3. LieandLay
• To lay is to place something or put something down, and it
must be followed by a noun or pronoun, a thing; to lie is to
recline. A lie is an untruth, and to lie also means "to tell an
untruth." Examples: Lay that package on the mantel, will you
please? Bridgette would like to lie in the hammock near the
pool. Sometimes it's tempting to lie when you're in trouble,
but a lie only makes things worse. (Hint: Lay sounds like place;
lie sounds like recline. But be careful: lay is also the past tense
of the verb to lie: Jay lay on the couch all day yesterday.)
5. Review: Historical Context
Increasing Immigrant Population
Resistance to Immigrants: cheap labor
and untrustworthy
The Homestead Act: 160 acres
Opposing Theories: The “melting pot”
versus the “salad bowl”
Frederick Jackson Turner and the
image of the American West
6. DISCUSSION
Theme: a main idea or an underlying
meaning of a literary work that may be
stated directly or indirectly.
Style: the way a writer writes; the
technique which an individual author
uses in his writing.
7. My Ántonia Style: Realism
Jim Burden gives voice to a romanticism, or at least
an overly sentimental or positive outlook that seems
close to romanticism. The homesteading German,
Danish, Bohemian, and Scandinavian settlers were the
embodiment of a cultural tradition Cather cherished.
However, the novel is saved from sentimentality by
the evocative depiction of the harsh realities of
pioneer and immigrant life and the complexity of the
characters, who are rarely, if ever, only sympathetic or
only despicable. British modernist E.M. Forster
coined the phrase “round” to describe these complex
characters.
8. Style: Imagery and Symbols
Cather's sparse but allusive style relies on the
quality and depth of her images. She consciously
uses the land, its colors, seasons, and changes to
suggest emotions and moods.
Summer stands for life (Ántonia can’t imagine
who would want to die during the summer)
Winter stands for death (Mr. Shimerda commits
suicide during the winter).
9. Animals are used as symbols of the struggle for
survival experienced by the Shimerdas during their first
winter.
The essential grotesque image of the cost of this
struggle is that of Mr. Shimerda’s corpse frozen in his
blood
His coat and neck cloth and boots are removed and
carefully laid by for the survivors.
Which other Images or symbols can you name?
Imagery and Symbols
10. Themes: Coming of Age
• My Ántonia is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, that
traces Jim Burden's development from the age of ten.
• It begins when he is orphaned and newly transplanted to his
grandparents' farm in Nebraska, where he first feels erased.
• His escape into romanticism first takes the form of a young boy's
fascination with outlaws, such as Jesse James, and lost
adventurers, such as the Swiss Family Robinson.
• As an adolescent, he remains estranged although conventional.
Bored by the sameness of his small, pioneer town, he is intrigued
by the romantic foreignness of the hired girls, girls he will never
marry, and he keeps away from girls that would be suitable for him.
• As an adult, he remains virtually without a real home. His marriage
is childless; he and his wife live almost separate lives, his being a
life of travel on the railway through the land that he loves.
11. Difference
It is through the eyes of Jim Burden, an orphan and thus
something of an outsider himself, that Cather considers
differences of class, nationality, and gender.
Even before young Jim arrives in Nebraska, he is met with
prejudice against foreigners.
Jake thinks that foreigners spread diseases.
But Cather makes it clear that prejudice was not invented
in America.
Otto tells Mrs. Burden, "Bohemians has a natural distrust of
Austrians."
And Norwegian Lena feels fated by the Lapp blood of her
paternal grandmother. "I guess that’s what's the matter with
me; they say Lapp blood will out."
12. In your groups:
Take ten
minutes to
review the
reading,
discussion
questions, and
the QHQs for
today!
13. 1. What are the contrasts that are being developed between the
characters in this section?
2. What is the importance of independent women in this
section, and why has Cather chosen to develop these
characters here?
a. Lena states “I’ve seen a good deal of married life, and I don’t care
for it. I want to be so I can help my mother and the children at
home, and not have to ask lief of anybody.” This passage captures
the motif of the ‘new woman’ because it depicts a woman as the
breadwinner for her family, rejects the assumed importance of
marriage, and portrays woman as an independent being who
doesn’t have to suppress her wants and actions.
14. Questions
3. Discuss the differences Jim sees between the
country girls and the town girls.
4. Explain the importance of the dance pavilion to
both Jim and Antonia.
