My Antonia by Willa Cather, first published in 1918
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
My Antonia is a story of adolescence, wildness, and coming of age in America. It begins in Black Hawk, Nebraska, with two young children being transported to the midwestern frontier for the first time in their lives, under totally different circumstance. Jim Burden, our narrator, is being sent west from his home state of Virginia to live with his grandparents in Nebraska, as his parents have both died. He is ten years old. Antonia (ann-toh-NEE-ah) Shimerda, fourteen, is traveling to Nebraska with her family, the latest stop on their immigration journey from then Bohemia.
Jim and Antonia's lives become intertwined as neighboring families on the frontier, and Jim's family helps the Shimerdas to tackle the unforgiving land and learn to survive. Jim is the only child in his home with his grandparents, but makes good friends with the family's two hired hands, Otto Fuchs and Jake Marpole. Antonia is one of four, two older brothers (Ambrosch, Marek) and a younger sister (Julia). They are living in a rather uninhabitable and inhospitable place because a local Bohemian, Krajiek swindled them into purchasing it.
The bulk of the book takes place during this time of Jim and Antonia's lives, and is full of adventures and occasional tragedies. Mr. Shimerda struggles to adjust, not having wanted to leave his homeland, and eventually takes his own life. This turns Antonia into a second field hand to help manage the farm with Ambrosch, who is surly and generally unlikable. Jim eventually moves to 'town', the nearby small town of Black Hawk, with his grandparents, and Antonia is later sent to town to work as a nanny of sorts.
Antonia and Jim have a sort of lifelong 'will-they, won't they', but ultimately their journeys part. He goes off to college in the Northeast, and she makes a poor choice of man and he strands her with a baby. Thankfully, when Jim finally comes back to visit her later in life, she has found a wonderful second man and married him, Anton, and they have many lovely children together. They are happily managing a farm of their own, not far from where Jim and Antonia grew up.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
Dear blobbists,
We are down to the last three books! Can you believe? I can hardly believe it, though the second list has taken far longer than the first. ;)
In any case, let's dig in. I LOVED this book. So heads up, this entry is on the long side. I will definitely name that there are some racist/icky parts that come up in passing, and some inappropriate/hurtful characterizations of Black people, but I will also allow that Willa Cather was a product of her time. Not to excuse, but perhaps to contextualize.
That said, this book was, in a word, nostalgic. I think because so much of it is Antonia and Jim romping and roving and enjoying a large stretch of land, which made me think of our family farm, Rosehaven, and how this loomed so large in my mother's childhood, as well as the earliest years of mine. Again, I think it's important to recognize that the land in this book was not wholly uninhabited, and likely was in the possession of indigenous people before the story begins, but the West was inhabited and occupied in this way.
At first, I thought it was weird that Willa Cather wrote as Jim, a man, but her female characters really sing throughout the book, and it became clear that Jim was, in many ways, a kind of foil for her female heroines. I also read up more on Cather herself, and learned that she lived with a woman for most of her life, and went by William for a period, so perhaps there's more to writing as Jim in that way as well.
If you haven't read this book, I would recommend it. It's a really striking story, it's not terribly long, but its prose is intensely rich in a way that I'm not sure I've experienced before. Onwards to my thoughts!
The Cast of Characters
Let's get to know some of them, shall we?
Otto Fuchs, the Burdens' hired man, a sort of 'jack-of-all-trades'
Otto and Jake were very good companions for Jim, almost like big brothers, and I was glad he had them and wasn't just always the only child with his grandparents.
- He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. I think Cather's descriptions are so wonderfully distinct.
- On why the Shimerdas may not like him: Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians.
- Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bartender, a miner; had wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it.
Grandfather (Josiah) Burden, a man of few words, but powerful words
Jim's grandparents are just LOVELY people. I know that they represent settlers, and that history is complicated, but they are just such delightful humans. I think we should all be so lucky as to have grandparents like the Burdens.
- Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle.
- Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.
- I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner. Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. This is when I first fell in love with Grandmother. I mean, she has her own rattlesnake cane. How cool is that?
- A body never knows what traits poverty might bring out in 'em. Grandmother is so endlessly kind and forgiving toward the Shimerdas, even though Mrs. Shimerda is often mean, and petty, and expects a lot of support without offering much in return. I loved this line, because she's so right! Who knows what traits poverty might bring out in all of us?
