My Ántonia Read Along: Book I, Chapters 6-12

Painting by Paul Powis. From the Willa Cather Review.

Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda, scarcely above a whisper. He was telling a long story, and as he went on, Ántonia took my hand under the table and held it tight. She leaned forward and strained her ears to hear him. He grew more and more excited, and kept pointing all around his bed, as if there were things there and he wanted Mr. Shimerda to see them. "It's wolves, Jimmy," Ántonia whispered. "It's awful, what he says!"

In Chapter 5, we learn that the Russian bachelors Peter and Pavel fled their homeland because of a “great trouble.” In Chapter 8, Cather reveals how they narrowly escaped a wolf attack in the Russian countryside — not through heroics, but by sacrificing the very bride and groom who had included them in their wedding party. 

The story of the wolf attack offers a glimpse of how deeply one can dive into Cather’s historical sources. As Michela Schulthies explains in a 2015 essay, Cather likely drew from multiple sources for this harrowing tale.¹ 

First there is the 1911 report in The New York Times (a viral story for its time, picked up by many newspapers) about a wolf attack on a bridal party in Russia with just two survivors. The parallels to Cather’s version are uncanny. 

Screenshot from The New York Times archive

Schulthies explains that Cather might also have drawn inspiration from an 1887 painting by Paul Powis (pictured above), which hung in a Red Cloud family’s drawing room. Powis appears to have copied Adolf Shreyer’s painting “The Pursuit” (below).

Adolf Shreyer, “The Pursuit.” From ipaintings.com.

Cather mimics her own creative process by passing the story to us thirdhand. First we witness Pavel’s dying confession with only the vaguest sense of the story he tells, since he gives his confession to Mr. Shimerda in Russian. “It’s wolves, Jimmy!…It’s awful, what he says!” Then Ántonia retells the story to Jim on the wagon ride home, filling in gaps for days afterward. The reader is held at arm’s length from this retelling, as well. Finally Jim offers us a distilled version from all of these fragments: the story within a story that brings the chapter to a close.² 

Susan Rosowski links this scene to Jim’s snake killing to illustrate Cather’s Romantic influences. Cather reminds us, after Wordsworth, that Nature evokes both “beauty and fear.” And just as “the snake in Mrs. Shimerda’s garden represents the oldest Evil, so the story does our most basic fears.” 

Sue (as I knew her) offers as fine a close reading of the episode as I’ve seen:

As is life within a wilderness or light within darkness, sound which breaks silence is dramatic; it is a principle Cather uses throughout this episode. Pavel begins his story in a whisper which grows to a raging cry, cut short by convulsive coughing, then by sleep. Ántonia’s translation to Jim similarly builds from the merriment of the wedding guests to the shrieks of people and screams of horses attacked by wolves, then stops short, for Pavel could remember nothing of throwing over the bride and groom. When this silence too is broken by another sound, the reader expects still other wolves to be pursuing the last members of the wedding party, then realizes these are monastery bells in Peter and Pavel’s village calling people to early prayer. Like the knocking on the gate in Macbeth, the bells signal a more profound horror than any thus far realized — a reentry of the ordinary world from which Peter and Pavel will henceforth be outcasts.³

Sue has me thinking about craft lessons on dynamics, tone, and dramatic reversals for those of us who read Cather as writers, hoping to incorporate a little of her magic into our own work.

Now I’d love to hear how Chapters 6-12 speak to you. As always, I’ll offer a few questions below to prime the pump.

We’ll finish Book I for next week: Chapters 13-19. You can find the full reading schedule at the end of this post or download a PDF here.

Chapter 6

What effect does Jim’s allusion to Exodus 3:2 have on his description of the prairie as “like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed”? And what are we to make of Cather’s combination of this biblical allusion with a reference to Greek mythology in the following lines? Namely: “That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death — heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.”

