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Antonia Analysis
Antonia Analysis
Andrew Pinkerton
Dr. Atlas
English 7330
15 December 2017
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, released in 1918, offers a collection of stories that mix
immigrant struggles in America, vivid descriptions of the Nebraska prairies and reflections on
the function of memory and the human struggle for permanence. One exemplifying passage
comes from the middle of the novel, when Jim Burden is walking back home after attending a
town dance. Observing the flimsy town houses, containing the guarded, often unhappy lives of
the town’s citizens, he says, “The people asleep in those houses…tried to live like the mice in
their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the
dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the
wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all” (107). Throughout the novel, there is a
palpable effort by the characters to establish some sense of permanence and stability. Or, in
other words, to leave a mark to be remembered by, contrasting with the townspeople just
described. However, My Ántonia uses the permanency of the land as a device to contrast with
the novel’s characters, namely, the ephemeral quality of their existence in the prairie and the
Within the first several pages of the novel, Cather introduces the main protagonist Jim
Burden, recently orphaned and traveling by train to Nebraska to live with his grandparents, as
well as the novel’s principle character, the western wilderness to which Jim is moving.
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Immediately, the land is described in almost mystical, eternal terms, setting this land apart as
something wholly unique and other-worldly. It is dubbed as “a new world,” evoking thoughts of
European colonizers and the early history of the eastern United States. Seeing the land for the
fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was
nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are
made…I had a feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the
edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at
the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the
The land was pure, unused, yet offered the materials with which to cultivate it and establish
oneself. Jim describes it as being something distinct from the land he was moving from and, in
connecting it with a term like “heaven,” he is associating it with the idea of eternality and
wistfulness. No matter what, the land would always remain. In addition, the “new world”
appears to be a place to forget all of the old, haunting burdens. Jim states, “I did not believe
that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there…I had left even their spirits
behind me” (7). The wilderness would be a place to create—to create a new life and new
memories, untethered from the old. For all of those seemingly positive qualities, however, Jim
also states something quite perplexing within his description. “Between that earth and that sky
I felt erased, blotted out” (7). The land held such an overwhelming power, that anything in
comparison felt irrelevant, ephemeral. With the eternality of the new world as a backdrop,
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Throughout its pages, My Ántonia offers example after example of people (and animals)
conceived of as permanent and stable, only to find those things being swallowed up by their
own insignificance within the grand scope of time and land. In his 1958 essay “Haunting the
Antonia is the insistent reminder that it is the tragic nature of time to bring life
to fruition through hardship and struggle only to precipitate the decline and,
ultimately, death, but not without first making significant provision for new life
to follow, flower and fall. The poignancy lies in the inability of the frail human
being to rescue and retain any stage, no matter how beautiful or blissful, of his
Whether we figure that solely stable figure as either the cyclic nature of the seasons or the
immenseness of the land, it still remains that My Ántonia is primarily a text concerned with
exploring the implications of being such an infinitesimal player on such a giant canvas. Even the
non-human characters in the novel face this struggle. While Miller is primarily concerned with
proving the unity of the novel via the passing of cycles, the principle argument here lies not in
seeking unity within the text, but rather in finding ways in which the text seeks to identify with
the reader’s own struggle with their humanity. In the fourth chapter of Book I, young Jim
Burden reflects on the times that he and Ántonia would venture out into the prairie and
observe the owls and the prairie dogs. The owls and dogs had created their homes
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underground; however, even they were not immune to the disruptions and havoc that life
brings about. “[The rattlesnakes] came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls,
which were quite defenseless against them; took possession of their comfortable houses and
ate the eggs and puppies” (17). Cather here uses the example of the prairie dogs and
rattlesnakes to illustrate a similar reality the Shimerdas were facing with their translator Krajiek.
The text states that the Shimerdas “kept him in their hole and fed him for the same reason that
the prairie dogs and the brown owls housed the rattlesnakes—because they did not know how
to get rid of him” (18). The Shimerdas, similar to the animals, were faced with situations outside
of their own control, which highlights their inability to combat the realities of their own
finiteness.
This problem is further magnified by Mr. Shimerda’s inability to adapt to his new
man in his home country. However, after he marries a woman of lower-class status, he allows
her to convince him to move to the United States. In the new country, Shimerda is faced with
multiple difficulties, all due to the temporal, untranslatable qualities of his former life in
Bohemia. Although he was formerly a weaver and a musician, once in the wilderness, he was
not able to adapt his skills to his surroundings. Making matters worse, he and his family were
essentially illiterate in their new home, as the text notes they were the first Bohemians to settle
in their part of the country, and the only person they could find to translate for them, Krajiek,
“could tell them anything he chose.” So unfortunate was their plight that, “They could not
speak enough English to ask for advice, or even to make their most pressing wants known” (13).
