[In the following essay, Carden explores the role of frontier mythology and national imagery in O Pioneers!]

READING THE NATIONAL ROMANCE

Although definitions and descriptions of America have varied considerably over time, one aspect of the national imaginary remains constant, if contentious: America is at heart a frontier nation, newly born, created out of the wilderness. Its character and spirit can be traced back to and accounted for by its frontier origins. This ideology of national identity was given coherent and persuasive articulation by the influential historian Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 address at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Discussing “the significance of the frontier in American history,” he proposes that to study the “advance of the frontier,” the “men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history” (4; emphasis added). Turner identifies the frontier as the primary factor responsible for “the formation of a composite nationality for the American people” (22) and characterizes “the forces dominating” this “American character” (3) as those of the rugged male pioneer, thus claiming national history and identity as male properties.¹

Turner and his adherents define the uniqueness of American character through an idealized and nostalgic vision of America as a “wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top” (Slotkin, Regeneration 5); in the “virgin soil of the frontier” (Turner 21), this “thrusting” male pioneer enacts the violent heroics of masculine creativity that expand national borders. The wilderness “appeal[s] to [him] as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a higher type of society,” drawing out the “manly exertion” (Turner 261) that produces and enforces national sovereignty. Richard Slotkin has proposed that violence “is central to both the historical development of the Frontier and its mythic representation” (Gunfighter 11), adding that “what is distinctively ‘American’ is not necessarily the amount or kind of violence that characterizes our history but the mythic significance we have assigned to the kinds of violence we have actually experienced, the forms of symbolic violence we imagine or invent, and the political uses to which we put that symbolism” (13).

Among the many uses of this symbolism, naturalized to the point of invisibility, is the production of a national erotics of male dominance. In the romantic script of frontier violence, America was begotten by self-made men on the sometimes pliant, sometimes resistant, but always feminized wilderness.² Annette Kolodny's work in The Lay of the Land, tracing the prolific and aggressive equation of American landscapes with “the female principle of gratification” (6), establishes that there is nothing “new” about this “new world”: it materializes around the oldest of gender/power dynamics—the woman-nature/male-culture binary. Equating nation-building with male sexual conquest, the romantic version of American history emphatically closes down women's access to the scene of self-making by equating “woman” with the “fair, blank page” for male creativity, with the wilderness that men conquer, subdue, and transform. As I have pointed out elsewhere,³ this historical narrative demands that women find fulfillment as productive bodies, as the fertile ground for a male's inscription of his story, a naturalized and nationalized biological destiny that positions women as mothers, and mothers, in Eva Cherniavsky's terms, “at/as the phantasmatic limit of the political order” (2).

Nation-building may evoke “the idea of popular unity,” but, Anne McClintock argues, it has “historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference” (89). Turner's narrative of the frontier serves to organize and prioritize a fragmented and discontinuous set of stories about American beginnings around an eroticized process of male self-making. And, because it establishes the “really American part of our history,” the valuable elements of American character, and the proper direction of national destiny in a male-dominated heterosexual romance, this frontier mythology also prescripts roles for men and women in the nation's best and most promising future. The presentation of history as romance functions as an embodying discourse; it both sanctions and perpetuates binary models of gender difference, with material consequences for individual American subjects. The editors of Nationalisms and Sexualities observe that to say “nation is ‘imaginary’ is not to consign it to the category of (mere) fiction; if it is a ‘dream’ it is one possessing all the institutional force and affect of the real.” Discourses of nationalism “create sexed bodies as public spectacles, thereby helping to instill through representational practices an erotic investment in the national romance” (11-12).

