The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!

Willa Cather's public persona turns on the rhetoric of wide-open space. Since the beginning of Cather's career, journalists have romanticized the wild Willa of the prairie, often obscuring the relative refinement of the Cather family. The mature Cather, too, is pictured as most at home in the open air; a 1921 piece in the Lincoln Sunday Star is representative: "Miss Cather had elected to take her interview out-of-doors in the autumnal sunshine, walking. The fact is characteristic. She is an outdoor person, not far different in type from the pioneers and prima donnas whom she exalts." ¹ The analog to the legend of Willa Cather, hoyden and pioneer, is the language in which the evolution of her literary career is described. Her art is commonly evaluated in spatial terms. "[Cather's] talents had no real scope in the drawing-rooms of New York and London," notes Louise Bogan in a 1931 piece in the New Yorker. ² Just as her protagonist Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! (1913) "expresses herself best" in the soil, ³ so Cather needed the wide-open prairie to fully flex her romantic imagination. As Bernice Slote observes of Alexander's Bridge, the portrait of fashionable society with which Cather began her career as a novelist, "Realism is a constriction, a drawing in." ⁴ For the Willa Cather who would later be mythologized as "the untutored western girl running wild on her pony," as Slote puts it, ⁵ there could be no such constriction of the writerly self.

Given Cather's deep roots in the prairie she describes, readers of O Pioneers! have found, quite rightly, a substantial authorial investment in the values of Alexandra Bergson, Cather's heroic pioneer. Ten years after O Pioneers!, Cather published a panegyric of Nebraska's "first cycle" that seems to cohere flawlessly with the tone of her prairie novels:

In Nebraska, as in so many other States, we must face the fact that the splendid story of the pioneers is finished, and that no new story worthy to take its place has yet begun. The generation that subdued the wild land and broke up the virgin prairie is passing, but it is still there, a group of rugged figures in the background which inspire respect, compel admiration. With these old men and women the attainment of material prosperity was a moral victory, because it was wrung from hard conditions, was the result of a struggle that tested character. ⁶

Cather's celebration of this "moral victory" appears to be consistent with the image of Cather as the "outdoor person": in both cases, identity is a function of landscape. But if the figure of Cather as constructed for public consumption is predicated on a fantasy of unboundedness, there is a fundamental conflict between that author-figure and the pioneer she memorializes. The "splendid story of the pioneers" is a story of spatial reconfiguration. The pioneers in Cather's first novel of the soil encounter an overwhelming vastness, "fierce," "savage," and "uninterrupted" (OP, 10); in the process of settlement and cultivation, this vastness is organized into a "checker-board, marked off in squares of wheat and corn" (OP, 51). In other words, settlement introduces boundaries: the demarcation and delimitation of those "outdoor" spaces by which the mythologized Cather is so often defined. This incompatibility of values is, it seems, easily overlooked. For example, Cather's longtime friend Elizabeth Sergeant reports: "Any thoroughly untamed aspect of nature refreshed her. She said that the air was totally different where fields had never been cleared and harvested nor virgin forest cut. When I thought about this, I saw that her intimacy with nature lay at the very root of her relation to O Pioneers!" ⁷ Curiously, Sergeant does not remark upon the fact that Cather's "intimacy with nature" is very much at risk in O Pioneers!, a novel written in homage...