My Ántonia Read Along: Intro and Book I, Chapters 1-5

W.T. Benda’s illustration of the Shimerda family. From The Willa Cather Archive.

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

I love this passage from the end of Chapter 2 because it takes place in a garden. It also shows a shift in Jim Burden’s thinking that I have lived and that I hope to experience again.

In the previous chapter, while traveling across the plains, Jim remarks, “The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.” Not only did he fail to see anything remarkable about the place, he felt that the open space was a threat, blotting him out.

I felt that way when I moved to Iowa initially, only it wasn’t a long horizon of prairie that haunted me, it was thousands of acres of corn. The only way I could understand Iowa was in contrast to Western landscapes, and the Midwest seemed like the absence of everything I loved. I’d been studying in Nebraska, where I had some family history, but I didn’t think of it as my real life. My real life began at the end of the spring term, when I drove across South Dakota and Montana and disappeared into the Idaho wilderness with my trail crew.

Cather recalls her own journey from Virginia to Nebraska through Jim’s character. And she captures the child’s honesty in reacting to places that feel safe or foreboding. A child doesn’t choose belonging; either a place feels like home or it doesn’t. We all carry that child within us, but as adults we check our visceral reactions for bias. And sometimes we accept uprootings in our lives, knowing that belonging to/in a new place will require work. That we can’t just pine away in exile from the places we want to be. That we have to make the effort to see a place for what it really is, not what it lacks.

Jim’s grandmother helps him make this shift. After the long, bumpy ride to his grandparents’ farm from the train depot, Jim wakes up in a clean home with a friendly cat, an elder who helps him feel safe and welcome, and the smell of gingerbread baking. These are the conditions that allow him to accept the garden as another sanctuary. It’s remarkable, isn’t it, that Jim moves so rapidly from feeling “erased” to feeling “entirely happy”?

But there’s no doubt about it: by the end of Chapter 2, he is home.

It took a garden for me to feel happy in Iowa, too. I tell this story at more length near the end of my memoir, but it happened that I was selected for jury duty, which required a full month of service. The only month I had entirely free was July, and so I had to break my cycle of escaping West for the summer. That was crushing, but I didn’t want to waste my summer moping, so I planted my first garden as an adult.

I could scarcely believe how instant the transformation was. It did not resolve all of my discontents about living so far from the Mountain West. But the scent of fresh humus, the ritual of planting seeds, and the pleasure of harvest made me feel connected to Iowa. As a Calvinist might say, the garden reversed the natural motion of my heart. In the garden, some of the best parts of my childhood came flooding back. And isn’t that what we mean when we speak of home?

I’ve gone through more than one uprooting over the past few years, moving from Iowa to Pennsylvania, and now beginning a new chapter as a single father. But for the first time I’m starting over in a place where I don’t have to dig a garden from the sod, where the previous owner lovingly tended the ground for 30 years.

George, as I’ll call him, stopped by a few weeks ago and walked me through the yard. It took us an hour to make it around the house. The ground was completely bare, except for a few weeds, but he promised that I’d see rhubarb and asparagus soon. George recalled how he’d salvaged glass panels from the old creamery at Penn State to build his greenhouse, how he’d dug all of the stones now lining the flower beds and koi pond out of the vegetable plots. I also learned that George trapped 13 skunks in the backyard one year (😬).

George is from Scotland, and he shared a few growing tips that he’d gleaned from a farmer there. It was a privilege to follow him through the yard that he’d called home for half his adult life. He, too, was a transplant here once. He didn’t see a literal frontier, but what Jim says of Nebraska is true for all of us when we are starting over: “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

Home is the country of the heart. Every new place is just land before it becomes native to us. Belonging requires work — like the clean house Jim’s grandmother keeps, like the sunny garden she tends. I hope that at some point this summer, when my cucumbers are climbing their trellis, when the tomatoes are ripening on the vine, when I’m snapping fresh broccoli crowns from the stems, that I’ll feel, for a moment, like Jim does among his grandmother’s pumpkins — entirely happy.

Now I’d love to hear how these opening chapters speak to you. Here are a few questions to prime the pump.

We’ll read Book I, Chapters 6-12 for next week. Please see the full reading schedule at the end of this post.

Introduction

Why does Cather take pains to mention Jim Burden’s wife in the introduction? For a book that is a love song to the West and to childhood friendships, this aside has always seemed strange to me. Genevieve Whitney is a political progressive: supportive of women’s rights, willing to be jailed alongside striking garment workers (jail in NYC was no joke then – or now), a patron of the arts. I wonder if Cather might be signaling something here about her sensibilities as a Westerner and as a Nebraskan, maybe defying the kind of snobbery that still casts the Midwest as “flyover country.” I do that sometimes with my Montana heritage. But why take a swipe at a minor character who doesn’t reappear after this one paragraph, and who might resemble the very kind of person Cather was likely to rub shoulders with in New York?