Willa Cather published her Nebraska novels O Pioneers! and My Ántonia in 1913 and 1918, respectively, but they take place in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the years directly before and after the frontier was declared “closed” by the internal Census in 1890.⁴ She writes about the frontier in an era infused with nostalgia for a mythologized American past and with anxiety about America's post-frontier purpose. In 1903, Turner observed that while “the free lands are gone” and “the material forces that gave vitality to Western democracy are passing away,” it is “to the realm of the spirit, to the domain of ideals and legislation, that we must look for Western influence upon democracy in our own days” (261). He cites American imperial ventures as “the logical outcome of the nation's march to the Pacific,” an outcome that obliges America “to reconsider questions of the rights of man and traditional American ideals of liberty and democracy, in view of the task of government of other races politically inexperienced and undeveloped” (315).

This urgent turn-of-the-century issue of the preservation and promulgation of “dominant individualism” (37) through “manly exertion” coincides with another question of “the rights of man” in connection with a “politically inexperienced and undeveloped” group closer to home—American women. In her fiction, Cather confronts and challenges gender-specific narratives of the nation along with complexities she faced as an unconventional woman at a time when tangible anxiety about the male supremacy that had served to explain the nation to itself was attended by slippage in traditional male/female power relations.⁵ Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note that in the mid-nineteenth century the notion of a “battle of the sexes” became “a trope for struggle over political as well as personal power” (War 6); the “entrance of the ‘gentler sex’ into unknown territory,” their struggles for suffrage and for legitimacy in the universities and professions, hinted that “a world that had previously been a male empire might now become a no man's land, a disputed domain” (17). Scientific and medical establishments responded to this encroachment by defining women who experienced discomfort with traditional roles as neurasthenic hysterics or as male-identified deviants.⁶ At no point in her life could Cather have been held up as a representative of “the gentler sex,” the delicate and submissive “angel in the house” and paragon of “true womanhood” exalted by middle- and upper-class American culture. As an adolescent she “distinguished herself from other Red Cloud girls by cropping her hair, donning boyish clothes, and naming herself ‘William Cather, Jr.’” (O'Brien, Willa 96); as a college student she formed intense friendships with women and cut a “disturbingly androgynous figure” (121); as an adult she maintained her commitment to female friendships while challenging traditional gender/power arrangements in her fiction (140-41). Although commentators differ over the extent to which a lesbian consciousness can be discerned in her writing,⁷ her discomfort with hegemonic gender-role expectations comes out in novels that redefine the place of women in the nation.

Cather situates her scenes of alternate gender construction on the Nebraska frontier of her youth. In her biography Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, Sharon O'Brien explores the impact of Cather's frontier experience on her writing. Moving from Virginia to Nebraska at a young age, she “was not merely exchanging one landscape for another: she was moving from an inscribed to an unwritten land” (61). “When I strike the open plains,” Cather herself remarked, “I'm home. I breathe differently. That love of open spaces, of rolling open country like the sea—it's the grand passion of my life” (qtd. in O'Brien 68). Many of Cather's critics have pointed out links between landscape and identity as central to her fiction. Judith Fryer, in her study of “the relationship of space to the female imagination, a function not to be divorced from behavior” (49), suggests that Cather's “imaginative structures” (204) spring from a relation between body and earth. Laura Winters argues that place, “like consciousness,” is “that which surrounds us always,” and that Cather's characters “do not simply live in places; they live places emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually” (3)—and, I would add, bodily.⁸

