Willa Cather is another American writer whose work has dealt with reverence for tradition. She asserts that new generations are adultering the past, having neither the standards nor the values of those who had gone before. Her novel, My Antonia, reflects such view. Like Thoreau, Cather idealizes the past. My Antonia prompts readers to speculate whether Cather’s romantic attachment to the traditional past is her limitation or whether it is her talent.
Writing My Antonia during the First World War, Cather has crystallized in fiction an extraordinary multiplicity of voices. This was done amid the fact that the upsurge of patriotism brought about by the war put an end to the notion that the America coming into being would be a multicultural Utopia. In such context, the novel liberally suggests a kaleidoscopic cultural variety. In it, Cather deploys recollections of European lives, anecdotes of lost persons and places, stray memories – more or less the same ideas as Thoreau adduced. The novel opens with Cather talking with Jim Burden, the fictitious narrator of the story, during a train journey. Both agree to write impressions of Antonia, a Bohemian girl whom [they] have known long ago and whom both of [them] admired. Months afterward, Jim shows her what he has written about Antonia. The rest of the book purports to be his manuscript. Thereafter, Cather convincingly frees herself from the bondage of the plot. My Antonia is largely Cather’s youth as she herself arrived in Nebraska as a girl and spent much of her time listening to immigrant folk-culture. Thus, using Jim’s point of view, she has liberated herself from an inheritance of the softer sentiments. Jim’s manuscript starts with his railroad journey to his grandparents in Nebraska after the death of his parents. He is then 10 years old. This is when he first hears and sees Antonia Shimerda’s family. As they are neighbors, Jim and his grandparents become friends with the Shimerdas who have difficulty adjusting to life in the new country. For a year, Jim teaches the 14-year-old Antonia English as they go looking for prairie dogs, eating watermelons in the patch, and visiting the Russians Pavel and Peter. In Jim’s words, he was entirely happy. Nonetheless, such happiness is brief for Mr. Shimerda, Antonia’s depressed father, shoots himself. The catastrophe heightens Virgil’s lines that in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee. This is the unifying pulse of the novel as the next chapters take readers from the prairie to the town of Black Hawk where Jim attends high school and Antonia works for the Norwegian Harlings. The Black Hawk memories of Jim include dances with the hired girls (immigrant young women like Antonia and Lena Lingard who work in households or stores), charades with the Harling children, and talks with other immigrants like Anton Jelinek. Jim loses communication with Antonia as he goes away for college. After several years, he visits Black Hawk (Jim, now, is done with his pre-law in Harvard). He learns through Mrs. Harling (and consequently the Widow Steavens) of Antonia’s bitter fate: Antonia was impregnated and deserted by Larry Danovan, a brute train conductor. He passes by a photo shop and sees a picture of Antonia’s baby. Then, he sees Antonia once more. They meet like old people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears. Antonia tells him that she intends to give her baby a better chance than she ever had. Jim promises to come back. He finally does after 20 years, now a full-fledged lawyer. Antonia beamingly introduces him to her husband, Anton Cuzak, and their nine children. The novel ends with Jim and Antonia in melancholia as they reminisce, balanced by the children’s bliss and vitality. It is here that Jim feels that he has come home to himself: For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny... I understand that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
This is a strong, poignant story. Moreover, its language gives readers a feast of sensations because Cather writes consciously of color and figurative language as in chapter 14 of the novel’s book II:
We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively... The girls sat listless... The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.
My Antonia like many novels celebrating a life of simple necessity and people’s capability to retain at least vestiges of their traditions and to seek a social and spiritual well-being, poses a dilemma for contemporary writers who are confronted with reportage remarkable of its link with the present. Of course, Cather has been accused of neglecting the world around her, suspiciously resisting change through looking backwards to the fixed values of a satisfying past. Nonetheless, this is not her limitation. It is her talent that has been transmuted into the very core of her art.
I am unyielding too like Cather – sometimes belligerently so – in my refusal to let go of the past, of the old times. Retrospection, I believe, is not always nostalgia. It is not a betrayal of the facts around us ascertaining that rivers disappear, presidents are ousted, wars start and end, lovers move away, actors die. Through keeping the past in mind, we are able to assess the dilemmas of today. This means a conjunction of past with present reality that is characterized by a materialist and consumerist culture haunted by economic, political, sociological, and educational issues. Thus, retrospection, instead, is a desire of another life, a better one that is not synthetic and claustrophobic. In my now cynical, numb state effected by the influx of responsibility, failed relationship, academic load, among others a young adult has to take, I have long been looking back to certain things in my past – walks with college friends along the beaches in Camarines Norte, talks with my maternal grandmother over mugs of guava syrup, swims in the barrio river with cousins, laughs with somebody I loved. Of course, I must have been really miserable to feel so but as Antonia remarks, I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people. And there is truth in Jim’s words that some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
My Antonia, as my favorite book, has served me all these beliefs. I eternally remember Cather and her novel, in these crude poetry lines of mine, intended at first for him whom I loved and whose memory lingers: Remembering you/ the amber dot/ of the lone distant lamppost/ seem like fire/ that emanates from my soul’s longing.