[In the following essay, Murphy applies different critical perspectives to O Pioneers!]

The dual nature of Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) has occupied its critics from the beginning, from bookman reviewer Frederick Taber Cooper's backhanded admiration for Emil and Marie's passionate affair as a vivid touch of Maupassant unfortunately outside the plodding main story to more thoughtful considerations by subsequent generations.¹ Cather herself described her work as a “two-part pastoral” developed from two stories—the earlier one titled “Alexandra” and the later “The White Mulberry Tree” and agreed with Elizabeth Sergeant that lack of a sharp skelton was a weakness.² The contrasting moods of the two seminal stories she announced in “Prairie Spring,” a poem included after the title and dedicatory pages of O Pioneers! The first nine lines of the poem tell of the harsh land and toil of Alexandra Bergson's story, and the remaining ten of the fierce necessity of youthful passion—the romance of Marie Shabata and Emil Bergson. David Stouck notes that “[t]he two stories woven together in O Pioneers! stretch back to Genesis. Alexandra's is the story of creation, the story of a human civilization being shaped out of a land as flat and formless as the sea. Emil and Marie's is the story of lovers cast from the earth's garden through sin.”³ However, there are more than two “parts” to O Pioneers!; the novel attests to Cather's surprising eclecticism as a writer, her ability to combine literary traditions and styles successfully. Between Alexandra's epic taming of the wild land and her final recognition of its eternity, Cather interweaves domestic drama and social satire, stories of friendship love and illicit passion, manslaughter and spiritual struggle. Developing from individual to universal concerns, the novel espouses the themes of Whitman's poetry, especially that of life everlasting in Leaves of Grass.⁴ The encompassing character of Alexandra becomes the integrating factor; through it Cather achieves unity despite her novel's dualistic beginnings and consequent lack of a “sharp skeleton.”

THE GENESIS DIMENSION

O Pioneers! opens on a January day in 1883 with a description of the embryonic settlement of Hanover, Nebraska, trying not to be blown away in the wind. The sea of prairie and sky are gray and dwarf the place, and snowflakes curl and eddy about haphazardly scattered dwellings “straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain.”⁵ The suggestion of chaos as described in Genesis is obvious: “the earth was without form and void, with darkness over the face of the abyss, and a mighty wind that swept over the surface of the waters.”⁶ This atmosphere established, Cather introduces her principals. Five-year-old Emil cries for his kitten and is given sweets by seven-year-old Marie, who has “tiger-eye” streaks in her eyes. Fifteen-year-old Carl Linstrum comes to the aid of Alexandra, four years his senior, already matronly and capable of Amazonian fierceness. While Marie flirts with Emil and her uncle's cronies, Alexandra and Carl share their loneliness and sustain each other. The relationships Cather will develop she thus defines within the context of the creation theme. The first chapter concludes with Alexandra, burdened with the sad knowledge that her father will soon die, rattling through the swirling darkness in a wagon with a lamp at her feet, making “a moving point of light along the highway, going deeper and deeper into the dark country” (18). She will be the creative force, bringing order to chaos: “God said, ‘Let their be light,’ and there was light; and God saw that the light was good, and he separated light from darkness” (Genesis 1:3-4).

In a low log homestead on a wintry waste without human landmarks patriarch John Bergson lies on his deathbed contemplating the futility of his efforts to make a country out of the wild land. So far, “[t]he record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers. … [The land] was still a wild thing that had its ugly moods. … Its genius was unfriendly to man” (19-20). Yet Bergson believes in the land's potential and recognizes Alexandra as the “one among his children to whom he could entrust the future of his family and the possibilities of his hard-won land” (24). He sees her outlined in the light of a lamp behind her and has her pledge to keep her brothers on the land—a pledge that will determine and limit her life. Unlike Isaac, who was tricked by his wife, Bergson deliberately entrusts the heritage to the unexpected one, his daughter rather than his eldest son, Oscar. In light too dim for him to see their faces, he tells Oscar and his younger brother Lou to be guided by their sister. They will bear a grudge against her like Esau bore against Jacob “because of the blessing which his father had given him. …” (Genesis 27:41).

