SOURCE: Carden, Mary Paniccia. “Creative Fertility and the National Romance in Willa Cather's O Pioneers! and My Ántonia.” MFS 45, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 275-302.

In the following essay, Carden explores the role of frontier mythology and national imagery in O Pioneers!

reading the National Romance

Although definitions and descriptions of America have varied considerably over time, one aspect of the national imaginary remains constant, if contentious: America is at heart a frontier nation, newly born, created out of the wilderness. Its character and spirit can be traced back to and accounted for by its frontier origins. This ideology of national identity was given coherent and persuasive articulation by the influential historian Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 address at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Discussing “the significance of the frontier in American history,” he proposes that to study the “advance of the frontier,” the “men who grew up under these...