- When the Norwegians refuse to allow Mr. Shimerda to be buried in their graveyard - Grandmother was indignant. 'If these foreigners are so clannish, Mr. Bushy, we'll have to have an American graveyard that will be more liberal-minded. I'll get right after Josiah to start one in the spring. If anything was to happen to me, I don't want the Norwegians holding inquisitions over me to see whether I'm good enough to be laid amongst 'em. I loved that Grandmother was so welcoming, and so insistent that Mr. Shimerda be offered a decent resting place.
Mr. Shimerda, Antonia's sweet and thoughtful father
- He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old country; he made good wages, and his family were respected there. There were so many immigration narratives that are still so true today, and this is one example. I constantly saw students of mine in Manchester whose parents were doctors, scientists, professors in their own country, but were only able to find jobs as custodians or hourly workers here. I think it's interesting tracing some of these immigrant narratives back a century.
- When his deep-seeing eyes rested on me, I felt as if he were looking far ahead into the future for me, down the road I would have to travel. Though Mr. Shimerda speaks almost no English, Jim feels like Mr. Shimerda sees straight into his soul, and I found this so interesting.
- She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not humble her.
- She seemed to think that my elders withheld helpful information, and that from me she might get valuable secrets. I thought it was cute that Mrs. Shimerda tried to quiz Jim on their plowing and planting plans, in case Grandfather was not telling her all the crucial details. I mean, practically, she was clearly right to be suspicious, since Krajiek was such a swindler!
- She took a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep warm for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers. I have seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot. When the neighbors were there building the new house, they saw her do this, and the story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their food in their featherbeds. I love this so much. I have never thought to wrap a coffee cake in a quilt, but what a great way to keep it warm for later!
'After I'd dressed the baby, I took it out to show it to Ambrosch. He was muttering behind the stove and wouldn't look at it.''You'd better put it out in the rain-barrel', he says.'Now, see here, Ambrosch', says I, 'there's a law in this land, don't forget that. I stand here a witness that this baby has come into the world sound and strong, and I intend to keep an eye on what befalls it.' I pride myself I cowed him. This was another Excellent female character, Mrs. Steavens, a widow who comes to rent and live on Jim's family's land after they move to Black Hawk. I was also really continuously struck but how collectively reliant people are on each other in the frontier. In the present day, we aren't often obligated or required or even called to assist in each other's birthing of children, or saving a family whose crops rotted or failed from starvation by sharing stores of food, and there's something very beautiful about this, as the Shimerdas clearly would not have survived without the Burdens.
- Antonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make them known.
- Antonia had the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world; love and credulousness seemed to look out of them with open faces.
- 'Oh Jimmy,' she sobbed', 'what you think for my lovely papa!' It seemed to me that I could feel her heart breaking as she clung to me.
- I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now. Antonia is so quick to take up the mantle for her family and make sure her family can continue to keep the farm. I found this really admirable.
- School is all right for little boys. I help make this land one good farm. This idea of Antonia farming the land and working out as a laborer initially is also an interesting example of how women don't have access to or the opportunity to do certain careers or occupations, but when a man falls absent for any reason, the opportunity/the ability to do such a career opens up. Which in Antonia's case initially seems kind of tragic, as she's losing out on her education, but later seems like a real gift, as she has incredible comfort with the frontier life and caretaking of the land, which comes in clutch when she and her city husband have to make their own farm to support their family.
- 'Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!' she used to sing joyfully. 'I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man. I love this about Antonia. Definitely also interesting in terms of Cather's own gender/sexuality, whatever that may have been.
- Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart. Antonia definitely became one of my favorite literary characters. It also made me realize that I don't think we have many examples of white settlers highlighting immigrant narratives, especially from this time, so it feels like it was forward thinking for its time.
- I looked forward to any new crisis with delight. I thought it was cute that because Jim felt safe in his life, for the most part, and lacked siblings or other children on the regular, crises were a thing of excitement for him.
- The more our house was like a country hotel, the better I liked it. Again, I think Jim felt really lonely at times. I wonder if Cather saw herself in Jim, as I know she had a somewhat similar trajectory of her own.
- After supper I used to catch up my cap, stick my hands in my pockets, and dive through the willow hedge as if witches were after me. I love this line.
