Literary O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

[fantasyfan]

Try as I might I just could engage neither with the characters in the book nor with the novel as a whole. The writing itself was certainly quite skilful and cery well crafted but that was the only thing I really appreciated. The story itself just didn't resonate for me.

Perhaps Willa Cather requires more than one reading before the depth of the novel will become apparent.

[desertblues]

I think there is more to this book then I'm seeing at this moment, so I will reread it and post about it later. But I will put some thoughts about it here.

I found this book rather refreshing: stripped of a lot of unneccessary ‘niceties’. This story is about the essential things of life, whose problems fundamentally are the same as in these days; how does a human being finds its place in the often chaotic or bewildering world?
Vivian Gornick, who wrote the forword for this novel, expresses it beautifully.

Spoiler:

10.'In all human beings, she felt, there is what she called a soul, an essential spirit, an expressive, inviolable self. She knew it was the task of every life to fashion an existence that would free the expressive self. This was the thing she saw from the very beginning. It became her subject, her metaphor, her lifelong preoccupation. For thirty years she fashioned stories and novels in which human beings struggle with the question of how to be themselves. If her characters struggle successfully, somehow or other, they come to glory. If not, if the inviolable self is denied or ignored, abused or pushed out of shape, the character comes to grief.'

Alexandra has to be the responsable one, or feels she has to be. She has a free spirit, unlike the society she is in and unlike two of her brothers. She must feel like an outcast, but still she follows her own path. The way she pursues her dream is rather modern for those days. She is the one who reflects on the inner life of men.
She doesn’t let the fixed morals and ideas of the restricted society influence her in the way she handles things or treats people. For example Ivar, who is closer to nature and wild things than the people in his community.

The way Willa Cather describes how the town on the prairie is struggling to survive, is comparable to the way the protagonists are battling to survive their emotions, their sense of alienation, the problems of their life.

Spoiler:

17.’ the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the toughprairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain “elevator” at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office.'

Emil, the only brother of Alexandra she can relate to, is also trying to survive. When he leaves for the big towns, he feels alienated; hardly knows who he is any more.

Spoiler:

88.'We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by.'

All these people are very unhappy and closed up. Alexandra’s friend Marie and her husband Frank are unhappy in their marriage. Marie is in love with Emil, but all cannot speak with each other about their true feelings.
Even Marie and Alexandra don’t discuss their problems; it all goes festering under the surface.

[Bookpossum]

Thanks desertblues - interesting thoughts. I plan on trying some of Cather's other books to see if I can get more out of them than I did with this one, so I haven't given up on her!

[Bookworm_Girl]

I have been too busy to post my thoughts but have been compiling them in my mind. I really enjoyed the book. I love the simplicity of her writing style yet how vividly the images are in your mind. I debated which novel to nominate, and I went with this one because it was one of her most well-known and I hadn't read it yet.

Willa Cather famously said she had two first novels. That's because she dismissed her real first novel, Alexander's Bridge, as being too drawing-room style in imitation of Henry James. It was in writing O Pioneers! that she found her true voice and was inspired by Sarah Orne Jewett to write about what she knew. She also didn't want to follow standard conventions of how to write a novel. My Antonia is generally considered the strongest of the Prairie Trilogy. Death Comes for the Archbishop is also considered one of her best; I really liked that book a lot and think most here would find it to be a stronger read. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours about WWI; however it's not considered to be as great a work as some of her other novels. I added it to my TBR list after another member of our club recommended it to me.

My point is I encourage you to try another book, maybe outside of the trilogy, to get a better impression of her legacy and why she is considered such an important author in the canon of American literature.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Willa Cather incorporates auto-biographical elements into her books. I found an interesting statistic that the foreign-born population in Nebraska during her childhood significantly outnumbered the native-born (3 to 1 in the 1910 census). It bothered her that native-born Americans ignored the traditions of the foreign-born or with snobbish attitudes looked down upon them. She reflects her fondness for her foreign-born neighbors of her childhood, especially the old women, through the character of Mrs. Lee, who is treated kindly by Alexandra to remember her old traditions and in opposite by her brother, Lou, and his wife, Annie Lee, who are small-minded and become more uppity now that they are have more land and want Mrs. Lee to be more civilized and forget those ways. Lou even loses his accent and now speaks just like "anybody from Iowa." Similarly, Alexandra is compassionate towards "Crazy" Ivar and his religious ways in contrast to her brothers and the rest of the town who'd rather banish him to the asylum. I thought it was a bit much to throw Oscar's Missouri wife into the mix as being ashamed of marrying a foreigner and also their children don't understand any Swedish.

Here are some memories in Willa's own words that you can see take shape in the book.

On Sunday we could drive to a Norwegian church and listen to a sermon in that language, or to a Danish or a Swedish church. We could go to the French Catholic settlements in the next county and hear a sermon in French, or into the Bohemian Township and hear one in Czech, or we could go to church with the German Lutherans. There were, of course, American congregations also.

