Notes for Willa Cather's My Antonia

In our first discussions about Cather's My Antonia we considered the various framing devices Cather's uses in the novel. First, the story Jim tells does not constitute the story in itself. There is an external frame beyond that. How does that device work? So, we have several (or at least a few) narrative voices embedded within each other? We also might think of "gender" as a component of the framing device(s): of what gender is the initial narrator, and how are Jim's and Antonia's characters informed by "gender(ed)" expectations?

When we come to know Antonia, we are initially confronted by a young girl who is immediately associated with the earth, from the very basic features of her appearance. She is also presented, throughout the novel, as stubborn, willful, hard-working, but lively. In contrast, what do we come to know of Jim? Is he associated with the land, with the earth? At all? As a boy, he comes to Nebraska for what reason? How does his family configuration contrast with the Shimerda's?

Within the discourse of nativism, which was a political movement and broader social attitude at the novel's publication, there was a fear that the "old stock" Americans were a kind of "dying breed." Do you recall our brief discussion of the text The Passing of a Great Race? The text by Madison Grant directly attended to these fears of "Anglo-Saxon" old-stock Americans. We see some reverberations of the effects of such attitudes throughout Cather's novel, and many of these we discussed in class. In regard to working the land, how does Cather distinguish the new immigrants' efforts from the old-stock Americans' efforts? How are these relationships to the land gendered?

Let's think about Jim's "directional movement" as related to nativism. His trajectory does seem to be one of progress, in that he moves from east to west. So too do the immigrant, but their movement carries them a longer distance, as if their divorce from the ways of the "old country" is more dramatic. So, indeed, Jim's "directional" Americanism is one of progress, but, do think about where he lives at the end of the novel. How does this- coupled with his childlessness and unhappy marriage- verify the fears that someone like Madison Grant presents about the future of "white" Americans? In particular, we need to contrast Jim's "future" at the end of the novel to Antonia's but we will get to that. But within a discussion of Cather's celebration of new Americans rather than mourning the desiccation of "old-stock" ones, we need to look at the end of the novel closely.

We discussed the elision of Native Americans in the novel. Of course, the land on which the Shimerdas and the Burdens live was of critical importance to communities before the "white" Americans and the immigrant families arrived. What become of those tribes? How does Cather treat this history?

I introduced the idea of "foreignness as a mark." How is Antonia's "foreignness" as indelible mark? How does it affect other's treatment of her? How does this "marked" status influence her assimilability? If we think about the other kinds of marks we've discussed this term, marks on landscapes that constitute borders, for example, how then can we consider Antonia's "foreignness" in regard to her association with the land her family works and that she later cultivates with her husband and family?

We spent some time puzzling over the incident, at the end of "The Hired Girls," where Jim and Antonia and the "girls" relax under an oak tree, when Antonia asks Jim to tell the girls about "Coronado and his search for the Seven Golden Cities." The story goes that he had not, supposedly, traveled as far as Nebraska, but Jim revealed that he had seen a metal stirrup and a "sword with a Spanish inscription on the blade" that a farmer had found in their area. This, presumably, was proof that indeed the Spanish had come as far as Nebraska. What is the importance of this story? We considered the idea of spatial and temporal distance traveled, that this account reveals the long and continuing history of conquest of the Plains. This also relates to Americans' obsession with "origin myths." How does this story, of Spanish conquest, serve a justificatory purpose?

We concluded our discussion of this section of the novel by examining Cather's image of a "plough that had been left standing in a field," which was silhouetted as a "great black figure . . . on the face of the sun." How does this plow correspond to the artifacts of Spanish conquest Jim discussed just before he and the girls see the plow? Are these all technologies of submission? As we discussed in class, the group sees the plow and thus connects to history; they form a narrative that links them together, their histories, their land-based experiences. I asked you to consider the plow as a "bi-directional" emblem. If the sun indicates the end of the day, or an end of an era, how does this work within the context of the novel? Does the plow silhouette suggest the relationship between life and a farm and history in the area (colonial, continental, personal)? Also, how does this image suggest a future?