My Ántonia Read Along, Book III, Chapters 1-4
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across the harvest field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and underneath it stood the mournful line: Optima dies . . . prima fugit.
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At the beginning of the chapter, Jim Burden struggles to focus on Virgil’s Georgics in his student apartment. Springtime beckons outside, so he shuts his window in an attempt to block out the “earthy wind.” But his thoughts keep wandering, and then he hears a knock at his door and is shocked to discover his friend Lena Lingard in the hallway. Lena and Jim chat for a bit, say goodbye with enough flirtation to ensure that they’ll meet again, and then Jim returns to his study refreshed.
Lena’s presence conjures up memories of home and of the hired girls who Jim thinks of as his real tribe. These feelings spark an epiphany about Virgil. “If there were no girls like them in the world,” Jim thinks, “there would be no poetry.”
He returns to the Georgics with his personal affections transposed over the page, almost as if he is reading a palimpsest of emotion, memory, and the written word. It’s not even a real memory that he sees, but the memory of his dream about Lena. Jim says, “It floated before me on the page like a picture, and underneath it stood the mournful line: Optima dies…prima fugit.”
Perhaps you had forgotten by this point that Optima dies…prima fugit (The best days are the first to flee) is also the epigraph to the novel. Cather brilliantly brings that thread home with Jim’s meditation on Virgil. But it’s the way that Jim reads Virgil through his personal experiences, and the way that those emotional associations allow Jim to unlock something new in Virgil’s text, that Cather captures so well.
To me, this illustrates the highest level of learning, what teachers call ownership. It’s like a religious experience: a conversion or an awakening. Virgil becomes Jim’s Virgil.
Yet Jim has been trained to distrust his instinctive approach to learning. He imagines that true scholars are dispassionate, capable of immersing themselves in “impersonal things.” This is the bent of academic standardization and assessment now, which tracks the supposedly objective benchmark or data point. It doesn’t matter if a teacher is passionate; it matters if their outcomes are in alignment with the rest of the department, if there is a developmental sequence to assignments, if this can all be funneled into software and processed for accreditors.
But I have taken a light hand with scholarship throughout this read along because I’ve been hoping that you might have an experience with Cather like Jim’s revelation about Virgil. My Ántonia has to become My My Ántonia for you to carry anything enduring away from it. And isn’t that true of all learning, from finance to history to athletic training?
Now I’d love to hear how Book III speaks to you. I offer a few questions below for each chapter. But I’d also love to hear your independent impressions.
Book III
Chapter 1
What do you make of Jim’s relationship with his mentor, Gaston Cleric? Jim is a romantic, so it is unsurprising that he idealizes his professor. But I forged personal friendships with many of my professors that continue to this day. One of my professors accompanied me at coffee house performances with the hammer dulcimer and tin whistle. I’ve reconnected with another who is now an occasional hiking companion.
Maybe this isn’t possible at big universities, but part of me thinks it should be. It’s the only way I knew to be a student, and it’s the only model that ever made sense to me as a teacher. In fact, I find that I cannot engage genuinely with my coaching clients without sharing something of my private life and appreciating them as actual friends, even if money changes hands. This isn’t supposed to be how professionalism works, and I suppose there are boundaries to keep in mind. But it’s an interesting question to consider in an age that urges us to embrace personal branding and platforms that bring professional work into our private spaces.
Chapter 2
I love the way this chapter opens with sensory detail. Cather illustrates beautifully how the mind is an advanced expression of the body and how our feelings, even the sensations that surround us, inevitably shape the meaning that we find in what we read or study. This is why sterile classrooms, with symmetrical seating and whitewashed walls are the worst environments for learning!
What do you think of Gaston Cleric’s idea about our “patria” being defined not by national or regional identity, but by the character of our home neighborhoods? In that sense, my patria is not the United States or even Montana, but the little corner of Montana that I know best. No matter where my path leads, I know that I have a source. But I’m also mindful that many don’t have an anchor like that, but are constantly moving between temporary dwelling places and the next uprooting. What a different sense of “patria” that must be.
Last week, we considered the sexual implications of Jim’s dream about Lena. What do you make of her flirtation with him near the end of this chapter, when she visits his rental in Lincoln?
Chapter 3
Here’s a lovely note on this chapter from Tracy Sanford Tucker, of The National Willa Cather Center:
One of the things I most enjoy about Book III is the scene in which Jim and Lena go to see Camille. We know that Cather saw it many times. In one of her reviews, Cather writes, "'Camille' is to the modern drama what 'Romeo and Juliet' is to the older; it is the test which mercilessly and unerringly divides talent from genius.”1 Her drama criticism frequently discusses who is playing Camille (and how well or how poorly) and who isn't playing Camille but should be.
There are other connections with Dumas's novel that are fun to think about: his use of the narrators versus Cather's; the idea shared between Dumas and Verdi in La Traviata, surrounding the idea of "a fallen woman" versus Cather's idea; class divisions in the novel and the play versus those in Cather's Black Hawk... So I like to pull at those strings and watch (or re-read) Camille every so often and see what catches.
