O Pioneers!

O Pioneers! honors the sanctity of land and nature. Certain characters take inspiration from the land, while others have an adversarial relationship with it, and these relationships indicate the characters’ personalities.

Alexandra embodies the pioneer spirit because of her natural connection to the land. While others see the land as impossible to cultivate, Alexandra senses and is imaginative about its potential; she respects the land’s dangers but knows she can work with it. While characters who have an adversarial attitude towards the land find it cruel and uncontrollable, Alexandra personifies nature as kind even in its harsher forms. In the aftermath of Emil’s death, she takes solace in the driving rain, which she describes in primal, womb-like terms: “It carries you back into the dark, before you were born; you can’t see things, but they come to you, somehow, and you know them and aren’t afraid of them. Maybe it’s like that with the dead” (101-02). Alexandra also recognizes that the land is immeasurably bigger than she is and will outlive her. She therefore doesn’t seek to control it but rather to form a temporary partnership with it. Indeed, because Alexandra does not marry in the course of the novel, her farm is her life partner.