SOURCE: McFarland, Dorothy Tuck. “O Pioneers! (1913).” In Willa Cather, pp. 19-28. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972.

[In the following essay, McFarland surveys the dominant thematic concerns of Cather's novel.]

When she returned to Red Cloud from her visit to the southwest in 1912, Willa Cather found in her mind a story, which was to be called “The White Mulberry Tree,” and a poem called “Prairie Spring.” With the new story she juxtaposed another story written the winter before in Cherry Valley, “Alexandra.” This “two-part pastoral,” after considerable additions linking and clarifying the relationships of the two stories, became O Pioneers! The poem, which is in essence the poetic distillation of O Pioneers!, she placed at the beginning of the novel.

With O Pioneers! Willa Cather was “suddenly in control of inner creative forces which had tended to swamp her and make her dismal so long as she could not use them.”¹ She was writing for herself, about people she knew—“some Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbours of ours when I … was eight or nine years old.”² The story had welled up in her: “there was no arranging or ‘inventing’; everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong.”³ But she did not expect much to come of it; it was too unconventional.

I ignored all the situations and accents that were then generally thought to be necessary. The “novel of the soil” had not then come into fashion in this country. The drawing-room was considered the proper setting for a novel, and the only characters worth reading about were smart people or clever people. … I did not in the least expect that other people would see anything in a slow-moving story, without “action,” without “humour,” without a “hero”; a story concerned entirely with heavy farming people, with cornfields and pasture lands and pig yards—set in Nebraska, of all places!⁴

Thought the Nebraska setting of O Pioneers! was, at the time of its writing, unconventional, its themes are classic and universal. It deals with the two or three human stories that “go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks … that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years” (p. 119). The novel's basic theme, the pioneer story of taming and making fruitful the wild prairie, is the background against which are set the more personal but thematically similar stories of love, birth, and death—the basic realities of man's existence.

Part I, “The Wild Land,” which deals with the pioneer experience, stresses the importance of the relationship of man to the land. The novel opens on the raw, barren countryside of winter; against the savage vastness of the untamed land men seem weak and puny, their houses dwarfed, their roads only faint tracks in the grass. Having struggled to wrest a living from the wild land for eleven years, John Bergson lies dying, willing to pass on the struggle to his strong daughter, Alexandra. Bergson exemplifies one possible relationship to the land—that of impersonal ownership—which is shown, by its results, to be inadequate. Other characters in this section embody other possible attitudes. Six months after the death of her father, Alexandra and her brothers and her good friend Carl Linstrum go to visit Crazy Ivar, a queer old Norwegian who lives close to nature with the simplicity of a wild creature. Deeply religious, he explains that he prefers his way of life apart from people and at one with nature by saying that “his Bible seemed truer to him there.”

If one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at the rough land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot sunlight; if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of the quail, the burr of the locust against that vast silence, one understood what Ivar meant

[p. 38].

While to John Bergson the land was an impersonal force against which man pitted his strength only to die, to Crazy Ivar, as to the Psalmist, it is transparent to the glory of God. Alexandra responds to Ivar, seeking his advice on the care of her hogs; but to her stolid and unimaginative brothers, Oscar and Lou, who have no love of nature and view their farm merely as a way of making a living, Ivar is simply crazy and possibly dangerous.

The ideal of man's creative relationship to the land is personified in Alexandra. This is dramatized three years later, when drought and crop failure threaten to drive the settlers out. Carl Linstrum and his family leave. Thus Alexandra is deprived of her closest friend, the only person who really understands her. Oscar and Lou, too, want to sell out, and they angrily oppose Alexandra, whose deep faith in the future of the land convinces her that this is the time to buy all the land they can. She decides to take the wagon and travel with her youngest brother, eight-year-old Emil, to the farms to the south, along the river, to see how things are going there. On her return she renews her faith that the Divide, the high plateau country, will yield to being cultivated and become rich farmland, and she fortifies her determination to remain.

