly possesses her. See also Sister Peter Damian Charles, P.O., “Love and Death in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!,” CLA Journal (December 1965), pp. 140-150.