My Antonia, Again

Dear Dad,

Well, you are the eternal optimist, finding such an ending copacetic.

Yes, you're right, I think, in saying that Jim and Antonia would have had problems together. But everyone has problems together. They also would have shared a very deep love, something that Jim doesn't have in his life, although we can't be as sure about Antonia.

The book is called My Antonia, and so it's apparent who the hero (or heroine) is, and Antonia remains a powerful figure throughout the tale. My beef is with Jim: in Cather's introduction he is painted as someone whose "ardent and optimistic disposition could not be suppressed by life's disappointments." He appears to be well adjusted and likable. But I think he's a putz. As a narrator he's unreliable. He avoids or is incapable of telling you what he really feels about Antonia; he never admits how much he loves her until he tells her son at the end of the book--cowardly in my view. And it's not exactly clear why he leaves Black Hawk--he says he's bored and finds the town provincial--but is he really running away from Antonia? He exhibits no real passion for Latin or learning or even for seeing the world--he just suddenly goes. And for most of the narration he's waxing eloquent about the prairie and its people, and even after moving to New York his business takes him back to the plains, where he loves to visit with the farmers and reminisce.

I concede your point about the impracticality of the relationship, but I'm still not satisfied with the outcome. It amounts to saying, "Well, one can't expect much better from life." Maybe one can't. I guess that's what makes this book a realistic novel instead of a romance.

But mistakes are still mistakes, no matter how you dress them up, and I still think Jim made a mistake. Maybe he wasn't capable of anything more--maybe he was just too "soft and funny," as Lena called him, to rise to the occasion and press Antonia to marry him. Cather wants to portray their failure as a poignant example of life's "could have beens," but you could equally say that Jim Burden simply didn't deserve Antonia, and I prefer to think the latter.

Charlie