Study Guide to My Antonia and Other Works by Willa Cather

Intelligent Education

• Editore: Influence Publishers
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645425373
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Study Aids
• Categoria: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Willa Cather, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Titles in this study guide include My Antonia, O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, One Of Ours, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.As an author of twentieth- century literature, Cather wrote about pioneer farming and post World War I pessimism. Moreover, her work had a characteristic style and contained themes like idealism and closeness to nature. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Cather's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO WILLA CATHER

 

THE POSITIVE VIEW

Some modern writers are pessimistic about man’s power to achieve true greatness in a world that often seems chaotic. In her novels and stories, Willa Cather was one twentieth-century author who continually reaffirmed a belief that even against great odds the human spirit could triumph. Few difficulties, she thought, were insurmountable if an individual had vision and determination.

EARLY DAYS IN NEBRASKA

As a creative artist she drew heavily upon her personal experiences. Many of these were such as to support her faith in the capacity of human beings to endure much and heroically persevere. Born in 1873 in Virginia, she moved with her parents nine years later to rural Nebraska. All around her there in the 1880s she saw courageous settlers breaking ground, building homes, braving extremes of climate, and finally becoming prosperous farmers. Not all, of course, succeeded. Some lost heart and gave up. Nevertheless, the wild Divide was being tamed, and brave men and women were doing it.

Among them she respected most highly the immigrant pioneers, who started with so little and could not even speak the language. Exploring the countryside on her pony, she made friends with many of the Bohemians, Germans, and Scandinavians in the area. She was interested in their unusual customs and native dishes, and she noted admiringly how they worked hard, paid off mortgages, and raised fine big families. These sturdy, indomitable people she was later to immortalize in O Pioneers! and My Antonia.

REACTIONS TO RED CLOUD

After two years her family moved again, this time into the nearby town of Red Cloud. There in a rather crowded house, Willa lived with her brothers and sisters until 1890, when she left for college. Red Cloud, founded only thirteen years before, was then a busy railroad center with bright prospects. Here the girl could not help hearing of those daring and enterprising individuals responsible for getting the tracks laid across miles and miles of grassy plains. She pays tribute to these men of vision in her portrait of Captain Forrester in A Lost Lady.

Other aspects of Red Cloud, however, she found less agreeable. Some townsfolk, acquiring wealth, looked down snobbishly on all the foreignborn. Others prided themselves on pretentious houses and showy apparel and despised those who lived simply. Many held narrow views as to what was socially acceptable, and were intolerant of any who would think or act independently. An individualist from the first, Willa found this atmosphere stifling. In The Song of the Lark, her young musical artist, Thea, knows this; she must get away from just such a hostile environment.

AN INDEPENDENT SPIRIT

While at Red Cloud, however, Willa refused to be regimented. Fond of her family, she still jealously guarded her privacy. Her friends were people of wide-ranging interests - the Miners, who loved music; “Uncle Billy” Ducker, the English-born merchant who taught her the Aeneid; the cosmopolitan Mrs. Weiner, who introduced her to French novels; and several local doctors, who talked over science with her. She wore her hair shorter than was fashionable, and built herself a summer sleeping tent on the upper front porch. Her first ambition was to be a surgeon, and her Commencement address was a ringing defense of vivisection.

At the fledgling State University, in Lincoln, she fortunately encountered several stimulating professors who encouraged her to write: On one she based the character of Gaston Cleric, Jim’s teacher in My Antonia. To help pay her way, she wrote for the local paper criticisms of dramas presented by acting companies on tour. Her reviews were lively and often caustic; these plus other experimental efforts proved to be good practice.

THE YEARS AT MCCLURE’S

In 1896, one year after her graduation, she accepted an editorial post in Pittsburgh. This was a large city with many cultural opportunities, of which she took full advantage. Then, after a decade divided between journalism and high-school teaching, she went to New York to join the staff of McClure’s Magazine. Later she served as its managing editor. This noteworthy publication brought out works of such outstanding writers as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Stephen Crane. S. S. McClure, its dynamic “idea man,” had been a poor Irish farm boy raised in the Midwest. He was one more example for Miss Cather of what could be accomplished by native ability and unstinting effort.

