Please Follow us on  Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Truth Social, Gettr, Twitter, Youtube 

Willa Cather’s classic My Ántonia was published over a century ago, but is startlingly relevant today, an anti-elitist, populist tale of the first order.

The story – hence the “My” – is told by a Nebraska boy “done well,” who leaves the farms and township of Black Hawk to first attend college in the state capitol and then Law School at Harvard. Twenty years later, he realizes that he left his heart back in Nebraska and with one girl, Ántonia, a Bohemian immigrant who coincidentally shared the same train west and night wagon ride to neighboring farms outside Black Hawk.

‘NO AD’ subscription for CDM!  Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!

The portrait of Ántonia is one of the most compelling of any American pioneer, a gusty, vivacious, and pretty girl who matures into a hard-working, sun-kissed ideal of American femininity. When her Bohemian family strikes out to a homestead in the desolate Midwest – bought from a fellow Bohemian homesteader, who partly swindles them – she is the only one who speaks a few words of English.

When our narrator, Jim, first meets her, he is recently orphaned and on his way to his grandparents’ distant farm. Too shy to meet her – as the train conductor encourages him – he waits until they become neighbors and the two of them, despite a four year spread in ages, become adventurers together in the radically new world of the Nebraskan prairie.

The hardships are immense: Ántonia’s family lives in a sod house, more a cave than a home, and barely survive the first harsh winter. Her father, an intellectual and musician more than a farmer, commits suicide, unable to cope, nearly sinking the small family, including Ántonia’s bitter mother and domineering older brother.

Despite an open-eyed treatment of the harsh realities, the book is beautifully elegiac, at the same time uplifting, detailing at first the narrator’s romance with the land:

“The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. […] It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting up of day.” (p.31]

But then the narration transforms, and the burning bush becomes the story of unrequited love between young Jim and Ántonia. Naturally, it starts out as a crush. When the 13 year old Jim steals a kiss on Ántonia’s mouth, she slaps him down. Ántonia is protective and proud of young Jim, warning off the other charming and beautiful immigrant girls – who become hired hands, like herself, in the town of Black Hawk where Jim’s grandparents have moved – from leading him on. But as Jim matures, and moves away to college in Lincoln and then Harvard, he can’t get her out of his mind.

On a summer visit prior to Law School – and after Ántonia has returned from a ruinous elopement, with a fiancé who jilted her and abandoned her with child – Jim searches out Ántonia to hear for himself what had happened.

In the story’s pivotal scene he confesses his enduring love for her – while keeping his distance:

“Do you know, Ántonia, since I’ve been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I’d have like to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister – anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are part of me.” [p.218]

When I first read this, I was thinking that Jim was lovingly saying no, their “stations” in life too far apart, but then I reconsidered. Cather’s original Introduction, which was excised eight years later in the 1926 official edition, was restored in 1995 – and it reveals, through an unnamed female meta-narrator, that the novel is a “download” at her behest by a Nebraska boy turned New York corporate lawyer and reveals that Jim is, as one reviewer put it, “mis-married, childless, unloved, and unloving.” The reader is encouraged, from the novel’s content, to believe that Jim has turned out amazingly well (i.e. successful in worldly terms), while Ántonia, after her disgrace and trial-by-work, not only on a struggling farm but from raising nearly a dozen children with a Bohemiam immigrant turned farmer, is to be pitied. After not seeing her for twenty years of his hollow New York life, Jim has the courage to seek her out, finding “her a battered woman now, not a lovely girl.” Yet adding, “she still had that something which fires the imagination, and could stop one’s breath for a moment […] She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.” [p.240]

With the framing and added information of the original Introduction, in which the female narrator relates her low opinion of Jim’s heiress wife and loveless marriage, we come to realize that Ántonia is leading a far more consequential life than Jim – who by story’s end has become an uncle to some of her boys, taking them on hunting trips.

Cather, it turns out, writes a very unconventional love story – in one interview, she admits it has “no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle for success” – in which a corporate lawyer finds meaning in life by reconnecting with his first love and writing a heart-stopping testimony of a wildly noble pioneer woman, a founder of a new people while settling the hardscrabble west. It is a failure of courage, and too high regard for social mores, that Jim never marries her when he had the chance.

The novel also turns on its head the contemporaneous disdain for newly arrived immigrants, showing the disruptive force of Ántonia and two of her farm-girl-turned-hired-hands who are “considered a menace to the social order” as they much more attractive (again, hard-working, sun-kissed) than Black Hawk’s narrow-minded young, conventional women.

(To be clear, the great settling of America, with large populations of immigrant brave hearts, could not be more different that the massive and destructive waves of recent years: they were legal immigrants, they learned English and assimilated, there was no welfare. Instead, they survived through brutally hard work, forming communities, and the charity of Christian neighbors, as with Jim’s grandparents’ rescuing of Ántonia’s family more than once.)

None of the book’s “elites” turn out well. Instead, Cather raises up the homesteader, the housewife, the farm hand and the hired girl. Her strong populist beliefs came out in an interview in which she claims, “The farmer’s wife who raise a large family and cooks for them and makes their clothes and keeps house…and thoroughly enjoy doing it all, and doing it well, contributes more to art than all the culture clubs.” Amen! Can you imagine a feminine role model that would be more detested by today’s feminists? Who would view Ántonia as a lowly “breeder” gone berserk?

The book’s epigraph from Virgil, Optima dies…prima fugit (The best days are the first to flee), tells of Jim’s (and Cather’s) lament. His best days are long past, they can only be re-created through memory and memoire. The novel is also a subtle treatise on memory, on taking the Muse to one’s homeland, and so much more.

You cannot find a more inspiring story of how homesteaders and pioneers busted up the sod of the Great American Desert (as it was called on early British maps) and helped turn the nation into the earth’s greatest. We owe a debt of gratitude to these unsung heros – and to Willa Cather, for her ground-breaking novel which remains relevant, even urgent, today.

My Ántonia, Willa Cather (1918), Bantam Classic, 2005 edition

Ben Batchelder is the author of four extended travel yarns and has been a Contributor to The Miami Independent since its inception. Contact him at his author site benbatchelder.com