Although with Book Two the novel moves into town and indoors, away from the prairie dogs and rattlesnakes, in many ways the book becomes wilder, more primal
Looking back at "Past Lives," one of the things I'm noticing is how Jim and Àntonia don't have a shared language for talking about their relationship. The moments when each lets down their guard are syncopated. The kiss: Jim sort of tells Àntonia how important she is to him, but brings up kissing Lena Lingard! She laughs and calls him a "kid" she's "awful fond of." She makes avowals and he lets them pass: “Maybe I be the kind of girl you like better, now I come to town.” She says more in these casual moments than he ever tells us, the readers, but maybe he is keeping back what he is prepared to confide in the writer from New York.
Parts of book 2 read like a coming of age story both for the young characters and also for the town. “Stuff” has been happening in the town for a while, including the occasional short term disappearance of a young woman (which happened everywhere in the US until Roe)but now, with the dance hall, the hired girls, more saloons, the spirit of the town is evolving, and the elders are confronting what to do to keep young people in line. Lines are being drawn. Grandfather wouldn’t be happy about Jim’s visits to a saloon. Jim sneaks out the window! Antonia is warned, but rebels.
I've thought about how Jim both feels Àntonia pulling away with this attraction to a more sensual, disreputable way of life, at the same time he is attracted to it. It reminds me of now how we worry when the kids spend all night at raves in Bushwick... Recently I've seen some commentary out there about how kids are getting puritanical post-pandemic, they have sex later, they don't drink so much, like that's a problem. Everyone is ambivalent about these forces of vitality in youth that pull both toward recklessness and discovery.
About the disappearance of young women: there really is this undercurrent of sexual menace, like what happened to Lena on the prairie, how exposed she was by her tattered clothes and her isolation. I think we are partly asked to see what Jim does not notice: that the girls live with this in their background as a threat. Jim's profund shame after the attack by Cutter is a register of how estranged he is from this awful reality, he displaces the shame onto Àntonia, that old move. Lena herself does not want to marry, dresses up when she comes into society to be accepted and protected. (Though she does seem to take pleasure in the attention of Ole, or is she brushing off humiliation?) Leaving the protection of the Harlings, in pursuit of freedom, exposes Antonia to Cutter.
I have also been thinking that this is reading much like a coming-of-age story -- specifically with respect to Jim's restlessness, his desire for/attachment to Antonia, who sees him so differently (from the way he sees himself and how others see him). I am a little at a loss as to where there exists real tension in the narrative -- where is it all going? I guess it is the episodic nature of it. But it is wearing on me, as a reader. And I'm wondering, who is really the narrator? I'm not sure it's Jim. But then why "My Antonia"? Book Two leaves me feeling a bit adrift.
And then there is the racism. I realize the importance of reading a work of literature in the context of the time in which it was written. But it is really awful.
Thanks for your comment about the tension or direction of Jim’s story. I think what keeps me going, other than the joy of being immersed in Cather’s descriptions of nature and Black Hawk, is curiosity about Antonia’s and Jim’s futures in the context of their shared pasts. He is now an attorney for a railroad and travels through the Midwest in this capacity. The narrator of the introduction implies that Jim’s marriage lacks the romantic appeal that draws Jim to the past. Where is Antonia now? Does her life suit her talents and temperament? Jim mentions in the introduction that he had renewed his friendship with her. I would like to read about that.
Yes! Also we feel modernity inching in. Like, the town already feels so much closer to our way of life than the country did. And when characters speak of what's going on in the big cities, we inch a bit nearer into familiarity. Lena thinks the "travelling man" is the height of sophistication. How do Àntonia and Jim and their relationship carry their sort of magical prehistory into something that touches on our present?
At a venture, I’d say if you’re eager to learn about the town of Black Hawk (cf. opening sentence) and the subtle ties between town and hinterland and the subtle changes and continuities in the lives of the characters by this change of scene then maybe you can stay hooked? But maybe there are other ways in?
