E notes on authors Willa Cather Pointers A Classic and My Antonia

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THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE

Dedication TOCARRIE AND IRENE MINERIn memory of affections old and true

Jim Burden an exemplar of western romanticism-described here.

Genevieve Whitney his wife her need to be a patroness and sponsor though not necessarily a sincere advocate of the causes she espouses.

Jim's ms MY ANTONIA was the ms that was used for the novel, the fiction of the story.

Notes
What is a literary classic and why are these classic works important to the world?
A literary classic is a work of the highest excellence that has something important to say about life and/or the human condition and says it with great artistry. A classic, through its enduring presence, has withstood the test of time and is not bound by time, place, or customs. It speaks to us today as forcefully as it spoke to people one hundred or more years ago, and as forcefully as it will speak to people of future generations. For this reason, a classic is said to have universality.
Willa Sibert Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, on December 7, 1873. When Cather was nine, her family moved to Nebraska as homesteaders, and she wrote about the experiences, setting, and characters she found there in nearly all her books. During these years, Cather met Annie Sadilek, who would become the model for one of her most memorable creations: the simple, yet heroic Ántonia Shimerda.
While attending the University of Nebraska, Cather wrote a column for the school newspaper, became managing editor for the college literary magazine, and wrote poetry for other publications.
After graduation, Cather continued her writing career and also taught high school in Pennsylvania. Between 1893 and 1895, books of her poetry and short stories were published; later, her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, also called Alexander's Masquerade, was serialized in McClure's Magazine. In 1913, the first of Cather's major works, O, Pioneers, caught the attention of the public, and My Ántonia, which took two years to complete, was first published in 1918.
Over the next thirty years of Cather's life, she continued to write and associate with many literary figures of her time—Stephen Crane, D. H. Lawrence, publisher Alfred Knopf, and Sara Jewett, among others. In addition, Willa Cather won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize. She had a few health problems, both physical and mental, but these did not diminish her output. While living in New York, she wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and it proved to be yet another success.
Willa Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 24, 1947.

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Notes
Reading Pointers for Sharper Insight
Dedication
Introduction
Book I
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Book II
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Book III
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Book IV
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Book V
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Copyright
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Reading Pointers for Sharper Insight
When reading My Ántonia, pay attention to the following points that will make the book more accessible:
Jim Burden is as much a main character as Ántonia Shimerda is:
Ántonia is more mature than Jim as the book begins, but his understanding of life soon catches up with hers.
Jim's social standing as a non-immigrant sets the stage his future success.
Ántonia's difficulties in life do not prevent her from eventually being happy.
Jim's feelings for Ántonia are tempered by her more mature understanding of their differences and her responsibilities.
Consider whether Jim is in love with Ántonia.
Cather's depictions of immigrants' life is considered accurate and representative of their struggles to survive:
Note the harsh weather and other difficulties they must endure.
Understand how the families' successes and failures are dependent on the weather and how it sometimes foreshadows events in the book.
Pay attention to the manner in which the immigrants, especially the women, are treated by non-immigrants.
Note how death, through suicide or other means, becomes a force in the novel.
In her portrayal of immigrant life, Cather stresses the importance that women had, sometimes in contrast to that of men.
The author's use of symbolism and repeated motifs helps tie the story together:
trees
Mr. Shimerda's violin
religion and superstition
isolation
the dances
change and growth
romantic love versus respect
the contrasts between Lena and Ántonia
similarities and differences between country life and life in the towns
homesickness for life in Europe





