In My Ántonia Cather moves smoothly and spectacularly from the small detail to an exalted vision of the landscape and its possibilities. Not long after ten-year-old Jim Burden arrives in Nebraska, having been orphaned in Virginia, he mulls over his grandmother's solemn instruction never to go to the garden without a stick for clubbing rattlesnakes. Then he muses: "Alone, I should never have found the garden.... I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away ... if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass."



Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873, near the town of Winchester, Virginia, in the North Neck region of the state, where her ancestors had farmed since the late eighteenth century. She was the first of seven children. Cather was nine when her family moved to Nebraska, following her father's parents and his brother, who had emigrated to the frontier during the 1870s. Cather's family left behind a large and prosperous farm, a house that Cather remembered as roomy and cheerful, and, of course, the lush foliage of Virginia. Her family settled on a farm near Red Cloud, Nebraska, which had been founded in 1870, and by the time Willa Cather arrived, it had a population of about 1,000 a school, and a small opera house.

The near-treeless countryside could not have been less like Virginia, and the drastic change took a toll on the young Willa Cather. In a newspaper interview following the publication of O Pioneers! Cather said that the new landscape had evoked a sense of "erasure of personality." In My Ántonia, Jim Burden says of his first glimpse of Nebraska, "There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made." During the twenty-mile trip by horse-drawn wagon from town to his grandparents' farm, Jim looks out at the starry night and says of his deceased parents, "I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither.... Between that earth and sky I felt erased, blotted out."

Jim Burden serves Cather well as a narrator of the land. As he is settling in with his grandparents, he notes with wonder that theirs is the only wooden house for miles around, and that their neighbors live in houses made of sod. His sense of being obliterated by the landscape remains strong: "Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy red grass, most of it as tall as I." But he begins to find beauty in the sea of grass, its red "the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running." In an elegant phrase that became Cather's epitaph—it is etched on her tombstone—Burden comes to accept the power of the land over him, asserting, "That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."

Cather said in a 1921 interview that the years from eight to fifteen were particularly formative in any writer's life; clearly, for her, it was the experience of moving to Nebraska and absorbing its pioneer culture that first inspired her as a writer and gave us the most beloved of her novels. At the age of eleven Cather obtained employment delivering mail to the farms around Red Cloud, which gave her unparalleled access to the talk and the lives of her immigrant neighbors. The knowledge she gained about them, however, set her apart from the other English-speaking settlers. In a 1923 essay entitled "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle," she says of her own people that they were kind to their neighbors from Europe but also "provincial and utterly without curiosity" about the Old World cultures from which these people had come. My Ántonia reveals the subtle ironies of a social milieu in which, as noted in Doris Grumbach's 1988 foreword to this novel, the Czechs, Swedes, and Norwegians "were looked down upon for their poverty but were lonely for a culture which was, in many cases, richer than their American neighbors'."

Ántonia Shimerda's father is a tragic case in point. A cultured man, a violinist, he cannot bear the weight of the hardships he encounters in Nebraska—living with his family in a crude dugout and taking turns wearing the one overcoat they own. Lacking the skills to manage a farm, he clings pathetically to his Old World wardrobe, emerging from the earthen dugout in a coat and "a knitted grey vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral pin." Mr. Shimerda was a common type among Plains homesteaders. My own great-grandfather Heyward, a proper Englishman, once refused to evacuate a South Dakota parsonage that was on fire until he was fully dressed.

Jim Burden notes that Ántonia is the only one of the Shimerda family "who could rouse the old man from the torpor in which he seemed to live." When Jim examines a gun brought over from the Old Country, he finds Mr. Shimerda looking at him with "his faraway look that always made me feel as if I were down at the bottom of a well." Jim senses that his grandmother, too, is "so often thinking of things that were far away." This homesickness is an important link between the native-born American homesteaders and the more recent immigrants; it helps them bridge their differences. When Shimerda, overcome by emotion, suddenly kneels and prays before the Burdens' Christmas tree, Jim's grandfather somewhat nervously bows his head, "thus Protestantizing the atmosphere." After Shimerda has taken his leave, thanking the Burdens and blessing Jim with the sign of the cross, Jim's grandfather tells him simply, '"The prayers of all good people are good.'"

This scene underscores a reality of frontier existence: Circumstances of deprivation and isolation often deprive prejudice of the ignorance and distrust that it needs in order to thrive. By the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was active on the Plains, preaching a virulent anti-Catholicism, but in both O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, Cather offers us a glimpse of a more innocent time. Even now, in the remotest places on the Plains, places that the larger society does not notice or care about, I've found that country people can often bridge cultural gaps with ease; they know that theological or ideological distinctions matter far less than the needs of the people at hand.



In writing about a novel such as My Ántonia, which has long been considered a classic of American literature, I am tempted to play the devil's advocate and ask a simple question, one that any fifteen-year-old assigned to read the novel might ask: Why read it now? What possible relevance can it have for life in urban, post-modern America? One can point, of course, to the many small delights of observation that give the book its rich texture, the "nimble air" of spring that releases the settlers from the fierce grip of winter, or Burden's observation that on a quiet night "it seemed as if we could hear the corn growing ... under the stars one caught a faint crackling ... where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and green." There are also people we recognize: the suspicious Mrs. Shimerda, unable to recognize that what she considers her peasant canniness is a self-defeating form of paranoia; the pompous and cruel Wick Cutter, "full of moral maxims for boys," who rapes his hired girls; and the hateful Mrs.