INTRODUCTION

The Best Days Are the First to Flee:
An Introduction to My Ántonia

"This girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood. To speak her name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain."

Nearly every page of Willa Cather's simple story of a young man's life in Nebraska is infused with an intense nostalgia--for the past, for the countryside, for the irrepressible spirit of youth. Its narrator, Jim Burden, comes to the midwest an orphan. He is instantly overwhelmed by the prairie's endless expanses and vast sky: a dome so big it threatens to blot out his existence. Yet he quickly learns to relish this land; on his grandparents' farm Jim feels "entirely happy . . . dissolved into something complete and great." Cather is at her most passionate describing this immense landscape with its acres of waving grass and harsh winter skies.

Late nineteenth-century Nebraska was a midwestern melting pot of immigrant farmers. Swedes, Norwegians, Russians, French, and Bohemians alike conjoined on the harsh prairie to nudge a living out of it. On a poor plot of land abutting Jim's grandparents' flourishing farm, a family of Bohemian immigrants struggles to survive. Jim is immediately taken by their oldest daughter, Ántonia, a cheerful, resourceful young woman who shoulders much of the responsibility for the family and the farm. While on the prairie, the two young people form a strong bond, each teaching the other vital lessons. Eventually, Jim's family moves to the town of Black Hawk. Ántonia soon follows, employed in the household of the Burden's neighbors.

In Black Hawk, Jim and Ántonia's friendship begins to change. Social constraints bind Jim to the merchants, lawyers, and scholars of his station, while Ántonia is relegated to the status of "hired girl" and other immigrant denizens whose faulty English and crude country ways limit their possibilities for advancement. Again and again, Jim finds himself in the company of Ántonia and her friends, drawn to their vivacious natures and their open enjoyment of life. Ántonia thrives in this setting, away from her family, where her independence and courage are both asset and liability. Inevitably Jim and Ántonia's lives diverge: He moves to the East coast to pursue a successful career as an attorney; she falls in love with a scoundrel who promises to marry her but instead impregnates and then deserts her. Disconcerted, Ántonia returns to the prairie to raise her illegitimate daughter on the family farm.

It is many years before Jim makes his return to the prairie. He is prosperous, well-educated, and cultured, and fears guiltily that he will find Ántonia impoverished, her spirit broken by the hardships she has endured. Instead he finds the Ántonia of his youth, her passion for life everywhere evident: in the family she has raised, in the home she keeps, and in her flourishing farm. Having come full circle, Jim has rediscovered his youth: Ántonia will always represent the best of his life. She is his everywoman--wife, mother, sister. She is the endless prairie and the immense sky.

For Jim Burden, recalling one's fondest childhood memories is more than just a nostalgic exercise--it is succor for a heavy heart, a way of immersing oneself in a spiritual and energizing bath. But it is Jim Burden's bittersweet recollections of a life he left behind that resonate most distinctly with readers, regardless of sex, stature, or ethnicity. Living as we do in a rapidly changing world, in which prairies and pioneers have all but disappeared, Cather's story, nearly a century old, possesses a chilling relevance: Are we forever doomed to pine for that which we once had, but lost?
 

ABOUT WILLA CATHER

Many of the events in My Ántonia grew out of Willa Cather's own life. Like her hero, Jim Burden, she moved from her family's Virginia home to a Nebraska farm in 1883 at the age of ten. Although Willa's parents accompanied her on the journey, there is every evidence that the upheaval from the hills and valleys of the south to a part of the country that appeared "as bare as a piece of sheet iron," was traumatic for the young girl. However, Willa grew to love the prairie. It was a love that inspired her first three novels, O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia.

Cather attended college at the University of Nebraska, where she was quite involved in the theater, both performing in and reviewing plays. But the midwest proved too sleepy for this adventurous woman, and she relocated to Pittsburgh, where she made her living as a journalist and teacher, and eventually to New York, where her career blossomed. As managing editor of the muckraking McClure's magazine, Willa Cather established herself as one of her era's leading journalists. Although she was a prolific writer of articles, reviews and short fiction, Cather did not publish her first novel until 1912, at the age of 38. Alexander's Bridge did not meet with critical success--even Cather herself claims to have disliked it--but in the next five years she churned out the three novels that make up her "prairie trilogy," which garnered the attention of reviewers and readers across the country and established Cather as a writer to watch. During the next thirty-five years, she published fourteen novels and one collection of short stories. Many of her works celebrate America's harshest landscapes and the people, especially women, who thrive in these settings. In 1922, Cather was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel about a farm boy who dreams of achieving greatness in the European Wars. Willa Cather died in 1941 in her home in New York, leaving behind a legacy of literature and empathy for the pioneer spirit that will live on forever.
 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1) We first meet Jim as a young boy newly arrived in Nebraska, overwhelmed by the immensity and power of the landscape. He has just lost both parents and has traveled hundreds of miles to live with his grandparents. On the first night of his journey, he muses, "I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be." What is the mood of this passage--desolation, resignation, or both? Do you think it unusual that a young boy would be so fatalistic about his future? How does this introduction to the prairie set up the scenes of Jim's young life there--and his relationship with Ántonia ?

2) As a storyteller, Cather doesn't waste words; her language is simple and lucid. Yet when writing about nature, she shifts into high gear, becoming rather passionate and almost erotic in her descriptions: "I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass." Is this Jim Burden's or Cather's perspective? Do you think such passages either enhance or detract from the story?

3) Ántonia's mother, Mrs. Shimerda, is not meant to be a likable character: she is jealous and mistrustful of her wealthier neighbors, and is clearly resentful of the hard life she faces in Nebraska. Given these considerable personality flaws, do you feel any sympathy for her plight? Why do you think Cather has drawn such a negative portrait of an immigrant woman? Is there any validity in the resentment Mrs. Shimerda feels toward Jim's grandparents, despite their generosity to her and her family? How has Cather's depiction of immigrants to America--the hardships and opportunities they experienced in their new country--weathered the test of time?

4) Although she does not reveal her own religious tendencies concerning Mr. Shimerda's suicide, Cather's description of Ántonia's father's burial site is the closest she comes to spirituality in the novel: "I never came upon the place without emotion, . . . I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence--the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper." How does Cather use the landscape in this and other passages to convey her own feelings about loss, redemption, and rebirth? What importance does the countryside hold for Jim Burden?

5) In the town of Black Hawk, winter isn't beautiful as it is on the prairie; it is harsh and punishing: "Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk." How does this passage demonstrate Cather's preference for country life over city life? What is she saying about nature versus civilization?

6) Why do we learn so little about Jim Burden's life after he leaves Nebraska for the East? From the little information that we are given directly, what can we infer about Jim's adult life--his work, his marriage, his happiness?

7) Why do you think the relationship between Ántonia and Jim never develops into a romance? What does Jim's final observation, that "the road of Destiny...had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be," say about the fatalistic tone of the novel's first scene?

8) Cather begins her novel with an epigraph from Virgil, "Optima dies . . . prima fugit", or "the best days are the first to flee." Why do you think Cather opens the story on such a wistful note? Why do you think Jim is constantly looking backward, to the past, instead of toward the future, which for him seems filled with success? If he's not happy in a city setting, why doesn't Jim move back to Black Hawk or to the prairie?