By 1912 she had left McClure’s to devote full time to her writing. In that year appeared her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge. In it a middle-aged engineer, seemingly a devoted husband, seeks his lost youth in the love of an admiring actress. His failure to act decisively in this and other matters leads to his death when a new bridge of his collapses. Carefully planned and written with skill, the book showed psychological insight. It imitated somewhat the style of Henry James, whose works she regarded highly. Later she herself thought the novel unsatisfactory because she did not know its people well enough.

PIONEERS AND ARTISTS

From college days on she had used some of her experiences in Nebraska in short stories. Her decision to employ them in her later novels was due in part to advice given her by Isabelle Jewett. This perceptive New England writer urged her most strongly to re-create those scenes with which she was completely familiar.

O Pioneers!, the first of the prairie novels, appeared in 1913. Its dauntless heroine, Alexandra Bergson, is a Swedish immigrant girl whose vision and sustained effort at length bring rich returns from the farm land she has loved. My Antonia, published five years later, has a somewhat similar theme. Antonia Shimerda, a generous, good-hearted Bohemian girl, suffers many hardships after her father’s suicide. Eventually, however, she becomes a happy wife and mother and enjoys prosperity on the farm she gave so much of herself to cultivate. This book was freer in form and used symbolism with greater artistry.

Between these two novels Miss Cather brought out The Song of the Lark in 1915. This long novel, more lavish in detail than the rest, describes the struggles of another type of creative personality to achieve a high goal. With the help of far-seeing friends and her own persistent efforts, Thea Kronborg escapes from the narrow confines of Moonstone and becomes a great opera star. The heroine reminds one at times of Miss Cather herself, but her story was also largely that of Olive Fremstad, a Swedish-born singer whose ascent to fame the author found remarkable.

POST-WAR PESSIMISM

Although disheartened by the increasing materialism and cultural shallowness in America, Miss Cather was hopeful for a time that the spirit of selfless dedication revived by World War I might continue to animate our national life. By 1922, however, her world, it seemed, “broke in two,” as she saw greed, vulgarity, and intolerance more strongly entrenched than ever. In One of Ours, which appeared in that year, the mother of the dead war hero is ruefully grateful that her Claude never came back to be disillusioned. In A Lost Lady, which came out in 1923, the widow of the great pioneer railroad builder surrenders everything to the mean, petty, grasping lawyer, typifying the contemptible new ruling class. Two years later there followed The Professor’s House, in which the hard-won gains of the earnest middle-aged scholar and of the brilliant young scientist are poured out to satisfy the extravagant whims of those who create nothing. These novels thus have pessimistic overtones.

RESTORING THE BRIGHT VISION

Yet Miss Cather also suggests ways in which the idealist can keep his vision bright even amid destructive influences. First of all he is strengthened by those who themselves have lofty standards. Jim, the saddened lawyer of My Antonia, derives new inspiration from meeting his Bohemian friend after two decades and finding her, “in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished.” Godfrey St. Peter, in The Professor’s House, is able to put new heart into his work after he meets eager, high-minded Tom Outland.

Miss Cather further indicates that closeness to Nature can be helpful. Alexandra and Antonia live in satisfying harmony with their vast prairie country. Thea Kronborg and Tom Outland, like the author herself, found their lives enriched by sojourns in America’s starkly beautiful Southwest. Its awesome canyons and mesas restored those dismayed by the small-mindedness in contemporary life. Its well-preserved cliff-dwellings of ancient tribes offered striking proof from the past of what even primitive man could achieve. Finally, there were traces everywhere of the good work of valiant early missionaries.

The novelist also undoubtedly believed that flagging idealism could be newly roused by steeping oneself in the heroism of earlier ages. In Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), which many consider her masterpiece, she relates in fictional terms the story of two brave, selfless 19th-century French priests who give up the comforts of life at home to bring the finest elements of European civilization to New Mexico. For Shadows on the Rock (1931), she went back two hundred years further to the French settlement of Quebec. There, too, she found gallant pioneers enduring a rigorous climate, yet carrying on the best of their cultural traditions.

