 |
| Photo: Jorn Olsen |
-- By Tom Phillips
Originally published in The Willa Cather Review, Vol. 66, number 2. Summer 2025
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is often read as a lyrical meditation on America’s frontier past. However, Cather defended herself stoutly against charges of escapism, or “supine Romanticism.” She believed in Art as Revelation. Alongside her paean to the prairie is a sharp critique of middle-American society and a vision of the conflicts that would roil this country to this day, over issues of ancestry, color, gender, language, and class.
The story of the Shimerdas illustrates the paradox of immigration–America’s xenophobic openness, a “nation of immigrants” that fears and shuns foreigners. This is the context of Ántonia’s father’s suicide, and her own hard-won independence. In the end she builds a little Bohemia, a burgeoning family farm at a distance from town. Speaking her native language with her children, she is worn down but not defeated by her struggles with the English-speaking establishment of Black Hawk, Nebraska. Meanwhile, Jim Burden’s retreat to the East--to Harvard Law and moneyed Manhattan–conveys the chasm between coastal elites and the agricultural heartland. The legacy of slavery also makes a central appearance in the plot. And the whole is shadowed by an indigenous civilization all but erased by America’s “manifest destiny.”
At the same time, the long, loopy romance between Jim and Ántonia--unconsummated but never abandoned–suggests the potential for reconciliation. And Cather’s constant evocation of the landscape places all her characters on common ground. As Lena Lingard says, “it ain’t my prairie.” The beauty and mystery of the land belongs to all; sun and wind diffuse the strains of a pluralist culture where change is rapid and trust often fleeting.
Cather’s fictional Black Hawk, Nebraska, lies at the western edge of the American Midlands, where the fertile plains fade into dry grasslands and desert. Jim perceives something like this on his first walk out to his grandmother’s garden: “The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little further there would be only sun and sky…” (Book I, Part II).
In his provocative re-mapping of North America into eleven regional cultures, Colin Woodard calls the Midlands arguably the most “American” of his American Nations. A vast T-formation from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains, flanking out to Texas and Canada, the Midlands was the destination for a middle class that migrated en masse from Germany, Scandinavia, and central Europe, seeking peace and freedom from tyrannical regimes. They followed a trail to the Midwest laid down by peace-seeking Quakers beginning in the 17th Century. Politically moderate, ethnically diverse, focused on community and prosperity rather than ideology, the region has been a key swing vote in national debates ever since the Civil War.
Renaming her hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, as Black Hawk, she traded the name of an indigenous leader with celestial associations for that of a fierce predator. In so doing, she begins to reveal the dark side of what Jim first perceives as Eden.
---------------------------------
In Book Two of My Ántonia, “The Hired Girls,” Cather anatomizes the social structure of Black Hawk through the eyes of Jim, now a high-school valedictorian who can’t wait to get out of town. Jim roams the darkened streets, “scowling at the little, sleeping houses” and their owners’ “guarded mode of existence” (Book II, Part XII).
Social standing in Black Hawk was based not on what you did, but what people said about you. Whispers and rumors shaped your image, and guilt by association was assumed. The result, to Jim, was a “like living under a tyranny. People’s speech, their voices, their very glances became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.” He says the citizens of Black Hawk “tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.”
The business of agriculture is the town’s raison d’etre; bankers and financiers top the social ladder, with the loan-shark Wick Cutter lurking in their shadows. Merchants hawk farm tools on credit; men’s conversation is dominated by markets--and debts. As Ántonia laments to her younger friend Jim, in this country there is no “beautiful talk”—about art, nature, God, or life (Book II, Part XIV).
In public school, Jim learns to fight, curse, and tease the little girls. He is saved from “utter savagery” by his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Harling, a Norwegian-born matron who becomes Ántonia’s employer. Industrious and efficient, Mrs. Harling still manages to practice her piano daily and can narrate the plots of great operas as she goes. Mrs. Harling, her four children, and Ántonia are Jim’s main companions, except when her husband is at home. An enterprising grain merchant, Christian Harling demands a quiet house and his wife’s total attention, so Mrs. Harling drops everything to wait on him, day and night.
The “hired girls” are the most respectable of the lower classes. Moving to town from the farm to earn money for their families, these immigrant housemaids are expected to live up to the standards of their hosts and employers. Below them are the working poor—railroad men, deliverymen, farmhands, and “ragged little boys” from the depot. Finally come the tramps and derelicts—wanderers and lunatics, physically or mentally defective.
Jim marvels at the durability of this structure—the “respect for respectability” that allows bankers’ sons to lust after the hired girls, but not to be seen with them (Book II, Part IX). He also notes the absence of nobility—perhaps recalling a notion of aristocracy from his early days in Virginia. The only nobles he hears of now are in the stories Ántonia tells of old Bohemia. Jim thinks Mr. Harling bears a faint resemblance to them, with his caped overcoat and diamond pinky ring. Yet there is also something thuggish about this proud businessman, “autocratic and imperial in his ways” (Book II, Part III).
