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© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 32, no. 2, 2002 “Where Do I Belong?”: Willa Cather’s Apocalyptic Landscapes Robert Thacker Writing in Wolf Willow (1962), Wallace Stegner offers a description of the prairie landscape that serves as a point of departure. Having returned as an adult to southwestern Saskatchewan near the Cypress Hills, where he spent his early boyhood years on a frontier homestead, Stegner is both remembering and describing that land when he writes: The drama of the landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always moving . The earth is passive. And yet the beauty I am struck by, both as present fact and revived memory, a fusion: this sky would not be so spectacular without this earth to change and glow and darken under it. And whatever the sky may do, however the earth is shaken or darkened, the Euclidian perfection abides. The very scale, the hugeness of simple forms, emphasizes stability. It is not the hills and mountains which we should call eternal. Nature abhors an elevation as much as it abhors a vacuum; a hill is no sooner elevated than the forces of erosion begin tearing it down. These prairies are quiescent, close to static; looked at for any length of time, they begin to impose their awful perfection on the observer’s mind. Eternity is a peneplain. (7) On a list of outstanding volumes from the prairie-plains region of North America, Wolf Willow is doubtless near the top. An unusual combination of memoir, history , and fiction, Stegner’s book encapsulates the most basic feelings of the prairie -plains, as the passage just quoted demonstrates. “Eternity,” he writes, “is a peneplain,” and no single landscape reveals both the forces of nature and the insipid puniness of human beings on the face of this planet than North America’s prairie-plains region. But if Stegner’s Wolf Willow is high on a list of prairie-based books, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) is probably first on that same list: there, she writes of her narrator ’s first glimpse of the prairie landscape: “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” There, this narrator , Jim Burden, says “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.” There, Burden thinks, “what would be would be” (7, 8). Five years earlier, in Canadian Review of American Studies 32 (2002) 194 O Pioneers! (1913), Cather made her first extended attempt to render in fiction the Nebraska landscape of her own late girlhood and teenage years. In that novel, however, she began by describing the land itself through a detached third-person narrator, one who “speaks with a universal voice,” as Susan J. Rosowski has noted (Voyage 62). Thus O Pioneers ! opens: One January day, thirty years ago, 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 haphazardly on the tough prairie 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. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o’clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers , having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. (11–12) I am consciously inverting Cather’s two prairie novels here. The greater appeal...

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