My Ántonia
Ántonia is, of course, Ántonia Shimerda, a twelve year old immigrant girl from Bohemia with big brown eyes and wavy hair, when we first meet her.
Ask different people what they remember of Willa Cather’s My Antonia and they will tell you different things. It depends, one supposes, on whether one grew up on a farm, in a small town, if one left, or stayed, if one had children, if one once really knew a girl, or a boy, and if one’s dreams came true.
Jim Burden, the narrator of My Antonia, remembering what it was like to be in his grandmother’s garden in Nebraska in the 1880s.
“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. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
Willa Cather, My Ántonia, 1918
Those who dream and fail tend to get mean and blame their failure on everyone else.
In My Antonia, Mrs. Shimerda who dreamed I’d a big farm in Nebraska blamed her neighbors, the Burdens, when things did not go well. A farm in Nebraska was not Mr. Shimerda’s dream. He wished for nothing more than to play his fiddle with his friends in the Old Country. He committed suicide. It was not Antonia’s dream. Hers was nothing more than a large happy family, unlike hers.
Her dream finally came true.
And little Jim Burden who narrates the story of growing up in the Great Plains, leaves.
And comes back, looking for Antonia. What did he dream?
“We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Willa Cather
In 1918, the year My Antonia was published, America was at war. Farm boys were in Europe fighting a war to end all wars.
The setting, Willa Cather herself, grew up on a farm in Red Cloud, Nebraska, moving there when she was nine, much like young Jim Burden. Red Cloud was much like, we suppose, fictional Black Hawk, Nebraska where the novel takes place. The time, the 1880s before road, when everything was new. Veterans of the Civil War and immigrants from all over Europe came by the thousands to take up land in Nebraska.
Willa left Red Cloud, to go to college at the University of Nebraska. She lived for ten years in Pittsburgh, and traveled to Europe when she was in her 20s, and settled in New York City, spending summers in New Brunswick, Canada.
When she was 58 (1931), Willa made her last trip to Red Cloud for a family gathering after her mother’s death.
Leaving Oz 