SOURCE: Harvey, Sally Peltier. “O Pioneers!” In Redefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather, pp. 33-41. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1995.

[In the following essay, Harvey discusses the concept of the American Dream and its role in Cather's O Pioneers!]

The quest to define self that fails in Alexander's Bridge proves decidedly more successful in Cather's next three novels, O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia, all of which depict the American Dream in a more positive light. It is as if, after exploring what was not fulfilling in the American Dream, Cather, unwilling to reject it totally, manages a swing toward optimism. In these novels, she seems to seek out ways in which success might be fulfilling. Her protagonists all achieve some version of the standard dream, but they also gain a sense of self-fulfillment; in doing so, they seem to confirm Cather's belief (or hope), at this stage of her life, that material success was available to most people in America, and—more importantly—that happiness could accompany it. Starting from humble beginnings, Alexandra Bergson, Thea Kronborg, and Ántonia Shimerda, through their own strength of will and resourcefulness, do find fulfillment: Alexandra develops a prosperous farm and ultimately marries her lifelong friend, Carl Linstrum; Thea achieves fame and the satisfaction of artistic accomplishment as an opera singer; Ántonia acquires the farm she had always wanted as well as a family who is devoted to her.

Gender seems a key factor in these heroines' ability to balance a desire for material success with a clear understanding of what they need for self-fulfillment.¹ Lears describes the late nineteenth-century belief in a “feminine principle,” a mystical “female vitality.” Such a view, he says, “joined maternal nurturance, emotional spontaneity, aesthetic responsiveness, and mythopoeic creativity.”² Cather in these novels seems to be responding to that belief. Her heroines have the vitality, the imagination, and the self-awareness to shape for themselves a form of success that foregrounds self-fulfillment.³ Gender may keep them on the margins of the male-dominated, aggressive, competitive scramble for success, but gender proves an asset in their efforts to achieve self-fulfillment, helping them turn inward to explore self in a way that Bartley Alexander never could.

Perhaps the key to these women's emotional as well as their material success, however, is their double marginality—as women and as immigrants (or a child of immigrants, in Thea Kronborg's case). Cather repeatedly suggests that because all three have been instilled with and retain “Old World” values, they can keep that typically “American” drive for material success from erasing or replacing their own identities. All three seem to understand that there must be something more to life than “getting on”; they define and reach for that something with a certainty that Bartley Alexander never exhibits. In these three novels, Cather depicts the special meaning that she saw the American Dream holding for immigrants: having come to America precisely because they believed that here they could succeed, most held dearly to their faith in that dream while they also held dearly to their own traditions.

Cather often commented on the values and traditions that immigrants brought to America. She had a special attachment to and appreciation for this transplanted “community,” with whom she first came into contact at age nine, when her family moved from Virginia to Nebraska. In a 1926 “Biographical Sketch” that she wrote about herself (though in third person) she comments:

Had she been born in that community [Red Cloud, Nebraska], she doubtless would have taken these things [the fascinating speech and customs of the immigrants] for granted. … An imaginative child, taken out of the definitely arranged background, and dropped down among struggling immigrants from all over the world, naturally found something to think about.⁴

That “something to think about” perhaps created in Cather a heightened sensitivity to the differences between the standard version of the American Dream and the immigrant version, which she interpreted as a richer, fuller definition of success, a definition that balanced an eagerness for material improvement with a deeper moral and cultural purpose for such striving.

Cather, of course, was most familiar with frontier immigrants' version of the American Dream, a drama played out on the bleak, expansive prairies, where banding together became a protection against both the loneliness and physical harshness of the environment. Perhaps she would have found less “to think about,” or less that she cared to think about, if she had grown up among discontented, “struggling immigrants” in the crowded ghettos of the nation's urban areas. When in 1928, she wrote the story of a city immigrant, Anton Rosicky, it is the story of his escape to a rural world, his realization that living and working in the cutthroat urban world could quickly turn anyone into a thief or a degenerate. But in the Nebraska of Cather's childhood, the “Old World” values and the struggle to adapt to a strange environment that Cather observed in her immigrant neighbors touched her heart:

No child with a spark of generosity could have kept from throwing herself heart and soul into the fight these people were making to master the language, to master the soil, and to hold their land and to get ahead in the world.⁵

In the American Dream envisioned by these people, “getting ahead” counted, but Cather seemed to feel that it counted for deeper, more worthwhile reasons than it did for most Americans in the early twentieth century, enslaved by the “bitch-goddess.” As Cather commented in her 1923 essay on Nebraska's immigrant pioneers: “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 In 1924, criticizing the Americanization process for turning immigrants “into stupid replicas of American citizens,” she asserted: “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.”⁷ Certainly, Cather did not mean that immigrants could not claim a piece of the American Dream; rather, they could enrich the meaning of that dream.

