In Part 1, Chapter 1, the narrator introduces the town of Hanover by personifying it:
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
The town itself does not have a literal personality or volition, but this phrasing emphasizes one of the novel's central conflicts—the conflict between the immigrants and nature. Hanover is the collection of human structures and institutions the European immigrants have built on the "windy Nebraska tableland." The idea that the wind is all but blowing the town away immediately implies that the town's continued existence chafes against the laws of nature. Human institutions and structures, according to the narrator, are not supposed to survive here for long. Meanwhile, the idea that the town is "trying not to be blown away" suggests collective effort on the immigrants' part to stay put. They are working together, as a town, to resist the wind that is trying to scatter them.
By the beginning of the novel's second part, many of the immigrants have been scattered. Alexandra is one of the few people who has held fast to the tableland. The others who have stayed seem in large part to owe their footing to her. The personification at the opening of the novel thus emphasizes Alexandra's incredible strength in hanging onto the family land. It also establishes that the reader should not understand the immigrants who left as weak or lazy. They had the forces of nature working against them, and they hung on as long as they felt they could. The narrator thus sets the stage for Alexandra to become the novel's heroine not because she has qualities none of the other immigrants have, but rather because she has an exceptional amount of the qualities Cather admires in immigrants (strength, determination, self-sacrifice, and dedication to her labor).
