SOURCE: O'Brien, Sharon. “The Unity of Willa Cather's ‘Two-Part Pastoral’: Passion in O Pioneers!” Studies in American Fiction 6, no. 2 (autumn 1978): 157-71.

In the following essay, O'Brien contends that the two sections of O Pioneers are linked by the theme of passion.

Willa Cather formed her first successful novel, O Pioneers! (1913), by combining two previously written short stories: “Alexandra,” a 1911 version of Alexandra Bergson's taming of the wild Nebraska soil, and “The White Mulberry Tree,” a tragic tale written a year later in which a crazed Bohemian farmer kills his wife, Marie, and her young Swedish lover.¹ Although Cather wrote the two stories separately, she experienced a “sudden inner explosion and enlightenment” when she realized that they belonged together.² It was as if she had brought together two chemicals with a powerful elective affinity, and O Pioneers! was the resulting compound, a “two-part pastoral” as Cather later described it...