Book Three works by juxtaposition—chaste Cleric versus sensual Lena. Book Four also has a divided focus, two pioneer women's stories, Ántonia’s bitter fate and the incredible saga of Tiny Soderball.
There is something singularly elusive about this Cleric guy. What does he actually teach Jim other than a few Latin tags? Jim’s vague phrase “the world of ideas” is unhelpful. I can imagine Cather chuckling in her sleeve as she wrote that sentence.
I wondered if there wasn't a slight comic edge here. Such figures must have been important to Cather, yet in retrospect she could see their provinciality. It is so puzzling where he is from—Gaston sounds so French. Like so many of the women he seems to have a homosexual shading, competing with Lena for Jim's attention. The "Cleric" reminded me of the Chaucer's Clerk, a young, overserious person. I also remembered Àntonia's reference to her father's talk back in Bohemia ("beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country"): Cleric is Jim's first taste of intellectual conversation, "the charm and vividness of his talk." The story about Paestum, have you ever been there? A spectacular place, two big Greek temples surrounded by flowering meadows. They're like Cleric in Nebraska: a classical relic amidst the countryside, for which he lacks the consitution.
It is one of the world's great places. It has that Italian thing of these breathtaking monuments just sitting there, no explanation. Also beautiful Greek frescoes in the little museum. Another feature: in the little cafe there are lovingly preserved photographs (or there were decades ago when I was there) of Americans liberating the town from the fascisti.
That would be great to see. As for Cleric, I find his learning is pretty solid. The point about patria being Virgil’s native Mantua is right if you look at Georgics 3.10-15, and the quoted sentence at the end is a translation of Eclogues 9.9: usque ad aquam et veteres iam fracta cacumina fagos. He shows intertextual virtuosity there! Interestingly, Cather forbade annotated editions of her work, or so I gather, so one is forced to break out the concordance, old school. A lot more could be said about what this Virgil stuff is doing in the novel!
I'm guessing that Cather, the high school Latin teacher, saw the aptness of the Virgil passages for what she was trying to do in My Ántonia. Then and only then did she invent a mouthpiece for those passages, Gaston Cleric, to provide Jim with what he calls his "mental awakening." Cleric does seem like a creature of literature, a creature made out of literature, with his name out of French novels and his complete command of ancient literature and culture. His near-death from a fever caught at Paestum (he's recuperating in Colorado) seems drawn from Henry James' Daisy Miller, who catches a fever, at midnight, in the Colosseum. In the paragraph in which Cather describes the fever, we are told that Cleric could discern "the figure in the carpet," the title of one of James's greatest short stories.
Thanks for spotting that allusion! Is there also something of Pater’s Winckelmann in Cleric, the Northern European discovering the glories of Italy, it’s antique statuary and giving all life and health, his whole hard gem-like flame?
What a story of female empowerment. A theme throughout is flexibility and resilience, especially among the immigrant women in the book. Perhaps women living outside the rigid rules of town society are more able to stray from expectations. Think of Antonia keeping her baby in contrast to the other girls who “disappeared briefly“ and then returned.
I know, right? All these women who fend for themselves or carry their families: Àntonia, Lena, Tiny, Widow Seaver, Mrs. Harling, Frances, the grandmother … And these shadowy men, invisible or not equal to it: Mr. Shimerda, Ambrosch, Mr. Harling, Larry, Orlinsky, Ole, even Cleric. Even the grandfather is only seen fleetingly.
Jim also feels like he should be clumped with these fellas. He could have saved Antonia from the shame of abandonment -- or even helped to support her financially early on with her baby. When he saw the portrait of the baby at the photographer's studio I felt like the kind thing to do would have been to pay for it and bring it to her himself, but that doesn't even occur to him.
That's so true! It's also so weird that he noses around to learn her story instead of going straight to ask her himself and offer help. Also at the end of the Lena chapter he goes back to Red Cloud "for a few weeks" without apparently seeing her or even thinking that possibility might cross our minds. Remembering how ashamed of her he was even when Cutter failed to rape her I wondered if he himself felt repelled by her fall from grace. There are lots of points where I wonder if Cather means for us to think that he is insensible to Antonia's experience.
Right, and therefore not worthy of her romantic love. I feel like one of her strengths is that she never turns to him to solve her misfortune — she is not in it for the easy rescue and that serves her deeply in the long run. Ultimately her marriage and family is much richer than anything Jim will ever create for himself. And, in fact, it is her children he taps to feel useful and needed with the promise of those summer camping trips with the boys.
Yes I really doubted he would follow through with those, much as he seems immersed in the enthusiasm of offering them. It seems like another of her strengths is that she doesn't hold any of this against him; she seems him for who he is.
I’m so gullible! I really believed he was going to follow through, but think your instincts are spot on. I kept wanting Jim to be something other than what he is . . . And see now that Antonia never tried to change him. There’s a sermon in there somewhere . . .
When he learns from Lena that Antonia is getting trouble with Donovan, he says, “I should go look after her.” Lena says “yes you should” and is amused. I feel like that’s the moment when he could have acted and maybe they would have become a couple. Instead, he started hanging around with Lena, who had no intention of ever marrying.
It's so subtle what Cather is doing here! We are inside his experience and appreciate him, and yet it seems possible that he really is actually kind of a cad! But "portrait of a cad" is not what people take from the book. It's a very subtle way of talking about *her*.
