SOURCE: Wiesenthal, C. Susan. “Female Sexuality in Willa Cather's ‘O Pioneers!’ and the Era of Scientific Sexology: A Dialogue between Frontiers.” Ariel 21, no. 1 (January 1990): 41-63.

In the following essay, Wiesenthal investigates the role of sexuality in O Pioneers!

Perhaps the most critical issue which immediately confronts any discussion of Willa Cather's fictional portrayal of sexuality is the nature of the relationship between the author's life and her work, between biography and art. For it is primarily on biographical bases such as Cather's adolescent rejection of femininity—her masquerade as the short-haired, boyishly-dressed ‘William Cather Jr.’—and her adult relationships with women such as Louise Pound, Isabelle McClung, and Edith Lewis, that an increasing number of critics have been led to consider her as a ‘lesbian writer.’ Although no evidence exists to indicate that any of Cather's relationships with women involved an erotic dimension, many scholars agree that, at...