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.
Peter, this is like a second essay itself! Thank you so much for this rich comment. I encourage everyone to read Peter's recent essay "Cather and the Antique Virtues" in The Bulwark https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/willa-cather-and-the-antique-virtues-one-of-ours. Seeing it pop up alongside our group and Ben's book made me really wonder if we were having a Cather moment, and why. Ben also has interesting things to say about the WWI novel, One of Ours, that Peter considers in his essay.
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."
Good question. Perhaps Jim adds "my" because he recognizes the story is as much about Jim and Jim's other relationships as it is about Antonia.
Incidentally, I feel that Cather shows restraint in tempering Antonia as a character. In my reading, yes, Antonia is a remarkable character, but not particularly more remarkable than the others. Instead, it feels like the unique position she holds in Jim's life is as much to do with happenstance--arriving in town on the same day, living as neighbors, etc. I think the temptation for an author would be to exaggerate Antonia in contrast to the other characters, but Cather seems to almost flatten Antonia by developing all sorts of other remarkable characters. It seems to me that Jim has a distorted view of (or, rather, distorted feelings for) Antonia in the same way one has a distorted view of their primary care givers on account of proximity in one's formative years.
Surely on the several occasions when Jim and Lena kiss (some of which may have been a bit more than a chaste peck on the lips), Jim's feelings for Lena are as strong as they ever are for Antonia. It's just that Lena wasn't Jim's childhood neighbor so he doesn't name his memoir after her. Ha.
There is that moment when he says, "I'd liked to have had you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be for a man." When he meets Àntonia he is newly an orphan and she is four years older, a big gap at that age. And so much is made of her as a mother—all those children! Though the "writer" does say in the introduction that she too remembered Àntonia as special, one gets the sense that Jim is seeking out mothers and some of the joy he gets from these women is the recovery of his lost mother, about whom we never hear a word.
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.
Chris's and my old pal, and Valley resident, Joseph Brodsky also loved this quotation and used it often. For him it was about poetry's relationship to time.
I've always been so struck that Goethe was a giant for generations and yet now is barely read and it's hard for us to see his presence. He was also huge for Eliot, our last Book Post book group subject...
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.
"She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes, which we recognize by instinct as universal and true."
He has this special affinity for the boys ("I found I hated to leave this boy"), as though he was trying to inhabit them, and reclaim his past self. (I found it so odd that he emphasized her prettiness with them, which seemed to me both inappropriate and also a weird diminishment of his feeling for her. But it was maybe another way of trying to become one of them, or integrate his boyhood feelings into the group. Another odd note: he observes that a daughter is "buxom" and at first site of the older Àntonia that she is "flat-chested.")
I don't really believe that he will go back to them.
Ann, I'm curious as to why you don't believe he will go back. I mean, I think I can guess some of the reasons, but I actually read the introduction as indicating that he *has* been going back. There the narrator wrote, "I had lost sight of [Antonia] altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart time enough to enjoy that friendship." I suppose that's not completely decisive, but that last phrase in particular certainly sounds as though Jim has been making repeated visits.
Sorry to vanish for a bit there! I got called away. But here it is my first Àntonia-less weekend and I return to the fold. I really don't mean to be hard on Jim—I am myself someone who hasn't been particularly faithful in friendship, who gets easily distracted—there just seem to have been so many moments in the book in which he has intense feelings for her and then walks away.
No need to be sorry, Ann! I was not expecting a reply any longer. You are amazingly conscientious in your efforts to reply to all comments. I certainly take your last point, which is very true. I guess I like to think that perhaps in adulthood--when Jim's life has taken on its own shape, Antonia is happily married with a bevy of children, and the possibility of a romantic relationship is no longer hovering in the background--that perhaps then he has found his way to a mature friendship.
