[The plow] stood out against the sun
. . . the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten
red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.
See Important Quotations Explained
Summary: Chapter VIII
Finally, the long winter gives way to spring, and Ántonia,
Jim, and the Harling children spend their days in the garden and
at play among the trees. In June, the Vannis, an Italian family,
arrive with a dancing pavilion and begin giving lessons. The pavilion
quickly becomes a center of town life, especially on Saturday nights,
when the dancing carries on until midnight.
Summary: Chapter IX
Jim claims that all the socially respectable boys are
secretly attracted to the country girls who came to Black Hawk as
hired girls. But because of the town’s extremely rigid social hierarchy,
none of the town boys feels comfortable dating a hired girl. For
his part, Jim finds the hired girls more interesting and worthwhile
than the townsfolk, and he begins to spend time with them, to the
general disapproval of the community.
Summary: Chapter X
Over time, Ántonia begins to draw notice at the pavilion,
and thoughts of dancing soon preoccupy her waking hours. Trouble arises
when an engaged boy attempts to kiss Ántonia on the Harlings’ back
porch. Although Ántonia manages to fight him off, Mr. Harling presents
her with an ultimatum: she must quit dancing or look for work elsewhere.
Indignant, Ántonia decides to take her chances on her own and announces
her plan to find work with Wick Cutter, the local moneylender. Distraught,
Mrs. Harling tells Ántonia that she cannot speak to her if she works
for the Cutters. Ántonia insists on keeping her independence and
leaving the Harlings.
Summary: Chapter XI
Jim describes the Cutters as a detestable Black Hawk couple,
generally loathed by the populace: Wick Cutter is a devious moneylender who
makes his money by manipulating farmers into accepting unwise loans,
and Mrs. Cutter is a hideous shrew. The Cutters do not even get
along with each other, and their epic arguments are legendary throughout
the town.
Summary: Chapter XII
Once set up at the Cutters, Ántonia spends even more time
and energy on her new social life. She sews her own outfits and
parades around town with Lena and a number of the other hired girls.
Now a senior in high school, Jim sometimes travels about with them. After
the Vannis leave town, a group called the Owl Club begins to stage
dances in the Masonic Hall each Tuesday, but Jim refuses to join.
Envious of the older girls, Jim begins to grow restless at the thought
of being cooped up in school, and so he visits a local saloon. When
Jim’s reputation is brought into question, he is forced to look elsewhere
for diversion, but he quickly finds that very few diversions are
to be found in Black Hawk.
Eager to find an alternative, Jim resolves to attend the
Saturday night dances at the Firemen’s Hall, sneaking out of the
house after his grandparents have fallen asleep. One evening, after
a night of dancing, Jim walks Ántonia back to the Cutters. When
he asks for a kiss and goes a little farther than Ántonia expects,
she scolds him for his brazenness. Jim, pleased at her show of virtue,
walks home with his heart full of her.
Summary: Chapter XIII
A short time later, Jim notices that his grandmother has
been crying. She has learned of his secret journeys to the Firemen’s
Hall dances, and she is ashamed of his deceitfulness. In an attempt
to atone for his actions, Jim swears off the dances, but he finds
himself lonely again as a result.
At his high school commencement, Jim gives an oration
that the crowd receives wonderfully. Afterward, Ántonia breathlessly
congratulates him and is moved to tears when he declares that he
dedicated the oration to her father. Jim is thrilled with his success.
Summary: Chapter XIV
During the summer, Jim commits himself to a rigorous study
schedule in preparation for his upcoming university studies. His
one -holiday comes in July, when he arranges to meet a party of
girls, including Ántonia and Lena, at the river. As he approaches,
he spots Ántonia sitting alone by a stream and notices she has been
crying. When Jim asks her why she is sad, she confesses to him her
pangs of homesickness for the old country and for her father. Later
in the day, Ántonia and Jim rejoin the rest of the girls, and they
spend the afternoon playing games and talking together until sunset.
Summary: Chapter XV
Left alone to housesit for the Cutters in late August,
Ántonia has an uneasy feeling about spending the night by herself.
Jim agrees to sleep there in her stead and comes back to the Burdens
each morning for breakfast. On his third night in the house, he
is roused by a noise, but quickly falls back asleep. A short while
later, he wakes to the noise of someone in the same room and comes
face to face with Cutter, who was expecting to find Ántonia in the
room. Cutter has used the trip as an elaborate scheme to abandon
his wife and either seduce or rape Ántonia. He had told Ántonia
that he left his valuables under her bed and that she must not leave
them unattended at night. A scuffle ensues, and Jim manages to escape
Cutter by leaping out of the window and running through the dark
town in his nightshirt. He eventually makes his way home, only to
find that he has suffered several severe bruises and cuts.
