SOURCE: Hively, Evelyn Helmick. “O Pioneers! In Sacred Fire: Willa Cather's Novel Cycle, pp. 37-49. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994.

[In the following essay, Hively views O Pioneers! from a mythological and cultural perspective.]

The first novel of the frontier, O Pioneers!, was begun certainly with Whitman's poem in mind. The young Willa Cather thought Whitman somewhat ridiculous, but admired him because “there is a primitive elemental force about him.” Alluding to him seems appropriate at the beginning of the first stage of the cycle for that reason and because, as she had said in the same essay, “He is so full of hardiness and of the joy of life. He looks at all nature in the delighted, admiring way in which the old Greeks and the primitive poets did” (KA,352). But for the classicist Erich Auerbach, the distinctive vocative form that the title uses recalls a construction that originates in the antique Roman verse of Virgil, Lucian, and Statius, and is not used again until the vernacular poetry of Dante.¹ With the title of the first book, then, there is reference to both the Virgilian aspect and the American.

O Pioneers! is, on one level, an examination of the relationship to the unsettled land of various types of people and ethnic groups. (The inscription, from the Polish writer Mickiewicz, a colleague of Michelet, is “Those fields, colored by various grain!”) The land itself is pre-eminent; it is personified to such a degree that, like Hardy's heath, it seems a protagonist. In the words of the novel, “the great fact is the land itself.” While the personalities of the human characters are static, the aspect of the land changes according to the temperament of the observer. The sentence introducing Alexandra's father is a significant one: “On one of the ridges of that winter waste stood the low log house in which John Bergson was dying.” For old Mr. Bergson, watching his strength and finally his life being depleted by the struggle with the land, it was “still a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why. Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendly to man” (OP,12-13). Young Emil Bergson, never really a part of this untamed land, finds its meaning a grim one: the land

seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness

(OP,9).

Later, a three-year drought is called the “last struggle of a wild soil against the encroaching plowshare” (OP,28).²

Other archaic ideas persist in this stage of civilization in O Pioneers! to show the mind-set of an early people. The dawn in the east again seems to be “the light from some great fire that was burning under the edge of the world” (OP,74). Nature “sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring” (OP,109). Like the ignorant primitive, the settler can “easily believe that in the dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever.” Yet the woman-goddess knows intuitively what is not apparent, that “down under the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood in one's heart; and the spring would come again!” (OP,117). The many pathetic fallacies of the book heighten the direct address to nature, as when Marie thinks of time in terms of space: “The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives” (OP,144).

The older generation of males in this story and in My Ántonia fail to subdue the land; early in both novels the father dies, making way for the establishing of a matriarchal society. As in the early agricultural societies, the land is an enigma, and no one knows how to farm it properly. The sacrifice of the father is made to create a new order through the emergence of the female. Alexandra begins to play the dominant role that women held in primitive agricultural society. The description of the land changes dramatically at the beginning of the second part: the earth, with its power of growth and fertility,

yields itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness. … The grain is so heavy that it bends toward the blade and cuts like velvet. There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back. Like the plains of Lombardy, it seems to rise a little to meet the sun. The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other

(OP,46).

The mating and intermingling of the air and earth point up Alexandra's dual role: she is at once identified with the feminine earth and appears wielding the masculine plow. Like the very earliest of fertility goddesses, she has the powers of both male and female. The wholeness of Alexandra, her capacity to encompass both masculine and feminine characteristics, is important to her role as goddess.³ Michelet insists that in order to exert power even the later male heroes of civilization should always combine male and female qualities in a single person. Although Alexandra accepts her dual role with the same ease with which she wears a man's long ulster—“as if she were a young soldier,” the maternal qualities of fruitfulness, imagination, and humanity are those that finally matter most, to her and to the world about her.⁴

