O Pioneers!, page 1
PENGUIN CLASSICS
O PIONEERS!
Willa Cather was born in December 1873 in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, the eldest child of Charles and Mary Cather, both descendants of established Virginian families. Her childhood was reportedly happy and well-ordered, and is remembered in her late novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. In 1883, the Cathers moved to Webster County, Nebraska, joining members of the family who had settled there earlier. This crucial move, dislocating and dramatic, introduced Cather to a landscape and to ways of life she would memorialize in her famous prairie novels, O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and A Lost Lady. In the small town of Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cather was a notably energetic, intelligent, and outspoken child, while, as her novels show, the town often seemed to her repressive. In Lincoln, Nebraska, where she attended the State University, she began her journalistic career, writing innumerable reviews for the local newspapers, and she published her earliest stories. Here, too, she formulated her idealistic and romantic ideals about art, and her literary ambitions. Those ambitions had to wait for their fulfillment, while she earned a living in Pittsburgh as journalist and teacher, and then as editor for McClure’s Magazine in New York. With the publication of O Pioneers! in 1913, Cather became the dedicated writer of her own dreams, in time achieving recognition for her prairie novels, and for rare and unique works like Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Professor’s House, Shadows on the Rock. She led an ordered life, writing stories, novels, and critical essays, travelling regularly, and maintaining valued friends, among them neighbors from her childhood, as well as famous writers and musicians. She was honored for her writings, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours, a novel about a soldier in World War I. She died at her home in New York in 1947.
Blanche H. Gelfant teaches American Literature at Dartmouth College, where she holds an endowed chair as the Robert E. Maxwell Professor in the Arts and Sciences. She has published widely on a variety of twentieth-century American writers and themes, and written a pioneer study of urban literature as a literary genre, The American City Novel. Her recent book, Women Writing in America: Voices in Collage, deals with diverse figures, all of whom in some way dramatize the possibilities of women’s survival. The volume contains two essays on Willa Cather, a much-republished study of My Ántonia and a new reading of Lucy Gayheart.
WILLA CATHER
O Pioneers!
With an Introduction by
BLANCHE H. GELFANT
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First published in the United States of America by Houghlin Mifflin Company 1913
This edition with an introduction by Blanche H. Gelfant published in Penguin Books 1989
Reissued in Penguin Books 1994
Introduction copyright © 1989 by Viking Penguin Inc.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Cather, Willa, 1873–1947.
O Pioneers! / Willa Cather; with an introduction by Blanche H. Gelfant.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-66200-7
I. Title.
PS3505.A8702 1989
813’.53—dc19 88–21896
Version_1
To the memory of
SARAH ORNE JEWETT
in whose beautiful and delicate work
there is the perfection
that endures
CONTENTS
About the Author
Introduction by Blanche H. Gelfant
Suggestions for Further Reading
O PIONEERS!
PART I
The Wild Land
PART II
Neighboring Fields
PART III
Winter Memories
PART IV
The White Mulberry Tree
PART V
Alexandra
INTRODUCTION
I
When O Pioneers! was published in 1913, reviewers praised Willa Cather for having created “a totally new kind of story.” Its “characters were new in American fiction,” they wrote, its heroine “a new and interesting type”; Cather had mined “a new vein of material,” “broken new ground.” If breaking new ground is the act of a pioneer, then Cather herself was being cast in the role she had created for her heroine, Alexandra Bergson. For like Alexandra, Cather was forming “a new relation” with the Nebraska prairies that O Pioneers! described as a vast somber waste, a wintry land resistant to human efforts, unfriendly and “wild.” Just as Alexandra transformed this wild land into orderly fields of wheat and corn, orchards of fruit trees “knee-deep in timothy grass,” into pasture ponds planted with willows, and gardens, so Cather transformed it, a seemingly uncultivable literary territory, into art. These transformations reflected an inner change that Cather transposed from herself to her character as both developed, in the novel’s words, “a new consciousness of the country.”
Praising this new consciousness, reviewers resorted to old metaphors of conquest and warfare. Pioneers, they said, are “men and women who . . . left their own country to wage war against Nature in virgin lands.” Pioneering meant “taming” and “conquering” the intractable prairie. Metaphors that likened pioneering to conquest implied that O Pioneers! was in essence a war novel, its adversaries humankind and nature, its issue victory or defeat. Reviewers criticized the novel for eliding the “story of how Alexandra fought her battle and won”; they wanted the details of battle and singled out for praise “one big moment” of violence that entailed gunshots and death. Violence, guns, struggle, victory and defeat, death—these elements of the generic war novel are woven into the plot of O Pioneers!, and yet readers today do not see war as its salient theme. Rather, they define O Pioneers! as a pastoral, an epic, or a creation myth. If we go to the “heart” of the novel—to use its own language of sentiment—we might call it a love story, or rather, a collection of love stories that have been involuted within each other and told with a simplicity achieved only by great art. On this account we can agree with early reviewers: as a work of art O Pioneers! is compelling, poetic, empathetic, and “touched with genius.”*
Like other Cather novels, O Pioneers! reflects upon itself in ways that shape the reader’s response. For example, a much-quoted sentence instructs us to see the love affair between Alexandra Bergson and the prairie as unprecedented: “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.” This hyperbolic sentence is appropriately self-doubting; its interpolated “perhaps” introduces the possibility of its own exaggeration or mistake. But Alexandra’s love cannot be exaggerated, we soon see, for it is the empowering force that enables her to take possession of the land: to own it and to appropriate it, preternaturally, into her being. Cather’s strained metaphor for appropriation translates seeing into a drinking in of space and subsequent blindness: “Her eyes drank in the breadth of it [the land], until her tears blinded her.” The sight of Alexandra irradiated with yearning and blindly weeping with love subdues “the great, free spirit” of the Divide; its Genius, for centuries “unfriendly to man,” yields to a woman, bending “lower than it had ever bent to a human will before.” In a complex relationship, love and will become indistinguishable from each other and from aesthetic sensitivity. The land submits to Alexandra’s love as though it were a coercive will, while Alexandra experiences love as a will-less response to the beauty inherent in the prairie’s breadth: “It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious.”
