My Ántonia Read Along: Book II, Chapters 1-5
Before I knew Lena, I thought of her as something wild, that always lived on the prairie, because I had never seen her under a roof. Her yellow hair was burned to a ruddy thatch on her head; but her legs and arms, curiously enough, in spite of constant exposure to the sun, kept a miraculous whiteness which somehow made her seem more undressed than other girls who went scantily clad.
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I’ll return to Lena Lingard in the questions below, but for now I’d like to think a little about the Burden family’s move to Black Hawk. Cather embeds a miniature history lesson here. What occurs within the span of Jim’s childhood has more typically played out between generations in American families.
Both sets of forebears on my paternal grandmother’s side – the Boomers and the Rhoadeses – had frontier ties. George and Anna Boomer homesteaded near what is now Killdeer, North Dakota. Samuel and Hulda Rhoades were rodeo people (Sam is now enshrined in the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame).
Both families encouraged their children to go to school, so my great grandfather, Roy Boomer, and great grandmother, Eyra Rhoades, became college graduates.1 By default, this made Roy and Eyra town people. Roy ran a profitable John Deere dealership in Killdeer. After she divorced Roy (she would be married twice more), Eyra wrote poetry and helped establish a Thespian club in Libby, Montana.
Because of their unplanned pregnancy and elopement, neither of my grandparents on my father’s side went to college. In fact, my Grandma Peggy dropped out of high school at age 16. That is a separate story, and part of the reason I grew up in a blue collar family. But I want to focus on an irony that runs through Cather’s writing about Nebraska and that remains unresolved in American mythology about the frontier, which is that pioneer life was self-defeating. Successful pioneers made themselves obsolete.
If you broke the prairie, “proved up” on your acres, and graduated from the sod dugout to the farmhouse, you’d keep right on trying to improve yourself by hiring a rural schoolteacher — or, as the Burdens do, seeking social mobility for your children in town. But we are forever trying to recover something we think we’ve lost on those homesteads. PBS even encourages this at times with reality shows like Frontier House. But the conclusion is the same: the successful pioneer sends their kids to school, where success is never defined by returning to the farm. Country kids who go on to “better” things recognize that the visceral connection with rural places will haunt them for the rest of their lives. This pain feeds the myth of the frontier and of pioneer life as more pure — because both seem, in hindsight, to offer antidotes to modernity’s ills.
But all you’d find, if you could really turn back the clock, would be the same pressure to move your kids to town. The paradox makes both my head and my heart hurt.
I’ve been following the news about rural kids opting out of college because of homesickness and financial risk. Elite universities are trying to recruit them now, wising up to the enormous pool of talent hidden in the American countryside. This is presumably the path by which Jim Burden becomes wealthy enough to mentor other enterprising young people in his Western travels. Jim’s path has long been the standard for success in America. It was also my path. Even if I didn’t end up at Yale or at an apartment on Park Avenue, opportunity has always led away from my roots.2
I’m of two minds about the current trends. Maybe it’s a good thing that more young people are rejecting the premise of higher education, refusing to “move into town” in that respect, as Jim and his family do. Some of my classmates graduated from the University of Montana and have built fine lives for themselves in my native Troy. On the other hand, I know that ultimate freedom means the ability to choose, and young people who shut the door on education may never get those choices back. Education still is the gateway to positions of influence, to the judgeships that lead to higher office, to policy making roles in government, to careers in medicine, and more.
Abe Lincoln brought rural wisdom into the Oval Office. We need people like Jim Burden in the boardroom and on the Supreme Court. But embracing those opportunities often means leaving a piece of your heart on the prairie or up in the mountains. As Jim says, “Our own house looked down over the town, and from our upstairs windows we could see the winding line of the river bluffs, two miles south of us. That river was to be my compensation for the lost freedom of the farming country.”
Maybe we just can’t have it both ways? Cather tried, though. Every line of My Ántonia was written more than a thousand miles from her Nebraska home.
Now I’d love to hear how Chapters 1-5 in Book II speak to you. I offer a few questions below for each chapter. But I might just as easily pose the general question that my mentor, Sue, often did: What is going on here?
