SOURCE: Gustafson, Neil. “Getting Back to Cather's Text: The Shared Dream in O Pioneers!” Western American Literature 30, no. 2 (summer 1995): 151-62.

[In the following essay, Gustafson analyzes the relationship between gender and nature in O Pioneers!]

A number of feminist studies of the past twenty years have focused on the relationship between gender and landscape or nature. Annette Kolodny and Ellen Moers are two important promoters of a theory that casts the male as the marauder of nature, the female as its protector; the male abuses nature, the female nurtures it.¹ Several critics have maintained that this general argument applies to Willa Cather's O Pioneers! For example, this stance serves as a basis for Sharon O'Brien's analysis of the novel in her Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, a work in which she goes to great lengths to establish a distinct difference between how John and Alexandra Bergson perceive and work with the land. While I do not object out-of-hand to the general theory, I do maintain that it cannot be properly applied to O Pioneers! and that such attempts to appropriate the novel as exemplary of that theory are clearly invalidated by Cather's text.

Yet attempts to apply this particular feminist argument to the novel are numerous; of these, O'Brien's approach is typical. She asserts that while “John Bergson wants to make his mark on the soil by imposing his will upon it” (434), Alexandra “achieves her creative designs by letting them emerge from the soil, not by seeking to subdue nature through force” (392). This is an interpretation long in incubation; O'Brien's is not even the first attempt to apply it specifically to O Pioneers! Dorothy Tuck McFarland, writing in 1972, states that “[John] Bergson exemplifies one possible relationship to the land—that of impersonal ownership—which is shown, by its results, to be inadequate” (21), and, “Though many have attempted to subdue the land, its submission to the hand of man is dependent on love rather than force” (23), thus anticipating much of O'Brien's argument.

More recent contributors to or promulgators of this theoretical approach in general include Carol Fairbanks, who writes in her 1986 study of female pioneer writers about a “traditional (and usually male) assumption: the land must be subdued; in subduing the land a person becomes heroic. … The relationship between women and the land is different.” Their “heroism arise[s] out of their ability to work with the land” (170). Josephine Donovan, writing about Cather and O Pioneers! specifically, identifies Alexandra's brothers, Lou and Oscar, and Frank Shabata as “figures [who] tend to be divorced from nature. They represent the masculine.” But Crazy Ivar, Marie Toveska, and Alexandra's younger brother Emil are found to be “in connection with nature” and, thus, represent the feminine (104). And, Elizabeth Jane Harrison sees the novel “as the first successful attempt to change the relationship between women and landscape,” and finds that Alexandra has an “empowering bond with nature,” that she gains her identity from the land rather than being symbolic of it (9).

I maintain, again, that a reading of Cather's text reveals quite clearly that this critical approach, whatever its general strengths or weaknesses might be, does not apply to John and Alexandra Bergson. First, John is not a failed farmer, nor does Cather depict him as a brutalizer of nature. Second, Alexandra is not presented as having been born with an “empowering bond” with the land; she is, instead, shown from the beginning to be a tough young woman blessed with a solid business mind. She develops her love for the land only gradually, as she begins, first, to understand her father's vision of the land and, then, to make his vision her own. It is a shared dream.

McFarland and O'Brien, however, insist upon seeing John as not only a failed farmer, but also a “defeated” man. He fails, O'Brien writes, because “men like Alexandra's father … can only interpret [the land's] resistance to cultivation as hostility …” (430). Their first and only impulse is, therefore, to “tame” the land; and this is the impulse that destroys. But Alexandra herself succeeds on the same land, it is maintained, because of her different approach: “Gifted with imagination, able to see possibilities in the soil that no one has glimpsed, she triumphs because she combines a mystic faith in the Divide with a pragmatic willingness to experiment with new farming techniques” (430-31). Alexandra feels no compulsion to forcibly tame the land: “Possessed by the land more than possessing it, Alexandra rejects a model of ownership and authorship based on the rights of dominance and force …” (154).

