SOURCE: “The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather's O'Pioneer!” American Literature, 75 (June 2003): 275-302.

[In the following essay, ]

Willa Cather's public persona turns on the rhetoric of wide-open space. Since the beginning of Cather's career, journalists have romanticized the wild Willa of the prairie, often obscuring the relative refinement of the Cather family. The mature Cather, too, is pictured as most at home in the open air; a 1921 piece in the Lincoln Sunday Star is representative: “Miss Cather had elected to take her interview out-of-doors in the autumnal sunshine, walking. The fact is characteristic. She is an outdoor person, not far different in type from the pioneers and prima donnas whom she exalts.”¹ The analog to the legend of Willa Cather, hoyden and pioneer, is the language in which the evolution of her literary career is described. Her art is commonly evaluated in spatial terms. “[Cather's] talents had no real scope in the drawing-rooms of New York and London,” notes Louise Bogan in a 1931 piece in the New Yorker.² Just as her protagonist Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! (1913) “expresses herself best” in the soil,³ so Cather needed the wide-open prairie to fully flex her romantic imagination. As Bernice Slote observes of Alexander's Bridge, the portrait of fashionable society with which Cather began her career as a novelist, “Realism is a constriction, a drawing in.”⁴ For the Willa Cather who would later be mythologized as “the untutored western girl running wild on her pony,” as Slote puts it,⁵ there could be no such constriction of the writerly self.

Given Cather's deep roots in the prairie she describes, readers of O Pioneers! have found, quite rightly, a substantial authorial investment in the values of Alexandra Bergson, Cather's heroic pioneer. Ten years after O Pioneers!, Cather published a panegyric of Nebraska's “first cycle” that seems to cohere flawlessly with the tone of her prairie novels:

In Nebraska, as in so many other States, we must face the fact that the splendid story of the pioneers is finished, and that no new story worthy to take its place has yet begun. The generation that subdued the wild land and broke up the virgin prairie is passing, but it is still there, a group of rugged figures in the background which inspire respect, compel admiration. With these old men and women the attainment of material prosperity was a moral victory, because it was wrung from hard conditions, was the result of a struggle that tested character.⁶

Cather's celebration of this “moral victory” appears to be consistent with the image of Cather as the “outdoor person”: in both cases, identity is a function of landscape. But if the figure of Cather as constructed for public consumption is predicated on a fantasy of unboundedness, there is a fundamental conflict between that author-figure and the pioneer she memorializes. The “splendid story of the pioneers” is a story of spatial reconfiguration. The pioneers in Cather's first novel of the soil encounter an overwhelming vastness, “fierce,” “savage,” and “uninterrupted” (OP, 10); in the process of settlement and cultivation, this vastness is organized into a “checker-board, marked off in squares of wheat and corn” (OP, 51). In other words, settlement introduces boundaries: the demarcation and delimitation of those “outdoor” spaces by which the mythologized Cather is so often defined. This incompatibility of values is, it seems, easily overlooked. For example, Cather's longtime friend Elizabeth Sergeant reports: “Any thoroughly untamed aspect of nature refreshed her. She said that the air was totally different where fields had never been cleared and harvested nor virgin forest cut. When I thought about this, I saw that her intimacy with nature lay at the very root of her relation to O Pioneers!”⁷ Curiously, Sergeant does not remark upon the fact that Cather's “intimacy with nature” is very much at risk in O Pioneers!, a novel written in homage to those very practices of clearing and harvesting and cutting that implicitly contaminate the revivifying air of nature. There may be, then, a radical ambivalence at the center of Cather's frontier hagiography.⁸

To put it another way, as I will argue in these pages, a deep anxiety about the taming of the wilderness—about the very process of civilization—makes itself felt in O Pioneers! as a crisis of space. Despite the figurative work of Cather's protagonist, whose primary labor in the novel is the symbolic resolution of ethical conflict (which requires not a plow but a vision), we can track a fundamental connection between the project of pioneering and a process of enclosure that cannot be completely dispelled by the novel's rhetoric. Significantly, Alexandra's conquest of the wilderness is represented as a process of domestication. She makes a home on and of the plains by bringing order to the landscape: “You feel that, properly, Alexandra's house is the big out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself best” (OP, 57). But while Alexandra's house is characterized by the spatial freedom of the “out-of-doors,” the same language that expands Alexandra's house inevitably shrinks the space of “the wild land.” This image may provide a starting point for an analysis of what it means to tame, to cultivate, or perhaps to “discipline” the wilderness.⁹

One sign of progress on the Divide is the enclosure of Old Mrs. Lee's feet in shoes. As mother-in-law to Alexandra's conspicuously Americanized brother Lou, Mrs. Lee is obliged to exchange her “little wooden tub” for a “great white” one, to abandon her habitual nightcap, and to submit her bare feet to confinement. While Mrs. Lee is bewildered and distressed by the demands of gentility, Alexandra finds Mrs. Lee's subjection to social nicety more amusing than disturbing. As she laughingly recalls, “We can remember when half our neighbors went barefoot in summer. I expect old Mrs. Lee would love to slip her shoes off now sometimes, if she dared” (OP, 64). This conflict between the old world and the new is more pointed in the case of Old Ivar, the eccentric Norwegian characterized by his intolerance of fire-arms, intense but idiosyncratic religiosity, and deep sympathy with the natural world. Ivar is allowed to remain unshod but faces a far more threatening disciplinary mechanism: the Hastings mental institution. Still, despite her emotional investment in the values of the old world, Alexandra is unruffled: she jokingly proposes her own household as an “asylum for old-time people” (OP, 64). The threat of confinement is then fully realized in the Nebraska state penitentiary, where Frank Shabata is incarcerated for killing his wife, Marie, and her lover, Alexandra's brother Emil, at the scene of their first and last tragic embrace. The image of Frank in the penitentiary provides an emblem for the theoretical relationship between civilization and enclosure that I will delineate—but considered in the context of history, that relationship isn't merely theoretical. The discourses of discipline and Americanization that underlie Cather's treatment of Mrs. Lee, Ivar, and Frank achieved particular force in the rhetoric of Indian policy during the same decades Cather fictionalizes in O Pioneers! In this image of the penitentiary we may also find traces of the disciplinary enclosure of Native Americans that Cather has deliberately forgotten in weaving her pioneer narrative. My essay concludes, therefore, with the suggestion that the removal of native populations to reservations—the confinement upon which the “moral victory” of the pioneer depends—constitutes the most deeply disavowed layer of meaning embedded in Cather's complex motif of enclosure.

“HARD MOLDS” OF CONFORMITY

To begin uncovering the relationship between episodes of enclosure in the novel, it is useful to remember the larger context of nativism and ethnic conflict that may be read into the figure of Mrs. Lee. Cather has been notoriously critical of Americanization and its effects on the fondly remembered immigrants of her childhood in Nebraska. In a 1924 interview in the New York Times Book Review, she remembers the multicultural Midwest of her growing-up years: “A ‘foreigner’ was a person foreign to our manners or custom of living, not possible prey for reform. Nobody ever cheated a foreigner. … Nobody investigated them; nobody regarded them as laboratory specimens.” But in twentieth-century America, Cather continues, progress manifests itself as intrusion:

They have come here to live in the sense that they lived in the Old World, and if they were let alone their lives might turn into the beautiful ways of their homeland. But they are not let alone. Social workers, missionaries—call them what you will—go after them, hound them, pursue them and devote their days and nights toward the great task of turning them into stupid replicas of smug American citizens. This passion for Americanizing everything and everybody is a deadly disease with us. We do it the way we build houses.¹⁰

This representation of the American drive toward conformity (the domestication of immigrants, whereby citizens are “built” like houses) as an assault on ethnic integrity parallels Cather's critique of “the hard molds of American provincialism.”¹¹ A modern America shaped by what people will think and say is a confining social space—a “hard mold” of small-mindedness, routine, and scripted behavior. Moreover, as with Alexandra's house out-of-doors, domestication in every sense of the word implies the shrinking of territory. The comparison of Americanized (domesticated) immigrants to houses (domestic spaces) is apt indeed; domesticated, they are made to fit into the architecture of American identity.

