{"id":75,"date":"2017-01-29T21:42:14","date_gmt":"2017-01-30T02:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/?p=75"},"modified":"2017-01-29T21:42:14","modified_gmt":"2017-01-30T02:42:14","slug":"the-enigmatic-land-in-o-pioneers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/willa-cather-novel\/the-enigmatic-land-in-o-pioneers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Enigmatic Land in O Pioneers!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Throughout the first fifty pages of Willa Cather&#8217;s\u00a0<em>O Pioneers!\u00a0<\/em>the notion of land itself carries\u00a0a sacred or divine importance. The implied author recounts that John Bergson possessed the &#8220;Old-World belief that land, in itself, was desirable&#8221; (8). John Bergson&#8217;s belief implies that it is not the crops nor the fertility that is valuable, but rather it is the mere ownership of\u00a0the space. Of course the hope is that the land will help the settlers acquire sufficient income, but it also\u00a0holds\u00a0a greater\u00a0significance.\u00a0\u00a0In part two, Alexandra personifies the land while she discusses\u00a0its transformation: &#8220;We hadn&#8217;t any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself&#8221; (45). In her explanation, Alexandra gives the land and not her family\u00a0all the credit for its blossoming. Further, she attributes\u00a0its infertility and unruliness to\u00a0its sense of humor and to its slumber\u00a0as if it were a mischievous\u00a0human. Her words suggest that she does indeed view\u00a0the land as\u00a0a divine power.<\/p>\n<p>It will be interesting to see how the text\u00a0will continue to unveil the divinity\u00a0of the land in the rest of the novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Throughout the first fifty pages of Willa Cather&#8217;s\u00a0O Pioneers!\u00a0the notion of land itself carries\u00a0a sacred or divine importance. The implied author recounts that John Bergson possessed the &#8220;Old-World belief that land, in itself, was desirable&#8221; (8). John Bergson&#8217;s belief implies that it is not the crops nor the fertility that is valuable, but rather it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-willa-cather-novel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}