Where It All Goes Down
The Great Plains of Nebraska (a.k.a. the prairie, a.k.a. the Divide)
Let's face it: the Nebraska plains don't sound all that exciting. But when it comes to O Pioneers!, the story's setting might just be the most important key to understanding the novel.
Take a passage like this one, for instance:
There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back. Like the plains of Lombardy, it seems to rise a little to meet the sun. The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness. (2.1.3)
This doesn't just set the stage. Here, the land is front and center, with its "open face," "frank and joyous and young," soaking up the spotlight. Looking for more where this came from? Well, you're in luck. Whether it's Cather's lush, pastoral descriptions (see "Tone;" "Writing Style;" "Theme: Visions of the Prairie"), or the symbolic significance of the Divide (check out "Symbols: The Divide"), we've got this one covered for you in a number of places.
But if it's the historical context of the novel you're after, well, we'd be more than happy to fill you in here.
When we talk about the West, nowadays, we often mean the West Coast: California, Oregon and Washington. Maybe we include states like Nevada or Arizona. Believe it or not, though, those states were still considered frontier territory until 1890, just 22 years before Cather publishes O Pioneers!
And what's more, the West still had a strong grip on the American imagination, its vast swaths of land inspiring dreams of freedom, plunder and prosperity. But as the country industrialized and inched closer to WWI, things are already starting to change. More and more, the West was being assimilated into the new image of 20th-century America.
Based on the "Shout Outs" in O Pioneers!, we can assume that most of the events in the novel take place after the western frontier has already closed, sometime in the last decades of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th. So, despite the novel's title, the Bergsons were probably not covered wagon types. To call them "pioneers" in the traditional sense would be a stretch. What they are, in fact, are immigrants, just like most of the settlers on the Divide.
Change in the Land
O Pioneers! takes place in a time when the frontier, and all it stands for in the American imagination, is undergoing transformation. We see the land go from untamable to productive farmland, and Emil is able to attend college and break his bond to the land—though his heart remains on the Divide. Even Alexandra, after a lifetime of bondage to the land, becomes a wealthy landowner with a clear understanding of herself and her identity.
As much as O Pioneers! is nostalgic for the good ol' days of pioneer settlement (see our section on "Tone"), it doesn't shy away from portraying the present reality. And that reality is one of dramatic environmental and social change. The one thing that remains the same—or so O Pioneers! will have us believe—is the power of the land to transfix the imagination.