The sense of confinement implicit in the language Cather uses to describe a twentieth-century phenomenon echoes a younger Cather's objection to the fashion imperatives of cultivated society. Cather biographer Mildred Bennett reports that “Mrs. Cather, who prided herself on her knowledge of high fashion, frequently objected to Willa's way of dressing and particularly her violent color combinations. Willa admitted that she loved colors like a savage,” and manifested “an intense dislike of the corseted discomfort of ‘civilized’ apparel.”¹² Apparel is similarly coded in O Pioneers! We can see the same discomfort in the unrefined (or “savage”) Mrs. Lee's resistance to the shoes that function as a sign of civilization. And significantly, the civilization that threatens the freedom of Mrs. Lee's feet is that of Americanization; her bare feet signify not only “savagery” but ethnicity. This is made clear in the contrast between Mrs. Lee and her painfully shod daughter, Annie: “Her tight, high-heeled shoes give her an awkward walk, and she is always more or less preoccupied with her clothes. … Annie and Lou sometimes speak Swedish at home, but Annie is almost as much afraid of being ‘caught’ at it as ever her mother was of being caught barefoot” (OP, 67). Annie, coded American by her high heels (which give her an unnatural gait), considers her Swedishness something to hide—like naked feet. These family dynamics in the novel suggest that the pernicious force of Americanization comes not exclusively from American nativists but from within the immigrant community, if those immigrants are successful pioneers (that is, successful “civilizers”) like the Bergson brothers. In other words, civilization and Americanization are mutually constitutive processes resulting in “corseted discomfort.”

On the surface, the second-generation attitude toward first-generation eccentricities may appear to be symptomatic of the pioneer spirit degraded. But the confinement of ethnic markers as represented in this episode is inherent in the founding principles of the pioneer. To be more precise, the pioneer is defined by her taming of the wilderness—of nature. Annie Lee, with the unnatural walk of civilized shoes, is thus an emblem for the successful pioneering enterprise: the reconfiguration of nature.

We should note particularly that bodies are a corollary site of reconfiguration in this novel famous for its reconfigured “checker-board” landscape. Critics have consistently called attention to the reciprocity between land and landscaper, as Alexandra feels “in her own body the joyous germination in the soil” (OP, 135); accordingly, disciplined bodies both testify to and make possible the ascendancy of civilization, of somatic wilderness tamed. Marilee Lindemann's analysis of queerness in Cather's work is especially useful here. Lindemann defines queer as the resistance against “a system that seeks to control difference by policing the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural, male and female, white and nonwhite”—or, we might add, between the civilized and the “savage.”¹³ As Lindemann demonstrates, in the challenge posed by queer bodies, the disciplinary imperative fixes on bodily disorder as a disruption of the orderly community. As Lindemann claims, Alexandra's “un-queer” body stands as “an allegory of nation-building predicated on the repudiation or containment of the ‘queer’ and emblematized in skin so smooth and white it is said to possess ‘the freshness of the snow itself.’”¹⁴ If landscapes, bodies, and nations all stand in for each other, then the work of pioneering manifests itself in the human landscape as well.

Humor defuses this conflict in the novel, as Alexandra presents herself as a refuge—an asylum—where feet can be free: “Alexandra shook with laughter. ‘Poor old Mrs. Lee! … Never mind; when she comes to visit me, she can do all the old things in the old way’” (OP, 164). But Alexandra, as the very embodiment of the pioneering spirit—of, in Lindemann's terms, the “un-queer”—cannot ultimately provide sanctuary; she is, in essence, the agent of Mrs. Lee's enclosure.

Sergeant's reflections on an incident at the market with Cather may help to illustrate Cather's view of American conformity as a violation of nature:

We paused to buy from a great crony of hers, an old Italian in a blue cotton cap, with stubbled chin and obtrusive tooth. Willa compared him to a correct young man who happened to pass, wearing a hard straw hat with a black band. Surely that one sold bonds on Wall Street, and no doubt his mother had had his teeth straightened! Mouths should be left as nature made them—mouths were individual as ears, or eyes … but the dentists insisted on deadly conformity.¹⁵

Here, the American whose natural (bodily) individuality has been tamed is contrasted with the immigrant whose status is signaled by a sort of dental wilderness. Americanization, in other words, reproduces the essence of pioneering—taming the wilderness—and Mrs. Lee, then, is the target not of the pioneer spirit gone bad—contaminated by crass materialism—but of the pioneer spirit itself.

SYMBOLIC FENCES

The enclosure that results from civilization is both physical—the cramping of toes—and figurative—the symbolic constriction of an increasingly legal society. One way to characterize the state of civilization is by its increasing reliance on symbols; that is, the progress from the savage to the civil is a rejection of the natural in favor of the constructed. In an early Nebraska State Journal sketch, Cather evokes the idea of law to represent alienation from a natural past. In this nostalgic piece about “a little gray-haired woman with a look of sad experience” playing piano for a dance, Cather contrasts the litigious adult dancers with the emotional sincerity (or naturalness) of youth: “[The pianist] knows those of us who still carry little seared places from the old flames that died hard, she knows those of us who obtained our heart's desires and have since sought refuge from them by process of law, she knows that the friend of my youth, whom I loved better than myself and to whom I gave my sweetheart, I yesterday sued for twenty thousand dollars.”¹⁶ A similar pattern illustrating the ascendancy of legal constructs turns up in O Pioneers!: When Mrs. Hiller's hogs get into Frank Shabata's wheat, he threatens to “take dat old woman to de court” (OP, 94). The good fences that make good neighbors no longer hold; in civilized society, fences are provided by law instead.

This link between civilization and symbolic enclosure reflects the fundamental premise of the Lockean social contract: Law exists to regulate—to tame—the ethical wilderness of our barbaric instincts. Put another way, civil structure overwrites natural law just as dentists straighten the natural savagery of teeth. Criminality—the violation of the Lockean contract—is thus associated with nature. As Foucault confirms in Discipline and Punish, “[T]he criminal designated as the enemy of all, whom it is in the interest of all to track down, falls outside the pact, disqualifies himself as a citizen and emerges, bearing within him as it were, a wild fragment of nature; he appears as a villain, a monster, a madman, perhaps, a sick and, before long, ‘abnormal’ individual.”¹⁷ The penal institution that literalizes the symbolic fences of law is then equivalent to the Nebraska checkerboard that emerges from the “the wild land” of O Pioneers!: evidence of nature tamed, of wild land broken, the ironic sign of the pioneer's “moral victory.”

