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.
Great post, Josh! I love the way you integrate the literary and the personal. I'll take a crack at your first question, about Jim's wife. What strikes me is how much the speaker feels sure of her judgments ("I do not like his wife." "I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest." "Her husband's quiet tastes irritate her, I think"), even though she spends no time with Jim or Genevieve ("I do not see much of him there [in NY]"). Maybe we're to understand that the speaker and the couple saw more of each other at some time in the past, but it does seem like the speaker has a chip on her shoulder, unable and unwilling to show understanding for someone so unlike herself.
Jim's marriage shows us that Jim, on the other hand, is capable of seeing things in people from different class backgrounds that others do not see. It shows us Jim in "motion" (that frequent trope of the novel) socially as well as geographically, and the contrast with the speaker of the Introduction makes that seem an unusual trait.
By contrast with the opening speaker, Jim has an unusually open and receptive mind.
On the other hand, I'm in the modernist camp, seeing the opening speaker as the first of two unreliables who can only tell the story of another person through their own biases and assumptions.
There's an excluded and unpleasant wife in The Song of the Lark as well.
Question from a Brit: what is a 'draw'? A gully? I'm also interested in the trees and the red grass species; I've never been to the mid-West so I don't recognise them. The landscape feels very similar to Laura Ingalls' Wilder's evocation of the landscape in her Little House books: possibly that's too simplistic, and I know the locations are different, but for this foreigner the sense of space and endless grass covering an unknown land surface, are very similar.
Language acquisition: are the Bohemians' attempts at speaking English, fitting the new vocabulary into their accustomed Czech syntax, realistic? I've worked with and taught Poles, French and Flamands with little English who use wildly varying speech patterns when putting their acquired English vocab together: I don't know any Czech or Russian but 'Much good' doesn't sound right to me. 'Much' is quite a complex word to teach, whereas 'very' is easily picked up early as an intensifier.
I'm going to gallop ahead and read the whole book now, which I haven't reread in decades. Thank you for nudging!
I am intrigued by the unknown identity of the introduction narrator. It seems to be a woman and I wonder if she once secretly loved Jim, since she has animosity toward his wife. I’m wondering if she feels the wife does not appreciate Jim, nor deserve him- although the text suggests she married him on the rebound of a broken engagement. Will her identity be revealed later ?
Also Jim’s “reliability” of Antonia is his experience- so not to be measured. Even siblings in a family will relay very different narratives about their parents and family life. Such things are subjective and according to individual lived experiences.
Read the novel in high school and never forgot it. You do such gorgeous work studying Willa Cather and explaining as you do here. Well-done, Joshua. Also, as you may know, I own your lovely, lyrical memoir.
The passage by Elizabeth Shepley Seargent really resonated with me. Cather’s description of how she wants her heroine to be is exactly how I want to present the heroine of my own novel.
“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” I’m so glad you highlighted this because for me it’s the passage that stood out the most. Thanks for these great reflections and questions. Busy day today but I will return to them tomorrow. For now: my first thought about the sunflowers was something we try to reckon with in architecture discourse: terraforming, the practice of making over a place in the image of your home country. Which is basically what we’ve done to this continent for the past 400 years. And possibly not in these chapters, but Cather does touch on that to refer to the prairie pasture land gradually disappearing in favor of corn. (Perhaps you can see why her sentence above caught my attention.)
In 1996 I moved with my family from western Washington (state) to Lincoln, Nebraska. Our home outside the town of Battle Ground sat on one acre adjacent to 20 acres of state forest land--second growth Douglas Fir for the most part. Our home in Nebraska, sitting on the southern edge of the city of Lincoln, backed up to a creek bed with several cottonwoods that, mercifully, anchored me to a vast landscape that left me disoriented--the great plains were to me, as Jim puts it, a "whole country . . . stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron." I discovered, in leaving Washington, the degree to which I had relied on geographical features to anchor me to my setting. A few minutes from my home the Columbia River flowed in a curve that turned from east-west to south-north. On my drive to work on clear mornings I could see Mt. Hood to the southeast and Mt. St Helens to the north, Silver Star Mountain to the east. In Nebraska I had lost all ability to read the landscape. I would avoid lifting my gaze to the horizon because I knew there was nothing there to check my sightline, nothing to help me sense cardinal directions. I was in Nebraska because of Willa Cather. Well, indirectly because of Cather. More directly, I had moved to Lincoln to teach at Union College, an opportunity I would not have otherwise considered without having experienced a reading of My Ántonia a couple years previous to our move.
