O Pioneers!

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1.  What images or facts come to mind when you hear the word “pioneer”?

Teaching Suggestion: Students may have some ideas of pioneer life from social studies classes. This short answer question asks students to think about the images of “pioneers” that they may have already internalized and provides an opportunity to unpack the mythology surrounding them; you may segue into a discussion of why this era looms so large in American lore and whether its celebration is warranted.

• “America’s Westward Expansion”: This History Channel documentary on YouTube is a detailed look at the history of westward expansion and the role of the pioneer in developing new American territories and states.
• “Re-Inventing the Wheel: Nebraska’s Immigration History”: This article from the University of Nebraska discusses the history of immigration to the state through the present day.

2. How can symbols such as nature and weather help an author develop theme?

Teaching Suggestion: There are several layers to the story in this novel. One way to interpret Cather’s themes is through a careful examination of the work’s nature symbolism. Students may already have an idea of how literature can utilize nature and weather as symbols but consider drawing attention to well-known examples from pop culture (e.g., rain underscoring the sad mood of a movie or TV show) to prompt further reflection. Having this discussion pre-reading can prime students to look for Cather’s nature symbols and think about their connections to the novel’s themes.

• “Symbolism” on SuperSummary: This overview of symbolism includes discussion of how and why writers employ it as well as examples of different kinds of symbols.
• ·        “Pathetic Fallacy”: This Encyclopædia Britannica entry explains the literary device known as “pathetic fallacy”—a form of personification that involves attributing emotions to the natural world. Pathetic fallacy often works in tandem with nature symbolism.

Short Activity

Read and annotate the following paragraph from O Pioneers!. You will see this paragraph and understand its context when you read the full novel. For this first excerpted reading, annotate for symbolism by marking or noting objects or details that might be symbols; then answer the questions that follow.

Excerpt from O Pioneers!

Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring. The birds have gone. The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is exterminated. The prairie-dog keeps his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put to it to find frost-bitten cabbage-stalks. At night the coyotes roam the wintry waste, howling for food. The variegated fields are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue they have taken on. The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads or in the ploughed fields. (Part 3, Chapter 1)

1) What mood does the imagery in this paragraph evoke?

2) What ideas might the symbols you marked logically represent?

Teaching Suggestion: Giving students this excerpt from the novel as a pre-reading exercise can help them prepare for close reading the novel’s symbolism. This excerpt exemplifies the harshness of the Nebraskan landscape—a recurring motif in the novel—but is not wholly negative. Notably, it personifies “nature,” implying a link to human experience (e.g., that the brutal and unvarying winter landscape asks people to turn inward in much the same way as nature itself does before spring).

Differentiation Suggestion: Teachers might instead use this activity to model or introduce annotation for students who would benefit from practice in critical reading skills. The following table can guide students in annotating for symbolism:

Symbol / Symbolic Meaning

Ex) The prairie-dog’s hole / Ex) Burrowing, hiding, forced isolation, hibernation, rest

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the novel.

If you were to work on a farm, what role do you think you would be best at? What role would you want to have? Explain your reasoning. If you work or have worked on a farm, describe your various roles and responsibilities; detail the ways in which you think farm work compares to other kinds of work.

Teaching Suggestion: Central to the family conflict in this novel are the roles played by different family members on the farm. Some characters, like Emil, don’t do much but lend an extra hand. Other characters, like Alexandra, imagine solutions and run the business. By placing themselves in the role of the pioneer before reading, students can more deeply analyze characters’ traits and motivations later.

• “The Role of Women on the Farm in the Early 20th Century”: This video details the roles typically given to women on farms and homesteads in the early 20th century.
• “Rural Midwest Farm Life in the Early 20th Century“: This video provides an overview of rural life in the early 20th century.