I am realizing that I have read My Àntonia twice before—at long intervals—but not much of the story has stayed with me, and perhaps this is why. We experience the stories less as plots than as kind of interludes or set pieces, that set against each other make up a kind of collage-like portrait. An example: he says at the beginning of Book Two "That river was to be my compensation for the lost freedom of the farming country," and then that is echoed by the interlude at the end by the river with the girls, when Antonia opens up to him about her nostalgia and “each of the girls pointed out to me the direction in whch her father’s farm lay,” and then we again see the prairie in red: "the curly grass was on fire now; the bark of the oaks turned red as copper."
In an essay critical of Defoe, Cather makes a beautiful statement about the importance of scene-making for the novelist. A remembered scene is full of significant details which take on life from the scene’s deeper emotional significance, is the gist of it, and a good novelist will make detailed scenes for that reason.
This is certainly exactly what she does in this book! I noticed in the scene at the river that the pace was slowing down, we see Jim go through all these minute movements, taking off his clothes, swimming, climbing up the bank, as the surroundings gets more and more closely described. The scene becomes a a setting, in the sense of a ring and a jewel, for Àntonia's confidences to come.
Yes, chapter XIV “on Sunday morning” is a great example of a landscape described in a way that speaks to the harrowing ambiguity of the circumstance: will it really be like old times? Words like “always” and “everywhere” resound with powerful irony. Or what about the milkweed, “rare in that part of the state,” is rare as the encounter. I can’t resist adding that the singer-songwriter Greg Brown seems to have borrowed from this passage in his song “Early,” celebrating his prairie home town of that name.
A key theme of Book Two is education, in school and outside of school. Jim has been brought into town (a key word) because it is time for him to go to school, but at first all he learns there is savagery. Similar paradoxes haunt the education of the hired girls. In the marvelous essayistic chapter nine, Jim (or Cather herself) submits an argument for a new kind of education for women based on his observations of the immigrant young women. They have been active and useful on the farm. This has strengthened their powers of observation, given them physical vigor, and given them a chance to make an economic contribution to their families. So I offer this as a rounding out of Chris’s excellent discussion of dance and primitivism. There is that, but there is also an attempt to discover principles for women’s education, not far from that of the ancient Spartans and Rousseau.
I love this observation. We can also see how much knowledge of literature and history Cather managed to eke out of her life in Red Cloud, and yet she has this envy of the freedom and sensuality of "the country girls" (assuming she was one of those town girls, "cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs"). Jim, as a boy, had "opportunities" that Cather would not have had to enter their world, and imagine a fuller education than she was able to have.
Cather and education: what a gigantic subject! In 1919, the same year My Ántonia was published, she wrote a lovely little essay on education on the prairie (link below) called "The Education You Have to Fight For" with lines like this: "Before there were any churches the building that was a schoolhouse all week became a church on Sunday and the congregation sat on the low seats behind the inkwells." Maybe worth remembering that Cather was herself a teacher. After leaving Nebraska, she taught Latin, math, and English at Pittsburgh high schools. She also wrote a tremendous "campus novel," with the not very alluring title "The Professor's House." I happen to live in a professor's house myself, built by an Amherst college English professor and currently occupied by another of the same ilk.
There was this early moment when there's a mention of "preaching at the sod school-house," and I thought, is there school at that school-house? Why aren't Jim and Antonia there?
It’s a fine essay, but I have trouble reconciling it with the much more daring approach to education in My Antonia (as something of the body, the emotions, taking place everywhere and not just in school). It may well be that Cather’s journalism is coming from a very different place in her mind than her fiction. Woodress makes a comment to that effect…
Beautifully said. It was part of Cather's commitment to writing novels rather than journalism that the two varieties of writing came, as you say, "from a very different place." She gratefully accepted the advice of Sarah Orne Jewett, another towering writer (The Country of the Pointed Firs), to give up her life as a professional magazine editor and writer. In 1908, in a letter of gigantic importance to Cather, Jewett wrote, "you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia; the city, the country—in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up." (Needless to say, "Bohemia" here does not refer to Ántonia's birthplace but to the world of Greenwich Village and other clusters of struggling artists and writers.)
