My Antonia

¶ … Willa Cather's novel My Antonia (1918) the Nebraska prairie of Jim Burden's, Antonia' Shimerda's, and Lena Lingard's childhood and adolescence functions not just as a vivid, sometimes stark setting for the story. It is also as an extremely important psychological and symbolic reference point for the major characters. The setting of their Nebraska childhood is a reference point, psychologically and physically, from which friendships are forged, important experiences are had, and personalities develop. The idealized setting of Jim's (and Jim's childhood friend Antonia's) earlier life is frozen in Jim's mind. However, within the novel Jim must also move past his nostalgia to develop a mature relationship with Antonia; Nebraska, and his own adult self.

Both Jim and "his" Antonia (the title of the novel serves to underscores how very personal and subjective Jim's memories are, of Antonia, and their childhood environment) lose their parents early in life. In Jim's case, both parents die; in Antonia's her father commits suicide. The Nebraska plain becomes for either of them at times almost like a comforting parent, at least symbolically. Despite the fact that the narrator of the story, Jim Burden, has now moved away to New York and become a lawyer, his reference point, from which all experience, even now, seems to continue to be filtered remains the vanished Nebraska setting of his childhood. Returning there after twenty years, however, Jim finds that he can accept that the Nebraska of his youth is gone, and appreciate Antonia, and Nebraska, as they are today, only by reconciling recollections of his past with realities of the present.

On many occasions, both Jim and Antonia in their early years, think of the Nebraska plains as a sort of living entity, sometimes describing even trees as people. In that sense, the landscape of youth continues to function almost like as a separate character in a literal sense, as well as a symbolic one. A key motif of My Antonia is the deeply integral nature of characters' personal relationship to their environment. In adulthood, Jim deeply misses various aspects of the setting of his childhood, almost as if these were human beings. The nostalgic tone of the novel, furthermore, reflects the way Jim, as an adult now living in different environment, yearns for his Nebraska past, i.e., people, places, and experiences, but most of all, the setting.

Even after twenty years, Jim's wistful memories of Nebraska never leave his heart and mind. Returning to Nebraska after all that time, then, Jim's psychological victory, at the end of the novel, will be to make the flesh-and-blood adult Antonia, along with present-day Nebraska, a part of his present. To do so however, Jim must permit Nebraska, and Antonia, to evolve truthfully beyond his memories. What Cather implies about this setting within My Antonia is that one must live not entirely in the past, but also embrace the present (and future). Jim can still have his memories, but can now also look toward a future that includes not just those, but present-day realities and adult lives.

Environment, therefore, as Cather also implies within this novel, can both underscore and help determine psychological perspective and outlook, even long after that environment ceases to be part of everyday life. As an adult, for example, Jim Burden still prizes his personal freedom, much as he cherished the early feelings of freedom the river of his Nebraska childhood gave him. Jim also filters his perceptions of the landscape through his own psychological perspectives. When Jim feels lonely or melancholy, for example, the landscape appears desolate to him; Cather's descriptions of landscape within the novel, especially as experienced by the characters themselves, are sometimes overt in their use of symbolism: for example, In Book II, Chapter XIV, after a pleasant day spent with friends on the Nebraska prairie, the narrator recalls, now, the sunset:

There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky.

Just as the lower edge of the red disc rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field.