SOURCE: O'Brien, Sharon. “The Unity of Willa Cather's ‘Two-Part Pastoral’: Passion in O Pioneers!” Studies in American Fiction 6, no. 2 (autumn 1978): 157-71.

[In the following essay, O'Brien contends that the two sections of O Pioneers are linked by the theme of passion.]

Willa Cather formed her first successful novel, O Pioneers! (1913), by combining two previously written short stories: “Alexandra,” a 1911 version of Alexandra Bergson's taming of the wild Nebraska soil, and “The White Mulberry Tree,” a tragic tale written a year later in which a crazed Bohemian farmer kills his wife, Marie, and her young Swedish lover.¹ Although Cather wrote the two stories separately, she experienced a “sudden inner explosion and enlightenment” when she realized that they belonged together.² It was as if she had brought together two chemicals with a powerful elective affinity, and O Pioneers! was the resulting compound, a “two-part pastoral” as Cather later described it.³

Most of the novel's critics, however, argue that the fusion of the two fictional elements is imperfect.⁴ According to this common view, the love affair of Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata, derived from “The White Mulberry Tree,” has no real connection with the primary plot, Alexandra's conquering of the stubborn land. The result for E. K. Brown, Cather's first biographer, was the novel's “happy looseness of structure.”⁵ David Daiches found this looseness less happy. In his opinion, this “episodic” and “unevenly patterned” novel contained “disparate elements which are never wholly resolved into a unity.”⁶ In particular, the love affair of Emil and Marie seemed to him “a feverish episode outside the mainstream of events.”⁷ A recent commentator on the novel, David Stouck, echoes these early objections, finding the lovers' tragedy a subplot that “distracts us from the epic theme for long sections in the middle and latter part of the book.”⁸

Cather's critics have tended to see the love story as a diversion or tragic interlude aside from the main plot because they have generally failed to recognize that the two intertwined stories are thematically connected. “The cold Swedish story” and “the Bohemian story” do belong together.⁹ Each is a parable about passion: Alexandra Bergson's taming of the soil chronicles the heroic results of passion regulated and channeled, whereas the lovers' doom records the destructive outcome of sexual passion indulged and unleashed. Artfully counterpointed and carefully contrasted, the two stories reflect one of Willa Cather's most persistent fictional preoccupations: the insufficiency, even the danger, of sexual passion and the opposing grandeur of passion deflected from the personal to the impersonal object.

Willa Cather had recorded her hostility to sexual passion as early as 1899 when she attacked Kate Chopin's The Awakening in a review for the Pittsburgh Leader, finding the novel's theme “trite and sordid” and its adulterous heroine “limited.”¹⁰ Other genteel or prudish critics had bristled at Edna Pontellier's immorality,¹¹ but Cather, who consistently denounced the pious didacticism of Victorian fiction in her journalism of the 1890s, faulted Edna's priorities rather than her morals in exalting a passionate love over more worthwhile pursuits like “the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect” (p. 698). She severely criticized Edna Pontellier and nineteenth-century fiction's other romantic suicides, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, for their membership in the unfortunate group of women who demanded “more romance out of life than God put into it” (p. 698). Willa Cather contended that such women were deluded in expecting “the passion of love” to “fill and gratify every need of life”; they mistakenly assumed that an “individual and self-limited passion” could provide what art, literature, or philosophy gave to “less limited and less intense idealists” (p. 698). Setting the sexual passion of the adulterous woman against the creative passion of the artist, Cather clearly aligned herself with the latter group: “So this passion, when set up against Shakespeare, Balzac, Wagner, Raphael, fails them. They have staked everything on one hand, and they lose” (p. 699).