I'm not prepared to be quite as hard on Jim as I sense reactions becoming here and at other places in the comments. I do have big questions about him, especially at some places others have already pointed out (his failure to do anything after Lena tells him that Antonia is getting herself into trouble, his odd decision to hear her story from the Widow rather than simply going to his old friend). Still, we learned in the introduction that he has retained a certain enthusiasm for his Western roots and is generous in supporting people who have ideas for new projects or enterprises. The frame narrator portrays him favorably in comparison to his wife, who "seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm." (A comment, incidentally, that is awfully similar to the later closing observation on Tiny Soderball: "She was like some one in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out"--to my mind, a quietly devastating comment.) And Jim, who has renewed their old friendship, seems capable of appreciating something special about Antonia--so much so that he manages to produce over 200 pages of writing about her, whereas the frame narrator never gets around to writing down her own memories of Antonia.
I found myself being hard on Jim here but I wasn't sure. I think one wrestles with these doubts about him while feeling so close to him as a speaker. I just had a thought after a long spell cleaning the attic (during which I cheered myself on by thinking about what a good job Àntonia would do of it): Perhaps Jim is a figure for the artist, a person who draws life from people's experience, sees deeply into it, and yet moves on, usurps it in a way for other purposes while valuing it greatly. There's perhaps a guilt that lurks there, which is figured here in Jim's reluctance to step in and really become a part of Àntonia's story.
For me, Jim's odd decision to go to the Widow first resulted in the most heart-wrenching passages of the book--where the Widow describes Antonia sewing with gusto and packing her trunks and making her joyful, tearful goodbyes and so forth before heading out to Denver. I found those passages nearly unbearably poignant.
So I'm chalking that one up to Cather just needing a third party to tell those stories, and seeing the oddness of it as perhaps a technical challenge presented to Cather on account of the whole conceit of the novel.
“And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.” The past staying with you is a theme throughout the best literature. Cather weaves it beautifully into her tapestry and yes, it reflects life. Who doesn’t live, at least partly, in the past?
It seems kind of her theme even, or her art—to discover the truths residing in the past and rescue them from oblivion. I've been reading Ben Taylor's book about Cather and her reverence for these American experiences really stands in contrast to her younger contemporaries, who were so much more ironic and skeptical: Fitzgerald, Hemingway. She was kind of making a stand for their value.
That’s all fair enough, but there are also a lot of dangers and conflicts residing in the past. Do we ever really recover it, or are we just indulging in nostalgia? What about harrowing regret for what might have been? And those skeletons in the closet…
Indeed. And Cather herself remained a worldly, travelled, cerebral person. None of this drew her back to the farm. It was a way of thinking about other things, I think. Maybe our experience of the past holds the kernel of how we came to understand value, purpose?
Incidentally, I enjoyed Taylor's book. He brings out the themes you mention quite nicely. He treats her sensibly, identifying some of her central preoccupations, and he does so concisely. I found it a useful introduction, the kind of book where I might want to go back and quickly re-read the relevant chapter if I were about to tackle a new Cather novel.
Empowerment but also disempowerment? I mean, if Antonia is so great, why doesn’t Jim marry her, take her with him into the elite power structure? That may be the unspoken subject of Book 3, even though Antonia is only mentioned a handful of times. She’s everywhere and nowhere. Cleric and Lena are offered as excuses, reasons a no teen year old Jim failed to save her from the awful Larry Donovan, from a life of toil and having ten kids. But he’s pierced with a regret he dare not express, except in vague Vergilian terms, which makes me wonder about the value of the classics.
I have wondered this same thing. I'm thinking that Jim didn't really have the language to express his true feelings, maybe didn't even have enough of a grasp on those feelings to name them, if he had had the language. And then Antonia -- she was always so much more mature than Jim. She saw each of them for who they were, where life was likely to take them, and appreciated their differences. She didn't want to hold Jim back, but she also knew where she felt she belonged, where she wanted to be. It wouldn't have worked. But then Jim's life doesn't seem to have quite worked out for him, although we don't really have that story, only the suggestion.
I was so preoccuped with this question in the last chapter we read! They are so open in their strong feelings for each other, and yet this possibility doesn't even seem to be in the background. Jim actually says, "I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother, or sister—anything that a woman can be for a man." Well, why not? He would save her from scandal, from Ambrosch's abusiveness, provided her child with a father … I was afraid that they both so fully accepted her disgrace that it was understood that Jim would not compromise his future by attaching himself to her—but I did not want to think that of Jim! Possibly one could shy in the moment from taking such a consequential step, but he doesn't even confide any hesitancy on this score with us, the reader. What does Cather expect us to think? I was reminded that Dan mentioned the film "Past Lives"—those two also simply miss opportunities to join together for reasons that are perhaps the unspoken subject of the film (actually, it's mostly *he* who misses the opportunities). Ben Taylor has this great quote in his book about Cather: "Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or thing or deed." Maybe their relationship cannot be captured by the institution of marriage, and it is the work of the novel to depict the ineffable thing it is.
Let’s take a hard look at this passage about girls and Virgil. “It came over me as it never had done before the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry. I understood that clearly for the first time. this revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it as if it might suddenly vanish.” I know it sounds pretty deep and Proustian, maybe, but it’s also harmfully vague, one might object almost so vague as to meaningless. It’s a classic piece of masculine idealizing. In context, it’s outrageously escapist as it serves Jim’s need to distance himself from the actual women in his life. It can’t hold up next to the often delightful portraits of individual women throughout the book. So in short it won’t do, and needs to be read ironically. Jim’s own phrasing hints at this: this revelation SEEMED TO ME inestimably precious, but was it precious indeed?
