Chris, thank you for another set of interesting and helpful reflections. I had a number of thoughts as I finished the novel, none very articulate, but most of them circling in one way or another around a theme you have highlighted here: the tension between living in the future (or even simply the present?) and living in the past. (I am not certain, however, that Antonia lives in the future--in some respects, she may also live in the past, though your comments about all her children are very well taken. But maybe that's for a different comment.)
The word that kept coming to me to describe the mood of the story was "bittersweet." I constantly had the feeling that I was being offered glimpses of a lasting happiness that was always just out of reach--certainly for Jim, but also for the reader. (For Antonia as well? I'm not really sure. Her joy and good spirits are memorable and infectious. But her life has been difficult.) If Book Five's images of Antonia and her family provide a happy ending of sorts--as I think they do--it is an ending that we observe along with Jim but don't exactly share, and perhaps couldn't.
The whole time I was reading, I had this nagging sense that I was being reminded of some famous line, maybe something from a poem, or a familiar work of literature, something I ought to remember but couldn't. Then suddenly, near the end, it came to me: "Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen: / Verweile doch! du bist so schön! ..." Without any attempt at poetry: "If ever I should say to the present moment: Tarry a while, you are so beautiful! ..." That certainly seems to capture Jim's attitude, always trying to freeze a moment and hang onto it, something the closing sentence seems to suggest (perhaps misleadingly) that he and Antonia have succeeded in doing. It can't be done, of course. Along with that wonderful last paragraph, I also love the penultimate one, with its description of the old road that has almost disappeared, the one along which Jim and Antonia had first come out west to Black Hawk. It is not completely gone--Jim can still see its traces (though his description of them, "like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws," is hardly idealized). But those traces are a far cry from the original road. Similarly, that original journey has left its traces on Jim and Antonia--he even claims (also perhaps misleadingly) that "early accidents of fortune... predetermin[e] for us all that we can ever be." But they have changed since then. (Chris, you don't happen to know whether Cather had any special fondness for Goethe, or for Faust? I wouldn't want to push the comparison very far--it doesn't really work, I don't think--but there is even an element of the Gretchen story about Antonia.)
In the same way, there is something Edenic about the many beautiful descriptions of the natural world throughout the book. This time I was particularly struck by a paragraph in ch. 1 of Bk. 5, when Jim and Antonia are in the orchard, watching her children: "The hedges were so tall that we could see nothing but the blue sky above them.... The afternoon poured down on us through the drying grape leaves. The orchard seemed full of sun, like a cup, and we could smell the ripe apples on the trees." A garden, and even one with apple trees! But if Jim and Antonia sometimes seem to inhabit an Eden in the beautiful prairie countryside, it is one that from the very beginning had a snake in it. The idyll remains just out of reach. Jim wants to fix it between the covers of a book for us, but his idealized past remains, as the very last word reminds us, "incommunicable."
I wouldn't want to leave it simply with that, although I have already let this comment go on far too long. There is also a more positive side to all of this, even if, for me, that bittersweet flavor predominates. We cannot hang onto the past, cannot say to any present moment, "Tarry a while." But we do carry traces of the past forward with us. The Old World immigrants bring aspects of their culture with them. Lena and Tiny leave Black Hawk but build lives for themselves that draw upon their experiences there. Antonia does not regret her time in town but is grateful for the lessons she learned and can now put to use on the farm. Her husband Anton similarly draws upon his previous experiences. Even Jim has renewed his friendship with Antonia and her family and will, it appears, remain in contact with this aspect of his past. I am not as widely read in Cather's work as I should be--and am grateful for the prompt by Ann and Chris to return to her here!--but I think the question of what we take from the past and how we build upon it in the present is one of her deepest themes.
While I'm at it, let me toss in one more comment, which I promise will be much shorter: what do people think of that possessive pronoun in the book's title? When Jim hands over his manuscript, he writes "Antonia" on its cover. But he "frowned" at that, and then added another word, making the title, "My Antonia." The frame narrator says, "That seemed to satisfy him."
