The Violence of Displacement
and Exile in Willa Cather's My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and The
Song of the Lark
S. Sangeetha
Abstract
The prairie novels written by Willa Cather,
namely, My Antonia (1918), O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the
Lark (1915), invoke the critical question of the American West as
the place of both promise and danger. This paper questions the
presence of displacement and exile as a force of violence, which
spawns bodily, emotional and social harm in characters. Through
utilising the lived experiences of the immigrants and pioneers,
Cather grounds the prairie as a dispassionate force that challenges
the strength of human beings. In My Antonia, the state of exile
leads to tragic suicide and lack of social belonging, whereas in O
Pioneers!, it creates family conflict and murder, and in The Song of
the Lark, it results in a mental trauma of gossip and the
suffocating aspects of small-town existence. Cather gains a critical
insight of the American dream through these accounts and she finds
out that the promise is re-balanced to be violence instead of
revitalisation. The discussion thus highlights the fact that Cather
made a contribution to pioneer literature in addition to
highlighting the human price of Western expansion.
Keywords: Displacement, Exile, Violence, Willa Cather, Pioneer
Literature, Immigrant Experience, American West, Emotional Trauma,
Social Isolation, Life in the Prairies, Gossip, Power, Frontier
Wrangling, Artistic ambition, Cultural Assimilation