- Antonia, to Jim: 'Lena does! If she's up to any of her nonsense with you, I'll scratch her eyes out!' You're not going to sit around here and whittle store-boxes and tell stories all your life. You are going away to school and make something of yourself.' There's definitely an interesting narrative around the idea that Jim needs to 'make something' of himself, and he's sort of held up as the pride of the town in this way.
- 'I don't care what they say about me, but if it hurts you, that settles it. I won't go to the Firemen's Hall again.' Jim, like I said, really is a very good boy. Sometimes he's a bit proud or jealous with Antonia, and he can be a bit silly around girls, but when push comes to shove, he behaves honorably. This line is from an exchange with his grandmother, where he's been sneaking out to go to dances at night, and his grandmother's upset when she finds out because it's hurting his grandfather's reputation.
- 'I don't want to marry Nick, or any other man,' Lena murmured. 'I've seen a good deal of married life, and I don't care for it. I want to be so I can help my mother and the children at home, and not have to ask lief of anybody.' YES. Again, now that I know Cather did not marry a man and lived with a woman, this line may have a different meaning, but in any case, I LOVE that we're seeing an example of a woman who just comfortably flat out says in the early 1900s, marriage? Nah. Pass. It reminded me of how my friend sent me a meme about spinsters, which of course now has a rather negative connotation, and the quotes from early spinsters were all about how excited they were to be independent women who could Earn their Living from their spinning. So yeah, maybe I'm a spinster! Proud of it!
- I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival meetings with someone who was always being converted. She handed her feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation. Lena is a lovely, passionate creature.
Lena: 'Why, I'm not going to marry anybody. Didn't you know that?'Jim: 'What makes you say that?'Lena: 'Well, it's mainly because I don't want a husband. Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.'Jim: 'But you'll be lonesome. You'll get tired of this sort of life, and you'll want a family.'Lena: 'Not me. I like to be lonesome.'
The Nebraska Prairie, the scenery, the backdrop, but really the star of the novel
One of the things I found most striking about this book was the way that the Nebraska plain was depicted. I will name that I don't have the most positive ideas about Nebraska, and assume it is rather flat and dull, but this book really sings its praises in the most lovely way.
- Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I.
- As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wineskins, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. This is such an exquisite line. So vivid.
- Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. <3
- All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. 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. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death - heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day. Isn't this just stunning? I spent almost two hours writing down the lines for this blog because there was so much underlining all over my copy.
On the smells of home
- As I entered the kitchen, I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. When Jim first enters his grandparents' home, he smells gingerbread, which I loved because gingerbread smells like home to me too, especially in the fall. What does home smell like to you, reader?
On hearing a different language for the first time
- I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue. This happens when young Jim first hears the Bohemian language being spoken. It made me wonder when was the first time I heard a foreign language? I think probably very young, as I know my mother spoke French to me as a baby. It was really interesting to think about when this happens for any child, and for Jim to experience it for the first time at ten years old.
On immigration
Like I said earlier, I think there were a lot of places and spaces in this book where Cather was really quite forward-thinking and liberal in her view of immigration, which I found refreshing. Here's an example:
Jim, reflecting: I thought the attitude of the town people towards these girls very stupid. If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard's grandfather was a clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn't speak English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Antonia's father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all 'hired girls'. I mean, yes, there's a little bit of an over-valuation of education here, but I appreciate that Jim is trying to point out a pervasive stereotype that is unfortunately still rampant today.
On reading with a smile on my face
I literally wrote in the back of my copy that I 'read this book with a smile on my face', because I found myself pausing and smiling and reading and smiling some more. Here's a line that made me smile:
At supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake, which I had hoped would linger on until tomorrow in a mutilated condition, disappeared on the second round.
On Jim and Antonia
I think something that really sets this book apart is the fact that Jim and Antonia don't get together. They never even do more than kiss once, I think but there's a deep intensity to their relationship. Here are some of my favorite moments between them:
- Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard of cooking cucumbers, but Antonia assured me they were very good. We had to walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.
- Up there the stars grew magnificently bright. Though we had come from such different parts of the world, in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be.
- We burrowed down in the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of the west and the stars begin to shine in the clear, windy sky.
- 'Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than anyone else in this part of the world. 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 dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.'
