Table Of Content

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations The Adventures of The Grapes of Wrath Portnoy’s Complaint Huckleberry Finn Great Expectations A Portrait of the Artist The Age of Innocence The Great Gatsby as a Young Alice’s Adventures in Gulliver’s Travels Man Wonderland The Handmaid’s Tale Pride and Prejudice All Quiet on the Heart of Darkness Ragtime Western Front I Know Why the The Red Badge of As You Like It Caged Bird Sings Courage The Ballad of the Sad The Iliad The Rime of the Café Jane Eyre Ancient Mariner Beowulf The Joy Luck Club The Rubáiyát of Omar Black Boy The Jungle Khayyám The Bluest Eye Lord of the Flies The Scarlet Letter The Canterbury Tales The Lord of the Rings Silas Marner Cat on a Hot Tin Love in the Time of Song of Solomon Roof Cholera The Sound and the The Catcher in the The Man Without Fury Rye Qualities The Stranger Catch-22 The Metamorphosis A Streetcar Named The Chronicles of Miss Lonelyhearts Desire Narnia Moby-Dick Sula The Color Purple My Ántonia The Tale of Genji Crime and Native Son A Tale of Two Cities Punishment Night The Tempest The Crucible 1984 Their Eyes Were Darkness at Noon The Odyssey Watching God Death of a Salesman Oedipus Rex Things Fall Apart The Death of Artemio The Old Man and the To Kill a Mockingbird Cruz Sea Ulysses Don Quixote On the Road Waiting for Godot Emerson’s Essays One Flew Over the The Waste Land Emma Cuckoo’s Nest White Noise Fahrenheit 451 One Hundred Years of Wuthering Heights A Farewell to Arms Solitude Young Goodman Frankenstein Persuasion Brown Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Willa Cather’s My Ántonia New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Editorial Consultant Janis P. Stout Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Willa Cather’s My Ántonia—New Edition Copyright ©2008 by Infobase Publishing Introduction ©2008 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Willa Cather’s My Ántonia / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.-new ed. p. cm. — (Modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7910-9626-0 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Cather, Willa, 1873–1947. My Ántonia. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Modern critical interpretations : Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. PS3505.A87M8947 2008 813’.52—dc22 2008007336 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Cover design by Ben Peterson Printed in the United States of America Bang BCL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Ántonia 5 Blanche H. Gelfant The Defeat of a Hero: Autonomy and Sexuality in My Ántonia 25 Deborah G. Lambert Immigrant Backgrounds to My Ántonia: “A Curious Social Situation in Black Hawk” 39 Sally Allen McNall “Fire and Wit”: Storytelling and the American Artist in Cather’s My Ántonia 49 Paula Woolley Pro/Creativity and a Kinship Aesthetic 75 Susan J. Rosowski Marek Shimerda in My Ántonia: A Noteworthy Medical Etiology 89 Patrick Shaw vi Contents My Ántonia and the Parables of Sacrifice 95 Steven B. Shively The Observant Eye, the Art of Illustration, and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia 105 Janis P. Stout Jim Burden and the White Man’s Burden: My Ántonia and Empire 117 Michael Gorman Americanizing Cather: Myth and Fiction in My Ántonia 141 Diana H. Polley Why Do We Read—and Re-read—My Ántonia? 151 Ann Romines Chronology 163 Contributors 165 Bibliography 169 Acknowledgments 173 Index 175 Editor’s Note My introduction argues for Cather’s aesthetic eminence, in the tradi- tion of Walter Pater and Henry James, her critical and novelistic masters, respectively. Blanche H. Gelfant locates the key to My Ántonia in the unreliability of Jim Burden as narrator, since he is a solipsist and an avoider of sexuality, attached most deeply to a vision of his own childhood. Examining the same theme of sexuality, Deborah G. Lambert relates to Cather’s lesbianism, after which Sally Allen McNall discusses the theme of immigration in the novel. Ántonia’s own art as a storyteller is analyzed by Paula Woolley, while Susan J. Rosowski emphasizes Cather’s lesbian identification with nature’s wildness. The strange figure of Marek Shimerda is seen by Patrick Shaw as a counterdesign that ignites Cather’s imagination. For Steven B. Shively My Ántonia is a parable of yielding up expectations, after which Janis P. Stout’s concern is with Cather’s visual acuity. Michael Gorman traces the American imperialism against our Indians or Native Americans, which is subtly conveyed by Cather. The theme of national identity is handled by Diana H. Polley, while Ann Romines values My Ántonia for the surprising questions it keeps raising. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction willa cather (1873–1947) I W illa Cather, though now somewhat neglected, has few rivals among the American novelists of this century. Critics and readers frequently regard her as belonging to an earlier time, though she died in 1947. Her best novels were published in the years 1918–31, so that truly she was a novelist of the 1920’s, an older contemporary and peer of Hemingway and of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Unlike them, she did not excel at the short story, though there are some memorable exceptions scattered through her four volumes of tales. Her strength is her novels and particularly, in my judgment, My Ántonia (1918), A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s House (1925); fictions worthy of a disciple of Flaubert and Henry James. Equally beautiful and achieved, but rather less central, are the subsequent historical novels, the very popular Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Shadows on the Rock (1931). Her second novel, O Pioneers! (1913), is only just short of the eminence of this grand sequence. Six permanent novels is a remarkable number for a modern American writer; I can think only of Faulkner as Cather’s match in this respect, since he wrote six truly enduring novels, all published during his great decade, 1929–39. Cather’s remoteness from the fictive universe of Fitzgerald, Heming- way and Faulkner is palpable, though all of them shared her nostalgia for an older America. She appears, at first, to have no aesthetic affinities with her younger contemporaries. We associate her instead with Sarah Orne Jewett, about whom she wrote a loving essay, or even with Edith Wharton, whom she scarcely resembles. Cather’s mode of engaging with the psychic realities 11