My Antonia

It would appear that My Atonia is the perfect example of how a work of realism can have little or no connections to the realm of naturalism, just like The Rise of Silas Lapham. It begins with a fairly simple frame story – an unnamed female writer (implied, of course, to be Cather herself) discusses a girl, Antonia, she once knew with her friend Jim Burden. They decide to each write an account of Antonia, with an interesting sort of impressionistic collaboration: “I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Antonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her” (5). Apparently two different impressions, when triangulated together, can provide some sort of greater accuracy – an idea that seems to me to be slightly opposed to the idea of impressionism itself.

I must confess that, on the whole, I found My Antonia fairly dull. The first portion follows the orphaned Jim Burden’s time on the farm and his relationship to the neighboring Bohemian girl Antonia; in the next section, Jim and his grandparents have moved to town, and Antonia has come as well to work in the house of their next door neighbors. Book III, Lena Lingard, describes Jim’s lackasdaisacal romance with Lena, a more promiscuous doppleganger of Antonia while he’s in college, whereas Book VI is the story of Antonia’s failed attempt at marriage, which ended her pregnancy and eventual marriage to Cuzak. The final portion details Jim’s visit to the adult Antonia Cuzak, and her preponderance of offspring. The novel closes with a final two lines which sum up, I think, much of my disinterest in the proceedings: “Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past” (273). Not only does this last sentence call into question the triangulation I mentioned earlier, it makes it clear that My Antonia is a work of nostalgia for a frontier time and place, and a frontier woman, and I was never drawn into and understanding of Burden’s/Cather’s desire.

This is a quintessentially realistic book, particularly in that it looks at the lives of Midwestern farmers and never, it would seem, finds excess. It bears many similarities to Main-Traveled Roads, but mostly lacks that book’s interest in the damage that the bleak farm life can do to human beings, outside of the suicide of Antonia’s father, who misses the old country but was compelled to find a way to feed his family. Furthermore, My Antonia seems to have absolutely no interest in punishing female misbehavior; no one is ruined, and although Antonia is described as “disgraced” by the pregnancy that resulted from her failed engagement, her life with Cuzak is, if small, not a bad one (253). Lena, the novel’s constant candidate for ruination (which is described as being “compromised” (215)) has a different fate than we would expect: “And that Lena, that was always a bad one, say what you will, had turned out so well” (233) as a dressmaker in San Francisco. My Antonia seemed to me mostly a tranquil novel, with most desire confined to the past and, even then, existing only below the surface.

This tranquility, which is the novel’s clearest sign of being opposed to naturalism and its excessive desires, has one more clear manifestation. In naturalism, people are often described as animals; naturalism’s entire product blurs the line between man and animal. But My Antonia has an entirely different model: “Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we were used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons” (28). Here, and elsewhere (253), the boundary between trees and humans is compromised, and the plant kingdom seems to be the model for humanity: tranquil, grounded, able to be transferred only with difficulty (Antonia’s father), and endlessly reaching into the past.