While frontier mythology provides the motivating energy and critical focus of O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, in these “novels of the soil” Cather takes up its sexually-charged vocabulary in order to posit an alternate “erotic investment in the national romance.” Using this vocabulary, especially the woman-earth equation, Cather's frontier stories restage the romancing of the wilderness—that paradigmatic activity of the self-made man—by situating women in his place. These “self-made women” function not as substitutes but rather as supplements, in Homi K. Bhabha's sense of a supplementary “strategy of intervention,” which he describes as “similar to what parliamentary procedure recognizes as a supplementary question.” This type of question “is supplementary to what is put down on the order paper,” and because it is “‘after’ the original, or in ‘addition to’ it,” it has “the advantage of introducing a sense of ‘secondariness’ or belatedness into the structure of the original. The supplementary strategy suggests that adding ‘to’ need not ‘add up’ but may disturb the calculation” (305). In O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, Cather inserts her characters into the interplay of landscape and body that gives form to the national romance—that pivot where patriarchal ideologies of nation-building meet those of gender—opening it to the very possibilities it seeks to close down, disturbing its “calculation” of American history and identity. Focusing on female activity and agency, Cather allows her protagonists a kind of alternate self-making through creative fertility on the frontier prairie. While she accounts for this fertility in the vocabulary of the female earth/earthy female trope, she adds terms that alter its embodying affects and effects for individual women. This renarration constitutes not simply or only an address to the dominant version of frontier history, but also a strategic intervention into the structure of the social field it engenders; Cather's novels supplement the historical “order paper” that legitimizes specifically gendered uses of America's past.

THE SELF-MADE WOMAN IN O PIONEERS!

The opening pages of O Pioneers! introduce the novel's heroine, Alexandra Bergson, as a “tall, strong girl” who walks “rapidly and resolutely, as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do next.” She is dressed in “a man's long ulster,” which she wears “not as if it were an affliction, but as if it were very comfortable and belonged to her; carried it like a young soldier” (5). Alexandra's “resolute” walk, confident demeanor, and ease in men's clothing immediately distance her character from any suggestion of female delicacy and docility. But, following on the heels of this demonstration of self-reliance, she is reinvested in traditional signifiers of femininity as she performs the role of surrogate mother to her brother Emil. Then, as if to further this cause, the narrative views her through the admiring eyes of a travelling salesman, who “gaze[s] stupidly” at her “shining […] hair” (5) and exclaims, “‘My God, girl, what a head of hair!’” Alexandra, however, meets this embodying gaze with “a glance of Amazonian fierceness” that is, according to the narrator, “unnecessary” in its “severity” (6). Reporting her divergence from conventional gender signs, the text both admires and retreats from her demonstration of strength and confidence.

Alexandra's father, however, appreciates her not for her feminine wiles, but for her “resourcefulness and good judgement” (15), and it is with Alexandra, rather than her brothers, that he discusses farm business. As he dies, he “entrust[s] the future of his family and the possibilities of his hard-won land” (16) to her, telling his sons to “‘keep the land together and to be guided by your sister. I have talked to her since I have been sick, and she knows all my wishes’” (17). The farm prospers and expands under Alexandra's administration, but her assumption of a management role that is coded male is grudgingly accepted only because it is drawn on her “father's account” (38). Even though Alexandra describes herself as the repository of her father's desire for the land, keeper of his pioneer dream, her crossing of gender boundaries renders her brothers anxious and self-conscious. Denying her the status of independent landowner, they see her instead as a conduit of inheritance, a place marker connecting their children to their father's patrimony. “The property of a family,” they believe, “really belongs to the men of the family, no matter about the title” (105). Anxious that no land associated with their father's homestead slip out of the lines of inheritance they claim as their right as men, they discount their sister's role as creator and characterize her as an unnatural woman. Alexandra herself is both proud of her accomplishments and aware of the “unnaturalness” of her position. When her brothers accuse her of unfeminine hardness, she responds: “Conditions were hard. Maybe I would never have been very soft, anyhow; but 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” (107). She argues that the demands of circumstance compel her deviant femininity and attributes agency not to her desire and skill but to “conditions” produced by frontier life.

But Cather insists that Alexandra's relation to the land is rooted deeper than the titles in the county clerk's office can signify. Her brothers view the land as their patrimony, and to their father the “wild land he had come to tame” (13) is “an enigma” (14), a “wild thing” on which he can make “but little impression” (13). In opposition to her father's failure and death and her brothers' fear of public opinion and focus on money and status, Alexandra's experience of the prairie becomes an alternate basis for understanding space claimed as American:

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.