We had very few American neighbors. They were mostly Swedes and Danes, Norwegians and Bohemians. I liked them from the first and they made up for what I missed in the country. I particularly liked the old women; they understood my homesickness and were kind to me.....these old women on the farms were the first people whoever gave me the real feeling of an older world across the sea. Even when they spoke very little English, the old women somehow managed to tell me a great many stories about the old country. They talk more freely to a child than to grown people....I have never found any intellectual excitement any more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these old women at her baking or butter-making. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt....as if I had actually got inside another person's skin.

[bfisher]

Thanks, Bookworm_Girl. I thought that the part where old Mrs. Lee visits was really well done; she must have been working from specific memories.

I'm ambivalent about this book. There were things that I really liked ; there were things that I didn't. It was the best of novels; it was the worst of novels.

I did find that on a second reading, I enjoyed the book much more. At that point, I wasn't reading to get to the resolution of the novel.

I immensely enjoyed the descriptions of the land, for example, when Carl gets up early to look at the dawn, and the description of winter on the prairie at the beginning of "Part III Winter memories"; these were exceptionally good.

Her references to nature and humans as a part of the natural world felt true, as in "down under the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood of one's heart", or Emil's musing on his life as the seed-corn where "the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains of the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why".

Her descriptions of pioneer life are also very good, as in the settlers in the general store, and the story of the circus trees.

Her crude stereotypes put me off a bit; Scandanavians are almost always "much more self-centered, apt to be egotistical and jealous", the French and Bohemian settlers are invariably "spirited and jolly" (except Frank, who should have been Swedish by her logic ).

Alexandria occupies an odd position; there are only a few places where we see her as a person, for example, in the opening scene, quelling the drummer with a look, or when she tries to scrub her dreams away "finishing it by pouring buckets of cold well-water over her gleaming white body". Then there is the odd visit to Frank at the end.

It was an early novel, and perhaps she had poor editorial support. I do think this book will hold up on subsequent readings, and I look forward to reading some of her more mature work.

[desertblues]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

Willa Cather incorporates auto-biographical elements into her books. I found an interesting statistic that the foreign-born population in Nebraska during her childhood significantly outnumbered the native-born (3 to 1 in the 1910 census). It bothered her that native-born Americans ignored the traditions of the foreign-born or with snobbish attitudes looked down upon them. (...)

Thank you for this information, Bookworm_Girl. So that's why her book reminds me of some Scandinavian novels I read a long time ago.

Spoiler:

I was a bit apprehensive about this book as novels like this actually were deemed proper lecture for us children; to read on Sundays after church; full of values and so on. At the time I was reluctant to read them, but this novel I find rather refreshing. Willa Cather writes about universal problems.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

That's an interesting comment desert blues. I hadn't thought of Bergman's films.

I have just finished reading the book and have to confess that I found it disappointing, as it didn't seem very deep to me. I didn't really feel that the characters were developing as they went through life.

Spoiler:

I also found Alexandra's sympathy for Frank a bit hard to believe, given how much she had treasured Emil. Would she really feel so much sympathy for him after he had killed Emil and Marie? And the ease with which all the blame was placed at Marie's door rather stuck in my throat! Of course, the book is of its time and I suppose reflects the attitudes about "fallen women".

I'm still trying to work out Alexandra's reaction to Emil's fate too, Bookpossum. I wasn't anticipating where her forgiveness and blame would be placed. I think it is her reaction to Frank that bothers me most, and I wondered if this were to reflect the Christian attitudes that would have been prevalent at that time. Although I don't think Cather really thought that Marie was the sole person at fault. Carl cautions Alexandra about her position and presents a different perspective. I think Cather was making a statement about the passion of youth that brought all three characters to their tragic conclusion. There is also passion (via bitterness and jealousy) in the marriage of Marie and Frank. And by further comparison you feel an intense positive love between Emil's best friend Amedee and his young bride, which also has a sad ending. These relationships are in contrast to Alexandra and Carl who are soul-mates and steady friends with a subdued love, yet you know that they will be happy until death to they part. The contrast of the passion of youth is represented in the introductory poem, Prairie Spring, and the roses also show up symbolically in several interactions between Emil and Marie.

The plot of Emil and Marie was an adaptation of a story she wrote called "The White Mulberry Tree."

Spoiler:

This story was based on the story of Paolo and Francesca which we read earlier this year in Dante's Inferno. As we are familiar, they were condemned for committing adultery, and Dante felt sorry for them because they were in love and couldn't resist that passion and didn't intentionally mean to commit sin. I think in her heart that Alexandra felt that Emil and Marie also couldn't have helped loving each other as they both represented the best of the youth. I can't remember if that was one of the situations where Virgil cautioned Dante to remember that they were in hell because they had committed a sin, but Ivar's belief in the cemetery scene with Alexandra that he didn't believe Emil and Marie were in Paradise stuck out to me.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by bfisher

Thanks, Bookworm_Girl. I thought that the part where old Mrs. Lee visits was really well done; she must have been working from specific memories.

