Take a photo of a barcode or cover
metenney 's review for:
My Ántonia
by Willa Cather
Willa Cather’s 1918 novel "My Ántonia" is a nostalgic, modernist perspective of American frontier life at the turn of the century. Set against the red Nebraska prairie, the tone of the novel veers wildly between the two planes of nostalgia and realism. On one side of the coin is Cather’s sentimental Winslow Homer portrait: simplistic, beautiful, romantic, full of happy, barefoot boys in suspenders and straw hats. The other side of that coin, the darker side, is an approximation of an Andrew Wyeth landscape: stark, gray, and utterly unforgiving. The reader can almost imagine the hardscrabble Shimerda’s, walking into the barn in Wyeth’s Weatherside and finding their father frozen in a pool of his own blood. Yet it’s exactly this blend of nostalgia and grit that make Ántonia so compellingly readable.
Yet for all its romanticized beauty and danger, there are problematic scenes in Ántonia that limp (rather ungracefully) towards the 21st century. Take, for example, chapter seven of “Hired Girls.” After the work is done the adults are afforded a night of dancing and entertainment, courtesy of a traveling musician named Blind d’Arnault. Cather’s wincing description of d’Arnault, a grotesque sort of African-American Quasimodo, whose blindness and physical deformities are only partially offset by his musical gifts, is uncomfortably pernicious. Cather doubles down on the awkward quotient by honing in on d’Arnault’s physical handicaps as well. Cather writes of d’Arnault, “I noticed the nervous infirmity that Mrs. Harling had told me. When he was sitting or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly like a rocking toy” (118). It might just be the ugliest scene in a book already full of flesh-eating wolves and a threshing machine suicide.
From a modern, postcolonial lens, Cather’s d’Arnault is uncomfortable in the same way a Laura Ingalls Wilder book quickly becomes troublesome any time an Indian appears and the normally kindhearted Ma exclaims, “Filthy savages!” That Caroline Ingalls might be perpetuating Native American stereotypes or squatting on appropriated land never crosses her 19th century mind. That the African-American population of the 1920s might not appreciate being portrayed by Cather as “hideous little pickaninny[s]” makes any sort of objective 21st century analysis of My Ántonia equally problematic (120). Cather’s unflinching portrayal of d’Arnault forces the reader to harvest the good alongside the bad and try to systematically untangle the two, while at the same time attempting to contextualize the scene as symptomatic of its time. Ultimately, the reader does not have to accept the racism in Ántonia but neither should they fail to recognize the harm it may engender.
Despite its flaws, Ántonia deserves a substantial amount of credit for pushing the literary canon forward, particularly in its varied depictions of nuanced female characters. For every chapter like d’Arnaults, there are at least a dozen more crammed with a Lena Lingard, Tiny Soderball, or Emmaline Burden. That these women seem to spring fully formed onto the page from Cather’s head is a testament to the progressive author who created them. And while Cather can sometimes look like Homer or Wyeth, she is also wholly, unapologetically, uniquely herself.
Yet for all its romanticized beauty and danger, there are problematic scenes in Ántonia that limp (rather ungracefully) towards the 21st century. Take, for example, chapter seven of “Hired Girls.” After the work is done the adults are afforded a night of dancing and entertainment, courtesy of a traveling musician named Blind d’Arnault. Cather’s wincing description of d’Arnault, a grotesque sort of African-American Quasimodo, whose blindness and physical deformities are only partially offset by his musical gifts, is uncomfortably pernicious. Cather doubles down on the awkward quotient by honing in on d’Arnault’s physical handicaps as well. Cather writes of d’Arnault, “I noticed the nervous infirmity that Mrs. Harling had told me. When he was sitting or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly like a rocking toy” (118). It might just be the ugliest scene in a book already full of flesh-eating wolves and a threshing machine suicide.
From a modern, postcolonial lens, Cather’s d’Arnault is uncomfortable in the same way a Laura Ingalls Wilder book quickly becomes troublesome any time an Indian appears and the normally kindhearted Ma exclaims, “Filthy savages!” That Caroline Ingalls might be perpetuating Native American stereotypes or squatting on appropriated land never crosses her 19th century mind. That the African-American population of the 1920s might not appreciate being portrayed by Cather as “hideous little pickaninny[s]” makes any sort of objective 21st century analysis of My Ántonia equally problematic (120). Cather’s unflinching portrayal of d’Arnault forces the reader to harvest the good alongside the bad and try to systematically untangle the two, while at the same time attempting to contextualize the scene as symptomatic of its time. Ultimately, the reader does not have to accept the racism in Ántonia but neither should they fail to recognize the harm it may engender.
Despite its flaws, Ántonia deserves a substantial amount of credit for pushing the literary canon forward, particularly in its varied depictions of nuanced female characters. For every chapter like d’Arnaults, there are at least a dozen more crammed with a Lena Lingard, Tiny Soderball, or Emmaline Burden. That these women seem to spring fully formed onto the page from Cather’s head is a testament to the progressive author who created them. And while Cather can sometimes look like Homer or Wyeth, she is also wholly, unapologetically, uniquely herself.