My Ántonia

Landscape of the Cather homestead

The title refers to Ántonia, a young woman immigrant to the western prairies of the US. The story is told by her friend Jim, who arrives there at age ten to live with his grandparents. Jim thinks of her as his close friend, my Ántonia.

The name Ántonia is pronounced in an approximation of the Czech. Cather writes, "The Bohemian name Ántonia is strongly accented on the first syllable, like the English name Anthony, and the i is given the sound of long e. The name is pronounced An'-ton-ee-ah.", a footnote in the text, at the start of Book I, "The Shimerdas".[1] The acute accent in Czech does not represent a stressed syllable but a long vowel; all Czech words are stressed on the first syllable by default. Note that the English short a sound, /æ/, is qualitatively different from the Czech á, which is pronounced /aː/. The Czech pronunciation can be heard at this sound file.[2]

Cather chose a first-person narrator because she felt that novels depicting deep emotion, such as My Ántonia, were most effectively narrated by a character in the story.[3] The novel is divided into sections called "Books": I: The Shimerdas; II: The Hired Girls; III: Lena Lingard; IV: The Pioneer Woman's Story; V: Cuzak's Boys.

Jim and Ántonia (illustration from a 1924 edition)

Orphaned Jim Burden rides the trains from Virginia to the fictional settlement of Black Hawk, Nebraska, where he will live with his paternal grandparents. Jake, a farmhand from Virginia, rides with the 10-year-old boy. On the same train, headed to the same destination, is the Shimerda family from Bohemia. Jim lives with his grandparents in the home they have built, helping as he can with chores to ease the labor on the others. The home has the dining room and kitchen downstairs, like a basement, with small windows at the top of the walls, an arrangement quite different from Jim's home in Virginia. The sleeping quarters and parlor are at ground level. The Shimerda family paid for a homestead which proves to have no home on it, just a cave in the earth, and not much of the land broken for cultivation. The two families are nearest neighbors to each other in a sparsely settled land. Ántonia, the elder daughter in the Shimerda family, is a few years older than young Jim. The two are friends from the start, helped by Mrs. Shimerda asking that Jim teach both her daughters to read English. Ántonia helps Mrs. Burden in her kitchen when she visits, learning more about cooking and housekeeping. The first year is extremely difficult for the Shimerda family, without a proper house in the winter. Mr. Shimerda comes to thank the Burdens for the Christmas gifts given to them, and has a peaceful day with them, sharing a meal and the parts of a Christian tradition that Protestant Mr. Burden and Catholic Mr. Shimerda respect. He did not want to move from Bohemia, where he had a skilled trade, a home and friends with whom he could play his violin. His wife is sure life will be better for her children in America.

The pressures of the new life are too much for Mr. Shimerda, who kills himself before the winter is finished. The nearest Catholic priest is too far away for last rites. He is buried without formal rites at the corner marker of their homestead, a place that is left alone when the territory is later marked out with section lines and roads. Ántonia stops her lessons and begins to work the land with her older brother. The wood piled up to build their log cabin is made into a house. Jim continues to have adventures with Ántonia when they can, discovering nature around them, alive with color in summer and almost monotone in winter. She is a girl full of life. Deep memories are set in both of them from the adventures they share, including the time Jim killed a long rattlesnake with a shovel they were fetching for Ambrosch, her older brother.

A few years after Jim arrives, his grandparents move to the edge of town, buying a house while renting their farm. Their neighbors, the Harlings, have a housekeeper to help with meals and care of the children. When they need a new housekeeper, Mrs. Burden connects Ántonia with Mrs. Harling, who hires her for good wages. Becoming a town girl is a success, as Ántonia is popular with the children, and learns more about running a household, letting her brother handle the heavy farm chores. She stays in town for a few years, having her worst experience with Mr. and Mrs. Cutter. The couple goes out of town while she is their housekeeper, after Mr. Cutter said something that made Ántonia uncomfortable to stay alone in the house as requested. Jim stays there in her place, only to be surprised by Mr. Cutter returning to kill Ántonia, whom he expects will be alone and defenseless. Instead, Jim attacks the intruder, belatedly realizing that it is Mr. Cutter.

Pavelka house in rural Webster County, Nebraska, setting of "Cuzak's Boys"[4]

Lena Lingard knitting (illustration from a 1924 edition)

Jim does well in school, the valedictorian of his high school class. He attends the new state university in Lincoln, where his mind is opened to a new intellectual life. In his second year, he finds one of the immigrant farm girls, Lena, is in Lincoln, too, with a successful dressmaking business. He takes her to plays, which they both enjoy. His teacher realizes that Jim is so distracted from his studies, that he suggests Jim come with him to finish his studies at Harvard in Boston. He does, where he then studies the law. He becomes an attorney for one of the western railroads. He keeps in touch with Ántonia, whose life takes a hard turn when the man she loves proposes marriage, but deceives her and leaves her with child. She moves back in with her mother. Years later, Jim visits Ántonia, meeting Anton Cuzak, her husband and father of ten more children, on their farm in Nebraska. He visits with them, getting to know her sons especially. They know all about him, as he features in the stories of their mother's childhood. She is happy with her brood and all the work of a farm wife. Jim makes plans to take her sons on a hunting trip next year.

