“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it … and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
When Willa Cather was only a child, her parents picked her up and headed west, along with her six siblings, to follow in the footsteps of her father’s family. They left behind a large and prosperous estate amongst the rolling, verdant hills of Virginia for the vast, treeless expanse of the plains. Their destination, Red Cloud, Nebraska, claimed only 1,000 residents at the time.
While My Ántonia is not strictly autobiographical, it plays the tune of a song written in her mind during those years of transition. Having already published three novels to critical acclaim, she followed Sarah Orne Jewett’s urging to pour her own childhood experience in Nebraska onto the page. This was the right advice at the right time, for, as H.L. Mencken observed, “[Cather] has got such a grip upon her materials—upon the people she sets before us and the background she displays behind them—that both take on an extraordinary reality. I know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the western prairies more real than My Ántonia makes them, and I know of none that makes them seem better worth knowing.”
The novel centers on the lives of Jim Burden and Ántonia Shimerda, two young people who find a natural friendship as they adjust to new lives: Jim, having arrived on the plains to live with his grandparents after the death of his parents; and Ántonia, who arrived as an immigrant with her family, ill-equipped to manage the hardness of frontier life. The story is told through Jim’s eyes, and one is struck with the steady interplay of comfort (his grandmother’s care, the sturdiness of his new home) and uncertainty (the risk of rattlesnakes, the expanse of tall grasses to the horizon that feel like the edge of the earth) of his situation. And so it is with life.
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” Cather selected this line from My Ántonia as her epitaph, to be carved onto the face of her tombstone as a representation of her truest sentiment and the lasting claim that the region held on her soul.
Please enjoy this excerpt…
Headline Image: Sunset of the Prairies | Albert Bierstadt, c. 1860-1880]
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