My Ántonia Read Along: Book II, Chapters 6-10
The girls I knew were always helping to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten. One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors,—usually of like nationality,—and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.
I’ve been a little windy with my personal notes on My Ántonia, so I thought I’d focus more on questions this week. Though you’ll see that I can’t resist folding some of those private associations into the chapter-by-chapter prompts below.
I’d love to hear how your own reading experience is unfolding!
This might also be a good chance to amplify the Winter 2018 issue of the Willa Cather Review, which includes many stories from people with family connections to the novel.
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.
Book II
Chapter 6
Some lovely notes on winter here, and the severity of it on the plains. Jim’s character reminds me that idealism often has this dark side — what transcends must typically come down, and farther down than what manages a more even keel.
What does Ántonia’s tale of the tramp add to the novel? I’ve always thought it odd that she’d want to repeat a story like that after her father’s own suicide, and with no hint of lingering trauma.
Samuel Woodworth’s “The Old Oaken Bucket” was published in 1817 and later set to music. There are many public recordings of it online, including Bing Crosby’s version below. What is the effect of this allusion on My Ántonia, which we know is Jim’s recollection of his childhood? What does it add to the tramp story?
I’m mindful of Ántonia herself as a kind of ballast against despair. Jim captures the idea well in his comparison of her to Mrs. Harling: “Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it.”
Chapter 7
How does Jim know Samson d’Arnault’s history so thoroughly? Should we trust this history?
Cather’s characterization of d’Arnault rings so harshly to the ear now that it’s hard to imagine that her language was once thought unremarkable. This is instructive in its own way as a reminder of how deeply embedded racism was in earlier generations and how new our current parlance about race is. I find myself of many minds about these things. I wonder what phrases I might be using now without any awareness of how they might sound fifty or a hundred years hence,1 but I also recognize that Cather’s dehumanizing language breaks the spell that much of this narrative casts. It’s been an ongoing problem in Cather Studies — how to encourage more diversity among the next generation of scholars, while recognizing how inhospitable many of her texts are to people of color.
I’m not sure I’ve found a way to reconcile the sentimental attachment I have to this narrative as a celebration of my family’s immigrant history with the recognition that Cather hides many things, including David Blight’s reminder that slavery was not outlawed in Western states like Nebraska for explicitly moral reasons, but moreso because those territories did not want the plantation economy to dominate the West. They wanted a chance for the “little guy” to succeed, which often meant white immigrants like my great great grandfather. Just as Jim feels nostalgic for things he’s never seen, like bison, that fit his fantasy about the West, so he is apt to ignore or omit histories that threaten his sentimental mood.
How do you reconcile these things, or does reading My Ántonia now require us to hold opposing histories in tension?2
Chapter 8
Jim’s melancholy notes on winter are long forgotten by the time the Vannis set up their dancing tent in Red Cloud. It’s hard to remember how scandalous recreational dancing once was in conservative communities.3 And so there is an interesting tension between the fact of the tent itself and the Vannis keeping “exemplary order,” always closing at precisely the hour that the City Council had decreed.
What do you think of the tent as a social space? Does it liberate the hired girls from their roles as laborers and second-class citizens in Red Cloud? Or does it cast girls like Lena and Ántonia only further to the margin as playthings, good for a waltz or two, but no more?
Chapter 9
What reflections about class and status in America today does this chapter spark for you?
Jim’s commentary on the social structure of Red Cloud, and how immigrant families often got ahead faster because they were less bound to outdated ideas about class, seems like an important companion to the questions about race in Chapter 7.
I’m reminded here of recent writing by
about wealth gaps in America. One of America’s core myths is its melting pot, which is supposedly less class-bound than Europe. But has that ever really been true? I’ve been listening to Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise on my road bike, and I confess I might abandon it because it feels too close to Succession (which pushed all of the wrong buttons with me). Maybe we are drifting back toward a more class-based view of status. Jim’s observation that “the respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth” feels of a piece with Operation Varsity Blues and everything it reveals about how parents leverage wealth for their children’s advantage.There may also be an ironic echo of our current time in Jim’s recognition that many second generation immigrants became “better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.” I’m thinking of this alongside young people considering trades instead of college. My cousin, the former Marine, has always vastly outstripped my earnings. Many of his jobs take him deep into oil country, where he makes more than some college presidents while packing his lip full of Copenhagen snuff. My Ph.D. grants me entry into different circles, but the notion of class as defined by wealth seems turned on its head. Might there be some American families who will be worse off for sending their kids to college, ironic echoes of those Pennsylvanians and Virginians in Nebraska who refused to send their children into service no matter how dire their straits?