(41-42)

Here the narrator defines the vision that positions Alexandra as a hero of the earth: she understands the prairie as a growing and vital entity unto itself and honors what it is naturally inclined to grow rather than forcing incongruent production on it. She has “faith” (41) in the prairie, and it is this faith, this relation with the already valued earth, rather than the authority of ownership vested in the name of the father, that Cather identifies as the founding moment of American history. Alexandra's will and the spirit of the Divide are not opposed, but cooperative forces; her success is accomplished not by the violent penetration and conquest glorified in the dominant narrative of national origins, but by mutual and conjoined desire.

During years “of drouth and failure, the last struggle of a wild soil against the encroaching plowshare” (31), her brothers want to leave, but Alexandra “stand[s] up for [the] country” (35). She buys land while others sell because she “know[s]” that it will increase in value: “‘When you drive about over the country you can feel it coming’” (43). This intuition is rooted in bodily identification with the prairie; she feels “as if her heart [is] hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she [feels] the future stirring” (45).

Although the narrator wants to cast Alexandra as agent of natural fertility, occasional reservations and contradictions disturb this equivalence. The text simultaneously asserts that Alexandra is “destined to succeed while so many men broke their hearts and died,” and that she won the “struggle” with the “old wild country” (51; emphasis added). Alexandra herself insists that she has done nothing coercive to create her farm, that “the land did it. […] It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still” (74). And O Pioneers! confirms her vision of the always-fertile earth in the triumphal productivity of the farmland. The narrator marvels as

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. […]

There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. […] The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness.

(49-50)

Alexandra's faith in the land has been validated in sensually-rendered and almost effortless production from the receptive, eagerly fertile earth. Her productivity is congruent with the “destiny” of the country; Alexandra stands in for the America made on the frontier—the history of her country begins in her pioneering heart. Here, the frontier appears not as the site where forms and practices of male hegemony are enacted, but rather as a liminal space where binary delineations of gender loosen their hold.

The text pushes aside the occasional ambivalence of the “destiny” versus “struggle” accounts of Alexandra's creation of her farm in favor of a sustained focus on her harmonious union and material identification with the land, on that happy conjunction of “strength” and “resoluteness,” “frankness” and “joyousness.” She is “sunn[y]” and “vigorous,” and “look[s] like one of the big double sunflowers that fringe her vegetable garden” (56-57). In the eyes of her childhood friend Carl Linstrum, she walks “straight out of the morning itself” (80). The narrator describes her mind as “a white book, with clear writing about weather and beasts and growing things. Not many people would have cared to read it; only a happy few. She had never been in love, she had never indulged in sentimental reveries. Even as a girl she had looked upon men as workfellows. She had grown up in serious times” (130). This “serious” pioneer experience produces gender outside traditional heterosexual arrangements. Related to a fertility disconnected from heterosexual romance, Alexandra is happiest “when she [is] close to the flat, fallow world about her,” and can feel “in her own body the joyous germination in the soil” (129). With O Pioneers! Cather posits an interpenetration of the earth and the female body, but sidesteps the vocabulary that merges “the feminine” with the inert and insentient landscape awaiting the male intervention that will shape it into meaningful form. The already-fertile prairie comes to fruition through Alexandra's empathy and cooperation, and, although these traits are customarily assigned to feminine identity and often enforce women's silence and passivity in patriarchal culture, here they lead to power and success.