The two adjectives Cather uses to describe passion here, “individual” and “self-limited,” suggest that she objects to sexual needs because they confine and limit the self, preventing artistic or intellectual expression.¹² Many of her novels elaborate on this view, implying that human happiness and achievement must arise from losing the self in something larger, from self-abnegation, not from the self-gratification that the young journalist linked with the pursuit of sexual and romantic fulfillment. In My Ántonia Jim Burden speaks for Cather in defining happiness as being “dissolved into something complete and great” or becoming “part of something entire.”¹³ In Cather's fiction, then, the only characters who find contentment are those who reject sexual expression and direct their passion toward goals beyond the self; the goals differ from novel to novel, but they are alike in requiring the seeker to transcend the personal.

In My Ántonia, the heroic Ántonia Shimerda, a fertile but asexual Earth Mother, pours herself into her family and the land after she recovers from a disillusioning romantic experience; in The Song of the Lark, opera singer Thea Kronborg realizes that she must shun human ties if she is to succeed and gives herself “completely to [her] art”;¹⁴ in Death Comes for the Archbishop, religious faith, like Thea's art, requires celibacy of the Catholic priests, but grants them in return loss of self in “something entire.” By contrast, “self-limited” characters in Cather's fiction, like Marian Forrester in A Lost Lady, Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy, and Lucy Gayheart in the novel of the same name, who think that love will fulfill “every need of life,” find no satisfaction in pursuing romantic passion but frustration, disappointment, or death.

Of all her novels, O Pioneers! presents Willa Cather's views on the proper employment of passion the most concisely and dramatically, for only here does she juxtapose in the same novel two characters who make the choices she opposed in much of her fiction: one pours her vitality into passionate human relationships, the other shuns sexual expression and directs her passion into “something complete and great,” the wild Nebraska prairie. Employing the categories she created in her review of The Awakening fourteen years earlier, Willa Cather casts Marie Shabata as the self-indulgent, impetuous romantic heroine who courts love and death, and Alexandra Bergson as the controlled, self-transcendent person who, like Shakespeare, Balzac, or Wagner, creates. As a journalist, Cather attacked the stuffy moralism of Victorian fiction, but as the author of O Pioneers! she does some preaching of her own, although her message is transmitted in the veiled form of the parable. She knew what she was doing when she combined “Alexandra” and “The White Mulberry Tree”: the connected stories and their contrasted heroines teach a lesson about passion that is central to Cather's fiction.¹⁵

Although Alexandra is an attractive woman with a full figure, smooth white skin, and fiery red hair, her physical appeal is curiously asexual, perhaps because she never thinks of herself as a sensual woman. As one of the early reviewers of the novel put it, “she has almost no consciousness of sex.”¹⁶ Alexandra never acknowledges any sexual feelings or betrays a hint of passion for her ever-faithful suitor, Carl. Her inability to respond physically to men helps explain why many critics have found her unfeminine:¹⁷ she is not manlike, but her insulation from sexual needs, her own and others', makes her an incomplete person.

Her angry response to the traveling salesman's spontaneous exclamation of admiration in the opening pages epitomizes a discomfort with male attention that persists throughout the novel. Gazing “stupidly” at Alexandra's “shining mass of hair,” the salesman “quite innocently and foolishly” exclaims “‘My God, girl, what a head of hair!’”¹⁸ Alexandra's response is an attack: “She stabbed him with a glance of Amazonian fierceness and drew in her lower lip—most unnecessary severity” (p. 7). Cather chose the adjective “Amazonian” carefully; Alexandra, like the race of strong warrior women, keeps men in subjection, dominating Carl and her farmhands, and avoids sexual relationships with her captives. Aggressive, military imagery surrounds Cather's prairie Amazon, her female Alexander: earlier she carried her coat like a “young soldier” (p. 6); now her fierce glance “stabbed” the hapless salesman. The effect of her knifelike glance is indeed worthy of a real Amazon. Completely unmanned, the salesman lets “his cigar fall to the sidewalk” and goes off “weakly” to have a recuperative drink, and “his hand was still unsteady when he took his glass from the bartender” (p. 8). Like his manhood, his “feeble flirtatious instincts” have been “mercilessly” crushed (p. 8). His discomposure is understandable, comments Cather: “was he to be blamed if, when he chanced upon a fine human creature, he suddenly wished himself more of a man?” (p. 8).