Dead center in the novel, at the dead end of a midwestern winter, another kind of nobility appears. And for one night, the social structure of Black Hawk is overthrown.
The hero is named Samson, professionally known as Blind D’Arnault. Born and raised a ragged little boy—a “hideous little pickaninny” on a plantation in the Deep South, he is now a world-renowned musician and guest at Black Hawk’s chief hotel (Book II, Part VII). Mrs. Harling has known him for years, and she lets Ántonia know there will surely be music in the hotel parlor that Saturday night. Ántonia goes to visit her waitress friend Tiny Soderball, and Jim goes along to watch.
He immediately notices an air of “unusual freedom.” Mrs. Gardener, the proprietor, is off in Omaha for a week, leaving her husband Johnnie in charge. Mrs. Gardener–AKA Molly Bawn–is described as “tall, dark, severe, with something Indian-like in the rigid immobility of her face” (Book II, Part VII). Like Mr. Harling, she wears diamonds.
When Jim arrives, Anson Kirkpatrick from Chicago–“Marshall Field’s man”--is warming up the grand piano. Jim calls him “a dapper little Irishman … homely as a monkey” (Book II, Part V). Jim’s unflattering description hints at the status of Irish Americans, who collaborated, competed and battled with African Americans on the bottom rungs of the social ladder. Also in the party is Willie O’Reilly from Kansas City, a salesman of musical instruments. These Irishmen step up to choreograph the revelry that ensues.
Johnnie Gardener comes in directing D’Arnault—who would “never consent to be led.” A “heavy, bulky mulatto,” he enters tapping the floor with a gold-headed cane, sporting a gold watch and a topaz ring, a gift from “some Russian nobleman” (Book II, Part VII).
He speaks, and Jim hears “the soft, amiable negro voice … with the note of docile subservience.” The narration slips into a heavily stereotyped vision of D’Arnault as a pin-headed idiot savant, a “kindly and happy” son of slavery. Jim declares, “It was the happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.”
This is a grotesque caricature, and some critics have blamed it on Cather’s presumed racism. However, that ignores the key distinction between author and narrator—as well as clear signs, beginning with his pride and his gold, that D’Arnault’s “subservience” is a pose, designed to put white audiences at ease.
“Seems like we might have some good old plantation songs tonight,” croons D’Arnault as he launches into Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home.” Jim might not know, but Cather certainly does, that Stephen Foster was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his songs were composed not for the plantation but the music hall. This was minstrelsy, America’s first popular music—evoking an idyllic South, an antebellum Eden invented for the stage by Irishmen in blackface and Blacks themselves.
Jim listens raptly as they sing “one Negro melody after another.” Then, amid a “crashing waltz,” Kirkpatrick peeps over the transom and spots Ántonia and three more “hired girls” waltzing in the dining room. O’Reilly piles chairs on tables, and the two Irishmen coax the girls to come and dance with “a roomful of lonesome men on the other side of the partition.” Johnnie Gardener protests, saying his wife will find out. But the Irish laugh and tell him they’ll make it all right.
At a word from Kirkpatrick, D’Arnault “spread himself out over the piano,” shining with perspiration. Jim is awestruck: “He looked like some glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood.” As for the hired girls: “They had the fresh color of their country upbringing, and in their eyes …’the light of youth.’” Afterwards, Jim remembers lingering at the Harlings’ gate with Ántonia, “until the restlessness was slowly chilled out of us.”
Jim is mute, perhaps clueless, on the cause of this restlessness—D’Arnault’s unleashing of sexual energy and upending of the social order. For one night only, a “colored aristocracy” has called the shots, in concert with Irish revelers, while immigrant serving-girls stooped to dance with a roomful of lonely businessmen. The owner is gone but acknowledged by all as the supreme authority—the diamond-flashing, “Indian-like” Molly Bawn.
D'Arnault is the only African American in the book, and he disappears as quickly as he crashed into the story. So do the Irish, along with Molly and her suggestion of noble indigenous blood. But critics beginning with Elizabeth Ammons have argued that D’Arnault’s “strong, savage blood” haunts the entire plot— embodying the African American cultural presence that has been there all along. Toni Morrison called it the “ghost in the machine” of American literature— a “dark and abiding presence” full of “fear and longing.”
