O Pioneers ! Sparknotes

In her novel O Pioneers!, Willa Cather, a well-known American author, depicts her experiences throughout her life living in the great state of Nebraska. O Pioneers! grew out of her familiarity with the communities of settlers, conversations with the immigrant farmers from different places, and the simple being of her living on the prairies herself. In 1913, after years of editing and writing short stories and poems, she wrote and became famous for her novel about the West, O Pioneers! At the time O Pioneers! was written, it “hailed” as a new kind of writing—particularly an American response to the American experience. In this novel, Willa Cather captured the essence of the late 19th century America, gaining knowledge from experience of living there to the settling West, to the power the land contained, and to the trials and travels of pioneer life.
In O Pioneers!
what basically happens is that it begins by opening on a winter day, in the town of Hanover, Nebraska, somewhere between 1883 and 1890. The narrator introduced four major characters in the story, but the main one being Alexandra. Alexandra's father, John Bergson, was dying. He tells his two eldest sons that he was leaving the whole farmland, and the preservation that he had achieved in getting since his immigration from Sweden, to his daughter. It became clear that Alexandra was stronger and bolder than all of her brothers. However, when drought and depression came three years later, Alexandra became determined which allowed her to continue steadfastly. Many families, one of them being Carl Linstrum's (her future husband) family, sell their farms and move away. But Alexandra believed in the promise of the gentle country, and so she convinced her brothers to re-mortgage their farm and buy more land. She also convinces them to try innovative farming
techniques. The narrative jumps sixteen years into the future, when Alexandra's faith in the land got repaid. Alexandra's farm became the most prosperous on the Divide. But, during all of this, Carl Linstrum returns for a long visit and, after years of travel, Alexandra and Carl slowly regain their teenage intimacy.
Months after the murder of one of her brothers and a married woman he was becoming too intimate with, Alexandra Bergson did not really recover from all the sorrow she felt; she was then exhausted with life. Returning from a visit to the husband of the married woman in Lincoln, Alexandra finds Carl Linstrum waiting for her. As soon as he heard of Alexandra’s brothers’ death, he returned from Alaska. They ended up finding comfort and companionship with each other and both decided to marry. In the story of Alexandra Bergson, the novel measures the capability of the exceptional individual against universal human desires and the forces of national history. Their land also displays the edginess that marks the characters' relationship with society and history in O Pioneers!. The land, which is their home and livelihood, constituted to the promise that they had sought in moving to the West. Willa Cather gave the land a force and presence of its own, completely independent of human settlement as one can tell when she wrote in the first chapter "the great fact" of prairie life “was the land itself." She ingrains the prairie with a vast inescapability and an undeniable power over those who try to exert their will upon it; the land was what mattered, not the people who inhabited it. So the land of O Pioneers! and the West become timeless and impersonal in their massive scale. Cather wrote that the land “wants” and “feels”; it “gives” and it “takes”, leaving the pioneers to submit to its impulse. In its expanse, the land seems beyond transformation and always held individual pioneers in its grasp. However over time, although no individual pioneer can conquer the land, the increasing spirit of generations of pioneers is a force unto itself. Because of the collective successes and failures of these individuals, the land was indeed transformed. Alexandra Bergson's relationship with the land exemplified this grand struggle between human agency and the larger forces that manipulate individuals. Even as the land bent her and shaped her, Alexandra exerted her will upon the land. Her relationship with the land, however, goes deeper than influence. She was an incarnation of the land. At the same time, she seemed like a person that had no personality or emotions. Alexandra lacked a personal inner life like everyone else. Her relationship with Carl Linstrum had no romance whatsoever; her attachment to him was largely unemotional. Her fantasies of a man who resembled a mythical corn god demonstrate her connection to the land and disconnection from the regular society. Her story is usually seen, as a kind of “creation myth”, a broad story about the American West with its cultivation and settlements. As Carl says, Alexandra’s story may be one of "two or three human stories which repeat themselves." The novel depicts individuals within a massive, unforgiving landscape, which put very little faith in individuals when it comes to the control of their own lives. Nor did it depict too much faith in the human capacity to form meaningful and lasting relationships: tragic and unsuccessful relationships, especially unhappy marriages, that occurred in O Pioneers!. In the end, Cather's novel encloses the earnest idea and hard reality of pioneer life in America, but remains doubtful about the individual pioneer's ability to contain happiness within the limits of traditional social relationships, and about the pioneer's ways of affecting history through positive action. Still, while Alexandra occupies a very familiar cultural space, the novel does not resolve the question of human historical agency and it makes Alexandra impersonal by assigning her a sort of stereotype. But, near the novel's end, Alexandra is able to become a little less to herself when she to married Carl, which, aside from their union, helped her gain some measure of individuality.