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.
This selection of chapters had me thinking about perspective- Cather’s women are filtered through her via the lens of a male narrator (who is in turn influenced by the values and expectations of the rural early 20th century.) There is a pervasive strain of judgement here- what makes a good woman? Being a novice Cather reader, and not having read any scholarship about her until your substack, I’m not exactly sure what her POV is. Does she agree with the harsh judgement of society about good and not so good girls? About women going into business? Being the good 21st century reader, I want a definitive feminist stance and am not getting one. But this ambiguity is keeping me interested in her story, I am hopeful that we’re not heading toward a hidebound morality tale.
I’m not bothered by the pace of the book at all, and don’t mind the POV shifting from Jim to his interlocutors. I’m calling this a distant first person and don’t feel the need to question his authority or theirs.
Sadie, thanks for this thoughtful discourse. Cather doesn't fit a predictable mold. She was the very definition of a New Woman -- rose to the top of journalism at McClure's Magazine, then quit that job to become a novelist, and became rich and famous as a result. She also had a lifelong union with Edith Lewis that we would not understand to be a same-sex partnership. Yet she was politically conservative, skeptical of political activists, and often misogynistic in her writing. One example is her disparaging view of Genevieve Whitney (Jim Burden's wife) in the introduction to the novel -- a clear dig at a card-carrying feminist of that time.
Part of the pleasure of reading Cather, for me, is that she is not doctrinaire about anything. As you say, the ambiguity is part of her allure. She creates religious characters, such as Father Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop, who seem like agnostics. And many of her independent women, like Lena Lingard, are also conventionally feminine and not militant about much.
I'll be curious about your thoughts on Ántonia in the final section! She becomes mythic again in Jim's eyes -- whether that is Cather elevating motherhood in a feminist way or in a conventionally patriarchal way is open to debate!
I wept at the end of this section. While it may be all these second-hand accounts of events and confusing POV, it worked for me on an emotional level. That Jim is initially mad at Antonia is not surprising. He didn't think she was in her right mind taking up with Larry Donovan. He's mad because she fell for Larry instead of him. He has this romantic idea of unrequited love with Antonia. She is not made for being the wife of a Harvard law graduate and she knows it. She belongs there. Or at least she makes him feel she belongs there in his heart with the place he leaves behind. An unconsummated love with the prairie as he heads to city and office life. Jim's views of Tiny and Lena (of Jim's views through Cather's narrative perspective) reveals a critique of feminism. The costs to a woman who defies social expectations for fulfilling the roles of wife and mother are spelled out by Jim. When he softens at seeing her toddler's photograph, it's because she found her own way to fulfill his feminine ideal: mother (which he did not have). It was interesting to read the parallels of Jim's leaving Antonia like other narratives of men leaving for war, but that hadn't been my first impression of this section. For a "middle" it's lovely muddling mess and another key turning point in Jim's tale.
Thank you, Jill -- and sorry for the delay over the holiday! It's such a moving chapter there at the section's end. Always breathtaking to read.
How interesting: "Jim's views of Tiny and Lena (of Jim's views through Cather's narrative perspective) reveals a critique of feminism. The costs to a woman who defies social expectations for fulfilling the roles of wife and mother are spelled out by Jim." Jim certainly does lift Ántonia up on a pedestal as a mother in the next section -- I wonder if you're suggesting that he doesn't support feminism, then? According to the introduction, he is married to a feminist. He's a moving target sometimes, and I suppose that complexity is what makes the narrative compelling.
I agree that reading war tropes into the novel requires some imagination -- it's not the most obvious association. I think Max makes a solid case for those contextual influences. I should probably have mentioned that there was an Armed Forces Edition of "My Ántonia," a pocketbook paperback version that soldiers carried with them as a reminder of home. So I think it's likely that those echoes and resonances were felt by young men reading this scene from Europe.
I didn't know about the Armed Forced Edition. That makes sense.