Cather and Flaubert, another rich conjunction. Cather revered Flaubert. In a letter from 1938, she reported that she had just read Salammbô for the ninth time, not the Flaubert novel most readers would choose to reread! Cather has a lovely essay called “A Chance Meeting,” about an encounter with Flaubert’s niece at a spa in France (as I remember). Rachel Cohen’s wonderful book about the crossings of American writers (including Cather) and artists, just reissued by New York Review Books, takes its title from the Cather essay.
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.”
Also the photograph of the baby that finally prompts him to seek Àntonia out a the end of the last book. And the one thing that Jim has managed to do in the interim, send those pictures, gains him all this gratitude ("that made me wish I had given more occasion for it"—is it his only note of regret for his inattention to Àntonia?). Looking for images for the posts I read this interesting article about how Cather insisted on having illustrations in the book, which no one seems to use any more. The author argues that these images are the "writer's" Antonia, as opposed to Jim's. It seems to me so rare that a writer wants a novel to be illustrated https://classicsbookclub.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/jean-schwind-the-benda-illustrations-to-my-antonia.pdf
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!
Lucy (and also responding in part to the somewhat similar comments from Amanda below), I did not read either Chris's reflections or Cather's novel as implying that being childless represents being doomed to live in the past. I think you and Amanda are absolutely right that in Lena and Tiny we get two different examples of women leading lives that are very different from Antonia's but that Cather also portrays as impressive in their own ways. I don't think anything about the ending negates that, nor did I take Chris to be suggesting otherwise. (Though of course Antonia, not the others, is the titular heroine--perhaps for other reasons.) What I did take him to be suggesting, and what I would agree with, is that Antonia's impressive (!) fertility--which she herself does not at all appear to regard as a sad outcome in life--is symbolic of one her most important and engaging qualities, what I would describe as her fundamentally affirming attitude toward life. Despite the considerable challenges it has thrown at her, she remains cheerful, optimistic, even enthusiastic, taking each day as it comes and making modest but meaningful plans for the future. Surely this is one of the things about her that other people, and we readers, most respond to. I think one can recognize the symbolism of her many children for this--to my mind, the passages Chris points to are really pretty decisive on that point--without concluding that Cather does not also see other choices one could make, other ways of expressing that fundamentally affirmative attitude toward life. The point is not to rank the different lives against one another, but simply to recognize the "fit" between Antonia's character and this feature of her life; in other words, it isn't simply accidental that Cather has emphasized this about her.
Gee. it surprises me that it seemed that way to you. I didn't read the book or the post as being biased against people who don't have children, though I guess I would agree that Cather is using Àntonia's fertility as a metaphor for something, something positive about her. ("She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.") The portraits of Tiny and Lena as not only not mothers but without interest in marrying seem very adventurous for their time and very appreciative, especially Lena. Cather herself had relationships with women and did not have children, but that's an external fact to the novel. I did not personally feel that Àntonia was burdened by her children, though we could have imagined another fate for her. For me, Jim felt she had a kind of a life-force that she experienced through family that was a thing not available to him. She also took pleasure from home life at the Harlings ("I loved you children [meaning the Harlings and Jim I guess] almost as much as I love my own"). A few comments ago I got to thinking about Jim as a figure for the artist: A person who kind of feeds off other people's experiences and yet cannot fully inhabit them himself. Maybe he shares that with the "writer" of the introduction and with Cather. For me the novel is sympathetic both with Jim's estrangement and with Àntonia's domestic life, but maybe there are other ways of experiencing it. I'm glad though that you enjoyed the read-along nevertheless! Did you like the book in the end?
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.
In the light of these comments, which seem pretty spot-on, what is one to make of this odd sentence, when Jim first sees Antonia after twenty years, he sees “a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little grizzled.” It’s pretty incredible writing just as sound pattern, but there’s something harsh there, too. I’m not sure what to make of it.
I mentioned this in my comment to you above! Maybe I should read them all before I plunge in! I do think there is something a little complex going on below the surface here, of Jim navigating both exalted and kind of crudely sexual responses to the situation. If nothing else all these kids suggest, in pre-birth control times, a pretty robust sexual relationship between Cuzak and Àntonia.
