Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
– Ecclesiastes 1:1-3

Imagine being a woman on the threshold of adulthood – ready to set out and make a life for yourself. For a woman in late nineteenth century Nebraska, that likely means marrying and settling down on your own farm. But then your father’s dying wish is that you carry on his life’s fruitless endeavors. He unshackles the albatross from his neck and chains it to yours, since your brothers have no imagination and your mother wishes she had never left her home country. And you have a young brother you must now essentially raise as your own child. A burden far too much for a 20-year-old woman to bear.

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! masterfully portrays the ruggedness of a harsh landscape as it was broken and transformed by the blood, sweat, tears, and lives of European immigrants who moved to America in search of something better than they had. Cather’s depiction of their lives suggests they didn’t find it, but maybe they made a better life for their grandchildren, although the emergence of the Dust Bowl a few decades after this book ends suggests they didn’t. In fact, their very efforts to remake the landscape likely caused the ecological disaster that ensued, which then spurred a new emigration, this time to California. In the end, their efforts to remake the land were futile. Their life’s work literally blown away on the wind.

O Pioneers! is generally thought of as an homage to the strength of the American prairie and the strength of the people who supposedly conquered it. At face value, that is true. At the time of publication (1913), the widespread drought to hit the American prairie region was still decades away. It is also often held up as a pillar of feminist triumph, with a strong female lead who is fiercely independent in her efforts to tame the land. That is a superficial and ultimately inaccurate reading, since Alexandra Bergson ultimately realizes her life’s meaning cannot be found in toiling over the land or crunching numbers in an account book.

Cather’s greatest strength in this novel is her ability to say so much with so few words. This brevity reflects the openness of her prairie home. She’ll often use brief phrases in the voices of her characters to make brief but deep statements, often in the mouth of Carl Linstrum, Alexandra love interest. Carl is the one who leaves the Divide as a teenager once his family decides to give up and return to St. Louis. Carl spends his life drifting, working as an engraver and dabbling in art. As an aside, that gave me a chuckle as my Swedish great-grandfather Oscar Engstrom worked as an engraver, and I grew up surrounded by his framed watercolors. Though he died before my grandparents even met, he has cast a long shadow over me, inspiring my own interest in watercolor.

Perhaps Cather is reflecting herself in Carl’s character as someone who left Nebraska yet found herself haunted by it, as evidenced in her work. One of Carl’s more poignant quotes is telling:

Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. 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 our 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 we have ever managed to do is pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theaters. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”

– O Pioneers! – Part II, Chapter IV

Today we might leave behind a smartphone, a video game console, and a pantry full of mass-manufactured chemicals masquerading as food. Apart from that, little has changed. We live lives of brutal obscurity. At best we might wave at our neighbors while taking the dog out, but deep down we know we won’t be missed when we move from one apartment to another or one job to another. We are cogs in a machine. Rolling stones that gather no moss. Carl (and Cather) comment on the same obscurity and brutality of life that Steven Wilson brilliantly analyzed in his album Hand. Cannot. Erase. just over 100 years after Cather wrote O Pioneers! Nothing is new under the sun.

Cather had the opportunity to experience both the ruggedness of the open land and the suffocating closeness of the city. She writes as someone who knows the futility of city life firsthand. And yet she never moved back to Nebraska, despite multiple novels ostensibly romanticizing rugged prairie life.

Or is she really romanticizing it? She did leave, after all, something her main character wanted so strongly for her little brother, Emil. Having not grown up in the Great Plains, I can’t exactly relate to Cather’s nostalgia. (I grew up in northern Illinois, though, and I will likely always have a soft spot in my heart for the flat fields of corn speckled with farms and distant treelines.) Yet after reading O Pioneers! I am left with a torn sentiment of the landscape so masterfully described, conquered, and lived in. It seemed to keep its more thoughtful inhabitants enthralled. They both hated and loved it. Both Alexandra and her father seemed to love it passionately, yet it is clear Alexandra is yoked to it.

As the book rolls through Alexandra’s life, the reader begins to wonder what she has to show for it? Yes, she has tamed the land, and she has even shown herself to be shrewd with business. She saw the potential her father saw in the land that others missed and even abandoned in hard times, buying their plots on credit and paying off the debt once the land soared in value. But beyond the land and some employees, what does she have? Two brothers who can’t stand her and another brother who doesn’t fit with the landscape, much like her lost, found, lost, and found again lover, Carl. She has no family of her own, no meaningful life beyond the day-to-day existence. It’s as if she, like her deceased father lying in his grave, is being swallowed up by the land while still alive. What is the point of her life? To continue fighting the land and the stubborn people who inhabit it?

Same old song
Just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do
Crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see

Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind

– Kansas (Kerry Livgren) – “Dust in the Wind”

Every time Carl walks back into Alexandra’s life, a subtle sense of regret pops up, as if she knows life has more to it than what she has created. She wishes she could go with him wherever he might go, live how he lives, be with the only man who ever seemed to understand her. From the get-go in this story, he’s the only other character besides Emil who seems to have a strong sense of empathy (he rescues little Emil’s kitten from a telegraph pole on a blustery winter day). And yet his sensitivity is what makes those around Alexandra dislike him. Her brothers call her foolish for considering marriage at the age of forty.

