My Ántonia, by Willa Cather

This novel is a complex one to review because while its existence is easier to justify and its nature easier to understand when one knows something about the author’s life and character, this knowledge is itself deeply problematic in making sense of the book as well and does not necessarily increase the pleasure of reading the book.  Cather had a well-earned reputation for writing novels that were deliberately incomplete, which focused on problems of frustrated romantic longings and isolation and loneliness and the struggle of men and women to find their place in the world.  And that is what we find here.  And Cather’s attempts here to view an obvious object of attraction in the titular woman from the outside through a timid and somewhat feminine man only highlight her own frustrated longings for women as a somewhat masculine woman, which makes the book easier to understand but not necessarily easier to appreciate or enjoy.  Readers who are no strangers to frustrated romantic longings will find much in this book to relate to, but being able to relate to a book or its protagonist, in this case the rather shadowy Jim Burden (no symbolic name there) does not mean that the book is an easy one to like.

The book itself is a bit more than 200 pages and includes endnotes and an introduction by Gordon Tapper, who includes quite a bit of information about the author’s intimate friendships with women and a period where she tried to pass herself off as a young man, which are certainly relevant to this particular book and the author’s burden of being attracted to yet isolated from the women who were her objects of desire.  After an introduction that presents the book as a frame story.  The internal story itself begins with reminisces of the author’s youth where he befriended the Shimerda family in Nebraska, where he went to town and carried on with some girls from the country who were hired by families in town to earn some money and to learn how to keep house, his relationship with one of these girls, Lena Lingard, in particular, which involved a fair amount of fun but was not intended to go anywhere, and then a return to Nebraska by Burden twenty years later where he (finally) confesses his love and admiration for the titular attractive woman, at which point the novel ends.

There are a lot of rather deep but somewhat obvious questions that this book prompts, especially in light of the author’s own life and behavior.  While one can see the title character as being an obvious attempt to view herself as an object of desire from the outside, the other members of the happy triangle are also fairly obvious candidates for being viewed as the author’s efforts to portray herself as well.  Lena is happy to have somewhat meaningless sex with a man but never intends to marry (although she does joke that if Jim becomes a preacher that he can marry her and baptize her children), and indeed goes off to live with a friend of hers and does not marry.  Jim marries only because a woman seeks him, and seems very passive in his own awkward intimacy with Ántonia, and some parts of the novel portray him as being feminized in a rather stark and unpleasant fashion in his efforts to protect Ántonia from harm and unwanted attention.  The way that the book as a whole is full of unconsummated and frustrated longing certainly appears to represent something important to the author, and it makes this book easy to recognize as a “classic” novel that nonetheless is not one that will be read by many people for fun.