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.
Great observations! If the unnamed narrator in the intro is Cather herself, as we're led to presume, and if Jim Burden's character gives voice to much of her own personal experience of moving from Virginia to Nebraska, then this is an interesting example of how all of us are many people at once. And in this regard I've sometimes wondered if the typical disclaimers about fiction or even literary memoir -- that the narrator is not interchangeable with the author, that Jim is not Cather herself -- are necessary. The author has to have deep affinities with a character to make them come alive on the page, so is it really a fallacy to attribute the love and openness in Jim's view to Cather herself, or at least to a slice of who she was? The petty, judgmental, grudge-keeping narrator in the intro is also part of who she was, but perhaps not the most important part :).
And the lovely thing about the modernist reading is that seeing our past through our affection for places and people doesn't have to be a false way of seeing, even if it is subjective? I'm doing some of that curation of my own past and present in the opening essay. How we remain mindful of the point at which generosity and optimism drift into bright siding or myth-making is another question...
I love your take on Jim and the opening narrator as different sides of Cather herself. Your last sentence especially sounds like you've caught Cather's spirit, and the structure of My Antonia is her answer to this problem of modern mythmaking. If a memoirist struggles with mythmaking, Cather seems to have thought it not enough to turn memoir into fiction; she also had to tell the fiction with a frame narrator to give us distance from passionate Jim.
In this context, the narrator/unnamed Cather-character's distaste for Genevieve Whitney could be any subject to grind her critical axe against. The fact that Jim loves a woman that the Cather-narrator distrusts gives us permission to both enjoy Jim's mythmaking and wonder if it isn't a bit much.
The passage about Jim's wife stood out to me this time with increased sharpness because I am concurrently reading David Von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire That Changed America in which he details the shirtwaist factory workers' strike that occurred in 1909 prior to the disastrous conflagration at the Triangle Waist Company that killed over 140 workers (the factory was located just a six-minute walk across Washington Square from Cather and Edith Lewis's apartment.) The 1909 strike attracted the attention of several wealthy society women, and Von Drehle's descriptions of Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont (married at one time to shipping magnate William K. Vanderbilt) and Anne Morgan (daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan) bear a striking resemblance to Genevieve Whitney. These ladies threw a lot of support in the direction of the striking women in hopes that such a move would bolster the women's suffrage movement. At a 3 A.M. hearing at the Jefferson Market courthouse Alva Belmont pledged her Madison Avenue home to post bail for four women strikers. Such support of factory workers soon dwindled, however, forcing the strikers to settle before fully reaching their goals for better working conditions. What stands out to me in reading about Mrs. Burden is the volatility of her interest in causes: "I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest." Cather in this brief moment in the text may be critiquing the wealthy for their whimsical support of the working class when subsequent abandonment leads to negative impacts on those who can least afford to absorb those impacts. Anyway, I think of this passage in Cather's novel as serving to scratch an itch to subtly provide social commentary and to add verisimiltudinous detail to her introduction of Jim Burden.
Really interesting new context -- there's always more to discover about Cather's historical milieu and how she might have appropriated it in her fiction.
I'm thinking about how Cather supported working people back in Nebraska, mostly privately and quietly, rather than in the public way that activists do. She was not immune to the saviorism of the Genevieve Whitneys (you recall how she wanted the washing machine she bought for the Pavelka family named after her), but she did prefer to express it via abiding personal relationships. Nonetheless, it is curious that her affinities in NYC were more bourgeois, whereas her circle in Nebraska was more blue collar. Different social circles, and perhaps understandable given her roles in both places, but also curious that more of her class sensibilities didn't transfer to NYC?
I hear this critique of wealthy whims also. I don't know if it was fair on Cather's part. For Alva Belmont to put up her house as bond seems more than superficial. Perhaps Cather had in mind someone in particular - maybe one of these women - who struck her negatively.
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!
Yes, and Enid Royce is a more thoroughly developed Genevieve Whitney in One of Ours. Do you see a subtle (or overt) misogyny in these characters?