While Jim's wife may be "modern," I think Cather is suggesting a critique of feminism from what some would call today a more intersectional approach. What kind of woman is an acceptable wife for Jim, the Harvard-trainer lawyer? Upward mobility is assumed to be the objective and the way up is to overcome or compensate for one's caste position. The irony is how impossible it is to extract oneself from the caste one is born into. Jim is the examplar of this American story about pulling yourself up by the boostraps. The idiomatic expression comes from the physics which make it impossible for a human to pick themselves up off the ground by the strap on the back of their boot. Impossible. And Antonia never falls into this trap of upward mobility. Antonia didn't marry Larry for money but for love. (While Larry left, she had the love of her daughter.) Tiny and Lena paid the price of a loveless life for the sake of financial independence and security. Either way, their fates are tied up with men and money in a no-win ultimatum. Jim is one of these modern men who supports the idea of ladies contributing to the bettterment of society as long as that society remains governed by men. He's perfectly happy to see the ladies take on the charitable work in the community rather than address why so much charity is required. What Cather shows me is how men and women collaborate in a set of social expectations around gender, personal wealth, and rugged individiualism in ways which perpetuate caste. Jim believes that what happens to a person in their life is entirely of their own making and if you don't make it, don't blame anyone else but yourself. Tiny's haggard and heartless old age can only be blamed on her choices of pursuing a new identity and personal wealth. As if the way she'd been treated in Black Hawke and that boarding house full of sailors had nothing to do with her choices. That none of these women, including Antonia, is considered by Jim to have lived up to their full potential is revealing about what Jim thinks that potential is: a mother. Surely the loss of his own gives his character the reason for such foundational views of the world, but Jim is a tool in Cather's hands to give us another perspective on gender from those found in other popular literature. First wave feminists were mostly women of a certain class. The organizers and supporters of the Ladies Garment Workers, for example, were mostly upper class women who took up the cause after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Cather's choice to narrate this from Jim's perspective is perhaps a radical feminist editorial decision. She can see the world through men's eyes and recognizes they are not all monsters who oppress women, while also revealing their blind spots. It gives Cather the chance to offer a more radical feminist critique which is not bound up in legislative reforms or a partisan agenda. Does Cather make Antonia a feminist? She does the work of a man and a woman and a mother. But Jim and Cather see her in more heroic, than feminist terms. Antonia is not cast in the role of victim. Cather gives her agency. And it is this agency, that she has a mind and heart of her own, that I think holds Jim's ongoing attention and affection.
So much here, Jill! Agree about Jim's bootstrapping ethic, which is somewhat blind to his privileges (he seemed to want for nothing, and presumably didn't have any trouble paying for Harvard).
How interesting that Cather (a self-identified conservative) might be conveying a radical message through Jim? I'll have to think about that. She certainly did see the world through a unique lens, which wasn't gender-bound. One of her closest mentors was Sarah Orne Jewett, as feminine a writer as you might find. Yet Cather also wrote The Autobiography of S.S. McClure, her employer at McClure's Magazine. And she frequently adopts a male narrator or centers her stories on male characters. Whether this is partly because she might now have identified more as "they" than as "she" or because it simply felt more natural or because she knew that being taken seriously as a writer meant adopting more masculine qualities is open for debate.
I love your point about Cather's framing of Ántonia as more heroic than feminist. That is so astute! And your language alludes to more classical roots, which defined Cather's foundational structures for art. Perhaps that was why she despised politics so much -- she didn't see any of it in Ovid or Homer. This might also have influenced her gravitation toward Catholic themes in her later novels (though she was not a Catholic herself) -- the allure of the timeless.
Like Flannery O'Connor, I think Willa Cather deserves a deeper look at her critique of culture regarding gender and race and class. A self-identified conservative might be another way of Cather distancing herself from the lady social reformers of the day. And O'Connor explicitly picked up Catholic themes and used them in this way. I think Cather is using Jim to make her critique of womanist politicians (womanist rather than feminist; womanist implying advancing the interests of white women of a certain class in a male-dominated world; womanist as in women's history where it's about adding sidebars and footnotes of their contributions to the success of the patriarchal society). But I may be way off base as I have not read all the secondary literature on Cather. And I astonished to learn she wrote about McClure, the muckraker, and more astonished to discover she was editor there in 1905. I've got more reading and research to do. The connection to McClure and the muckrakers helps me understand her slant. And now I wonder if she chose so often to narrate from a male character's POV wasn't quite strategic. The story of Antonia is an expose of sorts. The Progressive movement had a variety of ideological flavors. In Wisconsin we had Bob Lafollettewho was a darling of reform-minded conservatives until WWI. Cather doesn't do politics, but she does have a lot to say about power and its distribution in this nation of bootstrappers. It's about people and place, not about politicians, policies, and public posturing of elites. And her writing seems to be the most radical thing she could do during a time of political corruption, corrupted by corporate titans. Cather isn't arguing what should be; she is describing what is and in her description lies her analysis.