Six months after Bergson's death, Alexandra, her brothers, and Carl make their way to Crazy Ivar's to buy a hammock and get advice on hog raising. As they enter rough and less populated country, “all broken up with hillocks and clay ridges (35), they discuss Ivar's fits and communings with the Lord, and his gifts for doctoring animals. A powerful dwarflike man with a face shining with happiness as he contemplates Psalm 104 (a creation hymn), Ivar resembles Noah. Gentle and protective toward all God's creatures, he is especially solicitous about the shooting of birds and warns the boys that “these wild things are God's birds. He watches over them and counts them …” (41). As Alexandra approaches Ivar's cave, its single window and door visible at the end of a broad, flooded pond suggest the ark; indeed, in describing a visit from a sea gull, Ivar explains, “Maybe she thought my house was a boat, she was such a wild thing” (40). God gave Noah charge over “all wild animals on earth” and “all birds of heaven” after the flood, and in establishing the covenant with Noah and “living things of every kind” discouraged the eating of meat (Genesis 9:1-17).⁷ Ivar “never ate meat, fresh or salt” (43). As an otherworldly man in communion with universal rhythms, Ivar will be used to contrast with the family bickering of the ensuing domestic drama and recall the cosmic atmosphere of the novel's opening.

Three years go by; harder times come to the Divide, and people are selling out, including the Linstrums. When Carl brings Alexandra the news that he will no longer be around to comfort her, she is standing in a dry garden patch, “[h]er thick, reddish braids, twisted about her head, fairly [burning] in the sunlight” (49). Still the creative force, she is distinguished from her neighbors and her brothers by her tenacity in staying: “Like most of their neighbors, [the Bergson boys] were meant to follow in paths already marked out for them, not to break trails in a new country. … A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves” (47-48). Alexandra possesses this pioneer imagination, and after convincing her brothers not to leave with the others, she experiences what Edward and Lillian Bloom term “mystic insight into divine causes,”⁸ enabling her to persuade her brothers to invest in more land and fulfill their father's dreams. Her face is radiant and turned toward that land “with love and yearning”—perhaps the first human face to so respond “since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages. … It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her” (65). The Genius of the Divide, previously “unfriendly to man” (20), now “bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before.” The creative order Alexandra represents is now obvious in the comfort she takes in the stars, in “their vastness and distance, and … ordered march” (70).

In part 2, “Neighboring Fields,” set thirteen years later, order has indeed come to the wild land—creation is complete and the earth fruitful. The drab land and sky have been replaced by a colorful checker-board of wheat and corn that “seems to rise a little to meet the sun” (76). The chaos evident in the opening section has developed into the geometrical precision of Midwestern roadways, complete with corresponding telephone wires. The wind has been harnessed to serve the new order: “light steel windmills tremble throughout their frames and tug at their moorings, as they vibrate in the wind that often blows from one week's end to another. …” The earth itself responds to the plow “with a soft, deep sigh of happiness” (75-76). “Then God said, ‘Let the earth produce fresh growth, let there be on the earth plants bearing seed, fruit-trees bearing fruit each with seed according to its kind.’ So it was; the earth yielded fresh growth, plants bearing seed according to their kind and trees bearing fruit each with seed according to its kind; and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:11-12).

Carl returns in this section to focus on Alexandra's character and accomplishments, and it is through him that Cather manages the transition from the story of creation to that of the fall. Rising one morning before dawn, he climbs the hill where he and Alexandra used to milk together and recalls his favorite image of her—one he renews each time he sees the sunrise: with “her skirts pinned up, her head bare, a bright pail in either hand, and the milky light of the early morning all about her … she looked as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself” (126). Like the generating light God made to govern the day, the sympathy evident in Alexandra's radiant face has made the wild land prolific, and the field Carl sits in is teeming with life: “Birds and insects without number begin to chirp, to twitter, to snap and whistle, to make all manner of shrill noises. The pasture was flooded with light …” (126-27). Carl then walks toward a pasture pond and sees Marie and Emil, who is breaking Crazy Ivar's law by shooting ducks. The bloody birds, “too happy to kill” (128), prefigure the violent deaths of the lovers. In this way Cather directs us toward the love story which will dominate part 4, “The White Mulberry Tree.” The Genesis implications of this story are simple and obvious—the lovers sin beneath a tree in an orchard and are then killed by Marie's jealous husband. Earlier, when Emil came to cut grass in the orchard, Marie joined him there and then left his side to pick cherries, saying “I'll call you if I see a snake” (151). The destruction of Alexandra's Eden is announced by Ivar after he discovers the bodies: “Mistress, mistress, … it has fallen! Sin and death for the young ones! God have mercy upon us!” (271).