I see that Mark Robison answered your question above, so I'll quote him: "a draw is a gully eroded by a seasonal stream." We use the term differently in Montana to refer to mountain terrain where creeks have carved out small valleys (the same effect becomes a canyon along a main watershed).
You can claim much more authority on speech patterns among Eastern Europeans than I, but I'd be cautious about questioning Cather too pointedly here, since the Red Cloud of her childhood was a very diverse immigrant community. She grew up hearing Norwegian, Swedish, French, German, Russian, Czech, and other languages spoken all around her, and so I would trust her representation. However, it's an interesting question for further research! How would one disentangle the idioms of a certain historical period (late 19th century) or regional dialect (West/Midwest) from speech patterns in a second language? If the speech patterns are wildly varied, as you say, wouldn't that make any fictional representation vulnerable to critique? I don't mean to minimize your point -- if the dialogue jangles to your ear, then there is likely something to it!
On the language acquisition a TEFL teacher would be more helpful. I've obviously got no reason to doubt Cather's accuracy, derived from her lived experience. It's probable some of these phrases date from her own experience and signify more than we can know now.
Thank you! Glad I discerned gully more or less correctly, but hadn't reckoned on the seasonal element.
I don't see misogyny in the depiction of Mrs Burden. I was struck by the narrative voice saying that Mrs B preferred have the status of Mrs [Jim] Burden. It's a weighted name! From the narrative perspective she is an irrelevance in Jim's adult life. That doesn't so much reflect on her character, or the anonymous and no-sexed narrative voice's inclinations, but on how the reader is expected to consider her, which is of no account.. Rather, her existence as Jim's wife takes the place that a sentimental reader might wish was Ántonia's.
Exactly -- and the question of why Jim and Ántonia were never married (or whether they ought to have been, or why Cather avoids that romantic plot) becomes especially interesting later!
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.
Great questions, Claudia! I'll be curious about your thoughts on this as the narrative unfolds.
As I mention in the opening essay and in some of the other comments, the unnamed narrator in the introduction and Jim Burden's character both represent slices of Cather's personal experience. Jim reenacts her own move from Virginia to Nebraska as a child, as well as her friendship with Annie Pavelka, a Czech girl who Ántonia is modeled after.
And you're quite right -- the affection or personal feeling through which Jim remembers (and reconstructs) Ántonia is a common theme in Cather's work!
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 very one! It's always a pleasure to read work with a high level of craft. Your characters have rich and complex inner lives. I'll write you more privately when I have time.
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.)
How interesting! Yes, a lot of the tallgrass prairie was remade in this way. And one might say that the American Southwest continues to suffer from terraforming.
Now, as I see that sunflower passage, it's small example of Jim's myth-making. The botanists are correct, Prairie Sunflower (Helianthus petiolaris) is native to the Great Plains. And so Otto's story about the Mormons is factually wrong. Although now you have me wondering if that kind of myth-making is a figurative terraforming. A native plant becomes appropriated for a settler story? It's pretty to think of the sunflower as lining the roads to freedom, but it seems that Otto's story (and Jim's preference for it) is almost purely fanciful. This makes me wonder about how much to trust Jim's representation of Ántonia? Or at least makes me watchful for other moments when he either unconsciously or willfully resists the truth in favor of a dream.
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?)
Thanks for sharing these memories, Mark! I do remember playing my guitar on the Memorial Prairie. I took Sue's seminar twice -- once with you as an M.A. student, I think, and later as a Ph.D. candidate. The first trip to Red Cloud I believe I also played a song I'd written for Cather with Antoinette Turner, Annie Pavelka's granddaughter, in the audience -- at the old opera house before the renovation. And perhaps you also recall that I played guitar at Sue's graveside -- and in her home several times during her final months. I don't mean to derail your comment, but Sue's passing was the first deep loss I'd experienced. And she, more than anyone, helped me see the Great Plans as more than the Great Absence that I/we initially saw.
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.
Thank you, Matthew! Yes, I have a similar nostalgia for Montana. And I agree with the narrator and Jim, who claim in the introduction that a childhood in one of these rural places is a kind of freemasonry -- anyone outside that experience can't have the foggiest notion of it.
