In addition to juxtaposing these two very different women as objects of Jim’s unconscious dream life, Cather plays them against each other in several key scenes, perhaps most notably in an idyllic summer picnic Jim enjoys with a group of “hired girls” shortly before he leaves Black Hawk to attend college. During the picnic, Ántonia and Jim ensconce themselves beneath a protective enclosure of elder bushes and conduct a very private conversation about Ántonia’s parents. Suddenly appearing above them, “almost as flushed as she had been” in Jim’s dream, Lena intrudes upon their privacy and proceeds to “demolish [their] flowery pagoda” (p. 143). Jim recalls that in response to Lena’s flirtatious effort to help remove sand from his hair, “Ántonia pushed her away” and said, “sharply,” “You’ll never get it out like that” (p. 144). In spite of this underlying tension, Lena and Ántonia never aggressively compete for Jim’s attention. Rather than presenting the predictable melodrama of a romantic triangle, Cather merely suggests that complex emotional dynamics are at work among these three friends.

In one sense, Lena appears to win this understated contest, since it is she and not Antonia who enjoys a romance with Jim during his time as a college student in Lincoln. Although Cather hints at a full-blown sexual intimacy, she leaves the extent of their relations characteristically ambiguous. Nevertheless, in the section of the novel that bears her name, Lena effectively supplants Antonia, removing her almost completely from both Jim and the reader’s view. But if Lena is the only woman with whom we see Jim relate as a lover, the affair itself is treated as an immature phase that Jim needs to get over. As his mentor Gaston Cleric tells him, “You won’t recover yourself while you are playing about with this handsome Norwegian” (p. 173). Jim himself acknowledges that ever since Lena had disturbed the “serious mood” of his classical studies, he had been “drifting.” Through various means, Cather suggests that the couple is only “playing” at love, that it is a game lacking the emotional depth of the relationship with Antonia. Jim and Lena are deeply moved, for instance, by Camille, the famous play in which two ill-suited lovers not unlike themselves are forced to separate. Yet when their own real-life romance comes to an end, they do not appear to suffer much heartbreak at all. Jim gets to act like a man with Lena, but the relationship is never more than a distraction for him, and Lena treats it is a pleasing dalliance that will not lead to marriage.

It is important to keep in mind that when Jim narrates My Ántonia, he is a married middle-aged man. In the introduction to the novel, Cather hints that Jim is unhappy in this marriage, that it is one of the “disappointments” (p. 4) he has endured during the twenty-year separation from Antonia. But since Jim himself never speaks about his marriage, it is during his affair with Lena that he comes closest to describing himself as a suitor—a highly ironic circumstance, since Lena is quite categorical about her lack of interest in marriage. As she says in her very first appearance in the novel, “I’ve seen a good deal of married life, and I don’t care for it” (p. 100). Just in case we’ve forgotten this, Lena reiterates her aversion to marriage during their affair in Lincoln. To a somewhat incredulous Jim, she insists, “I’m not going to marry anybody.... Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers” (p. 174). As Jim later learns, Lena remains true to these sentiments and never marries. Instead, she relocates to San Francisco to be near her old friend Tiny Soderball, another former hired girl who made her fortune in the Alaska gold rush.

Ántonia wins the more important contest by becoming the inspiration for Jim’s nostalgic narrative. Even so, Jim’s relationship with Antonia remains ambiguous, in part because it is so bound up with his relationship to the past. In what is probably the most emotional scene between them, Jim returns to the Divide to visit Ántonia, whom he has not seen since she “had come home disgraced”, in the words of the Widow Steavens, pregnant and unmarried (p.