We can see this dynamic in the Ivar episode, where difference is constructed as insanity, and insanity is made interchangeable with criminality. Ivar is characterized by his inability to speak English and his hyperability to communicate with animals. As Carl explains to Emil, “He came to doctor our mare when she ate green corn and swelled up most as big as the water-tank. He petted her just like you do your cats. I couldn't understand much he said, for he don't talk any English, but he kept patting her and groaning as if he had the pain himself” (OP, 22). While Carl sees the world in man-made terms (nature is made comprehensible by the figure of the water-tank), Ivar lives in such sympathy with animal nature that he feels the pain of the mare. Likewise, his home is indistinguishable from the wilderness: “Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank, without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done” (OP, 24). Notably, Ivar's idiosyncrasies (especially his relation to nature) are tolerated while the prairie remains wild, but in a neat parallel, Ivar is tamed with the land—he becomes the human testament to pioneering. Having lost his land through “mismanagement,” he is now installed in Alexandra's household (OP, 59). His refusal to work the land disqualifies him from society, but although too old to work in the fields, he has been made to work for Alexandra. What's at stake here is labor.¹⁸ As the task of the pioneer is to make nature productive, Ivar must be transformed from unproductive wilderness into a productive labor force.

Not satisfied by this disciplinary tactic, Alexandra's brothers lobby to have Ivar sent to the asylum. Since criminality is marked by the “wild fragment of nature,” Ivar as a figure of incompletely tamed wilderness is construed by Lou and Oscar as dangerous, and the threat must be confined. As Ivar reports, “They say that your brothers are afraid—God forbid!—that I may do you some injury when my spells are on me. Mistress, how can any one think that?—that I could bite the hand that fed me!” (OP, 62). Ivar still views the world from the perspective of animal nature, rationalizing his harmlessness by way of natural law. In other words, he has been incompletely assimilated into the structure of civilization. Ivar makes his own status as a marginal figure quite plain:

The way here is for all to do alike. I am despised because I do not wear shoes, because I do not cut my hair, and because I have visions. At home, in the old country, there were many like me, who had been touched by God, or who had seen things in the graveyard at night and were different afterward. We thought nothing of it, and let them alone. But here, if a man is different in his feet or in his head, they put him in the asylum. … That is the way; they have built the asylum for people who are different, and they will not even let us live in the holes with the badgers.

(OP, 62)

Once again, the condition of savagery—too close a connection with the natural—is ethnically coded. As Ivar implies, the force of Americanization confines not just difference but ethnic difference (that which is tolerated in the “old country”). Ultimately, the work of the pioneer (taming the wilderness) is the work of the law (civilizing the savage) is the work of conformity (Americanizing the foreigner). And this work, as the figure of the asylum suggests, expresses itself in the delimitation of space.

As she does with Mrs. Lee, Alexandra again presents herself and her household as a refuge. But the irony here is far more meaningful than in the matter of Mrs. Lee's bare feet. When Alexandra proposes her household as “an asylum for old-time people,” she's quite right (OP, 64). Lou and Oscar's talk of the Hastings institution merely mystifies the fact that Ivar is already within the confines of the asylum. As Alexandra concedes to her brothers, “In my opinion Ivar has just as much right to his own way of dressing and thinking as we have. But I'll see that he doesn't bother other people. I'll keep him at home” (OP, 69, my emphasis). Her household, presented as an asylum (sanctuary), is ultimately the asylum (the “juridical space,” in Foucault's terms, of disciplinary confinement).¹⁹

It is worthwhile to consider in more detail this convertibility in the notion of asylum. As Leo Marx details, asylum was a key concept in the original pastoral propaganda of the new world. In early-eighteenth-century promotional documents, “many colonists described the new land as a retreat, a place to retire to away from the complexity, anxiety, and oppression of European society. A favorite epithet was asylum.”²⁰ This is the sense we get of Ivar's home: it is a protective dwelling, like a burrow, in the hillside itself, which makes literal the idea that nature offers a spiritual refuge for the world-weary. But as the American civilization developing out of that asylum progresses, the notion takes an ironic turn. The institutional asylum is still the dwelling place of nature—but here, the natural is construed as dangerous. Thus, the institutional asylum is the confinement of nature for the protection of civilization; it is civilization that achieves a kind of sanctuary by cutting off and containing the wilderness. Ivar's opposition of natural asylum—badger holes—to institutional asylum in the passage quoted above points to this semantic shift, just as Alexandra's “asylum for old-time people,” in simultaneously carrying both meanings of asylum, indicates that the institutional asylum is deeply involved with the fundamental idea of America as a natural asylum.

In Ivar's case, institutional confinement remains only a threat; he is merely semantically committed to the asylum. But that potential threat is realized in Frank Shabata's story. Frank's incarceration may be seen as the consequence of his pioneering marital spirit—his “husbandry” of Marie. The charge that “[f]or three years he had been trying to break her spirit” recalls the breaking of wild land, symbolized by “a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces” (OP, 179, 15). Murdering Marie merely literalizes the violence of taming the wilderness, of breaking her spirit; and if the activity of the pioneer necessarily implies containment, it is then ironically appropriate that Frank is effectively incarcerated by his own attempt to “cultivate.”

The temporary insanity that drives Frank to commit double murder is linked, like Ivar's criminal madness, to nature. Just after the fatal shots, “[h]e dropped on his knees beside the hedge and crouched like a rabbit”; he then “stood like the hare when the dogs are approaching from all sides. And he ran like a hare, back and forth about that moonlit space” (OP, 177, 178). Moreover, Frank's crime is associated not just with animal nature but with his own nature, with the human nature that is purposefully set aside in legal, civil society: “Being what he was, [Alexandra] felt, Frank could not have acted otherwise” (OP, 193). When we see Frank in prison, the essential purpose of the civil institution becomes manifest. Human nature is stripped away by a penal system that deprives him of a meaningful name, the marker of personhood: “You the lady that wanted to talk to 1037? Here he is” (OP, 198). Indeed, Frank Shabata has been transformed from a person into a number: a pure sign. He is bereft of his reason, that which would separate him from an animal—“I no can t'ink without my hair”—and, echoing Ivar's ethnic otherness, “I forget English.” He seemed to Alexandra “somehow, not altogether human” (OP, 199, 200). He is, therefore, wholly under the control of the state; in this sense, he is associated with the wilderness tamed, like a wild horse broken to harness.

Again, Alexandra presents herself as the solution to the crisis of enclosure. Her pledge to have Frank released echoes her promises to keep Ivar out of the asylum and Mrs. Lee out of her shoes. In this case, she proposes the land itself as the redemptive source of freedom; by promising to liberate Frank from the institution, she is promising him the original “asylum” of America. Safely back on the Divide, Alexandra tells Carl: “‘I thought when I came out of that prison, where poor Frank is, that I should never feel free again. But I do, here.’ Alexandra took a deep breath and looked off into the red west” (OP, 208). But here we see the novel divided against itself: Cather's pioneer epic is undermined by this invocation of the West as mere pastoral nostalgia, because this longing for breathing room inevitably appears precisely when that open space is unrecoverable. Ironically, Alexandra's pledge to liberate Frank rests on a paradigm of literal space—as if there is territory outside the prison walls. But the checkerboard prairie is caught up in the figurative legal fences of civil society whose boundaries are less easily crossed.