It took me over a year to look toward the horizon without flinching, and traveling to Cather's childhood home in Red Cloud, NE with a van full of fellow grad students provided a pivotal moment. I had enrolled in a variety of courses at the University of Nebraska, aiming to launch into a doctoral degree. In my sampling I joined Prof. Susan Rosowski's Willa Cather seminar in which we read all of Cather's novels and some of her short stories. With Rosowski at the wheel, we rode the two and a half hours to Webster County to tour the house Cather lived in and to walk through the farmstead once owned by the Pavelka family on whom she based the latter sections of My Ántonia. We walked a prairie preserve above the Republican River, dropping into a long draw in the May twilight. (Kate McDonald: you are correct that a draw is a gully eroded by a seasonal stream.) What makes a draw in a Nebraska prairie remarkable is that a person can be looking across the land and perceive only the high spots all the way to the horizon, yet walking only a few yards can lead one to the edge of a steep drop into a draw. Only by holding both the rise-tops and the draw-depths together in my consciousness did I begin to feel grounded, at home like Jim, Ántonia, and Yulka nestled in the long red grass.
(Josh, do you remember playing your guitar in the evening on the Cather Prairie?)
Josh, this is one of my favorite Cather books and I enjoyed your thoughts on these first few chapters. Having grown up in Missouri and Colorado, I am familiar with the region in between, specifically Nebraska and Kansas. I was only four when we moved west to Colorado and then eleven when we returned east to Missouri. Cather's depictions resonate with me in understanding how place and landscape evoke memory. This story has a lot of nostalgia, which is valid for many of us who have fond memories of the places we were raised in.
The inclusion of the two Russians adds to the story. The U.S. was founded by people fleeing other places for a wide array of reasons. Especially in the West, there was freedom and wildness in the country, and people's pasts could be erased as they forged a new life far from where they came from.
Lots of great material here and loving everyone's comments. Great stuff.
I realize chapter one gives us the inciting incident - Jim Burden heads west and chapter two he finds a home. And both require the voice of innocence found in descriptions of his experiences and that voice of experience setting it up for the reader to frame what will follow: Antonia. From her introduction until we meet the title character is a real set of dance moves on Cather's part as the narrator. This nostalgia for the past (references to buffalo and the Mormons before Jim's arrival) is part of the romance with the American West mythology. Cowboys then were still mostly men of color and not the stereotype we have from Western novels and films: white men with guns on horses. But the underlying Doctrine of Discovery -- that whatever land you explore you can claim a stake of ownership, that it becomes part of your identity. That by going west, you become Western. The mythologizing of recent history fascinates me as the stories get passed down and the stories become more fantastic than the facts ever were. Yarns they spun about pioneer country. Once we meet Antonia and her family the deeper story-worthy problem is getting unearthed and the Russians propel the story in an exciting new direction for Jim Burden. I'm immediately fascinated by these two bachelor immigrant homesteaders. Cather stirs the pot. Your guidance in closely reading Cather's opening chapters has been really helpful in understanding her craft. I've always been so taken with her language, her style, that I hadn't appreciated the editorial choices she made in structuring her version of this story based on real life. What a joy it is to read her prose.