Another gem: "Cather doesn't do politics, but she does have a lot to say about power and its distribution in this nation of bootstrappers. It's about people and place, not about politicians, policies, and public posturing of elites. And her writing seems to be the most radical thing she could do during a time of political corruption, corrupted by corporate titans."
The last sentence makes me squint a little, however, since Cather was quite fascinated with the corporate titans. Remember that Jim helps many young men get started in oil or mining out West -- this, to him, is part of those big Western dreams. Bartley Alexander, the protagonist of her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, is a top industrial engineer (the bridge he designs tragically collapses). I read some real admiration into Cather's representation of Lena and Tiny as businesswomen (Cather herself was a shrewd businessperson), and Frances Harling is another character who shows capitalism with a human face?
I have the advantage of studying Cather for years, so it's not really fair for me to be pulling out references from other sources! But I think you're right that Cather is concerned with power and its distribution, and she believed in the more old-fashioned version of that, where the magnate was also a deeply cultured and ethical person, often the benefactor of the arts. In "A Lost Lady," she shows that kind of figure (Captain Forrester) being replaced by crass materialists and opportunists, such as Ivy Peters.
Cather is full of surprises! Which is why she keeps scholars busy for a lifetime :). I really wish I could tour Red Cloud with you. That was one of my great pleasures as a teacher, particularly after having read many of the novels set in Nebraska with my students.
More than fair to pull out these other sources...I'm here for it.
The corruption occurs because of individuals, not systems, I think for her flavor of Progressivism. Those titans are people with life stories and experiences from specific places which she finds so compelling a force. Here in Wisconsin, there is some of this flavor which remains here in the "compassionate conservatism" in small towns like Appleton. There are 27 city parks free and open to the public with pools, skating rinks, pickleball courts galore, plus county and state parks and somehow the community has continued to support public education and the Wisconsin Idea (until Scott Walker in more recent history). The "paper barons" along the Fox River were not as humans rapacious capitalists and considered civic leaders and community-minded boosters. Humans with power can employ it for good or not and Cather seems to leave me feeling as though it depends entirely on the goodness of the place-based person. I confess I've never been to Nebraska. Though I feel Nebraska when I read Cather.
This selection of chapters had me thinking about perspective- Cather’s women are filtered through her via the lens of a male narrator (who is in turn influenced by the values and expectations of the rural early 20th century.) There is a pervasive strain of judgement here- what makes a good woman? Being a novice Cather reader, and not having read any scholarship about her until your substack, I’m not exactly sure what her POV is. Does she agree with the harsh judgement of society about good and not so good girls? About women going into business? Being the good 21st century reader, I want a definitive feminist stance and am not getting one. But this ambiguity is keeping me interested in her story, I am hopeful that we’re not heading toward a hidebound morality tale.
I’m not bothered by the pace of the book at all, and don’t mind the POV shifting from Jim to his interlocutors. I’m calling this a distant first person and don’t feel the need to question his authority or theirs.
Thanks again for all your notes!
Sadie
Sadie, thanks for this thoughtful discourse. Cather doesn't fit a predictable mold. She was the very definition of a New Woman -- rose to the top of journalism at McClure's Magazine, then quit that job to become a novelist, and became rich and famous as a result. She also had a lifelong union with Edith Lewis that we would not understand to be a same-sex partnership. Yet she was politically conservative, skeptical of political activists, and often misogynistic in her writing. One example is her disparaging view of Genevieve Whitney (Jim Burden's wife) in the introduction to the novel -- a clear dig at a card-carrying feminist of that time.
Part of the pleasure of reading Cather, for me, is that she is not doctrinaire about anything. As you say, the ambiguity is part of her allure. She creates religious characters, such as Father Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop, who seem like agnostics. And many of her independent women, like Lena Lingard, are also conventionally feminine and not militant about much.
I'll be curious about your thoughts on Ántonia in the final section! She becomes mythic again in Jim's eyes -- whether that is Cather elevating motherhood in a feminist way or in a conventionally patriarchal way is open to debate!