I’m starting to realize Cather was a great writer. When you consider her raw gift as manifested in her theater reviews as an undergrad, already famous in the region, and trembled at. But her ability to take that extroverted raw talent and find over decades that quiet center, as Jewett says, and to arrive at a set of artistic principles of such depth by the time she wrote her preface to Jewett, it’s the true mark of greatness. Why she isn’t recognized as a great writer I mean really heroized as an artist is partly sexism, partly elitism, I guess.
Fascinating angle, Chris, inasmuch as ultimately Mrs. Harling (end of ch. X) banishes Antonia from her house partly for going to the dancing tent.
There must be a distinction between hearing music and dancing to it. I agree that the long passage about D’Arnault contains some half a dozen sentences that are truly racist and revolting, beyond anything that was even normal for the time.
But can we still say Cather was at least trying to include this man in the sacred fellowship of art, clumsily but with sincerity? She wasn’t fond of Jews either but if that Jew happened to be a virtuoso violinist, he would be a friend in art.
Could that be what Mrs. Harling is doing: testifying that d'Arnault does indeed belong in the sacred fellowship of art, head and shoulders above the other pianist mentioned in the novel, Anson Kirkpatrick?
It's interesting--and wrenching--to contrast d’Arnault’s life story, as a disabled child suffering from, apparently, both Tourette Syndrome and epilepsy, with that of poor Marek, whose main talent is making animal noises and who ends up (spoiler alert) institutionalized in a mental asylum.
While we're on the subject of bigotry, I’ve sometimes wondered whether Cather, who was certainly capable of antisemitism (as well as philosemitism), considered making Wick Cutter a Jew, the stereotypical identity of the “moneylender.” Maybe we dodged a bullet with that one.
Cather’s racism is probably related to her sense of conflict about her own past and the unacknowledged role of African-Americans in her own life story. An essay I read by Marion someone in the 1999 CUP collection New Essays on My Antonia elaborates on this.
Another interesting character to me is Mrs. Harling. She is apparently drawn from Cather’s own mother, I believe. She stands at the threshold of part two with a no pasaran! A teacher in the art of life? Or is her influence oppressive?
I share your curiosity about Mrs. Harling. In previous readings, I had somehow missed the detail that she "had known d'Arnault for years." It's Mrs. Harling who urges Ántonia to visit Tiny on Saturday night, "as there would certainly be music at the Boys' Home." I like to believe--perhaps mistakenly--that Mrs. Harling would not have shared Jim's crudely racist assessment of d'Arnault's appearance.
It seems important in this line of discussion to note that Mrs. Harding is also a pianist and a person who lives artfully, full of joy, rigor , and passion. Her husband, sadly, (I think), suppresses the spontaneity of his family.
Good point! There is that moment where Jim says of the Harlings "there was usually someone at the piano," and "though we did not realize it then, Mrs. Harling was our audience." This was the sort of childhood Àntonia might have had. I felt like Frances was sort of a bookend or mirror-image of Àntonia. Two ways of being a strong female personality, a Daddy's girl, which is the way in. Recalling how Mr. Shimerda urged Jim to teach Àntonia, knowing, I thought, that she had the ability to take on the family, and/or be something more, the kind of cultured person who had "beautiful talk … about music, and the woods, and about God."
madness may be an important if subdued theme in this book, and that there is a tacit link between Antonia and the out and out crazy minor characters, the tramp, Mrs. Cutter, Crazy Mary. Antonia isn’t mad, in that way, but she isn’t rational in the purposive money-making American way, and so the madness theme may affect our view of her as it were at one remove, especially when she moves in with the Cutters. Also, her dancing is a form of positive Dionysian frenzy. I’m not saying this is the whole picture by any means, but a fascinating side-light.
