Willa Cather's O Pioneers !

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Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! Individual vs. Society Willa Cather’s 1913 novel O Pioneers!, resolves around the protagonist of the story Alexandra Bergson. The setting of the story is a small country town of Hanover, Nebraska. Alexandra is an emotional tough person showing confidence and bravery. The author begins the story by giving a dramatic flashback to 30 years before, to the day that her dad, John Bergson is at his death bed telling his children his last dying wishes which are as simple as just wanting his family to stay together and keep the family farm going. This is where he decided to leave his land to Alexandra, his oldest child. This decision is going to create a lot of conflict and tension between Alexandra and her two brothers, Oscar and Lou, who seem to be antagonists against Alexandra throughout…show more content…
conventionalism. Alexandra’s brothers believe the only way to succeed in farming the divide is to do everything how everyone else does it, they are stuck with the idea of conventionalism. Unlike her brothers, Alexandra isn’t afraid to try new things and Alexandra figured that the way to succeed with the land is to not struggle against it. Unlike her brothers who just own the land and see it as a way of making money. For their father, “John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is desirable” (Cather17). It seems like whoever loved and cared for the land are the characters that triumph throughout the story. Like in Home Grown (Ben Hewitt) talks about a man and a wife who buy land in Vermont, they start the farm they always dreamed of. But little did they know how important that land will become to them, it served as the born place of their two sons. It was a classroom and a home to them. They learned to “coexist with nature”(Hewitt), just like Alexandra learned to farm the divide and ended up being the best farmer there has ever been in the divide all due to hard work and
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