Nearly twenty years after Frederick Jackson Turner's famous 1893 thesis, a mere decade before the landmark census of 1920 that would quantify the transformation of the United States into an urban population, Alexandra's westward gaze can only be nostalgic: a yearning for asylum when the irrevocable semantic shift from refuge in nature to refuge from nature has already occurred. Alexandra “refused with horror the warden's cordial invitation to ‘go through the institution’” (OP, 202)—to revel, that is, in the proud testament to a civilization that has produced so efficient a machine for breaking wild horses to harness. And refuse with horror she well might, for her assertion of opposition between the prison and her own tamed wilderness is ultimately a false claim.

CATHER'S INDIAN REMOVAL

I have attempted to show the interconnected levels of significance associated with confinement as a manifestation of Cather's latent ambivalence toward the pioneering enterprise. There is, in addition, a silenced historical narrative that may be read out of this connection between civilization and confinement. Finally, therefore, I would like to propose that confinement in the novel also evokes the historical act of enclosure most intimately connected to the establishment of white civilization and most notably absent from Cather's narrative of those origins: the removal of Native Americans to reservations. Cather has tried to erase the Indian from her Nebraska landscape, but we may find that the vanished Indian returns as an unconscious element of her text.²¹

In discussing Cather's aversion to Americanization, it is useful to remember that the discourse of assimilation was not limited to immigrants—it was also a key theme of the Indian debate. Given Cather's sympathetic concern for foreigners within the state, then, we might wonder what she thought about the literal enclosure of “person[s] foreign to our manners or custom of living” on reservations or in Indian schools. Many of Cather's statements on the ethnic integrity of immigrants could be read out of context as an eloquent defense of tribal rights. However, it is highly unlikely that she made any conscious connection between white Northern European immigrants and the Indians those newcomers helped displace. As Slote points out, “[Cather] lived in Nebraska in the 1880s and 1890s, when Indians were noticed in the newspapers chiefly as warring tribes with dirty living habits. In any case, they were far from Red Cloud, and Wounded Knee was only a column or so of print. Literary views in Nebraska were composed in highly romanticized legends.”²² Of course, Cather couldn't consciously establish a sympathetic bond with the Native Americans whose dispossession was the prerequisite for her pioneer epic. Cather said in an August 1913 Philadelphia Record interview: “It is always hard to write about the things that are near to your heart, from a kind of instinct of self-protection you distort them and disguise them.”²³ She's not thinking of Indians at all in this statement, but the point is well taken; she has to protect her own narrative of origins by mystifying history. We can see the rhetorical process of self-protection in the very same conversation. Cather tells her interviewer:

My grandfather's homestead was about eighteen miles from Red Cloud—a little town on the Burlington, named after the old Indian chief who used to come hunting in that country, and who buried his daughter on the top of one of the river bluffs south of the town. Her grave had been looted for her rich furs and beadwork long before my family went West, but we children used to find arrowheads there and some of the bones of her pony that had been strangled above her grave.²⁴

In this one passage, we find both the history she needs to “distort and disguise” (the Anglo-Indian relationship characterized by “looting” of various sorts) and her disavowal of participation or responsibility (it happened “long before” her particular pioneers arrived).

We find similar maneuvers in her brief history of Nebraska written for the Nation in 1923. Cather acknowledges that “[b]efore 1860 civilization did no more than nibble at the eastern edge of the State, along the river bluffs. Lincoln, the present capital, was open prairie; and the whole of the great plain to the westward was still a sunny wilderness, where the tall red grass and the buffalo and the Indian hunter were undisturbed.” Yet she can simultaneously claim that “[i]t was a State before there were people in it.”²⁵ While this claim refers literally to the legal status of Nebraska and its inhabitants, her reference to “people” when what she means is citizens also implies that the nonwhite inhabitants of the region at the time it achieved statehood were not people. If she can unself-consciously deprive the plains Indians of their humanity with the stroke of a pen, we certainly wouldn't look to Cather for a sympathetic view of Native American dispossession; indeed, we may see this as the linguistic repetition of what the penitentiary does to Frank Shabata. Ultimately, Cather's position is made most clear in her telling statement about her later novel Shadows on the Rock: “An orderly little French household that went on trying to live decently, just as ants begin to rebuild when you kick their house down, interests me more than Indian raids or the wild life in the forests. … And really, a new society begins with the salad dressing more than with the destruction of Indian villages.”²⁶ Society for Cather is a function of quotidian concerns and intimate domestic affairs; her imaginative world is centered on the details of the Euro-American dinner table. And if history begins with the salad dressing, then Native American dispossession is relegated to prehistory, and it is therefore irrelevant to Cather's myth of origins. But despite this rhetorical sleight-of-hand, Cather's inescapable awareness of the profound “disturbance” visited upon “the tall red grass and the buffalo and the Indian hunter” may provide an entry into the repressed content of her narrative.²⁷

We must first pause to clarify what, indeed, Indians might have meant for Cather. Careful delineations must be made. To begin with, Cather's Nebraska is a site for universals—the “old story” that “writ[es] itself over” (OP, 208). Cather's encounter with Indian civilizations of the Southwest during the spring before she finished O Pioneers! is characterized more by admiration than dehumanization, but she is drawn to those cultures as manifestations of a universal human history; moreover, the agrarian culture of Southwest Indians would cohere with Cather's sense of universals in a way the nomadic plains tribes would not. According to Cather biographer E. K. Brown:

In Nebraska there was no past unless one was geologically minded; everything that had not happened yesterday had happened the day before. In the villages of the Cliff-Dwellers Willa Cather found something that was not only extremely simple and extremely beautiful, but extremely old. The discovery was a lengthening of one's past as an American, especially if one were a Western American, an enlarging of one's frame of reference.²⁸

He is, of course, patently wrong about Nebraska—it wasn't invented yesterday or the day before, and only a willful forgetting can obscure the history encoded in the name of Cather's childhood home of Red Cloud. The “old Indian chief” Cather refers to in the 1913 Philadelphia Record interview figured prominently in an era of plains history that Cather might well have preferred to overlook. Red Cloud, who died in 1909 “a captive and a pensioner,”²⁹ was an Oglala Sioux whose people were dispossessed, exiled, and ultimately confined to the reservation through a series of treaties with the United States that were consistently violated by government officials. But Brown is presumably giving an accurate reflection of the position Cather assumes: Plains Indian history was so long ago as to be geologic, not human history at all. The incommensurability of these histories enables the necessary erasure of more recent Indian matters. As Mike Fischer notes, “[I]n O Pioneers!, [Cather] conceives of ‘the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races [as] so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings.’ In a powerful demonstration of circular logic, Cather's reading of such ‘feeble scratches’ as ‘indeterminate’ allows her to relegate the people who made them to a time before writing—to prehistory.”³⁰ We can go even further: If these “scratches” might not reflect human activity at all, then the very existence of those “prehistoric” peoples is reduced to shadowy possibility. For Cather, Southwest Indians may provide the link between an ancient universal human past and the universal human present, but for her to address the plains Indians in the same way would be to encounter the perils of historical specificity. In other words, while Brown finds continuity in Cather's experience of Southwest Indian culture, there is a necessary rupture of that continuity on the plains: these Indians can only be part of ancient and irrelevant history for Cather.³¹

As managing editor for McClure's, the foremost muckraking periodical of its day, Cather was—however unwillingly—breathing the air of progressivism even as she disclaimed all interest in or connection to the concerns in circulation. One of the topics in the atmosphere would doubtless have been the Indian question.³² Regardless of her own position on the issues—and, as she repeatedly told Sergeant in later years, she emphatically had no position—Cather spent these early years of the century beyond the borders of Nebraska in contexts where the ideological hold of her growing-up environs might well have been, on some level, vulnerable to contradiction.