The “map-like prospect of field and hedge and pasture” (68) of Alexandra's prosperous farm indicates that her “house is the big out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself best” (54). By contrast, the interior of her house seems “curiously unfinished and uneven in comfort” (54). Rooted not in the domestic sphere but rather in “the soil,” in an alternate space of female creativity, Alexandra produces not children but farms and her creative fertility serves no husband, adorns no household. The narrator does not mourn her childlessness or suggest that her biological destiny remains unfulfilled—her farms stand in as evidence of her fertility.⁹

However, this triumphant story of female creativity is complicated through the character of Marie Shabata, Alexandra's friend and alter ego, who, as she becomes increasingly unhappy in her marriage to a bitter and possessive husband, falls in love with Alexandra's brother Emil. When Alexandra refuses to acknowledge Marie's desperation and fails to recognize her relationship with Emil, the narrator returns to her relation to the earth to explain her lack of perception:

If Alexandra had had much imagination she might have guessed what was going on in Marie's mind, and she would have seen long before what was going on in Emil's. But that […] was Alexandra's blind side. […] Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence; like an underground river that came to the surface only here and there, at intervals months apart, and then sank again to flow on under her own fields. Nevertheless, the underground stream was there, and it was because she had so much personality to put into her enterprises and succeeded in putting it into them so completely, that her affairs prospered better than those of her neighbors.

(129)

Having invested traditionally valued feminine energies of empathy, sensitivity, and loving service in the soil, Alexandra misrecognizes heterosexual desire and its consequences. She may be more prosperous than her neighbors, but the narrator suggests that her “complete” investment in the earth leaves her “self” un-“realized,” that in renouncing the qualities the text reinscribes in Marie, Alexandra renounces desirable aspects of female subjectivity.

As Alexandra applies her energy to “the order and fine arrangement manifest all over [her] great farm” (54), she grows slow, orderly, and patient—possibly stunted—like the vine “cut back again and again.” She tells Carl: “We grow hard and heavy here. We don't move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff” (78). Marie, however, is not reconciled to this life of “always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain—until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released” (159). To Marie, the farmland's orderly “map-like prospect” signifies repression of female desire.¹⁰ However, while the Marie-Emil plot seems to cast an ambivalent light over Alexandra's alternative to heterosexual romance, it also functions as a sort of underhanded reinforcement. The lovers' deaths, Gilbert and Gubar suggest, reflect Cather's “sense of the fatality of heterosexuality” (“Lighting” 193) and serve to illustrate the violence of the position that Alexandra has escaped.

Adding to the ambivalent relation of female desire to the prairie is Alexandra's imagining of a male spirit of the land¹¹ in her recurring dream of

being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by some one very strong. It was a man, certainly, who carried her, but he was like no man she knew; he was much larger and stronger and swifter, and he carried her as easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat. [… S]he could feel that he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him.

(Cather, Pioneers 131)

This “Genius of the Divide” seems to correspond with “the air”—the spirit—that we saw earlier “curiously mated and intermingled” (50) with the fecund earth, an association that would seem to reinstate the old male-spirit/female-matter binary. The Genius is related to the sun that governs the fertility of the earth, and Alexandra imagines herself as one of his products, “a sheaf of wheat.” He empties her of will and agency, and overriding her “ang[er] with herself” for these reveries is her luxuriant sense of surrender to the masterful Genius who takes “from her all her bodily weariness” (131). Later, after Marie's and Emil's deaths, she feels “actually tired of life” (183) and experiences “the old illusion” again:

He was with her a long while this time, and carried her very far, and in his arms she felt free from pain. [… F]or the first time in her life, she saw him, saw him clearly. […] His shoulders seemed as strong as the foundations of the world. 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.

(183)

This fantasy shifts the text's erotics of production from an alternative female desire in a natural, uncompelled fertility to a male-dominant dynamic. The Genius, who comes to Alexandra at moments of weariness and weakness, suggests her need for relief from the pressures and responsibilities of her position as an independent landowner. And the projected resolution of this dilemma, the long-desired end to her “wait,” seems to be in death.