I want to take your first question first because I found it so provocative. Why did Cather mention Jim Burden's wife? She more than mentioned her. She makes it clear she disliked her. And you hint to the literary purpose of dissociating herself from the likes of such a woman. Why did Cather dislike her? Jim's wife exemplifies the kind of women who were married to well-to-do white men and suffered from the philanthropic delusion their charitable acts would do more for others than their own egos. (Maybe it's because I've read too much about those ladies who help fund the Garment Workers Union, especially after the Triangle Fire, even going to jail with striking workers.) Cather is a more subversive writer. She writes Jim's story and embodies his voice as a way to deflect from her own gender; yet entirely informs her slant on things because women must think like a man in order advance her view of the world. This opening is an artifice carefully constructed by Cather; it dissociates her from being associated with the class of white women of elite status who policed social norms with their progressive movements. Cather saw social changes operating differently I think. It wasn't people but circumstances which changed and those changes in circumstances changed people. The Jim Burden wives would not be the movers and shakers they thought they would be in Cather's estimation. I think the purpose is to set herself up as a reliable narrator even though she begins with a child narrator in Jim. And we are then invited to identify with Jim so we are able to relate to Antonia. If she had narrated this from her (limited) knowledge of Antonia and told her story of Antonia from her slant it would not have worked in the same way for readers. I saw it as a subtle, yet razor-edge sharp, signal to which side of the blade she fell with regards to social change. (Great Wo/Men or larger cultural and environmental forces). Am I off base?
Late joining the conversation here. I’ll try to catch up.
I’ll start with the personal as you also introduce so well, Josh. I know Nebraska fairly well for a NYC boy since my partner Julia is from the little town of Broken Bow in Western Nebraska. One grandmother was from the even smaller Purdham, NE, where the joke was that the road sign read “Purdham, Next Six Exits,” with the exits being driveways. She was known as Grandma Purdham. The other grandmother was called “Grandma Out-the-Farm.”
My first visit, though, was at the age of 20, on my first drive across country as a passenger in a converted Greyhound bus run by some Oregon hippies who made trips back and forth. The seats had been replaced by mats on which we passengers slept, and I woke up with the sun one morning and peered out the window as we passed on Interstate 80 and I had NEVER SEEN ANYTHING SO FLAT IN MY LIFE. (This was one of Julia’s humorous pet peeves shared with me when we met about what people not from Nebraska say to people from Nebraska: “I drove through Nebraska once.”)
As a boy growing up amid NYC concrete, books and movies, more obviously visually, gave my imagination access to rural and wilderness terrains so foreign to me. I knew I would love them all once I had opportunity to go to them, and I always did: Southwest, the Plains, Montana – the English countryside. What I’ve always loved about Cather, who I know far less well than you, is the precision and lucidity of her descriptive evocations of personality and place. In these first five sections, I see in such detail the natural world of the Nebraska I know; I also see the Nebraska I’ve always tried to imagine, of a hundred and fifty years ago. I see it so clearly. I love every word of it.
As a child of immigrants, I find it so important how naturally Cather integrates that immigrant reality, that immigrant creation. I lived for a while in nearby Minnesota, where the descendants of Swedes and Germans surrounded me. This is the pentimento of the country, and Cather is revealing that layer – including the touch on our life here of the history over there.
I was going to quote that passage you offer to start myself. I think it and the ending of section 1 are companion passages. Julia didn’t see an ocean until she was 20, the same age I was when I first spied the plains, but she says they gave her that same oceanic feeling I got growing up near the Atlantic. And of course that is so important to Cather’s evocation of that world.
I could go on but I’ll stop. Mark Robison’s information about that early labor history’s connection to Cather is a great insight into the frame narrator’s comments about Jim’s wife.
Reading about the train journey that Jim and Jake experience in coming to Nebraska for the first time--"I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long day's journey through Nebraska"--I was reminded that Willa Cather wrote a poem about traveling the same route. Included in the 1923 edition of April Twilights, the poem presents a view of the journey that contrasts with the perceptions Cather gives to young Jim Burden in Chapter 1.
GOING HOME
(BURLINGTON ROUTE)
How smoothly the trains run beyond the Missouri;
Even in my sleep I know when I have crossed the river.
The wheels turn as if they were glad to go;
The sharp curves and windings left behind,
The roadway wide open,
"(The crooked straight
And the rough places plain.)
They run smoothly, they run softly, too.
There is not noise enough to trouble the lightest sleeper.