Chapter 10
Cather is not known for her tightly woven plots, but she does a fine job of pushing Ántonia’s independence toward a turning point in this chapter. I have a lot of thoughts on the intersecting tensions here — Ántonia’s innate defiance and strength, the patriarchal strictures in the Harling home, the shadowy menace that Wick Cutter represents (another kind of patriarchal threat). But I’d rather hear what you make of this chapter.
Put another way, as a father to daughters, I’m always thinking about how to prepare them for the Harry Paines of the world, knowing that some of that isn’t really my job anymore, that the days of the father as Guardian are long gone. And yet there are equivalents to the dancing pavilion in every college town, the illusion of ultimate freedom counterposed against The Hunting Ground. Needless to say, Ántonia’s brother Ambrosch isn’t fending off unwanted kisses or worse...
Willa Cather Read Along with Joshua Doležal
Upcoming Reading Schedule
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)
It’s not just politically charged language that looks different from a distance. It would be nigh impossible to write a sketch about why my children call me “Dude” or “Mate” or substitute “Biscuits!” for stronger language that would hold up for more than ten years. It all goes back to show Bluey, but how would a reader a hundred years from now understand all that? Cather typically avoids these limitations in her dialogue, which is not nearly as slangy as Sinclair Lewis’s now cringe-worthy fiction. But even literary giants have their limitations, and Cather’s are on full display here.
Michael Gorman’s “Jim Burden and the White Man’s Burden: My Ántonia and Empire” wrestles with some of these questions.
The dancing pavilion looks very much like a Maypole, which the New England Puritans thought idolatrous.
I loved the conviviality and youthful innocence of the scenes in the tent. Your question provokes deeper thought about the social dynamic, and my sense is -- it depends on who you ask. The girls may have felt liberated but not fully aware of how they were seen. Or they refused to acknowledge it - which is a more intriguing idea. (As for dancing in conservative communities, I went to college with a woman who was raised in the Mennonite community in Virginia. She said her clever parents cautioned her against premarital sex because it might lead to dancing. 😂 )
On the subject of class - these chapters reminded me of my Midwestern grandmother, who had Bohemian blood on her mother's side. She was such a judgmental snob about class; for her the measures were higher education and money. She was hyper-aware of everyone's status and herself a social climber. The architecture school where I teach has many first-generation students. Often they or their parents are from Central or South America. They work hard, both at school and in jobs, and they do excellent work. They stand out for their passion to succeed and willingness to try new things.
I was so angry with the way the Harlings handled Harry Paine's assault of Antonia, for all the predictable reasons. Blaming women for men's predation is still rampant today, sadly. This chapter serves as a reminder of that, but in a literary sense I admire how Antonia's actions following their egregious gaslighting further distinguish her character. (Knowing what's coming, both at the Cutter's and later, I admire her independence and strength all the more. Her light will never diminish.)
I listened to these chapters on a long run along the banks of the Charles River in Boston, so I keep seeing in my mind where I was on that run as I reread these passages.
I was particularly struck by the blind piano player. Such an interesting character to introduce. And makes me think much of what Cather is writing about is caste. Cather the narrator identifies him as mulatto but shows the characters treating him in a subservient position to which he plays their foil. Perhaps because I'm reading Everett Percival's new novel JAMES, I latched onto this character as serving an interesting purpose in the story. The way music disinhibits humans and dance moves people into new relationships to themselves and others -- the dance floor as melting pot. While trying desperately to fit in, there is real resistance to the assimilation of new American customs. This entire section on life in Black Hawk paints a portrait of the double-bind of gender within a caste system.