Introduction Page 1


Introduction
LAST SUMMER I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden—Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West. He and I are old friends—we grew up together in the same Nebraska town—and we had much to say to each other. While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.
Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends, I do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks together. That is one reason why we do not often meet. Another is that I do not like his wife.
When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage. Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished man. Her marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp comment at the time. It was said she had been brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland Whitney, and that she married this unknown man from the West out of bravado. She was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something unexpected. She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing during a garment-makers' strike, etc. I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm. Her husband's quiet tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth while to play the patroness to a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas and mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives her own life. For some reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden.
As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his naturally romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it often made him seem very funny when he was a boy, has been one of the strongest elements in his success. He loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development. He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable things in mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an idea can once get Jim Burden's attention, can manage to accompany him when he goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons, then the money which means action is usually forthcoming. Jim is still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams. Though he is over forty now, he meets new people and new enterprises with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood friends remember him. He never seems to me to grow older. His fresh color and sandy hair and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man, and his sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful as it is Western and American.
During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood. To speak her name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain. I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart time enough to enjoy that friendship. His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her.
“I can't see,” he said impetuously, “why you have never written anything about Ántonia.”
I told him I had always felt that other people—he himself, for one— knew her much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with him; I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Ántonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her.
He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took hold of him. “Maybe I will, maybe I will!” he declared. He stared out of the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. “Of course,” he said, “I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about myself. It's through myself that I knew and felt her, and I've had no practice in any other form of presentation.”
blustery – windy, gusty, blowy
bravado – boldness; showiness
patroness – a financial supporter
ardent – devoted, passionate
solicitous – considerate, attentive
impetuously – considerate, attentive
p2 Intro


I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most wanted to know about Ántonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a little girl who watched her come and go, had not.
Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with some pride as he stood warming his hands.
“I finished it last night—the thing about Ántonia,” he said. “Now, what about yours?”
I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.
“Notes? I didn't make any.” He drank his tea all at once and put down the cup. “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. It hasn't any title, either.” He went into the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the word, “Ántonia.” He frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another word, making it “My Ántonia.” That seemed to satisfy him.
“Read it as soon as you can,” he said, rising, “but don't let it influence your own story.”
My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim's manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.

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

Author
Willa Cather
Country
United States
Language
English
Genre(s)
(historical fiction)
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin (Boston)
Publication date
1918
Pages
419
ISBN
ISBN 0-486-28240-6
OCLC Number
30894639
Dewey Decimal
813/.52 20
LC Classification
PS3505.A87 M8 1994e
My Ántonia (first published 1918) is considered one of the greatest novels by American writer Willa Cather. My Ántonia — pronounced with the accent on the first syllable of "Ántonia" — is the final book of the "prairie trilogy" of novels by Cather, the other two being O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.
Contents[hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Characters
3 Impact and interpretations
3.1 Cultural references
4 Footnotes
5 Further reading
5.1 Books
5.2 Articles
6 External links
//
[edit] Plot summary
My Ántonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Ántonia. The book's narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, as he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for Ántonia, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views Ántonia's life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, through that lens.
The book is divided into five volumes, some of which incorporate short stories Cather had previously written, based on her own life growing up on the Nebraska prairies. The volumes correspond roughly to the stages of Ántonia's life up through her marriage and motherhood, although the third volume, "Lena Lingard," focuses more on Jim's time in college and his affair with Lena, another childhood friend of him and Ántonia.
The five books, in order, are:
- The Shimerdas - the largest book of all. It covers all of the time that Jim spends on his grandparents' farm, out on the prairie.
- The Hired Girls - the second largest. It covers Jim's time in town, when he spends time with Ántonia and the other country girls who work in town. Language, particularly descriptions, begin to become more sexualized, particularly concerning Ántonia and Lena.
- Lena Lingard - this chronicles Jim's time at the university, and the period in which he becomes re-acquainted with the lovely Lena Lingard.
- The Pioneer Woman's Story - Jim visits the Harlings and hears about Ántonia's run-in and fateful romance with Larry Donovan. The shortest book.
- Cuzak's Boys - Jim goes to visit Ántonia and meets her new family, her children and husband.
Ántonia "Tony" Shimerda: The bold and free-hearted young Bohemian girl with whom Jim develops a strong friendship. She is four years older than Jim, and embodies the spirit of the prairie. Her family comes over to Black Hawk, Nebraska, from Bohemia, and not long after, her father, suffering from depression at having to leave the old country, commits suicide (Although it is very possible that he was murdered by Krajiek). She endures a hard period of farming on the prairie after her father dies. As a young woman, she later moves to town to work for the Harlings (the next door neighbors of Jim) as a cook and maid. She gains a reputation as one of the town's beautiful "hired girls", which upsets the Harlings. She leaves them to work for Wick Cutter, one of the town money-lenders with a bad reputation, later becoming engaged to a young man named Larry Donovan who flees before the marriage, leaving Ántonia pregnant with an illegitimate child. She later marries a man named 'Cuzak', and has ten children with him on the farm.
Jim Burden: Jim is the narrator of the novel. He is an orphan, and at the beginning of the novel moves to Nebraska to live with his father's parents. Here he meets the young Ántonia, who becomes a great companion. At the beginning of the second book, The Hired Girls, he moves to town with his grandparents, who encourage their neighbors, the Harling family, to take Ántonia (Tony) on as a maid. Jim befriends the other hired girls, including the beautiful Lena Lingard. A group of dance teachers comes to town, and begins a craze. Jim, four years younger than Ántonia, becomes romantically interested in her, only to realize that she still considers him a child. Lena Lingard toys somewhat with the young man's emotions, but Ántonia ultimately prevents any relationship from occurring to protect Jim's feelings. Jim eventually goes away to college, and largely forgets his past in Black Hawk. Years later he meets Lena Lingard again, now a successful dressmaker. They are involved romantically for a time, but Jim's mentor notes the detrimental impact it is having on Jim's studies, and offers him the opportunity to study at Harvard Law School in Boston. Jim ultimately returns to Black Hawk after some twenty years, and goes to find Ántonia. She is now married with ten children, and Jim finds himself affectionate toward the whole family. The closing lines of the book communicate Jim's feelings that whatever he felt that he and Ántonia had missed, "we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."