Book II
Chapter 1
Jake and Otto disappear from the story here, swallowed up by the “wild West.” This is an uncommon narrative strategy. Conventional wisdom follows Chekhov’s Gun, which suggests that if you place a loaded gun onstage in Act I, it ought to go off in Act V. Or vice versa – don’t spring a loaded gun on the audience in Act V if you haven’t prepared them by planting it there early on. From a narrative standpoint, Cather might as well have killed Jake and Otto off once they stop returning the Burdens’ letters. So we might reasonably wonder: what purpose did they serve in Book I, and why can’t they go on serving a purpose throughout the rest of the book?
Chapter 2
Mrs. Harling might well be the answer to one of my earlier questions about why Cather didn’t write conventional Westerns. It is because as enamored as she was of the outdoors, Cather also loved domestic spaces. And just as Ántonia moves fluidly between the fields and Grandmother Burden’s kitchen near the end of Book I, so Cather encourages us to reject the field/hearth binary. She does this in part by making Mrs. Harling the head of the household, not the Angel of the Hearth. I’m not sure that “masculine” is the right word for Mrs. Harling, but she is certainly vigorous and authoritative – more modern than Victorian in that way, wouldn’t you say?
Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-looking, like her house. Every inch of her was charged with an energy that made itself felt the moment she entered a room. Her face was rosy and solid, with bright, twinkling eyes and a stubborn little chin. She was quick to anger, quick to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul. How well I remember her laugh; it had in it the same sudden recognition that flashed into her eyes, was a burst of humor, short and intelligent. Her rapid footsteps shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever she came. She could not be negative or perfunctory about anything. Her enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all the every-day occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary, at the Harlings'. Preserving-time was a prolonged festival, and house-cleaning was like a revolution. When Mrs. Harling made garden that spring, we could feel the stir of her undertaking through the willow hedge that separated our place from hers.
Francis Harling is another interesting character who reminds me of Tommy in Cather’s earlier short story, “Tommy, the Unsentimental.” For all of her Romantic impulses, Cather had a deeply practical side, and she often shows us with characters like these that imagination can be a powerful force in business. I love the fact that Frances’s empathy strengthens her business dealings:
She knew every farmer for miles about; how much land he had under cultivation, how many cattle he was feeding, what his liabilities were. Her interest in these people was more than a business interest. She carried them all in her mind as if they were characters in a book or a play.
How do you feel about Ántonia being rescued from Ambrosch’s control by the Harlings? There’s a lot of talk in this chapter about how pretty she is, but that typical emphasis on marriageability stands in stark contrast to Frances Harling’s character, does it not? I wonder if there might be more to Mrs. Harling’s statement, “I can bring something out of that girl,” than its face value?
Chapter 3
This is the first time I’ve read My Ántonia as a single father, and I’m thinking about what we would now call invisible labor. Whatever freedom Ántonia might find in her new role, she’s also reduced to trying to please Charley Harling. Mrs. Harling rules the roost when her husband is away, but when he’s home, she places his needs above everyone else’s. There is a real tension between these realities and the overall happiness of this section.
Maybe Cather herself is painting too rosy a picture of the good old days, a view that she could afford, having become a professional woman herself. Would she feel the same if she’d become Mrs. Harling instead of Willa Cather? So I’m not sure how much I trust the mood of this chapter. I have to remind myself that it’s filtered through Jim and is therefore unreliable. How do you feel while reading this chapter, and where do you find yourself interrogating those feelings?
Chapter 4
Lena Lingard is, in some ways, an answer to my previous question (as we’ll see in later chapters). She represents the choice that many women faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between family and career — one that Sara Orne Jewett dramatizes in A Country Doctor.
In fact, many women now echo Lena’s line:
I don’t want to marry Nick, or any other man… I’ve seen a good deal of married life, and I don’t care for it. I want to be so I can help my mother and the children at home, and not have to ask lief of anybody.
I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to mention my friend Evelyn Funda’s fine essay on Cather’s partnership with W.T. Benda, a Polish illustrator she admired. We see one of his most memorable illustrations in his portrait of Lena Lingard. Evelyn explains that Benda’s illustrations resemble those of the Czech artist Mikoláš Aleš, whose drawings conjure powerful women in Czech folklore, such as Libuše, a female warrior and prophetess.