In choosing to write of the family in nearly patronizing terms, Cather illustrates that even the
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mere ability to communicate the most basic of needs is an impermanent function, subjected to
and relative to the surroundings one finds themselves in. Ultimately, this struggle led Mr.
Shimerda to take his own life one night, bringing his fight against the land to a premature end.
Although the most successful characters in the novel are those who are able to adapt their skills
to their surroundings, these same characters are still relegated to the “incommunicable past,” a
relic of the memory of Jim Burden, a character who is ultimately frozen by his own inability to
Similarly, perhaps one of the most prominent examples of the decentralization and
instability of religious authority comes shortly after the suicide of Mr. Shimerda. Jim’s
matters.” However, many of the story’s Eastern European immigrants are Roman Catholic,
including the Shimerdas. When Mr. Shimerda dies under mysterious conditions, presumed to
be a suicide, conflicting Catholic and Protestant views on death and eternal life are brought to a
head. Anton Jelinek, fellow country-man of the Shimerdas, insists on the intercession of a priest
for Mr. Shimerda’s soul. At this, Grandfather Burden, representing the Protestant view, says,
“[W]e believe that Mr. Shimerda’s soul will come to its Creator as well off without a priest. We
believe that Christ is our only intercessor” (53). Jelinek replies, “I know how you think. My
teacher at the school has explain. But I have seen too much. I believe in prayer for the dead. I
have seen too much” (53). While in the “old world” of Protestant New England where Jelinik
could easily be dismissed as wrong and even a heretic, in the new world where religious
authority has been rendered unstable by religious pluralism, Grandfather Burden is forced
instead to respond with a pleasant, “I am always glad to meet a young man who thinks
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seriously about these things…and I would never be the one to say you were not in God’s care”
(53). Although Ántonia never really strays outside of Christian sects, its exploring or
democratizing of beliefs ultimately opens up the door for other religious systems to have an
One of the more important aspects of the novel, especially in regards to its relevancy for
readers in the twenty first century, is its questioning of the boundaries of American identity
through the diversity of the characters’ cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Although the Burdens
typically take on an attitude of superiority and display a sense of noblesse oblige toward the
Eastern European immigrants in the novel, their attitude is usually mocked within the narrative.
For example, when Emmaline Burden decided to share her abundance with the “poor”
Shimerdas, Mrs. Shimerda would typically respond by demonstrating that she also could share
out of her abundance. Additionally, Ántonia, by the novel’s end, has become a successful
worker of the land in her own right, questioning the uniqueness of Mr. Burden’s abilities. Other
immigrant characters, such as Lena Lingard, also become relatively successful in their
“American Dream” pursuit. In their immigration to and settling in America, the novel’s
characters are not only expanding the possibilities of who counts as an American, they are
Bohemian, Russian, etc. identities in order to assimilate into an American one. Thus, their move
to the Nebraskan plains demonstrates the impermanence of both the American and Eastern
European identities.
Although the novel is titled My Ántonia, the narrative is just as much, if not more so,
about things and people who are not Ántonia than it is about Ántonia. Indeed, in the novel’s
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short introduction, the reader is told that “Ántonia” serves just as much as a capsule filled with
varied memories as much as it does the woman Ántonia. “I didn’t arrange or rearrange. I simply
wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Ántonia’s name recalls to me. I
suppose it hasn’t any form,” (3) Jim claims. Although one might expect a novel’s namesake to
serve as a stable figure around which the narrative revolves, it turns out “Ántonia” is just as
unstable as everything else the novel’s characters attempt to assign fixedness to. While Jim may
have stated that his manuscript has no form, it is more plausible that the concept of Ántonia
has no definite, fixed form. As a character, Ántonia often acts as a destabilizing force: being part
of the immigrant community that questions what the meaning of an American identity, acting
against the local gender expectations by working the land as her brother did, rebelling against
moral dictates yet proudly living a quiet life by the novel’s end. It is appropriate, then, that the
narrator is sure to mention that even her identity is impermanent. “She was a battered woman
now, not a lovely girl” (167). As the time in the novel passes her identity changes along with her
age. “As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and a girl
ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the
grass,” (153) Jim observes. Ultimately, even Ántonia is also reduced to mere memory, to be
Works Cited
Miller, James E. Jr. “My Ántonia: A Frontier Drama of Time.” American Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4,
Works Consulted
Lucenti, Lisa Marie. “Willa Cather's My Ántonia: Haunting the Houses of Memory.” Twentieth
www.jstor.org/stable/441957.
Murphy, John J. ‘My Ántonia’: The Road Home. Twayne Publishers, 1989.
— and Merrill Maguire Skaggs. Willa Cather: New Facts, New Glimpses, Revisions. Fairleigh
Ştefanovici, Smaranda. "Sense of Loss in Willa Cather's My Ántonia." Studia Universitatis Petru
www.library.ohio.edu/ezpauth/redir/athens.php?http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com
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live%26scope%3dsite.