When I first read My Ántonia, I swallowed Jim's nostalgia without question. As I've grown older, I've become more attuned to some sophistry in his view -- some willful amnesia, like in the sunflower anecdote, that I think is worth interrogating, especially later in the narrative in his view of Ántonia.
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.
Cather was given to myth-making about her own past. She also rode a pony around Red Cloud, so some of Jim's adventures with Dude are based in fact. But she exaggerated those episodes later in life. Here's an excerpt from James Woodress's biography:
"The biographer of a writer like Cather, whose memories and experiences are woven into the fabric of her fiction, has to separate the reality from the invention. Cather presents a special problem because she often treats her own life as though it were fiction. In the biographical sketch she provided her publisher she writes: 'Willa Cather did not go to school. She had a pony and spent her time riding about the country.' This is part of the myth Cather created out of her past, the image of the young girl running wild across the prairie, but the reality is more prosaic. She certainly had a pony, as Jim Burden does, but she also went to school, as he does in the novel. The school district at Catherton had been organized as early as 1876, and by 1883 classes were being held in the township's one-room schoolhouse. Records show that she was enrolled during the winter of 1883-84."
Fascinating reveal of her construction of her author persona! I did not know she treated her own life as a fiction. How revealing. Thanks for the additional information.
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?
This is smart discourse, Jill -- thank you! You're right that Cather distrusted the ephemerality of political movements and particularly the kind of upper middle class woman you describe (a type that has not faded with time). There are many possible interpretations of this introduction, so I don't claim to offer the definitive one -- yours is persuasive. Ántonia Shimerda is modeled after Cather's friend Annie Pavelka (more on that later), and so the "real" Cather is closer to Jim Burden than to the unnamed narrator. But, as I said in response to Tara Penry in another comment, there is a healthy dose of Cather herself in each voice.
Incidentally, Cather was a conservative who was also groundbreaking as a career woman. She is full of paradoxes. An atheist who is also fascinated by Catholicism (and a member of the Episcopalian Church). More than anything, she loathed politics. She has many characters like Genevieve Whitney -- Enid Royce, in One of Ours, is perhaps the most obvious. And the Burden marriage is one of many unhappy marriages in her fiction.
Thanks for the additional background information and context. It makes more sense to see the "real" Cather as more like Jim Burden in her sympathies to Antonia. And yes, as Tara suggests, she reveals her own personality through the voices of these characters. I'm so in love with her voice and language choices and this closer reading helps me see how she pulled the strings as the narrator.
"That we have to make the effort to see a place for what it really is, not what it lacks."
Honestly, I've had to do the opposite, in a way. Moving from "home" throughout my life, my impulse has always been to be biased toward the positive in a new place, always giving the new place the benefit of the doubt, always working to identify the "good" reasons to be there. It's taken time to admit that the negative aspects of my new home exists and to come to terms with them. And to accept that the connection I have to my place of birth will always be a source of comfort, even if I never live there again.
I don't see this acceptance as childish. Quite the opposite, actually.
Thanks, Andrew -- I'm not sure if you mean it this way, but perhaps we lean toward one binary or the other earlier in life and come to embrace the more nuanced view with time? I blame some of this tendency in myself to having been raised as a fundamentalist. I've been trying to soften that rigid way of dividing the world ever since, sometimes with more success than others.
I think my upbringing and "middle child" position turned me into quite the accommodator, so I would agree with you. It has a lot to do with where we start.
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.
Thank you for sharing so generously from your own personal trove, Jay. I know Broken Bow -- how interesting that you have that connection through Julia.
The title essay in my memoir grapples with the very prejudice you describe while passing through Nebraska. The running joke is that the Midwest is the Gateway to the West, but you don't see signs in Denver or Memphis saying "Gateway to the Midwest." As I say in my essay, all of our tropes about the arc of a life, achievement, success, etc, all derive from mountains. We like to be at the apex, in our ascendancy. Being "in the thick of it" just doesn't carry much cachet, even if the great secret of the prairie is that sense of closeness and wonder, and the subtlety of grasslands. Part of making a home in Iowa was unlearning those mountaintop tropes, replacing them with metaphors like cycles or circles (after Emerson's essay).
