The Endless Possibility of Renewal
Reviewing Willa Cather’s 1918 Classic ‘My Ántonia’
When the orphan Jim Burden meets Ántonia Shimerda, they’re both children aboard a train headed for the Nebraska plains. His parents have died, and he’s going to live with his grandparents. Her family has emigrated to the US, hoping for better odds on the American prairie than those offered by their native Bohemia.
The margins are where people go when they’re out of better options, and the bonds we form there can be eternal.
The Prairie and the People
Anxious about the tuberculosis frequently troubling their home in Virginia, author Willa Cather’s family moved to the Nebraska plains in 1883 when she was just nine. After temporarily working a farm, the family moved to town where Cather’s father began selling insurance and real estate to the locals and European immigrants.
Between the prairie and the people, Cather had all the ingredients necessary for some of her earliest and most enduring novels, beginning with O Pioneers! in 1913 and The Song of the Lark two years later. She set the first part of One of Ours (for which she won the Pulitzer in 1923) on the plains and most of her beloved 1918 classic My Ántonia as well.
The Shimerda family settles nearby Jim’s grandparents, overpaying for a wretched dugout from a fellow Bohemian, Peter Krajiek. Though he’s a few years younger, Jim forms an early and unbreakable bond with Ántonia, teaching her English, exploring the countryside together, and defending her in one instance from a giant rattlesnake with a borrowed shovel.
But conditions prove difficult for all and intolerable for some. As a brutal winter worsens, Ántonia’s father despairs and takes his life. Against all odds, the family rallies and rebounds, thanks to the kindness of their neighbors, especially Jim and his grandparents.
Ántonia’s older brother Ambrosch hires her out as a farm hand, where she shows herself as capable as a man. By then Jim has moved with his grandparents to town and Jim’s grandfather finds Ántonia a more suitable job serving in the home of a local family.
Jim, from whose perspective the story is told, possesses deep affection for Ántonia, but while their relationship grows and matures it never veers into romance, though there are moments it seems as though he’d like nothing more.
He remains possessed with concern for Ántonia and saves her from another sort of snake before their paths split in different directions. As Jim leaves for college and a future in practicing law, it seems as though their separation might prove permanent.
Longing for the Land
Despite the distance and their divergent lives, Jim remains drawn to Ántonia. All along, their relationship is touched by an atmosphere of curiosity and longing that is mirrored by the prairie landscape, which pulls at Jim even when he settles back east and which represents a character in the story as much as anyone.
Describing a late afternoon in the fall:
As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.
Cather conjures moments like this throughout the novel, creating an immersive sense of place, one that Jim can never quite shake, a fascination wrapped up in the very person of his childhood friend. Ántonia becomes an icon of the land, what it represents, and its endless possibility for renewal.
Though an immigrant, Ántonia becomes America itself and despite creating another life for himself in New York Jim is captivated by her. We’re all coming from some place, and our lives collide in ways we may never understand.
‘Just Totally Enraptured’
Cather considered My Ántonia “by far the best of all my contributions to an extremely poor literary era,” as she explained in a letter. And she was highly protective of the book once released, refusing to allow her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to commoditize the book through cheap or garish editions—a fight she carried on for decades.
My Ántonia has gone on to find fans in every generation in the century since its publication—in part because Cather ultimately lost the fight with Houghton Mifflin. After Cather’s death in 1947, her partner, Edith Lewis, conceded to cheaper editions for schools, where countless fans of the book were and still are born.
When Ezra Klein praised journalist Rebecca Traister for her prose in 2021, he asked “if there’s a book you reread for the sheer beauty of the prose.”
“For the beauty of the writing,” she answered, “I would say that my go-to is actually My Ántonia by Willa Cather, which is a book I first read in high school and found slightly boring but beautiful, and then read again in my 20s and was just totally enraptured by and then have gone back to again and again and again as a beautiful piece of writing.”
My Ántonia is book No. 6 in my classic novel goal for 2024. Here’s what I’ve read so far and what’s in store for the rest of the year.
January: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
February: Alice Walker, The Color Purple
March: Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
April: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha
May: Chuang Hua, Crossings
June: Willa Cather, My Àntonia
July: Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
August: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
September: Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
October: Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
November: George Eliot, Middlemarch
December: Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
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What a great choice! I am an English professor at a small Christian college, and I have been teaching _My Antonia_ for several years in my American Lit. II class with very positive results. Many of my students are first-generation college students in a rural environment, and I think the novel’s thoughtful examination of the value of external vs. internal validation has particular resonance for these students, many of whom have grown up in extremely challenging financial circumstances.
The novel has such great contemporary relevance regarding issues of immigration, stewardship of the land, and female empowerment. My classes always have interesting discussions revolving around the work’s vision of ethical awareness in light of different life experiences and socio-cultural value structures. We see such moving visions of redemption in Antonia’s steadfast refusal to accept a victimized status through her internalization of empathy in response to wrenching challenges. Cather’s ultimate tribute to Antonia is refusing to allow anyone (including Jim) to trap her in a static posture.
There is a great online scholarly edition available through the Willa Cather Archive—Cather.unl.edu. Enjoy!
I read both 'My Antonia' and 'Death Comes to the Archbishop' earlier this year. Of the two, 'Death Comes to the Archbishop' was my favourite. 'My Antonia' reads more like a series of beautiful prairie paintings described by its first person narrator. In contrast, the third person narration brought the mesas and canyons of 'Death Comes to the Archbishop' vividly to the mind's eye.