In fact, Cather made quite a name for herself as a drama critic during her university years. One editor recalled that her reviews were so harsh that “[m]any an actor of national reputation wondered on coming to Lincoln what would appear the next morning from the pen of that meatax young girl of whom all of them had heard.”2
Take this dig at the cast of “The Spider and the Fly”: “As to the actors, they were of the usual kind who consent to act in spectacular performances, their sole art consisted in making their figures fit their tights, which were very pretty and made one rather glad that the Massachusetts skirt bill has not passed.”3
Chapter 4
Willa Cather is not often remembered for her humor, but the scene where Jim confronts Ordinsky, the Polish violinist, is wonderful, isn’t it? All of the nuances of Cather’s paradoxical politics are on display here. She turns Ordinsky into a caricature of patriarchy without pitting Jim or Lena against him in the militant way that is now in fashion. Jim and Lena simply enjoy their easy familiarity (and a physical relationship) without needing to make a fuss about defying norms. I rather appreciate Lena’s compassion for needy old men — for Ole Benson, who just wanted some companionship, and for her landlord, “Old Colonel Raleigh,” whom she humors because it makes old men “feel important to think they’re in love with somebody.”
Lena makes an interesting foil for Ántonia, particularly in light of what comes next in Book IV. As she tells Jim, she prefers solitude and her career to marriage, which she characterizes as “all being under somebody’s thumb.” This, in miniature, is the creed of the New Woman, and it was a bold stance for 1918. I suppose you might say that Lena illustrates the feminist principle that the personal is political. But somehow Cather seems to avoid making a political statement here. Do you agree? How does she pull that off?
Here’s a note on Lena from Andy Jewell, my former classmate and professor in the University Libraries at the U of Nebraska:
One of the first thoughts I had when considering this section was to reflect on how students responded to it, and to Lena's character more broadly, when I taught it a few years ago. In short, they loved her and found her to be highly relatable and empowering in her self-possession, including her comfort with her body and her sexuality. She struck them—and me, too—as a very "modern" character, quite able to seize control of her own life and unburdened by obligations to social conventions.
Why do you think we get a whole section devoted to Lena in a novel ostensibly devoted to Ántonia?
Willa Cather Read Along with Joshua Doležal
Upcoming Reading Schedule
May 24: Book IV (all four chapters)
May 31: Book V (all three chapters)
Nebraska State Journal, 11 Nov. 1894.
“Amusements,” The Nebraska State Journal, 9 Feb. 1894.
Oh, don't get me started on "learning outcomes" ~ ! The bureaucrats have taken all the fun out of teaching and learning.
In chapter 1, I read Jim and Gaston nearly as peers, from the first sentence characterizing Gaston as a "young scholar." I didn't have quite so personal a relationship with any of my professors, though I did become friendly enough with one power couple that I housesat for them at their very cool self-designed-and-built house, feeding their cat and gleaning whatever I wanted from their extensive vegetable garden. And, of course, sitting in cool designer chairs when I wasn't browsing their magnificent library. Reflecting on whether my students have become friends, it's hard to say. There's a mutual respect and affection, and I always love hearing from them, or catching up when they visit the school. I don't know what prevents more easy friendship, but maybe our age difference?
The final paragraph in ch.1 made me recall my own inclination as a new college student to embrace all that I was learning and reject where I'd come from. To swap the cosmopolitan world of ideas for the boring sameness of the suburbs. "I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory.. . . [but] in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences." This captures the tension perfectly, and how, no matter the level of education attained, your early life stays with you.
Just lovely, once again. I have the same experience as Andy Jewell with students appreciating Lena. I like to focus on her as a foil to Antonia, but of course, we only really understand what that means after Books IV and V, and her meaning as a foil changes a bit, I think, after each of those books. But here she is in the middle, almost as though she is the central character. Over on Notes, Sal Randolph just posted a quotation about poets, and the last line of it sounds so much like Lena: "What must be practiced—assiduously, infinitely, and without the slightest pause—is antiservitude, noncompliance, and independence." Lena shows how to do that in the most charming, nonconfrontational, disarming way. She can give the appearance of being "in service" without giving herself up to servitude. She has her own goals.
I agree with you that she represents a New Woman, but Cather keeps her busy with her profession rather than protests or politics. If we pressed this, students now might want Lena to be more of an activist, helping other women see their way to her kind of life, but Cather seems to think it's enough for every Lena to figure out her own way without a movement. Others may or may not agree with that, but it works for Lena.
I love how you turn this book into a lesson in reading. This may be one of my favorite things about this post. I completely agree. In the chapter about university, Cather shows *relationships* (with Lena and Gaston), not lessons. The memory and meaning of his own relationships enlivens Virgil for Jim. This is how we really read, and Cather won't let the university take experience and imagination from Jim. Instead, through his education outside the classroom, it's part of what he learns there. I'd like to frame this insight somehow and hang it beside my office door. :-)