Cather was one of the few writers to depict the “community” of new immigrants in a positive manner at a time when most Americans viewed these newcomers, especially those from southern and eastern Europe—such as the Shabatas in O Pioneers! and Ántonia's family—with both fear and suspicion.⁸ In the years between her fictional portrayals of Alexandra Bergson in 1913 and of Ántonia Shimerda in 1918, cultural critic Randolph Bourne published his essay, “Trans-National America,” in the Atlantic (July 1916). Bourne's essay can be read almost as a gloss on Cather's two novels about immigrants. “America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it,” Bourne insists, demanding “a clear and general readjustment of our attitude and our ideal.” Perhaps Cather hoped through her fiction to effect such a “general readjustment.” Bourne continues: “We have needed the new peoples … to save us from our own stagnation”⁹—a point that Jim Burden makes when he contrasts the vitality of the immigrant girls to the stagnant life in Black Hawk.

Like Cather, Bourne worried also about the stagnating effect of the Americanization process on immigrants:

What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities [of the immigrant's cultural background] should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity. … [It is precisely] because the foreign-born retains this expressiveness [that he is] likely to be a better citizen of the American community.¹⁰

In her three immigrant novels of this period, Cather shows the qualities that immigrants bring to America from what Bourne calls “the deep cultural heart of Europe.” Bourne's plea, that “we must give new edges to our pride,” is certainly part of her agenda here. Thus, the American Dream, as Cather depicts it in these novels, is an expansive as well as a spiritually fulfilling dream. Cather opens it up to women and to new ethnic groups, just as Bourne insists on expanding the definition of “American”: “In this category I include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the pioneer spirit and a sense of new social vistas.” Bourne asserts the need in America for “a vivid consciousness of the new [cosmopolitan] ideal”;¹¹ Cather, in her fiction, provides that new ideal. Her immigrants keep their own traditions, their own cultural identities, alive as they adapt, survive, and even prosper in a competitive, success-oriented America.

In each of these novels, however, Cather continues to address, as she did in Alexander's Bridge, the destructive elements of the dream of success. O Pioneers! is the story of Alexandra Bergson and her family as they struggle to succeed on the harsh Nebraska prairie. But that struggle is virtually finished by the end of Part I; then Cather contrasts Alexandra's reaction to material success with her brothers' reactions. In doing so, Cather shows the corrupting potential of the American Dream and the corrective that, in her view, Old World values could provide. For Cather, “Old World” signifies tradition, respect for the past, a clear sense of identity; in contrast are “New World” values, which emphasize rejection of the past and a pressure to conform. Herbert Croly in 1909 reminded Americans: “The better future, whatever else it may bring, must bring at any rate a continuation of the good things of the past.”¹² Cather, in her portraits of immigrants who adapt to American ways while they insist upon “a continuation of the good things of the past” offers the same view. She represents that worthwhile “past,” in the Old World customs that immigrants such as Alexandra continue to nurture. It becomes clear in Cather's contrast of Alexandra to her brothers that material success, if based only on a drive for modernism and conformity, hampers self-definition, as success had hampered Bartley Alexander in his efforts to define self.

Late in O Pioneers!, Alexandra reminds her younger brother Emil that their father “had better opportunities” than did Emil's older brothers, Lou and Oscar—“not to make money, but to make something of himself.”¹³ Lou and Oscar have by this time become prosperous, but since they had no motives beyond a desire for modern comforts and a fear of other people laughing at them if their actions deviated from the norm, their success appears empty to Alexandra. When the Bergson family is struggling during the early years on the prairie, Lou and Oscar would rather flee to Chicago and become bakers with their uncle, who leads a comfortable life, or move to a river farm where crop yield is consistently predictable if not abundant. They reluctantly decide to stay, only because they have neither the nerve nor the self-confidence to challenge Alexandra when she reminds them of their father's deathbed wish that they keep the farm; nor do they have the initiative to make any move on their own—even a move backwards, to a laborer's job in Chicago.