Despite Cather’s resistance to urban Freudians I think she was very well aware of the power of the “scene” that Freud called primal, and yes, Jim is exposing himself to a risky situation. That’s why the violent details of book five might be read as manifestations of Jim’s unconscious if you’re ready to go there. I’d start with the “dead dog.” Cuzak’s Boys are mourning the death of a dog Jim knows nothing about and that is an ominous sign, perhaps. Also, the Cutters, in their final horror, might be incorporated into Jim’s psychic journey, as evidence that no return to a rural idyll is possible. The difficulty of communicating with the wonderful Leo (those close together eyes sensitive to the light, the fleecy neck) is further evidence of the difficulty he faces. But he’s a good sport against the odds…
This post prompts some related (I think) questions of my own. Yes, Book Five opens with a dead dog and its proper burial, and it ends--or some critics have felt confident in saying that it ends--at the burial site of Ántonia's father. How are the Cutters involved in this subterranean (or unconscious) current? I wondered before why Willa Cather named an evil character Wick Cutter, as though she wanted to suggest some connection between them. That dead rattlesnake (unburied!) in the form of a "W" adds another component to this rebus. Does Cather link herself, her dream life, say, to these violent aspects of the novel? Okay, count me crazy and put me back to bed. Or give me another espresso.
These are perhaps the sort of dreams that espresso drinkers are especially subject to! I'm on board, in any case, though I try to keep off caffeine after 3pm. Hadn't registered the resonance between W's and Cather and Cutter. There is the tradition of leaving one's own name in a literary work, as a sort of sphragis or seal. It's disturbing that Cather would have chosen Cutter as her seal, but it reminds one of her wild declaration as a teen that she wanted to learn amputate limbs. The Cutters are also involved in a domestic struggle that in some ways mirrors on a different, macabre level the intensity of Antonia's life-and-death engagement with her farm and family.
"She wrote in a friend's album that slicing toads was her hobby, doing fancy work a real misery, and amputating friends perfect happiness." (Woodress bio. 55)
Dan, Chris, these are quite fascinating suggestions--I have to admit that nothing along these lines had occurred to me. But I wonder, is it too simplistic to suggest that the Cutters reappear primarily to supply us with some contrasts? Contrasting suicides, on the one hand, with Mr. Shimerda killing himself out of a kind of despair at being unable to provide adequately for his family and sustain the dignified life he remembered from the Old World, vs. Cutter committing suicide (and murder) out of spite. And also contrasting marriages: the Cutters' unhappy marriage vs. the very happy one between Antonia and Cuzak. (Though maybe that is too boring an explanation for round two of the Cutters, which is, I certainly agree, a surprising and unexpected insertion.)
This is all a very rich vein! The Cutters feel to me like something on a different register, something out of melodrama or burlesque, like "rude mechanicals" in Shakespeare. There is certainly a lot of ambivalence about marriage throughout and they perhaps offer an extreme of mutual annihilation. Jim and Àntonia are bonded by violence and there's a current, under the various renunciations of intimacy, that sex carries a deadly charge, and violence a sensual thrill. Mrs. Shimerda did kind of capture Mr. Shimerda with sex and put him on a path to his death. The heroes (Àntonia, Lena, grandmother, Mrs. Harling, the widow Seaver) seem to maintain a circle of health around themselves with their goodness and vitality: the "triple enclosure" of the orchard. "All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions." After Àntonia had children she did not want to kill anything. Does Jim think his attraction to Àntonia was dangerous to her, a snake in the garden?