Ah you're on to something! I was asking myself this question—Virgil and girls? Howso? I understood it as, Virgil (at least Virgil of the Georgics and the Eclogues), found meaning in humble experience and for him the spirit if his own humble experience was these particular girls. In that passage though the image he is holding in his mind is Lena from a dream! ("It seemed to me like the memory of an actual experience.") Optima dies—but the day he he is trying to hold onto is not even real! As a few pages earlier he says, "I knew I should never be a scholar … mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked (!) land and the figures scattered upon it." What is he missing from Virgil?
I'm thinking Peter Meilaender's recent post might be relevant here.
"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." I'm guessing it's this "vitality and authenticity" that Jim thinks is the root of all poetry. Though we might add that there is a centuries-long debate about just how vital Virgil's poetry is. Schiller thought it was self-conscious and "sentimental," as opposed to Homer's "naive" vitality. Pound joked that Aeneas seemed less like a hero than a priest. Etc.
If this is right, Cather might be exerting a similar pressure on the text of Virgil as did other of his critics (e.g. Matthew Arnold who preferred Homer?), that he live up to the real life experience of love and beauty and actual experience of real others. If we wanted to be more charitable toward Jim, looking back, he is describing a moment in his psychic development where the idea of beauty overwhelmed him, but he's not committed to keeping it on that level of abstraction as a mature adult. He still needs to return to that concrete reality (and vitality to quote Peter Meilaender) of the gals in Red Cloud and give his richer account of them, of Antonia above all!
Chris, I think you are right about what Jim sees as the root of poetry (and art)--that vitality, authenticity, naivete, perhaps sentimentality. One thinks of how he is swept up watching "Camille." And in the book's introduction, we were told, after hearing of his marriage, "As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his naturally romantic and ardent disposition."
But there is also another side to him, one that criticizes his own romantic tendency. He can look back at his battle with the rattlesnake and realize, in retrospect, that it was old and tired, and therefore less dangerous than he'd thought at the time. Just as he looks back in retrospect at the actress playing Marguerite and realizes that she wasn't actually very good, however swept away he'd been at the moment. So -- Jim is a romantic who has gone into business law? But still feels the pull of the frontier West? Something like that?
As for Vergil, I think he's about as good as it gets, but I'll look for another spot in the comments thread to toss in an observation about him.
I never had a feeling that Jim was truly in love with Antonia, the type of adult love that would lead him to propose to her. And the same for Antonia. It seemed like an adolescent crush and then friendly affection.
The novel definitely seems skeptical about love and romantic union. Even with the happy couples (only the grandparents?) we don't fully seem them both. And there are some truly lethal marriages.
"As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world."
One of the most beautiful passages in the novel. The consonance of that first sentence, the figurative comparisons in the second, the grandeur of the third: just amazing.
Maybe this is the model for human relation … two luminaries confronting each other, resting on opposite edges of the world. In the also beautiful next paragraph, this balance draws all creation upward, at the same time Jim "feel(s) the pull of the earth," and yearns both to be a little boy again and that his "way could end there." As though love asks to be held at a remove, and the balance of the world is suspended there.
I love that reading, Ann. I know I said the first week's reading reminded me of Marilynne Robinson's "Psalm Eight." Well, this week's reading had me thinking of "Gilead." There's a lovely moment there where the sun and moon in the sky together also figures as a model for human relation, and for the relation between God and humanity in prayer:
"Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up."
I also was struck this week by the varied ways of thinking about lonesomeness. Lena says "I like to be lonesome"; Antonia says she'd be miserable in the city and "die of lonesomeness" and then later says that, accompanied by her father's grave and Jim in her memory, she "won't be lonesome."
I love in the Gilead passage that the father did not consider looking up for this sight to be an interruption of prayer, or the kiss (love) is the bridge.
And (skipping ahead!) Jim sees that Cuzak is "sociable," "at first I near go crazy wth lonesomeness," "yet his wife had managed to hold him here on the farm, in one of the loneliest countries in the world." The "countries" here has this strange ambiguity: it seems grammatically to refer to America, but the meaning seems more local, like "the back country." Then Jim is ill at ease on the town and only recovers his sense of the place when he walks out to the north. Àntonia, by surrounding herself with these speakers of her native language, who carry on some of the traits of her family, seems in a way to have recreated her native village. Emptiness, solitude, companionship—these seem like such important themes, but they each hold their opposite. Jim's aloneness of his unhappy marriage and constant travel seems less rich than Àntonia's aloneness, which she fills with real connection.
I loved this passage and the ones that followed so much, it hurt. In fact the the entirety of this this short chapter has been hard for me to let go of and I would have been content if the book had ended here, but glad it didn't. Memory: what stays with us, what recedes, how we mean to hold onto it. It all felt kind of tangled up in the grass for me, which we know "was disappearing," but growing so wildly around Antonia's father's grave. I love that it gets the last word in this chapter as the most reliable of witnesses to their youth and all that formed them.
I was shocked when Jim got badly beat up by Cutter. I thought the scene (which was easy enough to imagine beforehand) would play out somehow differently, more comically? Jim jumps out the window - through the screen - and runs away in his nightshirt. He is truly scared.
But of what is he afraid?
The way Jim walks around at night looking at peoples' houses and thinking he knows what goes on in them .. I find him arrogant, pampered, sentimental, and hardly believable as a character. Only as a mask for Cather does he becomes interesting, begin to make a kind of sense. Jim - Burden! Why did she give him that name?