Clearly, Cather portrays the Bergson brothers as lacking a strong sense of individuality. They define themselves in terms of others, and thus, when prosperity comes, they become in Cather's eyes conforming, shallow “Americans.” “The way here is for all to do alike,” the old Norwegian Ivar says regretfully to Alexandra, fearful of those who might institutionalize him for his eccentric ways (92). Lou and Oscar are those unappealing “replicas of American citizens” whom Cather identifies in her Nebraska essay. Oscar marries an American woman who is embarrassed to have a foreigner for a husband; they raise their children to speak English only. Lou and his wife, Annie, although both Swedish, sometimes speak their native language at home, but are embarrassed to be “‘caught’ at it.” Lou has learned to speak English “like anybody from Iowa” (99). He and Annie boast that their home has all the modern conveniences. Cather describes this “type” in her Nebraska essay. The children of the immigrant farmers, she says, as if referring specifically to Lou and Oscar, “were reared amid hardships, and it is perhaps natural that they should be very much interested in material comfort, in buying whatever is expensive and ugly. … They want to buy everything ready-made.”¹⁴ These are the “conspicuous consumers” that Veblen identified in his 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class.

In the same Nebraska essay, Cather expresses her hope that the “third generation” will not be fooled into believing “that to live easily is to live happily.”¹⁵ Similarly, Alexandra Bergson puts her faith in Lou's daughter, Milly, who reminds Alexandra so much of her own mother. Alexandra is eager to buy her niece a piano because the girl has already learned the “old Swedish songs” that Alexandra's father used to sing (103). Just as Milly reminds Alexandra of her own mother, Alexandra, too, had reminded her father of his father. She had her grandfather's initiative, as John Bergson notes, recalling that his father “had built up a proud little business [in Sweden] with no capital but his own skill and foresight” (24).

Cather suggests that primarily because Alexandra retains Old World values and morals, she does not respond as Lou and Oscar do, either to material success or to the hardships that precede it. Guided by a strong sense of duty to parent, she holds onto the farm in hard times. Possessing the “foresight” of her grandfather, Alexandra knows that new ways are important in the struggle to succeed. She thus looks around the little community of Hanover and notices who is successful; she studies how they achieved that success and urges her brothers to learn from the lessons of others. Her remarks echo the rhetoric of nineteenth-century success manuals: “If only poor people could learn a little from rich people!” (58). Referring to the real estate brokers who are buying tracts of land from discouraged farmers, she tells Lou and Oscar: “They are the men to watch. … Let's try to do like the shrewd ones” (68).

John Bergson had noted that although “Lou and Oscar were industrious”—citing that old Horatio Alger virtue which was once seen as the key to success—they did not “use their heads” as Alexandra does (23). Alexandra's father knew that it takes more than hard work and steadiness to achieve the American Dream of success in a new, harsh land. “A pioneer should have imagination” (48), Cather's narrator remarks. And this is the trait that fits Alexandra for the new country far better than does her brothers' “industry.” Alexandra observes that in Lou, “the love of routine amounted to a vice” (55): industry taken to extremes can be self-limiting. With her imaginative pioneer spirit, Alexandra is willing to take big risks. She refuses to trade their seemingly worthless high land for the river land where one can “scrape along” but “never do anything big” (64). She takes risks with new crops such as alfalfa and wheat, with new methods such as a pig corral in the sorghum field, with new equipment such as a silo. She braves the criticism of neighbors, whom Lou and Oscar always fear will be laughing at them for Alexandra's unconventional ways. There is “something individual” (83) about Alexandra's farm: she is a strange mix of new entrepreneur and Old World artisan, which, Cather suggests, is the key to her combined material success and apparent peace of mind.

Alexandra's foresight, faith in the land, and financial shrewdness give the Bergsons their American Dream by the time Book II of O Pioneers! opens. But just as Alexander's Bridge exposes the problems that come once one has grasped the American Dream, Cather's second novel, too, shows the tension between material success and self-fulfillment. Alexandra's struggle toward self-definition is certainly more focused and more rewarding than Bartley's, but it is nevertheless a struggle. At first she identifies solely with the land, defining herself through it. Once she has established her “new relation to it” (71), she almost loses herself in the land: “She [feels] as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun” (71). But although “it is in the soil that she best expresses herself” (84), Alexandra, having achieved her version of the American Dream, finds that neither a rich farm nor fulfilling her father's wishes allows her to define herself. Tellingly, when she looks back on her success, “well satisfied” that all the struggle “had been worth while” (213), what makes it seem so for her is the opportunity to “escape” the land—an opportunity that she has made possible for Emil: “Out of her father's children there was one who … had not been tied to the plow, and who had a personality apart from the soil” (213). Alexandra, who has not had “a personality apart from the soil,” understands the limitations of such a self-definition.

