This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither.
Joshua - I’ve loved this. I’m sorry I got behind - we moved last weekend and it’s been solid packing, moving, unpacking and organizing. Today, I’m off to co-lead a weekend retreat, but I *will* catch up! Really appreciate all that you put into this. I’ve learned so much.
Thanks, Julie! It's been a joy to be in conversation. I'm amazed that you've had any time at all for the series during your move! I still feel like I'm recovering from my move back in December. Hope you feel settled soon :)
one correction to my comment "more Bergman and less Capra" I was thinking of the film, The Emigrants, with Liv Ullman. But it wasn't directed by Bergman but by Jan Troell! A powerful film that depicts the life of European emigrants at the turn of the century.
I am writing from the Yukon. It is 9:36 pm and the sun has just started to descend and is peeking through the tops of the trees at the edge of the campground (really nothing more than a gravel parking lot in the small town of Watson Lake). Someone nearby is hammering on wood, and the combination of the sun in my eye and the repeated banging is having a deleterious effect on my mood. Because we've been driving everyday since leaving New York City, I listened to the book on tape, and couldn't give it the close reading it deserved. That being said, having born two children of my own, it was hard to accept the final image of Antonià - toothless and worn (yet still glowing with vitality?), and not wonder about the consequences of 11 (am I remembering right?) home births and relentless farm work must have been. And while Cather never explicitly comments on the socio-economic differences between Jim and his ideal woman, I wondered how his lens of privilege (combined with a heady dose of nostalgia) had perhaps softened the focus on what must have been a very hard life. I guess I could have used a bit more Bergman and a little less Capra. All this aside, the scene in the barn with the boys and with Antoniá in the field were magical and reading all your comments, and the comments of the other readers, was always a pleasure. Thanks again - I hope to join you again for another.
What a lovely note! I'm jealous of your northern travels (rewatching "Northern Exposure" presently, as it happens).
I hear you about Jim's mythic portrait of Ántonia as an Earth Mother. This is very true: "And while Cather never explicitly comments on the socio-economic differences between Jim and his ideal woman, I wondered how his lens of privilege (combined with a heady dose of nostalgia) had perhaps softened the focus on what must have been a very hard life." Cather had a genuine friendship with Annie Pavelka and renewed it during visits back to Nebraska. But she was rather tone-deaf at times about privilege. Once she gifted the Pavelka family with a washing machine and jokingly suggested that it be named after her (as if they needed to put a donor's name tag on it). And Cather avoided motherhood, herself, so it was a little easier to celebrate it from that distance.
There were some cultural differences then that made a thriving farm less onerous than it might now seem, one of which was shared labor between families and the expectation that children contribute as soon as they were able. The same was true for men in their fields -- there were few truly solo acts in those days. I wonder if the expectations for present-day parents to nurture and protect might generate a lot more stress than country parenting? But that's also easy for me to say. The pioneer way was replaced by modernity for a reason. As Merle Haggard says, "No amount of money could buy from me the memories I have of then. No amount of money could pay me to go back and live through it again."
I try to manage a little compromise with a sizable garden and folk traditions like canning and pickling. But as a single dad I could not fathom caring for more than my three. And there are times when I'd like to just turn them loose on a farm!
Thanks for participating. I hope to try another of these -- or the full yearlong project -- when I have a better sense of interest and a little more time.
“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” This is a line that stood out for me when I read it as a core truth. Jim's memories of childhood with Antonia on the Nebraska prairie are so foundational to who he is and what he knows in his bones to be true about the world that nothing else quite meets his standard of what is real and true about himself and his world. His experiences as a Harvard-graduated lawyer and adventures far from home seem artifice and inauthentic by comparison to what he witnessed and this longing for the really-real never goes away entirely despite bootstrapping his way off the prairie, riding the trains and conducting his business affairs far and wide, he recognizes that in leaving his past behind him the world is less real to him, more myth-making and delusions than how he saw the world back then. That he has been made into a mythical character in the minds of Antonia's children with her stories is an affirmation that his story was real and not a myth. Jim Burden arrives back when the frontier has closed and the railroads have connected the city to the country and he's a self-made man. Jim can't go back to who he was before except vicariously through Antonia who has vindicated herself in his eyes with a dozen children and a suitable husband and a farm worthy of his envy. If he'd stayed it seems he can imagine this is what he would have hoped for himself and Antonia and his delusion of unrequited love is fulfilled: it becomes real. And I think this is why Cather thought we needed Antonia's husband backstory. It echoes what Jim would have imagined for her knowing her history. He teases it out of him to hear what he needed from his substitute/replacement/shadow object of her affection.