I was struck that when Àntonia told the story of the tramp's suicide Jim did not recall that her own father had (?) killed himself. He took in the story without an impulse toward compassion for Antonia at witnessing this, just as he hadn't really, to my eye, been much moved by grief over what Antonia went through the winter of her father's death, when they were separated. He does notice how close her feelings are to the surface (everything she says has "breath vibrating beneath it" and "seemed to come right out of her heart"; she has the "most responsive eyes in the world" like "open faces"). She lives in greater proximity to the physical self—danger, death, love—which is set up as being at odds with a social world where "every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution."
Ann I think You’re onto something big there: Cather’s technique of mirroring, juxtaposition, engrafting one story into another, significant contrast, diptych.
Thanks! There does seem to be this feeling of layering, or lining up, rather than movement in time. So much happens in jumps: the winter's over! they move to town!
Chiming in late on Book Two with a not-yet-well-thought-out observation: So much of this book seems to turn on the distinction between the "hired girls" from the country and the more buttoned-down city folk. The former possess a vitality and authenticity that the latter lack. At one level this is a familiar trope, a kind of Rousseauean primitivism that sees nobility and what is "natural" and unspoiled. This is also familiar in the American context, where nature often presses its claims against civilization, whether in a revolution of natural rights against the old world British or in the constant desire to escape to the frontier. But Cather gives it a twist here, because the natural, simple, unspoiled hired girls from the countryside are also the descendants of the Old World, not the new. Cather has transplanted the old, civilized, European world into the natural world of the American frontier. Not sure what to make of this, exactly, but I found it interesting.
I'm getting caught up on the comments I missed! You are reminding me that we talked about how Black Hawk/Red Cloud was paradoxically Jim/Cather's introduction to the Old World, through all the immigrants there. At the end we see Anton and Jim knowing the same famous singer from Vienna. Ben's book quotes a letter: "these old women on the farms were the first people who ever gave me a feeling of an older world across the sea." And Ben describes Jewish neighbors in Red Cloud whose "paintings and library collections of Victrola records were a first taste of contemporary arts and letters." "These deep influences," he says, "made her a cosmopolitan while she was still a provincial."
Looking back at "Past Lives," one of the things I'm noticing is how Jim and Àntonia don't have a shared language for talking about their relationship. The moments when each lets down their guard are syncopated. The kiss: Jim sort of tells Àntonia how important she is to him, but brings up kissing Lena Lingard! She laughs and calls him a "kid" she's "awful fond of." She makes avowals and he lets them pass: “Maybe I be the kind of girl you like better, now I come to town.” She says more in these casual moments than he ever tells us, the readers, but maybe he is keeping back what he is prepared to confide in the writer from New York.
Parts of book 2 read like a coming of age story both for the young characters and also for the town. “Stuff” has been happening in the town for a while, including the occasional short term disappearance of a young woman (which happened everywhere in the US until Roe)but now, with the dance hall, the hired girls, more saloons, the spirit of the town is evolving, and the elders are confronting what to do to keep young people in line. Lines are being drawn. Grandfather wouldn’t be happy about Jim’s visits to a saloon. Jim sneaks out the window! Antonia is warned, but rebels.
I've thought about how Jim both feels Àntonia pulling away with this attraction to a more sensual, disreputable way of life, at the same time he is attracted to it. It reminds me of now how we worry when the kids spend all night at raves in Bushwick... Recently I've seen some commentary out there about how kids are getting puritanical post-pandemic, they have sex later, they don't drink so much, like that's a problem. Everyone is ambivalent about these forces of vitality in youth that pull both toward recklessness and discovery.
About the disappearance of young women: there really is this undercurrent of sexual menace, like what happened to Lena on the prairie, how exposed she was by her tattered clothes and her isolation. I think we are partly asked to see what Jim does not notice: that the girls live with this in their background as a threat. Jim's profund shame after the attack by Cutter is a register of how estranged he is from this awful reality, he displaces the shame onto Àntonia, that old move. Lena herself does not want to marry, dresses up when she comes into society to be accepted and protected. (Though she does seem to take pleasure in the attention of Ole, or is she brushing off humiliation?) Leaving the protection of the Harlings, in pursuit of freedom, exposes Antonia to Cutter.