Again, it is important not to ignore the statements of a particular text when trying to recruit that text in support of a larger assumption. While Cather does portray John Bergson as a tired, physically beaten man, she also shows him to be a caring husband and father who has in essence sacrificed his own life for the betterment of his entire family. He is finished, but not “defeated.” He has been particularly devoted to his family and sensitive to their needs from their first days at the frontier. While others on the Divide live in sod huts, for example, John, aware of his wife's inability to abide such a residence, builds her a log home (147), no small feat in the middle of a treeless plain. As he is dying, he urges his sons not to “grudge your mother a little time for plowing her garden and setting out the fruit trees” because “she has always missed the old country” (151). As her father is waiting to die, Alexandra acknowledges that his concern for his family is uppermost in his mind: she says to her friend Carl Linstrum, “He lies and counts on his fingers all day. I think he is trying to count up what he is leaving for us” (145). And when his life is finally over, John is again a rarity among his neighbors: he is out of debt. He owns one square mile of land, unencumbered. This is “what he is leaving” his family, a solid beginning.

The tragedy is that John, himself, will not share the rewards of his effort.

As he lay there day after day he had to accept the situation as it was, and to be thankful that there was one among his children to whom he could entrust the future of his family and the possibilities of his hard-won land.

(149)

As Cather tells us here, John has not failed; he has “his hard-won land,” and he may now bequeath it and all its “possibilities”²—which he has foreseen, as this passage illustrates—to his children. John is comforted in knowing that he is leaving the results of his eleven years of effort in the capable hands of his daughter who—as we learn from John's own thoughts—is a kindred spirit, who possesses “resourcefulness and good judgment,” “who read[s] the papers and follow[s] the markets, … who learn[s] by the mistakes of their neighbors” (148-49), and who could further develop their land's “possibilities.”

Yet critics who fail to acknowledge this close relationship between father and daughter insist, instead, on seeing John as a man of faulty vision, as a man who fails because “he wants to make his mark on the soil by imposing his will upon it,” as a man whose vision of nature is a masculine one of total aggression which leads him to see the prairie only as a “virgin land to be raped” (O'Brien 434). While there is evidence that John is bewildered by his task, the text suggests that it is more likely a lack of knowledge than an innate desire to rape the virgin land that contributes to his frustration and his setbacks. Cather writes that

In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression upon the wild land he had come to tame. It was still a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why. Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendly to man.

(147)

O'Brien cites a portion of this passage to support her view of John as one involved in a violent “struggle to dominate nature” (435). But John's actions and words do not support such a view. Nowhere does Cather suggest that John is anything but mentally and physically exhausted from his efforts to make a home for his family. John knows that, in merely learning how to farm this wild country, he has made mistakes; he has discussed these with Alexandra, and he tells his sons, “If she does make mistakes, she will not make so many as I have” (150). After all, he has tutored her for years, and she will be the beneficiary of both his failed and successful experiments.

History itself tells us that John's efforts have not been those of a plunderer or rapist, but those of a courageous pioneer. The land was indeed a “wild thing” with “ugly moods” in the early 1870s when the Bergsons arrived on the prairie. Learning how to farm the new land, learning which kind of crop (and then, even, which kind of seed for a particular crop) would prosper in these unplowed regions was largely a matter of “trial and error” (Billington 708-9), a process which destroyed many thousands of pioneer dreams, those of immigrants and Easterners alike. As John himself acknowledges (even though “[h]e knew every ridge and draw and gully” of his land), “He had the idea that no one understood how to farm it properly, and this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their neighbors, certainly, knew even less about farming than he did.” John notes that most settlers, like himself, had not been farmers, but “handwerkers,” before coming to the Plains; most had been “tailors, locksmiths, joiners, cigarmakers, etc. Bergson himself had worked in a shipyard” (148). All were confronted with learning not only how to farm, but how to farm an untried land.

