Destiny's Dance: Willa Cather's MY ANTONIA as American History and Revelation

 

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.                                       

Calling 9/11 Again

---By Tom Phillips 

I wrote this in 2021, re-read it today, and didn't change a single word.  

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Photo by Jesse Mills

Out for a late-night walk this week, I saw what’s become a familiar sight in September — a beacon shining up from the former site of the World Trade Center. This lonely blue beam seemed a symbol of the narrow view Americans have taken on the events of twenty years ago.

I knew people who were killed in the World Trade Center that day, and others who barely escaped. The thousands of civilians who died were victims of an atrocious war crime. Even so, I agree with those who say it’s time to re-examine what happened and why.

The 9/11 assault on America was not an isolated act of “terrorism.” It was a shot heard round the world, as momentous as Lexington and Concord — -the opening battle in a clash of civilizations. It’s a war that was long in coming, still going on, and which we are inexorably losing.

The George W. Bush administration was warned of the 9/11 attacks by US intelligence which it chose to ignore. But the public had been warned much earlier— in a 1993 essay by a Harvard historian. In the journal Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington wrote that the next world war would be a “clash of civilizations” — a counter-raid by conservative Muslim and Confucian societies against America’s world empire.

Huntington’s essay was hastily dismissed by other historians. In a follow-up issue of Foreign Affairs, middle-east maven Fouad Ajami insisted that world wars could only be fought by state powers. Ajami later became a supporter of the US invasion of Iraq, which was in line with his theory but detached from reality. The reality is that the United States is the leader not of a free world, but a failed world, and its enemies are those who don’t want to live in it.

Our nation was founded on a unique phrase — the “pursuit of happiness.” Thomas Jefferson’s declaration was based on English philosopher John Locke, who argued for the rights of “life, liberty and property.” Jefferson preferred a final phrase so vague that it could inspire both a runaway slave and the bounty-hunter chasing him through the woods.

Thus we have pursued happiness for nearly 250 years, and wound up more miserable than we began. As F. Scott Fitzgerald described it in The Great Gatsby — “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

Happiness has taken the form of outsize property holdings, low taxes, racial privilege, gouging the environment, exploitation of labor, disregard for the poor, and a glut of consumer products, from salty snacks to SUVs, designed to addict their users — -all wrapped in an avalanche of plastic waste. We’ve had our ups and downs, but starting on 9/11, the world delivered its verdict on the American empire.

Thumbs down.

-- Copyright 2021, 2025 by Tom Phillips 

Standing Up for Evil: The Price of Knowledge in Frost's "Mending Wall"

This is an edited version of an article published online by The Explicator, 9/11/2020. 

  --  By Tom Phillips                               

Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” contrasts two New England farmers as they meet to repair the stone wall between their properties.  While much has been said about their opposing characters, the difference between their farms has barely been noted. The speaker cultivates an apple orchard, his neighbor a pine forest.  These are two of earth’s hardiest and most common trees, ubiquitous North of Boston (as Frost titled the 1914 collection in which the poem appears) and profoundly different in their physical properties and symbolic meanings.  

The apple tree is small and shapely, a tree of the field, sun-loving, deciduous, blossoming in spring and bearing an irresistible fruit in summer and fall.  It was a golden apple that set off the Trojan war, when Paris awarded it to Venus in exchange for Helen of Troy.  In Christian tradition, the apple is a symbol of both sin and redemption. The forbidden tree from which Eve ate in the Garden of Eden becomes “Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree” in an 18^th-century hymn.  

The pine is its polar opposite – tall and straight, a tree of the forests and mountains, a thousand-year survivor bearing hard and inedible cones. In the Bible a member of the pine family, the cedar, is associated with worship of God; Solomon’s temple is hewn from cedars of Lebanon (NRSV, 1 Kings 5). In folklore the pine forest is a dark and forbidding place, a scene of lethal trickery in Grimm’s tales, of murder and mystery in the American folk-song “In the Pines.”  In Frost’s own “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the forest is “lovely, dark and deep” --- a path to oblivion (224).  If the apple tree is a temptation to life, the pine forest is a temptation to death. 

Both pines and apples were part of the everyday world of Robert Frost, the New England farmer.  They were also the property of Frost the classical and biblical scholar, who saw his poems as dialogues with the whole history of literature, sacred and secular.  In “Mending Wall,” he uses the symbolism of the apple and the pine to underscore the qualities of the two farmers.  He also uses it to mimic and challenge a foundational text --- the dialogue between the serpent and Eve:  

Eve and the Serpent -- Henri Rousseau

            “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?”  The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”   (Genesis 3: 1-2)

Frost begins by identifying the people with their plants.  “I am all apple orchard and you are all pine,” says the crafty narrator.  Personified as the fruit, he becomes not just the tempter but the object of temptation.  The speaker extends it further when he teases, “here there are no cows.”  No females will intrude on this encounter.

On a literal level, all he wants to do is talk – about the absurdity of keeping a wall between an apple orchard and a pine forest.  He mocks his neighbor’s fears: “My apples won’t come across and eat the cones under your pines.”     

The Pauline Prophecy: Jewish-Christian Relations in Bernard Malamud’s A NEW LIFE

-- By Tom Phillips

Originally published in
ANQ: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES, AND REVIEWS 1/18/2020

A New Life, Bernard Malamud’s 1961 epic of a down-and-out New Yorker in the Pacific Northwest, is unique among his novels. The story takes place far from the urban Jewish milieu that was the author’s usual setting, and not coincidentally, it is the only work in which he fully develops a critique of American culture. Malamud studiously avoids mentioning religion until very late in the book, and then only obliquely. However a close reading, beginning with the significance of the main characters’ names, suggests an inter-religious dynamic.

Relations between Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians, and Jewish and gentile cultures are front and center in much of Malamud’s fiction – notably in The Assistant, the 1957 novel that immediately precedes A New Life. In A New Life these themes are concealed, or implied – probably because it was written while the author was sojourning in gentile territory, where his values came into sharp conflict with those of the dominant culture. A New Life can be read as a satire on American Philistia from a Jewish point of view, but in the end it goes beyond satire. The coupling of Seymour Levin with Pauline Josephson, the wife of his boss and enemy, and their absconding with her children, suggests a prophecy of a new age in which Jew and gentile combine in a generational assault on American values.

In short, the Sixties.