Having been dissapointed in her previous novels, including Alexander's Bridge Cather thought that O Pioneers! was a success. O Pioneers is a story on the character Alexandra Bergson, the strong and determined daughter of a Swedish immigrant left to carry on her father's struggle against the harsh prairie lands of the West. She fights to keep her family together and sacrifices her youth and beauty to a lifetime of hard labor. The story ends with Alexandra's eventual success and happiness with a man worthy of her love, but many say that the novel gains most of its emotional thrust from a narrative digression involving duplicitous lovers. Alexandra's youngest brother whom she adors, Emil, falls in love with Marie Shabata, wife of a gruff neighbor. Marie and Emil meet in an orchard when her husband discovers them together and kills them both.

In a review of O Pioneers!, F. T. Cooper called the murder of the lovers "perfect as it is by itself." David Stouck defended Cather's inclusion of the love triangle in the story, saying that "in terms of the novel's epic theme - and it is the epic note which prevails at the end - the death of the lovers is necessary to give Alexandra's story a tragic depth and to allow her old antagonist, nature, to reassert its power...Their death gives Alexandra's life a tragic quality because they represent essentially everything for which she has lived and fought."

Onward to:

When I read Willa Cather's novel, O Pioneers! I get a true sense of what the land really meant back in the early 1900's. Farms were much smaller at that time, and more land meant more wealth. I feel that Alexandra was an individual and ususual for the time period, as Cather was. She herself owned land as a women, and didn't not just hand it off to her brothers as many would have done. The land was more than soil in which to grow food in to Alexandra, but the land was life itself. She was the first character in American literature to yearn over Nebraska. She views the land as others might view religion or politics.

When the road began to climb the first swells of the Divide...Alexandra's face was so radiant...For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her.

As Vivian Gornick described Alexandra and her relationship to the land in the introduction to the book, "Alexandra sees not the world before her but the one that is to be made, and the unimaginative mind coupled with the prodigious strength of feeling becomes wedded to a single-mindedness of purpose that will not be weakened by complex or inappropriate emotions. This single-mindedness enters like passional love into Alexandra, becomes her sensual connection, binds her to the enduring effort. It makes Nebraska prosper, and it keeps her simple."

I couldn't agree more to this statement. Alexandra did see the true beauty in the land, and did not let it be, but expanded on it. When the town was in a harsh economic period, she did not sell her land, but instead bought more at a low price, going far into bankrupsy. While people viewed her as crazy at first, the intellectual side of Alexandra payed off in the end and she became one of the more succesful in the community.

One of the themes in this book that interested me was the views of women of this time period. In both My Antonia and O Pioneers! the vulnerability of young women, especially poor country girls, to sexual betrayal, to scandal and censure in late-nineteenth-century society, informs much of the story line. In O Pioneers! Alexandra's brothers, Lou and Oscar, fight with her for buying land and going into debt, but as soon as the land pays off they expect it to belong to them, because they are the "men" of the family.

Alexandra rapped impatiently on her desk with her knuckles. "Listen, Lou. Don't talk wild. You say you ought to have taken things into your own hands years ago. I suppose you mean before you left home. But how could you take hold of what wasn't there? I've got most of what I have now since we divided up the property; I've built it up myself, and it has nothing to do with you."
Oscar spoke up solemnly. "The property of a family really belongs to the men of the family, no matter about the title. If anything goes wrong, it's the men that are held responsible."
"Yes of course," Lou broke in. "Everybody knows that. Oscar and me have always been easy-going and we've never made any fuss. We were willing you should hold the land and have the good of it, but you got no right to part with any of it. We worked in the fields to pay for the first land you bought, and whatever's come out of it has got to be kept in the family."
Oscar reinforced his brother, his mind fixed on the one point he could see. "The property of a family belongs to the men of the family, because they are held responsible, and because they do the work."
Alexandra looked from one to the other, her eyes full of indignation. "And what about my work?"

I thought that the portrayal of the women's role in the society at that time was very interested, and Cather did a good job of expressing it in her writing. Being the individual that she was, somewhat like Alexandra, I wonder if she had trouble with other writers being a woman, and if this was a major influence on her writing about this topic.

I'd recommend O Pioneers! as a good book to read for the story, as well as it being a major work of Cathers. As Vivian Gornick said, "O Pioneers! is a classic American novel. It can be read with profit and pleasure at any age. To read it first in adolescence and then to return to it as an adult is to feel the testure of its intent ripen and mature. Cather's love of the American Midwest is as vividly alive on the page now as it was seventy years ago, and her appreciation of the painful contradictions buried in family life or group life is as tenderly indicated here as in anything she ever wrote."