Alexandra Bergson, the protagonist of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, is a father’s daughter, programmed at his deathbed to continue his work and secure the family and their estate. Alexandra is bold, pragmatic, driven and willing—an empty vessel. She accepts of course, and in just 16 years accomplishes his vision, single-mindedly and single-handedly increasing the land for herself and her older brothers, even providing a university education for the youngest. Look to her. She is the model modern business woman so many strive emulate: Independent, impenetrable, Athena sprung from her father’s head. A warrior woman empowered by her father’s will, she is Brunhilde of the Great Divide.
But for all her outward accomplishments Alexandra’s internal estate, much like the interior of her house, is unfinished and unevenly furnished: empty in some rooms and cluttered with relics or knick-knacks in others. As Cather writes, “…Alexandra’s house is the big out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself best” all exterior no interior. One wonders how, with nothing inside, she expresses herself at all.
Why does this matter? Because Alexandra’s work and her supposed success in this work is the product of her programming. She executes the instructions her father laid down for her. Like any machine she performs the routines automatically—until she encounters a variable outside of their scope. When the unexpected occurs only creativity born from a well-nourished, well-tended interior—imagination—can adapt to the new scenario. This is simply not something Alexandra possesses:
“…her life had not been the kind to sharpen her vision. Her training had all been toward the end of making her proficient in what she had undertaken to do. Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence; like an underground river that came to the surface only here and there, at intervals months apart, and then sank again to flow on under her own fields.”
Even though Alexandra is unconscious, her subconscious is present. It is the bug in the machine that undermines her programming. She experiences in rare moments of idle reverie as a recurring vision of surrender and release:
an illusion of being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by some one very strong. It was a man, certainly, who carried her, but he was like no man she knew; he was much larger and stronger and swifter, and he carried her as easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat. She never saw him, but with eyes closed, she could feel that he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him. She could feel him approach, bend over her and lift her, and then she could feel herself being carried swiftly off across the fields.
When these visions occur Alexandra forces them down below the surface by angrily scrubbing her skin cold water and vigor. She fails to understand her desire for liberation is innate and cannot be washed away.
No matter. Her father’s daughter’s mind may run in furrows but her subconscious has a will of its own. What she will not allow in herself she sows in her youngest brother Emil, “…He shall do whatever he wants to…He is going to have a chance, a whole chance; that’s what I’ve worked for.” Alexandra can not truly imagine “doing whatever one wants.” She cannot comprehend the implications of her gift. She learns the hard way.