His grandfather's Protestantism seems to disappear or die out, supplanted by the moral code of the town itself, a more tolerant and diluted sense of right and wrong, good and bad? As the morals of the saloons and bordellos infiltrate the community?
One wishes Jim would find a nice girl his own age - there must be one who would suit him - and stop all the silliness.
Jim is annoyed by Lena's Polish neighbor, who actually seems very nice. I wouldn't trust a college boy hanging around for some obscure reason, either. I have no idea why Lena gives him the time of day. She has plenty of other fish in her sea. What is he doing? Oh yes, trying to "decide."
There is a distinct fantasy aspect to the narrative, as well as brutal truth-telling of human behavior, nature.
The further we go the more complex Willa Cather's decision to show us Àntonia through the eyes of Jim comes to feel. The "author" in the beginning seems to think that Jim had some special access to Àntonia because of the conventions of romance, but nothing about their relationship is remotely consummated. I guess it gives him more of an excuse or a pretext to trail her around than the author would have had. Perhaps Cather is trying to illustrate for us the insufficiencies of these traits we think of (or they thought of then) as "charming" in young men: wit, ardor that comes and goes, the self possession of security and narcissism. I think she is also trying to show us how few people in the life of someone like Àntonia would be able to see into her experience.
I so appreciate this discussion and the wealth of insight that you all have shared! I now feel like I want to read the novel again, start to finish, before I am too far distant from this, my first, reading. But I need to consider what I will be looking for. My first impressions of Jim were way off -- or maybe I need to watch for when he began to disappoint me. Antonia and the other girls -- a study in the young, female, immigrant experience! Families and how they functioned -- or failed to function. I am a displaced Californian, living now -- for many years -- in the Midwest -- so there's that little bit of personal stake I have in the narrative. Social class -- of origin and aspiration -- and how that influences one's opportunities and one's choices. And then there is the question of Cather's voice and perspective -- was she the narrator of the introduction? Are we meant to continue to hear her as the narrative progresses? This is clearly a very complex work of literature.
Cather has something in common with Robert Frost, I think. She told him in 1915 that his poems were "the only American verse printed since I began to read verse, in which I have been able to feel much interest." They were both Latin teachers. They were both extremely well educated. They both wrote for two audiences: one that would take their homespun texts at face value; another that would notice their ambiguities and modernist tendencies (like the way Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is as much about how we deceive ourselves about our past as it is about taking "the road less traveled by"). And both developed a certain myth about their place of origin, though Frost was from San Francisco and Cather HATED the small town where she grew up. I remember reviewing her letters when they were first published after the long posthumous delay she insisted on. Everyone assumed there would be bombshell info about her love affairs with women. The bombshell turned out to be her rage at the small-minded people she'd grown up with. But what amazing stories she wove from that unpromising material!
Frost! There is some way in which she is a throughline who is knitting together all these people I did not think of as occupying the same world—James, Hemingway, Frost! It all lends dimension to this question--what are we being invited to look for and hold onto in the past?
Given the trickiness of Cather’s narration, with that elaborate frame at the beginning of the novel, it makes sense that our discussion has drifted from Ántonia (seemingly the heroine of the novel) to Jim (seemingly the writer of it). There’s always a moment when discussion of The Great Gatsby makes a similar shift from the (supposed) greatness of Gatsby to the mystery of why Nick Carraway is so fascinated with him. Interestingly, Fitzgerald wrote to Cather in 1925, worried that part of his description of Daisy Buchanan might seem to readers to have been plagiarized from Cather’s A Lost Lady, offering documentary evidence (an early draft of the novel) that it hadn’t been. Cather replied that she had “hugely enjoyed” The Great Gatsby, and that she saw no cause for alarm. “I suppose everybody who has ever been swept away by personal charm,” she wrote, “tries in some way to express his wonder that the effect is so much greater than the cause.” I’m guessing that what most readers remember from The Great Gatsby is Gatsby and Daisy, not Nick. What readers most remember from My Ántonia is Ántonia, not Jim. Jim and the unnamed writer he meets on the train at the start of the novel agree that “more than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.”
Which raises the question--I write this with about 20 pages to go--how we should respond to the adult version of a woman who represents, for those who remember her, the adventure of childhood.
I just read an essay, I'll link it below, about how Cather cut the introduction under pressure from her editor, but that she was herself dissatisfied with it. I'm always loyal to the first versions of things I read. To me the introduction is half the beauty of it! I was thinking about how this narrator fits into Black Hawk. She seems not to have had access to the "country" side that the "town" society saw as unkempt. Jim is sort of a bridging character there. But it's the "town" side that both Jim and Àntonia (and Cather?) find dispiriting, it's the country that nourishes them. Was the country a little more out of reach for the narrator, and is this somehow associated with Jim's having romantic access to Àntonia?
What a gracious exchange between Cather and Fitzgerald. "His wonder that the effect is so much greater than the cause": it makes you think that both Cather and Fitzgerald were responding to some experience of charisma that lies outside the novel, something they could only capture through the view of a somewhat compromised narrator.
There is something singularly elusive about this Cleric guy. What does he actually teach Jim other than a few Latin tags? Jim’s vague phrase “the world of ideas” is unhelpful. I can imagine Cather chuckling in her sleeve as she wrote that sentence.
