My Ántonia

This article is about the novel by Willa Cather. For the 1995 film adaptation, see My Antonia (film).

My Ántonia

File:My antonia.jpg First edition with rare dustjacket
Author	Willa Cather
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Historical fiction
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin (Boston)
Publication date	1918
Pages	175
OCLC	30894639
Dewey Decimal	813/.52 20
LC Class	PS3505.A87 M8
Preceded by	The Song of the Lark

My Ántonia (/ˈæntəniə/ AN-tə-nee-ə) is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, considered one of her best works. It is the final book of her "prairie trilogy" of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.

The novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia Shimerda, who are each brought to be pioneers in Nebraska towards the end of the 19th century, as children. Both the pioneers who first break the prairie sod for farming, as well as of the harsh but fertile land itself, feature in this American novel. The first year in the very new place leaves strong impressions in both children, affecting them lifelong.

This novel is considered as Cather's first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting.

Characters

Overview of characters in novel as social network

Jim Burden: The narrator and protagonist of the novel, Jim grows up in Black Hawk, Nebraska from age 10 and becomes a successful lawyer in New York City.

Josiah and Emmaline Burden: Jim's grandparents, who live on a farm in Nebraska. Mrs. Burden is 55 when her grandson arrives. This is the first time they see him, having moved to Nebraska ten years earlier. Mr. Burden is a religious Protestant and a successful farmer, who becomes a deacon in the Baptist church when they move to town.

Jake Marpole: Farm hand from Virginia at the Burden place.

Otto Fuchs: Farm hand from Austria at the Burden place.

Ántonia "Tony" Shimerda: The bold and free-hearted young Bohemian girl who moves with her family to Black Hawk, Nebraska. Her name is always pronounced as her father said it, (/ˈæntəniə/ AN-tə-nee-ə).

Mr. and Mrs. Shimerda: Ántonia's immigrant parents from Bohemia.

Ambrosch, Marek and Yulka: Ántonia's brothers and sister.

Anton Cuzak: Ántonia's husband and father of their ten children. He accepted her daughter Martha, born when Ántonia's first love deceived and deserted her, leaving her with child and socially disgraced.

Lena Lingard: Hired girl come from the countryside to work as a dressmaker in Black Hawk.

Tiny Soderball: Hired girl who came from the countryside to work at the Gardener Hotel in Black Hawk. She opens a sailor's boardinghouse in Seattle, then makes her fortune in the Klondike gold rush, by feeding the gold miners, working her own claim and becoming a founder of the town of Dawson City in the Yukon. Then she settles in San Francisco, bringing Lena to settle there as well.

Gaston Cleric: Jim's teacher in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska and at Harvard.

Mrs. Harling and her family: Norwegian immigrant neighbor to the Burdens when they move to town, she hires Ántonia, age 17, as housekeeper for her, her husband Christian, and their children, Frances, Charley, Julia, Sally and Nina.

Minor characters include: Peter and Pavel, Ole Benson, Mr. and Mrs. Cutter, Widow Steavens, Larry Donovan, Anton Jelinek, Ántonia's children (Martha, Rudolph, Anna, Yulka, Ambrosch, Leo, Charley Jan, Lucie, Nina are named).

Narration

Cather chose a first-person narrator because she felt that novels depicting deep emotion, such as My Ántonia, were most effectively narrated by a character in the story. The novel is divided into sections called Books: I The Shimerdas, II The Hired Girls, III Lena Lingard, IV The Pioneer Woman's Story, V Cuzak's Boys.

Plot summary

Orphaned Jim Burden rides the trains from Virginia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, where he will live with his paternal grandparents. Jake, a farmhand from Virginia, rides with the 10 year old boy. On the same train, headed to the same destination, is the Shimerda family from Bohemia. Jim lives with his grandparents in the home they have built, helping as he can with chores to ease the burden on the others. The home has the dining room and kitchen downstairs, like a basement, with small windows at the top of the walls, an arrangement quite different from Jim’s home in Virginia. The sleeping quarters and parlor are at ground level. The Shimerda family paid for a homestead which proves to have no home on it, just a cave in the earth, and not much of the land broken for cultivation. The two families are nearest neighbors to each other in a sparsely settled land. Ántonia, the elder daughter in the Shimerda family, is a few years older than young Jim. The two are friends from the start, helped by Mrs. Shimerda asking that Jim teach both her daughters to read English. Ántonia helps Mrs. Burden in her kitchen when she visits, learning more about cooking and housekeeping. The first year is extremely difficult for the Shimerda family, without a proper house in the winter. Mr. Shimerda comes to thank the Burdens for the Christmas gifts given to them, and has a peaceful day with them, sharing a meal and the parts of a Christian tradition that Protestant Mr. Burden and Catholic Mr. Shimerda respect. He did not want to move from Bohemia, where he had a skilled trade, a home and friends with whom he could play his violin. His wife is sure life will be better for her children in America.