I wept at the end of this section. While it may be all these second-hand accounts of events and confusing POV, it worked for me on an emotional level. That Jim is initially mad at Antonia is not surprising. He didn't think she was in her right mind taking up with Larry Donovan. He's mad because she fell for Larry instead of him. He has this romantic idea of unrequited love with Antonia. She is not made for being the wife of a Harvard law graduate and she knows it. She belongs there. Or at least she makes him feel she belongs there in his heart with the place he leaves behind. An unconsummated love with the prairie as he heads to city and office life. Jim's views of Tiny and Lena (of Jim's views through Cather's narrative perspective) reveals a critique of feminism. The costs to a woman who defies social expectations for fulfilling the roles of wife and mother are spelled out by Jim. When he softens at seeing her toddler's photograph, it's because she found her own way to fulfill his feminine ideal: mother (which he did not have). It was interesting to read the parallels of Jim's leaving Antonia like other narratives of men leaving for war, but that hadn't been my first impression of this section. For a "middle" it's lovely muddling mess and another key turning point in Jim's tale.
Thank you, Jill -- and sorry for the delay over the holiday! It's such a moving chapter there at the section's end. Always breathtaking to read.
How interesting: "Jim's views of Tiny and Lena (of Jim's views through Cather's narrative perspective) reveals a critique of feminism. The costs to a woman who defies social expectations for fulfilling the roles of wife and mother are spelled out by Jim." Jim certainly does lift Ántonia up on a pedestal as a mother in the next section -- I wonder if you're suggesting that he doesn't support feminism, then? According to the introduction, he is married to a feminist. He's a moving target sometimes, and I suppose that complexity is what makes the narrative compelling.
I agree that reading war tropes into the novel requires some imagination -- it's not the most obvious association. I think Max makes a solid case for those contextual influences. I should probably have mentioned that there was an Armed Forces Edition of "My Ántonia," a pocketbook paperback version that soldiers carried with them as a reminder of home. So I think it's likely that those echoes and resonances were felt by young men reading this scene from Europe.
I didn't know about the Armed Forced Edition. That makes sense.
While Jim's wife may be "modern," I think Cather is suggesting a critique of feminism from what some would call today a more intersectional approach. What kind of woman is an acceptable wife for Jim, the Harvard-trainer lawyer? Upward mobility is assumed to be the objective and the way up is to overcome or compensate for one's caste position. The irony is how impossible it is to extract oneself from the caste one is born into. Jim is the examplar of this American story about pulling yourself up by the boostraps. The idiomatic expression comes from the physics which make it impossible for a human to pick themselves up off the ground by the strap on the back of their boot. Impossible. And Antonia never falls into this trap of upward mobility. Antonia didn't marry Larry for money but for love. (While Larry left, she had the love of her daughter.) Tiny and Lena paid the price of a loveless life for the sake of financial independence and security. Either way, their fates are tied up with men and money in a no-win ultimatum. Jim is one of these modern men who supports the idea of ladies contributing to the bettterment of society as long as that society remains governed by men. He's perfectly happy to see the ladies take on the charitable work in the community rather than address why so much charity is required. What Cather shows me is how men and women collaborate in a set of social expectations around gender, personal wealth, and rugged individiualism in ways which perpetuate caste. Jim believes that what happens to a person in their life is entirely of their own making and if you don't make it, don't blame anyone else but yourself. Tiny's haggard and heartless old age can only be blamed on her choices of pursuing a new identity and personal wealth. As if the way she'd been treated in Black Hawke and that boarding house full of sailors had nothing to do with her choices. That none of these women, including Antonia, is considered by Jim to have lived up to their full potential is revealing about what Jim thinks that potential is: a mother. Surely the loss of his own gives his character the reason for such foundational views of the world, but Jim is a tool in Cather's hands to give us another perspective on gender from those found in other popular literature. First wave feminists were mostly women of a certain class. The organizers and supporters of the Ladies Garment Workers, for example, were mostly upper class women who took up the cause after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Cather's choice to narrate this from Jim's perspective is perhaps a radical feminist editorial decision. She can see the world through men's eyes and recognizes they are not all monsters who oppress women, while also revealing their blind spots. It gives Cather the chance to offer a more radical feminist critique which is not bound up in legislative reforms or a partisan agenda. Does Cather make Antonia a feminist? She does the work of a man and a woman and a mother. But Jim and Cather see her in more heroic, than feminist terms. Antonia is not cast in the role of victim. Cather gives her agency. And it is this agency, that she has a mind and heart of her own, that I think holds Jim's ongoing attention and affection.
So much here, Jill! Agree about Jim's bootstrapping ethic, which is somewhat blind to his privileges (he seemed to want for nothing, and presumably didn't have any trouble paying for Harvard).