The novel is titled My Antonia. Is the possessive meant to indicate Jim Burden? or Cather? or both. I think both. For Jim, he has always been possessed by Antonia until Cather solicits the story from him and she agrees to write his version. Jim never possesses Antonia, though. Not as a serious sweetheart nor is she wife material for him. It's a reflection of his heart. He has a particular slant to share which is romantic and nostalgic about that Czech girl they knew as kids. It isn't titled Jim's Antonia. There are probably scholars who have written about this (I didn't google it). But I see a story in which Jim has fallen for a female who is not in his future at the time when he turns from boy to man. She is in many respects his first love, unrequited, and the story is one told with great fondness for her. But I think Cather also thinks of Antonia as hers, her story as mythic and heroic through the male gaze.
There is so much to say about re-reading this novel closely and I am going to be thinking about it for weeks to come. Thanks, Josh.
This is spot on: "he recognizes that in leaving his past behind him the world is less real to him, more myth-making and delusions than how he saw the world back then." I think about this in relation to what I see on LinkedIn. People are making real money, but the corporate game often seems like shadows and mirrors. And for what? I guess that's why the humanities are perpetually under attack, because they remind us that the master narratives about progress or success are not necessarily true.
Also: "It isn't titled Jim's Antonia." My reading of the introduction is that Jim's challenge to the unnamed narrator -- here's my story, now what about yours? -- expands the "My" in "My Ántonia" to all of us. This is why I chose a more personal approach for this read along, rather than a more academic one. Cather scholarship is deep and wide and provides its own fertile lens. But this book -- which changed my life -- above all invites us to read personally. And so it has been my hope to guide such a reading. Thanks for being my companion!
First, I found the tour you provided here of Red Cloud fascinating. That root cellar is one of the finest I've ever seen. And yes, the root cellar is much like a womb. In fact, I see Jim Burden as returning to Antonia much like a boy to a mother. He doesn't so much elevate her as step down and back to who he was when he first met Antonia. In her, he now sees the perfect mother (of which he had been denied). And to find himself already known by her children as a character in her stories delights him. She has created for her children the magic of her own childhood spent with Jim and the other characters. And while Jim spent years thinking about poor Antonia with an illegitimate child toiling away for Ambrosh, she disabuses him of the idea that she has any regrets. Antonia is complete in her satisfaction with life in a way that Jim finds rewarding in the end. For Jim, it is finding himself in her son that seems to bring emotional resolution.
I've often forgotten about Jim having been orphaned, and I've appreciated your reminder that part of his attraction to Ántonia is because she fills that void. The reminder is right there in plain sight near the end of Book IV, but I've often read over the "mother" part.
"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."
Thank you. I have enjoyed this read a long. I read My Antonia many years ago, but have little memory of it. Have got so much more out of it with the slower approach and the insights and context you have shared. As a Brit I have little knowledge of pioneers and prairies. I was glad Antonia got the family and farm she always wanted. But do I detect Cather using Antonia's contented, traditional life to show the failings of women who want more, who pursue business, fashion and money. Lena and Tiny in the city seem less content than Antonia in the country. Whereas men like Jim and Cuzack can enjoy the city lights and entertainments.
Thanks so much! I wonder if Cather carried some of both within herself. She was "of" the prairie, but couldn't live there and raise a family -- so she spent the bulk of her life in NYC, as Tiny and Lena find their urban homes. But she was powerfully drawn back to Nebraska and recognized that friendships like her bond with Annie Sadilek Pavelka were some of her most foundational realities, and so she worked hard at maintaining those connections. I wonder if it needs to be a zero sum comparison between Tiny, Lena, and Ántonia? It's possible that Cather supports a more expansive view. This novel certainly centers Nebraska and the farm idyll near the end. But cities get more of the spotlight elsewhere in her oeuvre.
Joshua, thanks for hosting this. I love the book and Cather in general. I am hoping to make a trip to Red Cloud one of these days and see all the sights. I have no doubt it would solidify the sense of place in my mind as it relates to her writing.
Thanks, Matthew! Red Cloud would be worth your while -- especially if you read more of her novels. Either way, the town and country tours that the National Willa Cather Center offers (through trained volunteers) are fantastic.
Thank you, Josh, for hosting this read-through! I have enjoyed your commentary and questions as well as the discussion others have provided. I am still on the road (in North Dakota at present). We are wending our way towards Red Cloud for spring conference so this reading feels like a great preparation.