Gosh, this doesn't chime with my own experience of the book, but maybe it's all in what you bring to it. I've certainly experienced tension—even warfare!—between domesticity and other values of life, such as editing one's book review, but I did experience joy of family and the satisfactions of running a household as a positive in the book—the beautiful jars in the cellar, the care of the trees, and so on. With the grandmother and Mrs. Harling too and even Widow Seaver we saw a high regard for the labors of home and the security they brought. Àntonia's sexuality seemed to me pretty front and center, with the dancing and all the descriptions of her physicality. My sense was that Anton's non-abusiveness was being contrasted with the alternative of Ambrosch; it was noteworthy that she chose a guy with town-tastes rather than a committed farmer, even though it's not described as exactly a romance. But of course you are right her opportunities are very circumscribed. An interesting observation about breaking off the different characteristics into the various country women.
I agree, Antonia is sexualized to a degree, but I still could never imagine anything romantic happening between her and Jim. They seemed to be destined more for friendship from almost the very start.
As I read the book this time I found it increasingly difficult not to wonder what role Cather's own sexuality played in the narrative. It seems more a question of how it did, rather than if it did.
I guess I am having trouble forming a coherent picture in my mind of the various relationships in the book.
I share the feeling that this pair is destined more for friendship than for romance. Cather seems to load the dice against them. (It's a scenario Cather returns to in other novels, notably in A Lost Lady.) I think one thing we've been trying to get at in our threads of discussion is the possible dynamic between the nature of these relationships and Cather's mode of narration. Ann suggested earlier (I think) that Jim is something of an artist figure in this novel, the somewhat detached observer who reports on all parties. He is, after all, the guy who has supposedly sat down and written the novel we are now reading. Would it feel right to have the novel end, like Jane Eyre, "Reader, I married her"? I don't quite mean this as a rhetorical question. Cather's novels always feel open-ended to me, mysterious, asking us to mull and keep mulling.
Well I'll go ahead and answer that non-rhetorical question: No! it would not have felt right! In a way thinking about that turns me back to the beginning of the book, and how from the get go the book kept me on an edge the whole time. The open-endedness you speak of doesn't allow the reader to linger in expectations for long. I had said somewhere earlier that Jim began to feel more like a device than a character for me, a way for Cather to have access to all those lives she otherwise could not have, maybe. The side of the carpet she didn't want to write about?
A little aside: he keeps bringing up these worldly things that put him at a remove from the others. The young queen of Italy, the singer from Prague whom he had seen in London and Vienna. Maybe he really is trying to delight them with stories, but it also seems like he is trying to impress on them the difference of his circumstances. Maybe Cather is inviting us to wonder if these are determinative flaws in Jim: his temptation to worldly success, his society marriage, did they draw him away from "the rich mine of life"?
Perhaps--though I continue to wonder whether we (well, not I!) are being too severe on Jim. Is it quite fair to say that he has been drawn away from "the rich mine of life"? Or has he stepped into a different but also rich mine of his own? Cather, after all, enjoyed traveling and was surprisingly cosmopolitan in her tastes. (I think?) Isn't Jim in this respect at least a little like Cather herself?
A good reminder! I think maybe the novel asks the question rather than answers it. Can these experiences be held together? Does Cather wonder if she has lost out on something? Not that she regrets her life, but maybe because of her empathy and appreciation for people she can see forms of experience that she turned from, in favor of other things.
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?
Yes, it's very striking! I was saying something above about how powerfully Jim is drawn to the boys and seems to want in a way to live through them, to inhabit boyhood again, and once again be kind of under the protection or the spell of Àntonia's powers. Of Cuzak: "Clearly, she was the impulse, and he the corrective," "It did rather seem to me that Cuzak had been made the instrument of Àntonia's special mission," "in the group about Àntonia I was conscious of a physical harmony. They leaned this way and that and were not afraid to touch each other."
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?
Yes she really seems at pains to have us hold in our minds at once her roughness—her rough hands, her weathered skin—and this radiance that Jim sees in her.
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.
