My Ántonia

Willa Cather, 1918/1926 (June 2014)

  An interesting reflection on the lives of women settling in the American Midwest in the late 1800’s, this is not exactly what I had been expecting. Much like Angle of Repose, this novel gives a detailed look at the hard life of pioneer women trying to establish their lives in a context of frequently ineffectual men. Curiously, both are narrated by men at the periphery of the central woman’s life.

  My Ántonia is great in showing Nebraska prairie life, with the natural beauty of the grasslands in every season, and Cather’s poetic descriptions are quite evocative. Never having been there, I can see from her writing how people can find it beautiful. She also effectively contrasts the beauty with the summer heat and the harshness of the extreme winter. Her description of the first years of the immigrants’ life in a sod hut, and the neighbours’ more established wooden cabin, then the move to town life in Black Hawk, give a realistic picture of settler life. The range of characters is interesting, too, from the eccentricities of the farm hands, the prideful obstinacy of the Ántonia’s brother, the broken nostalgia of Ántonia’s father to the generosity and warmth of Jim Burden’s grandparents and neighbours. Even the bit characters, such as the spiteful town couple always fighting each other, show the range of life in a small town.

  Most interesting and memorable are the women: Lena, the free-spirited cow herder, who scandalizes the townsfolk by dancing with any men she chooses, and then becomes a stylish and successful dress maker. Tiny, who leaves the farm to make a fortune in the Klondike and settle in San Francisco. And at the centre, Ántonia, the lively and spirited young girl who captivates Jim with her energy and cheerful disposition. She lives a hard life, and it is to Cather’s credit that she does not romanticize it. She works to support her family, falls for a man who abandons her, and finally starts from scratch again to build a family with a man she loves. Her life, even when she finally makes her family farm a success, is relentless work until her children are old enough to take on some of the chores. Yet through it all, she chooses to make her own way in spite of mistakes and setbacks. She is the figure of the resilient, pragmatic, hard-working American that has become the classic type of American legend. So is it merely ironic that she is a female surrounded by flawed men, an immigrant who never loses her accent, a Catholic who becomes an unwed mother? Cather, even writing in 1918, clearly wants to up-end the stereotype and show something of a different reality.

  And what of Jim Burden in all this? As the story begins, he has lost his parents to disease and must go to live with his grandparents in Nebraska. He meets Antonia on the train, and is drawn to her, following her life on the neighbouring farm. As young friends, he falls in love with her, but does not seem to consider her a marriage partner, probably because of their different social status – he is to be a lawyer, and she is a farm girl. As a result, he ends up in a loveless marriage but affluent, while she eventually finds a man to love and turns him into a farmer. And Jim never stops thinking of her, even though he avoids contact for 20 years, and finally seems content when he rejoins her life as a sort of distant visiting uncle to her children. So in the end, he is fulfilled only by a connection to Antonia’s life force and the prairie, however tenuous that is as an eastern lawyer. And that, it seems, is to be his burden – he is privileged and civilized, but his life seems irrelevant – he describes it only in occasional references – and empty compared to the richness and beauty of Ántonia and the prairie.