The romance of the frontier

Willa Cather is one of those authors that so many American feminists love.  She writes about pioneer women - strong, hard-working, and realistic.  At this point, I've only ever read O, Pioneers!  by her, but I like her style.  I do wish she wrote a little bit more about the culture clashes of Americans vs Native Americans and even between different European immigrant cultures, but maybe she thought writing about strong and heroic women was enough and didn't want to water her book down with other themes, too.

O, Pioneers! is the first book in a trilogy of books that feature strong women set in Nebraska in the early 20th century.  If you're American, you probably have very vivid imaginings of this lifestyle.  Horizons that stretch forever, tiny cabins dotting the landscape, hardscrabble families working land that was not necessarily intended for farming, barn-raisings, never-ending fields of wheat, covered wagons, the Oregon Trail, etc., etc.  If you're not American, you may have a more difficult time evoking this era immediately to mind, but I would say that Cather does quite a good job of bringing it to life in this novel.


Alexandra Bergson is our guide through this novel.  A Swedish immigrant, she takes on the task of working the land and raising her brothers while very young, after her father dies.  Alexandra is savvy and stubborn, though, two excellent traits in a pioneer, and through good decisions and a lot of hard work, she makes her homestead a success.  She also mentors a lonely, beautiful neighbor, sends her youngest brother to college, misses the man she fell in love with as a girl (though she never pines for him or feels sorry for herself), and does all sorts of other things.

I can't quite explain how hard it was to write that plot summary because this book is not really about plot.  That is, there is one Big Plot Thing that happens, but to me it felt very different from the rest of the book.  I don't think that Cather wrote this book to center on the Big Plot Thing, I think she wrote it to talk about life on the prairie, and the Big Plot Thing was just one method she used to share that with readers.

So, life on the prairie.  It was hard.  While Alexandra and her neighbors are strong and able people, there was such a sense of loneliness and isolation in this book.  The prairie is unforgiving and harsh, and you could feel Alexandra just want to take a break sometimes.  But she never could.  And there were other people around her, such as her bubbly, beautiful and vivacious friend who was kind and good but just was not made for life on the prairie and would have been much better off in the city.

What I liked most about this book was the way that Cather made every character sympathetic.  She did not judge people, even if her characters did.  Instead, she would provide us with multiple perspectives to show how different people react to the same situation.  It gave readers the ability to really know the people who populated this book, which I appreciated.  I didn't come to like that many of them, but I understood them a little bit better than I would have if I had been in Alexandra's head the whole time.

Not that Alexandra's head was such a bad place to be.  Alexandra was wonderful.  She was strong, straight-forward, and willing to fight for what she wanted.  I loved the feminist streak in her.  For example, her brothers would keep telling her that women had no head for business, and she would calmly point out that all their success on the farm was due to her ideas.  They would say that they had done the physical labor, and she said that she did a lot of labor, too.  Her brothers were all very well and happy when they thought she would die alone and leave all her land to them; she told them quite frankly that she would do whatever she wanted with her land and they'd just have to deal with it.

Love.

So the Big Plot Thing was a little odd, the characters (especially Alexandra) were great, but what really makes me recommend this book to you is the writing.  Honestly, Willa Cather writes prose like poetry.  I wish I had read this in physical form rather than via audiobook, but I loved the language on audiobok, too, I just couldn't note down my favorite quotes.  She has the ability to paint beautiful landscapes with her words.  I feel like I overuse the word lyrical, and I don't know if that is even an appropriate word here because it's not like she writes in a flowery style.  She writes with words that just bring everything to life.  I don't know how else to explain it, so I hope you just trust me.

I look forward to reading more Cather!  Luckily, she wrote many stories, including short stories, which I hear are glorious.