Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.
MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather (first published in 1918)
After writing O Pioneers Willa Cather wrote another novel set in Nebraska called The Song of the Lark. After this came My Antonia, much of which also deals with struggling farmers; but unlike the first two novels, My Antonia is also set as much in the towns as in the fields. These three novels are often called “The Prairie Trilogy”, but when My Antonia was first published in 1918 it was immediately seen in America as a masterpiece. It is still read in American high-schools and colleges and it is still being regularly published. This time, Willa Cather makes the central narrator a man – perhaps because Willa Cather herself had a male demeanour.
Jim Burden – the narrator - is an orphan who has come from Virginia. His cousins live in Nebraska and that is where he is sent. His Grandmother and Grandfather look after him well, they have a good house in Black Hawk and they also farm. The family’s hired man is a German man, Otto Fuchs. Young Jim gets to understand how hawks behave, watching out for rattle-snakes, and helping his Grandmother dig up potatoes. How he loves the earth when he gets used to it. And Jim gets to be interested in the soil itself. He says “The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
He is introduced to a Bohemian family the Shimerdas, who are Catholic. Unlike the Burdens, they are very poor. They do not have a house. They live in a dug-out built of clay and they shelter their few animals in their house. Jim Burden in introduced to this family - a mother who is always angry that they live in such a poor house and who envies the Burdens; a father, Krajiek, who is getting old and often laments that they had left Poland; and a rather aggressive son called Ambrosch who hopes he will become a great farmer. But the youngest of the family is Antonia. She is a little older than Jim but not much. She is learning the English language slowly and better than the rest of her family. Jim takes to her, teaches her the English language better and the two of them often go walking in the fields and rambling near the streams and sometimes visiting people. Jim sees her as his best friend. But “Much as I liked Antonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her protecting manner. Before the autumn was over, she began to treat me more like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons. This change came about from an adventure we had together. One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas’ I found Antonia starting off on foot for Russian Peter’s house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed. I offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had been another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled, hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling, burry stalks.”
In one ramble, Jim kills a rattle-snake which came too near to Antonia…. but there are other things that Jim hears of. There are two Russian brothers, Peter and Pavel, and he hears from them the hair-raising story of a crowd of people, in their way to a wedding feast, being attacked and killed by wolves in old Russia. Jim also hears from old-timers about the “Indians” who used to be in the prairie nearby, but they are no longer there.
The winter is very, very cold – so much so that the creeks freeze over… but there is some joy at Christmas. The Burden family take gifts to the Shimerdas and for some time there is joy… but the father, Krajiek Shimerda, is more and more despairing, wishing he was still in his home country, believing they will get nowhere, and some months later he commits suicide. How is Krajiek going to be buried? There is no Catholic priest nearby but the Catholics get together and bury him carefully, say prayers, and some Protestants sing hymns.
By this stage both Antonia and Jim are growing into adolescence. Antonia is working in the fields. It is very hard work. For a short time there is a fight between Ambrosch – her brother - and the worker Jake, but Antonia smooths it over and she keeps on working.
Jim was very amazed by the hard work that Antonia does. “If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing, she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow, making me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me. On Sundays she helped her mother make garden or sewed all day. Grandfather was pleased with Antonia. When we complained of her, he only smiled and said, ‘She will help some fellow get ahead in the world.” Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that the farm-hands around the country joked in a nasty way about it. Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, steady, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed, ‘My Antonia!’ ”
Time goes by. Otto and Jake go away and are never seen again. Aged 13, Jim is sent to school in Black Hawk, where is grandfather is a Baptist deacon. By this time, Antonia no longer works in the fields. She is working in the town for Mrs. Harling, basically as a maid. Jim often visits the Harling family. At which point we are introduced to the Swedish girl Lena Lingard. She causes much bother and almost scandal because the young men are bewitched by her… and wives are angry as she is such a flirt. Lena wants to get away from being a cow-herder and she aims to work for a dressmaker in the town.
