Willa Cather, Catholics and Pioneers

The whole of Robert Wyllie's essay on No Stage Catholics from The Lamp weaves Willa Cather into his own Catholic faith and Catholicism itself. However, this paragraph is an insight about Cather's work that I ahve not seen before:

Cather’s noblest human types—the pioneer and the artist—endure great suffering to create new things. The virtuoso heroine of The Song of the Lark, Thea Kronborg, leaves a Colorado railroad town for Chicago, Dresden, and New York, but she remains “still Methodist enough” to believe that everything hard and irksome is good for her. Conversely, O Pioneers! intones, “A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” Alexandra’s far-sighted love for the land becomes her success. Yet early on Nebraska is the formless sea of pre-created nothingness described at the beginning of My Ántonia as “not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” Cather’s observation is the hard-boiled realism of an appreciative second-generation Nebraskan. The pioneer must be like an artist, because only dreamers, idealists, and optimists could survive on the frontier at first—if they had the grit. Cather’s dreamers are not the fragile sort. In an interview with the Lincoln Sunday Star, Cather praises Annie Sadilek’s ability to bear hardships, and calls the farmwife and mother of twelve “one of the truest artists I ever knew.” Thea and Alexandra, the artist and the entrepreneurial pioneer, are a pair—but the long-suffering Ántonia, persevering to raise a large and poor family with good cheer, crowns the trio.

Artists as pioneers is an idea I like. Something that can be latched onto. Does the frontier feed creativity, or is creativity its own frontier?

sch 9/6