Alexandra similarly makes her perennially hopeful lover Carl conscious of his inadequacy, his incomplete manhood. She manages to crush his romantic overtures as effectively, if not as mercilessly, as the salesman's. She continually responds to him as a friend rather than as a lover, inhibiting his expressions of feeling and admiration. When Carl returns home after his sixteen-year absence, he attempts to tell Alexandra of his love, but her tepid response soon silences him. When he admits that “‘it took courage to come at all, Alexandra. I wouldn't have, if I hadn't wanted to see you very, very much,’” she responds with no statement of her own affection (p. 121). Instead she efficiently squelches his tentative advances with her friendly concern for his timidity: “Alexandra looked at him with her calm, deliberate eyes. ‘Why do you dread things like that, Carl?’ she asked earnestly. ‘Why are you dissatisfied with yourself?’” She does not stab him with another fierce glance, but her words are effective weaponry: “Her visitor winced” (p. 121). Alexandra later blandly attributes his and all masculine pleasure in her physical appearance to an understandable human preference for “people who are clean and healthy-looking,” implying that Carl's response to her is hygienic rather than sexual (p. 131).

Alexandra's reticent behavior is not the maiden's modest concealment of a romantic interest. She is not a dissembler, and simply thinks of Carl as a companion rather than as a lover. At the close of the novel she assures him that “‘when friends marry, they are safe,’” clearly envisioning a calm companionship marriage with him, a “safer” prospect than a passionate liaison, considering the fate of Emil and Marie (p. 309). In their final (and only) embrace she turns to him for support, not passion: “They had reached the gate. Before Carl opened it, he drew Alexandra to him and kissed her softly, on her lips and on her eyes. She leaned heavily on his shoulder. ‘I am tired,’ she murmured. ‘I have been very lonely, Carl’” (p. 309).

Oblivious to her own sexuality, then, she cannot detect its presence or understand its force in others. From girlhood she had looked upon men as “work-fellows,” not as potential lovers, and unlike most adolescent girls she had “never been in love” nor “indulged in sentimental reveries” (p. 205). Consequently the love affair between her brother and Marie Shabata comes as a complete surprise: “It had never occurred to her that Emil's feeling might be different from her own,” and after all Marie was safely married, which “settled everything” for Alexandra (p. 284). After the tragedy in the orchard is discovered, it becomes apparent that passion is a human reality she neither comprehends nor condones. Sexual passion seems more reprehensible to her than murderous passion: “He [Frank Shabata] had been less in the wrong than any of them, and he was paying the heaviest penalty. … She could understand his behavior more easily than she could understand Marie's” (pp. 283-86). She tells Frank in prison that her sympathy rests with him rather than with the dead couple: “‘I hope you'll let me be friendly with you. I understand how you did it. I don't feel hard toward you. They were more to blame than you’” (p. 293).

Alexandra finds it easy to judge the lovers because her own passions have lain dormant, far below the level of her conscious mind. However, although her sexuality is submerged, it does not dissipate. Alexandra never expresses herself physically with another human being, but she does have one passionate relationshiph with the land. Critics of O Pioneers! have long noticed Alexandra's spiritual affinity with the Nebraska soil. Because she has faith in the recalcitrant land that others consider hostile and unworkable and finds the prairie “rich and strong and glorious,” the “Genius of the Divide” responds to her “love and yearning” (p. 65). The soil becomes fertile and yields her its fruit as the wild land is tamed.

