[In the following essay, Fox explores the symbolism in Cather's O Pioneers!]

Willa Cather by 1910 had determined to become a writer, as is evidenced by her work during the decade then just finished; but whether she was to be a poet, a journalist, a writer of short stories, or a novelist was not yet clear. She had published a number of stories of considerable maturity, a volume of poems (April Twilights, 1903), any number of critical articles and other journalistic essays; and had done extensive editorial work for McClures.

First, she had to determine who she was, what the Nebraska of her childhood and youth meant to her, and what forms best suited her genius. For example, “A Wagner Matinee” (Everybody's Magazine, March, 1904) and “The Sculptor's Funeral” (McClures, January, 1905) are more hardboiled than her later fiction of acceptance because in them she rejected her West for its sordidness and hostility to the aesthetic capacity of the human being. The West she then saw as particularly destructive of the artist. John H. Randall III has an interesting division of her work into four periods, of which the decade 1900-1910 covers approximately the first. As he says, during this period “She wrote about Nebraska … with a shudder of loathing.”¹

Sarah Orne Jewett recognized during this period that her friend Willa Cather was not yet settled in her artistry. In a letter written in December, 1908, she advised Willa to go beyond superficial appearances:

I want you to be surer of your backgrounds,—you have your Nebraska life,—a child's Virginia, and now an intimate knowledge of what we are pleased to call the “Bohemia” of newspaper and magazine-office life. These are uncommon equipment, but you don't see them yet quite enough from the outside. …²

Miss Cather's fledgling novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), proved a failure. As late as 1915 she was still experimenting with form. That year in her third novel (The Song of the Lark) she tried the “over-furnished method,” much used by the Naturalists.³ Evidently she found the method distasteful, for she never again returned to it. Instead, she irrevocably turned in 1918 (My Antonia) to a method that would produce a rich meaning in fewer words. That method, as I am sure careful readers of Miss Cather's best novels know, effectively employs the symbol and the image in abundance. In 1913 she had used it in O Pioneers! before doing The Song of the Lark. Later in A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) came the full fruition of her settled use of symbolic representation. The achievement in the early O Pioneers! lies in the degree of her use of the method rather than in the brilliance of the performance. She showed herself in this first successful novel a good and careful craftsman, but she needed more experience to write a brilliant novel.

The dominant symbols in the novels of Miss Cather are nature-centered. The most pervasive of these symbols is the Garden, which appears briefly in O Pioneers!, where for a time Emil and Marie enjoy an innocent but recognized love in the Shabata orchard before they become guilty in the recognition of their love; in well-developed form in My Antonia and A Lost Lady, complete with serpent; in a form briefly translated into Paradise on earth in The Professor's House—significantly, there is no serpent in that book; and in the form of many small gardens in which the faithful are usually assembled in Death Comes for the Archbishop.

This Garden, sometimes despoiled by a serpent in the early novels, is subject to the cycle of the seasons. In O Pioneers! the Garden in winter images slumbering passion; in the summer, passion in bloom. On the other hand, the Garden in My Antonia shows winter both as a time of bitter loneliness and of fireside joy, with the wind suggesting that the transient summer foliage of the trees has been only a mask for the cruelty of nature or reality. In A Lost Lady the winter separates Mrs. Forrester from another life that her unresting spirit yearns for; her quality as Eve will not allow her to rest satisfied in a retreat from the “real” world. She must have all the fruit of the earth, not alone the illusion represented by the Garden. The result is that she is an easy prey of the serpent—Ivy Peters. The Garden of The Professor's House is essentially a retreat from the crudities and the materialism of the world, and the seasons matter little because the professor's attic study can substitute when the weather cuts off the outside world. In Death Comes for the Archbishop the seasons affect the Garden only in a very general way. In the two latter books the infinite possibilities of intellectual introspection and the vast stretches of landscape render the seasons less consequence than they possess in the earlier books. Time at last has little concern for mere seasonal variations. The Garden in the ultimate sense becomes a paradise for the faithful.

What is illusory, what is real, what is important, what is everlasting; what is temporal, mortal, and mutable?—these are the questions to which the nature symbols bring various answers in the imaginative responses to Miss Cather's characters.

In O Pioneers! the primary purpose of a scene often is to foreshadow the future relationships of the characters in it at the same time that the individual qualities of the persons are revealed. In this way, the imagery is tied to the plot in O Pioneers! more than it is in any other Cather novel. The treatment of this relationship is somewhat mechanical.

Briefly let me remind you of the action that occurs there: As the story opens in a cold and windy Nebraska hamlet, Emil Bergson, five-year-old brother of the grown-up Alexandra, is crying because his pet kitten is stranded atop a telegraph pole. Alexandra fetches Carl Linstrum, a neighbor boy of fifteen, who takes the kitten down. Then these three and a little girl named Marie Tovesky meet in a local store for a tableau foreshadowing the central plot of the story: Emil and Marie, later to develop a tragic love after Marie's marriage to the Bohemian Frank Shabata; and Carl and Alexandra, whose late decision to marry is fraught with pathetic overtones.