I have also been thinking that this is reading much like a coming-of-age story -- specifically with respect to Jim's restlessness, his desire for/attachment to Antonia, who sees him so differently (from the way he sees himself and how others see him). I am a little at a loss as to where there exists real tension in the narrative -- where is it all going? I guess it is the episodic nature of it. But it is wearing on me, as a reader. And I'm wondering, who is really the narrator? I'm not sure it's Jim. But then why "My Antonia"? Book Two leaves me feeling a bit adrift.
And then there is the racism. I realize the importance of reading a work of literature in the context of the time in which it was written. But it is really awful.
Thanks for your comment about the tension or direction of Jim’s story. I think what keeps me going, other than the joy of being immersed in Cather’s descriptions of nature and Black Hawk, is curiosity about Antonia’s and Jim’s futures in the context of their shared pasts. He is now an attorney for a railroad and travels through the Midwest in this capacity. The narrator of the introduction implies that Jim’s marriage lacks the romantic appeal that draws Jim to the past. Where is Antonia now? Does her life suit her talents and temperament? Jim mentions in the introduction that he had renewed his friendship with her. I would like to read about that.
Yes! Also we feel modernity inching in. Like, the town already feels so much closer to our way of life than the country did. And when characters speak of what's going on in the big cities, we inch a bit nearer into familiarity. Lena thinks the "travelling man" is the height of sophistication. How do Àntonia and Jim and their relationship carry their sort of magical prehistory into something that touches on our present?
Thanks for your honesty here. That is a great question, Barbara; where is the tension, what is supposed to drive this thing forward?
At a venture, I’d say if you’re eager to learn about the town of Black Hawk (cf. opening sentence) and the subtle ties between town and hinterland and the subtle changes and continuities in the lives of the characters by this change of scene then maybe you can stay hooked? But maybe there are other ways in?
I am realizing that I have read My Àntonia twice before—at long intervals—but not much of the story has stayed with me, and perhaps this is why. We experience the stories less as plots than as kind of interludes or set pieces, that set against each other make up a kind of collage-like portrait. An example: he says at the beginning of Book Two "That river was to be my compensation for the lost freedom of the farming country," and then that is echoed by the interlude at the end by the river with the girls, when Antonia opens up to him about her nostalgia and “each of the girls pointed out to me the direction in whch her father’s farm lay,” and then we again see the prairie in red: "the curly grass was on fire now; the bark of the oaks turned red as copper."
In an essay critical of Defoe, Cather makes a beautiful statement about the importance of scene-making for the novelist. A remembered scene is full of significant details which take on life from the scene’s deeper emotional significance, is the gist of it, and a good novelist will make detailed scenes for that reason.
This is certainly exactly what she does in this book! I noticed in the scene at the river that the pace was slowing down, we see Jim go through all these minute movements, taking off his clothes, swimming, climbing up the bank, as the surroundings gets more and more closely described. The scene becomes a a setting, in the sense of a ring and a jewel, for Àntonia's confidences to come.
Yes, chapter XIV “on Sunday morning” is a great example of a landscape described in a way that speaks to the harrowing ambiguity of the circumstance: will it really be like old times? Words like “always” and “everywhere” resound with powerful irony. Or what about the milkweed, “rare in that part of the state,” is rare as the encounter. I can’t resist adding that the singer-songwriter Greg Brown seems to have borrowed from this passage in his song “Early,” celebrating his prairie home town of that name.
A key theme of Book Two is education, in school and outside of school. Jim has been brought into town (a key word) because it is time for him to go to school, but at first all he learns there is savagery. Similar paradoxes haunt the education of the hired girls. In the marvelous essayistic chapter nine, Jim (or Cather herself) submits an argument for a new kind of education for women based on his observations of the immigrant young women. They have been active and useful on the farm. This has strengthened their powers of observation, given them physical vigor, and given them a chance to make an economic contribution to their families. So I offer this as a rounding out of Chris’s excellent discussion of dance and primitivism. There is that, but there is also an attempt to discover principles for women’s education, not far from that of the ancient Spartans and Rousseau.
