O Pioneers!

C. Susan Wiesenthal (Essay Date January 1990)

SOURCE: Wiesenthal, C. Susan. "Female Sexuality in Willa Cather's O Pioneers! and the Era of Scientific Sexology: A Dialogue between Frontiers." Ariel 21, no. 1 (January 1990): 41-63.

In the following essay, Wiesenthal examines parallels between Cather's treatment of female sexuality in O Pioneers! and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific preoccupations with "deviant" female sexuality.

Perhaps the most critical issue which immediately confronts any discussion of Willa Cather's fictional portrayal of sexuality is the nature of the relationship between the author's life and her work, between biography and art. For it is primarily on biographical bases such as Cather's adolescent rejection of femininity—her masquerade as the short-haired, boyishly-dressed 'William Cather Jr.'—and her adult relationships with women such as Louise Pound, Isabelle McClung, and Edith Lewis, that an increasing...