SOURCE: Gustafson, Neil. “Getting Back to Cather's Text: The Shared Dream in O Pioneers!” Western American Literature 30, no. 2 (summer 1995): 151-62.

In the following essay, Gustafson analyzes the relationship between gender and nature in O Pioneers!

A number of feminist studies of the past twenty years have focused on the relationship between gender and landscape or nature. Annette Kolodny and Ellen Moers are two important promoters of a theory that casts the male as the marauder of nature, the female as its protector; the male abuses nature, the female nurtures it.¹ Several critics have maintained that this general argument applies to Willa Cather's O Pioneers! For example, this stance serves as a basis for Sharon O'Brien's analysis of the novel in her Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, a work in which she goes to great lengths to establish a distinct difference between how John and Alexandra Bergson perceive and...