My Ántonia – Willa Cather, 1918 ★★★★★

Nostalgia's Sweet Spell

American novelists of a certain time liked framing devices. Before beginning a book, they employed an involved prelude detailing how this story came into their possession, what led them to pass it along, some thoughts about their breakfasts or sleep habits, etc.

It happens with the “Custom House” introduction to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It happens again in My Ántonia, where we begin with a female narrator, perhaps author Willa Cather herself, telling us about a male friend she knew growing up in Nebraska.

During a long train ride into the American heartland, they reminiscence:

We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron.

She tells us how he is now a successful businessman, how she doesn’t care for his social-climbing suffragette wife, and how they spent much of the trip talking about this friend they grew up with in Nebraska, a girl named Ántonia. The two friends agree to each write remembrances about Ántonia and compare manuscripts when done.

All this suggests a potential Rashomon situation, except it isn’t: “My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim’s manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.”

My Ántonia as it was introduced to readers in a first-edition dust jacket. While it is billed as "a love story," readers might have been thrown by the fact the love depicted is not a matter of romance. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org.

We never hear from this female narrator again; the rest of the novel is just Jim’s point of view. In fact, the woman is never even referenced in Jim’s story, despite it being established as a shared experience. She is the ultimate framer, vanishing before the portrait is even hung.

This framing device does serve a purpose, just as it did in The Scarlet Letter. There, the custom house sets up the rigid social order we see imprisoning Hester Prynne. Here, the framing device calls to mind the power of nostalgia, how it informs and sustains us even while tormenting us with visions of life forever out of our grasp.

My Ántonia is presented as a series of vignettes, each capturing some moment, great or small, that seems to fade into the page before you finish reading it. Sometimes they are quite stark; other times mystical, yet each carries its own weight. Cather proves quite a spell-weaver.

Willa Cather in New Hampshire. While My Ántonia is a novel of the American West, Cather was herself born in Virginia (like Jim in the novel) and lived most of her life in the Northeast. Our unnamed female narrator is a resident of Manhattan, as was Cather. Image from https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2018/10/11/willa-cather-native-american-poets-harvard-tell-all-boston-debuts/JfjN7O5l4mXCbabgkCz7CP/story.html.

Jim tells us of an autumn day when he and Ántonia grew aware of a coming chill which had already killed much of the wildlife, though not all:

While we were lying there against the warm bank, a little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it, fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antennae quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him. Tony made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gayly and indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to sing for us – a thin, rusty little chirp. She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes.

Willa Cather's childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska is still there. The home is no doubt very much like the ones we encounter in fictional Black Hawk in the novel's second section. Image from https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-11-21/american-icons-my-ntonia.

It is a tiny moment in a long section crammed with blizzards and sudden death, but its thin, rusty little chirp of nostalgia cuts deep. It also sets up a key to Ántonia’s character, who tucks the insect into her hair to keep it warm and brings it back home with her, a gesture both sentimental and futile and thus suggestive of the nostalgic impulse she personifies.

My Ántonia is quite an amazing book. At the same time, it’s not one I’m eager to read again. For all Cather’s brilliant, descriptive prose and her elegiac magnetism, the stark beauty it offers may be too, well, stark.

An amusing observation from the train ride early on sets up the paradox: “The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.”

A sorghum field in Nebraska. Sea-like cropfields "the color of wine stains" cast a spell even as they rule over all. Image from https://wnax.com/news/180081-nebraska-sorghum-executive-pleased-with-epa-approval-of-sulfoxaflor/. 

As the book goes on, and its characters inevitably change and mature, there is a corresponding loss in reader investment, at least for me. It is here that nostalgia’s pull is most felt. An adult Jim, unrecognizable in his stodgy earnestness from the agreeable naïf we knew through most of the book, seems to share our misgivings:

In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones.

I am dancing around a plot summary because I feel a good one would not only be difficult but beside the point. What we get in My Ántonia is more character study, except it is not clear of whom. The title may be My Ántonia but that possessive is just as important as the name. What matters about Ántonia is as much how she is remembered as who she is.

