Woman Who Has the Qualities

¶ … woman who has the qualities and merits that enable her to break the fence of gender roles in her society. This woman is a character from a novel, but she exemplifies all the groundbreaking steps that women took in the late nineteenth century, in order to pave the way for suffrage and women's equality. It is important to study the framework of women during this time in American history, because it helps to illuminate the patterns that constructed the first real human rights movement for gender equality, which had express, expedient, and unequivocal political goals. Furthermore, this analysis reveals the specific ways that historical context and social milieu converge, as the character under analysis was a lone female pioneer in the American West. This context offers unique social, economic, and political considerations. There were indeed changes taking place in the broader patriarchal culture that enabled women like this to succeed and become role models for women in future generations to emulate and aspire to becoming in other social and political contexts. The woman in question is Alexandra Bergson, the Swedish-American protagonist of Willa Cather's novel O Pioneer!

Although women of the 19th century American West enjoyed a considerable amount of human rights like the rights of inheriting lands, working in some jobs, such as teaching and nursing, they faced many challenges and problems that spoiled their enjoyment of these limited rights. Women in the nineteenth century American West were described in many historical and literary contexts as being secondary and marginal. The traditional roles of women in the American West society at that time viewed woman as being nurturer, wives and sometimes prostitutes. In other words, woman, as far as most of the frontier literary and historical contexts can tell, is "an object," a spoil of war or the warriors' "fame." Woman is something that helps or prevents the adventurer but she is not the adventurer herself (Quawas).

In fact, gender played critical role in the determination of roles or role allocation in the context of the American West society. Women's roles and gender differentiation stand "at the crossroads of history," and relate to "eternal philosophical questions of mind-body duality, nature vs. civilization, and private-public equilibrium," (Fraisse 48). It is ideal to note that roles were executed in relation to one's gender. There were roles specifically for men and women in the society because of their gender differences. Women focused on the execution of home roles such as household chores, child bearing, rearing, making meals, taking care of the husband, and enhancing the image and reputation of the family and home. Men in this context were viewed as being superior to their women counterparts within the society. This meant that men held positions of power and authority in all the public spheres including economics/business, politics/the law, and the bearing of arms. Men also possessed social status that women did not have, enabling the perpetuation of a patriarchal society.

By applying Freudian psychoanalysis and feminist theory, I will analyze the personality of the independent, strong, risk taker, and smart Alexandra Bergson in Willa Cather's O Pioneer! As Smith points out in Freud's Philosophy of the Unconscious, the psychoanalytic model lends insight into the underlying psychic forces promoting personal and collective change. With regards to a singular female like Alexandra Bergson, psychoanalysis takes into account the protagonist's family background, tracing her ego development across the course of her lifetime starting with childhood. The significance of my research is that it studies the possibility of female's success in life under certain circumstances and refutes the outmoded opinion that suggests the leadership is a male-specific quality. Cather creates an overtly political novel with O Pioneer! As her protagonist single-handedly proves that women can be completely self-determined and self-reliant. This would have been a revolutionary view when Cather first published her novel.