But Alexandra's affinity for the land is more than spiritual; her body as well as her soul thrills to the beauty of the Divide. At times she seems to merge physically with the land, feeling its awakening life in her own body: “She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt 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. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring” (p. 70). Her physical bond with the land is strongest and Alexandra happiest when she sympathetically experiences the processes of birth and growth taking place in the soil: “There were certain days in her life, outwardly uneventful, which Alexandra remembered as peculiarly happy; days when she was close to the flat, fallow world about her, and felt, as it were, in her own body the joyous germination in the soil” (p. 204). As the imagery in these passages suggests, the land Alexandra loves is female and maternal; the connotations of the womblike imagery of the first passage (the “long shaggy ridges” protectively hiding minute, stirring life) become explicit in the “joyous germination” of the second. In merging with the land, then, Alexandra is not submitting to the force of male sexuality she has avoided in life, but is losing herself in identification with a gentle, welcoming maternal presence.¹⁹

Willa Cather's celebration of the affinity between Alexandra and the soil is consistent with her criticism of romantic women and praise of artists in her review of Chopin's novel.²⁰ Because Alexandra gives herself completely only to nature, just as the poet or painter commits himself to art, she escapes the narcissistic self-involvement Cather attributed to those women who chose to make men the objects of their passion. Indeed, Alexandra's preference of the land to men is understandable, for Cather's association of the land and its femaleness with birth, growth, and fruition is opposed to her association of male sexuality with violence, destruction, and death. Contrasted to the life-giving land are two death-dealing males: Emil Bergson, allied with two weapons of death, the scythe and the gun, and Frank Shabata, the murderer of the lovers.²¹ Significantly, only the sexual males are associated with death: both Carl Linstrum, content to win Alexandra on her terms as a married friend, and the celibate hermit, Crazy Ivar, are gentle men who protect life rather than threaten it.²²

Although Alexandra chooses the land rather than a human lover, her mysterious daydream of a powerful, godlike figure who carries her across the corn fields reveals the persistence of a repressed attraction to the troublesome force of male sexuality and power that her conscious mind rejects. Her daydream, which “persisted throughout her girlhood,”

most often came to her on Sunday mornings, the one day in the week when she lay late abed listening to the familiar morning sounds. … 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 someone very strong. It was a man, certainly, 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 her eyes closed, she could feel that he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him. She could feel him approach, bend over her and lift her, and then she could feel herself being carried swiftly off across the fields

(p. 206).

In her recurrent fantasy, Alexandra, who has towered over all the “little men” on the Divide (p. 181), allows her unconscious to create a strong, sexual male, “like no man she knew,” who lifts her with ease. The erotic implications of the fantasy seem clear: Alexandra's sublimated libido turns momentarily from the cornfields to a godlike man “with the smell of the ripe cornfields about him.” The feminine land is in charge of procreation and growth, but as Alexandra's fantasy shows, ultimately its products must be gathered in and its power relinquished to a force Cather portrays as masculine. The mysterious male figure seems to be a harvest-god who picks up Alexandra and carries her off “as easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat.” The dream occurs on the only day when Alexandra indulges herself by staying in bed late, for once being “luxuriously idle.” Cather seems to be developing the erotic implications of the passage with this phrase; “luxuriously” carries overtones of the original meaning of luxury: sensual pleasure. An attraction to sexual abandonment concealed during Alexandra's waking life is expressed here: on some level she wants to be harvested, to be carried off across the fields by a strong man whose force she cannot resist.

But this fanciful succumbing to a sexual harvest-god is extremely threatening to the normally controlled Alexandra, as her intense reaction to her morning reverie suggests:

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

(p. 206).

The conscious Alexandra, unable to accept the erotic lapse of her half-waking mind, punishes herself for her weakness, purging her body of any lingering pleasure. In almost a religious ritual of mortification she “prosecute[s]” her enemy, her guilty, treacherous flesh. Although she is not sexually aware, somehow she senses that a force within her body is responsible for the disturbing fantasy.

It is likely that Alexandra finds this daydream upsetting because it connects sexual expression with succumbing to a superior male force. The man she envisions is more than her match, “much larger and stronger and swifter” than her neighbors on the Divide, men who could never carry her “gleaming white body … very far” (p. 206). She seems to be punishing herself both for revealing a sexual need and for the concomitant desire to be passively swept away. The fantasy suggests the difficulty of Alexandra's position. As a triumphant, independent woman she overturns sex roles and dominates weaker, less successful males, but on an unconscious level she fears the force of her unexpressed sexuality. Acknowledging sexual needs would make her vulnerable and dependent, so to preserve her Amazonian self-sufficiency she must deny herself sexual fulfillment in the real world. In her daydream she can indulge in sexual fantasies safely, but upon returning to consciousness she angrily punishes herself for her momentary lapse.

If Alexandra's disturbing fantasy of self-surrender reveals why she carefully regulates her real-life relationships with men and remains “armored in calm” (p. 135), the lovers' subplot suggests that such regulation and control may be necessary for survival. For Emil and Marie, the result of sexual abandonment is death as murder follows consummation in the orchard.²³ For them as for the romantic suicides Cather criticized in her review of The Awakening, abandoning the self to passion means destruction.

Although Alexandra must practice self-control (except during her late mornings abed) to avoid the lovers' fate, with the land she does not have to guard or suppress any urges. She can be both dominant and submissive with the soil, both assert the self and give it up. She expresses self-assertiveness through farming, as she imposes order and cultivation on the wild, resistant soil. But like the admirable characters in Cather's other fiction, she also “dissolves” the self in something “complete and great” by surrendering her ego to the land. This form of self-abandonment is possible because she is giving herself to a sexual force that is female and procreative, not male and threatening.

Willa Cather disliked Freudian analyses of human behavior that reduced artistic achievement to re-directed sexual urges, but in speaking of Alexandra's relationship to the land she comes very close to a description of sublimation: “Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence,” Cather observes, “like an underground river that came to the surface only here and there, at intervals months apart, and then sank again to flow on under her own fields” (p. 203). Because she puts her personalihy “completely” into her enterprises, Cather continues, “her affairs prospered better than those of her neighborser personality “completely” into her enterprises, Cather continues, “her affairs prospered better than those of her neighbors” (p. 203). So the underground stream of her “subconscious existence” irrigates and nourishes the soil, keeping the land fertile and the crops thriving. Alexandra can finally agree to include Carl in her life because he is not an aggressive, sexual male who would endanger her stronger bond with the land; he will not drain her underground river. Carl knows that even as Alexandra's husband his role will be secondary. “‘You belong to the land,’” he observes in the closing pages of the novel. “‘Now more than ever’” (p. 307).

Opposed to Alexandra is Marie Shabata, the intense, vibrant Bohemian woman who prefers men to the “Genius of the Divide.” The result of Marie's choice is disastrous and Cather's implication is clear: sexual passion may not merely “limit” the self, it may also destroy it. Marie's fate explains why Alexandra must choose the land if she is to be “safe”; in this novel, as elsewhere in Cather's fiction, sexual passion is dangerous, even deadly.

Cather lays the foundation for Marie's tragedy early in the novel. Even as a child she is seductive and flirtatious. Whereas Cather used sexually neutral adjectives in sketching the young Alexandra, who has a “serious, thoughtful face” and “clear, deep blue eyes” (p. 6), she adopts the traditional vocabulary of feminine beauty to describe the young Marie. Dressed in a red cashmere frock and white fur tippet instead of Alexandra's “man's long ulster,” Marie is a “dark child, with brown curly hair, like a brunette doll's, a coaxing little red mouth, and round, yellow-brown eyes” (p. 11). Her reaction to the admiring circle of men who surround her in the country store illuminates the differences between the two girls. Where Alexandra angrily spurns male attention, Marie responds with instinctive coquettishness to their overtures: “They told her that she must choose one of them for a sweetheart, and each began pressing his suit and offering her bribes; candy, and little pigs, and spotted calves. She looked archly into the big, brown, mustached faces, smelling of spirits and tobacco, then she ran her tiny forefinger delicately over Joe's bristly chin and said, ‘Here is my sweetheart’” (p. 12).