Her strength, both physical and moral, is contrasted with the weakness of the men about her. “It is your fate to be always surrounded by little men,” a friend tells her, reminding the reader of ancient friezes and urns picturing larger-than-life goddesses surrounded by smaller male figures. Her argument with her brothers about the ownership of the farm leaves no doubt about the relative importance of the male and female to agricultural society: if they have contributed labor, she has been the source of the rarer more vital needs—intuition, imagination, and drive. The first description of Alexandra and the men in her family reveal much. She walks “rapidly and resolutely, as if she knew where she was going and what she was going to do next.” Emil is a little boy crying bitterly because of the cold. Her older brothers, Oscar and Lou, are physically strong but depend too much on their father and have little respect for nature. They become heads of families which neither honor the past nor presage the future. Alexandra alone is one of those creators whom Erich Neumann has described as forming the progressive element in a community at the same time that they retain the conservatism which links back to their origins.⁵

It is only Alexandra who can understand the land “and own it—for a little while.” Her relationship with the earth is an intensely personal one, as she becomes more than an observer of nature and identifies with its colors, shapes, and creative force. As she feels the future stirring, she acts as intermediary between nature and the people who do not understand, like Oscar, who wants to plant at the same time each year, regardless of weather conditions. She can feel in her own body “the joyous germination in the soil,” and the earth responds:

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

(OP,37-38).

The Genius that had been so unfriendly to man in John Bergson's view, could also, according to early Romans, act as both a protecting companion and a sense of mission to be fulfilled. In the Vichian scheme, every age is dominated by a spirit, a genius of its own. Here in the first stage of civilization, the divine is identified with the natural world.

The religious connotations of the more lyrical descriptions of nature prepare us for the emergence of Alexandra as a form of the Great Mother. Her appearance suggests the earliest of grain goddesses, her thick reddish-yellow hair wound in a tiara-like braid, the fiery ends escaping to make her head look like a double sunflower. The goddess as flower is a striking theme in archaic sculpture. Marie Shabata, whose role moves her into the mythic realms later in the story, wears poppies on her hat, and even her face resembles a poppy, the flower more frequently associated with the fertility goddesses.⁶

In many realistic ways Alexandra excels as a farmer, acting on Crazy Ivar's suggestion that the pigs—those animals sacred to the goddess—be kept in a clean pen, constructing the first silo on the Divide, increasing her acreage when others are selling to speculators. Even these decisions involve imagination, demonstrating her belief that a pioneer should enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves. But there is in Alexandra's decision a quality of mysticism that goes beyond mere imagination. When asked how she knows the price of land will rise, she says she can't explain it, “I know, that's all.” Observing the transformation of the land from “wild beast” to fertile farmland, she says that the farmers had little to do with it. “The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself.” Even the structure of the novel supports the mystical interpretation of Alexandra's success. The first chapter, “The Wild Land,” ends as she feels the future stirring; the second chapter, “Neighboring Fields,” opens sixteen years later, success achieved.

The vital contribution to her success is made by the strength of her unconscious life. On two levels—as symbol in the allegory of frontier civilization and as fertility goddess—Alexandra depends on her unconscious as the operative force. Her ideas are all impersonal ones; her mind is “a white book, with clear writing about weather and beasts and growing things.” She is a true chthonic deity in the early religious tradition in which, according to Vincent Scully, the land was not a picture—the landscape that the modern eye sees—but a “true force which physically embodied the powers that rule the world.”⁷ Alexandra's own realization of herself is described as almost a subconscious existence. One powerful drama of her unconscious life combines both her sense of herself as female and her personification of the primitive agricultural society. She has a recurring reverie of being carried across the fields by a large man who looks like the sunlight and smells like a ripe cornfield. What begins as a sexual fantasy when she is young turns into a kind of death wish as she grows older and tired, but the male figure remains consistently the consort of the goddess, representing fertility and resurrection.

As Great Mother, Alexandra is surrounded by other appropriate symbols. She lends religious significance to Crazy Ivar, the old man “touched by God” who lives in a clay bank so that he will not despoil nature, who reads from the Bible but interprets it in his own way, who knows instinctively how to tend both plants and animals. He is the archetypal figure of the “Wise Old Man” personifying the intuitive wisdom of the unconscious whose inspiration and secret advice guides the conscious personality of the hero. Ivar adds strength to the idea of Alexandra's divinity, calling her “Mistress,” a translation of the Greek Despoina, the appellation of the earliest of Great Mother emanations, and making a ritual of washing his feet at night after he comes to live with her, as if he were entering a sacred temple. He is described not as washing, but as “making his ablutions.” With his biblical attitudes, Ivar serves as a counterpoint, in his fear of temptation and his sense of evil, to the conviction of Emil that good was stronger than evil and was possible to men. The irony, of course, is that Ivar is a saintly figure and Emil, in the final view of his frontier community, is a man who has caused much evil.