What John is, in fact, is an exception, a success among many failures. He has managed to reach the point of solvency and to bequeath to his family—in the tradition of “the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is desirable”—a legacy of land, of a family homestead, of roots in the New World, of a debt-free beginning (148). Though the character of John Bergson is less well-developed than that of Anton Rosicky in Cather's “Neighbor Rosicky,” their backgrounds as immigrant laborers who sought to establish their families on their own lands as well as their obvious concern for the needs and well-being of those families suggest a strong kinship between the two. Rosicky lives to see his dream fulfilled. But the effort to achieve a similar level of success has taxed John Bergson to the limit; the price of his success will be extreme, an early death.

As he lives out his final moments, John calls the children together to explain that Alexandra will be left in charge of the farm and to urge his sons Oscar and Lou to heed the advice of their older sister. He further says, “And Alexandra must not work in the fields any more. There is no necessity now. Hire a man when you need help” (151). Obviously, a degree of success has been achieved; it is no longer necessary for Alexandra to work like a man. They are even prosperous enough to hire help when a labor-crunch occurs, and Alexandra will have the help of seventeen- and nineteen-year-old young men as she continues to work and improve the land. When John arrived on the prairie eleven years before, these young men were but boys of six and eight (150), not much help in breaking sod. What John has accomplished alone could now be built upon by an entire family. He has tilled one-half of his farm; the tilling of the second half is left to his children. His is not a legacy of failure.

But as many of their neighbors were giving up the fight and returning to eastern cities (Carl Linstrum's family, for example), it is reasonable that John be concerned about the future, and it is important that he choose the right person to lead his family. He tells Alexandra, “Don't let them [Oscar and Lou] get discouraged and go off like Uncle Otto [his brother]. I want them to keep the land” (150). As becomes apparent, John, in deciding to name Alexandra as leader, shows wisdom, the kind of wisdom in judging character that he will leave as yet another legacy to his talented daughter. And there is no indication that it is Alexandra's femaleness that is key to her eventual success. Rather, John notes that she “was like her grandfather; which was his way of saying that she was intelligent.” He sees, also, in her, her grandfather's “strength of will” and his “simple direct way of thinking things out” (149). It is her insight and good business sense that will allow her to build an agricultural empire from which the entire family benefits.

But it is wrong to assert that Alexandra creates this empire alone. Always, as she acknowledges, it is the beginning with which their father has provided them and his mandate that they “keep the land” that serve as Alexandra's sources of strength and determination, as she illustrates when she tells her brothers, as their neighbors are fleeing the Divide, “I think we ought to hold on as long as we can on father's account. He was so set on keeping this land” (166). He has left them in good stead, as the family's prosperity continues unabated for the first three years after John's death (161), solid testimony to both his fine preparation and Alexandra's continued good management. Alexandra pointedly explains to her brothers how their successful father had differed from other farmers and how much they owe to him by saying, “But all these fellows who are running off are bad farmers, like poor Mr. Linstrum. They couldn't get ahead even in good years, and they all got into debt while father was getting out” (166). And again, “Why are we better fixed than any of our neighbors? Because father had more brains” (172). These are not the accomplishments nor the characteristics of a failure. In Alexandra's evaluation—and, it would seem, Cather's—John Bergson, in contrast to many others, had been a good farmer, even a successful farmer.

The text states unequivocally that it is this good farmer's dream that Alexandra continues to build upon, that serves as her inspiration to take the risks that will lead to financial independence. When hard times do come again to the Divide, in the form of “three years of drouth and failure” (161), Alexandra proves her particular mettle. She sees the chance to expand their land holdings as others are selling out, and, as usual, she gives due credit to John: “The chance that father was always looking for has come” (171).³ It had been John's goal, obviously, to expand their holdings at the first opportunity, an intention he must have made clear to his daughter during one or more of their frequent consultations (148). When Cather writes, “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman,” she is speaking of Alexandra, clearly; yet Alexandra tells us in many ways that her father's dream was the seed planted in her heart that grew large enough to encompass the whole country “with love and yearning” (170). And it was Cather's opinion that “the heart of [either] a man or woman” could embrace the land, could look at it with that same gaze of “love and yearning.”