Peter, this is like a second essay itself! Thank you so much for this rich comment. I encourage everyone to read Peter's recent essay "Cather and the Antique Virtues" in The Bulwark https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/willa-cather-and-the-antique-virtues-one-of-ours. Seeing it pop up alongside our group and Ben's book made me really wonder if we were having a Cather moment, and why. Ben also has interesting things to say about the WWI novel, One of Ours, that Peter considers in his essay.
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."
Good question. Perhaps Jim adds "my" because he recognizes the story is as much about Jim and Jim's other relationships as it is about Antonia.
Incidentally, I feel that Cather shows restraint in tempering Antonia as a character. In my reading, yes, Antonia is a remarkable character, but not particularly more remarkable than the others. Instead, it feels like the unique position she holds in Jim's life is as much to do with happenstance--arriving in town on the same day, living as neighbors, etc. I think the temptation for an author would be to exaggerate Antonia in contrast to the other characters, but Cather seems to almost flatten Antonia by developing all sorts of other remarkable characters. It seems to me that Jim has a distorted view of (or, rather, distorted feelings for) Antonia in the same way one has a distorted view of their primary care givers on account of proximity in one's formative years.
Surely on the several occasions when Jim and Lena kiss (some of which may have been a bit more than a chaste peck on the lips), Jim's feelings for Lena are as strong as they ever are for Antonia. It's just that Lena wasn't Jim's childhood neighbor so he doesn't name his memoir after her. Ha.
There is that moment when he says, "I'd liked to have had you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be for a man." When he meets Àntonia he is newly an orphan and she is four years older, a big gap at that age. And so much is made of her as a mother—all those children! Though the "writer" does say in the introduction that she too remembered Àntonia as special, one gets the sense that Jim is seeking out mothers and some of the joy he gets from these women is the recovery of his lost mother, about whom we never hear a word.
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.
Thank you, Chris! Interesting.
Chris's and my old pal, and Valley resident, Joseph Brodsky also loved this quotation and used it often. For him it was about poetry's relationship to time.
I've always been so struck that Goethe was a giant for generations and yet now is barely read and it's hard for us to see his presence. He was also huge for Eliot, our last Book Post book group subject...
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.
You can't step into the same river twice, yes? Even if he would like to.
"She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes, which we recognize by instinct as universal and true."
He has this special affinity for the boys ("I found I hated to leave this boy"), as though he was trying to inhabit them, and reclaim his past self. (I found it so odd that he emphasized her prettiness with them, which seemed to me both inappropriate and also a weird diminishment of his feeling for her. But it was maybe another way of trying to become one of them, or integrate his boyhood feelings into the group. Another odd note: he observes that a daughter is "buxom" and at first site of the older Àntonia that she is "flat-chested.")
I don't really believe that he will go back to them.
Ann, I'm curious as to why you don't believe he will go back. I mean, I think I can guess some of the reasons, but I actually read the introduction as indicating that he *has* been going back. There the narrator wrote, "I had lost sight of [Antonia] altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart time enough to enjoy that friendship." I suppose that's not completely decisive, but that last phrase in particular certainly sounds as though Jim has been making repeated visits.
Sorry to vanish for a bit there! I got called away. But here it is my first Àntonia-less weekend and I return to the fold. I really don't mean to be hard on Jim—I am myself someone who hasn't been particularly faithful in friendship, who gets easily distracted—there just seem to have been so many moments in the book in which he has intense feelings for her and then walks away.
No need to be sorry, Ann! I was not expecting a reply any longer. You are amazingly conscientious in your efforts to reply to all comments. I certainly take your last point, which is very true. I guess I like to think that perhaps in adulthood--when Jim's life has taken on its own shape, Antonia is happily married with a bevy of children, and the possibility of a romantic relationship is no longer hovering in the background--that perhaps then he has found his way to a mature friendship.
