My Ántonia

322 Pages·2003·4.007 MB·English

by  Willa Cather, Joseph R. Urgo

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MY ÁNTONIA
MEMOIRSOFMODERNPHILOSOPHERS 1
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MY ÁNTONIA
Willa Cather
edited by Joseph R.Urgo
broadview literary texts
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©2003 Joseph R.Urgo
All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,transmitted in any form
or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,or otherwise,or stored in a
retrieval system,without prior written consent of the publisher — or in the case of photo-
copying,a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency),One Yonge
Street,Suite 1900,Toronto,Ontario M5E 1E5 — is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cather Willa,1873-1947
My Ántonia / Willa Cather ;edited by Joseph R.Urgo.
(Broadview literary texts)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-55111-491-7
I.Urgo,Joseph R. II.Title. III.Series.
PS3505.A87M9 2003 813’.52 C2003-900863-0
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Contents
Acknowledegments 7
Introduction 9
Willa Cather:A Brief Chronology 33
A Note on the Text 39
My Ántonia 41
Appendix A:Cather’s Revised Introduction to the 1926 Edition of
My Ántonia 245
Appendix B:Cather’s “Mesa Verde Wonderland is Easy to
Reach” 247
Appendix C:Cather’s “Nebraska:The End of the First Cycle” 253
Appendix D:Cather’s “Peter” 263
Appendix E:Interviews and Commentary by Cather on My Ántonia
1. Latrobe Carroll,“Willa Sibert Cather,”Bookman,3 May
1921 267
2. “A Talk with Miss Cather,”Webster County Argus,
29 September 1921 269
3. Eleanor Hinman,“Willa Cather,”Lincoln Sunday Star,6
November 1921 272
4. Rose C.Field,“Restlessness Such as Ours Does Not Make
for Beauty,”New York Times Book Review,21 December
1924 280
Appendix F:Contemporary Reviews of the Novel
1. Randolph Bourne,The Dial,14 December 1918 287
2. H.W.Boynton,Bookman,December 1918 289
3. C.L.H.,New York Call,13 November 1918 290
4. A.L.A. Booklist,1918 291
5. Book Review Digest,1918 291
6. Independent,25 January 1919 292
7. New York Times,6 October 1918 292
8. Nation,2 November 1918 293
9. The Globe and Commercial Advertiser,11 January 1919 295
10. H.L.Mencken,The Smart Set,17 February 1919 297
Appendix G:Photographs of Nebraska
1. Primitive Dugout 299
2. Sod House 300
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3. Threshing Scene 301
4. The Pavelka Farm 302
5. Anna Sadilek 303
6. Blind Boone 304
7. The University of Nebraska 305
Appendix H:Immigration to and Migration Across America
1. Nebraska Land Company,Czech Language Immigration
Poster 307
2. Welcome to the Land of Freedom 308
3. Emigrants Coming to the “Land of Promise” 309
4. Crossing the Great American Desert in Nebraska 310
Appendix I:Music from My Ántonia
1. “Oh,Promise Me” 311
2. “O Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” 316
Select Bibliography 319
6 CONTENTS
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ashley Craig and Lorraine Dubuisson, graduate
students in the Department of English at The University of Missis-
sippi, for their assistance in gathering materials and manuscript
preparation.
I wish to thank the University of Nebraska Press for permission
to reproduce the text of its Scholarly Edition of My Ántonia.
Costs incurred in the reproduction of images were offset
by funding from The University of Mississippi, for which I am
grateful. I acknowledge permission to reproduce images in Ap-
pendices G and H of this volume from The Nebraska State His-
torical Society,the State Historical Society of Missouri,and the
Library of Congress. At all three organizations, archive staff
members were most helpful.
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8 HELENMARIAWILLIAMS
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Introduction
In Willa Cather’s My Ántonia the reader enters a fictional world
reflecting some of the most salient elements of American social
thought and history, elements that continue to reveal essential
aspects of American culture and which make the reading of this
novel as rewarding today as it was in 1918,when it was published
to enthusiastic reviews.While the all-inclusive definition of the
term precludes any novel from achieving such status,My Ántonia
comes about as close as any book to being “the great American
novel,”a text which locates in American culture an aesthetic that