DOMESTIC DRAMA AND SOCIAL SATIRE

Cather's account of creation and fall, of pioneering and its aftermath, is largely a domestic drama of Bergson family fortunes. As appointed head of the family Alexandra must cajole her reluctant brothers into cooperating with her schemes. Comments about Alexandra's mind being “slow, truthful, steadfast,” without “the least spark of cleverness” (61) and possessing little imagination (203) can be misleading, for they do not apply to her efforts to fulfill her pledge to her father. She is able to dissuade her brothers from selling out by using their mother against them and by appealing to Lou's fear of being cheated, explaining how a local land dealer is capitalizing on the discouragement of their neighbors. Having accomplished this much, she maneuvers them into selling cattle and taking loans to buy the Linstrum, Crow, and Struble farms. She has it all figured out—the duration of two loans, the amount of land to be purchased from each neighbor, the value of the land by the time the mortgages are due, etc. When Lou, who is envious of the wealthy and anxious to get ahead, balks, Alexandra applies family pride, that the Bergsons are better quality than their neighbors: “We ought to do more than they do, and see further ahead” (68-69). With Oscar, who is dull-witted and plodding, she applies sympathy, explaining that her plans will make life easier for him: “I don't want you to have to grub for every dollar” (70). Thirteen years later we are not surprised that Alexandra's is the most prosperous farm in the area, and that she experiments with new farming methods and has the first silo on the Divide. Seated at the head of a long table having dinner with her men, she is a boss lady, a successful business woman settling into the ample physical proportions of middle age.

The Bergson clan now includes the three families Cather assembles for a dinner party in Alexandra's dining room, which the Hanover furniture dealer “had conscientiously done his best to make … like his display window” (97). This setting of “highly varnished wood and colored glass and useless pieces of china … conspicuous enough to satisfy the standards of the new prosperity” is appropriate to Cather's criticism of the petty jealousies, suspicions, and material concerns characterizing the successful Bergsons. Their talk is in English because they have grown ashamed of their Swedish origins. Oscar, affluent but still dull, is jealous because Alexandra is buying a piano for Lou's daughter. Lou, affluent but still suspicious, fears gossip about Alexandra's keeping Ivar, now old and dependent, on her farm. Lou's wife Annie, an overdressed social climber, boasts of their new bathtub and daughter Milly's piano talents, pries into Alexandra's domestic economies to her own advantage, and tries to keep secret Alexandra's gifts to her children. Within view in an adjoining room the portrait of pioneer John Bergson, with “sad eyes that looked forward into the distance, as if they already beheld the New World” (104), gazes down on the bickering. Ivar had anticipated their complaints and expressed his fears about being sent to an asylum, telling Alexandra that conformity is now the ideal: “The way here is for all to do alike” (92). There is no longer a place “if a man is different in his feet or in his head,” or for those “who had been touched by God, or who had seen things in the graveyard at night and were different afterward.”

Cather reintroduces Carl Linstrum at this point to develop his relationship with Alexandra and provide an outside perspective on the changes that have come with prosperity. A failure according to the standards of this new country, he is on his way to Alaska to make his fortune. Lou and Oscar immediately sense a threat to Alexandra's share of the property and are decidedly unfriendly, while Annie takes pains to primp herself, boast about Milly's talents in piano and wood-burning (“You wouldn't believe what she can do with her poker” [110]), Lou's success, and that they will be moving into town “as soon as her girls are old enough to go out into company” (113). When Annie steps inside to prepare to depart, Lou begins to swagger about William Jennings Bryan and how the West “is going to make itself heard” (112). In the midst of this tirade, Annie reappears “in a hat that looked like the model of a battleship” (113). The scene, anticipating Sinclair Lewis, is a masterpiece of satire on the Midwestern inferiority complex, a combination of resentment toward outsiders and misguided attempts to impress them. The nastiness of the condition is exposed when Lou draws Alexandra aside and asks, “What do you suppose he's come for?” (113). Oscar, rousing himself from his dullness, adds “solemnly, as from the depths of a cavern[,] ‘He never was much account.’”