The text gestures toward a solution by relieving Alexandra of her isolation with the projection of her “safe” (199) marriage to her rather ineffectual friend Carl.¹² This resolution may move toward reinscription of heterosexual structures for identity, but it does not displace Alexandra's relation with the earth; Carl understands that her commitment to him is secondary to her commitment to her land, affirming that “You belong to the land […] as you have always said. Now more that ever” (198). The text suggests that the ultimately fulfilling union will be with the fertile prairie—the Spirit of the Divide will end her “wait” when he carries her home to the female earth: “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!” (199). …

SELF-MADE FERTILITY AND SUPPLEMENTARY HISTORIES

In O Pioneers! and My Ántonia Cather's female protagonists live an alternate American dream, not a utopian fantasy of unfettered freedom. Cather does not simply replace the self-made man with a woman, nor does she project an uncompromisingly radical break with established concepts of nation-building. Instead, she recasts the starring role in the national romance with pioneering women who are both self-created and subject to history; Cather's novels reproduce the ideology of the “natural” American woman as fertile body, while simultaneously locating that fertility in a female desire that exceeds dominant models of gender- and nation-building. Although the novels flirt at points with masculinist articulations of female fertility, they ultimately project powerful and self-reliant female figures who work out ways to create their comfortable spaces.

These alternative locales materialize out of negotiation with traditional gender-role expectations and male-dominant narratives of history. In My Ántonia, Cather identifies an immigrant woman as figure and founder of a growing and vital nation, creator of an America to which the middle-class, Anglo-Protestant male narrator lacks access. Ántonia both resists and reproduces culturally pervasive scenarios for female identity. Her self-making is both typically “female” and untypically independent: she fulfills an expected function as a productive body, but her productivity is unmistakably her own. In O Pioneers! Cather makes Alexandra a hero of the earth and a stunted vine, originator of national possibilities and victim of “serious times.” Her success is simultaneously glorifying and stultifying, her femininity both natural and unnatural, her alternate self-making both a triumph and a limitation. In the end, however, the narrative moves to ameliorate her solitariness without turning away from her fertile conjunction with a space of female-identified creativity.

Embodying America in Alexandra and Ántonia, Cather supplements the nation's historical narrative by intervening in its structures for remembering its past; O Pioneers! and My Ántonia redefine the vocabulary that celebrates the erotics of a national romance based in male violence, disturbing the stability of its rigidly oppositional scripts for gender-role performance. Bhabha suggests that we see “the supplement” as “a meditation on the disposition of space and time from which the narrative of the nation must begin.” Thus “the power of supplementarity” lies in “the renegotiation of those times, terms, and traditions through which we turn our uncertain, passing contemporaneity into the signs of history” (306). As Cather imagines alternatively gendered forms of self-making, she imagines possibilities for multiple origins and for alternate Americas. She offers supplementary scenarios for female desire without offering another history; rather than replacing one monolithic and prescriptive discourse with another, she demonstrates that the national romance may be reread and redeployed for more than one purpose, with more than one result. Cather's strategy of intervention adjusts the accepted “calculation” of American history in outcomes for engendered American subjects, extending its equation of women and earth, making the sum of its parts greater than its whole.

Notes

1. For more detailed analyses of Turner's frontier thesis and its influence and uses in American culture, see Slotkin. Also, see Mogen, Busby, and Bryant; Fryer; Heyne; and Kolodny.

2. My use of the “national romance” trope is informed by Doris Sommer's essay “Irresistible romance: the foundational fictions of Latin America” and by the essays in Parker, Russo, Sommer, and Yaeger's Nationalisms and Sexualities.

3. In my article on A Thousand Acres, I suggest that Jane Smiley challenges American nostalgia for its mythical past by demonstrating the dangerous ways women's stories are covered over by patrilineal narratives and by positing routes to recovery of female memory, voice, and body.

