My Ántonia Read Along: Book IV, Chapters 1-4

From The Willa Cather Archive

We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her hands and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many kind things they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my heart. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory.

"I'll come back," I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive darkness.

"Perhaps you will"—I felt rather than saw her smile. "But even if you don't, you're here, like my father. So I won't be lonesome."

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

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One of my favorite essays on My Ántonia is Max Frazier’s “‘Heroic in Size’: Reading My Ántonia as Willa Cather’s First World War I Novel.” The novel was published in 1918, the year that WWI ended, but there is no implicit mention of the war. Instead, Frazier shows how Cather invokes the war contextually and by implication. 

For instance, the illustrator Cather chose, W.T. Benda, also created posters for the war effort, such as this one, which is uncannily similar to his illustration of Lena Lingard knitting on the Divide.

From The Willa Cather Review

Jim’s departure for college, Frazier argues, mimics a soldier’s goodbye, and many of the heroic motifs in the novel echo rhetoric about the Great War. The plow magnified against the setting sun is one example. 

Max doesn’t mention this, but I wonder if the portrait of Ántonia that we see in Book IV, and that Benda captures in the illustration at the top of this post, might also reflect tropes of the war era: a woman dressed in man’s clothing doing a man’s work. Not A League of Their Own exactly, but a similar idea.

Jim’s return to Ántonia in the field at the end of Book IV, Chapter 4, is also like a soldier’s homecoming, and their goodbye in the excerpt quoted at length above, with the uncertainty of another reunion, has all the elegiac tones of a war episode, wouldn’t you say? Two young people feeling like they might never see each other again, feeling that the most meaningful part of their lives might have already passed.

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Mark Robison, a frequent reader of this series, wrote the following as a follow-up to Book III.

One thing that caught my attention in this (re)reading of Book III is Cather’s ability to depict the synergy that develops between performance and audience. This synergistic relationship itself become a performance narrated for the reader. Jim and Lena attend a theatrical performance which Cather conveys directly in distinct detail.  But then Cather provides a further layer of performance in Jim’s response to the staging and acting. 

This scene recalls others in which Cather recreates a performance by depicting its effect on an audience member. It also harkens back to Cather’s days writing drama criticism for a Lincoln newspaper where among her remarks critiquing a performance she more than once focused on a member of the audience. 

Mark cites a moving example from Cather’s November 19, 1893 column in the Nebraska State Journal, where she describes an emotional gentleman in the audience who she learns was once the leading man.

Don’t you think that Mark’s reading applies just as equally to the Widow Steavens’s dramatic retelling of Ántonia’s story in Chapter 3, where Jim (the narrator) once again becomes an audience member, and we witness the effect of the widow’s story on him?

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Now I’d love to hear your thoughts on Book IV! See the questions below or just share the highlights of this section for you.

Book IV

Chapter 1

Why do you think Jim’s reaction, upon learning of Ántonia’s humiliation, is to feel disappointed in her rather than to rally to her side? 

There is a strange irony in his reaction, because even though Jim’s judgment of Ántonia looks an awful lot like Christian Harling’s habit of blaming Ántonia for the indecent acts of her companions, Jim is simultaneously proud of Lena and Tiny. So he’s not misogynistic across the board, and one might even say that he blames Ántonia for not being a better feminist?

Just as it seems odd that Book III is almost wholly devoted to Lena Lingard, in a book ostensibly about Ántonia, the lengthy aside about Tiny Soderball is also notable. A debut novelist would assuredly be told in a workshop to cut this anecdote and stick to the main story. What do you think Tiny’s story adds to the narrative? And why might Cather end this tale of almost unthinkable good fortune on a tempered note? Jim reflects that Tiny “was satisfied with her success, but not elated. She was like some one in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out.”