I wondered if there wasn't a slight comic edge here. Such figures must have been important to Cather, yet in retrospect she could see their provinciality. It is so puzzling where he is from—Gaston sounds so French. Like so many of the women he seems to have a homosexual shading, competing with Lena for Jim's attention. The "Cleric" reminded me of the Chaucer's Clerk, a young, overserious person. I also remembered Àntonia's reference to her father's talk back in Bohemia ("beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country"): Cleric is Jim's first taste of intellectual conversation, "the charm and vividness of his talk." The story about Paestum, have you ever been there? A spectacular place, two big Greek temples surrounded by flowering meadows. They're like Cleric in Nebraska: a classical relic amidst the countryside, for which he lacks the consitution.
It may just be a coincidence, but one of the characters in the Dumas play is also named Gaston. Have not been to Paestum, sounds so magical !
It is one of the world's great places. It has that Italian thing of these breathtaking monuments just sitting there, no explanation. Also beautiful Greek frescoes in the little museum. Another feature: in the little cafe there are lovingly preserved photographs (or there were decades ago when I was there) of Americans liberating the town from the fascisti.
That would be great to see. As for Cleric, I find his learning is pretty solid. The point about patria being Virgil’s native Mantua is right if you look at Georgics 3.10-15, and the quoted sentence at the end is a translation of Eclogues 9.9: usque ad aquam et veteres iam fracta cacumina fagos. He shows intertextual virtuosity there! Interestingly, Cather forbade annotated editions of her work, or so I gather, so one is forced to break out the concordance, old school. A lot more could be said about what this Virgil stuff is doing in the novel!
I'm guessing that Cather, the high school Latin teacher, saw the aptness of the Virgil passages for what she was trying to do in My Ántonia. Then and only then did she invent a mouthpiece for those passages, Gaston Cleric, to provide Jim with what he calls his "mental awakening." Cleric does seem like a creature of literature, a creature made out of literature, with his name out of French novels and his complete command of ancient literature and culture. His near-death from a fever caught at Paestum (he's recuperating in Colorado) seems drawn from Henry James' Daisy Miller, who catches a fever, at midnight, in the Colosseum. In the paragraph in which Cather describes the fever, we are told that Cleric could discern "the figure in the carpet," the title of one of James's greatest short stories.
Thanks for spotting that allusion! Is there also something of Pater’s Winckelmann in Cleric, the Northern European discovering the glories of Italy, it’s antique statuary and giving all life and health, his whole hard gem-like flame?
What a story of female empowerment. A theme throughout is flexibility and resilience, especially among the immigrant women in the book. Perhaps women living outside the rigid rules of town society are more able to stray from expectations. Think of Antonia keeping her baby in contrast to the other girls who “disappeared briefly“ and then returned.
I know, right? All these women who fend for themselves or carry their families: Àntonia, Lena, Tiny, Widow Seaver, Mrs. Harling, Frances, the grandmother … And these shadowy men, invisible or not equal to it: Mr. Shimerda, Ambrosch, Mr. Harling, Larry, Orlinsky, Ole, even Cleric. Even the grandfather is only seen fleetingly.
Jim also feels like he should be clumped with these fellas. He could have saved Antonia from the shame of abandonment -- or even helped to support her financially early on with her baby. When he saw the portrait of the baby at the photographer's studio I felt like the kind thing to do would have been to pay for it and bring it to her himself, but that doesn't even occur to him.
That's so true! It's also so weird that he noses around to learn her story instead of going straight to ask her himself and offer help. Also at the end of the Lena chapter he goes back to Red Cloud "for a few weeks" without apparently seeing her or even thinking that possibility might cross our minds. Remembering how ashamed of her he was even when Cutter failed to rape her I wondered if he himself felt repelled by her fall from grace. There are lots of points where I wonder if Cather means for us to think that he is insensible to Antonia's experience.
Right, and therefore not worthy of her romantic love. I feel like one of her strengths is that she never turns to him to solve her misfortune — she is not in it for the easy rescue and that serves her deeply in the long run. Ultimately her marriage and family is much richer than anything Jim will ever create for himself. And, in fact, it is her children he taps to feel useful and needed with the promise of those summer camping trips with the boys.
Yes I really doubted he would follow through with those, much as he seems immersed in the enthusiasm of offering them. It seems like another of her strengths is that she doesn't hold any of this against him; she seems him for who he is.
I’m so gullible! I really believed he was going to follow through, but think your instincts are spot on. I kept wanting Jim to be something other than what he is . . . And see now that Antonia never tried to change him. There’s a sermon in there somewhere . . .
When he learns from Lena that Antonia is getting trouble with Donovan, he says, “I should go look after her.” Lena says “yes you should” and is amused. I feel like that’s the moment when he could have acted and maybe they would have become a couple. Instead, he started hanging around with Lena, who had no intention of ever marrying.
It's so subtle what Cather is doing here! We are inside his experience and appreciate him, and yet it seems possible that he really is actually kind of a cad! But "portrait of a cad" is not what people take from the book. It's a very subtle way of talking about *her*.
I'm not prepared to be quite as hard on Jim as I sense reactions becoming here and at other places in the comments. I do have big questions about him, especially at some places others have already pointed out (his failure to do anything after Lena tells him that Antonia is getting herself into trouble, his odd decision to hear her story from the Widow rather than simply going to his old friend). Still, we learned in the introduction that he has retained a certain enthusiasm for his Western roots and is generous in supporting people who have ideas for new projects or enterprises. The frame narrator portrays him favorably in comparison to his wife, who "seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm." (A comment, incidentally, that is awfully similar to the later closing observation on Tiny Soderball: "She was like some one in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out"--to my mind, a quietly devastating comment.) And Jim, who has renewed their old friendship, seems capable of appreciating something special about Antonia--so much so that he manages to produce over 200 pages of writing about her, whereas the frame narrator never gets around to writing down her own memories of Antonia.