Is this just a matter of perspective? The story we are getting is Jim's version of Antonia, and if someone else told her story, it would be different? Although it appears, at least on the evidence we have, that people remember her in similar ways. Is the possessive aspect of "my" more significant? Is this another instance of Jim trying to freeze a moment and hang onto it for himself? I'm not really sure, but Cather goes out of her way to point out that he adds the "my."
Did Cather have any special fondness for Goethe, or for Faust? Yes, she did. She reviewed a bad theatrical adaption, comparing it unfavorably both to Goethe's original and to another adaptation. Paul whistles a tune from Gounod's Faust in "Paul's Case," Cather's first masterpiece, signaling a Faustian pact.
I was reminded of that phrase of Flaubert George Steiner always quotes, “ils sont dans le vrai.” Literally, “they are in the truth,” immersed in real life in a way that no observer can be. Antonia’s children are living in the here and now such a rich succession of activities, while Jim is barred from that felicity. He is forced to accept with amusement and wonder this variety of kids, but it seems doubtful whether he will ever matter to them as they do to him. One senses his vulnerability to the circumstance. He is returning to a home place, but the act is regressive and he verges on being a stranger.
It’s worth asking about the extraordinary prevalence of photography in Book Five! Jim sends Antonia photographs of her native village. Her children then ask him to see them framed. “Has mother shown you the pictures you sent her…?” Then, “She has a picture of you she cut out of the Chicago paper.” And the boxful of photographs which become family entertainment. But given Antonia’s importance in the novel there are singularly few pictures of her, only the briefest mention of her with Anton at the wedding. Perhaps there is some essence of her that cannot be photographed, that exists as an image in the mind, “pictures, fixed like the old woodcuts in one’s primer.”
The bias against people who are child-free is striking in this post. Do you really think the point of this novel is that being child-free is a doomed fate of living in the past while those with children get to live in the present, looking forward to the future? Not what I took at all. Rather, I think we see three very different lives for three immigrant women (Lena, Tiny and Antonia) without any real ranking by the author. A fourth life is Jim's, who may be mired in nostalgia and sentimentality, that probably has more to do with being in a bad marriage and losing his grandparents (which isn't mentioned but obvious). Antonia is his only connection to his childhood and to his nostalgia for unlived lives. Antonia doesn't share his nostalgia but I don't think that's about having children. If anything, the implication is that Antonia would have had a better life without all those kids. That she is the sad outcome of a world where women have few choices once they make the "mistake" of getting pregnant out of wedlock.
Regardless, I've really enjoyed this read-along. Thank you to all of you for sharing your thoughts. Look forward to the next one!
I read Jim and Antonia as both sharing a deep reverence for the past, and I didn't read anything particularly cautionary in the book about anyone's developing such a reverence.
I came away from books four and five--like other commenters--with complicated feelings. The blended and overlapping patterns of the different characters call forth bittersweet feelings with no easy way to unravel the individual threads, nor a particular desire to do so. As I read the last third of the novel, I couldn't help but think of the childhoods of the different generations of my family with a tremendous sense of nostalgia (and a healthy dose of fretting over the contemporary culture my young nephews are growing up in).
As I read the discussion here and reflect on the novel, I feel a desire to interpret My Antonia through some sort of spiritual lens--as if the events, the places, and the people of Jim's and Antonia's past exist for them with something like an awe-inspiring divine force, and Jim's project in writing it out is an attempt to try to tame the raw power of it all.
It's a low bar to conceive of Antonia being happy with someone simply because he's "not abusive," however Anton does seem harmless enough, though of course he's responsible for all the pregnancies (besides Martha) that Antonia repeatedly endures. I don't feel either romantic or sentimental about that.
Nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the kids in themselves or as group. But if we are seriously taking the quality of Antonia's life into some kind of real consideration, who would say that where she is at the end of the book is what we would have chosen for her? Her life as an individual I mean.
