The idea that takes hold of Jim most strongly in the course
of his study is the concept of patria, or loyalty
to one’s specific place of origin, a concept prominent in the works
of the renowned Latin poet Virgil. The heart of My Ántonia lies
not in its existence as an American novel, or even as a novel of
the American Midwest, but rather as a fictionalized document of
childhood in a town like Cather’s own Red Cloud, Nebraska. The devotion
that Cather, and by extension Jim, feels is not for the cosmopolitan
present in which they are immersed but rather for the provincial
countryside of their youth, which they carry in their hearts always.
Jim’s complete separation of his Lincoln world from his
Black Hawk world is undermined by the visit he receives from Lena
Lingard. She acts as a link between his past and his present and
continues to stand in Ántonia’s place as an object of his desire.
Jim’s relationship with Lena is curiously sterile; although he spends
a great deal of time with her, their interaction is rarely charged
with the same quality of emotional intensity as his earlier interactions with
Ántonia are.
With the security of his childhood and his early family
life slipping away from him, Jim finds himself in an aimless and
unhappy state. Cather makes use of a play (Camille)
within the novel to illustrate Jim’s mood, presenting his wistful
perspective in the middle of a particularly wrenching theatergoing
experience. As he watches the tragic story told in Camille unfold,
Jim feels “helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of idyllic
love” in which the protagonist’s “ineffable happiness was only to
be the measure of his fall.” The unhappy fate of the drama’s male
character is Jim’s fate as well, and Cather suggests that art itself
is of value as a reflection of our own emotions and experiences.
Jim marvels at the power of art to get at such universal
truths “across long years and several languages,” but at the same
time he reveals his own subjective bias about art’s meaning, asserting
that “whenever and wherever that piece is put on, it is April.”
The play has crystallized for him a certain emotion that he associates
with April, but in linking the play automatically to this emotion,
he potentially limits the breadth of his actual experience.
