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| 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.
