334 Making It New: 1900–1945the Lark (1915), which is partly set in the ancient cliff-dwellings of Arizona. Then, in
1916, on a trip back to Red Cloud, Cather visited a Bohemian woman, Anna Pavelka,
whom she had known and admired in her youth. She found Anna serene and happy,
and surrounded by children; it seemed to Cather that Anna’s story ran close to the
central stream of life in Nebraska and the West; and she decided to write about her.
The result was her masterpiece, My Ántonia (1918). The novel is divided into five
sections. In the first, the narrator Jim Burden recalls his early life in the Nebraskan
countryside, his relationship with the Shimerda family and the daughter in that
family, Ántonia Shimerda in particular. The second records how Burden moves into
the small town of Black Hawk, clearly modeled on Red Cloud, and renews his
acquaintance with Ántonia, who is now one of the “hired girls” working for a local
family. In the third section, Jim, as Cather once did, moves to the university in the
state capital of Lincoln, where he forms a close friendship with another Bohemian
girl, Lena Lingard. The brief fourth section tells the story of Ántonia’s betrayal by
Larry Donovan, from one of the “native” or non-immigrant families. And, in the
fifth, Burden remembers how, on a return west, he saw Ántonia again after many
years, happily married now to a Czech called Cuzak and surrounded by children.
Apparently, while she was writing My Ántonia, Cather told an old friend that she
wanted her “new heroine” to be “like a rare object in the middle of a table, which one
may examine from all sides.” This, however, is misleading. Ántonia is not seen from
all sides; the reader is offered only the dimmest conception of certain moments of
her life, such as her time as a hired girl; and there are numerous intriguing gaps and
omissions – her seducer Larry Donovan, for example, remains in the shadows. What
is seen from all sides is not Ántonia herself but the memory of Ántonia carried by
the appropriately named Jim Burden. It is not for nothing that, in the short, fictional
introduction to My Ántonia, another, anonymous narrator remembers being
presented with the manuscript of this book by Burden; and, as Burden handed it
over, (s)he recalls, he carefully added “My” to “Ántonia” in the title. This, the memory,
becomes a thing complete in itself, which is why the reader is never worried by the
missing pieces in Ántonia’s own story.
The entire novel is, in fact, about memory, the determining impact of the past:
the past of the narrator, the past of other characters who are constantly rehearsing
their memories, “the precious, incommunicable past” of America that is a crucial
part of the national heritage – and is vanishing. By extension, it is about the past
of all peoples and nations, and its function in the present: the past as influence
(we are all, Cather intimates, what our past has made us) and as intense focus of
commemoration, nostalgia (we find it difficult, Cather suggests, to surrender a past
that seems the more “precious” the more it becomes “incommunicable,” separate
from ourselves and those around us). The imaginative thrust of My Ántonia is,
powerfully, backward. Presented as a memory, the novel begins in autumn; the
dominant mood tends toward the elegiac and the heroic, a preference for legend,
the imaginative transfiguration of the past, over history. This is American pastoral,
a point that Cather makes perfectly clear when she has Jim Burden read the first
version of pastoral, the Georgics of Virgil, with their powerful refrain that the bestGGray_c04.indd 334ray_c 04 .indd 334 8 8/1/2011 7:53:47 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 47 AM