Yet it is with her prairie trilogy—and My Ántonia in particular—that Cather defined her literary voice.

When Cather began working on the stories that would become the nucleus of O Pioneers!, writing about farmers in Nebraska amounted to a fairly severe breach of decorum, at least in the eyes of certain members of the literary establishment. As Cather herself put it:

The ‘novel of the soil’ had not then come into fashion in this country. The drawing room was considered the proper setting for a novel, and the only characters worth reading about were smart people or clever people (Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, p. 963).

Cather was fortunate, however, that a group of iconoclastic young critics were clamoring for American writers to liberate themselves from a “genteel tradition” of high culture ruled by European canons of taste and subject matter. In such works as The Wine of the Puritans (1908) and America’s Coming-of-Age (1915), Van Wyck Brooks argued that the United States was suffering from a cultural malaise produced by an unhealthy gulf between these genteel pretensions and the social realities of American life. In his view, this bifurcated condition reflected a longstanding tension between the country’s material achievements and its spiritual ideals, a tension symbolized by two American types often at odds with one another. The practical ethos that transformed the United States into an industrialized nation was embodied by the “Pioneer” type, while the more reflective “Puritan” spoke for the country’s foundational desire to create a utopian community. Brooks and others were impatiently on the lookout for writers who would usher in an era of cultural rejuvenation by following the example of Walt Whitman, who they believed had reconciled these opposing strains of the American character through his transformation of vernacular materials into a radically new kind of poetry imbued with a transcendent vision of the democratic self.

It is not surprising, then, that Cather’s early novels were so well received, since their protagonists tend to fuse the qualities of the pioneer and the puritan. Set in marginal locales far from the centers of genteel culture, these works document the harsh realities of rural life and commemorate the generation of settlers who, in Cather’s words, “subdued the wild land and broke up the virgin prairie” (quoted in Lee, Willa Cather, p. 8). Part of what makes Cather such an important voice in American literature is that she reproduces the national mythology of the frontier while simultaneously revising it by placing indomitable women at the center of the cultural script. Conquering the land, however, is only the most obvious part of the story. What is probably most distinctive about the representation of the countryside in My Ántonia is the way in which Cather dwells on the more ineffable empowerment of the self as it gives itself up to an overwhelming, sublime landscape.

When Jim Burden, the narrator of My Ántonia, first arrives on the prairie, he is profoundly shaken by the featureless void into which he feels he has been marooned:

There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.... I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction.... If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be (p. 11).

In this early scene, Jim is so disoriented by an unfamiliar landscape of absence that he feels obliterated, not uplifted, by its vastness. Like many other characters of modern literature, he is radically alone: “Outside man’s jurisdiction” and beyond the power of prayer, he has been plunged into a nihilistic world where things “did not matter.” Within just a few pages, however, Jim’s alienation modulates into ecstasy. Captivated by the perpetual motion of the “shaggy, red grass,” he realizes that the “whole country seemed, somehow, to be running” (p. 16). Rather than being terrified by the sensation that he has traversed some kind of boundary, he becomes exhilarated: “I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away” (p. 16). Finally, he gives in completely to the loss of self that is provoked by the formless landscape, within which he feels not like an individual but a mere “something”:

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more.... Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great (p. 17).

Relinquishing oneself to “something complete and great” sounds more like Buddhist enlightenment than the true grit of an American pioneer. Jim’s epiphany, however, is very much in the American grain, since it closely resembles what is arguably the central passage in the literature of American Transcendentalism, in which Ralph Waldo Emerson declares, “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all” ( Essays and Lectures, p.