Thank you, Mark! I've been mindful of operating largely in a parallel universe throughout this read along, with the spring conference looming. Virtual spaces pale in comparison to those gatherings, but I wonder if I could offer a service of some kind either through the center or in tandem with the international seminar and other symposia. Maybe you'd want to team up with me sometime on a read along?
Someone mentioned a possibility in the survey about running a 12-month project, a novel each month, but allowing folks to dip in and dip out, depending on their interest in a particular novel. Seemed sensible, but the question of scale -- and how to justify the time involved -- remains the perennial question. But I'm wondering if Substack might be the kind of place where one could create a repository of teaching materials, perhaps even organizing them by novel. Kind of like the old "Teaching Cather" series that Steve Shively put together, only more focused on practical applications and popular appeal. I'd imagine that something like that could be grant funded, so perhaps I'll follow up with Tracy Tucker to see.
Great questions, as usual, and I love the pictures of the cellar-cave to accompany that wonderful passage! I've never been to Red Cloud, so thank you for the virtual journey with your students.
Your phrase that's lingering with me is the outdoor sanctuary offering intimacy to Jim and Antonia. This is one of the most defining qualities of this novel for me, that those scenes of outdoor sanctuary remain fresh and renewing time after time. She can make you feel the open vastness of the prairie or an intimate enclosure in the midst of the vastness at will, and both are food for Jim's soul and Antonia's, too.
Your questions have me thinking about many ways this novel challenges and resolves oppositions in its vision of life and love.
Of nostalgia: That's a good word for The Professor's House and Godfrey St Peter, who prefers the past to his modern present, but not for what Jim intuits in book V, when he is a native of both past and present, country and city. Thanks to his relationship with Antonia, he doesn't have to reduce himself to one half of an opposition.
The boys playing and sleeping in the barn are part of this. They are mortal and vulnerable and will suffer, like Mr. Shimerda, but they have this glorious present, as Jim and Antonia have immortally as part of their story.
And Cuzak is extremely important because we have so little reason to hope for a good, happy marriage for Antonia, and yet she has made an excellent one. Also, when Cuzak tells his story to Jim, we learn that the beautiful vision of fertility in chapter one of part V is Antonia's dream life but not her husband's. Cuzak is like Jim, a city person. Unlike Jim, his love for Antonia is great enough that he has sacrificed his preference for hers. And this is where the title comes in, "Cuzak's Boys": "Now it ain't so bad," he tells Jim about the loneliness of the farm; "I can begin to have some fun with my boys, already!" (2nd to last paragraph of Book V, ch 2)
Jim has "My Antonia" to ground him in continuity of past and present, land and city; Cuzak (Jim's double and foil) has "my boys" to resolve opposites for him, reconciling this city man to the country.
One could go on and on in Cather's company .... :-)
I love this reading: "Of nostalgia: That's a good word for The Professor's House and Godfrey St Peter, who prefers the past to his modern present, but not for what Jim intuits in book V, when he is a native of both past and present, country and city. Thanks to his relationship with Antonia, he doesn't have to reduce himself to one half of an opposition."
I've read Jim's nostalgia as escapist and untrustworthy for many years, but that's not how it felt to me the first time I read the novel as an undergraduate. You're helping me see that it might not be such a rose-tinted view, after all? As you know, I'm trying to reason my way toward a kind of positivity that does not feel like bright siding or denial. The depth of feeling in this novel is real enough, and those things that bind us to people and places can be reliable anchors in tumultuous times.
Thanks for such a generous reading! I'd love to take some of those Red Cloud tours with you. I learn something new every time.
Relative to Antonia, I do think Jim tends toward romance and escapism for most of the book, but maybe it's Cusak in Book V who helps him finally give up his romantic idea of Antonia and simply admire her as she is, in the remarkable world she has made. I'd want to look again at the language in the orchard scene with Antonia and the tete a tete with Cusak, but I wonder if that's why Cusak is so important - helping Jim give up his romance of Antonia (to give up "My Antonia" in a way). Displacing her from Jim's center of attention is a kind of growing up, and yet she's still there, better, a whole person. Maybe we watch Jim go through the very process you're talking about. (Your questions are drawing all of this out. I've been troubled at Cusak getting the title of Book V, but this makes sense to me - as Cather's answer to her own questions about whether her nostalgia for Nebraska is like St Peter's.) Answer: No.
