Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
Humankind’s Relationship to the Past
The central narrative of My Ántonia is
a look into the past, and though in his narration Jim rarely says
anything directly about the idea of the past, the overall tone of
the novel is highly nostalgic. Jim’s motive for writing his story
is to try to reestablish some connection between his present as
a high-powered New York lawyer and his vanished past on the Nebraska
prairie; in re-creating that past, the novel represents both Jim’s
memories and his feelings about his memories. Additionally, within
the narrative itself, characters often look back longingly toward
a past that they have lost, especially after Book I.
Living in Black Hawk, Jim and Ántonia recall their days on the farms;
Lena looks back toward her life with her family; the Shimerdas and
the Russians reflect on their lives in their respective home countries
before they immigrated to the United States.
The two principal qualities that the past seems to possess
for most of the characters in the novel are that it is unrecoverable
and that it is, in some way, preferable to the present. Ántonia
misses life in Bohemia just as Jim misses life in Nebraska, but
neither of them can ever go back. This impossibility of return accounts
for the -nostalgic, emotional tone of the story, which may have
been autobiographical as well, informed by Cather’s own longing
for her Nebraska childhood. But if the past can never be recovered,
it can never be escaped, either, and Jim is fated to go on thinking
about Black Hawk long after he has left it.
The other important characteristic of the past in My
Ántonia is that it is always personal: characters never
look back toward bygone eras or large-scale historical conditions,
but only toward the personal circumstances—places, people, things—that
they remember from their own lives. As a result, a character’s emotions
are destined to color his or her memories for the rest of his or
her life, a fact that is made thematically explicit in the novel
by Jim’s decision to call his memoir “My Ántonia” rather than simply
“Ántonia." In thus laying claim to Ántonia, Jim acknowledges that
what he is really writing is simply a chronicle of his own thoughts
and feelings.
The novel ends on an optimistic note, however, with Jim’s
return to Nebraska twenty years after he last saw Ántonia and his
mature decision to visit more often and to keep Ántonia in his life.
This decision implies that, by revisiting his past, Jim has learned
to incorporate it into his present, to seek a real relationship
with Ántonia rather than transform her into a symbol of the past
in his own mind. The past, the novel seems to suggest, is unrecoverable,
but the people who shared one’s past can be recovered, even after
a separation of many years.
Humankind’s Relationship to Its Environment
Related to the novel’s nostalgic feeling for the past
is its in-depth exploration of humankind’s relationship to its environment.
What characters in My Ántonia miss about the past
is not simply lost time but a lost setting, a vanished
world of people, places, and things, especially natural surroundings.
The characters in My Ántonia respond powerfully
to their environments—especially Jim, who develops a strong attachment
to the Nebraska landscape that never really leaves him, even after
two decades in New York.
As Cather portrays it, one’s environment comes to symbolize one’s
psychology, and may even shape one’s emotional state by giving thoughts
and feelings a physical form. The river, for example, makes Jim
feel free, and he comes to prize freedom; the setting sun captures
his introspective loneliness, and the wide-open melancholy of Nebraska’s
plains may play a role in forming his reflective, romantic personality—if
it does not create Jim’s personality, it at least comes to embody
it physically. Thus, characters in My Ántonia often
develop an extremely intense rapport with their surroundings, and
it is the sense of loss engendered by moving beyond one’s surroundings
that occasions the novel’s exploration of the meaning of the past.
