My Ántonia

Willa Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, in 1873. When she was nine, her family moved to Nebraska to join her paternal grandparents and uncle. Cather was profoundly affected by moving from the settled Virginia landscape to the untamed Nebraska prairie. On the farm, her neighbors included immigrants from Bohemia (now most of the Czech Republic), Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Their pioneering lives and stories of the old country were among her strongest influences.

In part an elegy for a way of life almost vanished at the time of its writing, Willa Cather's novel My Ántonia is also an inquiry into what it means to be an American. Cather explores characteristically American questions of identity through the novel's central relationship, the friendship between transplanted Virginian Jim Burden and Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda. The novel begins with an introduction by an unnamed narrator, a woman who grew up in Nebraska with Jim and Ántonia. This introduction emphasizes the themes that shape the novel-movement, discontinuous identity, and romantic hopefulness. The narrator unexpectedly meets the adult Jim Burden on a train crossing Iowa, and the two renew their acquaintance and reminisce about Ántonia, who represents for both of them "the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood" . At the narrator's suggestion, Jim agrees to write a portrait of Ántonia. As he describes it, Jim's portrait is impulsive, written without notes and without "any form" . It is the spontaneous overflow of Jim's recollected emotion, in keeping with his "naturally romantic and ardent disposition" . Before giving the manuscript to the narrator, Jim titles it "Ántonia"; after frowning a moment, he adds "my." The narrator notes that this "seemed to satisfy him," without suggesting whether Jim's title is a gesture of possessiveness, an acknowledgment of bias, or indicative of some other meaning .