Clearly, the qualities Alexandra attributes to the landscape belong to Alexandra Bergson as a pioneer woman. She has amazonian beauty and strength; she produces riches; and through her efforts, she brings a prosperous country into being. Her love is thus creative, an originative historical force, as we are told outright in a famous statement in the text: “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” If this is the novel’s truism, then we can understand why history in O Pioneers! assumes the form of a love story, or more accurately, of many love stories as the novel rebounds different kinds of love against each other and against Cather’s imagined past.
“A pioneer should have imagination,” Cather notes in her novel, attributing to Alexandra her own conceptualizing faculty as a writer. Alexandra imagines the future, and Cather the past. This simple antithesis places us in a convoluted time scheme as the novel represents Alexandra’s future as Cather’s imagined historical past. Past, present, and future thus coalesce in our reading, as though time as we ordinarily conceive it, as a succession of separate moments, has been transcended or somehow transmuted into timelessness. As an artist, Cather idealized timelessness, equating it with permanence or immutable values, with beauty and truth, with art. As a realistic writer, however, she recognized that life, unlike art, was subject to laws of mutabili ty: its essence was change. O Pioneers! dramatizes change—but not without great tension as it seeks simultaneously to describe timeless values and the vicissitudes of time. This thematic tension helps explain the novel’s disjunct form: its structural dissolution into five discrete parts; its startling elision of the sixteen years that have elapsed between Part I and Part II, crucial years of historic change; its disparate plots, one ending in death and the other unending as the country’s “bosom” receives and resurrects Alexandra’s “heart.” Two hearts thus beat as one at the end of O Pioneers!, a common conclusion to sentimental love stories that Cather makes uncommon. For she takes the ultimate consummation of Alexandra’s love outside of the novel’s past, present, or future, and places it in another dimension of time accessible only to the mythic imagination.
Love is the perennial theme of realistic novels and of romance, but love consummated in a death that renews life belongs to the archetypal myth of eternal return. This all-embracing myth universalizes Cather’s novel, making its careful specifications of time, place, and plot incidental to its elemental pattern of rebirth. Alexandra’s story thus becomes one of the “two or three human stories” that, as Carl Linstrum says, “go on repeating themselves”—or, as Alexandra corrects him, that “we” write. Alexandra’s correction suggests that characters can choose their fate, while Carl defines their possible fates as limited to a few eternally repeated patterns. Two of these are re-created in O Pioneers!, both concerned with love. Emil and Marie’s story describes the deeply felt personal passion of young star-crossed lovers; Alexandra’s story centers about an almost undescribable impersonal passion of a mythic goddess for the earth. The real “hero” of Alexandra’s story, as Cather herself said, was a land that endured forever: “We come and go, but the land is always there.” As Alexandra becomes identified with this land, she shares its destiny of eternal renewal. For once her heart is buried in the earth’s bosom, it will live forever “in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!” Alexandra has grown older in the novel, from a girl to a mature woman, but the earth promises to give her back the eyes of youth through which she first looked at the rustling yellow fields she loves.
Critics disagree about the nature of this love, whether it is sexual, sublimated, somehow supernal, or displaced from its real object, a woman, to a socially acceptable man. All these possibilities, relevant to O Pioneers! as a realistic novel, become inconsequential to a creation myth in which love gives life to the land. Through Alexandra’s love, the prairie becomes a living, fertile being with a “joyous . . . open face”; it is capable of emotion, of deliberate movement, of mating. It seems motivated to sustain life, “yield[ing] itself eagerly to the plow . . . with a soft, deep sigh of happiness”; rising “to meet the sun,” the source of life; and “mating” with the air so that earth and atmosphere share the same breath and the “same strength and resoluteness.” In the end, Alexandra herself will mate with the earth, whose qualities of strength and resoluteness she has always shared. These are her foremost qualities when she first appears on Hanover’s windy, wintry street, “a tall, strong girl” who walks “rapidly and resolutely, as if she knew exactly where she was going.” To a little boy on the street, red with cold and crying, she seems a warming “ray of hope,” and to a shabby little man, a sudden splendiferous vision, her shining mass of hair a golden halo. Later on, Alexandra appears with the dawn, or more precisely, as Dawn personified, “as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself.” Light surrounds her as she is associated with the rising sun, which in its inevitable course—rising, setting, and rising again—traces a pattern of eternal return.