The possibility of a real romance between Jim and Antonia never seemed at all likely to me. She was older than he was, she had come from an entirely different experience, and his being "in love" with her, whatever that meant, to me always seemed like a self-indulgent fantasy on his part, more a part of the good luck he enjoys in such abundance that it only has the effect of making him miserable. Besides that, the book seems to work consistently against that possibility, priming Antonia from the start as some kind of substitute mother figure for Jim, conveniently ignoring the reality of her own sexuality, which is all given to Lena and Tiny instead, though Tiny it turns out is not interested in sex, only money, while Lena is interested in both. And Lena, who has spent most of her life dealing with the sexual advances of men, is practical as well, helping her worn-out mother take care of all those kids. It is almost like in Antonia, Lena, and Tiny Cather took what could have been one woman and broke her into prismatic elements to explore discreetly.
I asked an earlier question about the "my" in the book's title. I'd be curious to get people's reactions to another title that struck me as curious. Book 5 is named "Cuzak's Boys." Not "Antonia's Boys." Nor "Antonia's Children" (or "Cuzak's Children"). Why? I suppose it could just be a matter of recognizing that Antonia is married and her last name had changed--Book 1, after all, was "The Shimerdas," so we began with her maiden name. But it feels as though something more than that is at work in the choice of both words, "Cuzak" and "Boys." Any thoughts?
That description stood out to me, too! It certainly serves as a reminder of the time and experience that's passed since Jim last saw her. Perhaps an indicator that he didn't just love her for her looks, but her essential qualities as he sees them are apart from and have survived their loss? A deliberately unromantic description from Cather, maybe to set up contrast to what will follow?
Thought this was an odd image of a heroine, as a glazed jar with orange flowers on a table seen from multiple angles (Woodress's bio. p. 285.)!
It might have been this winter that Cather went to Elizabeth Sergeant's apartment in the East 60s for tea. She arrived flushed and alert from one of her swift wintry walks in Central Park. While they were having tea, Sergeant remembered: “She then suddenly leaned over…and set an old Sicilian apothecary jar of mine, filled with orange-brown flowers of scented stock, in the middle of a bare round antique table.
“’I want my new heroine to be like this-like a rare object in the middle of a table which one may examine from all sides.’
“She moved the lamp so that light streamed brightly down on my Taormina jar with its glazed orange and blue design.
“‘I want her to stand out-like this-like this-because she is the story.’”
Chris, thank you for another set of interesting and helpful reflections. I had a number of thoughts as I finished the novel, none very articulate, but most of them circling in one way or another around a theme you have highlighted here: the tension between living in the future (or even simply the present?) and living in the past. (I am not certain, however, that Antonia lives in the future--in some respects, she may also live in the past, though your comments about all her children are very well taken. But maybe that's for a different comment.)
The word that kept coming to me to describe the mood of the story was "bittersweet." I constantly had the feeling that I was being offered glimpses of a lasting happiness that was always just out of reach--certainly for Jim, but also for the reader. (For Antonia as well? I'm not really sure. Her joy and good spirits are memorable and infectious. But her life has been difficult.) If Book Five's images of Antonia and her family provide a happy ending of sorts--as I think they do--it is an ending that we observe along with Jim but don't exactly share, and perhaps couldn't.
The whole time I was reading, I had this nagging sense that I was being reminded of some famous line, maybe something from a poem, or a familiar work of literature, something I ought to remember but couldn't. Then suddenly, near the end, it came to me: "Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen: / Verweile doch! du bist so schön! ..." Without any attempt at poetry: "If ever I should say to the present moment: Tarry a while, you are so beautiful! ..." That certainly seems to capture Jim's attitude, always trying to freeze a moment and hang onto it, something the closing sentence seems to suggest (perhaps misleadingly) that he and Antonia have succeeded in doing. It can't be done, of course. Along with that wonderful last paragraph, I also love the penultimate one, with its description of the old road that has almost disappeared, the one along which Jim and Antonia had first come out west to Black Hawk. It is not completely gone--Jim can still see its traces (though his description of them, "like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws," is hardly idealized). But those traces are a far cry from the original road. Similarly, that original journey has left its traces on Jim and Antonia--he even claims (also perhaps misleadingly) that "early accidents of fortune... predetermin[e] for us all that we can ever be." But they have changed since then. (Chris, you don't happen to know whether Cather had any special fondness for Goethe, or for Faust? I wouldn't want to push the comparison very far--it doesn't really work, I don't think--but there is even an element of the Gretchen story about Antonia.)
