10).

It is important to keep in mind that Cather has created Jim as a middle-aged narrator living in New York who is looking back with nostalgia at his youth on the prairie. In some sense, then, the epiphany in this early scene is experienced not only by a ten-year-old boy, but also by an older man coming to terms with his mortality through an act of memory. As the novel progresses, the mood becomes increasingly retrospective, since Jim becomes more and more distant from his original relationship with both the landscape and Antonia, the companion of his youth. An important turning point in Jim’s relation to the past occurs while he is a college student studying the classics. Struck by Virgil’s “melancholy reflection” that “the best days are the first to flee” (p. 159), Jim associates this sentiment of loss with his own memories of the prairie, which he finds crowding upon him during his studies. Virgil’s phrase, “Optima dies ... prima fugit,” which is also the epigraph for My Ántonia, is taken from the Georgics, a pastoral depiction of rural life. With this reference to Virgil, Cather places her novel in dialogue with the traditions of pastoral literature, which tend to idealize country life as simple, virtuous, and pure. Some pastoral works are also deeply elegiac, as they lament the gap between the “best days” of their legendary Arcadia and the less noble, even corrupt present. At the point in the novel when Jim reads the classics, childhood, along with the untamed landscape of memory, become his Arcadia, a mythical spot in time to which he yearns to return. As Jim says after an emotional parting from Antonia, “I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end” (p. 192) on the prairie. Whether or not Cather shares her narrator’s nostalgia has been a matter of critical debate, but there is no question that Cather asks readers to ponder how the pastoral idea of a utopian garden has affected American attitudes to the landscape and history of the nation.

Because the protagonists of Cather’s American pastoral are primarily immigrant farmers, her work also resonates with the important and often contentious debate during the 1910s over immigration to the United States, which surged to record levels between 1880 and World War I. In the opening pages of My Ántonia, the reader is almost as surprised as Jim to hear a “foreign tongue” (p. 10) upon completing his journey from Virginia deep into the American heartland of Nebraska. Eventually coming into contact with a wide range of immigrants, including transplanted Bohemians (Czechs), Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Russians, Jim resists the xenophobia casually expressed by his traveling companion, who believes one is “likely to get diseases from foreigners” (p. 10). This kind of animus against immigrant populations, which became prominent during the 1910s, was voiced by such notorious racist ideologues as Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, who in 1920 claimed that immigrants would “in time drive us out of our own land by mere force of breeding” (quoted in Michaels, Our America, p. 28). Arrayed against such nativist views were figures like Randolph Bourne, who strove to remind his fellow Americans that “the Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant.” In his important 1916 essay “Trans-National America,” Bourne even went so far as to challenge the widely accepted notion that immigrants should be completely assimilated into the “melting pot” of American society: “America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors” (p. 262). In certain respects anticipating contemporary notions of a multicultural society, Bourne believed that the United States would be strengthened by immigrant communities that preserved their ethnic autonomy.

In her prairie novels, Cather echoes this conviction that immigration would enrich the nation, and this may be one reason why Bourne was so enthusiastic when he reviewed My Ántonia. O Pioneers! and My Ántonia are set among the immigrant farmers who struggle to cultivate the “Divide,” the region near Red Cloud, Nebraska, to which Cather herself relocated with her family in 1883. In both novels, Cather favors the children of immigrants who preserve their parents’ way of life. Alexandra Bergson, the Swedish heroine of O Pioneers!, endures lean years to become one of the most prosperous farmers in the county, but instead of Americanizing like her unappealing brothers, she holds onto Scandinavian folkways. Her home is furnished with “things her mother brought from Sweden” (Early Novels and Stories, p. 178), her housekeepers are Swedish girls looking to marry her Swedish farmhands, and she protects Ivar, the old Norwegian man “despised” by assimilated members of the family because, as he puts it, “I do not wear shoes, because I do not cut my hair, and because I have visions” (p. 182).

In some ways this persistence of the “old country” as a cultural force is even more striking in My Ántonia. At the end of the novel, Antonia presides over a large family steeped in the culture of her native Bohemia. Like herself, her husband, Anton Cuzak, is a Bohemian immigrant, and since Bohemian is the language spoken at home, their children do not learn English until they go to school.