Making It New: 1900–1945 335days are the first to flee (“Optima dies ... prima fugit”) and their creator’s proud
claim that he will “be the first ... to bring the Muse into my country.” Considering
a woman like Ántonia, Burden sees a connection between her and the poetry of
Virgil. As a focus for his personal memories and a kind of racial memory for
America, its formative past, “she was a rich mine of life,” he concludes, “like the
founders of early races.” She embodies the past, as a resource that may be lost for a
while but, as in that last, magnificent section when Burden finds Ántonia restored
to her old vital self, may be returned to and recovered. What gives the book its
tension is that, while the imaginative thrust is backward, its narrative movement is
forward: in the story of his life, Burden rehearses the present and future of America,
from country to small town to large town to city (by the end of the book he is based,
like Cather, in New York). But what gives My Ántonia its beauty, its power, is this
rhythm of return and recovery. The entire book, the reader is made to realize, is
about just such a journey back into memory as Burden has made here: a resurrection
of the past, not to seek refuge, but to restore, to revitalize the present. We are made
to see yesterday as Burden finally sees Ántonia, in its plenitude and its potential for
today and tomorrow.
A complex pastoral, My Ántonia mixes its meditations on American history and
myth with a telling exploration of gender. This is a book in which a woman writes
about a man writing about a woman. Playing on the ironic possibilities opened up
by this, Cather quietly juxtaposes Burden’s mythologizing of Ántonia with the
mundane labor of her life: the role of the woman in the making of Western myth
and her role, more fundamentally, in the making of the West. This is a book, also,
that pulls no punches in its account of the tensions between “natives” and
“immigrants,” the “cramped” atmosphere of the provincial small town and the
gradual transformation of the American landscape under the pressure of
agribusiness. Cather never allowed her tenderness for the uses of the past, or her
tactful appreciation of the power of Western legend, to undermine her sense of just
how small, plain, and mean life in the West could sometimes be. Her finest books,
consequently, maintain a fine balance between romance and realism, elegy and
analytical insight, the tale of the virgin land as an epic and as an economic one.
Along with My Ántonia and O Pioneers!, those books include A Lost Lady (1923),
The Professor’s House (1923), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and Shadows
on the Rock (1931). Generally, the later fiction is sparer, leaner, a little more inclined
toward the occasional allegorical detail and the moment of epiphany. Occasionally,
it also dips further back into the past than My Ántonia. Death Comes for the
Archbishop, based on the careers of two actual French missionaries, is set in the
New Mexico territory in the middle of the nineteenth century; Shadows on the Rock
moves further back and afar, into the seventeenth century and the French-Canadian
frontier. But the determining rhythm of these later narratives remains the same as
the one rehearsed in the story of Ántonia Shimerda. And there is the same densely
woven texture of remembrance, personal, familial, and cultural: a shared sense that
what matters to people is what they carry from their predecessors, engraved on their
hearts and minds and pulsing through their blood. Cather may not have been theGGray_c04.indd 335ray_c 04 .indd 335 8 8/1/2011 7:53:47 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 47 AM