Joshua - I’ve loved this. I’m sorry I got behind - we moved last weekend and it’s been solid packing, moving, unpacking and organizing. Today, I’m off to co-lead a weekend retreat, but I *will* catch up! Really appreciate all that you put into this. I’ve learned so much.
Thanks, Julie! It's been a joy to be in conversation. I'm amazed that you've had any time at all for the series during your move! I still feel like I'm recovering from my move back in December. Hope you feel settled soon :)
one correction to my comment "more Bergman and less Capra" I was thinking of the film, The Emigrants, with Liv Ullman. But it wasn't directed by Bergman but by Jan Troell! A powerful film that depicts the life of European emigrants at the turn of the century.
Ah, a helpful clarification. And a nice tip! I'll add The Emigrants to my list.
I am writing from the Yukon. It is 9:36 pm and the sun has just started to descend and is peeking through the tops of the trees at the edge of the campground (really nothing more than a gravel parking lot in the small town of Watson Lake). Someone nearby is hammering on wood, and the combination of the sun in my eye and the repeated banging is having a deleterious effect on my mood. Because we've been driving everyday since leaving New York City, I listened to the book on tape, and couldn't give it the close reading it deserved. That being said, having born two children of my own, it was hard to accept the final image of Antonià - toothless and worn (yet still glowing with vitality?), and not wonder about the consequences of 11 (am I remembering right?) home births and relentless farm work must have been. And while Cather never explicitly comments on the socio-economic differences between Jim and his ideal woman, I wondered how his lens of privilege (combined with a heady dose of nostalgia) had perhaps softened the focus on what must have been a very hard life. I guess I could have used a bit more Bergman and a little less Capra. All this aside, the scene in the barn with the boys and with Antoniá in the field were magical and reading all your comments, and the comments of the other readers, was always a pleasure. Thanks again - I hope to join you again for another.
What a lovely note! I'm jealous of your northern travels (rewatching "Northern Exposure" presently, as it happens).
I hear you about Jim's mythic portrait of Ántonia as an Earth Mother. This is very true: "And while Cather never explicitly comments on the socio-economic differences between Jim and his ideal woman, I wondered how his lens of privilege (combined with a heady dose of nostalgia) had perhaps softened the focus on what must have been a very hard life." Cather had a genuine friendship with Annie Pavelka and renewed it during visits back to Nebraska. But she was rather tone-deaf at times about privilege. Once she gifted the Pavelka family with a washing machine and jokingly suggested that it be named after her (as if they needed to put a donor's name tag on it). And Cather avoided motherhood, herself, so it was a little easier to celebrate it from that distance.
There were some cultural differences then that made a thriving farm less onerous than it might now seem, one of which was shared labor between families and the expectation that children contribute as soon as they were able. The same was true for men in their fields -- there were few truly solo acts in those days. I wonder if the expectations for present-day parents to nurture and protect might generate a lot more stress than country parenting? But that's also easy for me to say. The pioneer way was replaced by modernity for a reason. As Merle Haggard says, "No amount of money could buy from me the memories I have of then. No amount of money could pay me to go back and live through it again."
I try to manage a little compromise with a sizable garden and folk traditions like canning and pickling. But as a single dad I could not fathom caring for more than my three. And there are times when I'd like to just turn them loose on a farm!
Thanks for participating. I hope to try another of these -- or the full yearlong project -- when I have a better sense of interest and a little more time.
“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” This is a line that stood out for me when I read it as a core truth. Jim's memories of childhood with Antonia on the Nebraska prairie are so foundational to who he is and what he knows in his bones to be true about the world that nothing else quite meets his standard of what is real and true about himself and his world. His experiences as a Harvard-graduated lawyer and adventures far from home seem artifice and inauthentic by comparison to what he witnessed and this longing for the really-real never goes away entirely despite bootstrapping his way off the prairie, riding the trains and conducting his business affairs far and wide, he recognizes that in leaving his past behind him the world is less real to him, more myth-making and delusions than how he saw the world back then. That he has been made into a mythical character in the minds of Antonia's children with her stories is an affirmation that his story was real and not a myth. Jim Burden arrives back when the frontier has closed and the railroads have connected the city to the country and he's a self-made man. Jim can't go back to who he was before except vicariously through Antonia who has vindicated herself in his eyes with a dozen children and a suitable husband and a farm worthy of his envy. If he'd stayed it seems he can imagine this is what he would have hoped for himself and Antonia and his delusion of unrequited love is fulfilled: it becomes real. And I think this is why Cather thought we needed Antonia's husband backstory. It echoes what Jim would have imagined for her knowing her history. He teases it out of him to hear what he needed from his substitute/replacement/shadow object of her affection.