And when they see each other much later in life
- When I told her I had no children, she seemed embarrassed. 'Oh, ain't that too bad! Maybe you could take one of my bad ones, now? That Leo; he's the worst of all'. She leaned toward me with a smile. "And I love him the best,' she whispered. lol. I love this so much.
- When Antonia proudly says that Jim can have a bed to sleep on when he visits, as two of the boys tend to sleep in the haymow: I told her I would like to sleep in the haymow, with the boys. This made love Jim more than any line in the book, I think.
On happiness
As some of my long time readers know, my grandmother was a great champion of this blob (and was, in fact, the reason for me calling it a blob occasionally ;)) and I read Thanatopsis at her funeral. This line reminded me of the end of that poem in a lovely way.
When Jim sits in the garden as a boy: Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is the sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
Willa Cather can write my seasons
I've said in other blobs that I like various writers for the way they write particular things, like weather, or jokes, or descriptions, or dialogue. Murasaki Shikibu is one of my all-time favorite depicters of the seasons, but she can share writing my seasons with Willa Cather.
Winter: When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: 'This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and the shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.' It was as if we were being punished for the loveliness of summer.
When the dancing tent comes to town
There's a really interesting trajectory of all prairie/frontier life, to small town life, and then eventually at the end, back to the prairie. I loved when a traveling group came to town and there were nightly dances:
At last there was something to do in those long, empty summer evenings, when the married people sat like images on their front porches, and the boys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks - northward to the edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back again to the post-office, the ice-cream parlor, the butcher shop. Now there was a place where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one could laugh aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silence seemed to ooze out of the ground, to hang under the foliage of the black maple trees with the bats and shadows. Now it was broken by lighthearted sounds.
On social options, and slim pickings
As someone who grew up in a small town myself, I empathized with Jim when he was weighing his options after the dance hall was taken off the table:
One could hang about the drugstore; and listen to the old men who sat there every evening, talking politics and telling raw stories. One could go to the cigar factory and chat with the old German who raised canaries for sale, and look at his stuffed birds. But whatever you began with him, the talk went back to taxidermy. These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other lights burning downtown after nine o'clock. Lol. Whatever you began, the talk went back to taxidermy.
Referents and Reverberations
There were honestly so many of these, I barely even know where to begin. I'll do my best to capture the ones I think are the most salient.
- I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
- The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
- The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck, As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
- Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town. I had wanted to get some picture books for Yulka and Antonia; even Yulka was able to read a little now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book. We bound it between pasteboard, which I covered with brilliant calico, representing scenes from a circus. For two days I sat at the dining-room table, pasting this book full of pictures for Yulka... Fuchs got out the old candle-moulds and made tallow candles. Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters and baked gingerbread men and roosters, which we decorated with burnt sugar and red cinnamon drops.
When I got to the pond, I could see that Jake was bringing in a little cedar tree across his pommel. He used to help my father cut Christmas trees for me in Virginia, and he had not forgotten how much I liked them.
We hung the tree with the gingerbread animals, strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted into pasteboard sockets.
After Otto adds his paper figures - Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches. Grandmother said it reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets of cotton wool under it for a snow-field, and Jake's pocket-mirror for a frozen lake. This is just about the sweetest depiction of Christmas that I have ever read, and it reminded me of the Marches and how they celebrate Christmas even when they're broke, and how they still make space to share with their neighbors who are even less fortunate.
- The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu
On writing as Jim Burden - My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim's manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me. Like I said, this was initially off-putting to me, as it reminded me of how The Tale of Genji is entirely about Genji, who is by and large, a Terrible human being. But I think the knowledge of how Cather may have identified and the fact that Jim is a really lovely human being made me more ok with it in this case.
I was also reminded of Genji in Cather's seasons. Here's spring:
When spring came, after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I was used to watching in Virginia, no budding woods or blowing gardens. There was only - spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind - rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring. So stunning.
- Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
- Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery
- The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
These didn't have specific parts that reminded me of them, but gave off similar vibes:
- Lord of the Rings
- Middlesex
- Candide
- (TV Shows) Yellowstone, Alone
- The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. I loved this line, and it reminded me for some reason of this Lewis Carroll line: The time has come,' the Walrus said, To talk of many things: Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — Of cabbages — and kings.
- If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. This reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
- I buttoned up my jacket and raced my shadow home.
- Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away.
- It seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in the night.
- I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall.
