My Antonia And Landsacpe Essay, Research Paper

The landscape in My Antonia

“This country was mostly wild pasture and as naked as the back of your hand. I was little and homesick and lonely and my mother was homesick and nobody paid any attention to us. So the country and I had it out together and by the end of the first autumn,that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to

shake.”

-Willa Cather (Internet #1)

Her life task became portraying how the pioneers tamed the wild land. Cather’s visual, and disarmingly simple, descriptions of prairie life and events that slowly unveil truly complex characters such as the protagonist Antonia Shimerda.

I believe, if Cather had been born in Nebraska, the land and its people would probably not have played so important a role in her work. Her encounter with this new land was profound, even traumatic. Cather described the experience best through Jim Burden in My Antonia. The vast sky, the endless plains, the enormous sun evoked a

pantheistic and acquiescent response in the young boy There he felt the individual ego diminished and merged with something much greater. (Internet #2)

Like Jim Burden,Cather found the immigrant pioneers fascinating–their stories, their vitality, their dignity. The land which at first seemed flat and monotonous proved to furnish endless variations on the theme of fertility. No matter how far she wandered across the globe, she wasalways drawn back to the Nebraska prairies and those best days of her youth which were the first to flee. (Internet #3)

The West is also a particularly difficult target for the kind of “country life” Cather seeks to describe. The first description we get of the landscape depicts it as alive, but with none of the human activity of, say, urban life or even developed rural life.

Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath the herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping … . (13)

If the Western landscape were simply dead and lonely, settling it would be a less daunting task. As described, the land is surging with life, but this life, this perpetual animation, is exclusive of mankind. Its strong current of life must be replaced by a human one before it can make the transition from land to country.

Cather is careful to point out that this impersonality—this never-ending sense that life goes on without you—has broken many hearts. For example, when Jim tells Antonia and some others of his discovery of evidence that Spanish explorers had come as far north as Nebraska.

The girls began to wonder among themselves. Why had the Spaniards come so far? What must this country have been like, then? Why had Coronado never gone back to Spain, to his riches and his castles and his king? I couldn’t tell them. I only knew the schoolbooks said he “died in the wilderness, of a broken heart.”

“More than him has done that,” said Antonia sadly … (pg155)

The connection of Coronado to Antonia’s father is a natural one. Both men had much to live for in the Old World, but when faced with an unending landscape with no human connections to reaffirm their personal worth, both gave up their will to live. Neither died unremembered, however, and that is, in itself, the first step toward the formation of a “country”. Through his suicide Mr. Shimerdas becomes the first humanizing influence we see in the landscape:

I never came upon [his grave] without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence—the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which thehome-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper. (pg77)

When we think of the landscape, Shimerdas becomes a part of it, a human being implanted in the soil forever. It is, then, through the passing of generations that we come to mark our time in a place. The remains of those generations remind us of our past;humble monuments like Shimerdas’ grave remind us to honor it.

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