endures the vicissitudes of contemporary events and speaks to suc-
cessive generations its truth about the United States as an historical
and intellectual experience.
In Cather’s novel we find the centrality of the immigrant
process (including interior migration—what we call relocation
today) to American cultural vitality,and we may chart the web of
influence that the immigrant experience has on newcomers and
established populations alike.We enter an America that serves as a
kind of testing ground for new ideas and fresh perspectives,where
identities are fluid, where gender roles are evolving, where the
constancy of social and economic change puts pressure on the
emotional lives of men and women, leading them to adaptive
strategies.We read of the interplay of country and city,agricultur-
al and urban lifestyles,the confident appeal of living close to the
earth,and the sophisticated and worldly satisfaction of living close
to other human beings.We witness the demands made by new
kinds of knowledge, the effects of education, the resultant class
stratification and the nostalgia that afflicts those who benefit by
upward mobility.We see the importance of family in America and
we see how its fluid social structure enables and encourages indi-
viduals to leave families behind.We feel Cather’s deep love and
awe for the landscape and for the tremendous forces of nature that
shape and sustain it.Finally,we recognize how important history is
to a people who have broken with it at some point in their lives,
how important it is for a migratory people to have some way of
recalling the past. Living far from origins, the only evidence
possessed to demonstrate identity is memory, the stories told of
whence,for what reasons,and to what effect.
Whether there will ever be a great American novel is as
unknowable as ever,but if one wishes to know something of the
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narrative soul of the United States,if one wishes to see American
culture cast as an aesthetic, to probe the art that is made of this
experiment in human culture and society,one must read My Ánto-
nia or one has to abide missing something beautiful and enduring.
Making Art from Experience
Cather’s career as a novelist was well underway by the time she
published My Ántonia.Nonetheless,she had not produced a mas-
terpiece of form until she wrote it and went on,after its publica-
tion, to produce one great work after another. My Ántonia is a
watershed in the career of Willa Cather,and it shores up a number
of strands of promise displayed in works before it.Most obviously,
the novel projects a more complex and intellectually complete rep-
resentation of emigration to Nebraska and settlement on the Amer-
ican prairie than her earlier novel,O Pioneers! (1913).The strong
concern for the development of narrative voice and the exploration
of female agency,both of which contribute to the energy behind
The Song of the Lark (1915), are less overt and thus much more
effective in My Ántonia. And Cather’s lifelong attention to form,
beginning in her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912), where the
idea of the bridge informs the novel’s structure as well as its the-
matic content,crashes through conventional symbol-making in My
Ántonia to produce one of the twentieth century’s most distinc-
tively structured novels.While My Ántonia is surely a breakthrough
novel for Cather,the one that established her as an artist working
at the height of her creative powers,it has a genealogy in her writ-
ing that extends back through each of its precursor novels and back
even further,to ideas and impressions which appear in her earliest
fiction, and indeed to her earliest experiences as a child on the
Nebraska frontier.
A central incident in My Ántonia, the suicide of Mr.Shimerda,
is based on an actual suicide in Cather’s childhood,an incident that
she narrated repeatedly. Her early short story,“Peter” (Appendix
D),was first published when she was in college in the 1890s.The
novel’s titular character,Ántonia Shimerda,is modeled on an immi-
grant girl Cather knew in Nebraska (the suicide’s granddaughter),
Annie Sadilek (Appendix G.5).Many other details in the text are
taken from Cather’s memory of her Nebraska childhood.Foremost
among these was her emigration from Virginia.The shock,awe,and
erasure that Jim Burden experiences as his body is moved from the
lush settled farmlands of Virginia to the bleak, treeless Nebraska
10 INTRODUCTION