Cather thought of Ántonia as her heroine, yet she gives the reader very little access to Ántonia’s inner life, which is only conveyed secondhand through Jim’s perspective. By allowing Jim to control the narrative, Cather distances the reader from Antonia, but it is precisely because Cather wants to imagine a man’s feelings for Ántonia that she wrote the novel from a man’s point of view.

Since Cather herself deliberately blurred the line between autobiography and fiction, her decision to write in a man’s voice raises interesting questions about the connections between My Ántonia and Cather’s sexuality. For many years Cather’s lesbianism was an open secret treated with decorous euphemisms by her critics and biographers. Although it was well known that all of Cather’s intimate relationships were with women, it was not until the 1970s that critics began to speak frankly about Cather’s sexual orientation and its relevance to her fiction. Cather never hid her attachments with women, though she guarded her privacy carefully and shied away from publicly identifying herself as a lesbian. On the other hand, during her adolescence and early years in college she made quite a spectacle of herself by wearing her hair short, dressing in men’s clothing, and calling herself “William.” In addition to flaunting this masculine appearance, she became deeply infatuated with Louise Pound, her fellow student at the University of Nebraska, to whom she wrote what can only be called love letters, several of which survive. Cather’s adult life revolved around two women: Isabelle McClung, the beautiful daughter of a distinguished judge who was Cather’s most intimate companion between 1899 and 1916, and Edith Lewis, a copyeditor at McClure’s and fellow Nebraskan with whom Cather lived for forty years in Manhattan.

Whether or not Cather ever engaged in sexual relations with a woman remains unclear; in fact, some critics view Cather’s relationships as anachronistic examples of the romantic friendships between women that were quite common and socially accepted during the nineteenth century. Yet even a critic like Joan Acocella, who objects to reading Cather’s fiction strictly through the lens of her sexuality, concedes that Cather was “homosexual in her feelings,” though she believes she was “celibate in her actions” (Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, p. 48). What is not in dispute is that Cather felt shocked and betrayed when Isabelle McClung decided to marry the violinist Jan Hambourg in 1916. Cather eventually restored a friendship with Isabelle, but she considered the marriage “a devastating loss” (Robinson, Willa, p. 205). Since it was only several months after this personal catastrophe that Cather began writing My Ántonia, it is tempting to read the powerful sense of loss that informs Jim Burden’s recollections as a reflection of Cather’s depressed mood in the wake of Isabelle’s marriage. In the most passionate scene between Jim and Antonia, Jim recalls parting from Ántonia for what would turn out to be a twenty-year separation:

About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women’s faces, at the very bottom of my memory (p. 193).

Given the knowledge of Cather’s loss of Isabelle, it is hard not to see the resemblance between this loss and Jim’s separation from Antonia, especially because, as we have seen, Jim is in many ways Cather’s fictional surrogate. At a time when Cather felt cut off from her intimate companion, she may have decided to speak through the persona of Jim Burden in order to more openly express her desire for women. Like Jim, preoccupied with “the shadows of women’s faces,” she must have felt that life was “growing darker and darker.”

On one level, then, Jim’s affections are a fictional echo of Cather’s emotions for women, but it would be a mistake to simplify My Ántonia into nothing more than a covert confession of homosexual desire. By leaving Jim’s inner life only partially exposed, Cather instead invites the reader to interpret his sometimes puzzling behavior in several ways, including the possibility that he is in conflict with his desires. My Ántonia is about a romance that never happens, and one of the most interesting things about the novel is that Cather prevents her speaker from disclosing why he never marries Antonia or becomes her lover. In fact, he himself may not know the reason. Even the title, which promises an homage to “my Ántonia,” the narrator’s beloved, raises the expectation of a love affair. Yet in spite of all the conventional signs that Jim is indeed infatuated with his lively Czech neighbor, Cather never lets the incipient romance come to fruition. At the very end of the novel, Jim finally offers his most explicit declaration of love, though instead of telling Antonia, he addresses the children Antonia has had with another man, her husband, Anton Cuzak: “You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there’s nobody like her” (p. 207). With this statement, Cather makes overt what Jim’s memoir often implies and thus confirms the reader’s suspicion that Jim has all along been in love with Antonia. Yet because this statement comes after a twenty-year separation, and because it is not spoken to Ántonia, it only serves to underscore the unconsummated state of their romance.

An intimacy quickly springs up between Jim and Antonia shortly after they arrive in the farming region outside Black Hawk. Ántonia plays the immigrant eager to succeed in her adopted country and, in the first scene between them, she impatiently asks Jim to teach her English. Jim, all but ten, readily complies; after all, he is completely captivated by her brown eyes, which are “big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood” (p. 20). As the months pass, their bond intensifies as they learn to love the wild landscape so new to both of them, but Jim also grows irritated with the fourteen-year-old girl’s “superior tone” and longs to prove his nascent manhood.