Nor jolting to wake the weary-hearted.
I open my window and let the air blow in
The air of morning,
That smells of grass and earth—
Earth, the grain-giver.
How smoothly the train runs beyond the Missouri;
Even in my sleep I know when I have crossed the river.
"More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood. To speak her name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain." And, "His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her."
I'm not sure why Genevieve is mentioned, other than it provides a stark juxtaposition as to what the rest of the story is not going to be about. It is not about My Genevieve, but rather My Antonia. Why is that? Jim is drawn back West both in his professional life and in his memories to that childhood time with Antonia.
I find this odd since if I were to write a story, a memoir, about a single person it would most definitely be "My Mary", who is my wife.
Perhaps I am odd, but I have no early childhood memory or event that I would be able to recall more than page about. Certainly no version of Antonia for me. I have not seen any of those people since 8th grade graduation. I attended the Jesuit high school across town, so not the local public high school and not the local parochial Catholic HS. This took me out of the neighborhood, out of my childhood circle, and into a much wider world. Perhaps this was "my West".
When I dwell on past memories at all, it is from those high school years, which as an adult I see as significantly transformative, but would not have at the time. Perhaps it is in those years I would conjure up some of the feelings of adventure and meaning that Jim does of his childhood and time with Antonia. I do not have a single person with the same impact, but all my closest friends are from that high school time period. No matter how long we are apart, it is the most natural and easy thing to re-connect. Shared experience, history, and memories does that I suppose. Like Jim and the narrator, we can each also speak specific names and events and set the quiet drama going in our brains. But oddly, for me, not so much from college or even later life (except for my wife and daughters), but from those 4 years specifically and the small subset of people I first met at that time.
What is it about certain times, events, or people that cause such deep and meaningful connection that is permanently etched in our mind, heart, and soul?
Great post, Josh! I love the way you integrate the literary and the personal. I'll take a crack at your first question, about Jim's wife. What strikes me is how much the speaker feels sure of her judgments ("I do not like his wife." "I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest." "Her husband's quiet tastes irritate her, I think"), even though she spends no time with Jim or Genevieve ("I do not see much of him there [in NY]"). Maybe we're to understand that the speaker and the couple saw more of each other at some time in the past, but it does seem like the speaker has a chip on her shoulder, unable and unwilling to show understanding for someone so unlike herself.
Jim's marriage shows us that Jim, on the other hand, is capable of seeing things in people from different class backgrounds that others do not see. It shows us Jim in "motion" (that frequent trope of the novel) socially as well as geographically, and the contrast with the speaker of the Introduction makes that seem an unusual trait.
By contrast with the opening speaker, Jim has an unusually open and receptive mind.
On the other hand, I'm in the modernist camp, seeing the opening speaker as the first of two unreliables who can only tell the story of another person through their own biases and assumptions.
There's an excluded and unpleasant wife in The Song of the Lark as well.
Question from a Brit: what is a 'draw'? A gully? I'm also interested in the trees and the red grass species; I've never been to the mid-West so I don't recognise them. The landscape feels very similar to Laura Ingalls' Wilder's evocation of the landscape in her Little House books: possibly that's too simplistic, and I know the locations are different, but for this foreigner the sense of space and endless grass covering an unknown land surface, are very similar.
Language acquisition: are the Bohemians' attempts at speaking English, fitting the new vocabulary into their accustomed Czech syntax, realistic? I've worked with and taught Poles, French and Flamands with little English who use wildly varying speech patterns when putting their acquired English vocab together: I don't know any Czech or Russian but 'Much good' doesn't sound right to me. 'Much' is quite a complex word to teach, whereas 'very' is easily picked up early as an intensifier.
I'm going to gallop ahead and read the whole book now, which I haven't reread in decades. Thank you for nudging!
I am intrigued by the unknown identity of the introduction narrator. It seems to be a woman and I wonder if she once secretly loved Jim, since she has animosity toward his wife. I’m wondering if she feels the wife does not appreciate Jim, nor deserve him- although the text suggests she married him on the rebound of a broken engagement. Will her identity be revealed later ?
