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.