I love this observation. We can also see how much knowledge of literature and history Cather managed to eke out of her life in Red Cloud, and yet she has this envy of the freedom and sensuality of "the country girls" (assuming she was one of those town girls, "cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs"). Jim, as a boy, had "opportunities" that Cather would not have had to enter their world, and imagine a fuller education than she was able to have.
Cather and education: what a gigantic subject! In 1919, the same year My Ántonia was published, she wrote a lovely little essay on education on the prairie (link below) called "The Education You Have to Fight For" with lines like this: "Before there were any churches the building that was a schoolhouse all week became a church on Sunday and the congregation sat on the low seats behind the inkwells." Maybe worth remembering that Cather was herself a teacher. After leaving Nebraska, she taught Latin, math, and English at Pittsburgh high schools. She also wrote a tremendous "campus novel," with the not very alluring title "The Professor's House." I happen to live in a professor's house myself, built by an Amherst college English professor and currently occupied by another of the same ilk.
https://cather.unl.edu/writings/nonfiction/nf008
There was this early moment when there's a mention of "preaching at the sod school-house," and I thought, is there school at that school-house? Why aren't Jim and Antonia there?
It’s a fine essay, but I have trouble reconciling it with the much more daring approach to education in My Antonia (as something of the body, the emotions, taking place everywhere and not just in school). It may well be that Cather’s journalism is coming from a very different place in her mind than her fiction. Woodress makes a comment to that effect…
Beautifully said. It was part of Cather's commitment to writing novels rather than journalism that the two varieties of writing came, as you say, "from a very different place." She gratefully accepted the advice of Sarah Orne Jewett, another towering writer (The Country of the Pointed Firs), to give up her life as a professional magazine editor and writer. In 1908, in a letter of gigantic importance to Cather, Jewett wrote, "you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia; the city, the country—in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up." (Needless to say, "Bohemia" here does not refer to Ántonia's birthplace but to the world of Greenwich Village and other clusters of struggling artists and writers.)
I’m starting to realize Cather was a great writer. When you consider her raw gift as manifested in her theater reviews as an undergrad, already famous in the region, and trembled at. But her ability to take that extroverted raw talent and find over decades that quiet center, as Jewett says, and to arrive at a set of artistic principles of such depth by the time she wrote her preface to Jewett, it’s the true mark of greatness. Why she isn’t recognized as a great writer I mean really heroized as an artist is partly sexism, partly elitism, I guess.
Fascinating angle, Chris, inasmuch as ultimately Mrs. Harling (end of ch. X) banishes Antonia from her house partly for going to the dancing tent.
There must be a distinction between hearing music and dancing to it. I agree that the long passage about D’Arnault contains some half a dozen sentences that are truly racist and revolting, beyond anything that was even normal for the time.
But can we still say Cather was at least trying to include this man in the sacred fellowship of art, clumsily but with sincerity? She wasn’t fond of Jews either but if that Jew happened to be a virtuoso violinist, he would be a friend in art.
Could that be what Mrs. Harling is doing: testifying that d'Arnault does indeed belong in the sacred fellowship of art, head and shoulders above the other pianist mentioned in the novel, Anson Kirkpatrick?
It's interesting--and wrenching--to contrast d’Arnault’s life story, as a disabled child suffering from, apparently, both Tourette Syndrome and epilepsy, with that of poor Marek, whose main talent is making animal noises and who ends up (spoiler alert) institutionalized in a mental asylum.
While we're on the subject of bigotry, I’ve sometimes wondered whether Cather, who was certainly capable of antisemitism (as well as philosemitism), considered making Wick Cutter a Jew, the stereotypical identity of the “moneylender.” Maybe we dodged a bullet with that one.
Cather’s racism is probably related to her sense of conflict about her own past and the unacknowledged role of African-Americans in her own life story. An essay I read by Marion someone in the 1999 CUP collection New Essays on My Antonia elaborates on this.
To be clear this i am not saying this position is humane or really adequate.
Another interesting character to me is Mrs. Harling. She is apparently drawn from Cather’s own mother, I believe. She stands at the threshold of part two with a no pasaran! A teacher in the art of life? Or is her influence oppressive?
