slaveholding culture; meanwhile, her daughter Rachel, challenging those values in thinking critically about that culture, plays a role in setting them free. Each in their way, Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers and Antonia Shimerda in My Antonia play a role in building the frontier. Alexandra comes to embody the best and bravest of the efforts of America to extend its values. Although Antonia assumes the traditional role of wife and mother on the frontier, as Jim Burden tells her story he associates her with the whole enterprise of founding a new race in a new place, or of consciously making history.
Cather's sense of history involves her with characters who deliberately act in a way that they know will change their environment and the way they and others live their lives. Sometimes, as in O Pioneers, this is a group effort, and Alexandra Bergson achieves stature partly because she is one of her group who senses the implications of subduing the prairie. Alexandra may not realize the depth of attraction between her brother Emil and Marie Shabata, but she is extraordinarily insightful as to the needs of her farm. Dedicated to the land, she prospers when her neighbors fail. "There were certain days in her life . . . when she was close to the flat, fallow world about her, and felt, as it were, in her own body the joyous germination in the soil" (O Pioneers 129). This is feeling in a woman who senses she is engaged in the important work of creating something beautiful in an environment that defeats others.
In The Song of the Lark, Thea Kronborg creates an artist's life by acknowledging and rejecting the harsh physical environment of the prairie. Although she divorces herself from the bleakness of provincial prairie life, however, she finds a source of artistic sustenance in another bleak, seemingly hostile landscape: Panther Canyon. In Panther Canyon, Thea strips away the inessentials of both city and country life, experienci...