Books, Writing, Self-Expression

 A Writer's Life

O Pioneers! makes its fair share of reflections on the artistic process, especially the process of writing. Often, it seems like the struggle to survive on the Divide, to carve out an existence and an identity for oneself in a harsh, new environment, is one big allegory for the struggle to write and express oneself as an author.

Not surprisingly, this allegory revolves around the character of Alexandra. She, out of everyone, is the protagonist of a struggle to assert herself, while also discovering a sense of belonging to the land she loves. Maybe that explains why the narrator takes to describing Alexandra's mind as a book:

Her mind was a white book, with clear writing about weather and beasts and growing things. Not many people would have cared to read it; only a happy few. She had never been in love, she had never indulged in sentimental reveries. Even as a girl she had looked upon men as work-fellows. She had grown up in serious times. (3.2.3)

Alexandra does not have the kind of life that entertains us. If her mind were a book, we might not want to read it, especially if we're expecting excitement, drama and sentimentality. Her mind, as the narrator also mentions early on, is "slow, truthful, steadfast," without "the least spark of cleverness" (1.4.36).

History? How About Her-story?

It's not in the usual stuff of novels that we can find a mind like Alexandra's, the narrator tells us. Alexandra has lived too close to the land, and it's in the land that she feels most comfortable. She's not your average character in a book—she is herself a kind of artist, finding self-expression in the world around her:

When you go out of the house into the flower garden, there you feel again the order and fine arrangement manifest all over the great farm […] You feel that, properly, Alexandra's house is the big out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself best. (2.1.22)

We could say that Alexandra is an artist of the soil. In any case, the novel makes clear that it's her ability to express herself in the land that sets her apart from, well, everyone else. Check out this early description of her countrymen's struggle to make something of the prairieland:

The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings. (1.2.1)

In this passage, the prairieland is depicted like a big canvas, and the inhabitants' attempts to farm it are seen as "feeble scratches," faded marks wrought by "prehistoric races." They're so pathetic, in fact, that they don't even have the mark of being human-made; they could just be "the markings of glaciers."

So what is this saying about Alexandra's forbears? For one, it depicts them as incapable of making history. Their attempts to express themselves in the land don't make the cut, so to speak. Their marks aren't even legible as human—the land reclaims all their efforts for its own. Nice try, guys.

It seems what a true pioneer needs, on the other hand, is "imagination." Without a vision and a love for the land, nothing comes of it. As the narrator puts it, "A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves" (1.4.1). When the "thing itself" is the Divide, though, that's easier said than done.

What A Disappointment…

Take Carl, for instance. At the beginning of the novel, Carl is an amateur painter, and when his family decides to leave the Divide, he chooses to become an engraver. Yet, in his own words, he seems to describe himself as a failed visionary—a failed artist. Take a look:

"What a wonderful place you have made of this, Alexandra." He turned and looked back at the wide, map-like prospect of field and hedge and pasture. "I would never have believed it could be done. I'm disappointed in my own eye, in my imagination." (2.3.34)

Carl might be disappointed in himself for not having been able to see the potential in the Divide, but he definitely sees one thing very clearly: human beings don't have much of a say in their own fates. History is full of people playing out the same stories, again and again. Here's how he describes it to Alexandra:

"And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, they have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years." (2.4.13)

In Carl's view of history, there's no room for unique self-expression. The templates for human action are already set.

In the context of O Pioneers!, it's no accident that Carl refers to the romance between Emil and Marie, at the beginning of this passage. The whole of their affair, down to its allusions to Ovid and Shakespeare, plays with this idea that "human stories" just go on repeating themselves throughout history. (For more on this one, see "Symbols: The White Mulberry Tree.")

We can even see it in the way the narrator describes the scene of their murder:

The story of what had happened was written plainly on the orchard grass, and on the white mulberries that had fallen in the night and were covered with dark stain. For Emil the chapter had been short. He was shot in the heart, and had rolled over on his back and died. (4.8.3)

Using the image of a "story […] written plainly" on the grass, stained by the blood of the young lovers, the narrator seems to make a reference to Carl's earlier thought about the endless repetition of "human stories." After all, in Ovid's legend of Pyramus and Thisbe (to which the story of Emil and Marie refers; again, see "Symbols: The White Mulberry Tree"), the blood of the lovers also stains the mulberries red, explaining why they still ripen this color. What's "written plainly," then, is that this story is nothing new.

The Same Old Story?

If anything, though, O Pioneers! includes this allusion to an ancient legend, in order to mock Carl's idea of endlessly repeating "human stories." The novel wants to make extra-sure we don't agree with Carl. After all, if Carl were right, what would be the point of trying to write new stories in the first place?

True to form, Alexandra comes in at the end to save the day. When everything is getting wrapped up at the end of the novel, she corrects what Carl has said about "human stories:

"You remember what you once said about the graveyard, and the old story writing I itself over? Only it is we who write it, with the best we have." (5.3.23)

In the end, Alexandra realizes her own freedom to write her own "old story"—to write history itself. And that, it seems, is what the Divide gave her, when its "great, free spirit […] bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before" (1.5.3). With her, the history of the Divide begins:

For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. (1.5.3)