Cather and Flaubert, another rich conjunction. Cather revered Flaubert. In a letter from 1938, she reported that she had just read Salammbô for the ninth time, not the Flaubert novel most readers would choose to reread! Cather has a lovely essay called “A Chance Meeting,” about an encounter with Flaubert’s niece at a spa in France (as I remember). Rachel Cohen’s wonderful book about the crossings of American writers (including Cather) and artists, just reissued by New York Review Books, takes its title from the Cather essay.
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.”
Also the photograph of the baby that finally prompts him to seek Àntonia out a the end of the last book. And the one thing that Jim has managed to do in the interim, send those pictures, gains him all this gratitude ("that made me wish I had given more occasion for it"—is it his only note of regret for his inattention to Àntonia?). Looking for images for the posts I read this interesting article about how Cather insisted on having illustrations in the book, which no one seems to use any more. The author argues that these images are the "writer's" Antonia, as opposed to Jim's. It seems to me so rare that a writer wants a novel to be illustrated https://classicsbookclub.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/jean-schwind-the-benda-illustrations-to-my-antonia.pdf
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!
Lucy (and also responding in part to the somewhat similar comments from Amanda below), I did not read either Chris's reflections or Cather's novel as implying that being childless represents being doomed to live in the past. I think you and Amanda are absolutely right that in Lena and Tiny we get two different examples of women leading lives that are very different from Antonia's but that Cather also portrays as impressive in their own ways. I don't think anything about the ending negates that, nor did I take Chris to be suggesting otherwise. (Though of course Antonia, not the others, is the titular heroine--perhaps for other reasons.) What I did take him to be suggesting, and what I would agree with, is that Antonia's impressive (!) fertility--which she herself does not at all appear to regard as a sad outcome in life--is symbolic of one her most important and engaging qualities, what I would describe as her fundamentally affirming attitude toward life. Despite the considerable challenges it has thrown at her, she remains cheerful, optimistic, even enthusiastic, taking each day as it comes and making modest but meaningful plans for the future. Surely this is one of the things about her that other people, and we readers, most respond to. I think one can recognize the symbolism of her many children for this--to my mind, the passages Chris points to are really pretty decisive on that point--without concluding that Cather does not also see other choices one could make, other ways of expressing that fundamentally affirmative attitude toward life. The point is not to rank the different lives against one another, but simply to recognize the "fit" between Antonia's character and this feature of her life; in other words, it isn't simply accidental that Cather has emphasized this about her.
Gee. it surprises me that it seemed that way to you. I didn't read the book or the post as being biased against people who don't have children, though I guess I would agree that Cather is using Àntonia's fertility as a metaphor for something, something positive about her. ("She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.") The portraits of Tiny and Lena as not only not mothers but without interest in marrying seem very adventurous for their time and very appreciative, especially Lena. Cather herself had relationships with women and did not have children, but that's an external fact to the novel. I did not personally feel that Àntonia was burdened by her children, though we could have imagined another fate for her. For me, Jim felt she had a kind of a life-force that she experienced through family that was a thing not available to him. She also took pleasure from home life at the Harlings ("I loved you children [meaning the Harlings and Jim I guess] almost as much as I love my own"). A few comments ago I got to thinking about Jim as a figure for the artist: A person who kind of feeds off other people's experiences and yet cannot fully inhabit them himself. Maybe he shares that with the "writer" of the introduction and with Cather. For me the novel is sympathetic both with Jim's estrangement and with Àntonia's domestic life, but maybe there are other ways of experiencing it. I'm glad though that you enjoyed the read-along nevertheless! Did you like the book in the end?
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.
In the light of these comments, which seem pretty spot-on, what is one to make of this odd sentence, when Jim first sees Antonia after twenty years, he sees “a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little grizzled.” It’s pretty incredible writing just as sound pattern, but there’s something harsh there, too. I’m not sure what to make of it.
I mentioned this in my comment to you above! Maybe I should read them all before I plunge in! I do think there is something a little complex going on below the surface here, of Jim navigating both exalted and kind of crudely sexual responses to the situation. If nothing else all these kids suggest, in pre-birth control times, a pretty robust sexual relationship between Cuzak and Àntonia.