When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. 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. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman

[p. 65].

Though many have attempted to subdue the land, its submission to the hand of man is dependent on love rather than force. As the settlement of a wild land is symbolically equivalent to the divine act of creation, which established an ordered universe out of primordial chaos,⁵ it is an undertaking which is charged with significance for the entire community. Right relationship with the land produces right order. Thus, Alexandra's relationship to the land not only brings the land under submission to the plow and makes it fruitful; it also brings into being, in Alexandra's household, a human community which is ordered and harmonious, and whose harmoniousness depends on the continuance of right relationships among its members.

Part II, “Neighboring Fields,” shifts the focus from man's relationship to the land to the human community. As in Part I Alexandra's creative response to the land is symbolically parallel to the Creation, Part II opens on a scene that is faintly suggestive of Eden, but which already contains foreshadowings of the Fall—the breaking of right order—and of death, which is its consequence. Thus, against the placid background of the fertile and prosperous Divide, Alexandra's brother Emil, now a young man of twenty-one just home from college, is scything the grass in the graveyard where his father and mother are buried. Marie Shabata drives by in her carriage and offers Emil a ride home to Alexandra's farm, which is one of the richest on the Divide. The scenes that follow reinforce the contrast between the way of life that grows out of Alexandra's relationship with the land and that of her materialistic brothers. Alexandra has invited Crazy Ivar to live with her because he lost his land, and she employs three Swedish girls to help her in the house and six men to work the farm. Lou and Oscar, now married and on farms of their own, still criticize her forward-looking ways of farming and grumble that Ivar is dangerous and should be put in an asylum. Alexandra's openness to things of value in both the old and the new—her sympathy and understanding of the needs of Ivar and of the old-fashioned Mrs. Lee, Lou's mother-in-law, and her willingness to try alfalfa or a silo when none of her neighbors would hear of such a thing—are implicitly contrasted with her brothers' slavery to conventional ways of behavior and their concern over what people might say.

Carl Linstrum unexpectedly returns, stopping for a visit en route to Alaska, where he intends to try prospecting for gold. Oscar and Lou despise him because they believe he has never amounted to much. Artistic and sensitive, he has left his profession as an engraver because he cares about fine wood engravings, and all that is being done now is cheap metal work. Through Carl, the pettiness and conventionality of Alexandra's brothers is seen as a metaphor of the lack of right order in the world at large, where modern prosperity has brought not only relative ease and abundance but shallowness and lack of taste and scorn of those who cannot or will not follow the conventional patterns of behavior.

Chapter five returns to the theme of death suggested by the figure of Emil scything the grass in the graveyard in the opening pages of Part II, and introduces an image of death as the outcome of the thoughtless pursuit of desire. Carl, out for an early morning walk to visit his old farm, now owned by the irascible, jealous Frank Shabata and his pretty wife, Marie, unintentionally observes Marie and Emil looking for ducks on the pond. Emil shoots and brings the dead birds back to Marie, whose delight changes to despair when she sees what her careless joy in pursuing the birds with Emil has done. This image prefigures the fate of Emil and Marie, which will be developed in the later section “The White Mulberry Tree.”

The love stories within the human community are thematically parallel to Alexandra's loving response to the Divide, for both reflect the reaching out of the human heart toward beauty and the fullness of life. But the love between Emil and Marie, however powerful and alluring, is at variance with the order of the community, and the results of their love, from the very beginning, are disruptive, for Marie is another man's wife. The contrast between this frustrated love, which makes Emil harsh and quarrelsome, and the delight of harmonious love is emphasized in the portrayal of the happy, sunny love between Emil's best friend, Amédée, and his bride, Angélique. While Emil's love threatens right relationships within the community, the emerging and appropriate love between Carl and Alexandra is threatened by Alexandra's self-seeking brothers. Oscar and Lou fear that Carl will get her property, which they feel by right, if not by law, to be theirs. The section closes on a note of discord: Emil, determined to go away to Mexico, is blind to Alexandra's distress about Carl, and the formerly close relationship between brother and sister is at least temporarily broken. There is an open, angry breach between Alexandra and her other two brothers; Carl, unable to face the criticism of Lou and Oscar, unhappily decides that he must leave. Alexandra feels that all at once, in a single day, she has lost everything.

