O Pioneers!
Since I got to South Dakota I've been asking people about what writers give the Midwest a sense of place. The first writer people pointed me towards was Kathleen Norris, famous for her meditations on the Dakotas and spirituality. Beyond that I found myself with a lot of local history publications - the sort of misty eyed nostalgia that I found hard to read because it wasn't history, it was memory. No one pointed me to Willa Cather but a quote from a National Geographic article on the Midwest sent me in her direction; she seemed to love this place but with the sight of the good and the bad.
"Between that earth and sky I felt erased, blotted out..."
As soon as I read those words I knew that she understood this place and the grand complication of living here in a way that I did. In the pages of O Pioneers! I found Willa's sense of place and even though she wrote about her familiar territory of Nebraska most of what she said could have easily been applied to what I've observed in the Dakotas. As apt as the quote above was what came before it:
"There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction."
And while Cather's early portrait of the open prairie is daunting, it's a special form of kinship that begins to rise out of the hardship that this place creates. Her honesty never demeans the place or belies how much love she has for it.
Most of my readings on feminism these days come from right wing fundamentalist sources and they all lament its effects on the modern woman. Such writing purports to retract the current gender "confusion" and trace our steps back to comfortable roles: male and female. I remember hearing its effects at a Bible study once whereupon being asked where she sees herself in 10 years a young college student said: "barefoot and pregnant."
O Pioneers!, however, is tinged with a balanced feminist tone and it lays a considerably healthy perspective of what our lives are today as men and women. The assumptions we make of freedom and choice are remarkable especially in considering the world of Cather, less than a century ago, women weren't allowed to vote and it wasn't ludicrous to assume that they couldn't own anything outside the auspices of a husband or male relative. In such a world this book must have challenged the going stereotypes and assumptions.
And so the central figure in the book is a woman to break these stereotypes, Alexandra Bergson. Her family homesteads in Nebraska after migrating from Sweden and although her father, a laborer from a shipyard, manages to learn a love for the land and what it takes to farm it, he runs out of time and dies prematurely. Knowing that his daughter Alexandra is a more capable decision maker than her younger brothers, he instructs them to follow her lead and allow her control of the farm until they marry or decide to part ways.
The story moves with Alexandra as she becomes a successful farmer, balancing her authority over her younger brothers with a description of the settler's climate - the various characters on the American prairie and the issues that face them. Among these characters are Ivar, a Norwegian maverick who embodies an ideal of deep seeded spirituality; one free from convention and structure; a man who is uncomfortable with the church and yet most alive spiritually in the book. There is Frank Shabata, a Bohemian hothead who by ill circumstance finds himself working the land, and hating it. Two of Alexandra's brothers are farmers - men overtaken by convention for whom departure from the norm is their most painful conception. Her youngest brother, Eli, is a would-be wayfarer and free spirit but his love for a woman keeps him coming back to "The Divide," ultimately becoming his undoing.
But aside Alexandra, the two characters who play at the forefront of the narrative are Carl Lindstrum and Marie Shabata, Carl as the man who Alexandra not only loves, but needs, and Marie, a picture of the type of beauty that destroys the things around it.
Cather is excellent with characters; her descriptions are simple and probing. For as little time as she spends developing them, they feel familiar and believable as they participate in her story. Here is her description of Alexandra's brother, Oscar:
"Oscar could not grow a moustache; his pale face was as bare as an egg, and his white eyebrows gave it an empty look. He was a man of powerful body and unusual endurance; the sort of man you could attach to a corn-sheller as you would an engine. He would turn it all day, without hurrying, without slowing down. But he was as indolent of mind as he was unsparing of his body. His love of routine amounted to a vice. He worked like an insect, always doing the same thing over in the same way, regardless of whether it was best or no. He felt that there was a sovereign virtue in mere bodily toil, and he rather liked to do things in the hardest way. If a field had once been in corn, he couldn't bear to put it into wheat. He liked to begin his corn-planting at the same time every year, whether the season were backward or forward. He seemed to feel that by his own irreproachable regularity he would clear himself of blame and reprove the weather. When the wheat crop failed, he threshed the straw at a dead loss to demonstrate how little grain there was, and thus prove his case against Providence."
As Cather uses these and other characters to weave her story, I found that each of them is amplified by life on the prairie, a concept I had never considered while living here. I felt blotted out, muted by the space and thought that the distance and openness of this place would muffle the things I did and who I was. But, in an odd way, without the clutter of elsewhere, a character can become more of itself: more resistant to change, more lonely, more isolated, more loved, and more broken.
The irony of Alexandra as a self-made woman, a locus of her family and strength against adversity is her waking daydream:
"Sometimes, as she lay thus luxuriously idle, her eyes closed, she used to have an illusion of being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by some one very strong. It was a man, certainly, who carried her, but he was like no man she knew, he was much larger and stronger and swifter, and he carried her as easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat."
She, like everyone else, longs for companionship - a need even more pronounced after she's attained her independence. As the book reaches its conclusion she's admitting this need to a man who has failed in most things except for his ability to support her emotionally. This in contrast with her daydream: the man she loves is "like no man she knew... larger and stronger and swifter..."
I like this portrait of our need going deeper than a safe home or physical protection. I like the frightening prospect of the independent woman who doesn't need material success but emotional support and companionship.
I also like Cather's portrait of life here. She alternates from the beauty and mystique of the land to grim realities, hardship, and isolation. She describes a diversity of this place that is taken for granted - before we began to consider it bland, white, or Christian, she shows it as a place of Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, and French immigrants. We see the beautiful side of hardship: people banding together and helping each other through - and we see the ugly side of human nature: jealousy, selfishness, and prejudice. In all we see people, fate, and circumstance, all amplified by a life on the prairie.
8:45:29 PM 
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