When she grows up, Marie continues to enjoy male attention, first eloping with Frank Shabata and then entering her adulterous and fatal union with Emil Bergson. Like the romantic heroines of Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and The Awakening, she encounters disaster.²⁴ The passionate, yearning Marie is similarly doomed to unhappiness: “The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring … always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain—until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman” (p. 248). Seeking intensity and meaning, she takes the path Alexandra avoided because unlike her controlled friend she is “a woman who could not live without loving” and who must fill this need in sexual relationships.

Cather contrasts the women's personalities as well as their fates, setting Alexandra's Swedish self-possession against the Bohemian woman's mercurial expressiveness: “They made a pretty picture in the strong sunlight, the leafy pattern surrounding them like a net, the Swedish woman so white and gold, kindly and amused, but armored in calm, and the alert brown one, her full lips parted, points of yellow light dancing in her eyes as she laughed and chattered” (p. 135). Alexandra resembles a Scandinavian Snow-Maiden, her skin white with “the freshness of the snow itself” (p. 88), and Marie a “fierce little flame” whose eyes seemed like “sparks from a forge” (p. 136). The snow and fire imagery reflects the difference in their temperaments. Alexandra is calm, phlegmatic, even-keeled, while Marie is volatile, unstable, intense: “she was incapable of being lukewarm about anything that pleased her” (p. 217). The Swedish woman avoids emotional display but the romantic Bohemian, like Edna Pontellier, exalts feeling over everything else in life. Emotions are not to be questioned or controlled; as she tells Emil, “‘If I feel that way, I feel that way’” (p. 153).

The destruction to which such indulgence of feeling and impulse will lead is foreshadowed early in the novel. Emil and Marie are first portrayed stationed against the sombre background of death; before his first encounter with Marie in the novel, Emil is standing “at the gate of the Norwegian graveyard, sharpening his scythe” as he prepares to cut the grass (p. 77). Cather makes the connotations of the graveyard and the scythe explicit in the later scene where Emil shoots the wild ducks. Here death is transformed from a symbolic backdrop to a bloody reality as Emil's gun turns the living bird into a “a rumpled ball of feathers with the blood dripping slowly from its mouth” (p. 128).²⁵ The shooting of the ducks anticipates the murder of the lovers in the orchard, where again wild, passionate life is destroyed.

As Marie's violent end suggests, Willa Cather encourages the reader to admire Alexandra, the strong, self-disciplined woman who devotes herself to a heroic task, and intends Marie to be pitied but not emulated. Yet Cather's attitude toward these paired characters is complex. As all her critics have noted, Cather identified with the lofty values of her pioneer heroines, but O Pioneers! reveals both her awareness of Alexandra's limitations and her sympathy with the unheroic but vital and passionate Marie. Cather implies that Alexandra's commitment to an impersonal goal exacts its psychological costs; she is uncomfortable with any signs of emotion, and thus never comes to know herself or her friends very well. When Marie wants to discuss her marital problems, Alexandra's characteristic discomfort with personal revelations causes her to fail her friend. Marie clearly needs someone to talk to, but Alexandra “felt it was wiser not to encourage her. No good, she reasoned, ever came from talking about such things” (p. 198). Instead of responding compassionately to her distressed friend, Alexandra quickly changes the subject. On the other hand, both Cather and Alexandra are attracted to Marie's warmth, vivaciousness, and generosity. Carl, who possesses the insight into human feelings Alexandra lacks, gives the final judgment: she was “‘the best you had here’” (p. 305).