Alexandra's difference is, of course, a major theme of this aspect of O Pioneers! She has little interest in the showy side of prosperity, which explains her victimization by the local furniture dealer and the unfinished state of her house. Her favorite rooms are the kitchen and the sitting room containing the family furniture from the old log house and a few treasures from Sweden. Unlike Annie, she has little concern for clothes or hiding from Oscar what she chooses to buy for Lou's children. She is unaware of the social distinction of having a bathtub, and her reasons for wanting a piano for Milly are winsome for their honesty and innocence. Milly deserves a piano, she explains, because of “[a]ll the girls around here … taking lessons for years, … Milly is the only one … who can ever play anything when you ask her. I'll tell you when I first thought I would like to give you a piano, Milly, and that was when you learned that book of old Swedish songs that your grandfather used to sing” (103). Her attitude toward gossip is evident when she tries to quiet Ivar's fears about the asylum: “Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best” (94).

Cather does not create a perfect heroine, however. Like Lou and Oscar, Alexandra has shortcomings; unlike them, she is aware of her own and theirs. She confides to Carl that she has little to do with her brothers and that her independent ways alienate them. She fails to protest when Carl says he liked the old Lou and Oscar better, and she admits to the limiting effects of life on the land: “We grow hard and heavy here,” she says, “and our minds get stiff” (124). Confessing a preference for Carl's freedom from the land, she equates purpose and survival with a sense of the larger world: “If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I wouldn't feel that it was much worth while to work.” She is conscious of the adverse effects of her sacrifices in fulfilling her pledge to her father, and tells Lou and Oscar in her eventual falling out with them over Carl, “I certainly didn't choose to be the kind of girl I was. If you take even a vine and cut it back again and again, it grows hard, like a tree” (171).

Alexandra depends too much on her brother Emil and neighbor Marie to compensate for her deprivations. Providing for Emil gives her purpose, and his education and opportunities satisfy her need for the larger world. In fact, she denigrates her pioneer efforts by applying them exclusively to his future: “He shall do whatever he wants to,” she tells Carl. “He is going to have a chance, a whole chance; that's what I've worked for” (117). Their unique brother and sister relationship is poignantly dramatized when Emil prepares to leave for Omaha and Michigan to study law. Unknown to Alexandra, he is actually fleeing Marie and not very confident about his future. She, however, is full of confidence. “She felt no anxiety about Emil. She had always believed in him, as she had believed in the land.” (239). When he expresses discouragement, that Lou and Oscar would be better off poor, that “it gets worse as it goes on” (239), she cites Milly's generation and her father to bolster his hope and pride. She must believe in this brother's future; it is a matter of her own purpose and survival.

Alexandra's need for Marie is, first of all, for the confidante Carl had been before he moved and Emil before he left for college. Marie is also her intimate companion (as the maid Signa becomes after Marie's death). Marie and Alexandra enjoy each other's company and demonstrate their affection physically. This is not to suggest, as a recent critic has, that theirs is a lesbian affair in which Alexandra's passion for the younger woman is satisfied vicariously through Emil.⁹ What is satisfied vicariously is Alexandra's need for what Marie embodies and what Alexandra temporarily lacks or has sacrificed to pioneering on the land. She has Marie in mind when she tells Carl, “The young people, they live so hard. And yet I sometimes envy them” (119). She then lists examples of “hard” living: Marie's running away at eighteen to marry Frank, her refusal to be dampened by her husband's moods, her ability to work all day and dance all night, etc. “She's too young and pretty for this sort of life,” Alexandra comments. “We're all ever so much older and slower” (121). The complementary nature of the women's relationship is suggested when Carl observes them seated together in Marie's orchard like an impressionist painter's study:

Alexandra took off her shade-hat and threw it on the ground. Marie picked it up and played with the white ribbons, twisting them about her brown fingers as she talked. They made a pretty picture in the strong sunlight, the leafy pattern surrounding them like a net; the Swedish woman so white and gold, kindly and amused, but armored in calm, and the alert brown one, her full lips parted, points of yellow light dancing in her eyes as she laughed and chattered.