Sadly it takes extreme tragedy for Alexandra to finally break free from the yoke her father placed on her and make her own choice. Or more accurately, it was an outside force that broke the yoke – the murder of Emil and Marie. Once this yoke is gone, then Carl is willing both to return and to stay, something he never seemed able to do before. While the story ends on the rosier implication that Alexandra has finally found peace with her lover returning to the Divide, she actually finds that peace a couple chapters earlier. The death of Emil rocks her world unlike anything else she has experienced. Her emotional breakdown culminates in her being caught out in an evening storm in the graveyard at the graves of her father and brother. Her friends find her and bring her home and put her to bed. As she nods off, she revisits a dream she has had repeatedly since her youth, yet this time the dream is fulfilled:

As she lay with her eyes closed, she had again, more vividly than for many years, the old illusion of her girlhood, of being lifted and carried away by some one very strong. He was with her a long while this time, and carried her very far, and in his arms she felt free from pain. When he laid her down on her bed again, she opened her eyes, and, for the first time in her life, she saw him, saw him clearly, though the room was dark, and his face was covered. He was standing in the doorway of her room. His white cloak was thrown over his face, and his head was bent a little forward. His shoulders seemed as strong as the foundations of the world. His right arm, bared from the elbow, was dark and gleaming, like bronze, and she knew at once that it was the arm of the mightiest of all lovers. She knew at last for whom it was she had waited, and where he would carry her. That, she told herself, was very well. Then she went to sleep.

O Pioneers! – Part V, Chapter I

This passage is the most important in the book, yet it is very easy to miss or dismiss: a dream following an exhausting physical and emotional experience. Yet Cather writes that this has been a recurring dream for Alexandra, one that only now in the midst of tragedy is made clear. Alexandra finds her peace, meaning, and purpose in the true source of peace, meaning, and purpose – Jesus Christ.

Why, might you ask, do I conclude that Cather is referring to Jesus in this passage? Let’s look at the description of Jesus in His glory as seen in the book of Revelation:

Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.

– Revelation 1:12-16 (ESV)

Cather’s description of this “mightiest of all lovers” mirrors the description of Christ from Revelation. The description of his skin as a bronze color is a direct reference, and I think that is the clear giveaway. Everyone else in this story is almost assuredly of extremely fair skin. The major characters are either Scandinavian or Bohemian, not races known for dark complexions. In Cather’s description, this individual is shown with a white cloak that “was thrown over his face.” The description of Jesus in Revelation explains why his face might need to be covered in this interaction with Alexandra: eyes like a flame of fire and a face shining like the sun in full strength. Not exactly something which someone experiencing traumatic emotions would want to be confronted.¹

With this encounter with Jesus, Alexandra is changed. Following this she travels to the prison in Lincoln to visit her brother and friend’s killer and offer him forgiveness. The grip the land has over her is loosened, allowing her finally to open her heart to Carl Linstrum and embrace the beauty, meaning, and purpose God gives us with love and marriage. Her breakdown in the cemetery and encounter with God in a dream shows her that what really matters is far more than what we build and grow with our hands and sweat. The people we love and the connections we make is what matters. How we treat others, how we care for those who need it, how we treat the world around us: those are things that matter. No matter what we build, it won’t ultimately give us the satisfaction we seek, no matter where we live or what we do. Carl Linstrum was right: “there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years” (Part II, Chapter IV). Or as Solomon put it, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

1. I came to this conclusion before consulting any secondary readings on O Pioneers! Some literary scholars (but not all) disagree with what I believe is an obvious interpretation of this passage. Many critics identify the person Alexandra sees in her dream as Death, going so far as to say that she had a death wish. David Stouck says as much, using rather bizarre language to describe the transformation Alexandra undergoes after the dream: “The final possibility of a marriage between Carl and Alexandra is perhaps sheer wish-fulfillment on the author’s part (that desire to be united with the eternal mother), but it is always held in perspective by the repeated account of Alexandra’s dream wherein only the mightiest of all lovers can carry her off, that lover being identified towards the end of the novel as none less than Death” (Stouck, 30). This is a remarkably inaccurate reading of this passage, especially considering how Alexandra’s behavior changes in the aftermath. Maire Mullins points out that it is following this dream that Alexandra goes to visit Frank Shabata in prison to offer him forgiveness for killing Emil and Marie. Mullins rightly recognizes the Christlike imagery in this dream. Mullins interprets the earlier dreams as Alexandra wrestling with her suppressed erotic desires. She argues that Alexandra spends the majority “of her life sublimating the erotic power that lies within her,” focusing on her farm instead. When she had these dreams Alexandra would try and block them out by taking a vigorous bath, even literally pouring cold water over herself in an effort to scrub out any hint of sexuality. Mullins accurately acknowledges the presence of Christ in the ultimate satisfying dream that Alexandra has, but she oddly claims the dream merges Christianity with Native American myths, a theme she tries to draw from other parts of the text. I believe this is reading something into the passage that simply is not there. Further, she limits the transformative power of Christ in Alexandra’s life. Mullins concludes that this encounter in the dream allows her to forgive Shabata and finally connect with Carl Linstrum through “the conscious connection to the erotic and spiritual power within.” This is the problem with the overarching feminist theory Mullins applies to her reading from the beginning of her article. It discounts the power of Christ to truly transform a person’s desires, instead limiting it to some vague sense of self-realization where Alexandra accepts her sexuality. In actuality, she finds the peace and meaning she has been searching for all along, finding that it is not in the land or in the sexuality she seeks to repress. It is in Jesus. With that ultimate realization, she is finally able to let Carl into her life since his presence will not impact her value or worth, just like her impact on the land will not impact her value or worth. Those things are inherent through her relationship to God. ↩︎

Works Cited

Mullins, Maire. “Alexandra’s Dreams: ‘The Mightiest of All Lovers’ In Willa Cather’s ‘O Pioneers!'” Great Plains Quarterly 25, no. 3 (2005): 147–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23533606.

Stouck, David. “O Pioneers!: Willa Cather and the Epic Imagination.” Prairie Schooner 46, no. 1 (1972): 23–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40629091.