But an agricultural empire, Alexandra's or anyone else's, is neither spawned by nor realized through love alone. Though O'Brien blames John's failure and even his death on his ill-advised, masculine-driven attempt to tame the land, she admits finally that this is just what his daughter has accomplished. O'Brien, however, would have Alexandra's taming the result of her feminine “artistic project” (438). The text suggests otherwise.

As previously stated, from the very beginning we are told of Alexandra's “resourcefulness and good judgment.” She is constantly trying to improve her farm and farming techniques. She visits Crazy Ivar on the pretext of buying a hammock, but we discover that her real intention is to learn how better to raise hogs (159). While her brothers and Carl cavort in the family pond the evening after the trip to Ivar's, she dreams of building “her new pig corral” (160). She is also canny enough to know, since it is a “real estate man” who is buying up all the farmland on the Divide from those pioneers who are giving up, that their Divide land is valuable land. She will not be persuaded by her brothers to trade it for land near the river (166). Yet, she is wise enough to test this hypothesis; she takes a trip to the bottomlands to find out for herself, a trip which only solidifies her desire to expand their Divide holdings. And while she's there, she does what she can to absorb any new farming techniques being practiced near the river. Upon her return she invites her brothers to make a similar fact-finding excursion (168-70), showing her to be a practical and effective manager of people.

In her efforts to win them over to her opinion, the extent of her pragmatism is highlighted: “Let's try to do like the shrewd ones, and not like these stupid fellows.” The “shrewd ones” are those who are buying land; the “stupid” ones, those who are selling it. Shrewd men are “the ones to watch in a new country,” Alexandra says; they “don't try to farm” the land they are buying; instead, they let others work it and then live off these laborers' efforts. Alexandra appreciates the practicality and shrewdness of managing real estate and the people who work it as opposed to toiling on the land itself. This is not loving the land into productive submission; it is, rather, the application of good, hard business sense. She is setting up her family members for a life of relative leisure based on the possession of large tracts of land. Alexandra leaves no doubt that this is her goal: at one point, when Oscar complains that buying more land will lead to more work than they can physically manage, she comforts him by saying, “You poor boy, you won't have to work it” (172). Through calculated land speculation, by taking advantage of the weakness or failure of her neighbors, Alexandra, like the “shrewd men” she has learned from, achieves financial independence for her entire family.

But Alexandra is not all shrewd businesswoman; she also develops, eventually, a true love for the country on the Divide. In the evening after her return from the bottomlands, Alexandra

had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. Even her talk with the boys had not taken away the feeling that had overwhelmed her when she drove back to the Divide that afternoon. She had never known before how much the country meant to her. … Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.

(173)

It is as if, at last, Alexandra has glimpsed fully for the first time the vision of the future her father had labored to instill in her, this father who “knew every ridge, draw and gully” of his farm and who, on his death bed, pleaded with Alexandra “to keep the land.” Alexandra understands for herself, now, why they must keep the land. While she has, perhaps, kept up the struggle to this point “on father's account,” now, having been to the other land, she comes back to her own farm with “a new consciousness” of the value, of the importance of their Divide land. She knows now just “how much the country meant to her.” Finally her father's dream has become fully her own; her apprenticeship is over. This is what is misunderstood, that this is a shared dream; that in his daughter, John recognizes a kindred spirit, one to whom he could entrust his own vision, one who would eventually make it her own.

