Assignment 2: O Pioneers, by Willa Cather

a. Discuss the transformation of Alexandra into a self-motivated, freethinking, American woman. What has she lost by emigrating from her native land to America? What has she gained? How does she perceive her new country?

Alexandra Bergson's connection with the land epitomizes this impressive labour between human bureau and the bigger forces that manipulate individuals. Alexandra uses her will upon the land even as it angles and forms her. Yet her connection with the land proceeds deeper than meagre command or influence. She is, to some span, an incarnation of the land. At the identical time, she appears inquiringly empty of human strong feeling and personality: "As a woman," composes the detractor Blanche Gelfant, "Alexandra needs a individual inward life." Her connection with Carl Linstrum appears oddly devoid of romance; her addition to him is mostly unemotional. Her recurring fantasies of a man who resembles a mythical maize god illustrate her attachment to the land and dissociation from accepted society. Her article can be glimpsed, Gelfant proposes, as a kind of creation myth, a universalized article about the cultivation and town of the American West. Alexandra's article may be, as Carl proposes, only one of "two or three human tales which replicate themselves." (Woodress pp.10-24)

As it depicts persons inside a huge, unforgiving countryside, the innovative places very little belief in the proficiency of persons to command their lives. Nor does it have much belief in the human capability to pattern significant and lasting relationships: tragic and abortive connections, particularly sad marriages, abound in O Pioneers!. In the end, then, Cather's innovative celebrates the determined concept and hard truth of pioneer America, but continues skeptical about the one-by-one pioneer's capability for joyfulness inside the confines of customary communal connections, and about the one-by-one pioneer's proficiency to sway annals through affirmative action. Yet, while Alexandra lives at a very well renowned heritage space--that of the one-by-one labouring against bigger forces--the innovative neither resolves the inquiry of human chronicled bureau neither, because of her large will and deep esteem for the pioneer essence, depersonalizes Alexandra by consigning her to a stereotype. By novel's end, through a sort of passive, stoic will that appears to reflector the will of the land, Alexandra is adept to bypass solitude in her amalgamation with Carl and gain some assess of individuality.

b. Use the elements of fiction to analyze this novel. Be sure to include setting, plot, theme, conflict, characterization, dramatic climax, denouement, and resolution.

Plot and Major Characters

O Pioneers! undoes in 1883 and chronicles the article of Alexandra Bergson, the oldest progeny of a Swedish immigrant, John Bergson. In the first part of the innovative, John Bergson falls sick after labouring to make a dwelling off of his farmland for eleven years. He passes away, departing Alexandra and her three male siblings to be careful of the family farm. A couple of years subsequent, the locality is strike by a devastating drought and prevalent crop malfunction, which forces some families to deal their land ...