O Pioneers! Themes

The novel portrays the Nebraskan prairie wilderness, describing it as a powerful expanse where settlers felt themselves “too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.” As Cather famously said, the land is the real hero of O Pioneers, making the real story one about its transformation from wilderness to civilization and its…

The relationships in the novel cover both romantic and familial love. Both types of love are complicated. While Alexandra has a chillier relationship with two of her brothers, Lou and Oscar—who resist both the land and Alexandra’s management because she is a woman—she genuinely cares for Emil, whom she dotes on from the beginning of the novel. Romantic love falls into two categories as well—there’s the reckless, passionate love between Emil and Marie…

In many ways, O Pioneers serves as a cautionary moral tale. Throughout the book, various temptations pull characters away from their duty to the land—but the characters who succumb are punished for their weakness. Many of the Bergsons’ neighbors sell their homesteads in exchange for an easier way of life, for example, and they find relatively small, pointless lives in town. Alexandra, on the other hand, stays behind and yields to the land…

In a most basic summary of the book, one could say that O Pioneers describes the difficulties of homestead life. It’s a book about inhabiting a land that resists habitation. Loneliness permeates the community, thanks to the distances that separate neighbors, the language barriers between immigrants of different countries, and the often-extreme weather.

As immigrants, for example, Mr. and Mrs. Bergson struggle with the harshness of the New World, as they pine for what they…