In the same way, there is something Edenic about the many beautiful descriptions of the natural world throughout the book. This time I was particularly struck by a paragraph in ch. 1 of Bk. 5, when Jim and Antonia are in the orchard, watching her children: "The hedges were so tall that we could see nothing but the blue sky above them.... The afternoon poured down on us through the drying grape leaves. The orchard seemed full of sun, like a cup, and we could smell the ripe apples on the trees." A garden, and even one with apple trees! But if Jim and Antonia sometimes seem to inhabit an Eden in the beautiful prairie countryside, it is one that from the very beginning had a snake in it. The idyll remains just out of reach. Jim wants to fix it between the covers of a book for us, but his idealized past remains, as the very last word reminds us, "incommunicable."
I wouldn't want to leave it simply with that, although I have already let this comment go on far too long. There is also a more positive side to all of this, even if, for me, that bittersweet flavor predominates. We cannot hang onto the past, cannot say to any present moment, "Tarry a while." But we do carry traces of the past forward with us. The Old World immigrants bring aspects of their culture with them. Lena and Tiny leave Black Hawk but build lives for themselves that draw upon their experiences there. Antonia does not regret her time in town but is grateful for the lessons she learned and can now put to use on the farm. Her husband Anton similarly draws upon his previous experiences. Even Jim has renewed his friendship with Antonia and her family and will, it appears, remain in contact with this aspect of his past. I am not as widely read in Cather's work as I should be--and am grateful for the prompt by Ann and Chris to return to her here!--but I think the question of what we take from the past and how we build upon it in the present is one of her deepest themes.
While I'm at it, let me toss in one more comment, which I promise will be much shorter: what do people think of that possessive pronoun in the book's title? When Jim hands over his manuscript, he writes "Antonia" on its cover. But he "frowned" at that, and then added another word, making the title, "My Antonia." The frame narrator says, "That seemed to satisfy him."
Is this just a matter of perspective? The story we are getting is Jim's version of Antonia, and if someone else told her story, it would be different? Although it appears, at least on the evidence we have, that people remember her in similar ways. Is the possessive aspect of "my" more significant? Is this another instance of Jim trying to freeze a moment and hang onto it for himself? I'm not really sure, but Cather goes out of her way to point out that he adds the "my."
Did Cather have any special fondness for Goethe, or for Faust? Yes, she did. She reviewed a bad theatrical adaption, comparing it unfavorably both to Goethe's original and to another adaptation. Paul whistles a tune from Gounod's Faust in "Paul's Case," Cather's first masterpiece, signaling a Faustian pact.
I was reminded of that phrase of Flaubert George Steiner always quotes, “ils sont dans le vrai.” Literally, “they are in the truth,” immersed in real life in a way that no observer can be. Antonia’s children are living in the here and now such a rich succession of activities, while Jim is barred from that felicity. He is forced to accept with amusement and wonder this variety of kids, but it seems doubtful whether he will ever matter to them as they do to him. One senses his vulnerability to the circumstance. He is returning to a home place, but the act is regressive and he verges on being a stranger.
What a gorgeous post. Thank you, Chris.
It’s worth asking about the extraordinary prevalence of photography in Book Five! Jim sends Antonia photographs of her native village. Her children then ask him to see them framed. “Has mother shown you the pictures you sent her…?” Then, “She has a picture of you she cut out of the Chicago paper.” And the boxful of photographs which become family entertainment. But given Antonia’s importance in the novel there are singularly few pictures of her, only the briefest mention of her with Anton at the wedding. Perhaps there is some essence of her that cannot be photographed, that exists as an image in the mind, “pictures, fixed like the old woodcuts in one’s primer.”
The bias against people who are child-free is striking in this post. Do you really think the point of this novel is that being child-free is a doomed fate of living in the past while those with children get to live in the present, looking forward to the future? Not what I took at all. Rather, I think we see three very different lives for three immigrant women (Lena, Tiny and Antonia) without any real ranking by the author. A fourth life is Jim's, who may be mired in nostalgia and sentimentality, that probably has more to do with being in a bad marriage and losing his grandparents (which isn't mentioned but obvious). Antonia is his only connection to his childhood and to his nostalgia for unlived lives. Antonia doesn't share his nostalgia but I don't think that's about having children. If anything, the implication is that Antonia would have had a better life without all those kids. That she is the sad outcome of a world where women have few choices once they make the "mistake" of getting pregnant out of wedlock.
