Willa Cather's Ántonia
Willa Cather, My Ántonia
On a train journey, two friends reminisce about an elusive figure from their childhood.
Now read on:
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. I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart time enough to enjoy that friendship. 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 can’t see,” he said impetuously, “why you have never written anything about Ántonia.”
I told him I had always felt that other people—he himself, for one knew her much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with him; I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Ántonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her.
He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took hold of him. “Maybe I will, maybe I will!” he declared. He stared out of the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. “Of course,” he said, “I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about myself. It’s through myself that I knew and felt her, and I’ve had no practice in any other form of presentation.”
I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most wanted to know about Ántonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a little girl who watched her come and go, had not.
Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with some pride as he stood warming his hands.
“I finished it last night—the thing about Ántonia,” he said. “Now, what about yours?”
I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.
“Notes? I didn’t make any.” He drank his tea all at once and put down the cup. “I didn’t arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Ántonia’s name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn’t any form. It hasn’t any title, either.” He went into the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the word, “Ántonia.” He frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another word, making it “My Ántonia.” That seemed to satisfy him.
“Read it as soon as you can,” he said, rising, “but don’t let it influence your own story.”
My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim’s manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.
What we love about this passage...
Fantasy, memory, experience, and even gender all run together during this dreamy train journey. On one level, Ántonia's central importance to Jim's childhood is made clear. Yet, Cather never quite tells us the nature of his obsession -- was it platonic? Erotic? Self-serving? As she suggests in the last line of the passage (and the title of the novel), what interests her is the deeper question of how we know others and their stories, and whether this one is his story to tell in the first place.
About the author
At the age of nine, Willa Cather (1873-1947) moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska. She became a popular success in her own lifetime for her novels of rural America, and eventually went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922). Critics have long been attracted to her interest in gender, nation, and sexuality. Other well-known novels of hers include O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915).
To read alongside...
F Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby (1925) and Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence (1920) similarly take stock of the changing political and intellectual landscape of early-twentieth century America. These narratives are set in cities; My Ántonia (1918) explores this period from a rural standpoint and focuses on the prominent place of immigration in American culture.
Early twentieth-century writers such as Marcel Proust are well known for their fascination with memory; the interest in the relationship between experience, memory, dreams, and gender continues up through the present in the work of figures such as Toni Morrison and Annie Ernaux.
For evocative memories of childhood, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), which tells the story of sibling rivalry and love between Maggie and Tom Tulliver, set the stage for much of what came after. After all, Proust said that just reading two pages of Eliot's novel made him weep!
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Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/
Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/
The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
“Five Tips to Get Reading Again if You’ve Struggled During the Pandemic,” The Conversation (8 January 2021): https://theconversation.com/five-tips-to-get-reading-again-if-youve-struggled-during-the-pandemic-152904
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