Willa Cather made a passing remark in her essay on Katherine Mansfield that illuminates her complex attitude toward her contrasted heroines and suggests why she may have chosen to tell their stories in the same novel. “One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessities of human life,” she wrote, “that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.”²⁶ Human relationships were the “tragic necessities” of life for Willa Cather because she knew that great art must arise from deep emotion, not intellectual conviction, and yet if the artist could not regulate her passions she would never achieve the self-discipline necessary to transform emotion into art. Ultimately the successful novelist must follow the path of Alexandra, not Marie, Cather realized, directing passion into art: he had to be “so in love with his subject that he forgets ‘self’ in his passion.”²⁴ The artist's passion had to outweigh the lover's.

Alexandra and Marie reflect this conflict between the need for passionate human relationships and the artist's even greater need for withdrawal and control. Like many contrasted heroines in nineteenth-century American fiction (in particular the “dark” and “fair” ladies who obsessed Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville), Alexandra and Marie suggest the two halves of a divided self. They may embody the division within Willa Cather herself, who for years struggled to reconcile her need for human relationships with the austere demands of Art. Marie is thus the part of the ego greedily seeking human bonds, Alexandra the part always pulling away. In sympathizing with Marie's spontaneity and passionate openness, Willa Cather was acknowledging her own emotional needs, those “tragic necessities” of life; in ultimately repudiating Marie's choice and giving her deepest admiration to the emotionally guarded but productive Alexandra, she was endorsing the part of herself that wanted to channel passion into artistic expression.

Although she is aware of Alexandra's limitations, Cather's ultimate allegiance is to her, for the pioneer woman is also an artist, and the author regards her imposition of order on the wilderness as a creative act. As Carl notes when he returns home after his sixteen-year absence, “‘I've been away engraving other men's pictures, and you've stayed at home and made your own’” (p. 116). Alexandra is the natural artist who makes her artifact from the raw material of the soil (“it is in the soil that she expresses herself best” [p. 84]), Cather the literary artist whose tools are words, not plows. But Cather's description of the artist in her preface to Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, similar to her definition of happiness in My Ántonia, characterizes both herself and Alexandra: “He fades away into the land and people of his heart, and dies of love only to be born again.”²⁸ In her review of The Awakening, as well as much of her fiction, Cather connects sexual passion with self-destruction; this remark suggests that the creator's passion, by contrast, thwarts death. The artist may “die of love” in the process of creation, but he is “born again.” Cather's romantic apostrophe to the Nebraska soil in the concluding paragraph of O Pioneers! also promises rebirth for Alexandra, the novel's artist, after she has “faded away” into the land: “Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!” (p. 309).

The conclusion suggests the final contrast between Alexandra and Marie, the opposed yet linked heroines. Death awaits the passionate, “self-limited” lover while immortality, a perpetual reincarnation in the “land and people of [her] heart,” rewards the pioneer woman who gives herself fully only to the soil. The underlying connection between the two women, the separated halves of the divided ego, is, however, also implied: one of Alexandra's future manifestations is to be the “shining eyes of youth,” an image recalling Marie's most characteristic feature, her “dancing yellow-brown eyes” (p. 79).

In speaking of O Pioneers! Willa Cather provided support for those critics who have found the novel's structure loose, insisting that she made no effort to impose form on her material: the book formed itself without her conscious intervention. The “cold Swedish story” had simply “entwined itself” with the Bohemian story, she told Elizabeth Sergeant, and “somehow she had on her hands a two-part pastoral.”²⁹ She struck a similar note in her preface to the second edition of Alexander's Bridge (1922), explaining that when the artist found “his own material” (as she had in O Pioneers!) he would have “less and less power of choice about the molding of it. It seems to be there of itself, already molded.”³⁰ But to trust the tale rather than the teller is to find that the two parts of Willa Cather's pastoral are carefully intertwined; these contrasting and counterpointed explorations of creative and sexual passion with their opposed heroines give the novel both thematic and structural unity. Willa Cather quite likely believed her statement that she did not consciously shape O Pioneers!, but in drawing on creative and psychological energies beneath consciousness she produced a novel whose structure may even seem overly controlled and balanced.

