My Antonia by Willa Cather

Cather's My Antonia

Willa Cather's My Antonia is a novel that is essentially about a place -- in this case the Nebraska prairie -- and all of the elements in it are mostly ways of exploring what this place meant to the narrator, Jim Burden. Willa Cather, herself, moved to Catherton, Nebraska, at the age of nine, so many of the stories and the general setting of the story itself are largely imbued with Cather's own memories. From the very beginning of the story, Cather's characters admit that the memory of the Nebraska prairie is in itself ineffable. You can only understand it if you've lived it, which is a strange opening indeed to a story that will attempt to explain prairie life to those who haven't lived it. The character of Antonia is essentially linked to Jim's memory of the prairie; she, in fact, embodies the whole of the prairie in her person. It is through her that Jim is most able to connect himself to his vivid past. In fact, Antonia represents all that is fertile and vigorous. Her lifelike force pervades the novel and provides a stark contrast to Jim, whose life since he left Nebraska is marred by loss, death, and infertility. Cather uses Antonia's character to illustrate the fertility of the Nebraska prairie and to contrast Jim's dilapidated life since he left Nebraska.

Place is of central importance in Cather's work. In My Antonia, especially, the Nebraska prairie is the central theme that everything else revolves around. One reviewer noted that, for Cather, "the landscape is central to her art... that its simplicity is crucial to realizing the underlying life of a thing" (The Economist). The prairie is her topic as much as anything else in the novel. Indeed, the person that meets Jim Burden on a train in the book's introduction begins speaking with him about that place, and it is only through place that the conversation then moves onto Antonia. The setting is the background that informs the rest of the action in the story. Despite the importance of place, however, Cather ultimately suggests that those of us who never grew up on the prairie can't ever really understand it.

Cather's characters suggest that their life on the prairie, despite the fact that it was the most important and formative influence on their lives, is basically ineffable, that no outsider could ever truly understand it. As the narrator of the introduction states, "We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a prairie town could know anything about it" (Cather 1). From the very first page, Cather suggests that, though we may read the entirety of her novel, we, as outsiders, can never truly know what prairie life is actually like. It is very likely that Cather herself held this belief, since she herself moved to the prairie at a young age. As one biographer noted, just "as 'Jim Burden' did, Willa and her family drove overland 16 miles to the precinct of Catherton, where the rest of the Cather family had a homestead" (Bennet 2). So the prairie upbringing was just as important for Cather as it was for Jim. Place is so important that it seems to affect the characters as well. Cather uses Antonia in particular as a symbol of the prairie, identifying her with life on the plains.

Antonia, as a symbol, is so important to Jim and the story because, for Jim, she embodies, in one person, all of what his early life on the plains was like. In the introduction, the characters actually state this identification in a straightforward and simple manner, saying, "more than any other person we remembered, this girl [Antonia] seemed to mean to us the country..." (Cather 3). This is an interesting link, because it shows how interrelated landscape and character are for Cather. In many ways the two are inseparable. Cather's longtime friend, Edith Lewis, even notes the way in which Cather connected the people and the land in her memories of the prairie:

She gave herself with passion to the country and the people, the straggling foreigners who inhabited it; became at heart their champion, made their struggle her own -- their fight to master the soil, to hold the land in the face of drouths and blizzards, hailstorms, and prairie fires.

Lewis 14)

Here we see that the tie between the land and people in Cather's work exists for very practical reasons. Life for prairie dwellers, who depended on agriculture -- on the land itself -- for their sustenance, was literally tied to the land. Their struggle was, as Lewis notes, a struggle with the land, a human attempt to "master the soil." So the identification of a single person with the land is not at all artificial, but a very natural extension of the literal link between the people and the land. Cather ultimately uses Antonia, the symbol of all of the fertility of the prairie, as a contrast to Jim Burden, who very much represents stagnation.