By its very presence, though, this relatively minor incident reminds the reader of the gender norm, beside which Jim’s acqui escence stands out more sharply. In spite of Jim’s failed attempt to play the lover, he does not recall this as a moment of thwarted desire. Instead, his emotions for Antonia gush forth with an exclamation: “Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she was, oh, she was still my Ántonia!” (p. 135). It is the refreshing honesty of Ántonia’s emotions that Jim remembers, not his inability to transform their friendship into a mature erotic relationship.

Looking back at this moment, then, Jim does not seem at all rueful. And yet Cather closes this chapter of their adolescence with a memory that points toward complex psychological forces at work below the surface of the narrative. In addition to the dances and their erotically charged aftermaths, Jim recalls two recurring dreams he used to have during this period of his life, one about Antonia and another about Lena, her sensuous foil:

Toward morning I used to have pleasant dreams: sometimes Tony and I were out in the country, sliding down straw-stacks as we used to do; climbing up the yellow mountains over and over, and slipping down the smooth sides into soft piles of chaff.

One dream I dreamed a great many times, and it was always the same. I was in a harvest-field full of shocks, and I was lying against one of them. Lena Lingard came across the stubble barefoot, in a short skirt, with a curved reaping-hook in her hand, and she was flushed like the dawn, with a kind of luminous rosiness all about her. She sat down beside me, turned to me with a soft sigh and said, “Now they are all gone, and I can kiss you as much as I like.”

I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Antonia, but I never did (pp. 135-136).

Here Jim does indeed regret that Antonia remains out of erotic reach, but the reader must supply much of the meaning that informs this regret, since Jim remains quite reticent about his inner life. In the first dream, Ántonia is associated with innocent games of childhood in which gender difference seems to be completely absent. They are like two boys at play, especially because Jim calls Antonia “Tony,” the nickname Cather deploys elsewhere in the novel when she wishes to emphasize Ántonia’s androgyny, such as when she works as a field hand on her family’s farm. Cather may be suggesting that this dream represents Jim’s regressive desire to return not only to the presexual world of childhood, but also to the protective, womblike “soft piles of chaff” into which he and Ántonia come to rest. Yet it is impossible to miss the signs that these games are also figures for erotic pleasure, with their emphasis on the activities of “sliding,” “climbing,” and “slipping.” Jim does not seem to be entirely aware of the erotic symbolism, and his frustration appears to stem from the fact that even in his dreams, his desire for Ántonia is censored by unconscious forces that he himself may not comprehend.

In sharp contrast with the dream about Ántonia, the second dream is suffused with the power of feminine sexuality. The explicitly erotic focus on Lena’s physicality—her bare feet, her “short skirt,” her “flushed” appearance—is driven home by her frankly expressed desire to kiss Jim. Although it is perfectly clear why Jim would like to picture Antonia in such an erotic scenario, there is something puzzling about Jim’s apparent lack of awareness that his dream conjoins the “luminous rosiness” of Lena’s sexuality with images of death that are far from “flattering.” The stubble fields and “reaping-hook,” which place Lena into the role of the grim reaper, are unmistakable allusions to mythical symbols of mortality. Exercising her characteristic restraint, Cather conceals as much as she reveals about Jim’s psyche through these dreams. He appears both enticed and threatened by sex, since Lena’s “reaping hook” indicates that on an unconscious level, Jim perceives her as a castrating figure.

In Jim’s reaction to these dreams, he seems oblivious to his own conflicted eroticism, but in one of the more striking episodes of the novel, Cather places Jim in a position in which he has no choice but to be revolted by sexuality. When Jim stands in for Antonia one night at the Cutters’ house, he becomes the victim of a sexual assault that had been meant for her. Finding Jim in Ántonia’s bed, the notorious womanizer Will Cutter is furious, since he had planned to rape Antonia, his “hired girl.” Jim escapes Cutter’s explosive violence, but not without sustaining injuries that he finds extremely embarrassing, presumably because they make him feel as if he himself has been the victim of rape. He is so ashamed that he forces his grandmother to keep the incident a secret, since he is afraid of what “the old men down at the drugstore” (p. 149) would think. Strangely enough, Jim is quite angry at Ántonia, whom he had been trying to protect, because “she had let me in for all this disgustingness” (p. 149). Through this incident, Cather forces Jim to temporarily occupy the position of a woman who becomes the target of male sexuality run amok.

This provocative and peculiar turn in the narrative can be interpreted many different ways. On the one hand, Cather once again emphasizes Jim’s discomfort with sexuality, but she also destabilizes the reader’s perception of gender through a tangled crisscrossing of roles. Jim has once again been feminized, but this time he rebels against the threat to his masculinity. At the same time, however, Cutter’s grotesque masculinity repels Jim, leaving him in a kind of androgynous limbo. Jim, Antonia, and other appealing figures are often portrayed as androgynous characters, but this is the only moment in the novel in which Cather expresses discomfort with even this hybridized gender.

Jim’s relationship with Ántonia is fated to remain asexual, and this status is reinforced by the contrast Cather draws between their friendship and Jim’s dealings with Lena.