American Fiction 1865 - 1940 by Brian Lee

Author:Brian Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Alexandra and Carl are driving back to see her dying father, John Bergson. He is one of the many defeated figures in the novel, a Swedish immigrant who unsuccessfully tried to tame the land for eleven years in the hope of recovering his lost family wealth. Others, like the Linstrums are driven back east by the droughts that sent so many others retreating across the Mississippi in the mid-1880s, or like Alexandra’s brothers Oscar and Lou, they merely lack the strength and imagination of the successful pioneer. Alexandra herself possesses these qualities in abundance and uses them powerfully and lovingly to create a paradisal garden out of the wilderness. Her feeling for the land, expressed in rich, sensuous imagery is too positive to be regarded as a mere compensation for the fact that, being always surrounded by little men, she finds no real joy in human sexual relationships. Her stoic loneliness that is only slightly tempered by her eventual passionless union with Carl, is seen as the necessary condition of her spiritual identity.

In one of her essays Willa Cather spoke of human relationships as ‘the tragic necessity of human life’, and a large part of O Pioneers is taken up with the story of such a relationship between Alexandra’s brother Emil, and Marie, the estranged wife of Frank Shabata. Their love-affair is spontaneous and idyllic, despite the social and religious transgressions it involves. Willa Cather comes as close here as anywhere to making out a case for sexual fulfilment, but when the two are killed by Frank in a murderous rage, she uses the terrible climax to brood on the destruction and sorrow brought by Marie’s warm impulsiveness. The best answer she can find is in the kind of withdrawal from human contact made by character after character in her subsequent fiction, and the varying degrees of emotional and spiritual fulfilment they achieve.

The weakness of O Pioneers derives from a lack of integration between its thematically related stories. In rejecting the artificial form of the well-made novel, Willa Cather never completely mastered the kind of organic structure which her materials demanded, though she came close to it in My Antonia by entangling her heroine’s story with that of Jim Burden, the narrator.

Jim and Antonia arrive in Nebraska together, one an orphan from Virginia, and the other in a poor family of Bohemian immigrants. The first third of the novel describing their early experience, the hardships and joys of lives that are intimately bound up with the folklore of the last European settlers, provides not just a superbly realized base for the rest of the work, but also the human values that it will test.

Jim’s grandparents take him to live in the nearby small town of Black Hawk, and he is shortly followed there by Antonia, who becomes one of the ‘hired girls’ that customarily help out their families by finding work in town. In addition to displaying a wonderful awareness of the nuances of social structure and providing a vivid

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