My Àntonia: Introduction. Book One, Chapters 1–7
Great books are like rivers. We never step into the same one twice. So, whether you’re reading My Ántonia for the first time (lucky you!) or the umpteenth, let’s wade right in.
Cather’s odd little Introduction is a frame narrative (a story enclosing a story) that aims to give a plausible (if fictive) origin story for the main narrative to come. Two old friends, a writer and a lawyer, meet on a train going west. Both remember a vivid figure from their Nebraska youth, a “Bohemian girl” named Ántonia. “More than any other person we remembered,” the writer observes, “this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.” Like Chaucer’s storytelling pilgrims, they make a deal. Each will “set down on paper” all that they remember about Ántonia. But only one of them, the lawyer James Quayle Burden, completes the task. The nonwriter writes, the writer doesn’t.
The Introduction establishes a certain offhand style for My Ántonia, one that feels spontaneous and improvised, and maybe distinctly American. “I didn’t arrange or rearrange,” Jim says when he hands over “the thing about Ántonia,” as he calls it. “I suppose it hasn’t any form.”
Cather had used omniscient (third-person, all-knowing) narration for her first two “prairie novels,” O Pioneers and The Song of the Lark. But for My Ántonia she adopted a first-person narrator. Cather liked using male narrators, often half in love with the central heroine, as she also did in A Lost Lady. Maybe this gave her a chance to express desire for her heroines without encountering resistance. “It is manifestly unfair,” she once wrote to a friend in a much-quoted letter, “that ‘feminine friendships’ should be unnatural.” You might compare the narration in My Ántonia to The Great Gatsby. Jim Burden and Gatsby’s Nick Carraway are interested parties with strong opinions of their own. They are technically “unreliable narrators,” but we may need words more nuanced than that. We might want to say that they are reliable up to a point.
The writer of the Introduction mentions that while both she and Jim Burden live in New York, they don’t see each other much. As legal counsel for “one of the great Western railways,” Jim is often out of town. Another reason: “I do not like his wife.” Cather implies that Jim doesn’t like her much either. “One hallmark of Cather’s work is the depiction of unhappy marriages,” Benjamin Taylor writes in his smart and humane new life of Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas. Why is it important to Cather to call Jim Burden’s marriage into question?
Like the Introduction, Chapter One also begins with a train journey, but now we are experiencing it through ten-year-old Jim Burden. In the first paragraph, we learn that Jim is an orphan; that he is making a long journey; and that he has set out, along with a Virginia “mountain boy” named Jake Marpole, “to try our fortunes in a new world.” These details are literary conventions signaling a certain kind of episodic narrative (think Tom Jones or Huckleberry Finn), referred to by literary critics as the picaresque.
At this point, we could be forgiven for thinking that Jim is going to be the hero of the novel. There is a certain delay in fully introducing Ántonia herself, who happens to be on the same train. The conductor describes her as “bright as a new dollar” with “pretty brown eyes,” but many barriers—her immigrant status, her lower social class, her foreign language and customs (sourdough, dried mushrooms), and Jim’s own prejudices—will have to be bridged before Jim can discover what is so special about her and why she could turn out to be the “whole adventure” of his childhood.
We are introduced to a large number of new characters in the opening chapters. Each character has a distinctive personal style, often revealed in the way they use language. Amid these pages bursting with life, we might give special attention to at least two moments. One is the first English lesson Jim gives to Ántonia, when she learns, in a particularly poetic way, the word for “blue.” It is almost as though she is teaching Jim about the nature of blue as she points to the sky and to his eyes, and claps her hands at the rhyme “Blue sky, blue eyes.” Another is their legendary encounter with a giant rattlesnake shaped like a “W,” a picaresque adventure if there ever was one. I have a little theory about that “W,” which I will save for later.
The opening chapter ends with a paragraph about what’s missing in the Nebraska landscape. “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields,” etc. What Jim derives from all these absent things is a new sense of his place in the world. He glances up at the sky. “I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there.” He doesn’t feel homesick, just mysteriously changed. “If we never arrived anywhere it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night; here, I felt, what would be would be.” This moment, an epiphany of sorts, will prove to be a key to the novel, as will be clear—spoiler alert—in its closing lines.
Cather’s list reminds me of two other famous lists. One is her idol Henry James’s list of absent things in American life, from his brilliant little book on Hawthorne (“no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins…”), which seemed to him a challenge for American writers. And one is Cather’s own (perhaps misleading) description of her novel: “My Ántonia … is just the other side of the rug, the pattern that is supposed not to count in a story. In it there is no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle for success. I knew I'd ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern.”
Join us with your thoughts below in the comments! And read to the end of Book One for Sunday, February 11. We’ll soon be announcing our Zoom party at the close to meet Chris and each other, stay tuned.
Editor’s note: Psst, click here to hear a Czech person pronounce “Àntonia”!
Book Post’s bookselling partner Square Books is offering My Àntonia at a discount here on the occasion of Fireside Reading (discount applied in cart). Thanks Square!
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Images: Sumac, from the Willa Cather Foundation. “Sumac is a native species to Nebraska and many parts of the United States. It is a hardy plant that can survive in most conditions and provides a great source of food for birds and other animals.” A homestead and a dwelling-house dug-out in Webster County, Nebraska, where Willa Cather moved in 1882 at the age of nine after her early childhood in Virginia. The homestead (1884) belonged to Oscar E. Ramey, Sr., a neighbor of the Cather family. The dugout appears in an undated postcard depicting the birthplace of Silas Garber, first probate judge and twice governor of Nebraska. Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Collection PHO-4-W689-266 and PHO-4-W689-301. Willa Cather Foundation Collections and Archives at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska
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Come on folks, don't be shy! Remember I went on TikTok trying to pronounce Àntonia! Maybe I'll give the comments a try.
I was really struck by the colors—the way Cather emphasizes red, which is not a color you usually associate with landscape, and kind of makes it vivid and arresting, even otherworldly—coppery, rosy, ruddy; like the burning bush; air heady as wine; and then the golds running through—amber, blond, tawny. The grandfather’s eyes really jump out from the contrast: “bright blue” with their “fresh, frosty sparkle.” He has a sharply defined presence even though he barely says anything; Mr. Shimerda by contrast is elusive and hard to picture, “something from which all the warmth and light had died out.”
Also I was thinking about the framing device of Jim’s writing the story for the “author,” and it occurred to me that it allows Cather in a way to dramatize how Antonia is maybe not fully *seen* by those around her; she’s a little beyond everyone’s understanding. Like her eyes full of the things she wants to say, but does not know how. Also Jim—whose name we rarely hear—barely seems, unlike anyone else, to have to *work*. He has a sort of privileged, coddled even, position, though he doesn’t seem aware of it. Partly an echo of his orphanhood? I think about his grandparents, how he is all they have of their child, though no one talks about that. Anyway my mother really loved this book, and I feel like I see in this sense of Antonia’s elusive soulfulness something about the way a girl from the 1950s Midwest could feel about herself.
Yes! So agree with what you say about pace. I think tying the book to the seasons contributes to that. This is kind of far afield, but on a podcast recently with Ezra Klein the writer Kyle Chayka was talking about how online reading forces you to keep moving, and to have full aesthetic experiences we, especially younger people raised online, need to teach ourselves to be patient, to sit/work through things. I think Jim’s grief is in the background, he lacks the means to experience it; but there is this convention of making child-heroes orphans to liberate them, maybe it’s being dispensed with too easily. My thought about their early relationship is that relief that kids sometimes have that there is another kid their age, when they would otherwise be alone; although some kids aren’t able to open into those opportunities, it’s true.