My Antonia turns 100
If you haven’t read Willa Cather’s wonderful novel, seek it out for its centennial in 2018
BOOK CLUB ALERT! My Antonia, Willa Cather’s extraordinary novel set on the Nebraska prairies, is 100 years old in 2018. I urge you to think about including it in your book choices for the upcoming year. You won’t be disappointed — far from it. A new vintage edition will be in bookstores for the anniversary.
My Antonia still carries a powerful emotional impact and speaks volumes about the settlement and development of mid-America in the pioneering years of the past century. Cather makes you see and feel what it must have been like to immigrate to the beautiful but unforgiving Midwestern prairies from a settled life in central Europe. Problems of survival, language, behaviour and culture loom very large as Cather dramatizes the challenges faced by the Shimerda family, freshly arrived from their native Bohemia. They were the first Bohemian family to arrive in that part of Nebraska. They came hoping to make a better life for their four children and had little idea of what they were in for.
My Antonia is also the story of Jim Burden, an adolescent who, having lost both his parents in Virginia, comes west to live with his grandparents on a prairie farm near Black Hawk, Nebraska (modelled on Cather’s Red Cloud). He is four years younger than Antonia Shimerda, but is fascinated by her and curious about her family. While he find himself living on a successful farm where he enjoys the company of two cowboy-farm workers, Antonia and her family have to live their first year in a small sod house cut into a prairie hill. There they struggle to get through their first winter in an unfamiliar and demanding landscape. Her father urges young Jim to “te-e-ach my Antonia!” — she is quick to respond.
The novel has five parts. The first is brilliantly structured to dramatize the seminal experiences shared that first autumn by Antonia and Jim. Because they are neighbours on the vast prairie, living only a mile or two apart, the two families necessarily converge, in large part because of Jim’s grandmother’s kindness and concern for the struggling Shimerdas. Vivid incidents hold particular fascination for me and for most readers. In his retrospective narration, Jim recalls being keenly open to his new world: “All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the [red] grass uplands, trusting my pony to get me home again.” Antonia has a similar openness to the new and the different.
Jim and Antonia share several adventures, each beautifully shaped and suggestively rendered by Cather. There are the visits they make with Antonia’s father to see his two new friends from Russia who live on a farm to the north. “Curly Peter” and “Rooshian” Pavel, two luckless sorts, had cobbled together a new life on the prairie, enjoying the profusion of melons in their garden while masking feelings of alienation about the Russia they had escaped. Pavel’s deathbed story, told in a delirious state and overheard by Jim and Antonia, recounts the perilous trip between Russian villages by a wedding party led by Peter and Pavel. Travelling in sledges, the party is pursued and savagely pulled down by ravenous wolves, though Peter and Pavel managed to escape.
Antonia and Jim struggle to make sense of the story. It haunts their imaginations — and the reader’s. “For Antonia and me,” writes Jim, “the story of the wedding party was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel’s secret to anyone, but guarded it jealously — as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure. At night before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.” As Cather knew, such stories are an extraordinary spur to young imaginations.
On another occasion when Jim and Antonia stop to investigate a prairie dog-town, Jim is surprised by a large rattlesnake as he studies an entrance hole frequented by the prairie dogs. Jim describes both his disgust and panic when he realizes that the snake, poising to attack, is as thick as his leg; it exudes “a disgusting vitality” and is, of course, potentially lethal. With the spade he is carrying, he lashes out and kills the “monstrosity,” feeling confused and “seasick” afterwards. For her part Antonia becomes the excited celebrant of his bravery: “You is just like big mans … Ain’t you scared a bit? ... Nobody ain’t seen in this kawntree so big a snake like you kill.” Jim later admits to himself that he was very lucky that the snake was old and lazy — “So in reality,” he thinks, “the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer.” But he also realized that it was very special to have “Antonia beside me, to appreciate and admire.”
A third and heart-breaking incident is the unexpected suicide of Antonia’s father. Drawn to the new world at his wife’s insistence, he loses his personal identity and desire to live in the demanding landscape of Nebraska. A wellmannered and gentle man, always neatly dressed, he is increasingly depressed by the restrictions of the sod house and the cold Nebraska winter that culminates for him in a heavy snow storm. Pavel’s death had deprived him of his only friend. Back home he had been a gregarious tailor who love to play his violin for village events. So completely is he out of his element in Nebraska that he refuses to play again. As Antonia poignantly tells Jim, he was “so unhappy that he could not live any longer.”
While Jim and Antonia wrestle in their youthful ways with the sudden loss of a beloved, iconic figure, life soon goes on, as it must, and relations between the two families change. Beyond the contentious politics of where to bury a Catholic on the prairie, a feud develops between the two families, predicated on the grasping and duplicitous ways of the struggling Shimerdas. Without ‘the papa’ as a buffer, the aggressive Mrs. Shimerda and her son Ambrosch make themselves disagreeable neighbours, and, as a result, the relationship between Jim and Antonia is strained. The following spring and summer Antonia proudly becomes a strong-armed farm worker committed to “mak[ing] this land one good farm.” That commitment to the family homestead takes so much of her time that the bond the two had shared during that first year is undercut. For his part Jim goes off to school while Antonia give herself over to farm work.
The novel, however, is about the strength of those early bonds in the face of the demands upon immigrants who are pushed to the limit in their struggle to make the prairie work for their needs. The final four sections contrast Jim’s more conventional educational progress to the very different life that Antonia makes for herself. I’ll develop this in my next column.
Reach Michael Peterman, professor emeritus of English literature at Trent University, at mpeterman@trentu.ca