In Part IV, “The White Mulberry Tree,” Emil returns to the Divide after a year in Mexico and is fatefully thrown together with Marie at a church festival. They are both miserable at the impossibility of their relationship, and Marie begs Emil to go away again. He packs his things and plans to leave for Omaha to read law. Before he can depart his best friend, Amédée, is stricken with appendicitis and dies. The next day, torn apart by grief and love, Emil leaves a gathering attended by Marie's husband and rides back to Marie to tell her good-by. He finds her alone in the orchard, dreaming of him. Several hours later, her rash and jealous husband returns and finds Emil's horse in the stable and the house dark. More to increase his sense of injury and self-importance than out of intention to kill anyone, he takes his gun and goes out searching for them. When he hears them behind the orchard hedge he blindly fires at them and then flees, terror-stricken at what he has done. He leaves Emil dead and Marie dying.

Through this act of violence, the placid Eden which Alexandra has created, in large part for Emil to inherit, is destroyed, and Alexandra herself symbolically undergoes the experience of death. As the last section opens, Alexandra is caught in a rainstorm at the graveyard. There, cold and soaking wet, she feels that the rain falling on her takes her back into the dark, before she was born. Brought home and put to bed, she feels tired of life, tired of her own aching body, and longs to be free. Then she experiences “the old illusion of her girlhood, of being lifted and carried lightly by someone very strong.”

He was with her a long while this time, and carried her very far, and in his arms she felt free from pain. When he laid her down on the bed again, she opened her eyes, and, for the first time in her life, she saw him, saw him clearly, though the room was dark, and his face was covered. … His right arm, bared from the elbow, was dark and gleaming, like bronze, and she knew at once that it was the arm of the mightiest of all lovers. She knew at last for whom it was she had waited, and where he would carry her. That, she told herself, was very well. Then she went to sleep

[pp. 282-83].

Some critics identify this “mightiest of all lovers” as death, but it should be remembered that he had appeared to her earlier as a personification of a god of vegetation, a god of corn, “yellow like the sunlight,” who carried Alexandra in his arms “like a sheaf of wheat” (p. 206). Perhaps it would be more accurate to see him as a symbol of the life force itself, life that contains both fertility and death. Significantly, it is in her total acceptance of him—symbolically, her acceptance of death and life—that Alexandra finds peace. Strengthened by this experience, she determines to go to the state penitentiary to visit Frank Shabata.

The visit to Frank is a kind of descent into hell, and never has Alexandra seemed less armed with power, more tired and worn, than she appears in the prison. She enters into the depths of negation and despair with Frank, herself taking on the burden of his disgust with life in order to try to set him free. There is no joy for her in this act, no feeling of pious self-sacrifice; it is a painful task that leaves her spiritually exhausted, feeling that she has not much more life in her than he. Only then, when she has reached the bottom, does she receive a telegram saying that Carl is returning, and life begins to flow into her again.

Alexandra's ascent from death is facilitated through the love of Carl, who, the moment he learned of Alexandra's misfortune, had left his prospecting business in Alaska and rushed to her as fast as trains and boats could carry him. His earlier timidity in the face of her brothers' disapproval vanishes in the awareness of her need for him, and her grief has opened in her a greater awareness of that need. Through Carl and Alexandra the human stories are brought again into the larger perspective and seen in relationsihp both with the passage of human history and with the land, the source from which the actors spring and to which they must return. At the close of the novel, the land theme wells up, larger than all the human actors who have emerged from it, but enriched by their lives as they are sustained by the land that bears them and which will someday receive them “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. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), p. 85.

2. Willa Cather, On Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), p. 92.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), p. 31.