SOURCE: Peck, Demaree. “‘Possession Granted by a Different Lease’: Alexandra Bergson's Imaginative Conquest of Cather's Nebraska.” MFS 36, no. 1 (spring 1990): 5-22.

In the following essay, Peck evaluates the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his work on Cather's O Pioneers!

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...