My point is neither to deny that Alexandra has a dream and that she accomplishes it, nor to suggest that she does not grow to develop a mystical relationship with her land. What must be made clear, however, is that the nature of her victory over the wild land has less to do with “mystic faith” than with foresight and successful risk taking (and the strong backs of her brothers). And, further, it must be acknowledged that Alexandra shares and expands upon a dream first envisioned by her father; that she is, like her father had been, a hard-working and practical visionary with a particular goal in mind; and that she, unlike her sacrificing father, was not so broken by the first hard steps toward the realization of the dream that she couldn't experience the fulfillment of it. Mrs. Bergson is unequivocal when Alexandra asks her if it was harder in the beginning for John than it is now for Alexandra, Oscar, and Lou. “Oh, worse! Much worse,” moaned Mrs. Bergson. “Drouth, chinch-bugs, hail, everything! My garden all cut to pieces like sauerkraut. No grapes on the creek, no nothing. The people all lived just like coyotes” (167). John Bergson, it is apparent, had faced difficulties in the early days that his children can not even remember. Some of them he recalls on his death bed:

Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back. One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairie-dog hole and had to be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, and a valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and time again his crops had failed. … Now, when he had at last struggled out of debt, he was going to die himself. He was only forty-six, and had, of course, counted upon more time.

(147-48)

Whatever reason Cather may have had for cataloguing this nearly melodramatic list of misfortunes, it is clear that she saw John's struggle as heroic and his death upon the brink of even greater success as tragic.

“The things that held him back.” They seem to have had less to do with Bergson's attempt “to tame the land” behind a philosophy of “dominance and force” than they did with bad weather and worse luck. No gift of “imagination,” no “mystic faith” can stay a blizzard, detect or fill a prairie-dog hole, or kill a rattlesnake. And though Alexandra may have been “possessed by the land more than possessing it,” it must be acknowledged that, through honed business practices, she ends up being possessed by a lot more of it than when John first handed her the reins. If Alexandra “achieves her creative designs by letting them emerge from the soil,” it must be further acknowledged that the attributes of this particular “artist” include some that are consistent with those of a skilled land speculator, an ambitious entrepreneur, and a capable capitalist.

These are not characteristics suggestive of a primarily mystical relationship between the female and the landscape. But they are the attributes that Alexandra puts to work; and, at the beginning of Part II of O Pioneers!, Alexandra owns “one of the richest farms on the Divide” (178). And we are led to believe that her good business sense results in her brothers' prosperity as well. There is also something traditionally masculine about the arrangement and scale of her agricultural empire.

When you go out of the house into the flower garden, there you feel again the order and fine arrangement manifest all over the great farm; in the fencing and hedging, in the windbreaks and sheds, in the symmetrical pasture ponds, planted with scrub willows to give shade to the cattle in fly-time. There is even a white row of beehives in the orchard, under the walnut trees.

(178)

All this order, symmetry, and practicality; all this fencing, hedging, and delimiting colors Alexandra in traditionally masculine tones, suggesting, perhaps, that a masculine sensibility was required to “tame the land” after all.⁴

Alexandra seems completely in tune with what historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has to say about the narrow (and unfortunately distorted) pioneer attitude toward land: “There was but one appropriate way to treat land—divide it, distribute it, register it” (55). Our Alexandra does just that, and she does it, apparently, with a skill unsurpassed on her Divide. She and her father, kindred spirits that they are, have crafted a dream; he the first part, she the last. While Alexandra molds the final shape of the dream, it is John who first glimpses the vision of the land's possibilities and who sets the foundation for Alexandra's future success. Both are entitled either to be lauded for this final success or condemned for “subdu[ing] nature through force,” since they share a common dream and practice a similarly pragmatic agriculture.

I am making no specific attempt here to remark upon the validity of a general argument which insists upon a distinctly feminine relationship to the land. I am merely stating that, clearly, Alexandra can not be recruited as an example of that relationship. While Alexandra has had a dream, a vision, she is no mere mystic; she succeeds in subduing nature—as the text illustrates—through the force of her will, her tenacity, her courage, and her good sense, attributes Cather always admired in her heroines. There is a much larger dose of shrewdness than mysticism in this universally admired, female, pioneer character.