(135)

Marie shares with Carl the ability to appreciate Alexandra in ways her brothers cannot. When Lou and Oscar begin to suspect she might marry Carl, they try to argue her out of property rights (because she “always took it pretty easy” [170]) and ridicule her wanting to marry such “a tramp” (167) at her age: “[E]verybody's laughing to see you get took in. … Why, Alexandra, you are forty years old!” (172). She breaks with them at this point and suggests they see a lawyer. Adding to her disappointment, Emil also fails to understand her need for Carl; involved in his own difficulties with Marie, “[h]e felt that there was something indecorous in [Alexandra's] proposal, and she did seem to him somewhat ridiculous. There was trouble enough in the world, he reflected, … without people who were forty years old imagining they wanted to get married” (179). Marie, however, disagrees with Emil's view that his sister “wouldn't know how to go about” falling in love: “Oh, you don't know Alexandra as well as you think you do!” (154). She realizes that Carl appreciates Alexandra more than her family does, a fact established soon after his arrival, when he tells Alexandra, “You've seen yourself for so long in the dull minds of the people about you, that if I were to tell you how you seem to me, it would startle you” (132). After Lou and Oscar convince him to leave, he explains Alexandra's dilemma and includes himself among the deficient for letting them unnerve him: “What a hopeless position you are in. … It is your fate to be always surrounded by little men. And I am no better than the rest” (181). As during the early years of creation, Alexandra towers above the others during the period of prosperity when the Bergson family collapses about her. What remains for her to achieve is the love she deserves and a vision of life suitable to her heroic stature.

THE LOVE STORIES

The love theme of O Pioneers! contrasts friendship (Alexandra and Carl's) and passion (Marie and Emil's) and contributes to Alexandra's vision of life. While both love affairs are announced in the first chapter, when Alexandra seeks Carl's help and shares with him the bad news about her father's health, and the child Marie offers sweets to little Emil, the theme's connection to Alexandra's vision begins after she returns from Ivar's with advice on hog raising. She sits on the doorstep “dreamily” watching the boys swimming in the moonlit pasture pool and then directs her eyes to the sorghum patch where she will build her new pig corral (46). Her efforts must be directed away from herself—or, at least, substitute for more usual forms of self-realization—in order for her to fulfill her pledge to her father. Her accomplishment will depend on the channeling of sexual passion to the detriment of the conscious sexual self. This explains her surprising unawareness of Emil's affair with Marie and the nature of her own relationship to Carl.

By omitting the years between “The Wild Land” and “Neighboring Fields” sections when such self-discipline would be most difficult, Cather avoids presenting Alexandra's conflict, merely suggesting it in her recurring erotic fantasy of being carried across the fields by a gigantic man. Alexandra recovers from such lapses of independence and integrity by “pouring buckets of cold well-water over her gleaming white body …” (206). Her sense that this male figure is “yellow like the sunlight, and [has] the smell of ripe cornfields about him” suggests the extension of her sexual self to the land. During her happiest days she feels “close to the flat, fallow world about her, and [feels], as it were, in her own body the joyous germination in the soil” (204)—a sensation obviously related to the description at the opening of “Neighboring Fields”: “The brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, 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” (76).

This channeling of passion through the extension of self to land defines the Alexandra Carl meets when he returns. When he stops her from carrying his suitcase for him, she explains, “You see, I give myself away. I have only women come to visit me, and I don't know how to behave” (107). Her response to his hope that having Marie at the end of the old Linstrum path is not quite the same as having him there is a surprised look and confusion: “Why, no, of course not. Not the same. She could not very well take your place, if that's what you mean” (130). Carl becomes concerned about this unawareness of womanhood and draws her out accordingly:

“But you must see that you astonish me. You must feel when people admire you.”

Alexandra blushed and laughed with some confusion. “I felt that you were pleased with me, if you mean that.”

“And you've felt when other people were pleased with you?” he insisted.

“Well, sometimes. The men in town, at the banks and the country offices, seem glad to see me. I think, myself, it is more pleasant to do business with people who are clean and healthy-looking,” she admitted blandly.

(132)

Even when Alexandra contemplates marrying Carl her love for him is still essentially Platonic. In the “Winter Memories” section, long after he has departed to prove himself and have something to offer her, we are told that she “had never been in love, she had never indulged in sentimental reveries. Even as a girl she had looked upon men as work-fellows” (205). Alexandra is disappointed when Carl admits he is not big enough to live off her fortune and must wait a year to prepare for marriage, but she fails to realize that she too is deficient and must become aware of sexual love.

