King Herod In Willa Cather's O Pioneers !

Frank Shabata is a man being cheated on, and if he ever finds out, his rage will be like that of a stone cold child killer, King Herod who killed thousands of innocents. King Herod was a man who killed many innocent children and Cather compared Frank Shabata to Herod if he would have ever found out about his wife and Emil Bergson’s secret love. Willa Cather uses allusions in her book, O Pioneers!. In the novel reference she compared Frank to Herod the Great. That will be my first paragraph. Next I will talk about Herod and his background information. Lastly I will talk about why Cather used King Herod as an allusion to Frank Shabata in her book. Kind Herod is compared to Frank Shabata in her novel, o pioneers!, using an allusion. “The spirit he had met in music was his own. Frank Shabata had never found it; would never find it if he lived beside it a thousand years; would have destroyed it if he had found it, as Herod slew the innocents” (Cather 91). Cather not only uses an allusion to describe Frank but she foreshadows the killing of Emil and his wife, Marie. At the beginning of this novel, Frank is a happy young man but over the course of the book he becomes full of jealousy and hatred.

He was the son of Antipater and Cyprus and became the King of Judea. The king got word of a boy named Jesus that would grow up and overthrow his power. In the Gospel of Matthew, Herod ordered the execution of all of the boys in Bethlehem to try and prevent Jesus from living. “When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi” (Ross, “The Slaughter of The Innocents”). God warned Joseph and told him to take Jesus and his mother away from the king. Herod the Great killed thousands of innocent young boys because of jealousy and