“‘Direction? … There was no direction. The prairie stretched to the end of the world’. American Land and the Pioneer Woman”

The goal of this essay is to investigate the strategies that the immigrant woman Nell Connor adopts to survive on the American frontier in Josephine Donovan’s novel Black Soil, published in 1930. Donovan narrates the arrival around the 1870s, and the first years of life, of an Irish American Catholic family in the prairies of contemporary Sioux County, Iowa, near the border with South Dakota. The leading question of this reading is whether Nell Connor manages to transform the unknown space of a specific section of the American frontier into a place related to her self. Does Nell O’Connor manage to find an alternative or a mediating term between the two common ideological positions of the Western experience of wild nature, “the polluter” and “the ecology freak”? This analysis of the novel follows the perspective adopted by Annette Kolodny in her The Land Before Her.