Summary: Chapter XIX
In high summer, Ántonia and Jim spend more time together,
walking to the garden each morning to collect vegetables for dinner.
One night, during an electric storm in a light rain, Ántonia and
Jim climb onto the roof of the chicken house to stare at the sky
until they are called down for supper. Ántonia tells Jim that things
will be easy for him but hard for her family.
Analysis: Book I, Chapters XIV–XIX
Throughout the novel, Jim shows an extraordinary capacity
to identify with others, and, upon hearing of Mr. Shimerda’s apparent
suicide, he immediately senses that “it was homesickness that had killed
Mr. Shimerda.” As Jim imagines the homeward route of Mr. Shimerda’s
released spirit through Chicago and Virginia, two way stations on
his own journey to Nebraska, he identifies with the sense of loss
that he believes caused Mr. Shimerda such disenchantment. In meditating
on Mr. Shimerda’s life, Jim comes to feel as though his memories
almost “might have been Mr. Shimerda’s memories.”
Jim’s most concentrated struggle with cultural difference
occurs over the matter of religion. As Jake describes Ambrosch’s
view that his father has been sent to purgatory as a result of his
suicide, Jim rails against what is to him an incomprehensible stance,
saying, “I almost know it isn’t true.” But the “almost” indicates
Jim’s hesitation. Because he himself holds a belief that is mystical
(his belief in the presence of Mr. Shimerda’s soul), Jim is unable
to rule out the seemingly unsupportable beliefs of others. As he
attempts to sleep that night, Jim is crushingly preoccupied with
this unfamiliar idea of purgatory, suggesting that his confrontation
with other ways of thinking has left him uncomfortable. Although
Jim listens carefully to Anton Jelinek’s story of religious conviction
and finds it “impossible not to admire his frank, manly faith,”
there is clearly a divide between the Bohemians’ more instinctual
faith and Jim’s more philosophical spirituality.
The Nebraska prairie, as an amalgam of various immigrant groups,
is a testing ground for collisions between such differing religious
viewpoints. Mr. Shimerda’s suicide proves to be a test case for the
solidarity of the farming community. When the old-guard religions
universally refuse to have a suicide buried in their graveyards, the
Shimerdas are forced to come up with an alternative. In dismis-sing
the conservative standards of the foreign churches, Mrs. Burden
proposes “an American graveyard that will be more liberal minded.”
This American graveyard is a burial plot on the family land, accompanied
by a makeshift funeral and an improvised service conducted by the
farming community. For all of its unorthodoxy, the beauty of this
service captures Jim’s imagination, as he remarks on his affection
for “the dim superstition” of the event and the “propitiatory intent”
of the grave that remains behind it.
With Mr. Shimerda departed, the different paths that await Ántonia
and Jim begin to emerge. Structurally, this chapter concludes Book I,
the main phase of Jim and Ántonia’s relationship in the rural countryside.
The directions that they will take in life are already becoming
visible, and they begin to grow apart. Thrown into a more laborious
role on the farm, Ántonia quickly loses her feminine softness, and
Jim’s entry into school sets him off on an altogether separate road.
Interestingly, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his more formal
education, Jim fails to recognize the reality of this difference.
When he says to Ántonia that he wishes she could always be “nice”
rather than rough and tumble, she explains that “things will be
easy for you. But they will be hard for us.” Here, for the first
time, Cather clearly presents the dichotomy between Ántonia’s role
as a rural worker and Jim’s role as a leisured thinker—a dichotomy
that she explores throughout the remainder of the novel.