There is an undeniably elegiac quality to Cather's writing because the wild land that caught hold of her was fast disappearing during her youth -- was, in fact, already gone by the time she came of age. Jim Burden's nostalgia for things that he never even witnessed, like the bison, speaks to that sense of loss that she carried as part of her birthright.
More to say, but it's good to have you here, and I'll look forward to more of your insights!
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.
Thanks for sharing this, Mark! I'll be reviewing this comment thread for any future go-rounds with My Ántonia. This is a great poem to pair with the intro.
"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?
"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."
Whole memoirs are written in search of an answer to your question! I had fewer of these moments in childhood, as well, at least with other people, because my parents sheltered me and I grew up in relative isolation in the country. However, high school and college were moments when I felt more a sense of agency and ownership over the memories I was making. I felt I belonged to a cohort, and this gave extra meaning to those years.
Do you agree that each of us has to answer that question in our own way and from our unique experience? It's perhaps why Cather frames that introduction in such personal terms, almost to resist the notion that there is a definitive reading of the text or the characters that follow. Jim gives his manuscript to the narrator and asks, "Now, what about yours?" And in that way, there could be many "My Ántonias."
Yes, agreed! "Now, what about yours?" Indeed. Perhaps that is the power of a great story in the hands of a master teller. There is on one level Jim's story that we are all immersed in. Which is told by Cather who has brought her own life story to it. And simultaneously I, and all readers, may find themselves remembering and re-telling their own. Well, either I am just making sh-- up on a Friday night, or there is something to that! Ha-ha. I think the latter as otherwise there would not be such the depth and breadth of comments from our reading group.
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.
Great observations! If the unnamed narrator in the intro is Cather herself, as we're led to presume, and if Jim Burden's character gives voice to much of her own personal experience of moving from Virginia to Nebraska, then this is an interesting example of how all of us are many people at once. And in this regard I've sometimes wondered if the typical disclaimers about fiction or even literary memoir -- that the narrator is not interchangeable with the author, that Jim is not Cather herself -- are necessary. The author has to have deep affinities with a character to make them come alive on the page, so is it really a fallacy to attribute the love and openness in Jim's view to Cather herself, or at least to a slice of who she was? The petty, judgmental, grudge-keeping narrator in the intro is also part of who she was, but perhaps not the most important part :).
And the lovely thing about the modernist reading is that seeing our past through our affection for places and people doesn't have to be a false way of seeing, even if it is subjective? I'm doing some of that curation of my own past and present in the opening essay. How we remain mindful of the point at which generosity and optimism drift into bright siding or myth-making is another question...
I love your take on Jim and the opening narrator as different sides of Cather herself. Your last sentence especially sounds like you've caught Cather's spirit, and the structure of My Antonia is her answer to this problem of modern mythmaking. If a memoirist struggles with mythmaking, Cather seems to have thought it not enough to turn memoir into fiction; she also had to tell the fiction with a frame narrator to give us distance from passionate Jim.
In this context, the narrator/unnamed Cather-character's distaste for Genevieve Whitney could be any subject to grind her critical axe against. The fact that Jim loves a woman that the Cather-narrator distrusts gives us permission to both enjoy Jim's mythmaking and wonder if it isn't a bit much.
The passage about Jim's wife stood out to me this time with increased sharpness because I am concurrently reading David Von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire That Changed America in which he details the shirtwaist factory workers' strike that occurred in 1909 prior to the disastrous conflagration at the Triangle Waist Company that killed over 140 workers (the factory was located just a six-minute walk across Washington Square from Cather and Edith Lewis's apartment.) The 1909 strike attracted the attention of several wealthy society women, and Von Drehle's descriptions of Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont (married at one time to shipping magnate William K. Vanderbilt) and Anne Morgan (daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan) bear a striking resemblance to Genevieve Whitney. These ladies threw a lot of support in the direction of the striking women in hopes that such a move would bolster the women's suffrage movement. At a 3 A.M. hearing at the Jefferson Market courthouse Alva Belmont pledged her Madison Avenue home to post bail for four women strikers. Such support of factory workers soon dwindled, however, forcing the strikers to settle before fully reaching their goals for better working conditions. What stands out to me in reading about Mrs. Burden is the volatility of her interest in causes: "I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest." Cather in this brief moment in the text may be critiquing the wealthy for their whimsical support of the working class when subsequent abandonment leads to negative impacts on those who can least afford to absorb those impacts. Anyway, I think of this passage in Cather's novel as serving to scratch an itch to subtly provide social commentary and to add verisimiltudinous detail to her introduction of Jim Burden.
