“Where Do I Belong?”: Willa Cather’s Apocalyptic Landscapes

Abstract

Writing in Wolf Willow (1962), Wallace Stegner offers a description of the prairie landscape that serves as a point of departure. Having returned as an adult to southwestern Saskatchewan near the Cypress Hills, where he spent his early boy­hood years on a frontier homestead, Stegner is both remembering and describing that land when he writes: The drama of the landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always mov­ing. The earth is passive. And yet the beauty I am struck by, both as present fact and revived memory, a fusion: this sky would not be so spectacular without this earth to change and glow and darken under it. And whatever the sky may do, however the earth is shaken or darkened, the Euclidian perfection abides. The very scale, the hugeness of simple forms, emphasizes stability. It is not the hills and mountains which we should call eternal. Nature abhors an elevation as much as it abhors a vacuum; a hill is no sooner elevated than the forces of ero­sion begin tearing it down. These prairies are quiescent, close to static; looked at for any length of time, they begin to impose their awful perfection on the observer’s mind. Eternity is a peneplain. (7)