The celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth century novelist Willa Cather wrote a trilogy of novels that target life on the Nebraska prairie: O Pioneers, My Ántonia, and probably the most autobiographical of the three, The Tune of the Lark. Having learn O Pioneers a number of years in the past, my church readers’ group took up My Ántonia this yr. It’s thought-about by many Cather’s best work and an exemplary expression of the prairie/pioneer style.
My Ántonia tells the story of an immigrant household from Bohemia, the Shimerdas, and their battle to forge a life on the prairie. The story facilities round Ántonia, the oldest daughter of the household, and Jim Burden, a boy who has come to reside on the prairie along with his grandparents after the demise of his mother and father. Now years later, the story recounts, from Jim’s re-telling, the connection between Jim, Ántonia, and their associates all through their childhood years and into early maturity.
As with all of the novels in Cather’s Prairie Trilogy, and lots of of her novels normally, the land is in a way a major character in My Ántonia. The Divide, a area close to Purple Cloud, Nebraska—the place Cather’s household relocated when Cather was ten—is the setting for Black Hawk, the central city in My Ántonia (and in O Pioneers). Even because the pioneers forge the land, the land is forging them. It’s simple for us twenty-first-century Individuals to neglect the intimate connection between the land of the Americas and the creation of the American ethos. It’s a connection that God supposed us to have, one value re-forging.
Amid charting a course of life on the prairie, Cather develops characters we take pleasure in attending to know. We will resonate with their struggles and struggling, rejoice of their triumphs, and perceive the problems of life and relationship introduced on by the battle with human willfulness and sin. In My Ántonia. Jim and Ántonia are on the heart of these resonances. And it’s of their lives that we start to search out our place: in relationship to the land God created, to at least one one other, and to the tales of our lives. As Jim says of Ántonia, “Greater than every other particular person we remembered, this woman appeared to imply to us the nation, the circumstances, the entire journey of our childhood. To talk her title was to name up footage of individuals and locations, to set a quiet drama occurring in a single’s mind” [Willa Cather, My Ántonia (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003), 5]. She resided on the heart of Jim’s reminiscence of his childhood, of his improvement, of his narrating of his personal life.
Therein resides a central theme of the novel: Reminiscence. On the title web page Cather subscribed a phrase from Virgil’s Georgics (pastoral descriptions of classical rural life): Optima dies . . . prima fugit—“the most effective days are the primary to flee.” In My Ántonia, Jim is actively remembering, recalling days now distant (the primary to flee), however crammed with all of the feelings of human life, engaged on the land of the prairie, and with deep private significance and that means. The act of remembering is vitally vital for all of us. These tales of the most effective days orient our lives within the current and have the capability to propel us into the longer term. It is for that reason Christians bear in mind “On the night time when he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus took bread and mentioned, ‘That is my physique.’” That remembrance orients our current and propels us into the longer term. Remembrance ends Cather’s novel as Jim stands on the fading highway that had led from Black Hawk into the Divide:
I had the sense of coming dwelling to myself, and of getting discovered what a bit circle man’s expertise is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the highway of Future; had taken us to these early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we are able to ever be. Now I understood that the identical highway was to carry us collectively once more. No matter we had missed, we possessed collectively the dear, the incommunicable previous. (My Ántonia, 222)
For Christians, remembering brings us to come across greater than what future and fortune can ship. Within the phrases of Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:22–23, “For all issues are yours, whether or not Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or demise or the current or the longer term—all are yours, and you might be Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” The most effective days would be the first to flee, however they’ll all return to us in him who’s the Alpha and the Omega.