Some see Cather’s introduction as an echo of 19-century fiction, when writers framed their stories as found artifacts, presumably to give them more authority.¹ Others see Cather’s introduction as characteristic of modernism, highlighting the story’s subjectivity and Jim Burden’s unreliability as a narrator. How do you see it? What effect does the introduction have on you and your approach to the narrative?

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 carries us away from the grimy day-coaches, the worldly conductor, and the panting engine — out into the country. The immigrant dream is one of rebirth, but it seems that Jim is undergoing something like that, too, with his awakening to the new landscape and his sense of being “erased, blotted out.” What other passages in this first chapter evoke that change in Jim’s way of thinking or signal that his core identity is about to be remade?

Does Jim’s traumatic move evoke any memories of a similar dislocation in your own life?

Chapter 2

We begin to see in Chapter 2 why My Ántonia has endured. It is difficult to say what makes a work of art timeless, but part of that secret lies in finding a universal principle, bedrock that can’t be moved by politics or culture. Do you agree that Cather finds something like that in lines like these? 

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running…. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping…

How does it affect our reading of this passage if we consider that the bison had been removed from Nebraska several years before the Cather family arrived?² The young Jim Burden is already feeling nostalgic for something that has been lost, that he never even saw with his own eyes. And we might now say the same about the tallgrass prairie.

Jim’s meditation on death at the end of this chapter is also one of Cather’s most beloved passages, which is why it headlines today’s post. It also reminds me how masterfully Cather weaves together two modes of storytelling that I often discuss with memoirists: the voice of innocence and the voice of experience. Much of this chapter is the young Jim Burden’s experience — told by the older man, but largely narrated with the child’s innocence. But in some passages the voice of experience comes in to frame a moment with larger significance. Reconstructing the voice of innocence requires close attention to things as they felt to a younger self. The voice of experience corrects what the child could not see or makes meaning of those memories in ways that a child cannot. Do you agree that these two modes add resonance to My Ántonia?

Chapter 3

Otto’s casual remark about Austrian / Bohemian politics reminds me of the history I learned while traveling in the Czech Republic two years ago. In fact, my first immigrant ancestor, Karel Joseph Doležal, might well have left Moravia to escape service in the Austrian army. He would have ridden a train to Nebraska just as the Shimerda family did. Does My Ántonia speak to your own family’s immigrant history?

The nest that Jim, Ántonia, and Yulka make in the grass is one of many such enclosures within wide open spaces in Cather’s fiction. You’ll see something like this on Ántonia’s farm in the final chapters. Cather herself was fond of writing in an outdoor tent (reportedly much of My Ántonia was written in a tent in Jaffrey, New Hampshire). Neuroscientists say that high ceilings and long sightlines encourage free association, and I wonder if some combination of freedom and security, open space just beyond comforting borders, proved stimulating for Cather’s imagination. 

This chapter gives us our first close look at Ántonia. Cather’s development of Ántonia’s character might be explained, in part, by an anecdote that Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant recalls in her 1953 memoir:

She [Cather] then suddenly leaned over—and this is something I remembered clearly when My Ántonia came into my hands, at last, in 1918—and set an old Sicilian apothecary jar of mine, filled with orange-brown flowers of scented stock, in the middle of a bare, round, antique table.

"I want my new heroine to be like this—like a rare object in the middle of a table, which one may examine from all sides."

She moved the lamp so that light streamed brightly down on my Taormina jar, with its glazed orange and blue design.

"I want her to stand out—like this—like this—because she is the story."³

Chapter 4

If the introduction establishes Jim Burden as an unreliable narrator who tells us a story driven more by feeling than fact, what do you make of his reflection on the myth of Mormons scattering sunflower seeds on their long journey to Utah? What light might his preference for legend over fact shed on other scenes in the novel, or on the novel’s reputation as a great hymn to the West? (I’ll admit to feeling troubled by how willing Jim is to lie to himself about the past, even while acknowledging that he knows better.)

Chapter 5

Cather has a deft hand with foreshadowing. In Chapter 2 and Chapter 4, she hints at rattlesnakes (preparing us for a scene yet to come). And in this chapter, we learn that Peter and Pavel have a troubled history, which we will learn in due time. 

What do you make of this pair of Russian bachelors? What do they add to our picture of the Great Migration or of America as an immigrant nation? To the novel itself?

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Willa Cather Read Along with Joshua Doležal

My Ántonia Reading Schedule

• April 5: Introduction and Book I, Chapters 1-5

• April 12: Book I, Chapters 6-12

• April 19: Book I, Chapters 13-19

• April 26: Book II, Chapters 1-5

• May 3: Book II, Chapters 6-10

• 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)

1. Washington Irving introduces “Rip Van Winkle” as a tale found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, an amateur historian. In a brief preface, Nathaniel Hawthorne similarly attributes “Rappaccini’s Daughter” to a French author, M. de l'Aubépine, who is really a parody of himself.

2. See other footnotes like this in the free online Scholarly Edition.

3. Richard C. Harris quotes this passage from Sergeant’s memoir in “Willa Cather, Ivan Turgenev, and the Novel of Character,” Cather Studies, Volume 1, 1990.