Really interesting new context -- there's always more to discover about Cather's historical milieu and how she might have appropriated it in her fiction.
I'm thinking about how Cather supported working people back in Nebraska, mostly privately and quietly, rather than in the public way that activists do. She was not immune to the saviorism of the Genevieve Whitneys (you recall how she wanted the washing machine she bought for the Pavelka family named after her), but she did prefer to express it via abiding personal relationships. Nonetheless, it is curious that her affinities in NYC were more bourgeois, whereas her circle in Nebraska was more blue collar. Different social circles, and perhaps understandable given her roles in both places, but also curious that more of her class sensibilities didn't transfer to NYC?
I hear this critique of wealthy whims also. I don't know if it was fair on Cather's part. For Alva Belmont to put up her house as bond seems more than superficial. Perhaps Cather had in mind someone in particular - maybe one of these women - who struck her negatively.
Fascinating!
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!
Yes, and Enid Royce is a more thoroughly developed Genevieve Whitney in One of Ours. Do you see a subtle (or overt) misogyny in these characters?
I see that Mark Robison answered your question above, so I'll quote him: "a draw is a gully eroded by a seasonal stream." We use the term differently in Montana to refer to mountain terrain where creeks have carved out small valleys (the same effect becomes a canyon along a main watershed).
You can claim much more authority on speech patterns among Eastern Europeans than I, but I'd be cautious about questioning Cather too pointedly here, since the Red Cloud of her childhood was a very diverse immigrant community. She grew up hearing Norwegian, Swedish, French, German, Russian, Czech, and other languages spoken all around her, and so I would trust her representation. However, it's an interesting question for further research! How would one disentangle the idioms of a certain historical period (late 19th century) or regional dialect (West/Midwest) from speech patterns in a second language? If the speech patterns are wildly varied, as you say, wouldn't that make any fictional representation vulnerable to critique? I don't mean to minimize your point -- if the dialogue jangles to your ear, then there is likely something to it!
Really appreciate these incisive comments :)
On the language acquisition a TEFL teacher would be more helpful. I've obviously got no reason to doubt Cather's accuracy, derived from her lived experience. It's probable some of these phrases date from her own experience and signify more than we can know now.
Thank you! Glad I discerned gully more or less correctly, but hadn't reckoned on the seasonal element.
I don't see misogyny in the depiction of Mrs Burden. I was struck by the narrative voice saying that Mrs B preferred have the status of Mrs [Jim] Burden. It's a weighted name! From the narrative perspective she is an irrelevance in Jim's adult life. That doesn't so much reflect on her character, or the anonymous and no-sexed narrative voice's inclinations, but on how the reader is expected to consider her, which is of no account.. Rather, her existence as Jim's wife takes the place that a sentimental reader might wish was Ántonia's.
Exactly -- and the question of why Jim and Ántonia were never married (or whether they ought to have been, or why Cather avoids that romantic plot) becomes especially interesting later!
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.
Great questions, Claudia! I'll be curious about your thoughts on this as the narrative unfolds.
As I mention in the opening essay and in some of the other comments, the unnamed narrator in the introduction and Jim Burden's character both represent slices of Cather's personal experience. Jim reenacts her own move from Virginia to Nebraska as a child, as well as her friendship with Annie Pavelka, a Czech girl who Ántonia is modeled after.
And you're quite right -- the affection or personal feeling through which Jim remembers (and reconstructs) Ántonia is a common theme in Cather's work!
"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.
Thank you, Jan! A work in progress -- as your own new home is.
