This document summarizes a class discussion on Willa Cather's novel My Ántonia. The class covered several themes in the novel, including coming of age, differences between immigrant groups, and the use of imagery and symbols. Students were asked to discuss how the novel relates to modernist manifestos. They considered works by Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, and Willa Cather's own manifesto on demeublé novels. The class ended with students asking their own questions about characters like Lena, Jim, and Antonia and their roles and choices in the novel. For homework, students were asked to finish the novel and respond to a prompt analyzing characters' successes, Cather's choices, or with their own Q

1. ELIT 48C Class #9

2. Lie or Lay? What is the difference?

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.)

4. AGENDA
Review
 Historical Context
Lecture
My Antonia Books II and III
Themes and Style
Discussion
QHQs

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.
Other Images or symbols?
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. The Mystery Guest on the Train
• “I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly
what I most wanted to know about Antonia. He had had
opportunities that I, as a little girl who watched her come
and go, had not.”

14. 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?

15. 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.
a. Q: Does the dance pavilion strengthen Jim’s
and Antonia’s relationship?
5. Explain why Willa Cather has chosen to devote
one of the books of her novel to Lena Lingard.
6. Discuss the importance of the narrator leaving
Black Hawk for college life.

16. 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”

17. Mina Loy
“The man who lives a life in which his activities conform to a
social code which is protectorate of the feminine– is no longer
masculine.”
Mina Loy explains in Feminist manifesto that if a man lives his
life conforming to a patriarchy then that man is not to be
considered masculine. She also proclaims that [women] who
“adapt themselves to a theoretical valuation of their sex as a
relative personality, are not yet feminine.” It’s tough for me to
tell what she’s saying right off the bat, but I sense that she’s
getting at women who prescribe themselves the roles that
are consistent with a patriarchal society, then she is not truly
feminine because it means she is devaluing herself.
If I’m correct, My Antonia would of been a shining example
Mina Loy would have loved.

18. Langston Hughes
• Willa Cather does follow Hughes’s advice [about voice] in
writing a story that embraces what she goes through as a
lesbian woman, and the way she plays with the narrator is an
intentional representation of how voiceless and powerless
women and queer people were.
• Q: When describing D’Arnault’s playing Jim says that “he could
never learn like other people, never acquire finish. He was
always a negro prodigy who played barbarously and
wonderfully,” My QHQ would be: who should determine when
something is done the right way? (Reference Hughes,
Feminist, and Queer Theories)

19. Cather and other Modern
Manifestos
1. Does Cather follow her own advice on My Antonia that
she puts forth in her manifesto The Novel Demeuble?
2. A principle of futurism was that “courage, audacity,
and revolt will be the essential elements of our poetry.”
In the case of relation to Antonia, these forms of
“courage, audacity, and revolt” [don’t] necessarily
manifest in any bloody war type of situation, but more
in the conscious disregard of female stereotypes.

20. QHQ: Lena
1. Q: Why is it that from all of “the hired girls”, Lena seems
to be the prime target for ridicule and judgment? Is there
a possibility that these allegations against Lena hold any
truth to them, or is it just mindless gossip?
2. Q: What does Lena mean to Jim? How does Jim’s
relationship with Lena contrast to the one he has with
Antonia?
3. Q: What does “Camille,” the play that Lena and Jim go to
see together, represent in this chapter?
4. Q: Why doesn’t Antonia want Lena Lingard to “run off”
with Jim even though she doesn’t show him romantic
affection?

21. Jim
1. Q: Why does Jim Burden marry Genevieve Whitney?
2. Q: Does Jim want to marry Lena or Antonia, but the
social oppression does not allow him to marry them, or
actually Jim does not want to marry those country girls?
3. Q: Although Jim is enamored with Lena and spends a
generous amount of time with her as he did with
Antonia, why isn’t his feelings for Lena comparable to the
feelings he had for Antonia?
4. Q: Although Antonia grew up with Jim and Lena evoked
sexual feelings from Jim, who played a more significant
role in shaping the man that Jim is becoming?

22. QHQ: Antonia
1. Q: What are the implications of Antonia leaving
the Harlings to find work on her own?
2. Q: Do you think Antonia’s selfishness (in
impulsively leaving the Harlings) is justified or
“good”? Or, do you think her selfishness is, well,
too selfish? Should she be considering more her
family in this decision?

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