The young Swedish women who work in the house have their origins in religious rituals, as well. They are always mentioned together as “the three,” just as goddesses often came in trios. Alexandra keeps them in the house not for the work they do, but for their beauty and gaiety. Both the hermit and the three young dancing goddesses are standard figures in early accounts of the Great Mother and, moreover, they reappear in Cather's next two novels in this first part of her cycle, leaving no doubt that they are more than incidental. In O Pioneers! the three maidens are repeated in a scene with Alexandra and her three nieces in the flower garden.

Two standard characters in this sacred drama are Alexandra's younger brother Emil and his best friend Amédée. In early liturgy and art, the young men close to the goddess are identified with the ears of grain which she holds; in O Pioneers! the identification is no less explicit. As Emil compares his unhappy love with Amédée's new marriage,

It seemed strange that now he should have to hide the thing that Amédée was so proud of, that the feeling which gave one of them such happiness should bring the other such despair. It was like that when Alexandra tested her seed-com in the spring, he mused. From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projected themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why

(OP,95).

Like many passages in Cather, this recalls one from Shakespeare: “If you can look into the seeds of time/And say which grain will grow and which will not … (Macbeth,1.3.58), which recalls, in turn, John 12:24: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” The concept was important to Cather; years later, she quoted the Shakespearean version in an essay on Thomas Mann.

Typical of final passages in the chapters of Cather's novels, this carries a heavy burden of meaning. It not only reinforces the idea of Alexandra as goddess, it also foreshadows the stories of Amédée and Emil as sacrificed gods. In the most primitive of the rituals of the Great Mother, the sacrifice of a beautiful vegetation god came at the time of the fall harvest to ensure the next year's grain. Just as primitive peoples chose the most virile of young men to propitiate the forces of fertility, Cather chooses to sacrifice Amédée, who not only is the head of a happy family, but also is the most productive farmer about. His fatal seizure comes in the wheat field on the first day of his harvest of the new crop.

Emil's love story, often interpreted as an almost unrelated episode, can be understood best in the terms of his relationship to Alexandra as fertility goddess. He appears only occasionally after he grows to manhood, since he lives on the Divide only during the summer; he disappears to the south, Mexico, for the winter and returns each June. He is the younger brother who is found frequently as a secondary figure in the cult of the Great Mother. His introduction as a young man compares him to a pine tree, the symbol of the vegetation god and his manhood; he is often seen wielding a scythe or a gun, to further signal the sexual scenes to come. Marie, the woman Emil loves, is presented in the first pages of the book as a young goddess in a circle of males to whom offerings of candy, pigs, and calves are made. As an adult her seductiveness, her constant smiles, and most of all, her need for love identify her with Aphrodite. Like that classical goddess, she is one of those women “who spread ruin around them through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too full of life and love” (OP,177). Aphrodite was borrowed by the Hellenic culture from the Asian chthonic religion, where she was related to Ishtar and Astarte and goddesses of many other names, and in the syncretistic world of the mysteries was worshipped as a fertility deity. One of her many emanations was as Mari in Paphos, her major center of worship. At other places her name was hyphenated as Aphrodite-Mari. Her aspect as a cruel goddess whose charms enslave men helps to explain the questions of Frank, the husband who has just killed Marie and Emil: “Why had Marie made him do this thing; why had she brought this upon him?” (OP,155). As in My Ántonia, the Aphrodite archetype is contrasted unfavorably with that of the older, wiser goddess, who is the Great Mother. In this drama, to Marie's Aphrodite, Emil plays Adonis, also an ancient Asian vegetation god who was adopted into the Greek Olympian panoply. His beauty, his seasonal wanderings, his sacrifice all point to the deliberate parallels. The deaths occur in late summer; as Emil leaves the church to find Marie the wheat stands ripe, and even the smell of ripeness has permeated the afternoon. The fertility god's usefulness for the season has ended.