Despite the assured sense of self that Alexandra displays throughout Book I, such autonomy grates against a desire for dependence: “There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon” (17). Although Alexandra remembers, admires, and certainly identifies with the solitary wild duck that she and Emil had seen on their river trip, “swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight” (205), she does not want to be “all by herself.” She desires secretly to be the one who is carried instead of the one doing all the carrying. In a recurring dream, she sees herself “being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by some one very strong.” Still identifying with the land, she envisions herself being carried “as easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat” (206). This secret longing for dependence embarrasses and angers her. Only in the final pages of the novel is she able to voice her desire openly when she leans on Carl's shoulder and confesses: “I am tired … I have been very lonely” (308). What Lears would call a “longing for dependent passivity” struggles in Alexandra against the “drive toward autonomous action,” as it did for so many caught up in the turn-of-the-century scramble for success.¹⁶

In Alexandra's struggle to gain or to relinquish autonomy we see her shifting relationship to community. Alexandra experiences the pull of community as both a positive and a negative force in her life. The family community gives purpose to her own struggle, but ties to family create more and more tension for Alexandra as the Bergsons achieve prosperity. Alexandra explains to Carl that her brothers “do not altogether like my way. … Perhaps they think me too independent” (118). When she finally quarrels openly with them over her right to marry Carl (whom Lou and Oscar see as a fortune hunter, interested only in Alexandra's property), she says, “I think I would rather not have lived to find out what I have to-day” (172).

Experiencing such tension within her family, Alexandra not surprisingly finds more satisfaction in her own hand-picked community, one that reinforces the Old World ways that she so values. Her favorite brother, Emil, is, she tells Carl, “more Swedish than any of us” (117), despite the fact that he is the only Bergson to have attended an American university. Alexandra treats her European hired hands, Barney Flinn and Nelse Jensen, as trusted family members. Her farm is “not unlike a tiny village” (83)—a village with distinctive Old World flavor. Three Swedish girls help her in her kitchen, and Alexandra admits that she employs them not because she needs that much help, but “to hear them giggle” (85). When the eccentric recluse, Ivar, loses his land, Alexandra adds him to her community, despite loud and continued protests from her embarrassed brothers. Alexandra Bergson is an important force in her neighbors' lives, and draws them into her community: she depends on young Marie Shabata's companionship; she invites old Mrs. Lee for a long visit each winter; she attends Sunday services with Marie in the neighboring French Catholic community.

Although Alexandra fashions her own responsive community, her relationship to her original community—her immediate family—remains burdensome. Far more crushing than her quarrel with Otto and Lou is her tragic loss of Emil. A mother figure for Emil, Alexandra has nevertheless been blind to his most pressing needs and problems. She feels that by sending him to the state university, she has given him the opportunity he needs to find fulfillment—“a chance, a whole chance” (117). But she never recognizes his emotional needs. Emil's and Marie's deaths at the hands of Frank Shabata, Marie's husband, is for Alexandra a double loss—of a brother whom she regarded as a son and of her closest friend, Marie. The loss awakens her to her inability to control all destinies, despite her strength of will and good intentions. Determined to mend her community, Alexandra later visits Frank Shabata in prison and promises to make every effort to have him pardoned.

Cather stresses the importance of community to the individual in all three of the novels written between 1913 and 1918. Gardens often symbolize for Cather such a healthy community—ordered, productive, nourishing.¹⁷ Cather's characters cultivate gardens to provide nutrients for the body as well as nourishment for the soul. Cather uses this image only once in Alexander's Bridge, in a letter that Bartley writes to Hilda Burgoyne admitting that he can no longer find peace of mind. He describes the garden outside his study:

There is a garden out there, with stars overhead, where I used to walk at night when I had a single purpose and a single heart. I can remember how I used to feel there, how beautiful everything about me was, and what life and power and freedom I felt in myself. … But that garden is closed to me.¹⁸

Bartley Alexander, no longer in control of his life, cannot feel a part of the healthy, productive community that is humankind. That world of ordered growth is closed to him.