I feel like I should add the correction that Cather based the Harlings on Carrie and Irene Miner, Red Cloud friends to whom the book is dedicated.
Whereas Frances Harling resembles Cather herself at that age.
I share your curiosity about Mrs. Harling. In previous readings, I had somehow missed the detail that she "had known d'Arnault for years." It's Mrs. Harling who urges Ántonia to visit Tiny on Saturday night, "as there would certainly be music at the Boys' Home." I like to believe--perhaps mistakenly--that Mrs. Harling would not have shared Jim's crudely racist assessment of d'Arnault's appearance.
It seems important in this line of discussion to note that Mrs. Harding is also a pianist and a person who lives artfully, full of joy, rigor , and passion. Her husband, sadly, (I think), suppresses the spontaneity of his family.
Good point! There is that moment where Jim says of the Harlings "there was usually someone at the piano," and "though we did not realize it then, Mrs. Harling was our audience." This was the sort of childhood Àntonia might have had. I felt like Frances was sort of a bookend or mirror-image of Àntonia. Two ways of being a strong female personality, a Daddy's girl, which is the way in. Recalling how Mr. Shimerda urged Jim to teach Àntonia, knowing, I thought, that she had the ability to take on the family, and/or be something more, the kind of cultured person who had "beautiful talk … about music, and the woods, and about God."
madness may be an important if subdued theme in this book, and that there is a tacit link between Antonia and the out and out crazy minor characters, the tramp, Mrs. Cutter, Crazy Mary. Antonia isn’t mad, in that way, but she isn’t rational in the purposive money-making American way, and so the madness theme may affect our view of her as it were at one remove, especially when she moves in with the Cutters. Also, her dancing is a form of positive Dionysian frenzy. I’m not saying this is the whole picture by any means, but a fascinating side-light.
I was struck that when Àntonia told the story of the tramp's suicide Jim did not recall that her own father had (?) killed himself. He took in the story without an impulse toward compassion for Antonia at witnessing this, just as he hadn't really, to my eye, been much moved by grief over what Antonia went through the winter of her father's death, when they were separated. He does notice how close her feelings are to the surface (everything she says has "breath vibrating beneath it" and "seemed to come right out of her heart"; she has the "most responsive eyes in the world" like "open faces"). She lives in greater proximity to the physical self—danger, death, love—which is set up as being at odds with a social world where "every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution."
Ann I think You’re onto something big there: Cather’s technique of mirroring, juxtaposition, engrafting one story into another, significant contrast, diptych.
Thanks! There does seem to be this feeling of layering, or lining up, rather than movement in time. So much happens in jumps: the winter's over! they move to town!
Chiming in late on Book Two with a not-yet-well-thought-out observation: So much of this book seems to turn on the distinction between the "hired girls" from the country and the more buttoned-down city folk. The former possess a vitality and authenticity that the latter lack. At one level this is a familiar trope, a kind of Rousseauean primitivism that sees nobility and what is "natural" and unspoiled. This is also familiar in the American context, where nature often presses its claims against civilization, whether in a revolution of natural rights against the old world British or in the constant desire to escape to the frontier. But Cather gives it a twist here, because the natural, simple, unspoiled hired girls from the countryside are also the descendants of the Old World, not the new. Cather has transplanted the old, civilized, European world into the natural world of the American frontier. Not sure what to make of this, exactly, but I found it interesting.
I'm getting caught up on the comments I missed! You are reminding me that we talked about how Black Hawk/Red Cloud was paradoxically Jim/Cather's introduction to the Old World, through all the immigrants there. At the end we see Anton and Jim knowing the same famous singer from Vienna. Ben's book quotes a letter: "these old women on the farms were the first people who ever gave me a feeling of an older world across the sea." And Ben describes Jewish neighbors in Red Cloud whose "paintings and library collections of Victrola records were a first taste of contemporary arts and letters." "These deep influences," he says, "made her a cosmopolitan while she was still a provincial."