179). Although this is a reunion between the two friends, it is also a farewell that marks the beginning of Jim’s long separation from her. In their exchange, they come the closest that they ever will to expressing their love directly to one another. Jim begins by saying,

I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me (p. 192).

In response, Antonia wonders,

How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when I’ve disappointed you so? Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other? I’m so glad we had each other when we were little. I can’t wait till my little girl’s old enough to tell her about all the things we used to do. You’ll always remember me when you think about old times, won’t you? (p. 192).

Once again, Cather keeps the two companions curiously beyond each other, while simultaneously insisting on their intimacy. What is remarkable about Jim’s declaration is that he resists placing Antonia into any of the roles a woman would ordinarily fill in a man’s life. Ántonia is “part” of Jim, but since it is the “idea” of Antonia that inspires him, he evidently believes that he does not need to choose whether he thinks of her as a lover, a domestic companion, or even, in a somewhat bewildering hypothetical exercise, as a family relation. Ántonia’s reaction, which is a curious mixture of pleasure and incredulity, provides one of the relatively few glimpses of her psyche, though it leaves many questions unanswered. On the one hand quite self-effacing, below the surface Antonia appears to be registering the social gap between them (“you know so many people”), though she does not seem to resent this gap at all.

Critics who argue that Jim is an unreliable narrator read this as a critical moment in which Jim fails to act decisively, revealing himself as incapable of getting beyond his self-centered nostalgia and thus unable to empathize with Ántonia’s difficult situation. After all, here is his beloved companion, beginning her life as a single mother, and instead of proposing to her, Jim goes off to a prestigious law school and eventually marries a socially prominent woman. Yet Antonia does not show any bitterness at all, nor does she seem to anticipate a marriage proposal, which would be completely out of keeping with the tenor of their relationship up until this point. Instead, she confirms both how much they “mean to each other” and that they “had each other” when they were children. These are both characteristically ill-defined formulations of their emotional attachment, but this is the way Cather has conceived of their relationship all along. Most important, perhaps, Antonia asks Jim to remember her, and of course this is precisely how Jim will make her “a part of” him. Although Jim loses Ántonia for twenty years, he recovers her by transforming memory into the narrative of his past.

Several years after writing My Ántonia, Cather set forth her aesthetic principles in “The Novel Démeublé,” a critical essay that first appeared in 1922, the year in which the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses marked the high tide of modernist experimentalism. Cather’s essay has taken its place among the period’s numerous manifestoes of modernism, though it is written in a manner very unlike most of these strident, often deliberately outrageous documents. As Cather’s title indicates, she is interested in producing “unfurnished” novels that eschew the “mere verisimilitude” (Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, p. 836) of nineteenth-century realism. She is equally critical of her contemporary D. H. Lawrence, whom she mocks for writing novels “crowded with physical sensations” that leave readers with “no less a catalogue than [novels] crowded with furniture” (p. 837). She proposes instead an uncluttered aesthetic that “leave[s] the scene bare for the play of emotions.” This is the aesthetic behind the understated prose of My Ántonia, in which the complexities of emotion and sexuality are never fully spelled out.