k_,
Antonia Shimerda in _My Antonia_--around these as girls and women the
actions primarily revolve. It is not, however, as other Helens or
Gudruns that they affect their universes; they are not the darlings of
heroes but heroes themselves. Alexandra drags her dull brothers after
her and establishes the family fortunes; Antonia, less positive and more
pathetic, still holds the center of her retired stage by her rich,
warm, deep goodness; Thea, a genius in her own right, outgrows her
Colorado birthplace and becomes a famous singer with all the fierce
energy of a pioneer who happens to be an instinctive artist rather than
an instinctive manager, like Alexandra, or an instinctive mother, like
Antonia. And is it because women are here protagonists that neither
wars, as among the ancients, nor machines, as among the moderns, promote
the principal activities of the characters? Less the actions than the
moods of these novels have the epic air. Narrow as Miss Cather's scene
may be, she fills it with a spaciousness and candor of personality that
quite transcends the gnarled eccentricity and timid inhibitions of the
local colorists. Passion blows through her chosen characters like a
free, wholesome, if often devastating wind; it does not, as with Miss
Jewett and her contemporaries, lurk in furtive corners or hide itself
altogether. And as these passions are most commonly the passions of
home-keeping women, they lie nearer to the core of human existence than
if they arose out of the complexities of a wider region.

Something more than Miss Cather's own experience first upon the frontier
and then among artists and musicians has held her almost entirely to
those two worlds as the favored realms of her imagination. In them,
rather than in bourgeois conditions, she finds the theme most congenial
to her interest and to her powers. That theme is the struggle of some
elect individual to outgrow the restrictions laid upon him--or more
frequently her--by numbing circumstances. The early, somewhat
inconsequential _Alexander's Bridge_ touches this theme, though Bartley
Alexander, like the bridge he is building, fails under the strain,
largely by reason of a flawed simplicity and a divided energy. Pioneers
and artists, in Miss Cather's understanding of their natures, are
practically equals in single-mindedness; at least they work much by
themselves, contending with definite though ruthless obstacles and
looking forward, if they win, to a free