More Kindred Spirits of the Earth - O Pioneers

I had picked up O Pioneers casually. It had been collecting dust on my nightstand for quite some time. I think I picked it up at Book hounds. I had read My Antonia as a girl, and it had made a huge impression on me. I identified with how her characters were in love with the soil. I’m not a farmer and I’m not drawn to the science of growing things nor am I naturally adept at it, but I love the earth itself. I love the smell of the earth in early summer and the musky after rain dirt smell. I love the feel of the earth in my hands while planting my mom’s garden for her. I identified with how Antonia felt empowered by her outdoorsy manual labory strength that she acquired from her toil on the farms. I too liked to admire my muscles and felt scornful of people who were pasty and frail.

Last summer I read Death Comes to the Archbishop

I don’t know how she does it -but she gets into the skin of these different characters and is able to express these timeless and universal human emotions in a way that is both powerful and artful. She was a feminist before her time and I love her strong female characters although the character I most identify with in temperament is Carl Lundstrom -Alexandra’s sensitive intuitive childhood friend who goes away to the city only to return into her life years later, somewhat jaded by life but still a kindred spirit. Alexandra manages to be a kindred spirit in her solid steadfast way.

 Alexandra takes the lead at the beginning of the story, taking over the business where her pioneering father leaves off upon his deathbed. He entrusted his plans not to the dull son  or insipid son but to his enterprising and intelligent daughter, who manages to see what others cannot and over time turns their struggling farm into a prosperous industry.

The climax of the story unfolds as Alexandra hits middle age and lights on the sweet friendship turned romance of her younger brother Emil with their married neighbor Marie, who has become Alexandra’s new best friend in Carl’s absence and is one of those beloved characters that is irresistible to the book characters and the reader alike. Bohemian Marie, who is full of life, sweetness, and vitality has got herself married to a whiny lump of a man – one of those who seemed dashing and swashbuckling but who lacked the kind of substance for husband material and turns into a self serving piece of lichen who finds it impossible to love another human being – especially one who is determined to be happy where he is determined to be unhappy.

You get it. It sets the stage for blossoming forbidden love. Plus Alexandra realizes too late, she kept sending Emil over to do things for Marie that she knew her husband wasn’t doing – by that I mean fixing things around the place – not to be unclear here. Ha!

There are a lot of other interesting side dynamics that take place that really capture small town life and friendship and family dynamics in rural America – the conflux of cultures: Bohemian (which means Czech in early Nebraska), German (Carl), old Ivar (the simple animal loving man who is Alexandra’s friend and whom she cares for), Swedes and Norwegians (she is Swedish.) Sidenote: Cather grew up in Nebraska. She knows what she’s talking about here. She lingers a bit on the difficulty of family dynamics in business relationships with the land. Her brothers come back to try to threaten and one up her – this kind of ends the civility that had tenuously existed prior to that point. They pretty much tried to dismiss the integral role she’d had in saving and furthering the farms, claiming that because they had done most of the physical labor, she should basically take a back seat in the business. She calmly refuses. You go Alexandra!!!

Emil and Marie struggle to resist their connection, but the deal is sealed when the lights go out at the party and she ends up in his arms.

He resolves to leave and they meet one last time to say goodbye in the orchard, where as luck would have it enraged armed husband finds them and down they go only to die side by side.

This twist of fate offers one great opportunity to Alexandra. Her grieving has reduced her to a state where she actually needs Carl. Since he was so poor he had been too proud to ask her to marry him, but now, in her hour of need, he returns from Alaska to comfort and rescue her emotionally. He hopes his business venture will be profitable so now he feels manly enough to marry her.

Alexandra visits Frank (jealous husband) in prison and expresses her forgiveness to him. She feels that she understands his rage more than she can understand how Emil and Marie could’ve fallen in love. She’s actually more angry at Marie for being a life wrecker. In the end, Carl helps her to see that: “I’ve seen it before. There are women who spread ruin around them through no fault of theirs; just by being too beautiful, too full of life and love. They can’t help it. People come to them as they go to a warm fire in winter.”

Favorite quotes:
of Marie: “The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives, always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain – until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released. “

“treasure of pain,”

Of Carl: “He had not become a trim self satisfied city man. There was still something homely and wayward and definitely personal about him. Even his clothes, his Norfolk coat and his very high collars, were a little unconventional. He seemed to shrink into himself as he used to do; to hold himself away from things, as if he were afraid of being hurt. In short, he was more self-conscious than a man of thirty-five is expected to be…..he was intelligent, sensitive, unhappy.”