Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Alexandra's Dreams: "The Mightiest Of All Lovers" In Willa Cather's 'O Pioneers!', Maire Mullins

Great Plains Quarterly

In her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde writes, "There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling."l Lorde notes that women often deny the erotic within themselves because of the suspicion in which it is held by western society; she exhorts her readers to challenge the artificial dichotomy between the spiritual and the erotic and to recognize this connection in their lives. …