After the groundwork for the relationships between the characters is laid in Part I, Part II opens with a scene in which Emil and Marie appear together in the great natural Garden of the West. From this point forward their love, their death, and the after-effects of their love and death are central to the plot. Alexandra's actions in Part V stem from the melodramatic events concluding the lovers' story in Part IV. Part III, “Winter Memories,” is a waiting time for both pairs of lovers. The women wait in the frozen Garden country of the West; the men seek adventure in exotic lands elsewhere—Mexico and Alaska.

In the opening scene of Part I, then, Alexandra and Carl's future concern about Emil is foreshadowed in the trouble to which they are put in rescuing his kitten from the top of the telephone pole;⁴ the second, a little later, comes when Marie is paired with Emil in play with the kitten (page 12). This first scene occurs on a wintry day when the elements appear determined to demonstrate their great power over the lives of the people, who will in Part III again be subjected to a fierce reminder that the happy scene inside the house is only a brief and ironic release from the harshness of reality. Passion slumbers in both scenes; summer will release it. The particular relationships between these four characters in the opening scene image the later action: the pairing of Marie and Emil and of Carl and Alexandra, the concern of the older pair for the younger, the centering of Marie and Emil's attention on a kitten.

In this scene, a personal symbol appears in the budding vitality of Marie, whose eyes produce “golden glints that made them look like gold-stone, or, in softer lights, like that Colorado mineral called tiger-eye” (page 11). Miss Cather does not forget the “tiger-eye”: when Marie and Emil have grown up and their love is in its incipient stages, Emil “saw Marie Shabata's tiger eyes flashing from the gloom of the basement doorway” during the revelry at a Catholic fair in the country (page 163). Marie's animal vitality is here again linked to a cat.

In the boisterous opening scene another image of later relationships appears. Much is made of the question, “Who is four-year-old Marie's sweetheart?” She first conventionally chooses her Bohemian uncle, but a little later makes a special point of taking some of her gift candy to Emil. The ambiguity of Marie's relationships with the two males is an image foreshadowing the complications of her adult life with two men—one her Bohemian husband, the other Emil.

In Part II, “Neighboring Fields,” imagery linking the characters to the plot frequently appears. An extended image of the basic unsuitability of Emil and Marie to each other is developed in a duck-hunting scene, where they are shown

moving softly, keeping close together. … The ducks shot up into the air. There was a sharp crack from the gun, and five of the birds fell to the ground. Emil and his companion laughed delightedly, and Emil ran to pick them up. When he came back, dangling the ducks by their feet, Marie held her apron and he dropped them into it. As she stood looking down at them, her face changed. She took up one of the birds, a rumpled ball of feathers with the blood dripping slowly from its mouth, and looked at the live color that still burned on its plumage.

As long as Marie maintains her close physical relationship to Emil in the common enjoyment of the walk, she is as happy as he, but when she becomes aware of the fact that the wild things have been killed—that a depredation has been made upon the Garden—her face changes. Now the difference in them comes out:

As she let it fall, she cried in distress, “Oh, Emil, why did you?”

“I like that!” the boy exclaimed indignantly. “Why, Marie, you asked me to come yourself.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” she said tearfully, “but I didn't think. I hate to see them when they are first shot. They were having such a good time, and we've spoiled it all for them.”

And a little later, Marie:

“Don't be cross, Emil. Only—Ivar's right about wild things. They're too happy to kill. You can tell just how they felt when they flew up. They were scared, but they didn't really think anything could hurt them”

(all from pp. 127-128).

Implicit in these lines is an image of later events—the manner in which the lovers, like the ducks, are to meet their end; but the lines also have a personal application to Emil and Marie. Loved by Alexandra and despised by his untalented brothers Lou and Oscar, the Hamlet-like Emil has not been able to make up his mind about the future. Miss Cather has repeatedly referred to his bitterness, evidenced by his moroseness and the appearance of his eyes. He has not intended to stay on the land; Alexandra has not supposed that he would. It is not clear what other talents he has. In his unsettled condition, unable to discover his vocation because he neither loves nor hates the land, he has come into conflict, in the dramatic scene above, with the wild thing that is Marie Shabata—who, like Ivar, has an innate kinship with the land. She is ingenuous, untamed, loving, a natural inhabitant of the prairies, outgoing by inclination.

Marie's inclination has produced in her a spontaneous love for the ducks and other wild things, as well as for her fellow human beings. She is one with Robert Browning's duchess:

“She had / a heart … too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed: she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.”

