Cutter, whom Cather describes, memorably, as having a face "the very colour and shape of anger."

But My Ántonia also holds an important place in American immigrant fiction; it taps into a communal sense of America as an admixture of rich heritages. Many people now alive, my own family included, share the story of the English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants who came to the Great Plains by way of New England or Virginia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I suspect that Willa Cather would be fascinated by contemporary novels about more recent immigrants by the Asian-American and Hispanic writers who are currently enriching American literature. No doubt some of these writers have learned much from Cather about what it means, as a novelist, to have fidelity to a time and a place. My Ántonia concerns, as do many of these recent books, coming of age in a new place and culture; it also explores childhood affections, dreams once held dear, in the light of an adult awareness of displacement. Cather herself epitomizes an all too American displacement; her best writing years, including the period in which she wrote her first three Nebraska novels, were spent in New York City, where she had gone in 1906 to work as an associate editor at McClure's, one of the most popular magazines of the day.

In many ways the world of My Ántonia is still with us, a neglected but significant part of America. While Cather witnessed the drastic changes that were occurring on the Plains in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, from the first to the second and third generations of immigrants, a writer now living on the Plains would note another kind of change: Like most small towns in the region, Cather's Red Cloud, Nebraska, has been losing population ever since she wrote about it. Its population surged to nearly 2,000 in the 1890s, and is down to some 1,200 people today.

In a prophetic 1923 essay on Nebraska, Willa Cather noted with unease that the children of the immigrants, the second generation to farm the Plains, "were reared amid hardships, and it is perhaps natural that they should be very much interested in material comfort, in buying whatever is expensive and ugly." She saw rural Nebraskans succumbing to the enticements of manufacture, the beginnings of a consumer society, and commented, "The generation now in the driver's seat hates to make anything, wants to live and die in an automobile, scudding past those acres where the old men used to follow the long cornrows up and down. They want to buy everything ready-made: clothes, food, education, music, pleasure." She wonders if the generations of the future will be fooled. Will they believe, she asks, "that to live easily is to live happily?" A relevant question for any thoughtful person in a consumer society, but one that has special resonance for those who still farm and ranch on the Great Plains and ponder the transition from families engaged in agriculture to corporations practicing agribusiness.

The cities of America contain a Great Plains diaspora, full of people who, like Jim Burden, left the small towns and farms of their youth for an easier life, who felt that they had to leave in order to make their way in the world. Like him, they are haunted by the past and by the painful ambiguities of their relationships with the friends and relatives who remained on the land. A lawyer in Fargo, North Dakota, the first in his family to graduate from college, told me recently that his family back in western North Dakota was enormously proud of his success, and would never forgive him for leaving. I picture this diaspora as people distractedly watching CNN in city apartments, but containing deep within themselves a vision of the long, "sunflower-bordered roads" in farm country, that had seemed to Jim Burden "the roads to freedom."

The doctrinaire socialist and Marxist critics of the 1930s came to see Cather's work (as well as that of Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and other writers depicting small-town America) as reactionary. Granville Hicks, in a devastating piece entitled "The Case against Willa Cather," decries her turning away from "contemporary life as it is," which he clearly envisions to be "our industrial civilization." His argument holds only if you are willing to dismiss the rural and small-town people of the Great Plains as unreal or irrelevant, to see their lives as not worthy of a writer's attention, an attitude long prevalent in American literature which has only recently begun to change.

It is precisely Cather's allegiance to her subject, her thoroughly realistic picture of the lives of Nebraska homesteaders even as she employs what one critic derisively termed "heroic idealism," that makes My Ántonia so remarkable. Her famous image of a plough, "magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, [standing] out against the sun," is anything but romantic when taken in the context of Ántonia Shimerda's difficult life. Visiting her after an absence of twenty years, after tragedies and disappointments have come to them both, Jim Burden finds Ántonia at the center of a thriving family, enormously proud of the fruit orchards she has brought out of nothing. The reader knows what her victories have cost her, and stands amazed with Burden as he says, "Whatever else was gone, Ántonia had not lost the fire of life."

Cather's depiction in My Ántonia of the situation of rural and small-town women constitutes another form of realism that many of her contemporary critics missed. The vulnerability of young women, especially poor country girls, to sexual betrayal, to scandal and censure in late-nineteenth-century society, informs much of the book. Cather also makes a sophisticated commentary on the distinctions that began to emerge between country people and town people in her youth. Burden's disappointment with town life, where "the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched," in comparison to life on the farms surely reflects Cather's own experience. When she was twelve years old, her family moved from their unsuccessful farm to Red Cloud, where her father set up a loan and mortgage business.

Cather's nonconformity was much gossiped about in Red Cloud—she frequently dressed in men's clothing and had the outlandish ambition to become a doctor; she also studied Latin in her attic study. Like Ántonia, who had thought nothing of having Jim feel the biceps she'd developed from doing heavy labor on the farm, Cather did not hesitate to work out of doors in "a man's job"—delivering mail on horseback. On moving into town, she, like Jim Burden, no doubt noted with scorn that a town girl's soft muscles "seemed to ask but one thing—not to be disturbed." When Jim describes the "guarded mode of existence" in town as "like living under a tyranny," he speaks a truth about humanity that we know all too well in the late twentieth century. The well-guarded conformity of the many not only stifles the independent spirit, it can destroy it. This aspect of the novel may offer a guide to placing My Ántonia in the current debate on diversity in American culture.



"Practicing fiction" proved to be Cather's means of survival, her way through a world that both rewarded and castigated her intelligence and independent spirit. Critics have often commented on the fact that Jim Burden, in many senses, stands in for Willa Cather: she, too, came to Nebraska from Virginia as a child; she, too, eventually lived and worked in New York City. Cather's appropriation of a male narrator was considered daring at the time; in recent years some feminist critics have called it reactionary; others have termed it a liberating act in the days before American women even had the right to vote. I see it as a splendid subversion, amplified in My Ántonia by Cather's creation of strong, memorable female characters.

It has less often been noted that Cather also incorporated large elements of herself into Ántonia, a character known to be based on Cather's childhood friend from the Nebraska countryside, Annie Pavelka. Cather was a notorious tomboy, and surely Ántonia reflects Cather's sentiments when she says, "Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!" She tells Jim, "I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man." But it is worth noting, too, as it says much about Cather's genius for creating a believable, late-nineteenth-century frontier woman, that Ántonia also pursues motherhood with the same innocent vigor.