For all of his myth-making and rhapsodic descriptions, Jim is also attuned to the harsher realities of frontier life, such as the depression he observes in Mr. Shimerda. As we watch Cather’s development of the Shimerda family, we might consider whether she reinforces the American trope of self-reliance and rugged individualism in contrast to more sensitive types, like Mr. Shimerda, or whether she offers a more sympathetic view of those who can’t so easily shed their Old World affinities? 

Chapter 7

Cather dropped hints about snakes in Chapters 2 and 4, building up to Jim’s dramatic confrontation with an enormous rattler. This is just good storytelling, teasing the scene before it drops, but I’m curious what it reveals to you about Jim’s character, particularly his penchant for romanticizing the past. What makes you trust or distrust his reconstruction of this memory? How does the episode deepen his relationship with Ántonia? And how literally are we to read the last line of this chapter: “I had killed a big snake — I was now a big fellow”?

Jim’s comparison of the snake to the “ancient, eldest Evil,” and Otto’s remark that the snake “could stand right up and talk to you” both allude to the serpent in Genesis. What might this biblical reference add to the narrative? Do you hear other biblical echoes in this section?

Chapter 8

Now that I am coaching writers as they plan and draft their book manuscripts, I am more attuned to certain elements of Cather’s craft. Just as she prepared us for Peter and Pavel’s dark past before developing it in this chapter, so she introduces a nefarious character, Wick Cutter, who will figure prominently into Book II. This is an honest question for the Cather scholars among us. Do we have a sense of where/how Cather learned these techniques, other than by imitating writers she admired? 

We don’t need the historical research I reference above to enjoy the mesmerizing tale that Cather tells in this chapter, yet it’s hard to resist the trail of crumbs once we begin to follow it. What do these layers of historical sources, and a clearer picture of how Cather synthesized them, add to your appreciation of My Ántonia?

Chapter 9

One of the perennial challenges in Cather scholarship is framing her view of race. Certainly passages like the opening of this chapter, which reinforces the Myth of the Vanishing Indian, have made Cather’s work less inviting to readers and scholars of color. A generous interpretation of Jim’s anecdote about the medicine wheel is that he offers a child’s view. Like Jim, I grew up in the homeland of the Kootenai people without learning anything about their history, stories, or culture. Even now I know less about the Kootenai — who have few literary champions — than I do about the Sioux, Navajo, or Iroquois. But the older Jim who is telling us this story (the older Cather speaking through Jim’s character) knows that indigenous people had not disappeared from the Nebraska frontier at the time the story is set. How do you make sense of this absence in My Ántonia?

No matter how much Jim might fancy himself a cowboy, we know from the introduction that he becomes a wealthy professional. So I wonder what we are to make of the quaint and rather tame representation of cowboy culture that we get from Otto and Jake. For instance, “For I Am a Cowboy and Know I’ve Done Wrong” is the refrain in “The Streets of Laredo,” a song that I’ve always associated with Johnny Cash. But My Ántonia is a far cry from Owen Wister’s The Virginian or other Westerns. What do you think these tidbits of Western lore add to the novel? A dash of local color? A sentimental gloss on Jim’s childhood that explain his undimmed youthfulness later in life, when he can still “lose himself in those big Western dreams”?

Chapter 10

My Ántonia earned Cather a reputation as a champion of Czech immigrants. Indeed, I responded powerfully to echoes of my own family history when I first read the book. But the glimpse we get of the Shimerda family in this chapter is painful. As one of my students pointed out to me, Cather reinforces stereotypes about Eastern Europeans nearly as much in My Ántonia as she rewrites them. There is an air of superiority in Josiah and Emmaline Burden that speaks to a hierarchy among European immigrants and prejudices between groups that we would now think of as equally white. At least, that is what I see in Grandmother Burden’s acts of charity and her suspicion of Mrs. Shimerda’s dried mushrooms, which were a great delicacy. How does this chapter land with you?