Interesting comments, bfisher. I felt the same way that there were some strong and some weak elements to the novel and attribute it to being one of her first novels. I also felt that there were some things that were too stereotypical as if she were trying to capture too many opinions and statements into a single novel. Perhaps there could have been fewer characters and more development of them. Another example is that she threw some political statements about William Jennings Bryan and the free silver movement into the book that seemed abrupt rather than fluidly integrated. Lastly I understood Carl's character development through his art career in the big city but did he really need to go off prospecting in the Klondike? I have some more to say later after I've thought about the book a bit longer. Maybe readers of the day would have thought of these events more fluidly because they were current events to them.

Many of her characters in her books are based on family members, friends and neighbors from her childhood. I wouldn't be surprised if she had specific memories of old women and farmers that influenced the character of Mrs. Lee!

[Bookpossum]

Thanks Bookworm_Girl. Yes, I put down the "clunkier" parts of the plot, particularly Alexandra's approach with Frank towards the end, to its being an early book. I do agree that the strongest parts are those that people have mentioned, such as the portrait of Mrs Lee, and the descriptions of landscape. I have downloaded several of her books and will try them out. One title I had heard of elsewhere was Death Comes for the Archbishop, so maybe I should try that one first.

The version I read was from Girlebooks, and was missing the poem as well as the dedication. Now I'm starting to wonder if it is missing other things as well, and will have a look at a couple of other versions.

Thanks again for your interesting list, Bookworm_Girl. Apart from the other Cather novels, I have downloaded several other nominations too. I'm not going to run out of reading matter any time soon!

[Bookworm_Girl]

I do recommend finding a complete version. The first public domain version that I found was missing this critical info too! You can find the missing introductions on the Willa Cather archive.

The first epigraph is a quote on the title page by the Polish poet, Mickiewicz, which says "Those fields, colored by various grains!". Mickiewicz is known for his nationalistic poems praising his homeland, which at the time was part of the Russian empire, and he spent much time away from home in political exile. Perhaps she chose it due to a similar nostalgia that she felt towards her childhood homeland while living her adulthood in Eastern cities.

The poem Prairie Spring was written after the novel. It is in two parts: the first half is about the land and the second half is about youth. Cather said that she intended the land to be a hero of the novel. If we think of the land as another living character in the novel, I think some of the adjectives in the poem help to define its personality. The poem also foreshadows themes in the book about youth and loneliness and about the struggles of the immigrants and pioneers to tame this wild land.

Her choice of words for the dedication is interesting because Willa Cather wrote the following about Sarah Orne Jewett. Cather herself was a perfectionist and seemed to worry about how her own legacy would endure after her death so I find some irony in these words.

If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once, "The Scarlet Letter," "Huckleberry Finn," and "The Country of the Pointed Firs." I can think of no others that confront time and change so serenely. The latter book seems to me fairly to shine with the reflection of its long, joyous future. It is so tightly yet so lightly built, so little encumbered with heavy materialism that deteriorates and grows old-fashioned. I like to think with what pleasure, with what a sense of rich discovery, the young student of American literature in far distant years to come will take up this book and say, "A masterpiece!" as proudly as if he himself had made it. It will be a message to the future, a message in a universal language, like the tuft of meadow flowers in Robert Frost's fine poem, which the mower abroad in the early morning left standing, just skirted by the scythe, for the mower of the afternoon to gaze upon and wonder at -- the one message that even the scythe of Time spares.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I also wanted to point out that the title of the book is from a Walt Whitman poem included in Leaves of Grass, another past book club selection. Here's the link to the poem and an analysis.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneers!_O_Pioneers!

I did forewarn you all that I have a lot of random thoughts running around in my head about this book!

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I did forewarn you all that I have a lot of random thoughts running around in my head about this book!

Thanks for all the insightful comments. I do expect to read this book again at some future point, and your comments will be very helpful in better understanding the book.

[ccowie]

I have to admit that I really didn't like this book. I'm not sure exactly why, but it just put me to sleep. I really didn't care much about the characters and the subject matter just left me cold. It was hard to actually finish.
It could have something to do with the fact that I read most of it while in the hospital with my wife and then while nursing her back to health at home. She's better now, but was really not well for about 10 days. I likely should have picked up something else to read, but I'd already started and just wanted to get through it.
I just couldn't get past Alexandria's character. For me she just seemed like a generic character, like an extra in a movie that for some reason the camera lingered too long on and the movie accidentally became about her.

[Bookpossum]

So sorry to hear about your wife, ccowie. I do hope she is fully recovered very soon. That would certainly colour your feelings about any book, I should think!

I agree - I didn't find Alexandra a believable fully-rounded human being. She was just too good to be true. I'm happy to look on the book as an early work and see how Willa Cather developed by trying some of her later ones.