Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

3. Harmonious Fields and Wild Prairies: Transcendental Pastoralism in Willa Cather’s Nebraska Novels

3 Harmonious Fields and Wild Prairies Transcendental Pastoralism in Willa Cather’s Nebraska Novels For us it is a farm with a different kind of harvest. We are farmers who cultivate a different sort of crops. Our fields are unplanted. But they are not unused. The yield for us is made up of observations and memories, of greater understanding and little adventures by the way. —Edwin Way Teale, A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, 1974 Willa Cather’s Homesteading Muse The homesteading success of Angella Loring and Nettie Day in Eaton’s Cattle provides a microcosmic expression of a broader bioregional and literary phenomenon that is most readily associated with Willa Cather. Indeed, Cather certainly warrants special attention here, as her Nebraska fiction provides a comprehensive literary record of the profound changes wrought upon the Plains by the Euroamerican homesteaders and road makers of the West. To begin my exploration of Cather’s contribution to bad land pastoralism,Iwanttoexaminetwomomentsinhermostwidelyrecognized novel, My Ántonia (1918), that, when juxtaposed, reflect well the conflicted nature and ambivalent legacy of the homesteading enterprise and chart her own shifting attitude toward the meaning and value of this enterprise. The first occurs after the narrator, Jim Burden, has returned to the little town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, after years of study in both Lincoln and Boston. On  100ҍ harmonious fields and wild prairies a trip out to visit Ántonia, who has been abandoned by her fiancée and left to raise a child as a single unwed mother, Jim comments on the vast changes to the rural Nebraska landscape that have occurred since the days when he lived on his grandparents’ farm: The old pasture land was now being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. . . . The windy springs and blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed the flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or idea. (145) No doubt inspired by his diligent, if misguided, reading of Virgil, under the tutelage of Gaston Cleric, Jim’s view of the transformed Plains romanticizes the work of the pioneers.1 The elements of wind and sun conspire with the hard work of the farmers to produce an agricultural masterpiece, a beautiful and harmonious work of art wrought from the soil of the tableland. Theorderedfields,however,reflectamodelofprogressfromprairiegrass to pastureland to grain farm that ultimately upsets Jim’s pastoral imagination . On a succeeding visit to Blackhawk, this time after a twenty-year gap which takes him all around the world, Jim becomes restless in the rural town and only finds comfort when he escapes out to the wild, unbroken land surrounding it: “I took a long walk north of town, out into the pastures where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt at home again” (174–75, emphasis added). Once out among the uncultivated stretches of grass, Jim imagines other wilderness excursions he will take with the Cuzak boys to the “Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water” (175). Ensconced in the modernized and developed urban world as he is, Jim develops an intimate spiritual and emotional attachment to the wild and original prairies he remembers from his childhood. Both of these moments are refracted through the lens of Jim Burden’s “romantic and ardent disposition” (2), and, as many critics have pointed out, the novel is largely a study of Jim’s imagination—about his creation of Ántonia as an embodiment of the “‘primal warmth’ of a feminine landscape ” (Goggans 156). While it is important to separate Cather from her harmonious fields and wild prairiesҏ 101 narrator, it is also necessary to examine where author and character intersect . When these two scenes from My Ántonia are set against each other, the central dilemma of Cather’s Nebraska novels is revealed. Within her work there is a profound conflict between her impetus to heroicize the process of transforming the wild prairies and her equally strong aversion toward the ultimate consequences of this transformation. For Jim, the transition from shaggy grass to fields of grain represents the...