Willa Cather’s Love Stories and the Land: The Interconnection of Human Emotion and Environmental Consciousness in O Pioneers!, the Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia

Abstract

Willa Cather is well known as a writer whose early novels’ narrative subtexts are environmentally focused. However, these interpretations of Cather’s Prairie Trilogy (O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918)) don’t fully explore her use of love stories as a conscious narrative device that not only connects individual characters with each other but also with the land itself. This thesis will explore how Cather’s Prairie Trilogy interweaves love stories among people and with the land to create commonly identifiable access for readers to begin developing a deeper understanding and relationship with nature. By doing so, Cather takes the love stories far past their basic capacity to trigger readers’ emotion or depict a metaphorical representation of the American landscape’s intense alteration during the 1910s. Rather, her use of love stories as narrative device actually assists the reader in identifying with environmental changes as an interpersonal experience and at a human level. Furthermore—and more importantly, I’ll argue—this potential to encourage the reader to increase her or his own environmental awareness and, quite possibly, change future behavior, may be potentially transferable, and highly effective, as a literary approach in contemporary discourse on environmental issues. Not only creating bridges between people of multiple backgrounds, but also between nature as “other” and nature as related to oneself, I argue that these bridges are built on one of the most basic tenets of the human psyche: the common experience of love and the common experience of loss, and that this operates in Cather’s Prairie Trilogy to cross the divide to a true identification with, respect for, and sustainably improved relationship between humans and the land.