Despite Cather’s resistance to urban Freudians I think she was very well aware of the power of the “scene” that Freud called primal, and yes, Jim is exposing himself to a risky situation. That’s why the violent details of book five might be read as manifestations of Jim’s unconscious if you’re ready to go there. I’d start with the “dead dog.” Cuzak’s Boys are mourning the death of a dog Jim knows nothing about and that is an ominous sign, perhaps. Also, the Cutters, in their final horror, might be incorporated into Jim’s psychic journey, as evidence that no return to a rural idyll is possible. The difficulty of communicating with the wonderful Leo (those close together eyes sensitive to the light, the fleecy neck) is further evidence of the difficulty he faces. But he’s a good sport against the odds…
This post prompts some related (I think) questions of my own. Yes, Book Five opens with a dead dog and its proper burial, and it ends--or some critics have felt confident in saying that it ends--at the burial site of Ántonia's father. How are the Cutters involved in this subterranean (or unconscious) current? I wondered before why Willa Cather named an evil character Wick Cutter, as though she wanted to suggest some connection between them. That dead rattlesnake (unburied!) in the form of a "W" adds another component to this rebus. Does Cather link herself, her dream life, say, to these violent aspects of the novel? Okay, count me crazy and put me back to bed. Or give me another espresso.
These are perhaps the sort of dreams that espresso drinkers are especially subject to! I'm on board, in any case, though I try to keep off caffeine after 3pm. Hadn't registered the resonance between W's and Cather and Cutter. There is the tradition of leaving one's own name in a literary work, as a sort of sphragis or seal. It's disturbing that Cather would have chosen Cutter as her seal, but it reminds one of her wild declaration as a teen that she wanted to learn amputate limbs. The Cutters are also involved in a domestic struggle that in some ways mirrors on a different, macabre level the intensity of Antonia's life-and-death engagement with her farm and family.
"She wrote in a friend's album that slicing toads was her hobby, doing fancy work a real misery, and amputating friends perfect happiness." (Woodress bio. 55)
Sphragis! What a word!
Dan, Chris, these are quite fascinating suggestions--I have to admit that nothing along these lines had occurred to me. But I wonder, is it too simplistic to suggest that the Cutters reappear primarily to supply us with some contrasts? Contrasting suicides, on the one hand, with Mr. Shimerda killing himself out of a kind of despair at being unable to provide adequately for his family and sustain the dignified life he remembered from the Old World, vs. Cutter committing suicide (and murder) out of spite. And also contrasting marriages: the Cutters' unhappy marriage vs. the very happy one between Antonia and Cuzak. (Though maybe that is too boring an explanation for round two of the Cutters, which is, I certainly agree, a surprising and unexpected insertion.)
This is all a very rich vein! The Cutters feel to me like something on a different register, something out of melodrama or burlesque, like "rude mechanicals" in Shakespeare. There is certainly a lot of ambivalence about marriage throughout and they perhaps offer an extreme of mutual annihilation. Jim and Àntonia are bonded by violence and there's a current, under the various renunciations of intimacy, that sex carries a deadly charge, and violence a sensual thrill. Mrs. Shimerda did kind of capture Mr. Shimerda with sex and put him on a path to his death. The heroes (Àntonia, Lena, grandmother, Mrs. Harling, the widow Seaver) seem to maintain a circle of health around themselves with their goodness and vitality: the "triple enclosure" of the orchard. "All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions." After Àntonia had children she did not want to kill anything. Does Jim think his attraction to Àntonia was dangerous to her, a snake in the garden?