OTHER WORKS

Although these are her major works, Willa Cather wrote three other novels. My Mortal Enemy (1926) is a short one about a woman who eventually regrets having given up all for love. Lucy Gayheart (1935) is a poignant love story in which a high-spirited girl comes to accept the loss of her beloved just before her own untimely death. Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), in which the author drew upon her early memories of Virginia, tells of a jealous wife who unjustly suspects an attractive young servant. Miss Cather also published several collections of short stories, one volume of poems, and two books of essays. From the early days at McClure’s to her death in 1947, Willa Cather made her home in New York, but enjoyed trips to Nebraska and the Southwest, France and Canada. She wrote much at her summer place off the coast of New Brunswick and in the quiet town of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where she was eventually buried. She never married despite opportunities, possibly because she was too deeply absorbed in her work. She kept in close touch with her family, however, and maintained many rewarding friendships, especially with those in literary and musical fields.

AWARDS AND ATTACKS

For her contribution to American fiction, she received honorary degrees and other awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. Throughout her career she won the praise of almost all discriminating critics and still retains a high reputation. Yet not all aspects of her work have been universally commended. Some early commentators, for instance, asserted, and she later concurred, that the final sections of The Song of the Lark were inferior to the chapters on Moonstone. Others took issue with her account of the war in One of Ours. Still others have been critical of her seeming inability to handle effectively the love relationship between a man and a woman. Her over-all concern with the past and her frequently nostalgic tone has also been subject to discussion. Lionel Trilling has suggested that her regard for earlier ages indicates a “devitalization of spirit” stemming from an excessive sense of being personally isolated. Maxwell Geismar sees in this a kind of escapism, or running away from the life of her times. A recent critic, John H. Randall, believes that she glorified childhood too much at the expense of maturity.

LASTING CONTRIBUTIONS

Yet such criticism, valid or otherwise, do not take much away from what Francis X. Connolly has called her “immense and imperishable” contribution to our literature. For one thing she broadened the scope of American fiction. Her accounts of pioneer farming in Nebraska and of the adventures of missionaries in the Southwest were essentially without precedent.

Secondly, she developed with great artistry a characteristic style at once simple, polished, and precise. For her superb descriptive passages, she selected details carefully. She disliked undisciplined, wordy writing that strained to reveal all things about everybody. Her ideal was the novel that was “demeuble,” or “unfurnished,” except for what was truly essential. “The higher processes of art,” she declared, “are all processes of simplification.” The genuine realist was one who perceived all that was basic in a situation and conveyed this to the reader. Not everything had to be lengthily explained. A careful writer like Miss Cather could leave much to the mature reader’s imagination, and her skillful use of symbols added richness without clutter.

Thirdly, she created memorable characters whose moral victories are hard won and whose rugged goodness has nothing in common with the weak, cloying kind exploited by sentimental fiction. Ernest Hemingway once described courage as “grace under pressure.” Long after reading the Cather novels, many recall with pleasure heartening examples of this type of admirable behavior. They remember her rugged old Bishop Laval, ringing his Mass bell at 4 a.m., and her dying Ray Kennedy, gallantly considerate to the last. They think of Antonia soberly facing up to the bitter facts of her betrayal and of young Niel quietly postponing his studies for a whole year to help his beleaguered friends, the Forresters. They relive, too, moments of high exaltation - Alexandra’s vision of flourishing farmlands, Thea singing gloriously amid the friendly Mexicans, Tom Outland experiencing for the first time alone the splendors of the mesa by night. In accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949, William Faulkner asserted his belief that man was certain not only to survive but to prevail because he possessed “a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” Willa Cather’s best work continues to have wide appeal because she too reveals this faith in humanity and because the stories she tells strengthen our confidence that men of the present and future can match, and perhaps even better, the shining record of the past.

MY ANTONIA

INTRODUCTION

During a hot summer’s train ride through Iowa, the narrator (conceivably Willa Cather herself) meets a childhood friend, Jim Burden. Now a successful New York lawyer, Burden is mar...