In sharp contrast to the quiet companionship shared by Alexandra and Carl, Marie and Emil's love blazes like the flaming wild roses among the bunchgrass in the Shabata orchard. Through this illicit affair, as Isabel Charles notes, “the passionate love of men and women … manifest[s] itself to Alexandra Bergson.”¹⁰ It also functions as the most dramatic element in a four-part pattern devoted to aspects of heterosexual relationships. In “Neighboring Fields” Cather carefully alternates between the two major love affairs and introduces those of Angelique and Amedee Chevalier and Signa and Nelse Jensen to reflect on various situations of love and marriage. When Marie reveals impatience with Signa for marrying the domineering Nelse instead of the Smirka boy she seems fond of, Alexandra explains that Swedish girls marry for practical reasons: “I guess we think a cross man makes a good manager” (229). Having eloped at her first infatuation and now deeply involved in another, Marie is irritated at this and stalks home. Discouraged when the happy newlywed Amedee pressures him about getting married, Emil compares his friend's hopeful situation and his own hopeless one to two grains of corn, one shooting toward the light and the other rotting in the earth. Amedee and Angelique are indeed enviable, balance passion and spiritual sharing, and find expression in a boy child. But Amedee dies of a ruptured appendix weeks after his son is born. The relationship is perhaps too perfect to survive in this world; the names even suggest otherworldliness, as does Cather's restriction of the couple to Sainte Agnes Church activities.

The hazards of relationships based on passion are evident in Marie's love for Emil and her marriage to Frank. Both are doomed to follow the route of infatuation, resentment, and violence. Marie's enthusiasm for life and refusal to be dampened by Frank's moods is a major cause of their trouble, and Emil, like Frank, a violent type susceptible to moods (Alexandra, for example, is frightened by his violent feelings [117]), resents Marie's light spirits at the Sainte Agnes fair while he suffers the agony of their love. When he accuses Marie of being shallow-hearted and flirting with other young men, she is as flippant with him as she is with Frank: “Perhaps I am,” she says. “What do you want me to do? Sit around and cry all day?” (230). Since passion is ungovernable all partners are insecure. Marie, for example, is as unreasonably possessive about Emil as Frank is about her and gets angry when Emil teases Angelique and stops with the French boys instead of rushing to her at the church supper. She admits being spoiled, of getting everything she ever wanted, from the Turkish lady toy to Frank Shabata, and becomes petulant when Emil allows one of his turquoise shirt studs to be auctioned off instead of giving it to her.

Waste and illusion define both Marie's marriage and her illicit affair. She surprises Emil by admitting that she was “[v]ery much in love” with Frank and that her way of perceiving him is really all that has changed: “Frank is just the same now as he was then, only then I would see him as I wanted him to be. I would have my own way” (231). Frank is guilty of similar self-deception; in the heat of his passion and frustration at Marie's banishment to a convent, he made her his destiny: “whereas he had been only half in love with her before, he now persuaded himself that he would not stop at anything” (145). Having experienced infatuation with Frank, Marie recognizes the ephemeral nature of her relationship with Emil. As a Catholic caught in a marriage based on long dead passion, she feels her life is over, considers Emil an exciting diversion, and finds it “pleasant to let the mind wander forth and follow a young adventurer who has life before him” (200). Although deeply infatuated with Emil, she tries to make him understand that their feeling for each other “won't last. It will go away, and things will be as they used to” (157). He, of course, rejects her estimate of the nature of their love.

Cather embellishes this romance with a variety of literary devices to indicate its escapist nature. Marie and Emil's scenes together are either among flaming roses, beneath the white mulberry tree, in costume (he as a Mexican and she a Gypsy fortune teller) at the Sainte Agnes Church supper, or in the wheatfields with fireflies twinkling and darting in the background. The consummation of their love is approached through a series of erotic gestures: early in the relationship Emil spills a handful of the “sweet, insipid fruit,—the long ivory-colored mulberries, tipped with faint pink”—(153), into her lap; later he performs the same gesture with “a handful of uncut turquoises, as big as marbles” (224). After Marie declares her love, she reflects, “They couldn't meet any more. They had spent the last penny of their small change; there was nothing left but gold” (249). When they do meet again beneath the white mulberry tree, the scene is reminiscent of Keats's “The Eve of St. Agnes,” a poem Cather might have had in mind when she named the French Church for this saint. As Marie lies in the orchard apparently asleep, her breast rising and falling faintly, Emil approaches: “The blood came back into her cheeks, her amber eyes opened slowly, and in them Emil saw his own face and the orchard and the sun. ‘I was dreaming this,’ she whispered, hiding her face against him, ‘don't take my dream away!’” (259). In the poem, Porphyro blends with Madeline's dream of him, although the distinction between dream and reality is established, and the lovers flee into the reality of the storm. In Cather's novel, no such distinction is made, and the lovers never leave the orchard. Their discovery and killing by Frank recalls the tale told by Francesca da Remini in canto 5 of Dante's Hell, how she and her young brother-in-law Paolo were killed by her husband Gianciotto when he discovered them in the act of love.