The pressures of the new life are too much for Mr. Shimerda, who kills himself before the winter is finished. The nearest Catholic priest is too far away for last rites. He is buried without formal rites at the corner marker of their homestead, a place that is left alone when the territory is later marked out with section lines and roads. Ántonia stops her lessons and begins to work the land with her older brother. The wood piled up to build their log cabin is made into a house. Jim continues to have adventures with Ántonia when they can, discovering nature around them, alive with color in summer and almost monotone in winter. She is a girl full of life. Deep memories are set in both of them from the adventures they share, including the time Jim killed a long rattlesnake with a shovel they were fetching for Ambrosch, her older brother.

A few years after Jim arrives, his grandparents move to the edge of town, buying a house while renting their farm. Their neighbors, the Harlings, have a housekeeper to help with meals and care of the children. When they need a new housekeeper, Mrs. Burden connects Ántonia with Mrs. Harling, who hires her for good wages. Becoming a town girl is a success, as Ántonia is popular with the children, and learns more about running a household, letting her brother handle the heavy farm chores. She stays in town for a few years, having her worst experience with Mr. and Mrs. Cutter. The couple goes out of town while she is their housekeeper, after Mr. Cutter said something that made Ántonia uncomfortable to stay alone in the house as requested. Jim stays there in her place, to be surprised by Mr. Cutter coming to take advantage of who he thinks will be Ántonia alone and defenseless. Instead, Jim punches him, until he realizes it is the owner of the house.

Pavelka house in rural Webster County, Nebraska, setting of "Cuzak's Boys"

Jim does well in school, the valedictorian of his high school class. He attends the new state university in Lincoln, where his mind is opened to a new intellectual life. In his second year, he finds one of the immigrant farm girls, Lena, is in Lincoln, too, with a successful dressmaking business. He takes her to plays, which they both enjoy. His teacher realizes that Jim is so distracted from his studies, that he suggests Jim come with him to finish his studies at Harvard in Boston. He does, where he then studies the law. He becomes an attorney for one of the western railroads. He keeps in touch with Ántonia, whose life takes a hard turn when the man she loves proposes marriage, but deceives her and leaves her with child. She moves back in with her mother. Years later, Jim visits Ántonia, meeting Anton Cuzak, her husband and father of ten more children, on their farm in Nebraska. He visits with them, getting to know her sons especially. They know all about him, as he features in the stories of their mother’s childhood. She is happy with her brood and all the work of a farm wife. Jim makes plans to take her sons on a hunting trip next year.

Reception and literary significance

My Ántonia was enthusiastically received in 1918 when it was first published. It was considered a masterpiece and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. Today, it is considered as her first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting. It brought place forward almost as if it were one of the characters, while at the same time playing upon the universality of the emotions, which in turn promoted regional American literature as a valid part of mainstream literature.

"As Cather intended, there is no plot in the usual sense of the word. Instead, each book contains thematic contrasts." The novel was a departure from the focus on wealthy families in American literature, "it was a radical aesthetic move for Cather to feature lower-class, immigrant "hired girls.""

Cather also makes a number of comments concerning her views on women's rights and there are many disguised sexual metaphors in the text.

My Ántonia is a selection of The Big Read, the community-wide reading program of The National Endowment for the Arts. For the communities and books in the program since 2007, see History of the program since 2007.

Publication history

My Ántonia remains in print in a number of editions ranging from free Internet editions to inexpensive, mass-market paperbacks to expensive "scholarly editions" aimed at more serious students of Cather's work.

The original 1918 version of My Antonia begins with an Introduction in which an author-narrator, supposed to be Cather herself, converses with her adult friend, Jim Burden, during a train journey. Jim is now a successful New York lawyer but trapped in an unhappy and childless marriage to a wealthy, activist woman. Cather agreed with her publisher at Houghton Mifflin to cut that introduction when a revised edition of the novel was published in 1926. A brief introduction with Jim taking that train ride, speaking with an unnamed woman who also knew Ántonia about writing about her, is included in the version at Project Gutenberg.

Allusions to the novel

Emmylou Harris' 2000 album Red Dirt Girl features the wistful song "My Antonia," as a duet with Dave Matthews. Harris wrote the song from Jim's perspective as he reflects on his long lost love.

The French songwriter and singer, Dominique A, wrote a song inspired by the novel, called "Antonia" (from the LP Auguri, 2001).

In Richard Powers' 2006 novel The Echo Maker the character Mark Schluter reads My Ántonia on the recommendation of his nurse, who notes that it is "[A] very sexy story. ... About a young Nebraska country boy who has the hots for an older woman" (page 240).

