Cloistered in her New England home, Emily Dickinson recognized the mood-inducing power of nature as she wrote: 'I'll tell you how the sun rose,/ A ribbon at a time./ The steeples swam in amethyst,/ The news like squirrels ran./ The hills untied their bonnets,/ The bobolinks begun./ Then I said softly to myself,/ 'That must have been the sun!'" (Pooley 436). Dickinson often used nature's images to tell her story. Willa Cather also recognized the emotion--generating power of nature. In My Antonia, the 1918 chronicle of immigrant life on the Nebraska prairie, Cather effectively uses nature as a descriptive undercurrent which directly reflects life as it is seen through the gentle eyes of Jim Burden.
At the novel's onset, ten-year-old Jim arrives on the Nebraska prairie to live with his grandparents. Even though his parents have recently died, Jim is seemingly calm, and his perception of nature clearly reflects this fact. Sitting in his grandmother's garden, Jim observes: "There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers" (18). Words such as humming, singing, and warm convey the comfort and pleasure Jim finds on the prairie. Cather has used Jim's subjective observations to imply that the adjustment to his new life has been an easy one.
Jim soon befriends Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant. Much of the remaining novel revolves around their relationship, and nature's tones continue to serve as the reader's harbinger. One evening Jim, Antonia, Mr. Shimerda, and Russian Peter are riding through the countryside, on their way to aid Peter's brother, Pavel, who is desperately ill. The scene suggests Pavel's impending death; and Jim, who earlier saw the warm, peaceful soil, now sees a disquieting nature: "After the sun sank, a cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie. If this turn in the weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. [Antonia and I] burrowed down in the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of the west" (52). The atmosphere is cold and moaning; the sky is angry and red--a red which is dying. Cather has used nature to intensify the scene's gloom.
A few minutes later, Jim and his companions see the prostrate and emaciated Pavel. As if to emphasize Pavel's withering life, Cather has Jim perceive his chest as one "covered with yellow bristle" (54). Pavel, like the yellowing prairie grass, is dying.
Jim is generally happy during his early days on the prairie. He spends a good deal of time with Antonia, and his prairie is accordingly uplifting. In summer he sees "the warm, grassy bank where the badger lived" (38); in winter, he notices that "the sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white stretches of prairie was almost blinding" (63). Cather has used the natural surroundings to strengthen Jim's exuberant character.
After approximately three years, Jim and his family move to Black Hawk. They are now removed from the open prairie; likewise, Cather's colorful descriptions of nature are noticeably fewer. Jim's life is more sterile, and one feels as if his imagination and creativity have been muted. Walking down Black Hawk's streets, Jim observes: "Black Hawk . . . was a well-planted little prairie town, with . . . good green yards about the dwellings, wide dusty streets, and shapely little trees growing along the wooden sidewalks" (145). Life's wildness and capriciousness have been replaced with orderliness. Jim reveals the undisguised blandness of his life as he perceives a common winter day: "The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify--it was like the light of truth itself" (173). Winter is to Jim "stale and shabby, old and sullen" (180), and he regards life in Black Hawk as "spread out, shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk." His snow "was grey and mournful-looking" (181), Cather has created for Jim Burden a natural world which mirrors his life after moving to Black Hawk--comparatively bleak and lifeless.
In nature as well as in the characters, there is a loss of spirit. The characters are now directing their energies toward conventional activities such as dances, the bustle of town life, mundane jobs, and for Jim, an enterprising law career. Jim greatly misses Antonia and his early life on the prairie, and as if to represent this void, Cather's rich descriptions of nature practically vanish for a large portion of the novel.
Several years later, Jim learns of Antonia's out-of-wedlock child. Disappointed because she is now an object of pity, Jim is not sure if he can forgive Antonia. He travels to a neighboring farm to learn the details of her plight, and while traveling he feels as though her solid character has been uprooted. He projects this through his perception of the landscape. He notices that "the old pasture land was now being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing" (306). Jim sees the previously untouched soil as violated; likewise, Antonia has been violated. And Jim knows that the purity of each can never be recovered.
The next afternoon Jim goes to the Shimerda farm to visit Antonia, whom he has not seen for many years. When he sees her working the land, the feelings of those youthful, free-spirited days return. As if willing a return to innocence, Jim remembers: "instinctively we walked toward that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest place to talk to each other" (319). Jim is standing on a patch of ground which he had years earlier described as "the soft earth roads along which the homecoming wagons rattled after sunset" (119). This is for Jim a different kind of homecoming. He now feels "the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall" (322). Jim's faith in Antonia, like the soil, is now restored. With a promise to return. Jim walks off down the familiar road of their youth.
Twenty years pass before Jim, traveling near Black Hawk, decides to visit Antonia. He knows she is now a laboring farm wife with eleven children. Not wanting to lose the images of earlier days, Jim is apprehensive about seeing her. What he finds is hardly a grim and unhappy Antonia. He notices instead the true satisfaction and joy she gets from her children and the farm.
Life for Antonia is flourishing on the prairie, and Cather once again relies on nature to reveal Jim's perception of Antonia's existence. Jim sees Antonia's I life as rich and fruitful, and Cather actually uses fruit to symbolize the children, the fruits of Antonia's Iife. The family eagerly shows Jim their well-supplied fruit cave, the contents of which are brimming with vibrant colors. As the children emerge one-by-one from the fruit cave, Cather is clearly showing that the children have meant the rebirth--the ripeningo-of Antonia's spirit. Jim sees them as "a veritable explosion of life" (339). Antonia even speaks of the surrounding fruit trees in terms of child-rearing when she says: "I couldn't feel so tired that I wouldn't fret about these trees when there was a dry time. They were on my mind like children" (340). Jim sees a prairie which is colorful and bursting with ripeness and splendor.
Jim leaves Antonia' s family, spends an unfulfilling day in Black Hawk, and takes the train through the countryside he first saw upon arriving in Nebraska. This panoramic view of the prairie is the vantage point from which Jim may now reflect on his life. He has returned to a teeming, spirited prairie: he now feels the completeness of his liŁfe.
Willa Cather's literary skills have allowed Jim to view the prairie as an exhilarating adventure or as a portent of grief. It could be red and vigorous, or it could be yellow and dead. Emily Dickinson, too, knew that the mind does indeed have the power to create its own world as she wrote of her prairie: "To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,/ And revery./ The revery alone will do/ If bees are few" (Pooley 438). In My Antonia, Jim's mind is the intermediary which recreates this symbol of America's heartland. The prairie is Jim Burden's second voice.
Works Cited
Cather, Willa. My Antonia. Boston: Houghton, 1977.
Pooley,
Robert C., ed. The United States in Literature. Chicago: Scott, 1963.