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.
Thank you, Mary! And I have your own exquisite collection of stories. I'm grateful that you are part of my community.
I didn't know that you bought _The Woman Who Never Cooked_ -- If that's what you did, I am honored indeed, Joshua.
The very one! It's always a pleasure to read work with a high level of craft. Your characters have rich and complex inner lives. I'll write you more privately when I have time.
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.
Yes, it is an inspiring vision for a story! Centering a narrative on a character is so different from mapping out a plot.
“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.)
How interesting! Yes, a lot of the tallgrass prairie was remade in this way. And one might say that the American Southwest continues to suffer from terraforming.
Now, as I see that sunflower passage, it's small example of Jim's myth-making. The botanists are correct, Prairie Sunflower (Helianthus petiolaris) is native to the Great Plains. And so Otto's story about the Mormons is factually wrong. Although now you have me wondering if that kind of myth-making is a figurative terraforming. A native plant becomes appropriated for a settler story? It's pretty to think of the sunflower as lining the roads to freedom, but it seems that Otto's story (and Jim's preference for it) is almost purely fanciful. This makes me wonder about how much to trust Jim's representation of Ántonia? Or at least makes me watchful for other moments when he either unconsciously or willfully resists the truth in favor of a dream.
https://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/flower/prairie-sunflower
It’s such a fascinating moment in the colonizing of the west. Everything is so new and untried.
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?)
Thanks for sharing these memories, Mark! I do remember playing my guitar on the Memorial Prairie. I took Sue's seminar twice -- once with you as an M.A. student, I think, and later as a Ph.D. candidate. The first trip to Red Cloud I believe I also played a song I'd written for Cather with Antoinette Turner, Annie Pavelka's granddaughter, in the audience -- at the old opera house before the renovation. And perhaps you also recall that I played guitar at Sue's graveside -- and in her home several times during her final months. I don't mean to derail your comment, but Sue's passing was the first deep loss I'd experienced. And she, more than anyone, helped me see the Great Plans as more than the Great Absence that I/we initially saw.
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.
Thank you, Matthew! Yes, I have a similar nostalgia for Montana. And I agree with the narrator and Jim, who claim in the introduction that a childhood in one of these rural places is a kind of freemasonry -- anyone outside that experience can't have the foggiest notion of it.
When I first read My Ántonia, I swallowed Jim's nostalgia without question. As I've grown older, I've become more attuned to some sophistry in his view -- some willful amnesia, like in the sunflower anecdote, that I think is worth interrogating, especially later in the narrative in his view of Ántonia.
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.
Cather was given to myth-making about her own past. She also rode a pony around Red Cloud, so some of Jim's adventures with Dude are based in fact. But she exaggerated those episodes later in life. Here's an excerpt from James Woodress's biography:
"The biographer of a writer like Cather, whose memories and experiences are woven into the fabric of her fiction, has to separate the reality from the invention. Cather presents a special problem because she often treats her own life as though it were fiction. In the biographical sketch she provided her publisher she writes: 'Willa Cather did not go to school. She had a pony and spent her time riding about the country.' This is part of the myth Cather created out of her past, the image of the young girl running wild across the prairie, but the reality is more prosaic. She certainly had a pony, as Jim Burden does, but she also went to school, as he does in the novel. The school district at Catherton had been organized as early as 1876, and by 1883 classes were being held in the township's one-room schoolhouse. Records show that she was enrolled during the winter of 1883-84."
https://cather.unl.edu/life/woodress
Fascinating reveal of her construction of her author persona! I did not know she treated her own life as a fiction. How revealing. Thanks for the additional information.
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?
This is smart discourse, Jill -- thank you! You're right that Cather distrusted the ephemerality of political movements and particularly the kind of upper middle class woman you describe (a type that has not faded with time). There are many possible interpretations of this introduction, so I don't claim to offer the definitive one -- yours is persuasive. Ántonia Shimerda is modeled after Cather's friend Annie Pavelka (more on that later), and so the "real" Cather is closer to Jim Burden than to the unnamed narrator. But, as I said in response to Tara Penry in another comment, there is a healthy dose of Cather herself in each voice.
