Willa Cather
About the Author
The author Willa Cather Sibert born on 1873 is an American writer, and one of the country's leading novelists. Here vigilantly skilled prose express dramatic pictures of the American landscape along with those people who were molded.
She was influenced by the writing style of the American regional writer Sarah Orne Jewett. However, she set many of her works in Nebraska and the American Southwest areas with which she was known from her childhood.
Comparison & Contrast of O, Pioneers with My Antonia
The analysis is done by covering briefly Cather's career prior to O Pioneer's and then My Antonia, comparison and contrast of the beginning and work of the novels, the details of the novels along weak points and strengths, about her characters in novels, her relation with the novels in terms of her life as how its related and parallel to her real life and finally close with a few simple critical observations.
Analysis of O, Pioneers:
The well-known line "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman." narrates everything one needs to know about the novel O, Pioneers. The author Willa Cather has given a touching, moving, emotional and an influential masterpiece, which at the same time is an ideal example of her delicate creativity.
In this dramatic departure, Cather has chosen the modest, poor settlers of the prairie as her theme instead of writing about the more powerful members of society. Thus, she sheds a an exclusive light on the history of a nation by exploring the heart of a pioneer woman and the lives of her family.
The origins of O Pioneers, like in all of Cather's novels, are found in the experiences of her youth. Thus, here pioneering had by tradition been vision as a type of a battle between the land and its defeaters but rather this novel takes an intense, mythological approach to the subject where the is no conquering hero, who is battling savages and restraining nature, instead the author has written on a woman, who tames the beast with her love and intelligence.
The leading character of Cather's novel, Alexandra Bergson, has one great desire, which is not another human, but the great, unconquered prairie. The novel reveals her story after her father's death where she has to manage of the family farm. Although her brothers were ready to give up by returning to life of city, but it was she who thought what is required by a new world is a new way of thinking. As described by Cather, Alexandra's feelings toward the land appears to be a love story, with the land personified as the beloved:
For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich strong and glorious. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before." (Pg: 44)
This great story of pioneering that has been put together is the very human tragedy that also plays the story between Alexandra's brother, Emil, and the Bohemian girl, Marie. Here the author gives the portrayal of sweet and compassionate relationship of the lovers and their predicament rejected to make a villain of any participant.
The stumbles and falls of its individual inhabitants balance the great strides taken in colonizing the new land. Still the author does not leave its emotions disheartened by human flaws, instead gives optimistic feelings by the strength of those who try to conquer, and the stability of the new life they make as Cather remarked: "We come and go, but the land is always there."
She however, ends her novel by saying of her and her beloved land;
The psychological strength of Alexandra is clearly visible when her dying father entrusts her with the family's land. According to father, she is supposed to be take care of the family's estates when he dies. The father seems to have developed more confidence in Alexandra in comparison to her other brothers, Lou and Oscar. It is for this reason that he makes a will stating that the Alexandra would
Willa Cather Willa Sibert Cather was born in Winchester, Virginia, in the year 1873. She lived in Virginia until she turned nine years old at which point she moved to the Nebraska prairie, to the borough of Catherton, which bore her familial namesake because so many members of Cather's family already lived here. This move to the prairie and her subsequent period of growing to adulthood on the prairie would be
Willa Cather and Herman Melville both explore themes of psychological and social isolation in their short stories. In Cather's "Paul's Case," the title character is a vibrant young man whose passion and creativity is constrained by his pitiful life in Pittsburgh, where his only solace is his work as an usher. Melville's protagonist Bartleby in "Bartleby the Scrivener" lacks the joie du vivre that Paul possesses. However, both of these
This meant that men held positions of power and authority in all the public spheres including economics/business, politics/the law, and the bearing of arms. Men also possessed social status that women did not have, enabling the perpetuation of a patriarchal society. By applying Freudian psychoanalysis and feminist theory, I will analyze the personality of the independent, strong, risk taker, and smart Alexandra Bergson in Willa Cather's O Pioneer! As Smith
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" Too, if language affects place, and place affects language, the one cannot escape Cather's great admiration for the complexities of nature. The future, Cather's Alexandra knows, is with the land, with seeing the complex interaction (what we would call biodiversity) ever working, and what pastoral mysteries might mean to humans if they could synchronize with the rhythms of nature (Garrard, 2004, 54). She had never known before how much the
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