A scene from a 1995 made-for-television move of My Ántonia. It has also been produced for the stage, which poses a challenge. Cather's novel is intensely cinematic, but not especially dramatic. Image from https://yts.digital/titles/18228.

The novel’s rural setting emerges early as a key focus. We learn much about the weather, the flora and fauna, the land itself. It is a place we are told seems to exist somewhere outside civilization. A famous early passage likens the sorghum landscape to a great ocean:

As I looked about me I felt the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

Yet after the land takes its toll, and the relationship between Jim and Ántonia survives sharp friction between their families, nature loses its prominence. Both characters separately make their ways to a nearby town of some size, Black Hawk, where their relationship resumes along different lines. The only constant is Cather’s episodic approach.

Here’s a spoiler that doesn’t spoil much but did throw me: Jim and Ántonia do not become lovers. The whole book might suggest a build up to some great romance, but in fact little romance is had by anyone in the book. Our main characters maintain a very earnest, platonic relationship throughout.

While a simple novel, My Ántonia presents a bevy of characters and interpersonal relationships, as depicted in this handy schematic. Community connections define every player. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org.

There is more than a suggestion of cultural difference. Jim is Anglo-Saxon Protestant, while Ántonia is a Catholic immigrant from Bohemia. A few times, Jim smugly disparages her for being a foreigner, yet his attitude is consistently protective and humane. In fact, Cather gives Ántonia some flaws; she is impulsive, and far too quick to take the side of her unpleasant mother and older brother.

Ántonia sees Jim as having a place far above her world:

“Now, don’t you go and be a fool like some of these town boys. You’re not going to sit around here and whittle store-boxes and tell stories all your life. You are going away to school and make something of yourself. I’m just awful proud of you. You won’t go and get mixed up with the Swedes, will you?”

If the second half of the book feels like a letdown, that’s because Cather sets the first-half bar so high. Ántonia makes such a compelling center to the story that when she disappears for long periods while Jim’s intellectual formation draws reader focus, the novel loses much force.

Jim and Ántonia as they were portrayed in a 2019 Red Cloud Opera House production staged in Red Cloud, Nebraska. I'm guessing she has a cricket in her hands. Image from https://www.willacather.org/events/my-%C3%A1ntonia-illusion-theater.

The episodic nature of that first half gives one a sense of life being lived, moment to moment, more so than your typical check-box plot. Cather seems to work less from a plot outline here than fragments of memory, which she uses to fill in an often-rambling narrative.

In one moment, a Russian wedding party is attacked by wild wolves. A few pages on, Jim experiences what he feels certain is a visit from the ghost of a friend who just died. There is also a savage encounter with a giant rattlesnake. It’s all very involving, if a bit of a Cuisinart.

The story itself, how Ántonia and her family come to terms with the harsh reality of a New World farm life, is told with great vigor, but also long ellipses. One winter’s devastating effect on the family is described in numbing detail, but a couple of pages later, it is suddenly spring:

There was only – spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind – rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted.

Sometimes the story sets up situations that never quite arrive. We are told several times about a sharpie named Krajiek who exploits Ántonia’s family, yet no big confrontation occurs. Several characters make even stronger impressions, then take their leave never to be seen again.

Antonia in what becomes a familiar role for her as the novel develops, working at the plow in the family field. Her stoic, uncomplaining nature proves equal to the harsh environment that lays others low. Image from https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2018/08/my-antonia-at-one-hundred/.

If I had to describe My Ántonia in just three words, it would be short but sprawling.

Another point about the framing device: Cather herself excised it from a later edition of her book, on the advice of an editor who felt it was superfluous. I see what the editor meant, yet the more I think about its place in the novel, the less eager I am to part with it.

Some novels benefit from being focused as an acetylene torch; My Ántonia makes of itself a patchwork nest instead, picking up all sorts of scraps from its environment to fashion as comfortable a home as it can of the author’s scattered memories and sentiments. What it imparts in terms of emotional investment is, for me, at least as important as any story it tries to tell.