Frank Shabata, Marie's husband, helps to establish the Adonis myth as the source of this story. Cather takes care to describe him both as the jealous war god Ares, who in some versions of the myth killed Adonis, and as the wild boar that Ares used as his disguise. His clenched fists, his savage energy, his constant “sense of injury and outrage,” indicate the attitude of brutality and violence that characterizes the war god. Mentioned pointedly in three passages, Frank's yellow cane assumes significance as the counterpart to Ares' lance. He is also certainly the boar, always a part of the Adonis myth. Much is made of his white teeth, the heavy stubble on his face, and his sulking “as if he could eat everyone alive.” Later, when Alexandra visits him in prison, his head is covered with bristles. His neck stiffens when he is angry to show that he is “one of those wild fellows,” something “not altogether human.”

The names of Aphrodite, Adonis, and Ares are used here because they are familiar names which emerged in both the fertility cults and classical mythology. However, in the syncretistic context of the myths and mysteries of the Hellenistic age, they can be exchanged for many other names of deities; the archetypal story of the earth mother and the divine son is universal in the religious rites of the time, and all of the myths are interrelated. In addition to the cross-fertilization of the myths of many regions, each myth had many versions, as might be expected of stories that spanned the entire Mediterranean area and eventually Europe during a period of two thousand years or more. Added to this incredibly rich and diverse background is Cather's own eclecticism—or syncretism—which makes hunting mythic patterns in her stories an adventure. Remarkably, patterns do appear, as in this consistent tale of a fertility god's sacrifice and resurrection, with characters, events, and symbols that are found in the earliest art and literature of the Western world.

After the deaths of Marie and Emil, two white butterflies, a symbol of resurrection, flutter in and out of the shadows, and “the last wild roses of the year opened their pink hearts to die.” The two lovers have become a part of nature. Alexandra will one day join these two, to complete her mission of creating life on the divide: “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!” (OP,180).

There are other interpretations of the story. L. V. Jacks explicates it as a version of the classical Pyramus and Thisbe myth.⁸ The story mentions the white mulberry tree at least four times, but not all of the elements fit. Multiple explications are inevitable in light of the syncretism of Cather's sources in the Olympian and the Oriental mystery religions, as well as the “two or three human stories” that the world knows. Indeed, she may well have had more than one myth in mind for a single story.

The fertility myth, however, is undeniably the predominant theme of O Pioneers!, as it is the chief expression of the consciousness of early agricultural society. As part of that myth, one of the book's major symbols is the wild duck, important because it is one of the water birds sacred to the Great Mother as well as one of the natural symbols, able to be interpreted only by priests, that Vico places in the divine stage of culture. When Alexandra in several passages reveals her inexplicable joy in seeing a duck, the reader can recall that many vases from the Hellenistic period picture ducks alongside goddesses, identifying them in our awareness of the culture. At the beginning of Alexandra's story Emil, after learning much about the water birds at Ivar's pond, asks:

“And is that true, Ivar, about the head ducks falling back when they are tired, and the hind one taking their place?” “Yes. The point of the wedge gets the worst of it; they cut the wind. They can only stand it there a little while—half an hour, maybe. Then they fall back and the wedge splits a little while the rear ones come up the middle to the front. Then it closes up and they fly on, with a new edge”

(OP,25).

This image shows the strength required of the pioneer leaders, of course; but throughout the book the stress is on the recurring cycles, the “little while” allotted to any human striving. Alexandra and Emil share a special day on the river watching a solitary duck swimming in the sunlight, an event that both find significant. Later Alexandra recalls that duck as a kind of enchanted bird that knew neither age nor change. But a darker, more portentous scene shows Marie's distress when Emil shoots five wild ducks—a scene that foreshadows the shooting of the lovers themselves, affirming the connection between the natural world and human events.

