My Ántonia


My Ántonia 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 as children to be pioneers in Nebraska towards the end of the 19th century. 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 Cather's first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting.

Characters

; James Quayle "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.
; Peter Krajiek: Fellow countryman of the Shimerda family; allegedly helpful to them.
; Otto Fuchs: Farm hand from Austria at the Burden place.
; Ántonia "Tony" Cuzak, née 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,.
; Mr. and Mrs. Shimerda: Ántonia's immigrant parents from Bohemia.
; Ambrosch, Marek and Yulka Shimerda: 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, and Nina.

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 labor 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, only to be surprised by Mr. Cutter returning to take advantage of Ántonia, whom he expects will be alone and defenseless. Instead, Jim attacks the intruder, belatedly realizing that it is Mr. Cutter.
, 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 novelists. Today, it is considered 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.
Writing in February 2020, critic and essayist Robert Christgau called My Ántonia a "magnificent, still too obscure novel" and said it "scrupulously documents the facts and foibles of farming as way of life and means of production, although not in the detail of O Pioneers!"

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."
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

's film, The Tarnished Angels, makes reference to My Ántonia as the last book read 12 years earlier by heroine, LaVerne, played by Dorothy Malone. She discovers the book in the apartment of the alcoholic reporter, Burke Devlin, played by Rock Hudson. After LaVerne's husband, Robert Stack, dies in an airplane racing accident, Burke Devlin sends LaVerne and her son, Jack, on a plane to Chicago, which will connect them to their next flight to Nebraska to start a new life. In the final scene, as LaVerne boards her plane, Burke hands LaVerne the book, My Ántonia.
Emmylou Harris' 2000 album Red Dirt Girl features the wistful song "My Ántonia", 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".
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 " very sexy story.... About a young Nebraska country boy who has the hots for an older woman".
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.
In the introduction of his New Year's Day opinion piece entitled "2019: The Year of the Wolves" in The New York Times, David Brooks evoked Pavel's deathbed story from My Ántonia of how he and Peter had been banished from their village in the Ukraine for throwing a bride and groom to the wolves to save their own lives when the six sledges of the inebriated bridal party were attacked by about 30 wolves. Pavel, who was the friend of the groom, had unsuccessfully attempted to convince the groom to save himself too by sacrificing his bride, but the groom fought to protect her. When the two sole survivors returned along to the village, they became pariahs, cast out of their own village and everywhere they went. "Pavel's own mother would not look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed them." This is how they came to settle in Black Hawk on the Nebraska prairie. Brooks compares 2019 to that Russian winter in the 19th century where it was known that wolves have been attacking humans, and a vulnerable wedding party that is a "bit drunk" is being led by two men who are willing to do anything to survive, including throwing their friend and his wife to the wolves. He foresees the upcoming year as one "where good people lay low and where wolves are left free to prey on the weak". In his deathbed confession, Pavel explained, "...the ones who do the sacrificing, who throwaway the baggage — bodies, loyalties, allegiances — are the ones who survive."
In Barbara Kingsolver's 2018 novel Unsheltered, a main character is named Willa, after Willa Cather. A paragraph of My Ántonia is quoted in Kingsolver's novel in the context of a dead woman wanting it read at her funeral.

Adaptations

Television

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

Stage

The Illusion Theater in Minneapolis, MN, staged an adaptation of My Ántonia by playwright Allison Moore and original music by Roberta Carlson in 2010. The production received an Ivey Award, and toured Minnesota in 2012, 2013, and Nebraska in 2019.
adapted the novel for the 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.
Book-It Repertory Theater produced an original stage adaptation of My Ántonia in December 2018. Adapted by Annie Lareau, it ran from November 29-December 30, 2018 at the Center Theater in Seattle, WA. Seattle Weekly praised the production, saying, "...with the current administration’s racial fearmongering as a goad, Book-It’s exploring yet another aspect of Cather’s 1915 novel My Ántonia, as adapted and directed by Annie Lareau, mixing racially traditional and nontraditional casting in ways that encourage the audience to view its tale of the immigrant experience in broader terms."

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