5. Explain why Willa Cather has chosen to devote one
of the books of her novel to Lena Lingard.
a. The reason Jim includes an entire book about
Lena Lingard, lends itself to the possibility that
the original narrator of the story is Lena Lingard.
6. Discuss the importance of the narrator leaving
Black Hawk for college life.
15. Discuss My Ántonia in terms of one or more of
the modernist manifestos.
• F.T Marinetti: “Manifesto of
Futurism”
• Mina Loy: “Feminist
Manifesto”
• Ezra Pound: “A Retrospect”
• Willa Cather: The Novel
Démeublé
• William Carlos Williams:
“Spring and All”
• Langston Hughes: “The Negro
Artist and the Racial
Mountain”
16. Langston Hughes
• “Where Willa Cather, along with many other modernists, sought to
divide high art from popular entertainment, Langston Hughes urged
African American artists to embrace black popular culture, epitomized
for Hughes and many other observers of the 1920s by the innovations
of jazz” (348), Cather’s My Antonia seems to unintentionally promote
Hughes’ point. This chapter goes into depth about the upbringing of a
blind black pianist, Samson, whose musical talent is coincidentally
discovered by their white slave owners, the d’Arnaults. After his musical
potential consisting of “an absolute pitch, and a remarkable memory”
(117) was discovered, Cather explains: “as piano playing, it was perhaps
abominable, but as music it was something real, vitalized by a sense of
rhythm that was stronger than his other physical senses” (117), when
referring to Samson’s jazzy compositions.
• QHQ: What is the role of black people and black culture in the story and
in Jim’s society?
17. Mina Loy
• Cather presents Jim as an intelligent, lovable young boy in the
beginning of the story. The idealistic lens he views the world
through bleeds optimism in the first book. However, as
Antonia ceases to be one of the beautiful observations of Jim’s
surroundings (which are made beautiful through Jim’s
descriptions), and begins to assert herself as a monarch of her
household, there is a palpable shift in Jim’s reaction to her. […]
Thus, I think from the perspective of a feminist, such as Mina
Loy (an assumption that’s based off what little I know of her),
Jim’s budding aversion to the Bohemian woman is his reflex to
their emerging independence.
18. QHQ: Lena
1. Q: What does Lena mean to Jim? How does Jim’s
relationship with Lena contrast to the one he has
with Antonia?
1. Q: Is Lena in love with Jim? Why does Jim kiss
her, and why does she allow him to multiple
times?
19. QHQ: Jim
1. Q: Why does Book 2 end so abruptly after Jim’s fight with
Wick Cutter? Why does Jim seem to want to hurry his
story to his University days?
2. Q: How do the details of the incident between Jim and
Mr. Cutter in chapter 15 of Book II change what would
normally be an assault? Is it almost as if Jim has been
raped in Antonia’s place?
3. Q: Is this Scene where Jim is being “raped” more a blow
to him or a blow to his manhood? How does it affect our
perception of the male and female roles in this story
knowing that it was Jim who was the victim instead of
Antonia?
20. The Cutters
1. “Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare
with his wife, and yet, apparently they never
thought of separating” (125).
If Mr. and Mrs. Cutter were so unhappily married,
why then did Mr. Cutter not take her up on the
opportunity when she threatened to leave him,
and why did Mrs. Cutter never leave when they
were always fighting, they had no children, and he
had no intention of including her in his
inheritance??
21. QHQ: Antonia
1. Q: In Chapter III of Book II, Antonia says “’Maybe I be the
kind of girl you like better; now I come to town,” to Jim when
she arrives in Black Hawk, in reference to the conversation
they had at the end of Book I. Why does being in town (or
just living under the same conditions as Jim in general) allow
her to be a different kind of person, and what are the
implications of this?
2. Q: How do the power of language and story-telling help
Antonia develops as a character?
22. More Questions
• Q: How are the differences and treatment
between the classes shown in the novel?
• Q: Is Lena in love with Jim? Why does Jim kiss
her, and why does she allow him to multiple
times?
• Q: Compare Mrs. Harling’s relationship with her
husband to Minnie Foster’s relationship to her
husband in Trifles.
23. HOMEWORK
Finish My Antonia (1918): Book IV and Book V
Post #9: Answer one of the following prompts:
1. Compare and contrast Tiny Soderball and Lena Lingard’s
success with money.
2. Discuss why Willa Cather chose to have Antonia return to the
Shimerda farm as an unwed mother.
3. Discuss the differences between the Cuzak household and the
Shimerda household from many years before.
4. Write your own QHQ
