The enclosure of America: Civilization and confinement in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!

American Literature

Volumn 75, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 275-303

  Ryan, Melissa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645620719     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-75-2-275     Document Type: Review

References (42)

1. "Willa Cather," interview by Eleanor Hinman, Lincoln Sunday Star, 6 November 1921
2. reprinted in Willa Cather in Person, ed. L. Brent Bohlke (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), 42
3. Louise Bogan, "Profiles: American Classic," New Yorker, 8 August 1931
4. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1989), 57. Further references to this source are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as OP
5. Bernice Slote, "The Kingdom of Art," in The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements 1893-1896, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966), 64
6. Bernice Slote, "Writer in Nebraska," in The Kingdom of Art, 3
7. Willa Cather, "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle," Nation, September 1923, 238
8. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (New York: Lippincott, 1953), 120
9. Blanche Gelfant, introduction to Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (New York: Penguin, 1989), ix-xxxvii
10. Demaree C. Peck, The Imaginative Claims of the Artist in Willa Cather's Fiction: "Possession Granted by a Different Lease" (Selinsgrove, Penn.: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 1996)
11. Susan J. Rosowski, The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986)
12. David Stouck, Willa Cather's Imagination (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1975)
13. and Louise H. Westling, The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1996)
14. On the other hand, some of the most interesting recent work on the novel has reversed this dominant view. Feminist critics like Judith Fryer and Sharon O'Brien don't see O Pioneers! as a pastoral myth, but I believe their focus on what Fryer calls an "anti-mythic" journey (246) or on the novel's regendering of the traditional pastoral landscape obscures some important justificatory maneuvers in this narrative of origins (see, respectively, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986]; and Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987]). Some critics do find a measure of ambivalence in Cather toward the project of imperialism, but focusing chiefly on later novels, they typically attribute any ill effects of the sod-breaking spirit to characters' alienation from the founding values of pioneering. I propose that this assumption of a moral decline from an imagined peak of pioneer rectitude inadequately accounts for the conflicted and conflicting implications of "subduing the wild land." Guy Reynolds, while noting the depoliticization of Cather's Nebraska and the idealization of her pioneer, finds a measure of subversion of the myth of empire in O Pioneers! (Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire [London: Macmillan, 1996], 58-60). To Reynolds's insightful reading, I would add that the novel is in conflict with itself in ways Cather does not fully control
15. Willa Cather, "Restlessness Such as Ours Does Not Make for Beauty," interview by Rose C. Feld, New York Times Book Review, 21 December 1924
16. Cather, "Nebraska," 238
17. Mildred R. Bennett, The World of Willa Cather (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1951), 30-31
18. Marilee Lindemann, Willa Cather: Queering America (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), 7-8
19. Sergeant, Willa Cather, 116-17
20. Willa Cather, "One Way of Putting It," Nebraska State Journal, 26 November 1893
21. reprinted in The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902, ed. William M. Curtin, 2 vols. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), 1:10-11
22. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 101, my emphasis
23. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 269
24. See also Lindemann, Willa Cather: "Ivar has in effect been to the asylum without ever actually going there, having internalized the disciplinary mechanisms Foucault associates ates with asylums" (38). I would add that this figurative asylum also, if redundantly, finds material walls in Alexandra's house, and that she is deeply implicated in this process of internalization
25. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964; reprint, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 87
26. Cather, "Nebraska," 236
27. Willa Cather, "On Shadows on the Rock," in On Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (New York: Knopf, 1949), 16. In reading this statement, however, it is important to recognize not just its disavowal of Indian history but also its celebration of a female frontier; certainly, the contrast of domestic detail with military aggression is gender-coded, and thus has crucial significance for the critic attempting to delineate Cather's relationship to the American literary tradition that Nina Baym famously terms "melodramas of beset manhood."
28. E. K. Brown, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography (New York: Knopf, 1953), 171
29. "The Era of Red Cloud," New York Times, 14 December 1909
30. Fischer, "Pastoralism," 32
31. Reading the absence of Indians in O Pioneers! in the context of Cather's earlier writing leads to an important conclusion. In texts whose key theme is nostalgic longing or lament for the unrecoverable past, Indians are part of the landscape. For example, she links vanished Indians with the vanished glory of an old steamboat town (see "Brownville," Nebraska State Journal, 12 August 1894; reprinted in The World and the Parish, 1:110); likewise, old Indians, buried Indians, and mythic Indians treated in such Cather tales as "The Enchanted Bluff" and "A Resurrection" parallel the old, buried, mythic kingdom of childhood imagination. O Pioneers!, however, has a different agenda. The purpose of the novel is to reestablish the heroism of origins-not of childhood but of history. Cather must then mystify the conquest of native peoples in order to obscure the loss in which the pioneering enterprise is implicated. In other words, there's no room for Indians in O Pioneers!, because Cather is trying to rhetorically recover the past, not lament its passing. However, given her ambivalence toward "progress," this recovery is not wholly innocent of lament. Accordingly, I would argue that her vanished Indian is not wholly vanished
32. Hiram Price, extract from the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 24 October 1881, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, 2d ed., ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990), 155. Price continues: "To domesticate and civilize wild Indians is a noble work, the accomplishment of which should be a crown of glory to any nation" (156), a flourish which may remind us of Cather's celebration of the pioneer's "moral victory."
33. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 233-34. Further references to this source will be cited parenthetically as DM
34. Henry M. Teller, extract from the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1 November 1883, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Prucha, 160-61
35. Thomas J. Morgan, "Rules for Indian Courts," 27 August 1892, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Prucha, 187
36. Westling, Green Breast, 66-67
37. J. Russell Reaver, "Mythic Motivation in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!" Western Folklore 27 (January 1968): 22
38. Sharon O'Brien, "The Unity of Willa Cather's 'Two-Part Pastoral': Pasion in O Pioneers!" Studies in American Fiction 6 (autumn 1978): 163
39. and C. Susan Wiesenthal, "Female Sexuality in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!and the Era of Scientific Sexology: A Dialogue between Frontiers, " Ariel 21 (January 1990): 41-63
40. Reaver, "Mythic Motivation," 23
41. Olson, History of Nebraska, 23
42. Willa Cather, "On the Art of Fiction," in On Writing, 102