In Anton Shammas' 1986 novel Arabesques, the autobiographical character of Anton reads My Ántonia on the plane to a writers' workshop in Iowa. It is the first novel he ever read, and he expects Iowa to have the same grass "the color of wine stains" that Cather describes of Nebraska.

Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, Delaware brews a continually-hopped imperial pilsner named My Ántonia.

Adaptations

Television

My Antonia (film), a 1995 made-for-television movie, was adapted from the novel.

Stage

The Celebration Company at The Station Theatre in Urbana, Illinois, performed a stage adaptation of My Ántonia in December 2011. The adaptation was written by Celebration Company member Jarrett Dapier.

See also

• Pavelka Farmstead

Bibliography

Books

• Bloom, Harold (editor) (1987) Willa Cather's My Ántonia Chelsea House, New York, ISBN 1-55546-035-6; eleven essays
• Bloom, Harold (editor) (1991) Ántonia Chelsea House, New York, ISBN 0-7910-0950-5; more essays
• Lindemann, Marilee (editor) (2005) The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, ISBN 0-521-82110-X
• Meyering, Sheryl L. (2002) Understanding O pioneers! and My Antonia: A student casebook to issues, sources, and historical documents Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, ISBN 0-313-31390-3
• Murphy, John J. (1989) My Ántonia: The road home Twayne Publishers, Boston, Massachusetts, ISBN 0-8057-7986-8
• O'Brien, Sharon (1987) Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, ISBN 0-19-504132-1
• O'Brien, Sharon (editor) (1999) New essays on Cather's My Antonia Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, ISBN 0-521-45275-9
• Rosowski, Susan J. (1989) Approaches to Teaching Cather's My Ántonia Modern Language Association of America, New York, ISBN 0-87352-520-5
• Smith, Christopher (2001) Readings on My Antonia Greenhaven Press, San Diego, California, ISBN 0-7377-0181-1
• Wenzl, Bernhard (2001) Mythologia Americana – Willa Cather’s Nebraska novels and the myth of the frontier Grin, Munich, ISBN 978-3-640-14909-4
• Ying, Hsiao-ling (1999) The Quest for Self-actualization: Female protagonists in Willa Cather's Prairie trilogy Bookman Books, Taipei, Taiwan, ISBN 957-586-795-5

Articles

• Fetterley, Judith (1986) "My Ántonia, Jim Burden, and the Dilemma of the Lesbian Writer" In Spector, Judith (editor) (1986) Gender Studies: New Directions in Feminist Criticism Bowling Green State University Popular Press, Bowling Green, Ohio, pages 43–59, ISBN 0-87972-351-3; and In Jay, Karla and Glasgow, Joanne (editors) (1990) Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions New York University Press, New York, pages 145–163, ISBN 0-8147-4175-4
• Fischer, Mike (1990) "Pastoralism and Its Discontents: Willa Cather and the Burden of Imperialism" Mosaic (Winnipeg) 23(11): pp. 31–44
• Fisher-Wirth, Ann (1993) "Out of the Mother: Loss in My Ántonia" Cather Studies 2: pp. 41–71
• Gelfant, Blanche H. (1971) "The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Ántonia" American Literature 43: pp. 60–82
• Giannone, Richard (1965) "Music in My Ántonia" Prairie Schooner 38(4); covered in Giannone, Richard (1968) Music in Willa Cather's Fiction University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, pages 116–122, OCLC 598716
• Holmes, Catherine D. (1999) "Jim Burden's Lost Worlds: Exile in My Ántonia" Twentieth-Century Literature 45(3): pp. 336–346
• Lambert, Deborah G. (1982) "The Defeat of a Hero: Autonomy and Sexuality in My Ántonia" American Literature 53(4): pp. 676–690
• Millington, Richard H. (1994) "Willa Cather and "The Storyteller": Hostility to the Novel in My Ántonia" American Literature 66(4): pp. 689–717
• Prchal, Tim (2004) "The Bohemian Paradox: My Antonia and Popular Images of Czech Immigrants" MELUS (Society for the Study of the Multi- Ethnic Literature of the United States) 29(2): pp. 3–25
• Tellefsen, Blythe (1999) "Blood in the Wheat: Willa Cather's My Antonia" Studies in American Fiction 27(2): pp. 229–244
• Urgo, Joseph (1997) "Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration" College English 59(2): pp. 206–217
• Yukman, Claudia (1988) "Frontier Relationships in Willa Cather's My Ántonia" Pacific Coast Philology 23(1/2): pp. 94–105

External links

• My Ántonia free full text in various formats, at Project Gutenberg.
• My Ántonia Audio Guide
• My Ántonia at IMDb