We often suspect the American Dream more the farther we progress into our future, the land that will someday be our own history.
Some of our stories make the Dream into an elegiac myth, while others despise it as a lying trap. For we children of immigrants’ children, our doubts of the Dream multiply the further we travel from our first roots here—in irony fit for a novel, assimilation and success seem to dilute the convictions of the immigrant forebears who set both in motion.
The American Dream, graciously unnamed, wafts through My Ántonia, the novel of immigrants reaping lives from stark early-20th century Nebraska. Using the protagonist Jim Burden as a spotless windowpane, author Willa Cather observes with devotion the lives of three young immigrants: the titular Ántonia Shimerda, Lina Lingaard, and Tiny Soderball. These women are the novel’s focal delights, captivating Cather as much as they do Jim.
Ántonia is prominently Bohemian (Czechoslovakian, for those of us with the same heritage but less flair) while Lena and Tiny are prominently Swedish, but as they work as farmhands and hired girls to rise through the town of Black Hawk, they’re not mere stand-ins for their immigrant communities. They are distinct women of ambition. Cather fills these three women with the dignity of the overcoming, industrious American spirit, but only as individuals. When a novelist valorizes an entire cultural group with this quality (or any other), it makes for schlocky propaganda rather than naturalistic depiction. Cather doesn’t make that mistake in My Ántonia.
Individuals of Recalled Inheritances
Instead, she paints the women, their communities, and their surroundings with feather-touch brushstrokes. Their lives stream by, accumulate, and churn, all with a geniality which rarely renders anyone abject or harsh. The novel moves, lingering only politely.
From their grotto-like cabin, Ántonia’s family must take up farm labor they need to survive, from low-value land deceitfully sold them before they arrived. Their living eventually drives the soulful, former violinist Mr. Shimerda through unmoored isolation to suicide in the darkest depth of one winter. The nearby Norwegian church refuses to bury him for this final act, and all his life Jim cherishes the antique Bohemian rifle the old man gifted him. Ántonia, Lena, and Tiny hire themselves out as tutors and governesses in Black Hawk. As pretty young women, they attract social attention and one or two rakes, but they withstand Black Hawk and move forward. On the novel moves.
Jim himself leaves town for the university life his grandparents had prepared for him, but his trajectory seems outside of himself, while Àntonia and her cohort drive their futures forward with more individual intent. She returns to prairie farm life as the fulfilled mother of ten, while Lena and Tiny find wealth rather than families as a dress-maker and Alaskan gold prospector, respectively. No matter their circumstance, these women succeed. They make for themselves the successes their humble starts long cast into doubt.
However, their lives are sweeter through memory—Jim’s memory, as he recalls of the immigrant girls he knew as a boy in the free wide land he yearns for as an adult.
The novel’s form, a recollection from Jim’s middle age, allows him to stroll from the Shimerdas’ arrival on the plains to his final visit with Ántonia and her brood of children, to include both the fat rattlesnake he once killed for her but also the Burdens’ beloved Austrian farmhand, Otto, he who came from the Far West and inexorably returns to it. Memory is the source of the novel’s geniality, its gentle sadness.
My Ántonia, at its heart, is inherited lore. Its narrative directly involves two generations of Black Hawk, but the older tales told by Burdens and Shimerdas alike reach still farther into their ancestral histories. Through Jim’s retelling, the novel preserves them. Lore is what most of what immigrants pass onto their descendants—any of us will confirm it—and so the novel honors, but also mourns, this tradition in its final scene.
Jim, as I’ve mentioned, chronicles the Ántonia and prairie he loves but no longer sees, to preserve them. While stopping briefly in Black Hawk, he visits Ántonia (under her married name, Cuzak), her husband, Anton, and their children in their well-loved, well-worn home. The children surprise Jim by telling bits of his own childhood back to him, pestering him to know more of what he and their mother once did together. He wasn’t the only one casting memories in amber. Since their parting, Ántonia had preserved Jim and their shared childhood in stories she gave to her children by another man, the kindest sadness she can gift the man who’d once loved her.
The Nebraska landscape does not retain Jim, Ántonia, nor their histories. And so they do their best with the lore they have. Their youthful memories are made into adult melancholy, by the end of the novel.
