The Song of the Lark

The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather is the second novel in her classic American series entitled The Great Plains Trilogy. The trilogy includes O, Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918). Each novel in this trilogy explores different stories of women who find themselves challenged, nurtured, and built up by the natural beauty of the American West. These novels explore the conflicts and compromises when women either lean into or forge away from traditional gender expectations of early 20th-century America.

Told through six narrative parts, The Song of the Lark utilizes an omniscient third-person narrator who explores both the main character Thea’s emotions and thoughts and the interior thoughts of her friends. The novel traces Thea’s ascendancy into her identity as an artist. The Song of the Lark uses allusions to paintings and opera to portray how art across forms is connected by an important component: All art moves people to know themselves better. The Song of the Lark also explores the sacrifices necessary to achieve one’s ambitions, as well as how one’s past determines the person one becomes, and therefore the future one creates for oneself.