My Antonia

My Ántonia is the most autobiographical of Willa Cather’s novels, with many parallels between her life story and the experiences of the book’s narrator, Jim Burden. However, rather than creating a semi-autobiographical novel that closely followed her life’s events, Cather drew on elements of her memories and crafted them into a story about a unique character with his own history and inner world.

There are some basic similarities between the author and her protagonist. Like Jim Burden, Cather was born on a farm in Virginia in the 19th century, and her paternal grandparents moved to the Nebraskan frontier in order to homestead. Nine-year-old Cather joined her grandparents on their prairie farm after the deaths of several relatives in Virginia; in contrast to the fictional Jim, Cather was not orphaned, but relocated to Nebraska with her parents, three siblings, and other family members. The biography on the Willa Cather website quotes Cather’s first impressions of the prairie that resemble Jim’s thoughts in the novel: “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.”

After 16 months residing at her grandparents’ farm, Cather and her family moved into the town of Red Cloud (its novelistic counterpart is Black Hawk), where they rented a house. One of the people who most fascinated her as a child was a Bohemian hired girl, Annie Sadilek (later Mrs. Pavelka), who worked for the Cathers’ neighbors: “She was one of the truest artists I ever knew in the keenness and sensitiveness of her enjoyment, in her love of people and in her willingness to take pains” (Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. UP Nebraska, 1987).

Cather heard the story of the suicide of Annie’s father, Mr. Sadilek, who loved music and fell into a depression struggling with the hardships of Nebraskan frontier life, and later, Cather learned about the desertion of the unmarried pregnant Annie by a railroad brakeman. Like the fictional Jim, Cather was an excellent student who left Red Cloud to study at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where she enjoyed Classical Latin literature, music, and drama. Eventually Cather worked as a journalist for McClure’s Magazine in New York City writing nonfiction articles, short stories, and poetry. Also, similar to the fictional Jim, Cather occasionally returned to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where a reunion with Annie on her farm inspired her to write a novel featuring a Bohemian woman as its central figure.

Cather insisted that her characters were composites, but a number of them were based on actual people, including Mrs. Harling (Mrs. Miner in real life; the novel is dedicated to her daughters), Gaston Cleric (Cather’s instructor, Herbert Bates), Wick Cutter (an unscrupulous lender, Mr. Bentley), and Mrs. Gardener (the hotelkeeper, Mrs. Holland). Cather felt that lengthy reflection on early events allowed for clearer impressions later in life. She hinted at her authorial enterprise in the Virgil quotation in My Ántonia: “‘Primus ego in patriam mecum . . . deducam Musas’; for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country” (264). Cather sought to transform her rural Nebraskan experiences into great literature.

Cather’s careful artistic choices included the selection of a first-person point of view, the avoidance of a conventional fiction plot and an overly formal structure, and the use of myth and symbol. Cather believed that a “novel of feeling” (Woodress 289) such as My Ántonia, needed to be narrated by a character in the story, so she told it from a first-person point of view and chose a male narrator whose admiration emphasized the qualities of the female heroine. Cather used a loose, episodic structure that gave the impression of an authentic memoir by the fictional narrator who was not a professional writer. Cather asserted: “I knew I’d ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern” (Woodress 290); her goal was a sense of truthfulness. Cather shaped the material, utilizing myth and symbol, until her particular memories achieved the universality of art as exemplified by the novel’s episode of watching the plow in front of the setting sun, until it is “magnified across the distance by the horizontal light. . . heroic in size” (245).