Incidentally, Cather was a conservative who was also groundbreaking as a career woman. She is full of paradoxes. An atheist who is also fascinated by Catholicism (and a member of the Episcopalian Church). More than anything, she loathed politics. She has many characters like Genevieve Whitney -- Enid Royce, in One of Ours, is perhaps the most obvious. And the Burden marriage is one of many unhappy marriages in her fiction.
Thanks for the additional background information and context. It makes more sense to see the "real" Cather as more like Jim Burden in her sympathies to Antonia. And yes, as Tara suggests, she reveals her own personality through the voices of these characters. I'm so in love with her voice and language choices and this closer reading helps me see how she pulled the strings as the narrator.
That introduction really signals how sophisticated this narrative is :)
"That we have to make the effort to see a place for what it really is, not what it lacks."
Honestly, I've had to do the opposite, in a way. Moving from "home" throughout my life, my impulse has always been to be biased toward the positive in a new place, always giving the new place the benefit of the doubt, always working to identify the "good" reasons to be there. It's taken time to admit that the negative aspects of my new home exists and to come to terms with them. And to accept that the connection I have to my place of birth will always be a source of comfort, even if I never live there again.
I don't see this acceptance as childish. Quite the opposite, actually.
Thanks, Andrew -- I'm not sure if you mean it this way, but perhaps we lean toward one binary or the other earlier in life and come to embrace the more nuanced view with time? I blame some of this tendency in myself to having been raised as a fundamentalist. I've been trying to soften that rigid way of dividing the world ever since, sometimes with more success than others.
I think my upbringing and "middle child" position turned me into quite the accommodator, so I would agree with you. It has a lot to do with where we start.
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.
Thank you for sharing so generously from your own personal trove, Jay. I know Broken Bow -- how interesting that you have that connection through Julia.
The title essay in my memoir grapples with the very prejudice you describe while passing through Nebraska. The running joke is that the Midwest is the Gateway to the West, but you don't see signs in Denver or Memphis saying "Gateway to the Midwest." As I say in my essay, all of our tropes about the arc of a life, achievement, success, etc, all derive from mountains. We like to be at the apex, in our ascendancy. Being "in the thick of it" just doesn't carry much cachet, even if the great secret of the prairie is that sense of closeness and wonder, and the subtlety of grasslands. Part of making a home in Iowa was unlearning those mountaintop tropes, replacing them with metaphors like cycles or circles (after Emerson's essay).
There is an undeniably elegiac quality to Cather's writing because the wild land that caught hold of her was fast disappearing during her youth -- was, in fact, already gone by the time she came of age. Jim Burden's nostalgia for things that he never even witnessed, like the bison, speaks to that sense of loss that she carried as part of her birthright.
More to say, but it's good to have you here, and I'll look forward to more of your insights!
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
Thanks for sharing this, Mark! I'll be reviewing this comment thread for any future go-rounds with My Ántonia. This is a great poem to pair with the intro.
"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?
"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."
Whole memoirs are written in search of an answer to your question! I had fewer of these moments in childhood, as well, at least with other people, because my parents sheltered me and I grew up in relative isolation in the country. However, high school and college were moments when I felt more a sense of agency and ownership over the memories I was making. I felt I belonged to a cohort, and this gave extra meaning to those years.
Do you agree that each of us has to answer that question in our own way and from our unique experience? It's perhaps why Cather frames that introduction in such personal terms, almost to resist the notion that there is a definitive reading of the text or the characters that follow. Jim gives his manuscript to the narrator and asks, "Now, what about yours?" And in that way, there could be many "My Ántonias."
Yes, agreed! "Now, what about yours?" Indeed. Perhaps that is the power of a great story in the hands of a master teller. There is on one level Jim's story that we are all immersed in. Which is told by Cather who has brought her own life story to it. And simultaneously I, and all readers, may find themselves remembering and re-telling their own. Well, either I am just making sh-- up on a Friday night, or there is something to that! Ha-ha. I think the latter as otherwise there would not be such the depth and breadth of comments from our reading group.