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MY ÁNTONIA
Willa Cather
Copyright
William Collins
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Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary
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Source ISBN: 9780008322809
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Version: 2019-08-12
Dedication
TO CARRIE AND IRENE MINER
In memory of affections old and true
Optima dies … prima fugit VIRGIL
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
History of William Collins
Life and Times
Introduction
Book I. The Shimerdas
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
Book II. The Hired Girls
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
Book III. Lena Lingard
I
II
III
IV
Book IV. The Pioneer Woman’s Story
I
II
III
IV
Book V. Cuzak’s Boys
I
II
III
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
About the Publisher
History of William Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William co-published in 1825, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly “Victorian” in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time.
A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of “books for the millions” was developed, although the phrase wasn’t coined until 1907. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
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Life and Times
‘The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.’ These words close a famous passage from My Ántonia, in which two characters see a plough on the field as the sun sets behind it. The plough casts a long shadow, leading them to momentarily believe it is a person, only to realize it’s a simple farming tool. Within this image is contained the essence of Willa Cather’s writing – her quintessential rural landscapes, the nod to her classicist influences such as Virgil, the clean, incisive language, the imagery of empire-building in America and the sense of ultimately being dwarfed, like the plough, by the awesome power of the natural world. Her ability to build layers of meaning into her stories has made her one of the classic American authors, whose shadow grows ever longer over the canon of American literature.
Early years
Willa Cather was born in 1873, on a small farm in rural Virginia. Although she is most often associated with the wide, open plains of the frontier, her roots were firmly in the antebellum South where she lived until she was nine years old. In 1882, fleeing from an outbreak of tuberculosis in Virginia, Cather’s family moved to Nebraska, where her father first tried his hand at farming, then eventually moved the family to the frontier town of Red Cloud to open an insurance office. At the time, Nebraska was made up of mostly unsettled land, and at first the wild and open landscape awed and frightened the young Cather. We see this experience mirrored in the characters of her novels, such as Jim Burden in My Ántonia, who describes his first encounter with the great expanse of Nebraska as ‘feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction’. Despite this early reticence, Cather grew to love her home in Nebraska, where she received her early education from local shop-owners and other adults in her small town, many of them immigrants from a variety of backgrounds who provided the basis for her expansive worldview.
‘New Woman’ – education and success
Despite a childhood determination to become a physician, Cather eventually took up writing during her studies at the University of Nebraska. This was one of the first universities to admit female students, and so Cather was among the first generation of women to go to college in America. She was an active participant in university life, editing the student newspaper, The Hesperian, and writing continuously. After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in English in 1894, she continued her career as a journalist, writing for various publications in Pittsburgh and supplementing her income with teaching. Only after a decade of establishing herself as a journalist did she begin to steer her work towards creative writing, publishing a short story collection called The Troll Garden in 1905. By 1912, the former southern farmgirl was living in New York City and working as an editor at the prestigious magazine, McClure’s. In 1912, she also published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge. Despite the slow start to her creative writing career, she went on to publish a total of four novels within that decade. She showed no signs of slowing down, going on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel, One of Ours. She continued writing well into the 1930s, by which time, however, the critical focus had shifted, and her novels were viewed in a less favorable light by her contemporaries, who often commented on her subject matter, which they considered too sentimental and lacking in contemporary relevance. Although she continued writing even into the 1940s, her final works in progress were destroyed at her request, and she passed away in her Manhattan home in 1947.
In the pantheon of ‘Great American Writers’
Despite the growing reluctance in the 1930s to take Cather’s writing seriously, critics today have once again embraced her. She is credited with shifting the roots of early American writing from the New England of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the transcendentalists, and opening it up to the wild plains of the Midwest. Yet her writing differs from traditional ‘frontier literature’ in the sense that she engages with the land itself, the Native Americans who lived there and the immigrant experience. Therefore, her works never quite fit into the ‘manifest destiny’ ideal of American literature, despite many of them being set amongst the frontier towns that drove the ideal of American expansion. Her writing would go on to bear a great influence on later authors such as Cormac McCarthy, and his novel Blood Meridien, and continues to engage literary critics today.
My Ántonia
Cather published her most recognizable work, My Ántonia, in 1918, as a conclusion to her ‘Prairie Trilogy’, which included O, Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. Many elements of Cather’s life made their way into My Ántonia: her early encounters with the Nebraskan landscape and frontier life; the American immigrant experience; and the rich interior life of her heroines’ later years in life. Although her narrator, Jim Burden, feels a keen nostalgia for his childhood spent in the countryside with his friend, it is in the tender descriptions of Ántonia as an adult that we see Cather’s true strength as a novelist. Cather’s focus on the middle-aged woman, and the reluctance to have the story driven solely by romantic relationships – as exemplified by Ántonia, but also appearing repeatedly throughout her oeuvre – is completely unique, not only among her American contemporaries, but among her fellow novelists of the Western tradition. It is no wonder that Virginia Woolf admired Cather’s work, and that generations of readers have continued to return to My Ántonia.
Sources
Parrish, T. (2012). Introduction. In T. Parrish (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. Xvii-Xxxiv).
Lindemann, M. (2005). Introduction. In M. Lindemann (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 1-16).
Goldman, A. (2005). Rereading My Ántonia. In M. Lindemann (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 159-174).
Reynolds, G. (2005). Willa Cather as progressive. In M. Lindemann (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 19-34). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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.’
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.
NOTE: The Bohemian name Ántonia is strongly accented on the first syllable, like the English name Anthony, and the “i” is, of course, given the sound of long “e”. The name is pronounced An’-ton-ee-ah.
BOOK I. THE SHIMERDAS
I
I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the “hands” on my father’s old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake’s experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.
We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a “Life of Jesse James”, which I remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant states and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk.
Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from “across the water” whose destination was the same as ours.
“They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is ‘We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.’ She’s not much older than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she’s as bright as a new dollar. Don’t you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She’s got the pretty brown eyes, too!”
This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to “Jesse James”. Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.
I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long day’s journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with lanterns. I couldn’t see any town, or even distant lights; we were surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people stood huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding oilcloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother’s skirts. Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue.
Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: “Hello, are you Mr. Burden’s folks? If you are, it’s me you’re looking for. I’m Otto Fuchs. I’m Mr. Burden’s hired man, and I’m to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy, ain’t you scared to come so far west?”
I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern-light. He might have stepped out of the pages of “Jesse James”. He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his moustache were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian’s. Surely this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to a hitching-bar where two farm-wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into the empty darkness, and we followed them.
I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or 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. No, there was nothing but land—slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the 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 complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.