The connection between man and nature is what O Pioneers! is about, just as it is the heart of the mystery religions. The story of Aphrodite, Adonis, and Ares is part of the mythic content of the Great Mother mysteries. In some primitive versions, Aphrodite is also the Great Mother and both mother and lover of Adonis; Cather, however, follows the later versions such as that of Apollodorus in separating the roles of the goddess in the story in order to make it acceptable to public taste. In fact, in this ritual of the hieros gamos, or sacred marriage, and the resulting deaths of the lovers there are strong hints of their sacrifice as a couple: the terror of Marie's husband at sight of the mutilated and bleeding woman in his orchard, and Carl's comment in another context that maybe Marie was “cut to pieces, too.” (OP,177). Both the male and the female are sacrificed because they are the best available.

That sacrifice, so terrible that much is hidden from view of even the assassin, was the climax in early accounts of mystery rites, such as those of Homer and Hesiod. But other elements of mysteries appear throughout O Pioneers!, often in juxtaposition with Christian rituals. As Emil, an unbeliever, sits through the mass for his dead friend, he responds to the singing of Gounod's “Ave Maria” by thinking of his own Marie: “He seemed to discover that there was a kind of rapture in which he could love forever without faltering and without sin. … The rapture was for those who could feel it; for people who could not, it was non-existent” (OP,148). Both the denial of sin and the exclusiveness of the experience of rapture differentiate the attitudes of the initiates into the mysteries from those of the Christian communicants. Emil's emotions as he goes to meet Marie are described in the language of the liturgy of the mysteries: “He was at that height of excitement from which everything is foreshortened, from which life seems short and simple, death very near, and the soul seems to soar like an eagle. … The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death” (OP,149). The smell of ripened grain and the sunlight bring the transformation scene necessary to the mystery rites: “When he reached the orchard the sun was hanging low over the wheatfield. Long fingers of light reached through the apple branches as through a net; the orchard was riddled and shot with gold; light was the reality, the trees were merely interferences that reflected and refracted light” (OP,150). As he sees Marie, Emil puts his hand over his mouth—a sign of the initiate related to the etymology of the word mystery, “to close the eyes or mouth.” Marie's breast rises and falls—the primary symbol of the goddess, which is, as Segal shows, emphasized in the Theocritean idyll.

The scenes re-enacting the mystery rites involve only a few participants and take place in secluded natural settings. In contrast the Christian rituals in the novel—the cavalcade to greet the bishop, the combined funeral and confirmation service—are so public and open that only those who don't attend are noticed. From this first novel to the last in the cycle, Cather addresses the questions of comparative religion in subtle ways. In O Pioneers! Crazy Ivar is a link between the Christian and mystery religions.⁹ He is the one to find the bodies of the lovers, and his judgment is a Christian one: “It is fallen!” he sobs, signalling the fall from innocence. “Sin and death for the young ones!” significantly puts sin ahead of death in his report and denies Emil's revelation at the church that he can love without sin. “God have mercy upon us!” he cries, expressing the sense later echoed by Alexandra's maid that everyone must be punished for the sins of Emil and Marie. Ivar later refuses to believe that Emil can be in Paradise. In spite of these Christian views, Ivar has a role in some of the mystery rites. Some of his locutions, sounding vaguely biblical, are in the language of mystery liturgy: “When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open,” he says as he thinks of Alexandra. “She will have a message from those who are gone, and that will bring her peace” (OP,162).

Ivar's buggy ride to the graveyard to find Alexandra after a storm is another re-enactment of a ritual, with lanterns prominent in this nocturnal scene, a rain that obscures the distinction between earth and sky, and the sight of a white-robed Alexandra rising from a white gravestone. “When you get so near the dead,” she instructs Ivar, “they seem more real than the living” (OP,164). The storm after the crisis, with Alexandra looking like a drowned woman and even Ivar's mare getting “a ducking,” repeats the end of mystery rituals in which the final words were “Let it rain!” to complete the purification and insure the fertility resulting from the supposed “love-union” of the rain between heaven and earth.¹⁰ Another of the novel's many ritual scenes occurs when Alexandra and Carl walk through the fields to plan their future. Alexandra wears ritual white for this journey with stops at important landmarks—the pond and the furthest ridge. Carl, remembering the young Alexandra who had looked “as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself,” still sees her as integral with nature: gazing into the west, she has an expression of “exalted serenity” as the sinking sun shines in her eyes.

