My Ántonia (Willa Cather)
This post is part of Commonplace Classics, wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love.
The word "prairie" evokes powerful mental images, even for those whose relationship with the United States is entirely pop cultural. One pictures vast expanses of fertile grassland, teeming with elk and bison and the giant squirrels known as prairie dogs. Pioneers work the land: rugged, salt of the earth types, often impoverished immigrants from central and northern Europe, enduring the cruel whims of nature as they attempt to carve out a life on the howling plains. For all its beauty, the prairie is a place of great hardship: Pa gets bit by a rattler; little Mary puts a pitchfork through her thigh; Granny almost freezes to death assisting the birth of a two-headed calf during a blizzard, a calf that Bobby, only twelve years old, has to put out of its misery, Pa being laid up with yet another rattler bite, except there's only one round left for the rifle, and as mentioned the calf has two heads, so how that's going to turn out is anyone's guess.
Willa Cather1 spent much of her childhood on the Nebraska prairie, an experience that found expression in several of her novels, sans two-headed calves, as far as I know. My Ántonia is the recollections of Jim Burden, an orphan taken in by his grandparents on their Nebraska farm. Jim's arrival coincides with that of the Shimerdas, a somewhat hapless family of Czech immigrants. Jim immediately falls in with the family's eldest daughter, Ántonia, and the story follows them through their adolescence and into adulthood.
My Ántonia is written with a seemingly effortless grace, full of appreciation for the natural world and admiration for "the strange, uprooted people" who are settling the plains. (The prairie's original inhabitants are merely gestured to in passing.) Here Jim recalls the farm's hired men:
I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table in the lamplight; Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his face seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted mustache. As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had only their hard fists to batter at the world with. Otto was already one of those drifting, case-hardened laborers who never marry or have children of their own. Yet he was so fond of children!
Hard times abound, and there is plenty of death and discouragement. Life becomes less overtly dramatic, yet more socially fraught, when Jim and his grandparents leave the farm and take up residence in town. Soon, Ántonia and other immigrant girls follow, taking employment as servants in the houses of more well-heeled citizens, where they face the duel prejudices of xenophobia and classism. Then there is the constant, not always welcome, attention from local men. "The country girls were considered a menace to the social order", but really it is they who are in peril: "in every frontier settlement there are men who have come there to escape restraint."
Cather is painfully alert to the ruptures and anxieties of adolescence: "When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no.” Jim sees the town's "guarded mode of living" as "being like living under a tyranny". A not uncommon opinion in one's teens, wherever you find yourself. But in Jim's case it also reflects an idealisation of country life, farm life, that only increases as he grows up, achieves academic and professional success, and becomes more and more removed from this rustic sphere.
The oddest thing about My Ántonia is the enigmatic character of Ántonia herself. Or rather, the enigma of what it is about her character that so transfixes Jim Burden, to the extent that she becomes, in his conception, something more than the ordinary, unassuming young woman she appears to the reader. In the novel's final section, the middle-aged Jim visits Ántonia at the farm she shares with her husband and their absurd number of children. Jim tells her:
"I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister- anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and my dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of time when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me."
At first glance, this seems like a touching encomium. But praising "the idea" of someone in such general terms, with scant regard for their actual, specific person, is dehumanising, or at the very least shockingly self-absorbed. Ántonia seems fine with it, although we're only getting Jim's version of the meeting. I'm not sure what this rather puzzling coda is intended to achieve. I think it's supposed to be a moving statement of Jim's pure and Platonic love for Ántonia and by extension the prairie. For me, though, it highlights the fact that the Ántonia we see is very much Jim's Ántonia, not a figment, but also not quite a real person.
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The next Commonplace Classic is everybody's favourite high school English text, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
The correct pronunciation of "Cather" is difficult to pin down. I have been saying "Cath-uh", which is almost certainly wrong. Some sites assert that "Cat-ter" (rhymes with "hatter") is accurate, but allegedly Truman Capote - who knew Cather - pronounced it "Cay-ther" (rhymes with "bather"). This is complicated by Google's claim that "People also ask: why did Truman Capote talk like that?" As for "Ántonia", it is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable: An-ton-ee-ah.↩