In order to identify how the discourse of the Indian question haunts Cather's narrative, it may be useful to briefly review the history of Indian enclosure, noting the parallels between reservation policy and the forms of confinement treated in the novel. As Lucy Maddox demonstrates, the rhetoric of Indian policy has consistently been organized into a series of false dichotomies: “The fundamental question of the Indians' capacity for assimilation into white American society was usually contextualized by the almost universally shared assumption that there were only two options for Indians: to become civilized, or to become extinct.” Put this way, a policy of dispossession can thus be easily reimagined as a humanitarian alternative to outright destruction. This explains the marked paternalism we find again and again in the documentary history of Indian affairs. The underlying agenda of discipline—building a labor force—is couched in language that opposes the degradation of government “handouts” to the true “charity” of enforced industry. As Indian Commissioner Hiram Price maintained, in language echoed repeatedly by Indian policymakers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “Labor is an essential element in producing civilization. … The greatest kindness the government can bestow upon the Indian is to teach him to labor for his own support, thus developing his true manhood, and, as a consequence, making him self-relying and self-supporting.”³³ Similarly, Indian Commissioner Francis Amasa Walker conceived of the reservation system as a disciplinary enclosure, where assimilation takes the form of taming the moral wilderness of “strong animal appetites” and making that wilderness productive—in some cases, having the Indians both experience and dramatize the process by farming the land (cultivating as a means of being themselves cultivated). As Ronald Takaki describes Walker's plan for the assimilation of Indians, “the government would subject them to ‘a rigid reformatory discipline’ … [because t]hey were unable to control their ‘strong animal appetites.’ … Grateful for the ‘whipping’ he had received as a child and the self-discipline he had developed, Walker was certain ‘wild Indians’ would become ‘industrious’ and ‘frugal’ through ‘a severe course of industrial instruction and exercise under restraint.’”³⁴ This emphasis on overcoming nature by restraint and making “wilderness” productive allows us to see a fundamental link between the civilization of savages and the cultivation of land—an exercise of power that extends in O Pioneers!, as we have seen, to the “savage” in Mrs. Lee, Ivar, and Frank.

A closer look at rhetorical patterns in documentary history illustrates the degree of this link. To begin with, we should note that the emphasis on labor is in part an attempt at bodily control: at turning ostensibly idle bodies into productive bodies. Recalling Lindemann's analysis of the “queer body” as a subversive site of indiscipline, it is particularly interesting to note to what extent bodily activity—interpreted, when those bodies are Indian, as bodily disorder—becomes a primary focus of Indian policy. For example, Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller, in listing the misdeeds to come under the jurisdiction of the Courts of Indian Offenses (tribunals for censuring misbehavior on the reservations), focuses especially on bodily matters: erotic relations, medical practices, and dancing.³⁵ A reissue of these rules in 1892 reiterates these same concerns, adding a proscription against prostitution and a set of criteria for selecting Indians to sit on the courts. In order to participate in this self-policing—a Foucauldian internalization of disciplinary power—Indians must, among other things, “wear citizens' dress”³⁶—testifying to their orderly bodies like Cather's Mrs. Lee.³⁷

The Indian body in American cultural history has been a deep and enduring source of fascination. Indian Commissioner Francis E. Leupp, in his 1905 report, includes the provocative claim, “I like the Indian for what is Indian in him. I want to see his splendid inherited physique kept up, because he glories, like his ancestors, in fresh air, in freedom, in activity, in feats of strength.”³⁸ It is tempting to read this celebration of the Indian physique as a nostalgic lament for lost wilderness itself: a romanticizing gesture akin to Alexandra's westward gaze prompted by Frank's incarceration. Indeed, it wouldn't be quite safe for Leupp to make such a remark until the confinement of that splendid body is secure, because the Indian body is also threatening in its mobility. One of the clearest disciplinary imperatives satisfied by reservation policy is immobilization; as Foucault claims, “One of the primary objects of discipline is to fix. … [I]t arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways.”³⁹ Indians in these documents are always “wild roving” and “roaming wild”;⁴⁰ clearly, wildness (or wilderness) is a spatial phenomenon, posited in opposition to the orderly space of, for example, Cather's checkerboard.

But as land greed intensified through the nineteenth century, the reservation ceased to provide a satisfactory solution to the Indian problem. The reservation system then evolved into a new policy intensifying the series of dispossessions that began with initial contact. The later years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth witnessed an assault on tribalism through the policy of allotment, whereby the lands of the initial enclosure—reservations—were cut up into family parcels in an attempt to indoctrinate Indians into the dominant value system. Ironically, Leupp employs this “fresh-air” Indian body as the rhetorical foundation for the allotment policy he champions. His strategy for “improvement” of the Indian, a word with suggestive links to the improvement of land upon which ownership rights are predicated, is to “keep him moving steadily down the path which leads from his close domain of artificial restraints and artificial protection toward the broad area of individual liberty enjoyed by the ordinary citizen.”⁴¹ Figuring the reservation as a “close domain,” he transforms the even closer allotment perimeter into an area made “broad” by an Anglo-American definition of “liberty.”⁴²

In order to educate Indians in the virtues of private property ownership, the 1887 Dawes Act granted the president “the power, at his discretion and without the Indians' consent, to allot reservation lands to individual heads of families in the amount of 160 acres,” while “[t]he federal government was authorized to sell ‘surplus’ reservation land—land that remained after allotment—to white settlers in 160-acre tracts” (DM, 234). An “inalienability” clause prohibiting the sale of allotted lands for 25 years proved ineffectual; legislation in 1902 (the Dead Indian Land Act), 1906 (the Burke Act), and 1908 (a congressional statute known to reformers as the “Crime of 1908”), as well as rampant corruption among those controlling implementation of the legislation, made allotments vulnerable to white buyers, such that, as a government official told President Roosevelt in 1902, “[I]t will be but a few years at most before all the Indians' land will have passed into the possession of the settlers” (DM, 237). Indian lands, in other words, were shrinking; not only were “surplus” reservation lands taken out of Indian hands, but many Native Americans were obliged to participate in their own dispossession by selling allotments in order to survive. The displacement of native peoples was not, therefore, a single irrevocable gesture so far in the past as to be beyond redress; the confinement of the Indians was in fact an ongoing series of enclosures and spatial reductions, enacted and debated while Cather was situated in one of the major centers of debate in the country. In other words, the consequences for Native Americans of the “moral victory” of Cather's pioneers were not obscured by the mists of time but repeatedly reenacted even as she spun her epic of American heroism.

Relatively few critics have seriously addressed the erasure of the Indian in O Pioneers!, although the important work of analyzing the rhetorical strategies by which this mystification of history is accomplished has begun.⁴³ For example, Louise Westling reads Ivar as a replacement for and displacement of the Indian, an overwriting of the Native American story with the immigrant story Cather prefers: “Through him, Cather erases the original inhabitants of the Plains whom the white man had evicted not long before the time of the novel. She replaces the Pawnee, Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho with a European immigrant literally dug into the American earth to establish his legitimacy and supplant Indian ways of living on the land.”⁴⁴ But despite this attempt to legitimate the authority of immigrant over native claims to the land, we might say that Ivar's story, in overwriting the Indian history, also retains its shadow. Ivar loses his land due to mismanagement and is given a “comfortable” but not especially desired space in Alexandra's household (OP, 59). Only agriculture is proper “management” of the land; alternative relations to the physical world like Ivar's—or like those of the plains Indian cultures—are deemed to nullify the claim to rightful possession and leave the dispossessed vulnerable to social engineering—proper “management”—for their own good.

