Natural Landscape in Willa Cather’s Pioneer Novels: Between Official Pioneering and Folk Vernacular Discourses

According to critics, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers (1913) and My Antonia (1918), two novels written early on in her career, tend to espouse an overt anthropocentric celebration of the domestication of the land. In keeping with this direction in criticism, Louise Westling comments on Cather’s attitude towards the land in these two novels from an ec-feminist perspective saying, “Cather succeeded in many respects as the epic celebrant of western settlement [...] her novels of the land remain part of a male semiotic economy of heroic action” (81). However, a few lines later Westling inadvertently goes on to point out that Cather’s “imperialist nostalgia” is challenged by the subtext of women’s rituals and domestic values. Yet, she does not believe that this really marks an attempt at subversion by Cather. I believe that as critics, we need here to pause and explore the ramifications of this brief bifurcation in Westling’s argument, setting aside the issue of Cather’s conscious attempt at subversion, it is my opinion that we can trace in these two early novels a polyphony of natural landscape discourses through this very subtext which at times echoes and at others subverts the official dominant historical discourse of pioneering. Westling’s own inadvertent reference to an inherent subtext in Cather’s pioneer novels testifies to that. Critics like Michael J. McDowell posit that “the best landscape writers suppress their egos and give voices to the many elements of a landscape” (386). In alignment with this, it is my intention to propose that natural landscape discourses in Cather’s pioneer novels display a multi-vocal interplay of conceptions of nature through weaving discourses such as the official pioneering discourse, which promoted the Frontier myth and folk vernacular discourses, which trace actual interactions with the land.