"Possession Granted by a Different Lease": Alexandra Bergson's Imaginative Conquest of Cather's Nebraska
Ever since O Pioneers! was first reviewed in 1913 as "a study of the struggles and privations of the foreign emigrants in the herculean task of subduing the untamed prairie land of the Far West,"1 it has become enshrined in our literature as a national epic. And yet, ironically, the actual chronicle of the pioneer's taming of the wild frontier is precisely what Cather omits in a sixteen-year hiatus in the plot. Moreover, she never once depicts her heroine Alexandra Bergson physically working the land. Although Alexandra has typically been seen as a representative of the pioneers who settled the prairie, she can be better understood as a representative of Cather, herself a pioneer staking out a new territory in art. At its deepest level, 0 Pioneers! tells not the dramatic story of the pioneer's conquest of the prairie but rather the imaginative story of an artist's conquest of her true literary materialÂ—a material that, as we shall see, lay not, finally, in Nebraska but in consciousness. The real pioneers whose footsteps marked the way for Alexandra's imaginative conquest