Marie runs about on the prairie giving her winning smile to every person who needs it and is willing to accept it. The dramatic irony in the hunting scene is obvious: the basic conflict between her and Emil is fraught with tragic possibilities. Even if Marie's marriage were not in the way, these two are unsuited to each other. Later it can also be said of the lovers, as Marie has said of the ducks, “They were having such a good time. … They're too happy to kill. … They were scared, but they didn't really think anything could hurt them.” Though the analogy is not perfect (Marie and Emil are not really happy, though at times they find an exquisite pleasure in their love), the incident with the ducks does suggest their coming tryst together, where their love-making is interrupted by Frank Shabata's death-dealing gun.

The poignancy of the love developing between Marie and Emil appears in a sensuous and symbolic scene in the Shabata orchard. Marie, having heard the sound of the whetstone on Emil's scythe, decides to go pick cherries. Meeting him on the way, she pelts him with a flood of questions and comments about the rain that has fallen during the night. Emil, noticing her excitement, asks her why she is so flighty. She replies, “I suppose that's the wet season, too, then. It's exciting to see everything growing so fast,—and to get the grass cut!” (page 150).

The after thought represents the undercurrent of her feeling; getting the grass cut means Emil's presence. The first part of her statement is a frank admission that she is physically stimulated when nature is at the height of its summer beauty. But the two ideas are bound up together in her feeling. Miss Cather goes on to show Marie's continuing high spirits, her singing as she picks cherries, “shivering when she caught a shower of rain-drops on her neck and hair. … White and yellow butterflies were always fluttering above the purple blossoms” (pages 151-152). Her response to the rain is essentially sexual, and the butterflies above the blossoms complete the idea.

Additional personal symbols appear in the scene, both in the consciousness of the lovers and in the description laid on by the author. Marie's pagan ancestors worshiped trees, she tells Emil, and even in recent times “the old people in the mountains plant lindens to purify the forest, and to do away with the spells that come from the old trees they say have lasted from heathen times. … I think I could get along caring for trees, if I hadn't anything else” (pages 152-153). Emil's response is to deny the value of caring for trees (he is there to be cared about; and he picks a handful of white mulberries and drops them into her lap). Hovering over the whole scene are ambiguous images of purity—the whiteness of the mulberries, the purity and fecundity of the Virgin (Alexandra often calls Marie by the variant name “Maria”), the assertion of Marie that she is a good Catholic in the same breath that she asserts her pagan love of trees, the evident fecundity of the earth and the lack of fecundity in Marie, the enchantment of the spot where the two hold colloquy as lovers. The scene is an image of the conflicts, the ambiguities, the hopelessness of their love.

Even their presence there that day has a secondary meaning. Marie has asked Emil to clear the grass out for her, because her husband hasn't time to do work that will not produce an economic return. Frank and the hired man can hardly keep up with the work of the farm that summer. As a result the orchard has become “a neglected wilderness” (page 151)—just as Marie herself is a neglected wilderness—and Emil is now clearing out the wild roses and grass against their last trysting time there—not consciously doing it for that purpose, but symbolically making preparations for it. Finally, he leaves standing for Marie a knot of roses under the tree where they will be shot to death.

A little later at the Catholic fair, another suggestion of the misshaped love of this pair appears in Emil's reflection upon the contrast between himself and Amedee, his bright French friend who has recently married happily: “It seemed strange that now he should have to hide the thing that Amedee 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-corn in the spring. … From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains of the other lay still in the earth and rotted” (pages 163-164). That night Emil's “spirit went out of his body and crossed the fields to Marie Shabata” (page 180). Here the primary meaning is plain enough, but if a secondary image is allowed to emerge, Emil's death is as good as accomplished: the body of a human being does not survive the departure of the spirit. On the other hand, Emil's body is the only part of him that is attuned to Marie, and then only to her body. Their spirits are sharply divided, as the duck-hunting episode has shown. If his spirit goes out of his body in search of her, either his spirit must find itself newly adapted to hers or the search will prove fruitless—nay, even tragic. Thus it is proper to assume that the unregenerated soul that departs from his body that night should by that departure suggest his coming death.

Part III, “Winter Memories,” a waiting time for both pairs of lovers, foreshadows the impending tragedy. It begins with an image of slumbering passion: “Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring” (page 187). The passage continues in a tone reminiscent of the opening lines of Keats's “Eve of St. Agnes”: “The prairie-dog keeps his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put to it to find frost-bitten cabbage-stalks. At night the coyotes roam the wintry waste, howling for food” (pages 187-188).

At this time, Emil and Marie are separated by his trip to Mexico; their passion sleeps and nature is an image of the fact: “One could easily believe that in that deep dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever” (page 188). As several times repeated by Miss Cather in discussing her theory of the novel, the characters are the story, the action and the characters are one. The cycles of nature alternate between beauty and harshness; life for the lovers also alternates, and a bitter iron-country hour will soon arrive.

