Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2002
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer 2002, pp. 199-215.
Abstract
Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) has traditionally been read within the twin contexts of Cather's pioneering childhood and her nostalgic reminiscences that glorify the lives of prairie settlers. These critics interpreted the novel in light of Walt Whitman's poem of the same name in Leaves of Grass, which celebrates the conquering American pioneer who "civilizes" the land for production.1 More recent critics have contextualized it within her family history, agricultural history, domestic plots, American migration, and women leaving the home.2 However, if we consider O Pioneers! in relation to the gender role redefinitions of Cather's adult life, we discover a work that is not primarily about homesteading pioneers, but rather about two women who are pioneers in crossing socially constructed gender barriers. Both Alexandra Bergson and Marie Shabata overturn the presupposition that farm women are necessarily subordinate farmwives who support their husbands by working in the domestic sphere. As a woman farmer, Alexandra Bergson is a superior manager of her land, money, workers, and extended family. Alexandra's movement in the novel is from an initial rejection of traditional women's roles to an exploration of how she can be a woman in a dominant position and a family woman simultaneously, while Marie's movement is from a farm woman who embodies contemporary ideals of women's roles to rejecting them because of their oppressiveness. Marie Shabata acknowledges that her marriage is not emotionally fulfilling, resists her husband's verbal and physical abuse, and seeks personal fulfillment outside marriage. Each woman subverts traditional late nineteenth-century gender perceptions by eschewing the role of supporting a male regardless of the consequences. In doing so, each of these women appropriates traditional male roles and explores pioneering possibilities for women's lives.
THE PIONEERS OF O Pioneers!
The American "pioneer" usually refers to those at the leading edge of American migrations whether frontiersman, forester, mountain man, miner, overland trail venturer, prospector, gold rusher, or homesteader. These people are initiators, originators, and forerunners preparing the way for "civilization." Etymologically the word is derived from foot soldiers who "march with or in advance of an army or regiment, having spades, pickaxes, etc. to dig trenches, repair roads, and perform other labours in clearing or preparing the way for the main body."3 Within Cather's novel, genuine homesteading pioneers are curiously absent.
Homesteading is finished on the Divide, except for the "the rough country across the county line" near Old Ivar's homestead (18).4 The Bergsons were pioneers of this region who staked and "proved up on claims," but when the novel opens they have accumulated the wealth of a debt-free section of land (640 acres). This is a significant acreage considering that the government census of 1890 claimed the average Nebraskan farm was only 1901 acres.5 The novel begins with the death of the family's founding pioneer, and most of the novel transpires twenty-seven years after the Bergsons initially homesteaded their land. Mrs. Bergson compares droughts from early pioneer days to the current water shortage and describes their predicament as less arduous than those the family faced when they first arrived (31). The novel's main characters are second-generation settlers who do not create houses out of the wilderness, but like farmers in American agrarian novels they steadily work to improve the land, the crops, the animals, and their fortune.6
Comments
Copyright 2002 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln