SOURCE: Downs, C. “Glasgow's Barren Ground and Cather's O Pioneers!: Changing the Paradigm.” Southern Quarterly 35, no. 4 (summer 1997): 51-8.

In the following essay, Downs finds parallels between Cather's O Pioneers! and Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground.

In the early twenties and twenties of the century Willa Cather and Ellen Glasgow embarked upon experiments in form in the novel. Like other early modernists, they reacted against the worn-out paradigms of a previous century. Within those paradigms, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis has pointed out, the novel ends in marriage. Marriage, for female characters, was the rest of the story. Cather's and Glasgow's novels of the soil, O Pioneers! (1913) and Barren Ground (1925), while retaining vestiges of nineteenth-century patterns, helped invent the twentieth-century novel.

Twentieth-century readers would like to lump together all of the things against which Cather, Glasgow and other modernists rebelled and call these “nineteenth-century fiction.” Fortunately, critics such as Nina Baym...