As elemental as sun and earth, the seasons of the year reinscribe this pattern of life, death, and rebirth as they move through their timeless cycle. Part I of O Pioneers! begins in winter, a season of death: the Bergson cattle have died in a winter blizzard, and now John Bergson, Alexandra’s father, lies dying. The father’s death, however, allows the daughter to exercise her powers as a life force. Part II, set in spring and summer, describes the effect of these powers, which have transformed the blank lead-colored miles of nothingness that lay before Mr. Bergson into the richest, most fertile, most beautiful farm on the Divide. The Divide itself is alive and animate. We see its tremendous vitality from an extraordinary perspective, however, for the panoramic description of the Divide’s rich, resolute life radiates from the graveyard.
Graveyards on the flat prairie make death visible and close, a familiar feature of the landscape. Before he dies, Mr. Bergson feels himself willing to merge with this landscape, “to go deep down under [the] fields” he knew intimately, “every ridge and draw and gully.” Death offers him rest, and ends his story as a struggling pioneer; but his death makes possible Alexandra’s unique life. For Mr. Bergson does not bequeath his land to his sons, as we might expect. Instead, he places it in his daughter’s strong hands. He realizes that Alexandra has more than youth, “strength of will,” and “intelligence”: she possesses an inexplicable and transcendental quality revealed by the ambience of light in which she moves. She knows the future, though she “can’t explain” how; and what she knows turns out prophetically true. In essence, she is the future, or, as her father expresses it, the future lies in her hands.
To Alexandra, however, the land is the future; she knows this intuitively, feeling “in her own body the [soil’s] joyous germination.” Alexandra’s sense of oneness with the “flat, fallow world about her” makes her seem pregnant with life; but (re)union with the earth is also the essence of death. This aporia emerges at the end of Part I, which adumbrates the final ending of O Pioneers! In both conclusions, Alexandra’s heart lies underground. In Part I, it hides deep down in the prairie’s long grass, beside the hiding quail, plover, and the “wild things that crooned . . . in the sun.” Under the grass, Alexandra feels “the future stirring.” At this early point in the novel, the future demands Alexandra’s energy and resoluteness; in the end it will take her heart. Thus Alexandra’s death and life belong within an eternal pattern of return described by nature, by its sun and seasons, and by myth. It is the pattern described also by a great American poet to whom O Pioneers! explicitly declares indebtedness: Walt Whitman.
As various critics have pointed out, the endings of O Pioneers! and Whitman’s “Song of Myself” are similar in their refusal to recognize death as finality. Both describe a continuity of life as human forms become translated through death into elements of nature. Air, sun, the “scud of day,” dusk, dirt, grass—the “I” of “Song of Myself” is effused into all these and into the blood of the reading “You.” In O Pioneers!, Alexandra’s buried heart will also burst the bounds of space, time, and identity, though it will not be unrestricted; wheat and corn belong to a more specific geographic region than Whitman’s grass, and youth to a more specific human time than blood. Nevertheless, O Pioneers! aspires to the expansive vision of “Song of Myself,” and its conclusion resonates to the Whitmanesque couplet that describes the self, bequeathed to earth, growing from the grass it loves. In the novel, as in the poem, “the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” to use Whitman’s phrase, reveals that “there is really no death”: “All goes onward and outward.”
Abstracted from a particular place or time, movement “onward and outward” suggests eternality, the dimension of cyclical myths of return which formally frame O Pioneers! Movement becomes a matter of history, of human progress, when it is identified with a particular geographic place, a specified time, and a chosen people. Whitman became specific and historical in his poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!,” from which, obviously, Cather took her title, and much more. Whitman addresses his poem to the country’s “youthful, sinewy races,” its “Western youths,” marshalling them to a great historic destiny in Colorado, Arkansas, Missouri, and in Nebraska, in the prairies that Cather had deliberately excluded from her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge. For, as she would later say in an essay on O Pioneers!, she knew that struggling immigrants in the sod huts of Nebraska’s prairies were “distinctly déclassé,” not recognized as literary material by contemporary American writers she admired, like Henry James. Cather had shown her admiration for James by imitating him in her first novel; in her second, O Pioneers!, written when she was almost forty years old, she freed herself from the Master’s influence and, in the words of Edith Lewis, found “at last . . . the path she wanted to travel”—a path that led to the prairies of her childhood, to the fields as well as the kitchens of immigrant families she had known, and to her innermost self. With O Pioneers!, Cather discovered her authentic voice as she rediscovered the prairie. Effectively, she answered Whitman’s call to “Minstrels latent in the prairies,” pioneer poets he urged “to rise and tramp amid us.” In O Pioneers!, Cather not only eulogized the forward-marching youth who were creating the future: she joined their ranks.
