My Àntonia: Books Three and Four

Willa Cather, drawing by Nicholson Baker after a 1921 photograph by Rinehart Marsden, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries

Book Three is named for Lena Lingard, who used to come to Jim in dreams, “barefoot, in a short skirt, with a curved reaping-hook in her hand.” But it opens with Jim under the sway of the “brilliant and inspiring” young Latin scholar Gaston Cleric, whose name (cleric means clergyman) suggests his monk-like tendencies. Cleric is closely associated with the passage from Virgil’s Georgics that Jim quotes at the beginning of Chapter Two. Translated as “in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee,” the same passage—a reminder that Cather was a high school Latin teacher herself—supplies the epigraph for My Ántonia as a whole. Virgil was Dante’s spiritual guide; Cleric is Jim’s.

In Book Three, Lena and Cleric compete for Jim’s allegiance, body and soul. Each love interest is anchored in works of art. For Cleric, it is Virgil’s poetry. For Lena, it is Dumas fils’ play Camille, and the famous opera it inspired, Verdi’s La Traviata. Cleric, who has seen Jim and Lena huddled at the theater, urges Jim to follow him to Harvard. “You won’t recover yourself while you are playing about with this handsome Norwegian,” he says primly. Jim’s decision is eased when Lena tells him (as she told Frances Harling in Book Two) that she’s not going to marry Jim or anybody else. “Didn’t you know that?” she asks, as though it’s obvious. Why isn’t it obvious to him?

Jim’s cluelessness is matched by a certain callousness in his description of the “infirm old actress” who plays Camille. As with the pianist d’Arnault, Jim seems transfixed—and repelled—by the disjunction between the actress’s physical appearance and her powerful stage presence, which he describes as “a crude natural force.”

The two competing strands of Book Three—Lena versus Cleric—are woven together when Jim has what he calls a “revelation” concerning Lena and her friends. It dawns on him that there is a profound connection “between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.” What does Virgil have to say about the connection between girls and poetry? Crucial for Jim is Cleric’s claim that when Virgil refers in the Georgics (poems about farming) to his “patria,” he doesn’t mean the Roman empire but rather “the little rural neighborhood” where he was born. In Jim’s view, Virgil exalted the local into the universal, as in Cather’s overwhelming symbol of the plough magnified against the setting sun—first introduced in Book Two and invoked again in the first chapter of Book Three. For Jim, the spirit of the girls is the essence of his experience of home and place. 

The title of Book Four, “The Pioneer Woman’s Story,” always reminds me of a statue—one of twelve erected in the 1920s along the old transcontinental National Road by the Daughters of the American Revolution—in the Rust Belt Indiana town where I grew up. Called “The Madonna of the Trail,” it features a pioneer woman holding a baby in one arm and a rifle in the other. I try not to think of Ántonia as the Madonna of the Trail, but old impressions, as Cather keeps reminding us, die hard.

If Book Three works by juxtaposition—chaste Cleric versus sensual Lena—Book Four also has a divided focus. The pioneer woman’s story could either refer to Ántonia’s bitter fate, holding a baby in one arm and a plough handle in the other, or to the incredible saga, a high point of the novel for me, of Tiny Soderball.

The heartbreaking jilting of Ántonia is followed by her arduous work in the fields—clad in “a man’s long overcoat” and “a man’s felt hat with a wide brim”—from which she takes a quick break for childbirth. The cad Larry Donovan (whose “unappreciated worth was the tender secret [he] shared with his sweethearts”) recalls the scum Wick Cutter. Both men strand their marital partners in big cities so they can pursue their evil plans. In both cases, the intended victim is Ántonia. The Cutter scheme plays out as farce, the Donovan scheme as tragedy. (Did Cather have the hero Aeneas’s abandonment of queen Dido, in the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, somewhere in the back of her mind?) Ántonia drives the cattle home, turns them into the corral, goes into her own room, and shuts the door. “There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay down on the bed and bore her child.” The pioneer woman’s story.

And for contrast, Tiny Soderball! When last seen, she was “tripping briskly about the dining-room in her high heels,” or waltzing with Lena Lingard in the Boys’ Home Hotel. When she hears of gold in Alaska, her life takes a stunning turn, right out of Jack London. After her tiny feet are shorn of three toes in the Klondike snows, she returns to San Francisco and summons Lena to join her. “She was satisfied with her success, but not elated,” Cather writes, in one of her wonderfully understated chapter endings. “She was like someone in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out.”

At points, the narrative strands of the book—Jim, Lena, Tiny, Gaston Cleric—can seem so interwoven that Ántonia momentarily disappears from view. It’s worth repeating Cather’s description of the novel. “My Ántonia … is just the other side of the rug, the pattern that is supposed not to count in a story. In it there is no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle for success. I knew I'd ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern.”

This is Cather in her most defiant modernist mode. She is telling us that her oddly constructed novel—with its juxtaposed stories, its seemingly cobbled-together structure, its lack of a conventional narrative arc, its occasionally vanishing heroine—is deliberate, her own.

Take it, she says, or leave it.

Join us with your thoughts here in the comments! And read Book Five for Sunday, March 3. We’ll soon be announcing our Zoom conversation at the close to meet Chris and each other, stay tuned. We’ve also made a list of other reading/viewing/listening we’ve discussed in the comments, to help us keep track. Let us know if you have someting to add!

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Chris Benfey is the author of five books about the American Gilded Age, including The Great Wave and A Summer of Hummingbirds, and the family memoir Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay. He has written for Book Post on hunting, kites, Whitman, and other subjects.

Nicholson Baker’s new book about teaching himself to draw, Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art, will be published in just a few weeks! See his drawings for Book Post at the tag “N Baker Drawing.”

Book Post’s bookselling partner Square Books is offering My Àntonia at a discount here on the occasion of Fireside Reading (discount applied in cart). Thanks Square!

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The Madonna statue stands as a memorial to pioneer women (1991), William Eccles. Historic National Road - Madonna Statue on the Indiana National Road, Richmond, Indiana. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, Office of Planning, Environment, and Realty, Office of Natural and Human Environment, National Scenic Byways Program