my ántonia: the feminist farmer · Apr 14, 04:29 PM by j.
Above my desk sits a stack of books upon a shelf, chosen to inspire my current novel; they lay on their sides, lengthwise, so that their titles can haunt me clearly. The pile at a glance: a logging memoir, an historical book on Maine, a handful of short story collections where the protagonists are men and the settings are wooden (Faulkner, Pancake). Willa Cather’s My Ántonia was chosen in particular for Cather’s well-known capacity for the language of nature. Just a few pages in: “As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie 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.” Lovely. I can only hope that her style has had some effect on my own work, but the truth is that while reading, I found myself hung up on an issue beyond language.
In the prologue, Jim, the novel’s narrator, delivers a manuscript to a friend. “Here is the thing about Ántonia,” he says. “Do you still want to read it? I finished it last night. I didn’t take the time to arrange it; I simply wrote down pretty much all that her name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn’t any form. It hasn’t any title, either.” This unpublished manuscript – which, cleverly, the reader begins once he or she turns the page – gives identity to the hard female faces often found in old black-and-white photographs such as the one above. Here her name is Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian transplant through whom the quintessential pioneer woman is given both form and title. This gradual definition actually serves as kind of a neat parallel to America’s early western settlers. What I mean is: those guys really had to wing it. As Jim points out upon his childhood arrival in the then desolate Nebraska: “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” America was but a baby, and the largely untapped western plains represented the harsh promise of possibility. Like the prologue’s manuscript, it had neither form nor title, and therefore no identity, not until the mish-mash of people who tilled its earth inadvertently blessed it with one.
Inasmuch as this novel follows the bloom of Jim’s relationship with Ántonia, it journals the daily toils of life for the men, and perhaps more importantly, the women who endured this pioneer era. While it is largely Ántonia’s story, however, it is not her voice we hear. Back in the prologue, Jim is unhappy with his manuscript’s lack of name. “He went into the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote across the face of the portfolio ‘Ántonia.’ He frowned at this moment, then prefixed another word, making it ‘My Ántonia.’ That seemed to satisfy him.” This may be a small nudge on Cather’s part. I imagine her saying, pay attention! You are learning this woman’s story, but it is through a man’s eyes. And it’s true. So much of this novel is Jim’s view of Ántonia, his watchful gaze revealing her transformation from exotic childhood playmate to beautiful young woman who, because of familial circumstance, must reject school in order to work the fields. Jim describes her in the act. “She wore the boots her father had so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as brown as a sailor’s. Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like the bole of a tree out of the turf.” In the field, Ántonia wears men’s clothes, and her arms and throat – archetypal feminine features – are compared to those of a sailor’s. On this day, when Jim tries to convince her to return to school, she rebuffs him. “I ain’t got time to learn. I can work like mans now…School is all right for little boys. I help make this land one good farm.” Jim doesn’t like this new Ántonia, or rather, he doesn’t know what to do with her. In his mind – and perhaps in the minds of most men at this time – he believes that women belong in the kitchen, cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. This is further proved later, when Jim’s crush on Ántonia is revived only when she leaves the family farm for a job in town, cooking and cleaning for his neighbor. Here she becomes lovely again, wearing dresses and letting boys walk her home after the Friday night dances. It’s as if she can only be attractive, be a woman, when she’s nestled safely into the stereotype of the time. (And, side note, I can’t find any definitive etymological proof, but I’d like to believe that the phrase “working out” in the fields has in some part evolved into “working out” at the gym; something once so anti-feminine has become a necessity for contemporary female attraction via the male gaze. Oh, the irony. But back to the novel.) Jim soon leaves Nebraska to attend college out of state, while Ántonia is essentially left by her fiancé at the altar, pregnant and alone. It seems as though the stereotypical female role doesn’t work for all the girls.
Years pass, and the two friends lose touch. Jim leads a scholarly and well-traveled life, eventually landing in New York City as a railroad executive. (“He loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches.”) When Jim returns to visit Ántonia in Nebraska, he finds her back in the country with a farm of her own, a loving husband and ten children. He is struck by her appearance. “She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last…It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.” As much as this novel is about everything I’ve already discussed, it’s also about Jim’s (a.k.a. the male’s) ability, in the end, to accept Ántonia for who she is and where she belongs. Through the book that Jim writes about her, Ántonia slowly comes to embody that pioneer spirit, in both the American and feminist understanding of the term.
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