Notes

1. See E. K. Brown, Willa Cather (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. 173-74 for a discussion of the novel's genesis.

2. James Woodress, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art (New York: Pegasus, 1970), p. 154.

3. Elizabeth Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (New York: Lippincott, 1953), p. 86.

4. An exception is John Randall, who in The Landscape and the Looking Glass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 76-95, suggests that the two stories are connected because they both address the question of “spontaneity” in human relationships.

5. Brown, p. 179.

6. David Daiches, Willa Cather (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 28-29.

7. Daiches, p. 29.

8. David Stouck, “O Pioneers!: Willa Cather and the Epic Imagination,” PrS, 46 (1972), 31. In his book-length study of Cather, Willa Cather's Imagination (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1975), he changes his view somewhat, arguing that “the death of the lovers is necessary to give Alexandra's story a tragic depth” (p. 32).

9. Willa Cather, quoted in Sergeant, p. 86.

10. Willa Cather, in The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902, ed. William M. Curtin (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), II, 697-99. A longer discussion of Cather's review of The Awakening can be found in my article “The Limits of Passion: Willa Cather's Review of The Awakening,” in Women and Literature, 3 (Fall, 1975), 10-20.

11. For a discussion of the contemporary reviews of The Awakening, see Per Seyersted: Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 173-81.

12. Of course the opposite point of view has been maintained by artists like Whitman and Lawrence who argue that sexuality aids rather than inhibits self-transcendence.

13. My Ántonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 18.

14. The Song of the Lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), v.

15. For a ground-breaking article analyzing sexual fear in Cather's fiction, see Blanche Gelfant, “The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Ántonia,” AL, 43 (1971), 61-82.

16. Lincoln Sunday State Journal (Aug. 3, 1913), p. A-7.

17. See, for example, Mary Ellman, Thinking About Women (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), p. 192.

18. O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913; rpt. 1941), pp. 7-8. All future references will be to this edition.

19. Cather's description of spring plowing reinforces the impression that the land's sexual force is female: “There are few scenes more gratifying than a spring plowing in that country, where the furrows of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away from the shear not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness” (p. 76). The land's sexuality is erotic rather than maternal here; unlike Alexandra, the soil responds happily to male sexuality, yielding “eagerly” to its symbol.

20. Several other American women writers have created female characters who have a special affinity with the natural world, an affinity that sometimes precludes or replaces relationships with men. See Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Story of Avis, Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground, Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs. In her relationship with nature, the heroine is frequently able to develop or preserve her autonomy, whereas with men she must accept subordination.

21. Male sexuality is associated with violence and exploitation elsewhere in Cather's fiction: consider Wick Cutter in My Ántonia, Frank Ellinger in A Lost Lady, Martin Colbert in Sapphira and the Slave Girl.

22. Ivar prohibits the symbol of male violence and sexuality from his world. When Alexandra and her brothers visit him, he runs out shouting “‘No guns, no guns!’” (p. 39).

23. The association of sexuality and death is further underscored by the transformation of Alexandra's dream. As years pass, the sexual harvest-god becomes the personification of Death, the “mightiest of all lovers” (pp. 282-83).

24. Like them she combines (and sometimes confuses) sexual passion and romanticism.

25. See Sarah Orne Jewett's “The White Heron” for another work of fiction that shows male sexuality and violence combined in a character who wants to destroy a bird.

26. Willa Cather, “Katherine Mansfield,” in Not Under Forty (New York: Knopf, 1932), p. 135.

27. Willa Cather quoted in Mildred Bennet, The World of Willa Cather (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1951; rpt, 1961), p. 208.

28. Willa Cather in her preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), xii.

29. Sergeant, p. 86.

30. Alexander's Bridge (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1922), p. viii.