Influences for My Novel: an Insular Social Humiliation, a Naturalist’s Poetry
Frankly, I’m still figuring out what qualifies as an “influence,” and how I might actually use one plucked from the fiction of last century. When I read while mulling my novel-in-progress, what I read can be leavened with the textures I’d like to recreate—that is, with influences as I’ll define it for this review, or perhaps only this sentence.
For the texture of my novel, I’ve long been attracted to insular communities which move by their own unspoken rules. Beneath their everyday greetings and oft-comic manners, they’re rooted in a moral system particular to their people, place, and needs.
Understated Black Hawk of My Ántonia is such a community. The town’s family-bound immigrant enclaves determine a significant share of its social and economic levers, and I’ve specifically lingered over one specific mechanism: the daughters of these Norwegians, Bohemians, and Swedes take to working and living in the town to pay their farmer fathers’ debts with their own wages.
This setup is how Ántonia, Lena, and Tiny begin to make their fates as servants and governesses in Black Hawk, and their escapades in town prove them cheerful and game enough to do just fine for themselves. And yet, I couldn’t help considering the little-noted backside of this arrangement: the humiliation of their immigrant parents, dependent on the earnings of their young daughters (this income only scraps from wealthier families in Black Hawk).
Proud, impoverished families helped but in the same act humiliated by the only economic chance they have. Cather, generally genial through Jim, doesn’t foreground the resentment of such a system. But it’s there, easy and rich to imagine. It’s one vertebra in the backbone beneath Black Hawk, and I’d like to graft it into my own fictional insular community if I can.
So, too, I’ll dream Cather’s understated poetry of the landscape.
Her prose is rarely showy, but it it embeds the evocative image of the Nebraska landscape deep into the novel. Cather beholds every line of these descriptions in her painter’s eye, and she writes it with her botanist’s vocabulary. Each skill is exalted in the other.
“It was a beautiful blue morning,” begins one passage. “The buffalo-peas were blooming in pink and purple masses along the roadside, and the larks, perched on last year’s dried sunflower stalks, were singing straight at the sun, their heads thrown back and their yellow breasts a-quiver. The wind blew about us in warm, sweet gusts.” This excerpt isn’t the focus of its passage (just one description from a larger childhood episode), but it demonstrates the evocative clarity Cather brings to the prairie setting, whether she has written a passing observation or a show-stopping sunset tableau. Her visual texture of colors always begins in the names of its flora, and it always echoes the natural processes that create them.
Her default choice—to write natural poetry in nature’s terms, enveloping her characters so they feel the land even as they rarely think on it—seems a good stepping-off point for the wilderness I want to create in the western North Carolina setting.
It is a land with poetry in its bones. Its mountain coves and ridges have hidden rich webs of biodiversity, every species adorned in its own name. Its 330 million years of life have enabled the hellbender, the glowing mushrooms, the entrapping pitcher plants, and the speckled trout. From only a few visits and light reading, this poetry of the Southern Appalachian wilds has already inspired me. Cather’s example inspires me to write it in the language already present, already beautiful and alive.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch with more poetry readings to start February.
My Ántonia is the reason I traded pre-law for an English major. I wrote extensively about my Prague adventures this summer and will not reprise that here. But I can't resist commenting, since I've both loved and resisted this novel over the years.
Cather's lyricism is lovely, but Jim Burden is often untrustworthy. He, like many Americans, does not want to see the bleaker side of immigrant experience. He judges Ántonia for being too masculine when she must work in the fields, bristles at her independence during their time together in Black Hawk, and avoids her after she is jilted by Larry Donovan. There's quite a lot in the novel that is *not* the American Dream (Wick Cutter's assault on Jim, for instance, when he takes Ántonia's place in the Cutter home one night). But Jim's nostalgia elides much of that.
As you say, the land deserves to be a character in its own right. Since you mention North Carolina, I wonder if you've read much of Ron Rash? He began as a poet, so I suspect you know of him. Saints at the River is one of my favorite novels of his. His dialogue is sometimes weak, but he brings the full force of his lyricism to the landscape.
I never appreciated My Antonia until now. Thank you, Kevin.