The opening chapter introduces the main characters in relation to a

harsh winter landscape on a Nebraska tableland (the Divide or high country), thirty years in the past (roughly 1883). Alexandra Bergson is tall and strong with "clear, deep blue eyes... fixed intently on the distance" (4-5). When a traveling salesman remarks on her "shining mass of hair," she "stabbed him with a glance of Amazonian fierceness" that challenges his manhood (5-6). By contrast, her friend Carl Linstrum is thin and frail with "brooding dark eyes" and a mouth "too sensitive for a boy's" (7). Still, Alexandra encourages Carl to play a man's role, saving Emil's kitten from the telegraph pole, driving Alexandra's wagon, and finally lighting a lantern that "made a moving point of light along the highway, going deeper and deeper into the dark country." Carl is also associated with a "magic lantern" that he promises to bring to the Bergson's to entertain Alexandra's father, who is dying (10-11). Both Alexandra and Carl are described as "lonely" (7). In a sense, they are both similar to the land, which Carl sees as wanting to "be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength,... its uninterrupted mournfulness" (9). However, Carl seems to be looking into the past, Alexandra into the future. What do these descriptions and interactions suggest about Alexandra and Carl, and the relationship of each to the land? What does the lantern imagery suggest about Carl's relationship to Alexandra?

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Alaska and get "something to show for myself" (106). To accept Alexandra's wealth without having any of his own, "I should have to be either a very large man or a very small one, and I am only in the middle class" (106). What does Carl mean by this? What does he mean when he says to Alexandra, "It is your fate to be always surrounded by little men" (105)?

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personality into the land. She is prosperous but largely unconscious of personal feelings. Her memory of a wild duck—"a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change"—typifies her mental life, "a white book, with clear writing about weather and beasts and growing things," but free of "sentimental reveries." "She had never been in love"—suggesting that she must understand her feelings toward Carl, however strong, as a kind of friendship (119). Her one romantic dream, beginning in girlhood, is of a large man, "yellow like the sunlight," smelling like "ripe cornfields," who carries her "swiftly across the fields" (120). How is her experience of this dream different in girlhood vs. adulthood? Who is this great man?

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Alexandra, driving him to a supper and fair at the French Church , feels "well satisfied with her brother." She recalls that pivotal moment when she drove with Emil back from the river country and felt convinced of the Divide's promising future (37-38). Emil is the fruit of that destiny because he has "a personality apart from the soil" (124). Are Emil's accomplishments worthy of Alexandra's great satisfaction? Has he proven himself "fit to cope with the world," as she thinks (124)?

Cather observes that "Norwegian and Swedish lads were much more self-centred, apt to be egotistical and jealous" than the French and Bohemian—suggesting that Frank is an unrepresentative Bohemian (125). The psychology of Frank's relationship with Marie is further explored. Frank knows deep down that if he could give up his grudge against Marie, she would "come back to him" (128). What is his grudge against Marie, and why can't he give it up? Is his grudge justified? Is Marie partly to blame for their distance?

Alexandra" (136). Looking at John Bergson's portrait, he reflects: "No... she didn't get it there. I suppose I am more like that" (137). What is "it"? What does Emil mean?

They couldn't meet any more. There was nothing for them to say. They had spent the last penny of their small change; there was nothing left but gold. The day of love-tokens was past. They had now only their hearts to give each other" (144). What "small change" have Marie and Emil spent? When? As beautiful as this metaphorical language is, it is also economic language, in a novel that has been greatly concerned with economic matters—mortgages, loans, and interest. How do the "economics" of Marie and Emil's relationship relate to economics more generally in the novel? What economic issues have influenced the relationship between Alexandra and Carl?

