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.
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.
“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?
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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?
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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.”