4. Slotkin observes that the frontier was not really “gone” in 1890: “As a purely material entity, the Frontier was far from closed. More public land would be taken up and brought into production between 1890 and 1920 than during the heyday of the western frontier in the decades that followed passage of the Homestead Act (1862)” (Gunfighter 30-31). He also points out that this “apparent closure of the old agrarian/artisanal/entrepreneurial frontier coincided with a crisis in American social and political history”:

   The social order envisioned in republican ideology and the Frontier Myth was one in which class tensions were disarmed by the broad diffusion of wealth and power, by the relatively slight differentials between wealthy and working classes, and by the promise of upward mobility. By 1890 it was clear that the industrialization of the economy had produced a social order in which wealth and power would increasingly be concentrated in the hands of a relatively few men, and a few powerful (and even monopolistic) industrial and financial “trusts.”

   (Gunfighter 31)

5. For in-depth analyses of the crisis in gender attendant with modernism, see DeKoven; DuPlessis; volumes 1 and 2 of Gilbert and Gubar's No Man's Land; and Showalter.

6. The application of madness to unwomanly women has been explored by Chesler; Gilbert and Gubar (Madwoman); and Showalter (Female), among others.

7. See, for instance, Gilbert and Gubar's essay “Lighting Out for the Territories” in Sexchanges; O'Brien; Butler's essay “‘Dangerous Crossing’” in Bodies That Matter; Fetterly; Irving; Lambert; Russ; and Wiesenthal.

8. My argument that Cather posits an alternative female fertility and creativity out of an alternate female connection to the earth is indebted to previous critical attention to her representations of space. Janet Giltrow and David Stouck argue that Cather's “pastoral landscape is ultimately a place of innocent erotic fulfillment where the individual is reunited to the world in a maternal embrace” (93). Judith Fryer's book takes up a specifically female search for “felicitous space,” and Susan Rosowski, Laura Winters, and Sharon O'Brien also address issues of landscape in their books.

9. O'Brien points out that “in saying that Alexandra's house was the out-of-doors—thus making the domestic realm coterminous with the world—Cather was collapsing the traditional nineteenth-century distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private,’ male and female space. Simultaneously she was suggesting that a female hero and a female author could write stories that both sprang from and transcended female experience” (Willa 434).

10. Also worth noting in this context is Alexandra's construction of an order that subsumes people around her. She sells Frank Shabata his farm, the space in which Marie is trapped and reduced. Further, as Gilbert and Gubar point out, Alexandra runs a kind of marriage market out of her kitchen, orchestrating the pairing off of giggling kitchen maids with surly farmhands. In this way, she reproduces patriarchal order over the newly mapped prairie, sending her new couples out to farm the land. These couples seem to be simplified versions of the Marie-Frank pairing, and, as the next generation of farmers, suggest that Alexandra's forms and practices of alternative creativity will not be perpetuated.

11. Nina Baym argues that Cather “mak[es] nature out to be male” (76) in the novel. While I agree that the Spirit of the Divide is gendered male in this incarnation of the Genius, I believe that the overwhelming weight of textual imagery codes nature itself as female. Critical opinion on this issue is divided. While many readers argue that the presence of the Spirit figure indicates Alexandra's need to compensate for her position outside heterosexual romance by creating one for herself, O'Brien suggests that because the “erotic god” figure is a “character whose manifestation and meaning depend on her psychological and emotional state,” the Spirit can be interpreted as Alexandra's projection of “herself both into the figure who lifts and the one who is lifted” (Willa 438).

12. Here I disagree with O'Brien, who argues that Alexandra's relationship with Carl forms an ultimately desirable heterosexual romance because it is a marriage between mature friends who truly understand each other. While I emphatically agree that it would be reductive to wish a swept-off-her-feet romance plot on Alexandra, I do not think that the text is invested in Alexandra's relationship with Carl, but rather needs to resolve her lack of human companionship and understanding. See O'Brien, Willa 445-46.

My thanks to Sidonie Smith, Susan Strehle, Lennard Davis, and Fred Garber for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay, and to MFS's anonymous readers for their suggestions to improve its focus.

Works Cited

Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” The New Feminist Criticism. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 63-80.

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