The Fredösphere

We watched O Pioneers last night, a TV movie made in 1992.  (This one, not this one.)  It was nominated for a golden globe and won other awards, including Outstanding Individual Achievement in Hairstyling for a Miniseries or a Special (no joke).  In spite off all that, the wifeösphere and I liked it hugely, although it is hard to say how good it would be for someone unfamiliar with the Willa Cather novel.

Willa, Willa, Willa.  What are we to do with you?  Your deeply conservative nature and your gender elasticity seem hard to reconcile to us modern folk.  Somehow, you channeled your contradictions into a creative energy that gave us fascinating novels.

[And here, let me say I'm glad to rediscover the essay I just linked to, which I first read a couple of years ago.  But what's this?

Well into her career as an internationally celebrated Isolde, the book's heroine, Thea Kronborg, marries her loyal suitor-manager - the somewhat bathetically named Fred.

Hey!  That's not nice!]

We've read three Cather novels, including My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop, and of them, O Pioneers was the least distinct.  I found, while watching the movie, I had forgotten the plot completely.  It was individual scenes that I remembered:  the plow on the horizon, the horsemen who escort the visiting bishop, the kiss stolen in the darkened room, and Alexandra's dream of the mysterious masculine figure.

Just as we did when we read the book, we got a jolt from the line in the movie where one character is described as going off to law school "in Ann Arbor."  Notice, they don't bother to say "in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that out of the way state in the north-central U.S. that's shaped like a mitten." -- thus, confirmation that truly Ann Arbor is the world navel.  The only thing more jolting would be to read Death Comes for the Archbishop and find out his eminence's last words involved ordering a reuben from Zingerman's Deli.