My Ántonia (1918)

What I remember about reading early American fiction in school is that I found it tiresomely obsessive about the great expanses of amber waves of grain and rugged individualists who forged this great blah blah blah. That was one reason why I put off reading American works in any number until year two of this project. So here I am.

In the novel, young Jim Burden describes growing up amid American and Eastern European homesteaders in what was then the wilds of Nebraska. He is especially taken with his neighbor, Ántonia, and describes her teenage years and subsequent adulthood in detail.

I do not think Willa Cather and her contemporary Upton Sinclair really saw eye-to-eye about the merits of an agrarian lifestyle. I’m going to have to go with Sinclair here; if subsistence farming in a pre-electrical world is so great, why doesn’t everybody do it? A few hippies tried it in the Sixties and they grew up to be stockbrokers. Even Cather lived her whole adult life in New York City.

But she wrote this famous book which is a paean to rutting around in the dirt. “I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem.” Yes, yes, this is very pretty. The descriptions are all like this — relentlessly beautiful. Meanwhile major characters are shooting themselves in the head or beating their wives or gnawing on the boiled bread-like mash of whatever was mouldering in the cellar three months into winter. I didn’t sense that the genuine hardships she describes were meant to be ironically juxtaposed against the rugged beauty — when the characters come to town they get restless and the townies they meet are almost uniformly amoral jerks. Starvation’s okay, it builds character, and manual labor builds big strong muscles on Ántonia.

Famously, nothing really happens in the novel. The plot moves along, and the characters age, and while there are some dramatic twists, they happen off-screen. Cather did not want to write melodrama. This makes for a curious relationship between the narrator, Jim, and Ántonia, whom critics seem to universally assert he loves. If so, it’s a weirdly platonic love. They do not get together in any meaningful way despite no social barriers to doing so. He instead sees Ántonia as some kind of untouchable womanly- (but not feminine-) ideal. His other relationships are stilted or loveless. “People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he was with [Ántonia] and Lena or the three Marys.” Or maybe he’s supposed to be gay.

Cather, who never married, was intensely private (she insisted none of her letters be published, which this site seems to cheerfully ignore). When she was young, she dressed in men’s clothes and wore her hair scandalously short. Now I would be the first person to insist that this doesn’t prove anything, but what most obviously disproves any suspicion is having a relationship with a man, of which she had none. Biographers are curiously reticent to state the obvious: “…though it is true that her strongest emotional attachments (outside of her father and brothers) were to women, all the evidence points to a celibate writer, married only to her art.” Who do they think she is, Morrissey?

Look, here’s a novel with a male narrator with some unresolved sexual issues yet whose “mind was full of her”, full of this manly, powerfully-fecund farm woman who threshes wheat with her bare hands. The book is semi-autobiographical; Ántonia was based on a real person whom Cather knew in her childhood and visited again as an adult, just like Jim: “She was there, in the full vigor of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.” Biographers say, “If one defines a lesbian as a woman who has sexual relations with another woman, Cather cannot be called a lesbian on the basis of available records.” Fine. But to not call this a lesbian novel is to be disingenuous.

Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed, “My Án-tonia!”