Cather's text endorses Alexandra's proper management of Ivar—his assimilation into her household—as a way to avoid confinement in the asylum, at least on the literal level. Like Alexandra's household, Indian policies of progressive shrinkage as a means of social integration ostensibly provide asylum from the threatened alternative of extermination (and the historical fact that an asylum, like the reservation, proved the most effective means of obliterating Indian peoples and cultures reminds us of this word's dangerous duality). But the threat of confinement is not abolished from the text; it returns in Frank's incarceration. And once again, we may find in this prison image an echo of history. The rhetoric of disciplinary enclosure discussed above offers suggestive parallels to Frank's condition as a ward of the state; but there is another figure we should consider at this moment in the narrative. In his analysis of the corn god fantasy-figure who appears to Alexandra in moments of repose or exhaustion, J. Russell Reaver points out that “[s]ignificantly, just before she resolves to visit Frank Shabata, who is now in prison for his double murder, [Alexandra] has a vision more vivid than it had been for many years.”⁴⁵ For Reaver, this significance is unrelated to the history of Native American dispossession, but this narrative juxtaposition of Alexandra's recurring vision and the penitentiary may direct us to look more closely at the fantasy image.

We first encounter Alexandra's fantasy at the close of “Winter Memories”:

Sometimes, as she lay thus luxuriously idle, her eyes closed, she used to have an illusion 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. 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.

(OP, 137)

This image of sun-kissed eroticism quickly becomes threatening. When he then “bend[s] over her,” we see not the Genius of the Divide entering into reciprocal desire but an erotic kidnapping—“she could feel herself being carried swiftly off across the fields.” If, as Sharon O'Brien claims, “on some level she wants to be harvested,”⁴⁶ Alexandra experiences this desire as traumatic: “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” (OP, 137). As several critics have pointed out, the threat of this figure is linked to his emphatic heterosexuality (in contrast to the lesbian eroticism of Alexandra's relation to the land). Indeed, he is the land bodied forth in masculine sexual aggression—a reminder of the sexual threat associated with Frank's attempt to tame Marie.⁴⁷

But considered in its entirety, this image may also suggest another kind of threat. Reaver, in providing mythological contexts for Alexandra's fantasy figure, suggests that this corn god embodies certain Native American beliefs. When Alexandra does finally see him clearly, his arm is “dark and gleaming, like bronze,” and he wears a white cloak (OP, 192). According to Reaver,

the hero's shining cloak in this version has analogs closer to home. … The Pawnee have a sacred rite in the form of a dramatic prayer for life and children, health and prosperity, addressed to the universal powers: Father Heaven and celestial forces and Mother Earth and terrestrial forces. The central symbol in the bird imagery serving as intermediaries between heaven and earth is the ‘plume of white featherdown, typifying the fleecy clouds of heaven, and hence the winds and breath of life.’ In Navaho lore also, it is interesting to note, Atse Hastin or ‘First Man’ was created from white maize, and in the cult-symbols of the Navaho white is the mantel of dawn.⁴⁸

While he doesn't address whether Cather would have been familiar with these native beliefs, Reaver does offer potential validation for the intuitive sense that this fantasy figure has a certain Native American resonance. We might add that, as Nebraska historian James C. Olson details, Pawnee culture was profoundly connected to the image of corn: “Corn was their mother, figuring in their rituals and in their mythology even more prominently than did the buffalo.”⁴⁹ A “larger, stronger, swifter” mythological being with a deeply symbolic relationship to corn may not be inconsistent with the romanticized view of Indians to which Cather would have been exposed; this figure does boast the “splendid inherited physique” that, for Indian Commissioner Leupp, made the Indian an Indian. Moreover, the profound otherness of this figure suggests an eruption, perhaps both of time and of culture: a return of repressed history.⁵⁰ The fantasy is then doubly threatening, as both heterosexual aggression and as the symbolic Indian whose literal presence would disrupt Cather's epic narrative.⁵¹

If we follow through on Reaver's observations and identify the corn god as a representation of the vanished Indian, Alexandra's decision to visit the penitentiary just after this fantasy may likewise take on further meaning. Alexandra has been “haunted” by Frank's “haggard face and wild eyes,” as the heroic myth of the pioneer is haunted by its untold history (OP, 192). If what we see here is the disturbing recollection of the “disturbance” of the plains Indian in the “first cycle” of Nebraska history, then it is significant indeed that the fantasy is linked to the site of confinement. Alexandra's attempted resolution of the problem of civilization—her promise to get Frank released—may then point to another historically troublesome problem of civilization: the shrinking space of Indian culture. In this moment of rupture, we might say that the novel tells the story of its own production: pastoral nostalgia (Alexandra's fantasized restoration of wide-open space to an irrevocably “tamed” Frank) both springs from and compensates for its own primal crime of civilizing the wilderness—both the land and the bodies, white and red, that inhabit it.

According to Fischer, “Any story of the (white) settlement of Nebraska—or ‘America’—will inevitably find itself referring to those peoples whose ‘removal’ preceded that settlement. The function of criticism, accordingly, is to uncover these traces.”⁵² I have argued that civilization is fundamentally linked to disciplinary enclosure, an attempt to tame wilderness in its many manifestations. The Indian is perhaps the most culturally potent figure for untamed landscape, and the removal of native populations was the historical act of enclosure most fundamentally linked to the spirit of the pioneer. We may then see a deep anxiety about that untold history as one among several interrelated historical and theoretical phenomena that are condensed in O Pioneers! in the motif of confinement.

In one of Cather's many statements about the process of composition—which, read in this context of Indian erasure, is especially telling—she endorses an art of deletion:

Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions in form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were type on the page.⁵³

In O Pioneers!, Cather has “suppressed and cut away” the historical record of Native American removal, but her narrative of Nebraska origins is nonetheless haunted by a shadow text, available to the reader “as if it were type on the page.” The text's preoccupation with enclosure may lead us to one of those “traces” Fischer challenges us to uncover—and to the unacknowledged history we continue to restore.

University of Arizona

Notes

1. “Willa Cather,” interview by Eleanor Hinman, Lincoln Sunday Star, 6 November 1921; reprinted in Willa Cather in Person, ed. L. Brent Bohlke (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), 42.

2. Louise Bogan, “Profiles: American Classic,” New Yorker, 8 August 1931; reprinted in Willa Cather in Person, ed. Bohlke, 115.

3. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1989), 57. Further references to this source are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as OP.

4. Bernice Slote, “The Kingdom of Art,” in The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements 1893-1896, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966), 64.

5. Bernice Slote, “Writer in Nebraska,” in The Kingdom of Art, 3.

6. Willa Cather, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,” Nation, September 1923, 238.

7. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (New York: Lippincott, 1953), 120.