The novel is titled My Antonia. Is the possessive meant to indicate Jim Burden? or Cather? or both. I think both. For Jim, he has always been possessed by Antonia until Cather solicits the story from him and she agrees to write his version. Jim never possesses Antonia, though. Not as a serious sweetheart nor is she wife material for him. It's a reflection of his heart. He has a particular slant to share which is romantic and nostalgic about that Czech girl they knew as kids. It isn't titled Jim's Antonia. There are probably scholars who have written about this (I didn't google it). But I see a story in which Jim has fallen for a female who is not in his future at the time when he turns from boy to man. She is in many respects his first love, unrequited, and the story is one told with great fondness for her. But I think Cather also thinks of Antonia as hers, her story as mythic and heroic through the male gaze.
There is so much to say about re-reading this novel closely and I am going to be thinking about it for weeks to come. Thanks, Josh.
This is spot on: "he recognizes that in leaving his past behind him the world is less real to him, more myth-making and delusions than how he saw the world back then." I think about this in relation to what I see on LinkedIn. People are making real money, but the corporate game often seems like shadows and mirrors. And for what? I guess that's why the humanities are perpetually under attack, because they remind us that the master narratives about progress or success are not necessarily true.
Also: "It isn't titled Jim's Antonia." My reading of the introduction is that Jim's challenge to the unnamed narrator -- here's my story, now what about yours? -- expands the "My" in "My Ántonia" to all of us. This is why I chose a more personal approach for this read along, rather than a more academic one. Cather scholarship is deep and wide and provides its own fertile lens. But this book -- which changed my life -- above all invites us to read personally. And so it has been my hope to guide such a reading. Thanks for being my companion!
It's been fun! Thank you
First, I found the tour you provided here of Red Cloud fascinating. That root cellar is one of the finest I've ever seen. And yes, the root cellar is much like a womb. In fact, I see Jim Burden as returning to Antonia much like a boy to a mother. He doesn't so much elevate her as step down and back to who he was when he first met Antonia. In her, he now sees the perfect mother (of which he had been denied). And to find himself already known by her children as a character in her stories delights him. She has created for her children the magic of her own childhood spent with Jim and the other characters. And while Jim spent years thinking about poor Antonia with an illegitimate child toiling away for Ambrosh, she disabuses him of the idea that she has any regrets. Antonia is complete in her satisfaction with life in a way that Jim finds rewarding in the end. For Jim, it is finding himself in her son that seems to bring emotional resolution.
I've often forgotten about Jim having been orphaned, and I've appreciated your reminder that part of his attraction to Ántonia is because she fills that void. The reminder is right there in plain sight near the end of Book IV, but I've often read over the "mother" part.
"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."
Thank you. I have enjoyed this read a long. I read My Antonia many years ago, but have little memory of it. Have got so much more out of it with the slower approach and the insights and context you have shared. As a Brit I have little knowledge of pioneers and prairies. I was glad Antonia got the family and farm she always wanted. But do I detect Cather using Antonia's contented, traditional life to show the failings of women who want more, who pursue business, fashion and money. Lena and Tiny in the city seem less content than Antonia in the country. Whereas men like Jim and Cuzack can enjoy the city lights and entertainments.
Thanks so much! I wonder if Cather carried some of both within herself. She was "of" the prairie, but couldn't live there and raise a family -- so she spent the bulk of her life in NYC, as Tiny and Lena find their urban homes. But she was powerfully drawn back to Nebraska and recognized that friendships like her bond with Annie Sadilek Pavelka were some of her most foundational realities, and so she worked hard at maintaining those connections. I wonder if it needs to be a zero sum comparison between Tiny, Lena, and Ántonia? It's possible that Cather supports a more expansive view. This novel certainly centers Nebraska and the farm idyll near the end. But cities get more of the spotlight elsewhere in her oeuvre.
Thanks for reading along with me!
Joshua, thanks for hosting this. I love the book and Cather in general. I am hoping to make a trip to Red Cloud one of these days and see all the sights. I have no doubt it would solidify the sense of place in my mind as it relates to her writing.
Thanks, Matthew! Red Cloud would be worth your while -- especially if you read more of her novels. Either way, the town and country tours that the National Willa Cather Center offers (through trained volunteers) are fantastic.