How interesting that Cather (a self-identified conservative) might be conveying a radical message through Jim? I'll have to think about that. She certainly did see the world through a unique lens, which wasn't gender-bound. One of her closest mentors was Sarah Orne Jewett, as feminine a writer as you might find. Yet Cather also wrote The Autobiography of S.S. McClure, her employer at McClure's Magazine. And she frequently adopts a male narrator or centers her stories on male characters. Whether this is partly because she might now have identified more as "they" than as "she" or because it simply felt more natural or because she knew that being taken seriously as a writer meant adopting more masculine qualities is open for debate.
I love your point about Cather's framing of Ántonia as more heroic than feminist. That is so astute! And your language alludes to more classical roots, which defined Cather's foundational structures for art. Perhaps that was why she despised politics so much -- she didn't see any of it in Ovid or Homer. This might also have influenced her gravitation toward Catholic themes in her later novels (though she was not a Catholic herself) -- the allure of the timeless.
Like Flannery O'Connor, I think Willa Cather deserves a deeper look at her critique of culture regarding gender and race and class. A self-identified conservative might be another way of Cather distancing herself from the lady social reformers of the day. And O'Connor explicitly picked up Catholic themes and used them in this way. I think Cather is using Jim to make her critique of womanist politicians (womanist rather than feminist; womanist implying advancing the interests of white women of a certain class in a male-dominated world; womanist as in women's history where it's about adding sidebars and footnotes of their contributions to the success of the patriarchal society). But I may be way off base as I have not read all the secondary literature on Cather. And I astonished to learn she wrote about McClure, the muckraker, and more astonished to discover she was editor there in 1905. I've got more reading and research to do. The connection to McClure and the muckrakers helps me understand her slant. And now I wonder if she chose so often to narrate from a male character's POV wasn't quite strategic. The story of Antonia is an expose of sorts. The Progressive movement had a variety of ideological flavors. In Wisconsin we had Bob Lafollettewho was a darling of reform-minded conservatives until WWI. Cather doesn't do politics, but she does have a lot to say about power and its distribution in this nation of bootstrappers. It's about people and place, not about politicians, policies, and public posturing of elites. And her writing seems to be the most radical thing she could do during a time of political corruption, corrupted by corporate titans. Cather isn't arguing what should be; she is describing what is and in her description lies her analysis.
Another gem: "Cather doesn't do politics, but she does have a lot to say about power and its distribution in this nation of bootstrappers. It's about people and place, not about politicians, policies, and public posturing of elites. And her writing seems to be the most radical thing she could do during a time of political corruption, corrupted by corporate titans."
The last sentence makes me squint a little, however, since Cather was quite fascinated with the corporate titans. Remember that Jim helps many young men get started in oil or mining out West -- this, to him, is part of those big Western dreams. Bartley Alexander, the protagonist of her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, is a top industrial engineer (the bridge he designs tragically collapses). I read some real admiration into Cather's representation of Lena and Tiny as businesswomen (Cather herself was a shrewd businessperson), and Frances Harling is another character who shows capitalism with a human face?
I have the advantage of studying Cather for years, so it's not really fair for me to be pulling out references from other sources! But I think you're right that Cather is concerned with power and its distribution, and she believed in the more old-fashioned version of that, where the magnate was also a deeply cultured and ethical person, often the benefactor of the arts. In "A Lost Lady," she shows that kind of figure (Captain Forrester) being replaced by crass materialists and opportunists, such as Ivy Peters.
Cather is full of surprises! Which is why she keeps scholars busy for a lifetime :). I really wish I could tour Red Cloud with you. That was one of my great pleasures as a teacher, particularly after having read many of the novels set in Nebraska with my students.
More than fair to pull out these other sources...I'm here for it.
The corruption occurs because of individuals, not systems, I think for her flavor of Progressivism. Those titans are people with life stories and experiences from specific places which she finds so compelling a force. Here in Wisconsin, there is some of this flavor which remains here in the "compassionate conservatism" in small towns like Appleton. There are 27 city parks free and open to the public with pools, skating rinks, pickleball courts galore, plus county and state parks and somehow the community has continued to support public education and the Wisconsin Idea (until Scott Walker in more recent history). The "paper barons" along the Fox River were not as humans rapacious capitalists and considered civic leaders and community-minded boosters. Humans with power can employ it for good or not and Cather seems to leave me feeling as though it depends entirely on the goodness of the place-based person. I confess I've never been to Nebraska. Though I feel Nebraska when I read Cather.