8. Critics have devoted substantial attention to the novel's mystification of history in service of its epic enterprise. Cather's valorization of conquest as an imaginative act and concomitant erasure of both labor and the complex issues of settlement have been well documented, described variously as generic operations of romance (that is, romanticization) or pastoral (that is, pastoralization). For excellent examples of this approach to the novel as a romance or pastoral, see Mike Fischer, “Pastoralism and Its Discontents: Willa Cather and the Burden of Imperialism,” Mosaic 23 (winter 1990): 31-44; Blanche Gelfant, introduction to Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (New York: Penguin, 1989), ix-xxxvii; Demaree C. Peck, The Imaginative Claims of the Artist in Willa Cather's Fiction: “Possession Granted by a Different Lease” (Selinsgrove, Penn.: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 1996); Susan J. Rosowski, The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986); David Stouck, Willa Cather's Imagination (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1975); and Louise H. Westling, The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1996). On the other hand, some of the most interesting recent work on the novel has reversed this dominant view. Feminist critics like Judith Fryer and Sharon O'Brien don't see O Pioneers! as a pastoral myth, but I believe their focus on what Fryer calls an “anti-mythic” journey (246) or on the novel's regendering of the traditional pastoral landscape obscures some important justificatory maneuvers in this narrative of origins (see, respectively, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986]; and Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987]). Some critics do find a measure of ambivalence in Cather toward the project of imperialism, but focusing chiefly on later novels, they typically attribute any ill effects of the sod-breaking spirit to characters' alienation from the founding values of pioneering. I propose that this assumption of a moral decline from an imagined peak of pioneer rectitude inadequately accounts for the conflicted and conflicting implications of “subduing the wild land.” Guy Reynolds, while noting the depoliticization of Cather's Nebraska and the idealization of her pioneer, finds a measure of subversion of the myth of empire in O Pioneers! (Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire [London: Macmillan, 1996], 58-60). To Reynolds's insightful reading, I would add that the novel is in conflict with itself in ways Cather does not fully control.

9. I use discipline in the sense elaborated by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, as a phenomenon of spatial control: “[D]iscipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space” and “sometimes requires enclosure” (trans. Alan Sheridan [1978; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1995], 141). According to Foucault, this deployment of power is designed “to strengthen the social forces—to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply” (208). My point is that there is an analogous relationship between the reconfiguration of land for the purpose of productivity and the reconfiguration of social or human space for the same purpose.

10. Willa Cather, “Restlessness Such as Ours Does Not Make for Beauty,” interview by Rose C. Feld, New York Times Book Review, 21 December 1924; reprinted in Willa Cather in Person, ed. Bohlke, 71-72.

11. Cather, “Nebraska,” 238.

12. Mildred R. Bennett, The World of Willa Cather (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1951), 30-31.

13. Marilee Lindemann, Willa Cather: Queering America (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), 7-8.

14. Ibid., 46.

15. Sergeant, Willa Cather, 116-17.

16. Willa Cather, “One Way of Putting It,” Nebraska State Journal, 26 November 1893; reprinted in The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902, ed. William M. Curtin, 2 vols. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), 1:10-11. In language that characterizes this increasingly civil status as a form of constriction or confinement, Cather castigated the “cramping” laws of Nebraska in a 1921 address. As reported in the Lincoln Evening State Journal under the headline “State Laws are Cramping,” Cather charged: “Nebraska is particularly blessed with laws calculated to regulate the personal life of her citizens. … They are not laws that trample you underfoot and crush you but laws that just sort of cramp one” (31 October 1921; reprinted in Willa Cather in Person, ed. Bohlke, 147). For a much more pointed indictment of the state as a punitive entity, see also Cather's 1893 story “The Clemency of the Court.”

17. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 101, my emphasis.

18. As Michel Foucault makes explicit, “Confinement … is a ‘police’ matter. Police, in the precise sense that the classical epoch gave to it—that is, the totality of measures which make work possible and necessary for all those who could not live without it. … Before having the medical meaning we give it, or that at least we like to suppose it has, confinement was required by something quite different from any concern with curing the sick. What made it necessary was an imperative of labor” (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard [1965; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1988], 46).

19. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 269. See also Lindemann, Willa Cather: “Ivar has in effect been to the asylum without ever actually going there, having internalized the disciplinary mechanisms Foucault associates with asylums” (38). I would add that this figurative asylum also, if redundantly, finds material walls in Alexandra's house, and that she is deeply implicated in this process of internalization.

20. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964; reprint, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 87.

21. Lucy Maddox has persuasively argued that all nineteenth-century writing in one way or another addresses the “Indian question” (Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991], 10-11). I would add that the production or rehearsal of national origin mythologies in any period cannot avoid engaging these questions on some level.

22. Bernice Slote, “Willa Cather and Plains Culture,” in Vision and Refuge: Essays on the Literature of the Great Plains, ed. Virginia Faulkner with Frederick C. Luebke (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982), 98-99. But Slote's explanation doesn't put an end to the question. Fischer emphasizes that “‘columns of print’ describing the Indians did in fact exist. On one level, some late-nineteenth-century Nebraskans were still aware of the Indians, as they could not help being, given how recently—as late as the 1870s—much of western Nebraska had still been under Sioux control” (“Pastoralism,” 33). Furthermore, it may not be wholly accurate to assume that the entirety of Nebraska press coverage would preclude awareness of or even sympathy with the increasing enclosure of native peoples. For example, James C. Olson details the case of the arbitrarily relocated Ponca Indians in his History of Nebraska: “The plight of the Poncas attracted wide attention, and a commission appointed by President Hayes in 1880 to inquire into the matter worked out an arrangement whereby those who wanted to return to Nebraska … were allowed to do so” ([Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1955], 137). While Cather would have been too young to take notice of this particular case, the “wide attention” attracted by the Poncas suggests that the plight of dispossessed Native Americans may not have been entirely obscured by romanticized legends.

23. Willa Cather, “Willa Cather Talks of Work,” interview by F. H., Philadelphia Record, 9 August 1913; reprinted in Kingdom of Art, ed. Slote, 449.

24. Ibid., 448.

25. Cather, “Nebraska,” 236.

26. Willa Cather, “On Shadows on the Rock,” in On Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (New York: Knopf, 1949), 16. In reading this statement, however, it is important to recognize not just its disavowal of Indian history but also its celebration of a female frontier; certainly, the contrast of domestic detail with military aggression is gender-coded, and thus has crucial significance for the critic attempting to delineate Cather's relationship to the American literary tradition that Nina Baym famously terms “melodramas of beset manhood.”

27. Fischer investigates this repressed content in his article on My Ántonia. Pointing out that “[the Indians] were not so far away … either temporally or geographically, as Cather might have wanted—and successfully managed—to believe” (“Pastoralism,” 33), he argues that My Ántonia bears traces of this deliberately forgotten history. I am indebted to Fisher's argument; in attempting to read O Pioneers! with an analogous attention to erasures and disruptions, I hope to further the groundbreaking contribution he has made to Cather studies.

28. E. K. Brown, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography (New York: Knopf, 1953), 171.

29. “The Era of Red Cloud,” New York Times, 14 December 1909.

30. Fischer, “Pastoralism,” 32.

31. Reading the absence of Indians in O Pioneers! in the context of Cather's earlier writing leads to an important conclusion. In texts whose key theme is nostalgic longing or lament for the unrecoverable past, Indians are part of the landscape. For example, she links vanished Indians with the vanished glory of an old steamboat town (see “Brownville,” Nebraska State Journal, 12 August 1894; reprinted in The World and the Parish, 1:110); likewise, old Indians, buried Indians, and mythic Indians treated in such Cather tales as “The Enchanted Bluff” and “A Resurrection” parallel the old, buried, mythic kingdom of childhood imagination. O Pioneers!, however, has a different agenda. The purpose of the novel is to reestablish the heroism of origins—not of childhood but of history. Cather must then mystify the conquest of native peoples in order to obscure the loss in which the pioneering enterprise is implicated. In other words, there's no room for Indians in O Pioneers!, because Cather is trying to rhetorically recover the past, not lament its passing. However, given her ambivalence toward “progress,” this recovery is not wholly innocent of lament. Accordingly, I would argue that her vanished Indian is not wholly vanished.

