My Antonia
...'t Jim who puts the "My" into the title, but the narrator, presumably Cather. Miller argues that it is Jim's narration which shapes and "informs" My 聲tonia. Jim's narration at first concentrates on the seasons, the first year that the Shimerdas are there-- the beauty of the land and the fall when they first arrive, the harshness of the winter, and then the vibrance of the spring following Mr. Shimerda's death. Then there is the summer, in which 聲tonia goes to be hired out... she is moving cyclically into adulthood while Jim is still a child. This narrative "seasonal shape" is further shaped through Jim's narrative in the way the rest of the structure of the novel proceeds. The first part is on the farm, then in the city. When 聲tonia moves into the city, she is again growing up more than Jim. Then Jim moves away to college, and 聲tonia is thrust into adulthood with a "marriage" and birth, while Jim & Lena "play" at adult love in college. Finally, Jim moves into a very odd marriage and then goes back to the farm with 聲tonia and her children. Jim identifies more with the children than he does with Antonia here. Jim is still incomplete, whereas 聲tonia is an adult... her body is worn but her spirit is still there whereas we get the idea that Jim's spirit is a little lost even though his body seems younger, less touched by time. Miller discusses the passage of time as the structure of the novel: The Shimerdas, the first book of My 聲tonia, introduces from the start the drama of time in the vivid accounts of the shifting seasons. . .portraying the terrible struggle for mere existence in the bleakness of the plains' Winter, dramatizing the return of life with the arrival of Spring, and concluding with the promise of rich harvest in the intense heat of the prairie's Summer. This is Jim Burden's remembered year, and it is his obsession with the cycle of time that has caused him to recall 聲tonia in a setting of the changing seasons. (Miller 55) Another similar argument is that: It is in the dramatization of 聲tonia from the girlhood of the opening pages through her physical flowering in the middle books to, finally, her reproduction of the race in a flock of fine boys in the final pages of the book that her life is represented, like the year with its seasons, as a cycle complete in its stages of birth, growth, fruition and decline. Although 聲tonia's life represents a greater cycle than that of the year, the pattern remains the same in both. (Bloom, 55) Bloom continues to argue that: If in Book one 聲tonia represents the eternal endurance under supreme hardship of woman appointed propagator of the race, and in Book II she represents the overflowing liveliness and energetic abundance of physical woman come to the flower, in Books III and IV she symbolizes the calm and faithful endurance of woman eternally wronged . . . But Willa Cather insists on 聲tonia's appearing in a double role, not only as woman wronged, but also as woman fulfilled in her destiny. (Bloom, 55) These arguments clearly accept the structure of the novel as an argument that is solely about 聲tonia, when, in reality, it is more about Jim. Another of the types of critiques of Cather's novel has begun to appear-- one that places the novel within the construct of myth and relationship in a manner that it has not been placed before. Rather than simply looking at the novel as a grown up child's narrative, this type of analysis looks beneath the surface for meanings that lurk in and around the narrative. This type of critique is exemplified by Blanch H. Gelfant's 1971 reading of sexual imagery in My 聲tonia from the essay "The Forgotten Reaping Hook: Sex in My 聲tonia." Gelfant argues that "our persistent misreading of Willa Cather's My 聲tonia rises from a belief that Jim Burden is a reliable narrator. Because we trust his unequivocal narrative manner, we see the novel as a splendid celebration of American frontier life" (Gelfant 104). However, Gelfant declares that we cannot accept Jim's narrative position as unchallengeable. "Jim Burden belongs to a remarkable gallery of characters for whom Cather consistently invalidates sex. . . Whenever sex enters the real world. . .it becomes destructive, leading almost axiomatically to death" (104). This argument calls into question the narrative structure, and leads us to question more of what appears in the novel. Gelfant points out that "Jim forgets as much as he remembers, as his mind sifts through the years to retrieve what he most needs-- a purified past in which he can find safely from sex and disorder" (105). Gelfant's argument speaks for itself, so I will cite a rather long passage from the essay, without much of my own explanation: 聲tonia is cast as a "mythopoeic memory. . .an affecting creation story with 聲tonia a central fertility figure 'a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.' . . .In Jim's dream of Lena, desire and fear clearly contend with one another. With the dreamer's infallibility, Jim contains his ambivalence n a surreal image of Aurora and Grim Reaper as one. This collaged figure of Lena advances against an ordinary but ominous landscape. Background and forefigure first contrast and then coalesce in meaning. Lena's voluptuous aspects-- her luminous glow of sexual arousal, her flesh bared by a shor...