With the D’Arnault episode as its “pulsating center,” My Ántonia can be read as Revelation. Its upending of the social ladder foretells a series of earthquakes—convulsive shocks to the patriarchy, beginning as Cather wrote her book in the years around World War One. They include women’s suffrage, Prohibition, the market crash of ‘29, the Great Depression and the New Deal—plus a social and cultural revolution in the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the development of popular music and dance from minstrelsy to ragtime, to Jazz, Rock, and today’s Rap and Hip-Hop.
_________________________
Dancing drives the narrative through the rest of the “The Hired Girls.” A troupe of Italians arrives with a summer dance pavilion; Mrs. Vanni, the teacher, is a “dark, stout woman,” with a long gold watch-chain on her bosom. Dressed in lavender and black lace, her black hair piled up with red combs, she smiles with “strong, crooked yellow teeth.” Like D’Arnault she is a contradiction in colors: black, red and yellow mark her social inferiority, while gold sets her above the pallid crowd of “little girls in white dresses,” their partners, and their parents (Book II, Part VIII).
On a level dancing floor, Ántonia is discovered by respectable young men, and the hired girls become a “a menace to the social order.” As Jim observes, “their beauty stood out too boldly against a conventional background.” One summer night Mr. Harling hears “scuffling on the back porch, and then the sound of a vigorous slap” (Part X). Ántonia has fought off one of the town’s leading young men–one engaged to marry his employer’s daughter the next week–as he forced a kiss on her.
Mr. Harling cares only about what people will say. “You’ve been going with girls who have a reputation for being free and easy, and now you have that reputation, too,” he tells Ántonia, with an ultimatum—quit dancing or quit his house. Ántonia’s banishment is the beginning of her downfall. She goes off to marry a railroad conductor and comes back unmarried, abandoned, and pregnant with his child.
Book II ends with social order restored in Black Hawk, but the energy unleashed by D’Arnault and the Vannis cannot be contained. The hired girls take it with them, back to the farm or to points West. Tiny Soderball and Lena Lingard wind up in San Francisco, each single, free, and rich.
Ántonia survives, returns to the farm to raise her daughter, and eventually marries a Bohemian friend. With Anton Cuzak she raises a large family and cultivates a burgeoning farm---a pastoral work of art, composed over time of all she loves: people and animals, trees and gardens, music, love itself.
As a pioneer, Jim is a bust. He goes to the new University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where he falls into a sleepy affair with Lena Lingard, who is learning the fashion trade in the state capital. Lena distracts him from his studies. After his sophomore year, he is hauled off to Harvard by his literary mentor, a dying poet named Gaston Cleric. Jim ends up a corporate lawyer in New York, married without children to a socialite who “has her own fortune and lives her own life.” In middle age, Jim is animated mainly by his work for a western railroad, and a renewed connection with Ántonia. This desexualized friendship may be the best he can do for himself, suggests Anne Goodwyn Jones, given his childhood traumas and the “oppressive models of manhood” he encountered in the South and West. Blanche Gelfant, an earlier feminist critic, was harsher. In a landmark 1971 essay she “outed” him as an unreliable narrator, “afraid of sex, afraid of women, afraid of growing up,” in love with his own memories of boyhood.
Jim’s failings reflect his coming of age in Black Hawk—where “every natural instinct was bridled by caution” (Book II, Part XII). Though contemptuous of this way of life, Jim is not immune from it. Compared with D’Arnault, a “savage god of pleasure,” or the leprechaun-like Kirkpatrick; the dancing Italians, or the “free and easy” Bohemians, Jim is a mouse in the kitchen. Watching D’Arnault, he sees “a negro enjoying himself as only a negro can.” Watching Ántonia, he sees “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races” (Book V, Part 1).
Jim lives through others. He is transported by D’Arnault’s “barbarous and wonderful” music-making, by Ántonia’s leaping into life and love, even by an “infirm old actress” on tour in Dumas’s Camille--“a woman who could not be taught,” who communicated though “a crude natural force” (Book III, Part III). Jim’s own force is repressed beyond reach. Unable to mourn his dead parents or change his privileged, outcast state, he grows up alone, amid social tyranny in a cultural wasteland, cut off from both the Old World and the New.
Still, Jim retains his air of superiority, the notion that he is more civilized than others. If D’Arnault embodies the Blackness hidden in American literature, Jim is the whiteness that hides it---the educated elite class that creates “races” for others, patronizes them, and experiences its passions through them.
“Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us,” Ántonia tells Jim at the close of Book I. In Book V, the conclusion, it is Jim who comes to pay homage to her. The scene harks back to the summer when she taught him to dance, “against and around the hard-and-fast beat of the music” (Book II, Part XII). When you “spun out into the floor with Tony,” Jim recalls, you “set out every time upon a new adventure.” If his Destiny is no more than to follow her, befriend her family and take part in their abundant lives—at least he has realized it, come back to it, and found it good as gold.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips
Photo: Jorn Olsen
No comments:
Post a Comment