My Ántonia

This passage from the Introduction is the first the reader hears of Ántonia. The narrator of the Introduction, who grew up with Jim and Ántonia in Nebraska, describes a train ride taken with Jim many years later and details their conversation about Ántonia. They agreed that Ántonia, more than any other person, seemed to represent the world they had grown up in, to the point that speaking her name evokes “people and places” and “a quiet drama . . . in one’s brain.” This quotation is important because it establishes that Ántonia will both evoke and symbolize the vanished past of Jim’s childhood in Nebraska. It situates Ántonia as the central character in Jim’s story and explains Jim’s preoccupation with her by connecting her to his memories of the past. Finally, it establishes Jim’s character with its implication that Jim shares the unnamed narrator’s romantic inclination to dwell on the past and to allow people and places to take on an extraordinarily emotional, nostalgic significance.

Ántonia speaks these lines in Book I, Chapter VII, praising Jim for having killed the rattlesnake. Jim is angry with Ántonia for failing to warn him about the snake (in a moment of panic, she screams out in her native language), and she quickly appeases him by gushing about his bravery and manliness. The quote captures Ántonia’s way of speaking in the early part of the novel, as she is learning English; it also represents a moment of transition in Jim’s relationship with her. Because she is older than Jim, Ántonia has had a tendency to treat him somewhat condescendingly, to Jim’s increasing frustration. After he proves his strength by killing the rattlesnake, she regards him with a new respect and never talks down to him again. She may never love Jim romantically, but at this moment, she clearly comes to regard him as an equal and as someone very special to her.

This dialogue from Book I, Chapter XIX, occurs as Jim and Ántonia sit on the roof of the chicken house, watching the electrical storm. The two have grown apart somewhat following Mr. Shimerda’s suicide, as Jim has begun to attend school and Ántonia has been forced to spend her time working on the farm. Jim has found himself dismayed by Ántonia’s increasing coarseness and her pride in her own strength. As they sit watching the lightning storm, Jim feels his old intimacy returning, and he brings himself to ask Ántonia why she has changed. Ántonia understands Jim’s question and, because she is four years older, understands better than he does why their lives have begun to move in separate directions. Jim has opportunities and a bright future ahead of him, but for Ántonia, life now means simply helping her family get by. Ántonia acknowledges this unalterable circumstance with her customarily wise simplicity: “Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us.”

This passage from Book II, Chapter XIV, recounts a sunset that Jim and Ántonia watch the summer after Jim graduates from high school. Gradually, the sun sinks behind a plow on the horizon, so the plow is superimposed on the red sun, “black against molten red.” The passage is an excellent example of Cather’s famous ability to evoke the landscape, creating a sensuous and poetic picture of a sunset on the Nebraska prairie. It also indicates the extraordinary psychological connection that Cather’s characters feel with their landscape, as the setting sun perfectly captures the quiet, somewhat bittersweet moment the characters are experiencing—they care for one another and have had a wonderful day together, but they are growing up and will soon go their separate ways.

The image of the plow superimposed on the sun also suggests a symbolic connection between human culture (the plow) and the nature (the sun). As the plow fills up the disk of the sun, the two coexist in perfect harmony, just as Jim recalls the idyllic connection between the natural landscape and the settlements in Nebraska. But as the sun sinks beneath the horizon, the plow dwindles to insignificance (“its own littleness”), suggesting that, in the relationship between humankind and environment, environment is dominant.

This quotation, which concludes Book V, Chapter I, finds the adult Jim still contemplating the fascination he feels for Ántonia. Here he attributes her significance to her nurturing and generous presence, which suggests an enviable fullness of life. Ántonia evokes “immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true” because she is full of love and loyalty. As Jim portrays it, Ántonia is a “rich mine of life,” an inexhaustible source of love and will from which others draw strength and warmth. This portrayal explains why Ántonia lingers so prominently in the minds of so many people from Jim’s childhood (Jim, Lena, the narrator of the introduction). In her presence they have been filled with the love and strength that she exudes, and they will never forget the way it made them feel.

Apart from standing as the novel’s final important analysis of Ántonia, this quote is important because it reveals the psychological changes that the passage of time has wrought in Jim. Whereas before he avoided Ántonia for twenty years because he did not want to see the lovely girl he knew transformed into a hardened, overworked matron, he can now see beyond Ántonia’s age to her essential inner quality, which he finds can still “stop one’s breath.” This newfound connection to the present indicates that Jim can finally move beyond his dreamlike preoccupation with his nostalgia for his youth and contemplate Ántonia as more than a symbol of the past.