O Pioneers! and the Importance of Place

May I start by offering my cordial apologies for lack of posts? There really is no excuse for three years. But after one master's degree, a few jobs and one massive move across the country, I believe I am ready to begin again.

That being said, I took a short break from authors I have read before and have expanded my interest to new ones. After speaking with a friend who is an avid reader of Edith Wharton, I realized that I have a sizeable gap in my knowledge of classic literature. Besides Hemingway, I have not extensively read works by very many American authors.

When thinking about which author I wanted to read, I first thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whom I read growing up. Perhaps because of my rural upbringing, I had been fascinated by pioneers and the adventures of settling in a wild land. I thought about taking up Wilder again and reading the Little House series, but then Willa Cather came to my mind, so I read the first book in her Great Plains Trilogy, O Pioneers! 

I must say that after reading this novel, my interest in pioneers and the American frontier has been rekindled. This engrossing story of a small community of settlers in the little town of Hanover, Nebraska, was a work that like true art, entangled me into their lives whilst entwining my own memories and experiences, making their hardships harder and their joys sweeter.

O Pioneers! tells the story of the Bergsons, a Swedish family, who, among other immigrant families works the land as their livelihood. At the beginning of the novel, the Bergsons are poor, and John Bergson, the head of the family, is dying. Within the first few pages of the novel, John will exit this world, thus leaving behind his wife, his daughter Alexandra and his three sons: Oscar, Lou and Emil. In a surprising and refreshing challenge of early 20th century norms, it is Alexandra who takes over as head of the family. She manages the farm and after years of hard work, brings prosperity to the family. However, it is after the prosperity when the struggles really begin for the family. Love, death, abandonment, loneliness -- these are the experiences that Alexandra must face, proving to be more difficult than poverty or any hardship the land throws at her.

I won't give away everything in the book because I really want you to pick up this book, read it and be as engrossed in the story as I was. Cather is an exceptional storyteller. I have read that she preferred to tell her stories in a first-person male point of view, but O Pioneers! has a third-person/omniscient point of view, which I think works well because you get a wonderful portrait of each of these unique characters. Like any great story, the characters are what made me care and what made me stay up late every night to read as much as possible of this book.

The characters were each painted so well in this portrait of the American plains that you saw the beauty in each of them, as you see a remarkable painting as beautiful in all its parts, not just some pieces. Alexandra was the pillar, constant in her care and reasonableness but then also surprising in her quiet struggles. Emil was the dreamer, whose heart definitively ruled his actions, his lifestyle and unfortunately, his downfall. Carl Linstrum was the problem solver, the thinker with a steadfast drive to find his path. Marie Shabata was the bright-eyed, lovelorn beauty, so full of life and energy, yet always searching for fulfillment. Every character kept me guessing, and every event kept me turning the pages.

All the characters in the Hanover community are also immigrants. The Bergsons are Sweedish, the Shabatas are Bohemian, Ivar and Alexandra's in-laws are Norwegian, and some communities are French. All speak different languages and even have little cultural nuances that Cather touches on (the French are more fun, the Norwegians are more free, the Bohemians are passionate). Despite their cultural differences, they all lived together harmoniously and many still held to their traditions and native languages, even if the younger ones viewed them as old fashioned. These communities formed an authentic American experience, fostering a hybrid individualistic collectivism. The land is what shaped them as people but what also bound them together through hardships and happiness, as Cather effectively portrays.

While every person in the novel was intriguing to me, I believe that the most interesting character of all in the novel is the most peculiar, the most unpredictable one: the land.

Cather treats the land not simply as the place where the people live, but as another being. She personifies it in such a way that it plays an integral role in the feelings and fate of its characters yet also carries some of them through its own trials. It's not as simple as, for instance, there was a drought and people starved, so the land and everyone suffered. No, the land sees all, it knows all, it grieves with the people, it tries to hold on through the tough times, it serves as home for both the living and the dead.

The land, like the characters, lives and breathes. For instance, the first sentence of the book reads: "One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away." It's weathering the storm just as much as the people living on it. Another interesting aspect of the land as a character is how it affects those who respect it and understand it. Alexandra is a perfect example. As she has tamed the land by making her farm prosper, the land bends to her will, but she acknowledges that, in the end, she is but a passerby on the eternal land:

"The land belongs to the future...thus the way it seems to me...I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while."

Before this novel, it had been a long time since I thought about nature and the outdoors lending so much to the human experience. Admittedly, I had never been moved by Walden or by the works of Robert Frost or by any work that puts great emphasis on nature and the land, but Cather's telling of these determined and strong-willed settlers truly intrigued me and helped me to see just how meaningful "the wild land" really was.

This story even brought back my Midwestern childhood memories of quiet walks in the woods, plucking fresh mint leaves from neighboring fields and sledding through fresh blankets of snow. It makes you wonder why anyone leaves the serenity of the land for noisy, bustling cities. But I suppose that concept is described in a great many other novels. It seems that great stories tend to have a common factor: they evoke an undeniable sense of place that is integral to plot and character development. In Dr. Zhivago, it's the despairing tundra of post-Revolution Russia. In The Sun Also Rises, it's the cafe society of 1920s Paris. In Wuthering Heights, it's the brooding, lonely moors of 19th century England. O Pioneers! stands among the great stories with its tale of the Great Plains, a place and culture that I'm convinced Cather captured like no other.