32. A brief survey of the New York Times in the few years leading up to O Pioneers! suggests some of the forms this debate assumed. While a consistently or overwhelmingly sympathetic attitude toward Native Americans doesn't emerge in the Times, there was certainly ample coverage of official misdealings and some particular emphasis on issues of space and enclosure. For example: “The red men will never endure civilization. Of the millions who formerly overran the National domain, some 300,000 survive on reservations. Rum is slaying its thousands, tuberculosis its ten thousands. … But it is their domesticated state, not primarily disease, that ails them” (24 March 1909); “[Red Cloud] returned westward to go into peaceful retirement, a captive and a pensioner” (“The Era of Red Cloud,” 14 December 1909; this item might have had particular interest for Cather, given the name of her home town); and “an investigation … has disclosed ‘a disgraceful condition’ affecting the material and moral welfare of the [Indian] schools” (“Balinger Suspends Indian Officials,” 10 January 1910). A similar concern about the destructive effects of confinement is expressed by former Indian affairs commissioner Francis E. Leupp, whose The Indian and His Problem was quoted extensively in a Times review (“Francis E. Leupp Writes of The Indian and His Problem,” 27 March 1910, pt. 5, 8). The Times reported at some length on “Grafting on the Indians and How It Is Done—How Our ‘Century of Dishonor’ Has Been Replaced by an Era of Plain Swindling,” including coverage of the scandal of the McMurray law firm, under investigation for exploitation of the allotment system (7 August 1910, pt. 5, 6), and of Oklahoma Senator Thomas P. Gore's investigation into the “dark and devious ways by which the native wards of the Government have been despoiled of their heritage” (“Yankee Tricks Played on the Indians,” 13 August 1910). The series concludes pointedly: “[A]lready, as the record shows, the Indians had been cheated out of millions upon millions of their rightful inheritance” (“‘Grafting’ on the Indians,” 14 August 1910). My summary of the Times's coverage of the “Indian question” illustrates a perspective to which Cather would have been exposed. Comparable pieces in McClure's would be more conclusive, but I have found no articles or editorials on Native American issues during Cather's tenure there.

33. Hiram Price, extract from the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 24 October 1881, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, 2d ed., ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990), 155. Price continues: “To domesticate and civilize wild Indians is a noble work, the accomplishment of which should be a crown of glory to any nation” (156), a flourish which may remind us of Cather's celebration of the pioneer's “moral victory.”

34. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 233-34. Further references to this source will be cited parenthetically as DM.

35. Henry M. Teller, extract from the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1 November 1883, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Prucha, 160-61.

36. Thomas J. Morgan, “Rules for Indian Courts,” 27 August 1892, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Prucha, 187.

37. In the twentieth century especially, the diseased Indian body became the object of particular attention. In his 1910 report, Indian Commissioner Robert Valentine outlined a plan of inspection and education that implicitly identifies the unsanitary or unhygienic Indian body as another manifestation of its indiscipline (extract from the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1 November 1910, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Prucha, 212-13).

38. Francis E. Leupp, extract from the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 September 1905, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Prucha, 206.

39. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 218-19.

40. Hiram Price, extract from the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 10 October 1882, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Prucha, 158.

41. Leupp, extract from the Annual Report, 30 September 1905, 205-6, my emphasis.

42. What's ultimately at stake, in other words, is a fundamental conflict over land use, property, and definitions of identity. As Priscilla Wald demonstrates, this conflict formed the legal basis for the nineteenth-century Indian policy of exclusion. According to America's Lockean understanding of itself, the commodification of nature—the idea of land as privately ownable—is the foundation of civil personhood itself. As Wald argues, “Where citizenship is defined through the natural right to own property, and following Locke, the most basic expression of this concept rests in the citizen's self-ownership,” Indians are dispossessed of personhood “in the tribal absence of an ‘American’ concept of private property” (“Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease [Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1993], 65). By the late nineteenth century, assimilation—civilization or extinction—had also become for the Indians a matter of civil life and death. Civil life could only be produced by private property—by tribal dispossession and spatial reduction. The state thus grants that life only on condition of enclosure. On the notion of property and property law in Indian policy and how the law “demanded that these cultures accept the terms of property/individualism/representation or die fighting for another set of terms” (112), see also Eric Cheyfitz, “Savage Law: The Plot against American Indians in Johnson and Graham's Lessee v. M'Intosh and The Pioneers,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan and Pease, 109-28.

43. Stouck merely observes: “In her Nebraska novels Willa Cather does not describe the Indians who inhabited the plains before the white settlers. … Curiously, the drama of the Plains Indians did not play a part in Willa Cather's imagination” (“Willa Cather and the Indian Heritage,” Twentieth Century Literature 22 [December 1976]: 434). Both Fischer and Westling do take up this question—Fischer in a detailed analysis of My Ántonia (“Pastoralism”), and Westling in brief in her larger study of the novel (Green Breast of the New World).

44. Westling, Green Breast, 66-67.

45. J. Russell Reaver, “Mythic Motivation in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!” Western Folklore 27 (January 1968): 22.

46. Sharon O'Brien, “The Unity of Willa Cather's ‘Two-Part Pastoral’: Passion in O Pioneers!” Studies in American Fiction 6 (autumn 1978): 163.

47. For the argument that heterosexuality is consistently associated with violence throughout the novel, see especially O'Brien, “Unity”; and C. Susan Wiesenthal, “Female Sexuality in Willa Cather's O Pioneers! and the Era of Scientific Sexology: A Dialogue between Frontiers,” Ariel 21 (January 1990): 41-63.

48. Reaver, “Mythic Motivation,” 23.

49. Olson, History of Nebraska, 23.

50. The queer or unassimilable body, to use Lindemann's terms, may at the same time function as a kind of legal uncanny. As Wald notes in her analysis of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), “The Courts' decisions turn the Cherokee … into uncanny figures who mirror the legal contingency—and the potential fate—of all subjects in the Union, a fate made all the more plausible by the instability of the Union and the tenuousness of national unity” (“Terms of Assimilation,” 59).

51. We may then find more than passing interest in one of Cather's repeated disavowals of interest in Indians: “[U]nless [the poet] is more interested in his own little story and his foolish little people than in the Preservation of the Indian or Sex or Tuberculosis, then he ought to be working in a laboratory or bureau” (“Light on Adobe Walls,” in On Writing, 125). In this statement, Cather links Indians, the disease that was decimating Indian populations, and sexuality. This indirect association of Native Americans with sexuality may allow us to identify a familiar pattern in Alexandra's corn-god fantasy: the eroticization of the other, where a racial threat is coded as a sexual threat.

52. Fischer, “Pastoralism,” 32.

53. Willa Cather, “On the Art of Fiction,” in On Writing, 102.

I am deeply indebted to Annette Kolodny and to members of her graduate seminar “Reconceiving the United States Frontiers and Frontier Theory” (University of Arizona, 1999-2000) for their insightful responses to this essay throughout the writing process.