This language, combining the bucolic and the numinous, keeps an emphasis on Alexandra as goddess. But this story, like all pastorals, has two sides, and like the third Idyll of Theocritus, with the goatherd coming back to his mundane world, it brings the reader back to the realities of daily existence. In Lincoln to visit Frank Shabata in prison, Alexandra notes big brick buildings and an iron fence, hears sharp military commands to cadets, and talks to a young man from Cherry County, where the hay is fine and the coyotes find water easily. Frank's own reality is grim—he is called only 1037—and Alexandra shares his disgust with life, although she expresses the Heraclitan view that being what he was, Frank could not have acted otherwise. The pastoral is an enabling form in this and the other novels of the first stage; its very structure helps to achieve the integration in which “the design is the story and the story is the design,” as she said of Jewett's stories. Both David Stouck and Hermione Lee recognize the complexity of Cather's use of the pastoral form; but in the context of the mystery religions, there is an additional level of meaning. The frequent use of the pastoral made by Theocritus and Virgil to introduce the mysteries transfers some of that meaning to the literature that follows the tradition. The nature of allegory is especially important to both mundane and mythic meanings of many passages in pastoral poetry. Cather uses the pastoral as she uses all her sources—just as far as it serves her purpose. So when Stouck and Slote discuss O Pioneers! in terms of the epic, there need be no dissent, even though Cather described the book to Sergeant as a two-part pastoral. Critics of antiquity faulted Virgil for writing eclogues that were not true pastorals.¹¹ Cather, like Virgil, needed a wider view than the pure form, if there is such a thing, could afford. Considering her experimental sense of design, it is best to approach her work as C. S. Lewis recommends we view all art: by asking how far it participates in the conventions of any form. Using the pastoral form with energy and skill, Cather was able to bring the Aphrodite and Adonis myth to contemporary awareness in much the same way as Theocritus had speculated in his third idyll on that myth and the mystery cult surrounding it, and at the same time she brings the story of a new beginning of a nation.

She provides a sign that more of the national story is to come. At the end of O Pioneers! a storm delays a telephone call until the thunder has stopped. That incident has no meaning in the story, until the realization that the Vichian epoch that begins a culture's rise is signalled by a thunderclap. The meaning becomes clearer when the next thunderclap appears in Death Comes for the Archbishop, the novel of the ricorso, or the second rise. With her history of a culture, its applicable myths, and appropriate forms, Cather has begun in O Pioneers! an interpretation of the story of the American West.

Notes

1. Auerbach, Mimesis, 155.

2. The plow, so important to this first stage for Cather, figures as a sacred symbol in Herodotus, in Vico (the frontispiece of his Scienza Nuova prominently features the plow), and in Celtic histories.

3. Stouck, “Willa Cather and the Epic Tradition,” Prairie Schooner 46 (Spring 1972) calls Alexandra “the Eternal Mother”; Daiches, Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction, identifies her as a corn goddess.

4. Those qualities help to explain the impact of Alexandra on the modern reader: Gimbutas, in The Language of the Goddess, says, “The Goddess-centered religion existed for a very long time, … leaving an indelible imprint on the Western psyche.”

5. Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 377.

6. Frazer, The New Golden Bough, 204, explains the symbolism of the poppy by comparing its shape to the earth's, its uneven edges to mountains and valley; a sunflower's edges are more suggestive of the “shaggy ridges” of the Divide.

7. Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 3. Cather's feminine landscape is discussed in Fryer, Felicitous Space.

8. Jacks, “Willa Cather and the Classics,” Prairie Schooner, 25 (Winter 1961-62).

9. Murphy, in My Ántonia, finds a connection between biblical and pastoral themes. This volume contains a very useful chronology of Cather's life.

10. Jung, Man and His Symbols, 280.

11. Segal, 235