![]() ![]() There are accounts of childhood friendships, adolescent loves and youthful ambition – which is pretty much Jim’s story. There are some telling descriptions of small-town life, with all its snobbery and small-mindedness. We see the girl and the land change and grow, but the novel is altogether something more than a creation myth about the making of America although it is that too, as one of Jim’s later summations of Antonia – “She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.” (259) – makes clear. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. ![]() If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. Here is how Jim describes his first sighting of it, on the night of the journey to his grandfather’s farm: ![]() And the land, too, is innocent and unformed. When we first meet Antonia she is a young girl, innocent and unformed, part of a family of Bohemian (for the purposes of the novel, the word means simply “Czech”) migrants newly arrived in Nebraska. Cather assumes the voice of a man, Jim Burden, to tell the life-story of a woman and a country, the American Midwest. My Antonia is written in the first person, but in a different gender to that of the author herself. Willa Cather’s novel, like a number of classics – Wuthering Heights and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure are two that immediately come to mind – is one of those “I in drag” efforts. ![]()
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