Regardless, I've really enjoyed this read-along. Thank you to all of you for sharing your thoughts. Look forward to the next one!
I read Jim and Antonia as both sharing a deep reverence for the past, and I didn't read anything particularly cautionary in the book about anyone's developing such a reverence.
I came away from books four and five--like other commenters--with complicated feelings. The blended and overlapping patterns of the different characters call forth bittersweet feelings with no easy way to unravel the individual threads, nor a particular desire to do so. As I read the last third of the novel, I couldn't help but think of the childhoods of the different generations of my family with a tremendous sense of nostalgia (and a healthy dose of fretting over the contemporary culture my young nephews are growing up in).
As I read the discussion here and reflect on the novel, I feel a desire to interpret My Antonia through some sort of spiritual lens--as if the events, the places, and the people of Jim's and Antonia's past exist for them with something like an awe-inspiring divine force, and Jim's project in writing it out is an attempt to try to tame the raw power of it all.
It's a low bar to conceive of Antonia being happy with someone simply because he's "not abusive," however Anton does seem harmless enough, though of course he's responsible for all the pregnancies (besides Martha) that Antonia repeatedly endures. I don't feel either romantic or sentimental about that.
Nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the kids in themselves or as group. But if we are seriously taking the quality of Antonia's life into some kind of real consideration, who would say that where she is at the end of the book is what we would have chosen for her? Her life as an individual I mean.
The possibility of a real romance between Jim and Antonia never seemed at all likely to me. She was older than he was, she had come from an entirely different experience, and his being "in love" with her, whatever that meant, to me always seemed like a self-indulgent fantasy on his part, more a part of the good luck he enjoys in such abundance that it only has the effect of making him miserable. Besides that, the book seems to work consistently against that possibility, priming Antonia from the start as some kind of substitute mother figure for Jim, conveniently ignoring the reality of her own sexuality, which is all given to Lena and Tiny instead, though Tiny it turns out is not interested in sex, only money, while Lena is interested in both. And Lena, who has spent most of her life dealing with the sexual advances of men, is practical as well, helping her worn-out mother take care of all those kids. It is almost like in Antonia, Lena, and Tiny Cather took what could have been one woman and broke her into prismatic elements to explore discreetly.
I asked an earlier question about the "my" in the book's title. I'd be curious to get people's reactions to another title that struck me as curious. Book 5 is named "Cuzak's Boys." Not "Antonia's Boys." Nor "Antonia's Children" (or "Cuzak's Children"). Why? I suppose it could just be a matter of recognizing that Antonia is married and her last name had changed--Book 1, after all, was "The Shimerdas," so we began with her maiden name. But it feels as though something more than that is at work in the choice of both words, "Cuzak" and "Boys." Any thoughts?
That description stood out to me, too! It certainly serves as a reminder of the time and experience that's passed since Jim last saw her. Perhaps an indicator that he didn't just love her for her looks, but her essential qualities as he sees them are apart from and have survived their loss? A deliberately unromantic description from Cather, maybe to set up contrast to what will follow?
Dear All,
Thought this was an odd image of a heroine, as a glazed jar with orange flowers on a table seen from multiple angles (Woodress's bio. p. 285.)!
It might have been this winter that Cather went to Elizabeth Sergeant's apartment in the East 60s for tea. She arrived flushed and alert from one of her swift wintry walks in Central Park. While they were having tea, Sergeant remembered: “She then suddenly leaned over…and set an old Sicilian apothecary jar of mine, filled with orange-brown flowers of scented stock, in the middle of a bare round antique table.
“’I want my new heroine to be like this-like a rare object in the middle of a table which one may examine from all sides.’
“She moved the lamp so that light streamed brightly down on my Taormina jar with its glazed orange and blue design.
“‘I want her to stand out-like this-like this-because she is the story.’”