"The Great Divide": Isolation in Willa Cather's O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark

Abstract

This essay examines the importance of isolation to the self-development of midwestern women in Willa Cather's early novels, O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. Cather employs the natural physical isolation of the Great Plains and the Arizona desert to give her protagonists physical space for their work. Unlike some of Cather's other works, such as My Ántonia, which focus more on the negative effects of physical isolation, Cather offers in these novels a more complicated portrait of isolation's value to women who need independence from their communities in order to explore the widely dissimilar fields of agriculture and opera. While Cather does not shy away from the mental toll of isolation on her characters, she demonstrates the vital role that physical isolation plays in their successful careers.