SOURCE: “The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather's O'Pioneer!” American Literature, 75 (June 2003): 275-302.

In the following essay,

Willa Cather's public persona turns on the rhetoric of wide-open space. Since the beginning of Cather's career, journalists have romanticized the wild Willa of the prairie, often obscuring the relative refinement of the Cather family. The mature Cather, too, is pictured as most at home in the open air; a 1921 piece in the Lincoln Sunday Star is representative: “Miss Cather had elected to take her interview out-of-doors in the autumnal sunshine, walking. The fact is characteristic. She is an outdoor person, not far different in type from the pioneers and prima donnas whom she exalts.”¹ The analog to the legend of Willa Cather, hoyden and pioneer, is the language in which the evolution of her literary career is described. Her art is commonly evaluated in spatial terms. “[Cather's...