Yet before that time arrives, witness in Part III an image of the possible retrieval of happiness: Under the gay appearance of an afternoon tea-party, eating coffee-cake loaded with nuts and poppy seeds, Alexandra, Marie, and old Mrs. Lee indulge happy memories. However, before the afternoon is finished, Marie takes Alexandra to the attic, where the mementoes of the past draw them to talk of something deeper than surfaces: Marie says, “Frank would be all right in the right place. … He ought to have a different kind of wife. … The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs” (page 197). Marie is not under the delusion that she and Emil would make a good pair, but she does reveal here an awareness of differences between her and Frank that would apply equally well to Emil and herself.

All this under the aegis of “Winter Memories” in an atmosphere bright and cheery down in the dining room, where surfaces matter. Marie's passion for Emil is slumbering also. She is aware of both his feeling and her own, but she has not yet verbalized either. Meanwhile, it is well to remember the contrast between the cold outside and the honeyed warmth within the house. In the passage quoted above appeared the “frozen garden patch” and the shivering rabbits and the coyotes roaming “the wintry waste.” How like the scene from Keats where “bitter cold it was! / The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; / The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass, / And silent was the flock in wooly fold,” and Porphyro sought the honeyed warmth of fair Madeline's chamber, from which he was to emerge into an ambiguous future with his over-wrought romantic Madeline.

The brief interlude of the tea party is also an image of the relationship between Alexandra and Carl. They are of different natures—she an earth goddess, he a not very notable tinker with wood and metal and gold, a worker particularly with the surfaces of metal. In the winter season, whatever feeling Alexandra and Carl may have for each other is slumbering, awaiting the coming of a spring that is destined to reveal to Alexandra her lack of feeling for the usual intimacies between a man and a woman. She does not understand the danger to Emil and Marie, and she has shown only a feeling akin to sisterhood in her relationship with Carl.

Miss Cather makes this analysis tenable when, at the end of “Winter Memories,” she has Alexandra remember a recurring illusion or waking dream which images her sluggish sexual nature and her unrealistic ideal view of a mate:

She used to have an illusion of being lifted 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. She never saw him, but, with eyes closed, she could feel that he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him. She could feel him approach, bend over her and lift her, and then she could feel herself being carried swiftly off across the fields. After such a reverie she would rise hastily, angry with herself, and go down to the bath-house that was partitioned off the kitchen shed. There she would stand in a tin tub and prosecute her bath with vigor, finishing it by pouring buckets of cold well-water over her gleaming white body which no man on the Divide could have carried very far

(page 206).

Her rite of purification shows a revulsion against the idea of physical contact with a man; but she actually enjoys the vision because on another level she is an earth goddess desiring an earth god as a mate. Such a god should have the superficial characteristics of a man, but he should far excel any man she knows. However, the death of Emil and Marie brings a change to her. Now she must compromise with her ideal man-image because the ideal man is not available; she needs a real companion as a shield against loneliness. In her confidence that she and Carl will be happy she says: “I think when friends marry, they are safe. We don't suffer like—those young ones” (page 308). It is an admission that life is to be neutral for them, not the suffering, not the ecstasy, of passionate youth. They will have friendship and peace to shore up the empty spot left in their lives. Through the use of Alexandra's dream, the pathos of her limitation is heightened.

In sum, then, the pairing of characters at the beginning of O Pioneers! as an image of the plot—i.e., the tragic love of Marie and Emil and the effect of their actions and fates upon the final bringing together of Alexandra and Carl—is a device not used elsewhere in Miss Cather's novels. The harsh winter weather at the opening of O Pioneers! also provides an image of the characters' involvement in later events. Nobody in O Pioneers! dies or is greatly estranged from the rest of the human family as a result of the cold or loneliness. Winter is an image of slumbering passion. When the earth is fruitful and a lush harvest richly rewards the people, passion ironically blossoms and destroys its possessors. Personal symbols flourish in O Pioneers! as in other Cather novels, and the symbols of the Garden in each novel are integrally related to the characters. However, structure in O Pioneers! is more closely related to the symbolic devices affecting characterization than it is in any of the other Cather novels. And though not brilliant, O Pioneers! is interesting and successful as Miss Cather's first attempt in writing an “unfurnished” novel. Had she not felt the need to experiment further, perhaps The Song of the Lark would have been only half its published length, and perhaps it would then have achieved the synthesis that was to bring broad acclaim to My Antonia.

Notes

1. The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather's Search for Value (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 18-19.

2. The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Annie Fields (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), pp. 248-249.

3. For Miss Cather‘s own discussion of her views about the method, see “The Novel Démeublé,” New Republic (April 12, 1922), reprinted in Willa Cather on Writing (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1962), pp. 35-43.

4. O Pioneers! (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1941), p. 7. Subsequent references within the text are to this edition.