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Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) by Carl Van Doren
page 97 of 146 (66%)
Something more than Miss Cather's own experience first upon the frontier
and then among artists and musicians has held her almost entirely to
those two worlds as the favored realms of her imagination. In them,
rather than in bourgeois conditions, she finds the theme most congenial
to her interest and to her powers. That theme is the struggle of some
elect individual to outgrow the restrictions laid upon him--or more
frequently her--by numbing circumstances. The early, somewhat
inconsequential _Alexander's Bridge_ touches this theme, though Bartley
Alexander, like the bridge he is building, fails under the strain,
largely by reason of a flawed simplicity and a divided energy. Pioneers
and artists, in Miss Cather's understanding of their natures, are
practically equals in single-mindedness; at least they work much by
themselves, contending with definite though ruthless obstacles and
looking forward, if they win, to a freedom which cannot be achieved in
the routine of crowded communities. To become too much involved, for her
characters, is to lose their quality. There is Marie Tovesky, in _O
Pioneers!_, whom nothing more preventable than her beauty and gaiety
drags into a confused status and so on to catastrophe. Ántonia, tricked
into a false relation by her scoundrel lover, and Alexandra, nagged at
by her stodgy family because her suitor is poor, suffer temporary
eclipses from which only their superb health of character finally
extricates them. Thea Kronborg, troubled by the swarming sensations of
her first year in Chicago, has to find her true self again in that
marvelous desert canyon in Arizona where hot sun and bright, cold water
and dim memories of the cliff-dwelling Ancient People detach her from
the stupid faces which have haunted and unnerved her.

Miss Cather would not belong to her generation if she did not resent the
trespasses which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists.
For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces--and she knows it
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