A small stylistic question. Why does Chapter 10 end with a long ellipsis? Cather ends a rhapsodic passage in Chapter 2 with a conventional ellipsis, comparing the “shaggy grass” to a “loose hide,” beneath which “herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping…” One might say that there is a lyrical or wistful effect to the passage in Chapter 2, but I’m not sure that Chapter 10 is meant to end with the same dreamy effect. Any theories about why Cather made that choice or what aesthetic effect the long string of dots has on the end of Chapter 10?

Chapter 11

I keep a craft table for the kids, so I enjoyed this glimpse of holiday scrapbooking and decorating. I’m not sure whether to take Cather’s reference to the Napoleon lithograph (a rather grim subject for Jim’s frontispiece) as dry humor? Certainly she was fond of Napoleon, which may have been reason enough. 

“Napoleon Announces to Josephine…” From MeisterDrucke

In this country Christmas scene, shut off from town by snowdrifts, I hear echoes of Chapter 1, when the train depot fell away and Jim journeyed deeper into the countryside. Only the obliterating strangeness of the place has been replaced, firmly, with these memories of belonging. Even the driftless Otto and Jake are anchored by the festive Christmas tree. This scene is also a good reminder that the novel is a story of feeling, of how Jim sees his past through his affection for episodes like this one.

Chapter 12

Christmas morning centers on Mr. Shimerda’s visit, and the awkwardness of Grandmother Burden’s visit to the Shimerda’s cave is replaced by the generosity that we seek during the holidays. I’m struck by how the scene illustrates the more porous boundaries between faith traditions on the frontier, how rigid lines between Protestantism, Catholicism, and paganism are sometimes softened in these hybrid communities. In Chapter 1, Jim does not say his prayers — he feels that, in this new place, “what would be would be.” I’m not sure there is a doctrinal basis for Josiah Burden’s declaration that “the prayers of all good people are good,” but it captures a feeling that Cather carried with her for many years, an impression of her hometown as an inclusive place. We might watch for other moments like this, where differences that might be accentuated in other contexts are blunted — or exceptions, where Cather’s dream of cultural harmony is broken? 

I’m wondering now if the kind of nostalgia that Jim feels for the past might also be a form of forgetting, much as his grandfather “Protestantizes” Mr. Shimerda’s nearly-idolatrous prayer before the tree. 

Jim’s remark about Mr. Shimerda’s “deep-seeing eyes” which seem to anticipate his future and the prevailing sentimentalism of this chapter recall Cather’s epigraph from Virgil at the opening of the novel: “Optima dies…prima fugit” (“The best days are the first to flee”). 

If you’ve read to the end of this post, I’d be grateful for your thoughts on a more ambitious project: reading all 12 of Willa Cather’s novels in a year. I’m still thinking through logistics and pricing, but a lot will depend on how many readers would be willing to commit to the project. If you have been following this series and would be interested in a more ambitious challenge, please let me know in the brief survey below.

---

Willa Cather Read Along with Joshua Doležal

My Ántonia Reading Schedule

• April 19: Book I, Chapters 13-19

• April 26: Book II, Chapters 1-5

• May 3: Book II, Chapters 6-10

• May 10: Book II, Chapters 11-15

• May 17: Book III (all four chapters)

• May 24: Book IV (all four chapters)

• May 31: Book V (all three chapters)

1. Schulthies, Michela. “‘Never at an End’: The Search for Sources of Cather’s Wolves Story,” The Willa Cather Review, vol. 58, no. 1, 2015, pp. 2-8.

2. This chapter is as good an illustration as any of how Cather defied formulaic plots in her fiction. Her texts are more driven by images and anecdotes than by traditional narrative arcs. Cather is so good at keeping us in the waking dream of reading that we forget, don’t we, that Jim’s simplified version of Pavel’s story has an additional layer of unreliability, as Jim reconstructs it (dialogue and all) entirely from memory decades after he first heard it secondhand from Ántonia. Thank goodness Cather did not submit her manuscripts to fiction writing workshops. Someone would have pounced on this passage as illogical or impossibly constructed. Yet it works, doesn’t it?

3. Rosowski, Susan. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism, U of Nebraska P, 1986.