Written by Liz Boccolini
This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, which depicts life on the rural farms of Nebraska in the late 1800s. The story is narrated by Jim Burden, who moves from Virginia to Nebraska as a boy to live with his grandparents. On the way, he meets the Shimerda family, also on their way to Nebraska. The Shimerdas, including their daughter Ántonia, come to the United States from Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic). Jim strikes up a friendship with Ántonia and begins teaching her and her younger sister English. Together they face the struggles of adjusting to an unforgiving environment, an experience drawn from Cather’s own life.
Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873 in Virginia, the oldest of seven children. At the age of nine, Cather moved with her family to join her grandparents, aunt, and uncle in Webster County, Nebraska. Cather later described the trip in an interview, saying, “The land was open range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything—it was a kind of erasure of personality.
“I would not know how much a child’s life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it, if I had not been jerked away from all these and thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron.”
Jim Burden describes his trip similarly, saying, “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”
While life is difficult for everyone on the untamed lands of Nebraska, the Shimerdas have no advantages. They lack clothes for the bitter cold, and Ántonia and her sister, Yulka, sleep in a hole dug out of the wall. But most of all, they seem to lack the know-how to survive in a place where nothing is guaranteed.
“Where’s a body to begin, with these people? They’re wanting in everything, and most of all in horse-sense [common sense]. Nobody can give ‘em that, I guess. Jimmy, here, is about as able to take over a homestead as they are,” says Jim’s grandmother.
But Ántonia and her siblings find their way. After the death of their father, Ántonia and her older brother, Ambrosch, take up the task of ploughing the land, caring for the animals, and maintaining the homestead. When the Burdens move to the closest town, Black Hawk, Ántonia comes to work for their neighbors, the Harlings. Many other girls from the surrounding farm communities come to Black Hawk to work and earn money for their families. These girls, often with little or no schooling, either the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, can do little else but work as maids, seamstresses, or laundry girls.
Although some in town look down upon the “hired girls,” Jim admires them. “Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little schooling themselves….The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new.” These girls gained a confidence and freedom that some of the girls raised in town did not.
Growing up as they did also gives the girls perspective on their own lives and the wisdom to make decisions for themselves. Lena Lingard, Jim and Ántonia’s childhood friend, tells Jim she does not want to get married and have a family, a surprising sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “[Lena] told me she couldn’t remember a time when she was so little that she wasn’t lugging a heavy baby about, helping to wash for babies, trying to keep their little chapped hands and faces clean. She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.”
“You can’t tell me anything about family life,” Lena says. “I’ve had plenty to last me.”
What’s lovely about My Ántonia is that the main characters each become successful in their own ways. Lena becomes a well-known dressmaker and moves to San Francisco, keeping her promise to herself that she would never marry. After graduating from college, Jim becomes a lawyer. Ántonia marries, has children, and runs a successful homestead of her own in Nebraska. Overcoming difficult beginnings and trying situations is a timeless inspiration, which is part of why My Ántonia has remained a popular read. In addition, to people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and continental Europe, which have some of the highest foreign-born populations in the world, it may remind us a bit of ourselves or of our ancestors who started over in a different land. Personally, it makes me grateful that my grandparents and great-grandparents did the hard part of leaving Europe for the United States, working two or three jobs while learning English and raising families.
Finally, My Ántonia takes place in a time where things would almost certainly be better for the children than it had been for the parents, which is not a guarantee today. Perhaps, for us readers, it is comforting to look back on hard times knowing they have passed, knowing that the characters’ futures can only be full of hope.