Throughout the romance of Marie and Emil, Alexandra functions as a mundane figure of reality having a chilling effect on their love. During the church supper, Marie stiffens at her touch: “There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain” (226). She anticipates seamstress Augusta in Cather's later novel The Professor's House, who is “like the taste of bitter herbs. … Seasoned and sound and on the solid earth she surely was, and, for all her matter-of-factness and hard-handedness, kind and loyal.”¹¹ Surrounded by the ruin left in the wake of Marie's, Frank's, and Emil's passion, Alexandra and Carl survive to develop an older relationship based on friendship.

THE WHITMAN DIMENSION

The fireflies, wheatfields, mulberries, wild roses, and lush grass surrounding Marie and Emil's lovemaking also suggest inevitablity and naturalism. The dark stains on the orchard grass and the attitudes of the bodies in death tell “only half the story. Above Marie and Emil, two white butterflies from Frank's alfalfa field were fluttering in and out among the interlacing shadows; diving and soaring, now close together, now far apart; and in the long grass by the fence the last wild roses of the year opened their pink hearts to die” (270). This other half of the story is one of instinct and necessity. Marie's prayers and religion are powerless before the attraction she and Emil feel for each other. Although Ivar cries sin as he brings Alexandra the news that shatters her world, the lovers are finally absolved by Carl, who compares their relationship to “something one felt in the air, as you feel the spring coming, or a storm in summer” (305). Attempting to soften Alexandra's bitterness toward Marie, he explains that she and Emil tried hard to control their feelings but that some women “spread ruin around them through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too full of life and love. They can't help it. People come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter” (304). Cather's passionate romance thus dramatizes the natural law, while the story of Alexandra framing it celebrates the law of restraint. The same kind of sympathetic dualism is evident throughout The Scarlet Letter. When his lovers decide to flee and the sun floods the forest, Hawthorne comments on the two laws: “Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth—with the bliss of these two spirits!”¹²

The cosmic vision advanced by the tragic circumstances in O Pioneers! and ultimately by Carl is unquestionably informed by the poetry of Walt Whitman. Not only did Cather take her title from Whitman's “Pioneers! O Pioneers!,” but her prose approximates his free verse in lyric passages devoted to what he describes in paragraph 3 in “Song of Myself” as “The procreant urge of the world. / Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex. …”¹³ At the beginning of “Neighboring Fields,” for example, air and earth “are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other” (77); also, the responsive earth “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” (76). This creative urge explains Alexandra's sensation of germinating soil, her fantasy of being carried across the fields by a gigantic earth figure, and her spiritual communion with the Genius of the Divide. The “love and yearning” she feels for the “free spirit which breathes across” the land (65) resembles the intercourse between poet and soul in Whitman's paragraph 5, which concludes with the insight that creation is one, “that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,” and relates the universal spirit to the common grass “sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones …” (91-109).

Alexandra's consciousness of social ostracism and death as well as illicit passion is managed through other people, as in Whitman's poem, where the persona first observes and then becomes those involved in a full range of life experiences. During her visit to the graveyard a few months after Emil's death Alexandra feels carried back into the dark before birth: “Maybe it's like that with the dead,” she tells Ivar. “If they feel anything at all, it's the old things, before they were born …” (281). Her realization that death is not painful or frightening results from Whitmanlike introjection, as in “The Sleepers,” where the persona identifies with the dead state: “A shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie in the coffin, / It is dark here under ground, it is not evil or pain here, it is blank here, for reasons” (66-67). Alexandra's conjoining of birth and death is a major insight in paragraph 49 in “Song of Myself,” although reversed:

To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,
I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.