Then “Winter comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie. The wind that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens that hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw closer together. The roofs, that looked so far away across the green tree-tops, now stare you in the face, and they are so much uglier than when their angles were softened by vines and shrubs. In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I couldn’t see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify – it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: “This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.’ It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer”
We understand how Antonia thinks of her mistress Mrs. Harling. “There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it. I could not imagine Antonia’s living for a week in any other house in Black Hawk than the Harlings’.”
Comes summer and there is a kind of festival where Danes, Italians, Swedes, Bohemians and others gather together. More girls are now leaving the farms and finding work in the town where they are paid well. Antonia, Lena and three other Bohemian girls now work in the town. Antonia leaves the Harling house because Mrs. Harling is too severe and will not let her and other girls go to a dance…. And after this she goes back to working in the farm…. By this stage Jim is about to go to [what Americans call] College … but first there is an unpleasant fight between Wick Cutter, a nasty money-lender, and Jim who is badly beaten. But off he goes to College. By this stage we see the gap between a young working woman (Antonia) and a young middle-class man (Jim) on his way to being a lawyer.
Now at Lincoln University Jim has a very helpful tutor, Gaston Cleric, who is head of the Latin Department [remember that right up to the late-twentieth century lawyers had to know all Latin terms]. Perhaps Gaston Cleric was too fixed to ancient poetry… and then Jim is surprised that Lena Lingard is also working in Lincoln. She is doing well and she runs a dressmaking store. She visits him a number of times. Indeed they go to plays together often – and they are both moved by a performance of “Camille” [which says something about the tastes of the late 19th century.]. But they are friends only. Indeed Lena makes it clear that she never wants to marry any man. Lena tells him about how Antonia is getting on. Apparently Antonia has a boyfriend back in Black Hawk. By now Jim is 19. He is reluctant to say good-by to Lena. He is on his way to Harvard… and well on his way to being a lawyer.
Jim visits Black Hawk again. he sees that “The wheat harvest was over, and here and there along the horizon I could see black puffs of smoke from the steam threshing-machines. The old pasture land was now being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. There were wooden houses where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards, and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women, and men who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue. The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces.”
Under the heading “The Pioneer Woman’s Story” Jim learns about Antonia when he visits Black Hawk again. Hers was a tragic one. Her boyfriend had promised to marry her and said he had much wealth – but before she was married she was pregnant and her man ran away. He had claimed to be wealthy, but that was a lie. She went back to her Bohemian family where they looked after her and they welcomed the new child. They had prospered by hard work. Jim, visiting from Harvard, drops in on Antonia and once again he remembered their youth when they walked in the fields…. Years later Jim, now a prospering lawyer, once again visits Antonia. She is now married to a Bohemian man Anton Cuzak and – being good Catholics – they have ten children who are also hard workers. Once again Jim and Antonia talk of their childhood. When he goes back to his work, he can’t help thinking of her as “My Antonia”.
What I have given you is a mere synopsis. Among other things, there are stories that are not central to the novel. There is, for example, the story of Wick Cutter, the nasty money-lender, who kills his wife just before he dies rather than letting her have any money after he has gone. And there is the brief tale of d’Arnault, the Negro pianist who entertains hotels. And all the while Willa Cather celebrates the many ethnicities who have come to the United States.
There is a strong possibility that anyone first seeing a book called My Antonia would think that it is going to be a romantic novel about two lovers. Far from it. What Willa Cather does is showing us two strong women who have made they way in the world in spite of difficulties. Lena Lingard has decided that she does not want to be pawed by men and has made her way as an entrepreneur in the town. Antonia has always wanted to be a mother and have a family, as well as knowing the necessity of work. Both of them have reached their goal. In that respect My Antonia is a feminist novel. Note too that the novel has a man as the narrator… but maybe this shows how much Willa Cather prefers women.
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