O Pioneers! is a wonderful book that tackles the issue of the massive social and economic transformations that made the United States a modern industrial power in the years between the Civil War and the First World War. The basic plot revolves around Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent and clear-headed young woman whose passionate faith in the Nebraska prairie makes her a wealthy landowner. The Bergson family is one of the many families who are struggling to settle the prairies of Nebraska.One by one, the neighboring families move away to tamer land, but even when her father dies, Alexandra refuses to leave. She, her mother, and her three brothers stay on the land and farm it. Eventually, their work pays off and the land becomes some of the best in the country.
Because of her careful planning and hard work, Alexandra is able to relax and take her leisure. But she hasn't seen the end of her troubles, because her young neighbor Marie Shabata, who is unhappily married to a man, named Frank, falls in love with Alexandra's youngest brother Emil.Alexandra also is surprised when an old friend from her childhood returns to the prairie. Carl Linstrum's family had sold their land when times got tough, but now he has come back to see Alexandra. They decide they want to get married, but Alexandra's brothers, Oscar and Lou, think that Carl is only after Alexandra's money so they run him out of town.
While Carl is gone, Emil and Marie get into trouble together with Marie's husband, but Alexandra doesn't seem to realize that anything's going on.By the time she does, it's too late. The development of this story line reflects the difficult relationship between the individual and society. O Pioneers! , addresses itself in large part to that uneasy balance. In the story of Alexandra Bergson, the novel measures the potency of the remarkable individual against universal human desires and the forces of national history.
Alexandra Bergson's relationship with the land epitomizes this grand struggle between human agency and the larger forces that manipulate individuals.Alexandra exerts her will upon the land even as it bends and shapes her. Yet her relationship with the land goes deeper than mere control or influence. She is, to some extent, an incarnation of the land.
At the same time, she seems curiously empty of human emotion and personality. The same uneasiness that manifests itself in the characters’ relationship with society and history in the story is also present in their relationship with the land. The land, as their home and source of livelihood, constitutes the promise that they sought in moving to the West.The author masterfully gives the land a force and presence of its own, utterly independent, even disdainful, of human settlement: "the great fact" of prairie life, she writes in the first chapter, "was the land itself. " The prairie is characterized by its vast inescapability and undeniable power over those who attempt to exert their will upon it; the land itself is what matters, not the people who inhabit it.
The author describes the land as something that wants and feels; it gives and it takes; subjecting the pioneer to every whim and will.In its vastness, the land seems beyond transformation, always holding individual pioneers in its grasp. Yet over time, though no individual pioneer can conquer the land, the cumulative spirit of generations of pioneers is a force unto itself. Through the collective successes and failures of these individuals, the land is indeed transformed.
As it depicts individuals within a massive, unforgiving landscape, the novel puts very little faith in the ability of individuals to control their lives.Nor does it have much faith in the human capacity to form meaningful and lasting relationships: tragic and abortive relationships, especially unhappy marriages, abound in O Pioneers!. In the end, then, Cather's novel celebrates the ambitious idea and hard reality of pioneer America, but remains skeptical about the individual pioneer's capacity for happiness within the confines of traditional social relationships, and about the individual pioneer's ability to affect history through positive action.