My Ántonia was enthusiastically received in 1918 when it was first published. It was considered a masterpiece and placed Cather in the forefront of novelists. Today, it is considered her first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting. It brought place forward almost as if it were one of the characters, while at the same time playing upon the universality of the emotions, which in turn promoted regional American literature as a valid part of mainstream literature.[5][6]^: vii

"As Cather intended, there is no plot in the usual sense of the word. Instead, each book contains thematic contrasts."[7] The novel was a departure from the focus on wealthy families in American literature; "it was a radical aesthetic move for Cather to feature lower-class, immigrant 'hired girls.'"[7]

Cather also makes a number of comments concerning her views on women's rights, and there are many disguised sexual metaphors in the text.[6]^: xv

My Ántonia is a selection of The Big Read, the community-wide reading program of The National Endowment for the Arts.[8] For the communities and books in the program since 2007, see History of the program since 2007.[9]

Writing in February 2020, critic and essayist Robert Christgau called My Ántonia a "magnificent, still too obscure novel" and said it "scrupulously documents the facts and foibles of farming as way of life and means of production, although not in the detail of O Pioneers!"[10]

When author and columnist Rebecca Traister was asked by Ezra Klein during his New York Times podcast on March 19, 2021, if there was a book she rereads for the “sheer beauty of the prose” Traister was emphatic:  “For the beauty of the writing, I mean, I would say that my go-to is actually My Antonia by Willa Cather, which is a book I first read in high school and found slightly boring but beautiful, and then read again in my 20s and was just totally enraptured by and then have gone back to again and again and again as a beautiful piece of writing.”[11]

The novel was shaped by the contribution of Viola Roseboro', Cather's editor at McClure's Magazine, who read the original manuscript after it had been repeatedly rejected, and told Cather that she should rewrite it from Jim's viewpoint.[12]

The 1918 version of My Antonia begins with an Introduction in which an author-narrator, supposed to be Cather herself, converses with her adult friend, Jim Burden, during a train journey. Jim is now a successful New York lawyer but trapped in an unhappy and childless marriage to a wealthy, activist woman.[13]^: 15 Cather agreed with her publisher at Houghton Mifflin to cut that introduction when a revised edition of the novel was published in 1926.[13]^: 14 A brief introduction with Jim taking that train ride, speaking with an unnamed woman who also knew Ántonia about writing about her, is included in the version at Project Gutenberg.[14]

Douglas Sirk's film The Tarnished Angels makes reference to My Ántonia as the last book read 12 years earlier by heroine LaVerne, played by Dorothy Malone. She discovers the book in the apartment of the alcoholic reporter Burke Devlin, played by Rock Hudson. After LaVerne's husband, Roger, (played by Robert Stack), dies in an airplane racing accident, Burke Devlin sends LaVerne and her son, Jack, on a plane to Chicago, which will connect them to their next flight to Nebraska to start a new life. In the final scene, as LaVerne boards her plane, Burke hands LaVerne the book My Ántonia.

Emmylou Harris' 2000 album Red Dirt Girl features the wistful song "My Ántonia", as a duet with Dave Matthews. Harris wrote the song from Jim's perspective as he reflects on his long lost love.

The French songwriter and singer Dominique A wrote a song inspired by the novel, called "Antonia" (from the LP Auguri, 2001).

In Richard Powers' 2006 novel The Echo Maker, the character Mark Schluter reads My Ántonia on the recommendation of his nurse, who notes that it is "[A] very sexy story. ... About a young Nebraska country boy who has the hots for an older woman" (page 240).

In Anton Shammas' 1986 novel Arabesques, the autobiographical character of Anton reads My Ántonia on the plane to a writers' workshop in Iowa. It is the first novel he ever read, and he expects Iowa to have the same grass "the color of wine stains" that Cather describes of Nebraska.[15]

Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, Delaware brews a continually-hopped imperial pilsner named My Ántonia.[16]

In the introduction of his New Year's Day opinion piece entitled "2019: The Year of the Wolves" in The New York Times, David Brooks evoked Pavel's deathbed story[Notes 1] from My Ántonia[17][Notes 2] of how he and Peter[Notes 3] had been banished from their village in the Ukraine for throwing a bride and groom to the wolves to save their own lives when the six sledges of the inebriated bridal party were attacked by about 30 wolves.[18]^: 56–60[19][Notes 4] Pavel, who was the friend of the groom, had unsuccessfully attempted to convince the groom to save himself too by sacrificing his bride, but the groom fought to protect her.[18]^: 56–60 When the two sole survivors returned along to the village, they became pariahs, cast out of their own village and everywhere they went. "Pavel's own mother would not look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed them."[18]^: 56–60 This is how they came to settle in Black Hawk on the Nebraska prairie.[17] Brooks compares 2019 to that Russian winter in the 19th century where it was known that wolves have been attacking humans, and a vulnerable wedding party that is a "bit drunk" is being led by two men who are willing to do anything to survive, including throwing their friend and his wife to the wolves.[17][19]^: 55–6 He foresees the upcoming year as one "where good people lay low and where wolves are left free to prey on the weak".[17] In his deathbed confession, Pavel explained, "...the ones who do the sacrificing, who throwaway the baggage — bodies, loyalties, allegiances — are the ones who survive."[18]^: 56–60

In Barbara Kingsolver's 2018 novel Unsheltered, a main character is named Willa, after Willa Cather. A paragraph of My Ántonia is quoted in Kingsolver's novel in the context of a dead woman wanting it read at her funeral.[20]

In Bret Stephens' opinion piece in The New York Times, July 19, 2019, titled ”The Perfect Antidote to Trump – Willa Cather knew what made America great”[21] Stephens wrote that Willa Cather's My Ántonia is “a book for our times—and the perfect antidote to our President.” “My Ántonia becomes an education in what it means to be American.” We need to recall “what we’re really about, starting by rereading My Ántonia.”

• Pavelka Farmstead

• The full text of My Ántonia at Wikisource
• My Ántonia at Project Gutenberg.
• My Ántonia at Standard Ebooks
• My Ántonia public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• My Ántonia Audio Guide
• My Ántonia at IMDb