In subsequent novels, Cather continues to suggest in her garden imagery the security, the sense of belonging, and the sense of ordered growth that humans need and that a healthy community provides: “Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden, and find something to preserve” (29). The narrator in O Pioneers! later describes the garden behind Alexandra's new home in similarly positive terms: “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” (84). Significantly, both Lou and Oscar do not have “the patience to grow an orchard of their own” (104); but Marie Shabata's vitality and nurturing concern for others is imaged in her lush orchard as well as her indoor garden of flowering plants that bloom all winter long under her nurturing care.¹⁹

In The Song of the Lark, we see a similar reflection of a healthy, caring community in the German immigrant Mrs. Kohler's garden: “Her plants and shrubs were her companions. She lived for her men and her garden.” When Mrs. Kohler takes in the old music teacher, Wunsch, she “went at him as she did at her garden,” caring for him unselfishly.²⁰ In My Ántonia, young Jim Burden, newly arrived in Nebraska, settles against a “warm yellow pumpkin” in his grandmother's garden and feels “entirely happy”; later, when he moves to town, he describes one of his happiest experiences—helping the neighboring Harlings “break the ground and plant the garden”. When Jim visits Ántonia after she has married, she proudly shows him her orchard, explaining that she loves the trees “as if they were people,” and that her husband's expertise at grafting has made their orchard the most productive in the region.²¹ As this imagery suggests, the Cuzak family is a caring, thriving community; for them, this healthy community is an important aspect of success.

Cather depicts community in a positive sense in her garden imagery, but in her repeated depictions of small towns, we find an often negative perspective on community. In O Pioneers! we briefly glimpse this. The young Emil sees the town of Hanover as “a very strange and perplexing place, where people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts,” a place where “people might laugh at him” (5-6). Years before, in an editorial (1901), Cather gave a similar appraisal of people in small towns: “Social endeavors become discouraged in small towns,” she remarked. In analyzing why this is so, she highlights a negative characteristic of competition—jealousy over others' success:

If the people in the villages all over the western states took more interest in each other and could manufacture a smile when their neighbors had a stroke of good luck or could find a sympathetic word to say when they were in trouble … the corn itself would take heart o' grace and see some use in growing.²²

Cather concluded with a despairing question: “Why is it that the common courtesies of life … come harder than blood in the small towns?”²³ The Cather who as a young journalist indicted small towns presents a softened, though still critical, look at such a community in both The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia.

Notes

1. Perhaps Cather is calling our attention to gender as a key factor in achieving a fulfillment-based success by giving Alexandra the feminine form of Cather's previous hero's name.

2. Lears, Grace, 248, 250.

3. Sharon O'Brien stresses gender as a key factor in the three protagonists' triumphs (“Mothers, Daughters, and the ‘Art Necessity’: Willa Cather and the Creative Process,” in American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Fritz Fleischmann [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982], 281, 284, 287).

4. Willa Cather, “A Biographical Sketch,” in A Biographical Sketch, an English Opinion, Reviews and Articles Concerning her Later Books and an Abridged Bibliography (1933; reprint, Folcroft, Pa.: The Folcroft Press, Inc., 1975), 1.

5. Ibid., 2. See Woodress, “Writing Cather's Biography,” Cather Studies, ed. Susan J. Rosowski (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 1:108-9, for a discussion of the fiction about herself that Cather wove into this biographical sketch.

6. Cather, “First Cycle,” 238.

7. Cather, “Restlessness,” in Bohlke, Person, 71.

8. Books such as Rena M. Atchison's Un-American Immigration: Its Present Effects and Future Perils. A Study from the Census of 1890, (Chicago: C. H. Kerr and Co., 1894), warned of the threat posed by the new, non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Anti-immigration organizations such as the Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894, called for a literacy test for immigrants; by 1917 such a test became law, shortly before quota systems were established in the National Origins Act of 1924.

9. Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” The Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 87. Lasch notes that Cather and Bourne were two of the few voices in favor of cultural pluralism in the early 1900s (Heaven, 421).

10. Bourne, “Trans-National,” 90.

11. Ibid., 91, 92, 96, 97.

12. Croly, Promise, 16.

13. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941), 237. Subsequent citations are noted parenthetically in the text.

14. Cather, “First Cycle,” 238.

15. Ibid.

16. Lears, Grace, 119.

17. Interestingly, Van Wyck Brooks, in America's Coming of Age (1915), uses similar growth/garden imagery to outline his plan for a healthy nation, urging Americans to “build that garden in the cosmic wilderness … fertilizing the soil, cultivating and protecting the most beautiful and the greatest variety of plants” (154). He saw everywhere in America “an unchecked, uncharted, unorganized vitality” that needed to be “worked into an organism, into fruitful values” (164).

18. Cather, Alexander's Bridge, 101.

19. Cather uses this same image of indoor plants that bloom all winter in “Neighbour Rosicky,” where we again see a caring, nurturing family.

20. Cather, Lark, 28-29.

21. Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918; reprint, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1954), 18, 193, 340.

22. Willa Cather, “Small Town Life,” Courier, 24 August 1901, in Curtin, Parish, 2:849.

23. Ibid., 850.