Gosh, this doesn't chime with my own experience of the book, but maybe it's all in what you bring to it. I've certainly experienced tension—even warfare!—between domesticity and other values of life, such as editing one's book review, but I did experience joy of family and the satisfactions of running a household as a positive in the book—the beautiful jars in the cellar, the care of the trees, and so on. With the grandmother and Mrs. Harling too and even Widow Seaver we saw a high regard for the labors of home and the security they brought. Àntonia's sexuality seemed to me pretty front and center, with the dancing and all the descriptions of her physicality. My sense was that Anton's non-abusiveness was being contrasted with the alternative of Ambrosch; it was noteworthy that she chose a guy with town-tastes rather than a committed farmer, even though it's not described as exactly a romance. But of course you are right her opportunities are very circumscribed. An interesting observation about breaking off the different characteristics into the various country women.
I agree, Antonia is sexualized to a degree, but I still could never imagine anything romantic happening between her and Jim. They seemed to be destined more for friendship from almost the very start.
As I read the book this time I found it increasingly difficult not to wonder what role Cather's own sexuality played in the narrative. It seems more a question of how it did, rather than if it did.
I guess I am having trouble forming a coherent picture in my mind of the various relationships in the book.
I share the feeling that this pair is destined more for friendship than for romance. Cather seems to load the dice against them. (It's a scenario Cather returns to in other novels, notably in A Lost Lady.) I think one thing we've been trying to get at in our threads of discussion is the possible dynamic between the nature of these relationships and Cather's mode of narration. Ann suggested earlier (I think) that Jim is something of an artist figure in this novel, the somewhat detached observer who reports on all parties. He is, after all, the guy who has supposedly sat down and written the novel we are now reading. Would it feel right to have the novel end, like Jane Eyre, "Reader, I married her"? I don't quite mean this as a rhetorical question. Cather's novels always feel open-ended to me, mysterious, asking us to mull and keep mulling.
Well I'll go ahead and answer that non-rhetorical question: No! it would not have felt right! In a way thinking about that turns me back to the beginning of the book, and how from the get go the book kept me on an edge the whole time. The open-endedness you speak of doesn't allow the reader to linger in expectations for long. I had said somewhere earlier that Jim began to feel more like a device than a character for me, a way for Cather to have access to all those lives she otherwise could not have, maybe. The side of the carpet she didn't want to write about?
She creates Jim to be her eyes, but what keeps her from being the Jim really?
Yes ... imaginatively, maybe not much?
A little aside: he keeps bringing up these worldly things that put him at a remove from the others. The young queen of Italy, the singer from Prague whom he had seen in London and Vienna. Maybe he really is trying to delight them with stories, but it also seems like he is trying to impress on them the difference of his circumstances. Maybe Cather is inviting us to wonder if these are determinative flaws in Jim: his temptation to worldly success, his society marriage, did they draw him away from "the rich mine of life"?
Perhaps--though I continue to wonder whether we (well, not I!) are being too severe on Jim. Is it quite fair to say that he has been drawn away from "the rich mine of life"? Or has he stepped into a different but also rich mine of his own? Cather, after all, enjoyed traveling and was surprisingly cosmopolitan in her tastes. (I think?) Isn't Jim in this respect at least a little like Cather herself?
A good reminder! I think maybe the novel asks the question rather than answers it. Can these experiences be held together? Does Cather wonder if she has lost out on something? Not that she regrets her life, but maybe because of her empathy and appreciation for people she can see forms of experience that she turned from, in favor of other things.
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?
Yes, it's very striking! I was saying something above about how powerfully Jim is drawn to the boys and seems to want in a way to live through them, to inhabit boyhood again, and once again be kind of under the protection or the spell of Àntonia's powers. Of Cuzak: "Clearly, she was the impulse, and he the corrective," "It did rather seem to me that Cuzak had been made the instrument of Àntonia's special mission," "in the group about Àntonia I was conscious of a physical harmony. They leaned this way and that and were not afraid to touch each other."
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?
Yes she really seems at pains to have us hold in our minds at once her roughness—her rough hands, her weathered skin—and this radiance that Jim sees in her.
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.’”
A wonderful coda.