Willa Cather\u27s Women: Gender, Place, and Narrativity in O Pioneers! and My Antonia

In a dissertation submitted to the Department of Rhetoric and Oratory at the University of Wisconsin in 1895, Zona Gale argued that American writers were a timid lot, lacking originality and unwilling or unable to see what was happening around them, the harsher truths of a social reality. They drew their material from art rather than from nature, books rather than life. They had, she said, all drawn from the same sources, imitated the same models and had not won their material so much from men as from books. 1 Like Zona Gale, Willa Cather was critical of writers content to work within the boundaries of established narrative patterns and formations. She likened the old-fashioned American novel to a chemist\u27s prescription with its unvarying, carefully dosed ingredients ... its plots always the same, its accent always on the same incidents. She was especially harsh on those women writers she judged to be sentimental scribblers and purveyors of cold cream fiction. 2 Her first novel, Alexander\u27s Bridge (1912), and earlier short stories manifest some of the same symptoms she had diagnosed in others. She came to feel that she had laboriously imitated Henry James and Edith Wharton and was determined not to do so again. Her second novel, 0 Pioneers! (1913), completed after a trip to New Mexico and Arizona, marked a recovery from what she termed the conventional editorial point of view. It was, as she put it, a book entirely for myself. 3 A major stylistic shift coincided with her discovery of a new landscape and a deepening appreciation of the importance of place. Responding to the greater openness and variety of the American Southwest, she felt less constrained by the influences that had shaped her earlier work. In the broader reaches of prairie and desert, she found new materials to explore, stories that needed to be told. And she proceeded to tell those stories with startling precision and accuracy and with special attention to the crucial role of culture and region in the construction of social identities and relationships