I always enjoy Ferber's light, charming descriptive style....and i did with this one as well. But it is a bit of a head-scratcher in that it was a constantly changing struggle as to who was good, and who was not. A very strong female character, Sabra drives the entire book.....and with a somewhat strong feminist bent......which i initially thought was the point....but oh my, does she have some unpleasant qualities that kept rearing their ugly heads throughout. And her dashing, adventurous bigger-than-life husband Yancey was always behaving badly........yet......when push came to shove, he often was an unexpected believer and supporter of the underdogs......almost always in conflict with his wife on that......thus, there are 2 main characters that are often hard to like. The story line is fascinating.....the opening up of the Oklahoma Territory and all the struggles that pioneers suffered through starting a town...and a community.....in the middle of desolate dry territory surrounded by Native Americans. There are several hard-to-read brutality moments based in fact....another learning experience. So, ultimately, we cheer Sabra on......she is unstoppable in her pursuits.....i think she ultimately is the hero.....but boy did she make it hard getting there. Be warned there is much bigotry as part of the story....but we also witness the forced dilution of such that comes with forced interactions between different people. I liked the book....but I was often conflicted.... ( )

I did not finish this novel, after getting about halfway through, so it is possible some of my objections were resolved by the end. I'm not giving it any stars for that reason.

The challenge of reading older novels is that the attitudes embedded in the text, while probably an accurate reflection of the feelings current at the time, can be hard to swallow. Usually I can gloss over the things which might be found to be offensive today, but not always. That was the case with Cimarron.

I appreciated the skill which Ferber drew the character of Sabra Cravat, who begins as a sheltered Southern belle and must rise the the many challenges she faces as a new settler in the Oklahoma territory. Her husband, Yancey, although embodying many of the heroic masculine qualities valued at that time (including a very unfashionable sympathy toward the Native Americans), lacks staying power, and it is up to Sabra to keep their life and family on the rails.

What bothered me most about the novel was the embedded racism toward African Americans, especially in the portrayal of Isaiah, a black boy who accompanies the Cravat family on their journey. It's a given that Sabra is going to be racist because of her heritage, so, although a flaw, it is an understandable part of her character. She also is bigoted toward Native Americans, again understandable, but Ferber takes care to balance Sabra's attitudes toward Indians with Yancey's opposing views. However, no such balance is struck regarding blacks.

Ferber's portrayal of the Cravat's black servant child Isaiah is almost cartoonish. Although emancipated, he seems content, even happy, to remain a slavish servant. Ferber goes so far as to state his value to the family, how important he is to their newspaper business and the smooth functioning of the family as he serves as laborer, babysitter, messenger, and news-gatherer. Sabra is said to love Isaiah, she trusts him implicitly, and yet he sleeps in a kennel in the yard like a dog and wears cast-off clothing, while the Cravats dress in finery. He is mistreated by the cowboys in town as they shoot at his feet to make him dance, and this episode is treated as comedic by Ferber, rather than traumatic. Ferber also compares Isaiah to a dog, or a monkey, or a child (which he is, but the other children in the novel are not denigrated by being described as such). Ferber never acknowledges that this child is an actual person who is subjected to nearly constant trauma -- at least, not in the portion of the novel that I read.

So although there were things to like about the novel, the glaring omission of Isaiah's humanity bothered me enough that I eventually decided to stop reading.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2899947.html

Cimarron is a really good book, a feminist text (the words "feminist" and "feminism" are actually used) whose guts were torn out of it by Hollywood. The central character of the novel is Sabra Cravat, daughter of a Southern family who moved to Kansas after the Civil War; having married Yancey at a very young age, she is swept off to Oklahoma by him. She breaks away from the stereotypes of her Southern parents, and gets over many of her own hangups, to build a new version of society in the town of Osage, to the point where she herself is elected to Congress. Cimarron was the best-selling novel in America in 1930, and the film's popularity must surely have been a reward for its insipid reflection of the popular original text. I was struck that the opening titles featured the characters and actors playing each, which looked like an assumption that many viewers would already be familiar with them.

However, we are a long way from intersectionality, and the book is still pretty racist, if not quite as racist as the film. There is still only one named black character (who suffers an even more horrible end than his screen version), though it's also clear that there are lots of others in the town. While Sabra's view of the Indians is pretty bigoted, the unreliable Yancey is totally on their side, and preaches to her frequently about the disgrace of the Trail of Tears and the awful things that white men have done; this is somehow dropped from the film. (Also worth noting that the Vice-President of the United States at the time the film was made was actually descended from the Osage tribe, and remains the only Native American to have served at the top of the executive branch.) The one Jewish character is sympathetically treated in both book and film, but the nasty anti-Semitism of the baddies in the book doesn't make it to the screen.

The feminism of the book is completely erased by the film, in that Yancey is given much more screen time and better lines (though his defence of the Indians is removed), and we are cut off from Sabra's internal dialogue, which is the loudest voice in the novel; it is replaced by Turner’s sighs and meaningful glances. The sub-plot with the sex workers in the book is explicitly a dialogue about different visions of womanhood in the new society that is being built, but becomes just a humorous set of vignettes in the film (apart from Yancey's courtroom defence of Dixie Lee, which in fairness is actually done better on screen than on the page). I'm not especially well versed in the early twentieth century history of American feminism, but it seemed clear to me that the makers of a Hollywood blockbuster did not feel able to reflect the feminism of their source text.

I enjoyed the book much more than I had expected to, and the film's success was surely in large part a homage to the work it was based on. ( )

I liked the land rush episode. It occurs early in the book. What follows is as effective as Lunestra, but with a much lower incidence of viral infection, dry mouth, dizziness, hallucinations, infection, rash, and unpleasant taste; although I did experience the latter, to be honest. ( )

Restless Yancey Cravat, a pioneer newspaper editor and lawyer, settles in Osage, a muddy town thrown together overnight when the Oklahoma territory opens in 1889. To this place he brings his wife Sabra, a woman both conventional and well-bred.

Against all odds, Sabra develops a brilliant business sense. She makes a success of the newspaper, a success that ultimately leads her to Congress. Through Sabra's eyes we see the violent frontier collide with resentful Indians, the sodbusters tame the prairie, and the sudden fortune of a lucky few.