Chapter 2

Another interesting chapter from a craft perspective. The photograph of Ántonia’s baby helps propel the plot by softening Jim’s judgment. And the conversation with Mrs. Harling provides a pretext for the following chapter, as well as a little suspense for Jim’s visit to the Widow Steavens, whom we’re told will share the full story. But a writer in an MFA workshop would never get away with such episodic storytelling, and a narrative like this would assuredly not attract an agent in today’s marketplace. Do you agree? What are your thoughts on the meandering structure of Book IV?

Chapter 3

It is curious that Jim began his narrative, in Book I, with nostalgia for the buffalo (which he’d never even seen) and other artifacts of pioneer life. Yet he seems to embrace the changes he sees in the pasture land after years away. He says, “The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modeling of human faces.” The two halves of Jim’s statement seem contradictory, especially by the standards of nature writers like Aldo Leopold, who call the definition of progress into question. How do you reconcile Jim’s love of wild land with his celebration of its cultivation? 

I’m full of stylistic questions today, it seems, but I’ve been told repeatedly not to use fictional characters as “vessels” for narration. Cather has embedded many stories within stories throughout the novel, including the harrowing wolf tale and back stories for characters like Samson d’Arnault, Wick Cutter, Larry Donovan, and Tiny Soderball. Typically the way this works is that a story gets passed to Jim second or third hand, and he then takes over the narration of it. But this chapter turns into a lengthy monologue by the Widow Steavens, a character we’ve heard next to nothing about (except that she is a “good woman” who buys the Burden farm). What effect does this change in style, with every paragraph set off by a quotation mark, have on the narrative? What makes it work (or not)?

We’ve commented often on Jim’s unreliability as a narrator. I don’t think the standards for fiction were looser in the early twentieth century, but there are several oddities about the Widow’s story. First, Jim did not bring a recorder with him, so we’re getting his reconstruction of it from memory years later (even though it’s quoted as if relayed verbatim). This might be the only way of making sense of the Widow’s dramatic delivery. Do you punctuate your stories with real-time dialogue (“she says to me very quiet and natural-like” or “says I”). The only way this makes any sense is for us to suspend our doubts and surrender to the story, wouldn’t you say? 

Stylistic questions aside, what do you find most moving or memorable in this delayed account of what happened to Ántonia? In what ways does Cather reinforce or resist the conventional Victorian plot of the “fallen woman” through Ántonia’s character? (And why, this father of daughters wants to know, is the other party never a “fallen man”?)

Chapter 4

Cather repeatedly creates private spaces for Jim and Ántonia even in the open prairie. I find it so moving that they sit near Mr. Shimerda’s grave to catch up after years apart. Cather deftly squeezes the “accordion of time” to fast forward through Jim’s life and then draws the moment out with Ántonia’s words. 

In a conventional romance, Jim would have come back to rescue Ántonia. But this is not the plot of Pretty Woman. I wonder if My Ántonia has endured, in part, because of its strangeness, because of scenes like Jim’s confession of love to Ántonia that culminates in an uncommon intimacy. It is love, but not the kind that we typically find story-worthy. What are your thoughts on their memorable exchange? It is strangely elegiac, isn’t it, even though both characters are in their early twenties? 

"Do you know, Ántonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of any one else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister — anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me."

"How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when I've disappointed you so? Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other? I'm so glad we had each other when we were little. I can't wait till my little girl's old enough to tell her about all the things we used to do. You'll always remember me when you think about old times, won't you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people."

I forget all about the stylistic intrigues of Book IV by the end of this chapter. The tenderness of it, the genius of making Jim squint through twilight to study Ántonia’s face, the way Cather elevates the most ordinary details, like a face, into myth: “...the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory.” What do you take from this closing scene?

The end of Book IV makes me wonder if the secret to enduring fiction (or memoir) is not mastery of the tricks of plot and character and whatever else you might learn in an MFA program. The secret is affection, loving a place or a person so much that you can’t rest until that truth comes alive on the page, until you have written timeless scenes like this one. 

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It’s hard to believe, but we’ll finish the novel for next week! Please read Book V, Chapters 1-3, for our final discussion.