Willa Cather's O Pioneers
How can love conquer all? Stephen Chbosky’s idea that “We accept the love we think we deserve”, tells us that sometimes we love out of desperation and not out of appreciation. The art of love entices us to yearn for it, to aspire to achieve it in all its greatness. Love changes us, it makes us stronger and more open minded to the world's strength, it enlightens us to all the possibilities and opportunities the world has for us. Maybe Willa Cather, author of O Pioneers! has proven to us that the idea that love can conquer all is indeed achievable, and that maybe love, in all forms, is the key to all life’s difficulties. The characters in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! demonstrate that ecstatic infatuation with the land keeps us united, fosters gratitude, and frames our self-perception.
We all seem to fight infatuation, why, because fear is engraved in our minds, but fear and all that is in our minds keeps us all the same, it keeps us together. In O Pioneers!, the novel begins with
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Before Carl opened it, he drew Alexandra to him and kissed her softly, on her lips and on her eyes...They went into the house together, leaving the Divide behind them, under the evening star. (179-180)
They finally can live happily ever after in their simple lives. In “The Happiness and The Curse” Cliff Boyer agrees that Cather successfully represented the land in happiness:
Cather is consistent in representing the land as both happiness and curse in her fiction and she deploys the ecological paradox rhetorically, symbolically and thematically. For Cather the land is the source of everything-including identificatory meaning (2).
Boyers interpretation of happiness in love and the land describes how we use the land for everything it is purposed for, the land shows us the way of love, we follow the land, because we love the land. Just as though we follow our lovers, because we love them, and we see all the good in them, as we should see all the good in
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The Use Of Three Philosophies In O Pioneers ! By Willa Cather
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