I found myself being hard on Jim here but I wasn't sure. I think one wrestles with these doubts about him while feeling so close to him as a speaker. I just had a thought after a long spell cleaning the attic (during which I cheered myself on by thinking about what a good job Àntonia would do of it): Perhaps Jim is a figure for the artist, a person who draws life from people's experience, sees deeply into it, and yet moves on, usurps it in a way for other purposes while valuing it greatly. There's perhaps a guilt that lurks there, which is figured here in Jim's reluctance to step in and really become a part of Àntonia's story.
For me, Jim's odd decision to go to the Widow first resulted in the most heart-wrenching passages of the book--where the Widow describes Antonia sewing with gusto and packing her trunks and making her joyful, tearful goodbyes and so forth before heading out to Denver. I found those passages nearly unbearably poignant.
So I'm chalking that one up to Cather just needing a third party to tell those stories, and seeing the oddness of it as perhaps a technical challenge presented to Cather on account of the whole conceit of the novel.
“And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.” The past staying with you is a theme throughout the best literature. Cather weaves it beautifully into her tapestry and yes, it reflects life. Who doesn’t live, at least partly, in the past?
It seems kind of her theme even, or her art—to discover the truths residing in the past and rescue them from oblivion. I've been reading Ben Taylor's book about Cather and her reverence for these American experiences really stands in contrast to her younger contemporaries, who were so much more ironic and skeptical: Fitzgerald, Hemingway. She was kind of making a stand for their value.
That’s all fair enough, but there are also a lot of dangers and conflicts residing in the past. Do we ever really recover it, or are we just indulging in nostalgia? What about harrowing regret for what might have been? And those skeletons in the closet…
Indeed. And Cather herself remained a worldly, travelled, cerebral person. None of this drew her back to the farm. It was a way of thinking about other things, I think. Maybe our experience of the past holds the kernel of how we came to understand value, purpose?
Incidentally, I enjoyed Taylor's book. He brings out the themes you mention quite nicely. He treats her sensibly, identifying some of her central preoccupations, and he does so concisely. I found it a useful introduction, the kind of book where I might want to go back and quickly re-read the relevant chapter if I were about to tackle a new Cather novel.
Empowerment but also disempowerment? I mean, if Antonia is so great, why doesn’t Jim marry her, take her with him into the elite power structure? That may be the unspoken subject of Book 3, even though Antonia is only mentioned a handful of times. She’s everywhere and nowhere. Cleric and Lena are offered as excuses, reasons a no teen year old Jim failed to save her from the awful Larry Donovan, from a life of toil and having ten kids. But he’s pierced with a regret he dare not express, except in vague Vergilian terms, which makes me wonder about the value of the classics.
I wonder if Antonia would have married Jim. I'm not so sure...
Why not? I think you have a great point, but would like to know your reasons.
I have wondered this same thing. I'm thinking that Jim didn't really have the language to express his true feelings, maybe didn't even have enough of a grasp on those feelings to name them, if he had had the language. And then Antonia -- she was always so much more mature than Jim. She saw each of them for who they were, where life was likely to take them, and appreciated their differences. She didn't want to hold Jim back, but she also knew where she felt she belonged, where she wanted to be. It wouldn't have worked. But then Jim's life doesn't seem to have quite worked out for him, although we don't really have that story, only the suggestion.
I was so preoccuped with this question in the last chapter we read! They are so open in their strong feelings for each other, and yet this possibility doesn't even seem to be in the background. Jim actually says, "I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother, or sister—anything that a woman can be for a man." Well, why not? He would save her from scandal, from Ambrosch's abusiveness, provided her child with a father … I was afraid that they both so fully accepted her disgrace that it was understood that Jim would not compromise his future by attaching himself to her—but I did not want to think that of Jim! Possibly one could shy in the moment from taking such a consequential step, but he doesn't even confide any hesitancy on this score with us, the reader. What does Cather expect us to think? I was reminded that Dan mentioned the film "Past Lives"—those two also simply miss opportunities to join together for reasons that are perhaps the unspoken subject of the film (actually, it's mostly *he* who misses the opportunities). Ben Taylor has this great quote in his book about Cather: "Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or thing or deed." Maybe their relationship cannot be captured by the institution of marriage, and it is the work of the novel to depict the ineffable thing it is.
Let’s take a hard look at this passage about girls and Virgil. “It came over me as it never had done before the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry. I understood that clearly for the first time. this revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it as if it might suddenly vanish.” I know it sounds pretty deep and Proustian, maybe, but it’s also harmfully vague, one might object almost so vague as to meaningless. It’s a classic piece of masculine idealizing. In context, it’s outrageously escapist as it serves Jim’s need to distance himself from the actual women in his life. It can’t hold up next to the often delightful portraits of individual women throughout the book. So in short it won’t do, and needs to be read ironically. Jim’s own phrasing hints at this: this revelation SEEMED TO ME inestimably precious, but was it precious indeed?