Also Jim’s “reliability” of Antonia is his experience- so not to be measured. Even siblings in a family will relay very different narratives about their parents and family life. Such things are subjective and according to individual lived experiences.
"Home is a country of the heart" and "Belonging requires work" Indeed. I love that your tending to the soil is what grounded you in place.
Read the novel in high school and never forgot it. You do such gorgeous work studying Willa Cather and explaining as you do here. Well-done, Joshua. Also, as you may know, I own your lovely, lyrical memoir.
The passage by Elizabeth Shepley Seargent really resonated with me. Cather’s description of how she wants her heroine to be is exactly how I want to present the heroine of my own novel.
“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” I’m so glad you highlighted this because for me it’s the passage that stood out the most. Thanks for these great reflections and questions. Busy day today but I will return to them tomorrow. For now: my first thought about the sunflowers was something we try to reckon with in architecture discourse: terraforming, the practice of making over a place in the image of your home country. Which is basically what we’ve done to this continent for the past 400 years. And possibly not in these chapters, but Cather does touch on that to refer to the prairie pasture land gradually disappearing in favor of corn. (Perhaps you can see why her sentence above caught my attention.)
In 1996 I moved with my family from western Washington (state) to Lincoln, Nebraska. Our home outside the town of Battle Ground sat on one acre adjacent to 20 acres of state forest land--second growth Douglas Fir for the most part. Our home in Nebraska, sitting on the southern edge of the city of Lincoln, backed up to a creek bed with several cottonwoods that, mercifully, anchored me to a vast landscape that left me disoriented--the great plains were to me, as Jim puts it, a "whole country . . . stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron." I discovered, in leaving Washington, the degree to which I had relied on geographical features to anchor me to my setting. A few minutes from my home the Columbia River flowed in a curve that turned from east-west to south-north. On my drive to work on clear mornings I could see Mt. Hood to the southeast and Mt. St Helens to the north, Silver Star Mountain to the east. In Nebraska I had lost all ability to read the landscape. I would avoid lifting my gaze to the horizon because I knew there was nothing there to check my sightline, nothing to help me sense cardinal directions. I was in Nebraska because of Willa Cather. Well, indirectly because of Cather. More directly, I had moved to Lincoln to teach at Union College, an opportunity I would not have otherwise considered without having experienced a reading of My Ántonia a couple years previous to our move.
It took me over a year to look toward the horizon without flinching, and traveling to Cather's childhood home in Red Cloud, NE with a van full of fellow grad students provided a pivotal moment. I had enrolled in a variety of courses at the University of Nebraska, aiming to launch into a doctoral degree. In my sampling I joined Prof. Susan Rosowski's Willa Cather seminar in which we read all of Cather's novels and some of her short stories. With Rosowski at the wheel, we rode the two and a half hours to Webster County to tour the house Cather lived in and to walk through the farmstead once owned by the Pavelka family on whom she based the latter sections of My Ántonia. We walked a prairie preserve above the Republican River, dropping into a long draw in the May twilight. (Kate McDonald: you are correct that a draw is a gully eroded by a seasonal stream.) What makes a draw in a Nebraska prairie remarkable is that a person can be looking across the land and perceive only the high spots all the way to the horizon, yet walking only a few yards can lead one to the edge of a steep drop into a draw. Only by holding both the rise-tops and the draw-depths together in my consciousness did I begin to feel grounded, at home like Jim, Ántonia, and Yulka nestled in the long red grass.
(Josh, do you remember playing your guitar in the evening on the Cather Prairie?)
Josh, this is one of my favorite Cather books and I enjoyed your thoughts on these first few chapters. Having grown up in Missouri and Colorado, I am familiar with the region in between, specifically Nebraska and Kansas. I was only four when we moved west to Colorado and then eleven when we returned east to Missouri. Cather's depictions resonate with me in understanding how place and landscape evoke memory. This story has a lot of nostalgia, which is valid for many of us who have fond memories of the places we were raised in.