Jim holes up in his room to recover, and Mrs. Burden accompanies
Ántonia to the Cutters to pack her trunk. They find the house in utter
disarray, and, as they are gathering up the torn garments, Mrs. Cutter
arrives at the front door. After doing her best to calm Mrs. Cutter
down, Mrs. Burden listens in amazement as Mrs. Cutter relates the
elaborate ruse that her husband concocted: he put her on the wrong
train while he slipped back to Black Hawk in his failed scheme to
have his way with Ántonia.
Analysis: Book II, Chapters VIII–XV
Frances Harling, the no-nonsense businesswoman of the
novel, perfectly describes the core of Jim’s affliction. Criticizing
Jim over his affections for the hired girls, Frances says, “The
problem with you, Jim, is that you’re romantic.” Frances’s objection
to Jim’s social persona lies both in his withdrawal from society
and in the glorified sense of glamour that he bestows upon Ántonia,
Lena, and the rest of their kind. Frances, who speaks for the more
respectable realms of Black Hawk society, represents a class of
people whom Jim despises. Jim contrasts the staid propriety of a
house full of “hand-painted china that must not be used” with the
carefree charms of the free spirits he deems “my country girls.”
The dancing pavilion brings the difference between the
sheltered American daughters and the immigrant working girls into
relief. As Jim observes, the presence of the dance hall upsets the
established social order. With little to lose, the displaced immigrant
girls from Bohemia, Denmark, and Norway take advantage of their
working-class freedom to gain a foothold among the young men of
Black Hawk, while the more respectable girls of established families
are left to hang back in the shadows.
From the distanced perspective of a man writing a memoir,
Jim can look back on this curious social order and analyze it as
the natural evolution of the American immigrant experience. The
same girls who were initially held back by barriers of language
and wealth applied the strength of character acquired through hardship
in order to better their lot in life. As a result, the servant girls
of Jim’s youth become the property-owning mistresses of his adulthood.
That such radical changes are afoot is clear from the
pressing march of time. Jim himself is very conscious of the fleetingness
of existence, soliloquizing that “when boys and girls are growing
up, life can’t stand still, not even in the quietest of country
towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no.” Although
Jim clearly understands the inevitability of growing up, we get
the sense that his romantic side is loath to do so.
Jim grows to dislike the stillness of Black Hawk, however,
shuffling aimlessly as he does in his senior year among the “malcontent” in
their “flimsy shelters.” But at the same time, he longs to recapture the
innocence and purity of his childhood affection for the domestic and
the mundane, as shown when he hangs a May basket for young Nina
Harling, taking a “melancholy pleasure” in the action.
As Book II comes to an end, the
feeling that the characters are moving out of childhood and into
the world of adulthood is nearly complete. The story’s increasing
emphasis on sexuality—including Cutter’s bizarre attempt to sleep
with Ántonia—reflects this transition. Jim’s reluctance to grow
up manifests itself most strongly in his inability to reconcile
his emotional and sexual urges. When he attempts to kiss Ántonia
in the same way that he has kissed Lena, she curtly but politely
rebuffs him; he does not protest, but is pleased by her modesty.
Although he is “not half as fond” of Lena as he is of Ántonia, it
is Lena that he dreams of passionately embracing, and though he
wishes it were Ántonia in her stead, he is never able to dream about
her in the same way.
Ántonia, too, harbors nostalgia for a purer, more childlike
past. She arranges for Jim to meet her and her friends at the river,
in a last attempt to re-create old times. While her tears are ostensibly
shed in longing for a lost Bohemia, she perhaps feels another grief—equally strong
but subconscious—for the loss of her and Jim’s shared childhood
in the Nebraska countryside.
Once again, Cather reverts to the majesty of the landscape
to provide a visual analogue for the nostalgia and sense of loss
that her characters feel. As Jim and the girls continue to reminisce
late into the afternoon, a plow emerges against the red disk of
the setting sun, heroic in its loneliness, a symbol for the romantic
imagination. But, inevitably, like the romantic imagination itself,
this heroic image can enjoy only a fleeting moment of distorted
importance. As the sun slowly sinks, the plow is returned “back
to its own littleness” beneath the darkening sky, symbolizing how
helpless humankind is in the face of indomitable forces of the universe
such as time.
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