ABSTRACT
As is explained in the introductory chapter, the land licenses the people even as the people license the land. This chapter focuses on such politics of landscape as exemplified in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! By attending to the representation of the land, alongside the ways in which the characters interact with the environment and represent themselves from within their landscape, we can begin to perceive how empire mediates an enclosed socio-political landscape. As witness, proponent, and emblem of the New Woman ideal, Cather creates in O Pioneers! a valuable historical document in its closeness to her lived experience and, in her protagonist Alexandra Bergson, an independent character of startling newness in a country taken up with newness as definitional self-conceit. Yet in the headiness of this Progressive Era novel’s earnest consideration of the radical dimensions of freedom available for the first time to women like Cather, the author also provides for our project an opportunity to interrogate the absences that shape such triumphalism. In an echo of Chapter Six’s exploration of Hester Prynne as reimagined by Maryse Condé in I, Tituba, here, too, the wilderness comes to signify a haunting or an animating terror, that is evocative of Toni Morrison’s Africanist presence.