Cather was in her fortieth year when O Pioneers! was published in 1913; seventeen years earlier, in 1896, her “Tommy, the Unsentimental,” a story about another young Nebraska woman of grit, was published. What Cather says about Tommy applies perfectly to Alexandra: “People rather expect some business ability in a girl there, and they respect it immensely” (473).

Notes

1. Moers particularly notes a mystical relationship between females and the landscape (Literary Women 260), a concept upon which O'Brien and other critics have drawn heavily. In The Lay of the Land, Kolodny writes, “I would have had women's fantasies take the nation west rather than the psychosexual dramas of men intent on possessing a virgin continent. In the women's fantasies, at least, the garden implied home and community, not privatized erotic mastery” (xiii). The concept of possession plays an important role in the critical analyses of O Pioneers! that are questioned in this paper.

2. The word “possibilities,” used here by Cather and attributed to the thoughts of John Bergson, is emphasized because it is a key word in O'Brien's statement quoted earlier in this paper. She speaks of Alexandra as being “able to see possibilities in the soil that no one has glimpsed.” I submit that at least Cather thought that John, too, had glimpsed those possibilities.

3. Cather's fictional chronology closely resembles historical fact. In the novel's first line, we are told that the story begins “thirty years ago,” meaning that John would have died in 1883. Three good years followed for the family, but in 1887, the drought came to their land as it did to all the Plains states historically (Shannon 313). This is the year that the great land boom of the Plains came crashing to an end, resulting in severely tightened credit policies. Many farmers who were in debt were unable to keep their property, allowing for the purchase of inexpensive land by debt-free farmers such as Alexandra. And we remember that John had presented his daughter with one square mile of debt-free land. When Part II of the novel begins, sixteen years have elapsed since John's death. It is 1899, and Alexandra has seen the fulfillment of her (shared) dream. Historically, by this time prosperity had indeed come to the farmer, a prosperity that would continue unabated for nearly twenty years through World War I (326).

4. Other critics have seen Alexandra as masculine. See, for two examples, Hermione Lee, who remarks that, in O Pioneers!, “The attributes of the strong pioneer figure who combines masculine and feminine qualities is firmly introduced” (106—the emphasis is Lee's); and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who comments on Alexandra's particularly “masculine vision and her power to ‘dominise’ … the land of her inheriting and increasing.” Sergeant also contrasts this masculinity in Alexandra with the femininity of Ántonia who “was simply and lustily contained in the country” and whose “rôle was so primeval, and so much woman's whether she plowed for her brother or cooked for Mrs. Harling …” (150-51). Sergeant's comments also support my contentions that, first, Alexandra did dominate the land as certainly as anyone, and, second, her task was not to forge a prosperous farm out of nothing, but to build upon the inheritance, the substantial head start, her father had bequeathed to her.

Works Cited

Billington, Ray Allen. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. 3rd. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Cather, Willa. O Pioneers! Willa Cather: Early Novels and Stories. Ed. Sharon O'Brien. New York: Library of America, 1987, 133-290.

———. “Tommy, the Unsentimental.” Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912. Ed. Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, 473-80.

Donovan, Josephine. After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1989.

Fairbanks, Carol. Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Harrison, Elizabeth Jane. Female Pastorals: Women Writers Revisioning the American South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

Lee, Hermione. Willa Cather: Double Lives. New York: Pantheon, 1989.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987.

McFarland, Dorothy Tuck. Willa Cather. New York: Ungar, 1972.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. London: Women's Press, 1976.

O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley. Willa Cather: A Memoir. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1953.

Shannon, Fred A. The Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860-1897. 1945. New York: Holt, 1961. Vol. 5 of The Economic History of the United States. 9 vols.