The inclusion of the two Russians adds to the story. The U.S. was founded by people fleeing other places for a wide array of reasons. Especially in the West, there was freedom and wildness in the country, and people's pasts could be erased as they forged a new life far from where they came from.
Lots of great material here and loving everyone's comments. Great stuff.
I realize chapter one gives us the inciting incident - Jim Burden heads west and chapter two he finds a home. And both require the voice of innocence found in descriptions of his experiences and that voice of experience setting it up for the reader to frame what will follow: Antonia. From her introduction until we meet the title character is a real set of dance moves on Cather's part as the narrator. This nostalgia for the past (references to buffalo and the Mormons before Jim's arrival) is part of the romance with the American West mythology. Cowboys then were still mostly men of color and not the stereotype we have from Western novels and films: white men with guns on horses. But the underlying Doctrine of Discovery -- that whatever land you explore you can claim a stake of ownership, that it becomes part of your identity. That by going west, you become Western. The mythologizing of recent history fascinates me as the stories get passed down and the stories become more fantastic than the facts ever were. Yarns they spun about pioneer country. Once we meet Antonia and her family the deeper story-worthy problem is getting unearthed and the Russians propel the story in an exciting new direction for Jim Burden. I'm immediately fascinated by these two bachelor immigrant homesteaders. Cather stirs the pot. Your guidance in closely reading Cather's opening chapters has been really helpful in understanding her craft. I've always been so taken with her language, her style, that I hadn't appreciated the editorial choices she made in structuring her version of this story based on real life. What a joy it is to read her prose.
I want to take your first question first because I found it so provocative. Why did Cather mention Jim Burden's wife? She more than mentioned her. She makes it clear she disliked her. And you hint to the literary purpose of dissociating herself from the likes of such a woman. Why did Cather dislike her? Jim's wife exemplifies the kind of women who were married to well-to-do white men and suffered from the philanthropic delusion their charitable acts would do more for others than their own egos. (Maybe it's because I've read too much about those ladies who help fund the Garment Workers Union, especially after the Triangle Fire, even going to jail with striking workers.) Cather is a more subversive writer. She writes Jim's story and embodies his voice as a way to deflect from her own gender; yet entirely informs her slant on things because women must think like a man in order advance her view of the world. This opening is an artifice carefully constructed by Cather; it dissociates her from being associated with the class of white women of elite status who policed social norms with their progressive movements. Cather saw social changes operating differently I think. It wasn't people but circumstances which changed and those changes in circumstances changed people. The Jim Burden wives would not be the movers and shakers they thought they would be in Cather's estimation. I think the purpose is to set herself up as a reliable narrator even though she begins with a child narrator in Jim. And we are then invited to identify with Jim so we are able to relate to Antonia. If she had narrated this from her (limited) knowledge of Antonia and told her story of Antonia from her slant it would not have worked in the same way for readers. I saw it as a subtle, yet razor-edge sharp, signal to which side of the blade she fell with regards to social change. (Great Wo/Men or larger cultural and environmental forces). Am I off base?
Late joining the conversation here. I’ll try to catch up.
I’ll start with the personal as you also introduce so well, Josh. I know Nebraska fairly well for a NYC boy since my partner Julia is from the little town of Broken Bow in Western Nebraska. One grandmother was from the even smaller Purdham, NE, where the joke was that the road sign read “Purdham, Next Six Exits,” with the exits being driveways. She was known as Grandma Purdham. The other grandmother was called “Grandma Out-the-Farm.”
My first visit, though, was at the age of 20, on my first drive across country as a passenger in a converted Greyhound bus run by some Oregon hippies who made trips back and forth. The seats had been replaced by mats on which we passengers slept, and I woke up with the sun one morning and peered out the window as we passed on Interstate 80 and I had NEVER SEEN ANYTHING SO FLAT IN MY LIFE. (This was one of Julia’s humorous pet peeves shared with me when we met about what people not from Nebraska say to people from Nebraska: “I drove through Nebraska once.”)
