Willa Cather's O Pioneers

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At the close of the 1800’s, thousands of Americans left their home for the great opportunity of the West. It was the second chance many needed. They were living lives of urban struggle and sought refuge in the prairies. Willa Cather, in her novel O Pioneers!, wrote about the Frontier experience of the Bergson family. Alexandra, daughter and eldest child to the man who instigated the family’s westward move, took on the role of ultimate pioneer. She developed a close relationship with the land and devoted her life to it, all the while discontented that this was not the life that she had expected nor exactly wanted. In one sense of the term, Alexandra was the ideal pioneer. Cather states in her novel: “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman” (pg. 42). Alexandra believed this. Her father willed it that she was to take care of the land and give her all to it. To Alexandra, the inheritance was a heavy debt and she devoted herself to it and was constantly striving to get the ultimate yield to pay back from the land’s mortgage on her sole. Undaunted by her brother’s counterattack, Alexandra was only further motivated to toil on. The patriarchal views and extrinsic values of her …show more content…
He was the one person she was always candid with. Carl left the prairie and had a chance at the city life and failed, yet Alexandra still envied him: “I’d rather have had your freedom than my land” (pg.77). This goes back to the fact that Alexandra settled into her life because of the debt she felt she held to her father. The novel comes to an end with Alexandra and Carl getting together and growing old. Alexandra no longer felt like she had to live up to anyone’s expectations, and she wanted to have companionship of her own. She would never have been able to love Carl fully because she gave herself up to the land so many years before but he could at least share the friendship she had with Emil and

Character Analysis Of Marie Tovesky In O Pioneer

Marie Tovesky is a young Bohemian girl with beautiful brown curly hair and catching eyes. Willa Cather uses tigers eye in the description on Marie Tovesky in O Pioneers to show the complexities of her character. Cather uses tigers eye twice in the novel to describe Marie. Tigers eye has some very unique meanings within its self. This allows Cather to use it to describe Marie. Tigers eye is used to describe Marie Tovesky at the very beginning of the novel. When she is described Marie is playing with…

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Greyness of the Color Wheel - Cather Essay

The greyness of the color wheel - A Midterm Paper on Cather This thesis addresses the relation between the bland, muted “Divide” and the nuanced and complex emotional treatment of the characters who live within it. The color wheel used by Willa Cather to describe both people and place is subtle, sophisticated, and belies a deep acceptance and love of human character. Nearly a century after these novels were written, indeed “[y]ears afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red…

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Willa Cather's Use Of Foreshadowing Analysis

Making Changes Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! is a novel based in the outskirts of the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska, and focuses on Alexandra Bergson, a young Swedish-American whose father is slowly dying. His dying wish is for Alexandra to run the farm, along with her younger brother Emil , after he is gone. Many challenges and failures come about. Alexandra learns to grow crops, live on the land, and adapt. Which is a great accomplishment for having little prior knowledge of farm life, but turns…

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O Pioneers By Willa Cather Analysis

In the story O Pioneers, the author, Willa Cather, starts the story in a romantic way, viewed by many other writers. Cather builds the story in a naturalistic way, where the “divide” always has ways of making the situation worse without “sympathy” and simply not caring about the main characters. However, even though the story had been written by a writer with such naturalistic views, some areas can be seen and described as romantic. The title of her book, O Pioneers, comes from the romanticised poem…

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O Pioneers Essay

“O, Pioneers”, by Willa Cather, is a story about an immigrant, family’s struggle of living in a rural area while trying to make ends meet. The story mainly focuses on the daughter of the family, Alexandra. Throughout the novel, readers get a glimpse into the hardships and victories of Alexandra and her family and also the social and cultural life of rural areas. During the time when this novel was written, 1913, workers and immigrants in rural areas had it much different than today. Workers of…

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Mrs. Forrester As The American Frontier

C. Formal Analysis Essay #1 Mrs. Forrester as the American Frontier When Willa Cather wrote her novel, A Lost Lady, in 1923, she did not write it to become a feminist novel but to symbolize the loss of the frontier lifestyle of America and how everything was rapidly changing. The character of Mrs. Marian Forrester was meant to symbolize America and the frontier land. Cather does an excellent job doing this in her novel. Throughout the novel, Mrs. Forrester shows a number of ways that she was the…

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Symbolism In Willa's Mother

It goes without saying that two people of a similar age can be found in very dissimilar life situations, as is evident with Emil and Marie in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!. Although there are numerous passages that illustrate this, one of the clearest examples is found when the two are discussing the former religions of their homelands, prior to the introduction of Christianity (pg. 59). Marie discusses pagan Bohemian tree worship with Emil in order to display the stagnancy and resignation found in…

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