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The Drama of Memory in My Ántonia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Terence Martin
Terence Martin*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Abstract

The focus of My Antonia is controlled by Jim Burden's attempt to invest the memories of his youth in the image of Antonia. Jim gives us first an extended portrait of the Nebraska prairies, of the Shimerdas' struggle for survival, and of an Antonia who grows muscular under the strain of work. An idyllic quality pervades the narrative, a sense of happiness remembered. Incidents of bitterness and violence are muted by a style which sacrifices immediacy to the afterglow of remembrance. At the midpoint of the novel, Lena Lingrad, enticing, sensually eloquent, poses a challenge to Jim and his memories. A latter-day enchantress, Lena inspires irresponsibility, forgetfulness, and dream. But Jim's narrative is dedicated to showing the value of memory in and for the present; he identifies Antonia with the prairie and clusters its meanings around her. When, after years have passed, he returns to Nebraska and sees Antonia's large, joyous, and vibrant family, the past and the present finally merge for him in a dynamic new image of happiness. Antonia comes to be Jim's personal symbol of the value of human experience. The novel first validates his memory, then transfigures it into something fertile, fresh, and living.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 2 , March 1969 , pp. 304 - 311
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

1 O Pioneers! (Boston, 1937), p. 13; Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York, 1950), p. 95.

2 My Ántonia (Boston and New York, 1954), p. 7. Subsequent page references to My Ántonia will appear in the text.

3 In his Willa Cather: A Critical Biography (New York, 1953), E. K. Brown points out that Miss Cather was unhappy about her preface for My Ântonia. “She had found it, unlike the rest of the book, a labor to write” (pp. 199–200).

4 David Daiches, Willa Calher: A Critical Introduction (Ithaca, N. Y., 1951), pp. 45, 60–61; Brown, Cather, p. 202; James E. Miller, Jr., “My Ántonia: A Frontier Drama of Time,” AQ, x (Winter 1958), 478; John H. Randall, III, The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather's Search for Value (Boston, 1960), p. 107.

5 O Pioneers!, p. 17.

6 Commenting on the relationship between Jim Burden and Ántonia (on which Miss Cather has established a claim at the outset), David Daiches writes that “for all her devotion to her father's memory, Mr. Shimerda's mantle does not fall on Ántonia, but rather on Jim, who responds to the suggestion of a rich European culture lying behind his melancholy. This is the first of a series of influences that lead him eventually to the university and a professional career in the East [and even to Europe], yet in a profound if indirect way it draws him closer to Ántonia” (Willa Cather, p. 48).

7 Wallace Stegner takes up the point that Part Three of the novel “has been objected to as a structural mistake, because it turns away from Ántonia,” in The American Novel from James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner, ed. Wallace Stegner (New York, 1965), p. 150. Stegner continues: “But the criticism seems based on too simplistic a view of the novel's intention. Though the title suggests that Ántonia is the focus of the book, the development from the symbolic beginning scene is traced through both Ántonia and Jim and a good part of that theme of development is concerned with the possible responses to deprivation and to opportunity. We leave Ántonia in Book Three in order to return to her with more understanding later.”