As a boy growing up amid NYC concrete, books and movies, more obviously visually, gave my imagination access to rural and wilderness terrains so foreign to me. I knew I would love them all once I had opportunity to go to them, and I always did: Southwest, the Plains, Montana – the English countryside. What I’ve always loved about Cather, who I know far less well than you, is the precision and lucidity of her descriptive evocations of personality and place. In these first five sections, I see in such detail the natural world of the Nebraska I know; I also see the Nebraska I’ve always tried to imagine, of a hundred and fifty years ago. I see it so clearly. I love every word of it.
As a child of immigrants, I find it so important how naturally Cather integrates that immigrant reality, that immigrant creation. I lived for a while in nearby Minnesota, where the descendants of Swedes and Germans surrounded me. This is the pentimento of the country, and Cather is revealing that layer – including the touch on our life here of the history over there.
I was going to quote that passage you offer to start myself. I think it and the ending of section 1 are companion passages. Julia didn’t see an ocean until she was 20, the same age I was when I first spied the plains, but she says they gave her that same oceanic feeling I got growing up near the Atlantic. And of course that is so important to Cather’s evocation of that world.
I could go on but I’ll stop. Mark Robison’s information about that early labor history’s connection to Cather is a great insight into the frame narrator’s comments about Jim’s wife.
Really looking forward to the rest of this read.
Reading about the train journey that Jim and Jake experience in coming to Nebraska for the first time--"I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long day's journey through Nebraska"--I was reminded that Willa Cather wrote a poem about traveling the same route. Included in the 1923 edition of April Twilights, the poem presents a view of the journey that contrasts with the perceptions Cather gives to young Jim Burden in Chapter 1.
GOING HOME
(BURLINGTON ROUTE)
How smoothly the trains run beyond the Missouri;
Even in my sleep I know when I have crossed the river.
The wheels turn as if they were glad to go;
The sharp curves and windings left behind,
The roadway wide open,
"(The crooked straight
And the rough places plain.)
They run smoothly, they run softly, too.
There is not noise enough to trouble the lightest sleeper.
Nor jolting to wake the weary-hearted.
I open my window and let the air blow in
The air of morning,
That smells of grass and earth—
Earth, the grain-giver.
How smoothly the train runs beyond the Missouri;
Even in my sleep I know when I have crossed the river.
The wheels turn as if they were glad to go;
They run like running water,
Like Youth, running away...
They spin bright along the bright rails,
Singing and humming,
Singing and humming.
They run remembering,
They run rejoicing,
As if they, too, were going home.
https://cather.unl.edu/writings/books/0030#goinghome
"More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood. To speak her name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain." And, "His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her."
I'm not sure why Genevieve is mentioned, other than it provides a stark juxtaposition as to what the rest of the story is not going to be about. It is not about My Genevieve, but rather My Antonia. Why is that? Jim is drawn back West both in his professional life and in his memories to that childhood time with Antonia.
I find this odd since if I were to write a story, a memoir, about a single person it would most definitely be "My Mary", who is my wife.
Perhaps I am odd, but I have no early childhood memory or event that I would be able to recall more than page about. Certainly no version of Antonia for me. I have not seen any of those people since 8th grade graduation. I attended the Jesuit high school across town, so not the local public high school and not the local parochial Catholic HS. This took me out of the neighborhood, out of my childhood circle, and into a much wider world. Perhaps this was "my West".
When I dwell on past memories at all, it is from those high school years, which as an adult I see as significantly transformative, but would not have at the time. Perhaps it is in those years I would conjure up some of the feelings of adventure and meaning that Jim does of his childhood and time with Antonia. I do not have a single person with the same impact, but all my closest friends are from that high school time period. No matter how long we are apart, it is the most natural and easy thing to re-connect. Shared experience, history, and memories does that I suppose. Like Jim and the narrator, we can each also speak specific names and events and set the quiet drama going in our brains. But oddly, for me, not so much from college or even later life (except for my wife and daughters), but from those 4 years specifically and the small subset of people I first met at that time.
What is it about certain times, events, or people that cause such deep and meaningful connection that is permanently etched in our mind, heart, and soul?