Ah you're on to something! I was asking myself this question—Virgil and girls? Howso? I understood it as, Virgil (at least Virgil of the Georgics and the Eclogues), found meaning in humble experience and for him the spirit if his own humble experience was these particular girls. In that passage though the image he is holding in his mind is Lena from a dream! ("It seemed to me like the memory of an actual experience.") Optima dies—but the day he he is trying to hold onto is not even real! As a few pages earlier he says, "I knew I should never be a scholar … mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked (!) land and the figures scattered upon it." What is he missing from Virgil?
I'm thinking Peter Meilaender's recent post might be relevant here.
"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." I'm guessing it's this "vitality and authenticity" that Jim thinks is the root of all poetry. Though we might add that there is a centuries-long debate about just how vital Virgil's poetry is. Schiller thought it was self-conscious and "sentimental," as opposed to Homer's "naive" vitality. Pound joked that Aeneas seemed less like a hero than a priest. Etc.
If this is right, Cather might be exerting a similar pressure on the text of Virgil as did other of his critics (e.g. Matthew Arnold who preferred Homer?), that he live up to the real life experience of love and beauty and actual experience of real others. If we wanted to be more charitable toward Jim, looking back, he is describing a moment in his psychic development where the idea of beauty overwhelmed him, but he's not committed to keeping it on that level of abstraction as a mature adult. He still needs to return to that concrete reality (and vitality to quote Peter Meilaender) of the gals in Red Cloud and give his richer account of them, of Antonia above all!
Chris, I think you are right about what Jim sees as the root of poetry (and art)--that vitality, authenticity, naivete, perhaps sentimentality. One thinks of how he is swept up watching "Camille." And in the book's introduction, we were told, after hearing of his marriage, "As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his naturally romantic and ardent disposition."
But there is also another side to him, one that criticizes his own romantic tendency. He can look back at his battle with the rattlesnake and realize, in retrospect, that it was old and tired, and therefore less dangerous than he'd thought at the time. Just as he looks back in retrospect at the actress playing Marguerite and realizes that she wasn't actually very good, however swept away he'd been at the moment. So -- Jim is a romantic who has gone into business law? But still feels the pull of the frontier West? Something like that?
As for Vergil, I think he's about as good as it gets, but I'll look for another spot in the comments thread to toss in an observation about him.
I never had a feeling that Jim was truly in love with Antonia, the type of adult love that would lead him to propose to her. And the same for Antonia. It seemed like an adolescent crush and then friendly affection.
This is so interesting. How do you define adult love? Is it so easy to draw the line between these different kinds of love?
The novel definitely seems skeptical about love and romantic union. Even with the happy couples (only the grandparents?) we don't fully seem them both. And there are some truly lethal marriages.
"As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world."
One of the most beautiful passages in the novel. The consonance of that first sentence, the figurative comparisons in the second, the grandeur of the third: just amazing.
I loved the Tiny interlude, too!
Maybe this is the model for human relation … two luminaries confronting each other, resting on opposite edges of the world. In the also beautiful next paragraph, this balance draws all creation upward, at the same time Jim "feel(s) the pull of the earth," and yearns both to be a little boy again and that his "way could end there." As though love asks to be held at a remove, and the balance of the world is suspended there.
I love that reading, Ann. I know I said the first week's reading reminded me of Marilynne Robinson's "Psalm Eight." Well, this week's reading had me thinking of "Gilead." There's a lovely moment there where the sun and moon in the sky together also figures as a model for human relation, and for the relation between God and humanity in prayer:
"Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up."
I also was struck this week by the varied ways of thinking about lonesomeness. Lena says "I like to be lonesome"; Antonia says she'd be miserable in the city and "die of lonesomeness" and then later says that, accompanied by her father's grave and Jim in her memory, she "won't be lonesome."
I love in the Gilead passage that the father did not consider looking up for this sight to be an interruption of prayer, or the kiss (love) is the bridge.
And (skipping ahead!) Jim sees that Cuzak is "sociable," "at first I near go crazy wth lonesomeness," "yet his wife had managed to hold him here on the farm, in one of the loneliest countries in the world." The "countries" here has this strange ambiguity: it seems grammatically to refer to America, but the meaning seems more local, like "the back country." Then Jim is ill at ease on the town and only recovers his sense of the place when he walks out to the north. Àntonia, by surrounding herself with these speakers of her native language, who carry on some of the traits of her family, seems in a way to have recreated her native village. Emptiness, solitude, companionship—these seem like such important themes, but they each hold their opposite. Jim's aloneness of his unhappy marriage and constant travel seems less rich than Àntonia's aloneness, which she fills with real connection.
I loved this passage and the ones that followed so much, it hurt. In fact the the entirety of this this short chapter has been hard for me to let go of and I would have been content if the book had ended here, but glad it didn't. Memory: what stays with us, what recedes, how we mean to hold onto it. It all felt kind of tangled up in the grass for me, which we know "was disappearing," but growing so wildly around Antonia's father's grave. I love that it gets the last word in this chapter as the most reliable of witnesses to their youth and all that formed them.
Oh, so beautifully put! Thank you Jainee!
Such a beautiful book, Ann! I lost the thread for a few weeks but was able to catch up and devoured the balance in one day. ❤️
I was shocked when Jim got badly beat up by Cutter. I thought the scene (which was easy enough to imagine beforehand) would play out somehow differently, more comically? Jim jumps out the window - through the screen - and runs away in his nightshirt. He is truly scared.
But of what is he afraid?
The way Jim walks around at night looking at peoples' houses and thinking he knows what goes on in them .. I find him arrogant, pampered, sentimental, and hardly believable as a character. Only as a mask for Cather does he becomes interesting, begin to make a kind of sense. Jim - Burden! Why did she give him that name?