(1289-93)

The earth lover of Alexandra's fantasy is revealed after the graveyard episode. As he stands in the doorway of her room with his head covered she recognizes him as Death, “the mightiest of all lovers” (283). Such conjoining of love and death is a favorite Whitman theme, basic to “Song of Myself” and the particular subject of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” where the poet fuses the love song of the grieving bird with the “strong and delicious word” death whispered by the sea (174-83).

Having identified Death, Alexandra decides to visit Frank Shabata in the State Penitentiary in Lincoln, where she experiences his revulsion at his deed, his confusion between the wife he loved and the woman who wronged him, and the guilt he feels for neglecting Marie. Alexandra is able to identify with this changed, not altogether human prisoner, and share his lack of future and feeling of imprisonment: “A disgust of life weighed upon her heart …” (298). In spite of her despair, however, she will petition for the release of this man who killed her brother. As when she protects Ivar from those who would have committed him, she uplifts and speaks for the downtrodden, the ostracized, as the poet in paragraph 24 of “Song of Myself”: “Through me many long dumb voices, / … of prisoners and slaves, / … of thieves and dwarfs …” (508-10).

Carl returns to Nebraska to rescue Alexandra from her dark night of the soul and help her toward the cosmic vision for which her experiences have prepared her. After changing from mourning clothes to a white dress, she walks the sunny fields with him and discusses the inevitability of passion and the future. She reveals that on the train from Lincoln she felt again the spirit of the land, its comfort and freedom. She realizes now that the land has a wider future than the Bergson family, that her efforts were not confined to Emil: “We come and go, but the land is always here. And those who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while” (308). Cather's final words, that the land will receive hearts like Alexandra's to give them out again in various forms of life, echo the conclusion of Whitman's great poem: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles” (1339-40).

Alexandra Bergson, then, unifies O Pioneers! Hers is the creative force bringing wild land to productive order. Aside from pampering Emil, she remains uncorrupted by the materialism of success evident in Lou and Oscar. Her blindness toward her own accomplishments and toward relationships beyond friendship between men and women is challenged by the tragic affair which deprives her of Emil and exposes Marie's destructive passion. Finally, passing through a dark night of the soul and sharing Frank's horror, she is led by Carl to a new, universal vision of the land and its people.

Notes

1. Cooper's review appeared in Bookman, 37 (Aug. 1913), 666-67. Among recent critics, David Daiches in Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1951) sees the first part of the novel as arising “from a different impulse and … built on different underlying rhythms than later sections which deal with the love of Emil and Marie …” (p. 22); John Randall in The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather's Search for Value (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) detects the logical sequence of the two parts, that Cather turned to spontaneity in human relationships “after exploring spontaneous emotion in relation to nature and the land …” (p. 76).

2. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant in Willa Cather: A Memoir (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 1963) describes Cather's recognition of the dualistic nature of the novel (pp. 86, 91).

3. David Stouck, Willa Cather's Imagination (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1975), p. 31.

4. James Woodress notes the Whitman connection in Willa Cather: Her Life and Art (New York: Western Publishing Company, 1970), pp. 158-59, as does Bernice Slote in “Willa Cather: The Secret Web,” in Five Essays on Willa Cather: The Merrimack Symposium, ed. John J. Murphy (North Andover, Mass.: Merrimack College, 1974), pp. 11-12.

5. Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, Sentry Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), p. 3; hereafter cited in the text.

6. Genesis 1:1-2; subsequent references are to The New English Bible with the Apocrypha: Oxford Study Edition, ed. Samuel Sandmel, M. Jack Suggs, and Arnold J. Tkacik (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976).

7. Ibid., notes to Genesis 9:1-17, pp. 8-9.

8. Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom, Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, Arcturus Books, 1964), p. 18.

9. Deborah G. Lambert, “The Defeat of a Hero: Autonomy and Sexuality in My Ántonia,” American Literature, 53 (Jan. 1982), 682.

10. Isabel Charles (Sister Peter Damian), “Love and Death in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!,” CLA Journal, 9 (Dec. 1965), 144-45.

11. Willa Cather, The Professor's House (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 280-81.

12. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed., ed. Sculley Bradley et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 145-56.

13. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (ll. 45-46), in Leaves of Grass: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973); hereafter cited in the text.