Thank you, Josh, for hosting this read-through! I have enjoyed your commentary and questions as well as the discussion others have provided. I am still on the road (in North Dakota at present). We are wending our way towards Red Cloud for spring conference so this reading feels like a great preparation.
Thank you, Mark! I've been mindful of operating largely in a parallel universe throughout this read along, with the spring conference looming. Virtual spaces pale in comparison to those gatherings, but I wonder if I could offer a service of some kind either through the center or in tandem with the international seminar and other symposia. Maybe you'd want to team up with me sometime on a read along?
Someone mentioned a possibility in the survey about running a 12-month project, a novel each month, but allowing folks to dip in and dip out, depending on their interest in a particular novel. Seemed sensible, but the question of scale -- and how to justify the time involved -- remains the perennial question. But I'm wondering if Substack might be the kind of place where one could create a repository of teaching materials, perhaps even organizing them by novel. Kind of like the old "Teaching Cather" series that Steve Shively put together, only more focused on practical applications and popular appeal. I'd imagine that something like that could be grant funded, so perhaps I'll follow up with Tracy Tucker to see.
Great questions, as usual, and I love the pictures of the cellar-cave to accompany that wonderful passage! I've never been to Red Cloud, so thank you for the virtual journey with your students.
Your phrase that's lingering with me is the outdoor sanctuary offering intimacy to Jim and Antonia. This is one of the most defining qualities of this novel for me, that those scenes of outdoor sanctuary remain fresh and renewing time after time. She can make you feel the open vastness of the prairie or an intimate enclosure in the midst of the vastness at will, and both are food for Jim's soul and Antonia's, too.
Your questions have me thinking about many ways this novel challenges and resolves oppositions in its vision of life and love.
Of nostalgia: That's a good word for The Professor's House and Godfrey St Peter, who prefers the past to his modern present, but not for what Jim intuits in book V, when he is a native of both past and present, country and city. Thanks to his relationship with Antonia, he doesn't have to reduce himself to one half of an opposition.
The boys playing and sleeping in the barn are part of this. They are mortal and vulnerable and will suffer, like Mr. Shimerda, but they have this glorious present, as Jim and Antonia have immortally as part of their story.
And Cuzak is extremely important because we have so little reason to hope for a good, happy marriage for Antonia, and yet she has made an excellent one. Also, when Cuzak tells his story to Jim, we learn that the beautiful vision of fertility in chapter one of part V is Antonia's dream life but not her husband's. Cuzak is like Jim, a city person. Unlike Jim, his love for Antonia is great enough that he has sacrificed his preference for hers. And this is where the title comes in, "Cuzak's Boys": "Now it ain't so bad," he tells Jim about the loneliness of the farm; "I can begin to have some fun with my boys, already!" (2nd to last paragraph of Book V, ch 2)
Jim has "My Antonia" to ground him in continuity of past and present, land and city; Cuzak (Jim's double and foil) has "my boys" to resolve opposites for him, reconciling this city man to the country.
One could go on and on in Cather's company .... :-)
I love this reading: "Of nostalgia: That's a good word for The Professor's House and Godfrey St Peter, who prefers the past to his modern present, but not for what Jim intuits in book V, when he is a native of both past and present, country and city. Thanks to his relationship with Antonia, he doesn't have to reduce himself to one half of an opposition."
I've read Jim's nostalgia as escapist and untrustworthy for many years, but that's not how it felt to me the first time I read the novel as an undergraduate. You're helping me see that it might not be such a rose-tinted view, after all? As you know, I'm trying to reason my way toward a kind of positivity that does not feel like bright siding or denial. The depth of feeling in this novel is real enough, and those things that bind us to people and places can be reliable anchors in tumultuous times.
Thanks for such a generous reading! I'd love to take some of those Red Cloud tours with you. I learn something new every time.
Relative to Antonia, I do think Jim tends toward romance and escapism for most of the book, but maybe it's Cusak in Book V who helps him finally give up his romantic idea of Antonia and simply admire her as she is, in the remarkable world she has made. I'd want to look again at the language in the orchard scene with Antonia and the tete a tete with Cusak, but I wonder if that's why Cusak is so important - helping Jim give up his romance of Antonia (to give up "My Antonia" in a way). Displacing her from Jim's center of attention is a kind of growing up, and yet she's still there, better, a whole person. Maybe we watch Jim go through the very process you're talking about. (Your questions are drawing all of this out. I've been troubled at Cusak getting the title of Book V, but this makes sense to me - as Cather's answer to her own questions about whether her nostalgia for Nebraska is like St Peter's.) Answer: No.