accompany the bishop to the French Church. Thus, although Emil is a Protestant, not a Catholic, he spends this Sunday surrounded by Catholic ritual at Marie's church—but Marie is inexplicably absent. Here, listening to the hymn "Ave Maria," he feels "a kind of rapture in which he could love forever without faltering and without sin"—similar to the feeling Marie herself attains at the end of the previous chapter. Still, he must see Marie, and he races past the "brown hole" of Amedee's grave, without horror: "The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth" (149). Compare this passage to the description of Alexandra at the end of Part I, feeling that "her heart were hiding down there, somewhere" in the earth (41). How are their feelings toward the earth similar or different? As Emil rides like an arrow "his life poured itself out along the road before him" (150). The language recalls the description of young Frank Shabata himself, in love with Marie: "Any one could see, with half an eye, that his proud heart was bleeding for somebody" (85). Are there any similarities in the feelings of Emil and Frank toward Marie?

professional crime scene investigators: from the position of the bullets and trails of blood she pieces together a physical and emotional account of Emil's and Marie's final moments. But this is "only half the story." The other half is suggested by "two white butterflies... fluttering in and out among the interlacing shadows; diving and soaring, now close together , now far apart"; and by "the last wild roses of the year open[ing] their hearts to die." What "other half" of Emil and Marie's story do these natural details suggest? Ivar adds a third perspective on the scene—a religious one: "Sin and death for the young ones!" (157).
　

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the dead: "After once you get cold clear through, the feeling of the rain on you is sweet. It seems to bring back feelings you had when you were a baby. It carries you back into the dark, before you were born; you can't see things, but they come to you, somehow, and you know them and aren't afraid of them. Maybe it's like that with the dead. If they feel anything at all, it's the old things, before they were born, that comfort people like the feeling of their own bed does when they are little." Ivar's correction of Alexandra—that "[t]he dead are in Paradise"—and his private belief that Emil the sinner is not in Paradise , serve to contrast his Biblical fundamentalist convictions with Alexandra's view of the earth as redemptive (164). This view of death as part of an organic cycle, reminiscent of Whitman's poetry, is further developed in the last line of the novel: "Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!" (180).

That night, Alexandra has again the dream about the strong man carrying her, but this time she sees the man more clearly, sees his arm as "the arm of the mightiest of all lovers. She knew at last for whom it was she had waited, and where he would carry her. That, she told herself, was very well" (165). Who is this man, and where does Alexandra expect to be carried?

Carl. Why? She reflects that Carl is a better match for Alaska than the Divide because dreamers belong on the frontier—thus identifying Carl as a dreamer and the Divide as no longer the frontier. Carl understands the love between Emil and Marie, and says they met their fate because they "were both the best you had here" (178). Note that his memory of Emil and Marie near the pond the previous year as "young and charming and full of grace" does not correspond to his actual experience (177). At the time, he felt "unreasonably mournful to find two young things abroad in the pasture" (76). What does this discrepancy say about the nature of memories, and about Carl?

Alexandra talks about her own memory: returning to the Divide from Lincoln reminded her of when "I drove back with Emil from the river that time"—that moment when she first responded to the land with her heart (178). When Carl says Alexandra belongs to the land, he seems to accept that she will never really belong to him. Alexandra even alludes to her dream about the strong man carrying her, saying she will tell Carl about it after they are married. How is Carl's relationship with Alexandra different from the relationships of Emil and Frank to Marie? How is Cather challenging the convention of romantic novels that end with the heroine's marriage? Alexandra recalls Carl's remark that the same story writes itself over, and adds, "[o]nly it is we who write it, with the best that we have" (179). Why is this clarification important? The land, Alexandra says, belongs to the future. How is this vision different from her earlier focus on Emil as the purpose of her work?

Although Alexandra belongs to the land in a mythical sense, it doesn't satisfy her everyday human needs. Her final words in the novel are: "I have been very lonely, Carl" (180). Loneliness—a feeling that Carl and Alexandra have always shared with the land—will be overcome by their marriage, with the understanding that the land is always waiting to receive Alexandra's heart "into its bosom" (180).

　

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