His grandfather's Protestantism seems to disappear or die out, supplanted by the moral code of the town itself, a more tolerant and diluted sense of right and wrong, good and bad? As the morals of the saloons and bordellos infiltrate the community?
One wishes Jim would find a nice girl his own age - there must be one who would suit him - and stop all the silliness.
Jim is annoyed by Lena's Polish neighbor, who actually seems very nice. I wouldn't trust a college boy hanging around for some obscure reason, either. I have no idea why Lena gives him the time of day. She has plenty of other fish in her sea. What is he doing? Oh yes, trying to "decide."
There is a distinct fantasy aspect to the narrative, as well as brutal truth-telling of human behavior, nature.
The further we go the more complex Willa Cather's decision to show us Àntonia through the eyes of Jim comes to feel. The "author" in the beginning seems to think that Jim had some special access to Àntonia because of the conventions of romance, but nothing about their relationship is remotely consummated. I guess it gives him more of an excuse or a pretext to trail her around than the author would have had. Perhaps Cather is trying to illustrate for us the insufficiencies of these traits we think of (or they thought of then) as "charming" in young men: wit, ardor that comes and goes, the self possession of security and narcissism. I think she is also trying to show us how few people in the life of someone like Àntonia would be able to see into her experience.
I so appreciate this discussion and the wealth of insight that you all have shared! I now feel like I want to read the novel again, start to finish, before I am too far distant from this, my first, reading. But I need to consider what I will be looking for. My first impressions of Jim were way off -- or maybe I need to watch for when he began to disappoint me. Antonia and the other girls -- a study in the young, female, immigrant experience! Families and how they functioned -- or failed to function. I am a displaced Californian, living now -- for many years -- in the Midwest -- so there's that little bit of personal stake I have in the narrative. Social class -- of origin and aspiration -- and how that influences one's opportunities and one's choices. And then there is the question of Cather's voice and perspective -- was she the narrator of the introduction? Are we meant to continue to hear her as the narrative progresses? This is clearly a very complex work of literature.
Cather has something in common with Robert Frost, I think. She told him in 1915 that his poems were "the only American verse printed since I began to read verse, in which I have been able to feel much interest." They were both Latin teachers. They were both extremely well educated. They both wrote for two audiences: one that would take their homespun texts at face value; another that would notice their ambiguities and modernist tendencies (like the way Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is as much about how we deceive ourselves about our past as it is about taking "the road less traveled by"). And both developed a certain myth about their place of origin, though Frost was from San Francisco and Cather HATED the small town where she grew up. I remember reviewing her letters when they were first published after the long posthumous delay she insisted on. Everyone assumed there would be bombshell info about her love affairs with women. The bombshell turned out to be her rage at the small-minded people she'd grown up with. But what amazing stories she wove from that unpromising material!
Frost! There is some way in which she is a throughline who is knitting together all these people I did not think of as occupying the same world—James, Hemingway, Frost! It all lends dimension to this question--what are we being invited to look for and hold onto in the past?
So much in this comment! I should use it as a guide to a second reading. Maybe we should have a reunion!
Given the trickiness of Cather’s narration, with that elaborate frame at the beginning of the novel, it makes sense that our discussion has drifted from Ántonia (seemingly the heroine of the novel) to Jim (seemingly the writer of it). There’s always a moment when discussion of The Great Gatsby makes a similar shift from the (supposed) greatness of Gatsby to the mystery of why Nick Carraway is so fascinated with him. Interestingly, Fitzgerald wrote to Cather in 1925, worried that part of his description of Daisy Buchanan might seem to readers to have been plagiarized from Cather’s A Lost Lady, offering documentary evidence (an early draft of the novel) that it hadn’t been. Cather replied that she had “hugely enjoyed” The Great Gatsby, and that she saw no cause for alarm. “I suppose everybody who has ever been swept away by personal charm,” she wrote, “tries in some way to express his wonder that the effect is so much greater than the cause.” I’m guessing that what most readers remember from The Great Gatsby is Gatsby and Daisy, not Nick. What readers most remember from My Ántonia is Ántonia, not Jim. Jim and the unnamed writer he meets on the train at the start of the novel agree that “more than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.”
Which raises the question--I write this with about 20 pages to go--how we should respond to the adult version of a woman who represents, for those who remember her, the adventure of childhood.
I think this is exactly the question of the last 20 pages!
I just read an essay, I'll link it below, about how Cather cut the introduction under pressure from her editor, but that she was herself dissatisfied with it. I'm always loyal to the first versions of things I read. To me the introduction is half the beauty of it! I was thinking about how this narrator fits into Black Hawk. She seems not to have had access to the "country" side that the "town" society saw as unkempt. Jim is sort of a bridging character there. But it's the "town" side that both Jim and Àntonia (and Cather?) find dispiriting, it's the country that nourishes them. Was the country a little more out of reach for the narrator, and is this somehow associated with Jim's having romantic access to Àntonia?
What a gracious exchange between Cather and Fitzgerald. "His wonder that the effect is so much greater than the cause": it makes you think that both Cather and Fitzgerald were responding to some experience of charisma that lies outside the novel, something they could only capture through the view of a somewhat compromised narrator.
Here's the essay. It's about those illustrations that the author argues Cather wanted included with the book. I stumbled on it looking for pictures: https://classicsbookclub.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/jean-schwind-the-benda-illustrations-to-my-antonia.pdf