My Ántonia was enthusiastically received in 1918 when it was first published.[1] It was considered a masterpiece and placed her in the forefront of women novelists.[2] Today, it is considered as her first masterpiece.[3] Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting.[1] 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,[2] which in turn promoted regional American literature as a valid part of mainstream literature.[4]
While interpretations vary, My Ántonia is clearly an elegy to those families who built new lives west of the Mississippi River and highlights the role of women pioneers in particular.
Cather also makes a number of comments concerning her views on women's rights and there are many disguised sexual metaphors in the text.[5]
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.

Cultural references
A made-for-television movie, also entitled My Ántonia, was based on this novel.
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.[6]

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
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
Fischer-Worth, 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
[edit] External links
Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive
My Ántonia at American Literature
My Ántonia at Project Gutenberg
My Ántonia study guide, themes, quotes, character analyses, plot analysis, teacher guide
[hide]
v • d • eWorks by Willa Cather
Novels:
Alexander's Bridge · O Pioneers! · The Song of the Lark · My Ántonia · One of Ours · A Lost Lady · The Professor's House · My Mortal Enemy · Death Comes for the Archbishop · Shadows on the Rock · Lucy Gayheart · Sapphira and the Slave Girl
Short stories:
"Peter" · "Lou, the Prophet" · "The Elopement of Allen Poole" · "A Tale of the White Pyramid" · "A Son of the Celestial" · "The Clemency of the Court" · "The Fear That Walks by Noonday" · "On the Divide" · "A Night at Greenway Court" · "Tommy, the Unsentimental" · "The Princess Baladina - Her Adventure" · "The Count of Crow's Nest" · "The Burglar's Christmas" · "The Strategy of the Were-Wolf Dog" · "A Resurrection" · "The Prodigies" · "Nanette: An Aside" · "The Way of the World" · "The Westbound Train" · "Eric Hermannson's Soul" · "The Dance at Chevalier's" · "The Sentimentality of William Tavener" · "The Affair at Grover Station" · "A Singer's Romance" · "The Conversion of Sum Loo" · "Jack-a-Boy" · "El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional" · "The Professor's Commencement" · "The Treasure of Far Island" · "A Death in the Desert" · "A Wagner Matinee" · "The Sculptor's Funeral" · "Flavia and Her Artists" · "The Garden Lodge" · "The Marriage of Phaedra" · "Paul's Case" · "The Namesake" · "The Profile" · "The Willing Muse" · "Eleanor's House" · "On the Gulls' Road" · "The Enchanted Bluff" · "The Joy of Nelly Deane" · "Behind the Singer Tower" · "The Bohemian Girl" · "Consequences" · "The Bookkeeper's Wife" · "The Diamond Mine" · "A Gold Slipper" · "Ardessa" · "Scandal" · "Her Boss" · "Coming, Eden Bower!" · "Uncle Valentine" · "Double Birthday" · "Neighbour Rosicky" · "Two Friends" · "The Old Beauty" · "Before Breakfast" · "The Best Years"
Collection of poems:
April Twilights
Non-fiction:
On Writing · Not Under Forty
Collaborations:
The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science