O Pioneers! and the Paradox of Property: Cather's Aesthetics of Divestment

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Abstract
O Pioneers! begins with the wind, which is threatening to blow away Hanover, Nebraska, a little town serving homestead settlements. On their return to the Bergson homestead, Alexandra, her brother Emil, and their neighbor Carl Linstrum pass homesteads, whose sod houses, lowslung shelters made of the land itself, crouch in hollows to survive the elements, their very materials denoting their subjection to nature. “The great fact was the land itself,” “a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why,” only that “the land wanted … to preserve its own fierce strength.” Nature's unpredictable impulses to self-preservation “overwhelm[ed] the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes.” In this novel, then, Willa Cather introduces the relation between nature and culture within the sublime tradition, in which the experience of nature discloses the limits of human faculties and threatens their health and continuance.

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