Evelyn writes that these sensual portrayals of farm women are empowering, not objectifying, and that Cather relished Benda’s illustration of Lena for this very reason. I’ll borrow some of Evelyn’s research here to illustrate the point:
Critics have discussed both Cather’s and Benda’s characterization of Lena in ways that particularly echo the sensuality of Aleš’s farm women: Jean Schwind writes that Benda’s Lena “fairly bursts from her scanty dress; the carefully delineated nipple pressing against her bodice is the most conspicuous” (66), and Blanche Gelfant notes how in Cather “Lena’s voluptuous aspects—her luminous glow of sexual arousal, her flesh bared by a short skirt, her soft sighs and kisses—are displayed against shocks and stubbles, a barren field where the reaping-hook has done its work” (65).3
Evelyn published her essay in 2010, before the ban on quoting Cather’s letters had been lifted (yes, there was such a ban for many years!), and so she could not quote Cather’s letter to her publisher, Ferris Greenslet, on March 7, 1918, in which they discuss illustrations for My Ántonia. But I can happily do so now. Here’s Cather to Greenslet:
I will send you three Benda drawings tomorrow; the two full figure ones, of Antonia and Lena Lingard--the latter fairly busting out of her clothes--I think extremely good. I wouldn't ask for better.4
You can read the original letter here:
I’ve always loved Lena’s backstory, with its built-in Norwegian humor (I guess even in 1918, they were telling Ole and Lena jokes). This, like Pavel’s recollection of the wolf attack, is passed to us as a story within a story. All the layers of translation are peeled away, so we can experience the story in distilled form. Lena’s history is an entertaining tale, gossip elevated to literature, with a miniature Freytag’s pyramid built into it. I love the way it resolves with Lena’s casual line, “It ain’t my prairie.” But I’m also mindful of how damaging rumors like this can be in rural communities. Ántonia is uncomfortable when Lena comes to visit precisely because she had been “kind of talked about, out there” in the country. But Lena seems immune to stigma and social norms. What gives her this power? And how much of Cather’s own path as a New Woman might we read into Lena’s character?
Chapter 5
Maybe I’m turning into an old sap, but Lena’s conversation with her brother Chris brings tears to my eyes. It recalls a women’s rights exhibit that I saw years ago at the Franklin Institute, namely, a Christmas stocking embroidered with the message, “Ask Santa to Bring a Vote for Mother.” Cather is so good at these personal touches, isn’t she? Of course Chris’s mother would like to be remembered as an actual person, as Berthe, and not merely as Mother. Wouldn’t we all?
How do you read the ending of this chapter, when our Lena, who seems to rise above every gendered obstacle, tears up after seeing Chris off in his wagon? Jim recalls,
As we walked together up the windy street, Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her woolen glove. ‘I get awful homesick for them, all the same," she murmured, as if she were answering some remembered reproach.’
Whose reproach?
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. 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
Upcoming Reading Schedule
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)
I always thought Roy was an only child, but I know from a cursory genealogy search that he had two siblings who both died in childhood. His sister, Ruth Inez, and brother, Clarence J, died within days of each other in April 1910. Ruth was 7 years old and Clarence was just 4. Ruth and Clarence are buried together in North Dakota. Presumably they died of smallpox, though I’d have to do additional research to be sure.
The echoes of the rural experience with immigrant stories is profound. I’ve often pondered this while watching Elemental for the umpteenth time with my kids. Ember feels trapped by her father’s shop and the expectation of taking it over. Opportunity for her lies in chic urban centers, not in the more sheltered ethnic community she knows. How do we reconcile these competing impulses to maximize our self-realization while recognizing that family roots and native places are fundamental to who we are?
Funda, Evelyn I. “Picturing Their Ántonia(s): Mikoláš Aleš and the Partnership of W. T. Benda and Willa Cather,” Cather Studies, vol. 8, 2010.
Letter by Willa Cather to Ferris Greenslet, 7 March 1918, https://cather.unl.edu/writings/letters/let0411.
Haven't had time to write about last week's reading because it inspired writing of my own related to many of the same issues and historic forces. The disappearance of the two characters at the end of Book I to me represented the disappearance of a way of life; cowboys go further west and they move to town. When Jim moves to town with his grandparents his social world expands as wide as the prairie. There is this tension that moves forward in time between country and city; rural and urban. She situates this tension in ways that reveal a form of American pastoralism.