85 pages • 2 hours read
Willa CatherO Pioneers!
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1913A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Respect the Power of the Land
O Pioneers! honors the sanctity of land and nature. Certain characters take inspiration from the land, while others have an adversarial relationship with it, and these relationships indicate the characters’ personalities.
Alexandra embodies the pioneer spirit because of her natural connection to the land. While others see the land as impossible to cultivate, Alexandra senses and is imaginative about its potential; she respects the land’s dangers but knows she can work with it. While characters who have an adversarial attitude towards the land find it cruel and uncontrollable, Alexandra personifies nature as kind even in its harsher forms. In the aftermath of Emil’s death, she takes solace in the driving rain, which she describes in primal, womb-like terms: “It carries you back into the dark, before you were born; you can’t see things, but they come to you, somehow, and you know them and aren’t afraid of them. Maybe it’s like that with the dead” (101-02). Alexandra also recognizes that the land is immeasurably bigger than she is and will outlive her. She therefore doesn’t seek to control it but rather to form a temporary partnership with it. Indeed, because Alexandra does not marry in the course of the novel, her farm is her life partner. While other people fall in love with people, Alexandra falls in love with nature.
Oscar and Lou do not genuinely respect the power of the land. As teenagers, Oscar and Lou were eager to get away from the farm; they found farming pointless in such an unforgiving natural climate. The success of their farms is due entirely to Alexandra’s ingenuity. What’s more, Oscar and Lou never learn to appreciate the land but rather grow up to treat the land as though it owes them profit and security. Because Oscar and Lou don’t respect Alexandra—who in her resilience, independence, and beauty is a human manifestation of the land—they also do not respect nature itself.
Carl also has a complex relationship with Nebraska. As a teenager, he felt depressed in Hanover. He thought it foolish that anyone could imagine that the land would yield to human hands. Carl’s family moves away, and when he returns years later, he admits that he wishes the land were still cruel to humans: Carl needs to believe that nature is his adversary because otherwise he would have to analyze himself in order to account for (what he sees as) his failures. However, because Carl loves Alexandra, he also comes to love the land.
Sacrifice of Self for the Good of the Community
As Cather depicts it, pioneer life requires enormous self-sacrifice. The novel’s homesteaders live in an interdependent community in which the failure of one farm could mean the failure of all farms. Their neighborly bonds are therefore strong. Though these pioneers are individualistic in spirit, as a community they value society over the individual. This is a direct result of developing a civilization in the middle of nowhere: They must develop the infrastructure and support systems that already exist in established towns and cities. This challenge is isolating, making neighborly hospitality and support crucial to the survival of everyone.
This self-sacrifice is most evident in the character of Alexandra. Alexandra sacrifices the possibility of being a wife and mother to establish her family’s security on the farm. She dreams only of survival and success so that her youngest brother, Emil, can live a life of opportunity. Alexandra is also generous with the community more broadly. She puts her reputation on the line by providing a home to Ivar, who the town believes is “crazy.” She helps develop land for her neighbors and creates a legacy that she can pass down to her nieces and nephews. Oscar and Lou become concerned about Alexandra’s relationship with Carl because, if Alexandra were to marry, Carl would have control of the family land and investments. Notably, however, Alexandra doesn’t decide to marry Carl until the novel’s final pages. Though the argument destroys Alexandra’s relationship with her brothers, Alexandra puts the needs of the community over her own happiness, even if she knows there’s a way to have both.
Alexandra has internalized the importance of self-sacrifice so much that when Frank murders her brother and her best friend, Alexandra blames his actions on the selfishness of Emil and Marie. As Alexandra sees it, Emil and Marie should have overcome their attraction to one another because Marie was married. That they succumbed to their desires and put themselves before the good of their community is Alexandra’s explanation for why they died. The fact that Alexandra saw Frank spend years sacrificing his happiness for Marie, who did not repay that sacrifice, further solidifies her opinion. In putting their own urges ahead of the norms and social codes of their community, Marie and Emil represent individual pleasure, which Alexandra dismisses as foolish if not outright destructive. Cather uses the theme of self-sacrifice to emphasize the relentlessly difficult life of a pioneer—a life that requires putting community before self.
Loneliness Is a Double-Edged Sword
A feeling of loneliness informs most of this novel. Several characters are lonely in their own way, and Cather uses the feeling to develop a paradox: Loneliness is difficult, but in loneliness, people can find their true selves.
Alexandra is surrounded by people and nature, but she is extremely lonely. She spends much time completely on her own. Everyone she loves leaves her (Carl), changes (Oscar and Lou), or dies (her father, Marie, and Emil). Her loneliness is mirrored in the bleak landscape, but the landscape also eases her loneliness. Alexandra sees loneliness as a phase that helps her appreciate people and her life. Thus, Alexandra’s loneliness is a double-edged sword. Though her isolation saddens her, it also deepens her connection to the land, which will never change or leave; if Alexandra were less lonely, she might not have the same relationship to nature (though by the same token, it is perhaps because of that connection that she is lonely). While Alexandra is a strong and independent woman, her secret fantasies about a man carrying her indicate that she does want a partner in her life—someone whom she can depend upon. When Carl returns in the final chapter, Cather foreshadows a cessation to Alexandra’s loneliness.
Other characters have a more difficult time enduring loneliness—a flaw that ultimately dooms them. Emil has many friends and opportunities to meet new people, but he feels lonely because of his unfulfilled love for Marie. Marie also feels lonely because of her flawed and unhappy marriage to Frank, but she tries to see the good in her isolation: Marie compares her feelings to winter, a symbolic season in which people have no choice but to burrow inside and engage in deep reflection. This suggests that while loneliness can be painful, it is also an important part of one’s development (and will eventually pass). Emil, however, is oppressed by his loneliness. It makes him restless when he’s home and dissatisfied when he’s away from home. Unlike Marie, Emil doesn’t reflect on the value of loneliness, so he acts on impulse and pursues Marie even though it is impossible for them to be together—an action that results in his death.
Cather suggests that loneliness is natural and encourages her reader to consider loneliness as part of the process of self-discovery. This process is especially important in the context of rural life, in which people may go weeks without seeing another person; one of the first things the novel says about the Nebraskan landscape is that “[o]f all the bewildering things about [it], the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening” (7). The resilience of the pioneer involves feeling at peace with isolation and ultimately oneself.
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