“On the Opposite Edges of the World”: Class, Nation, and Romantic Musings in Willa Cather’s My Antonia
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Followed by the initial spate of generous commentaries on the novel, a significant portion of critical insights on Willa Cather’s My Antonia since the mid 1980s has revolved around discussions of narrative voice and authority, storytelling, and gender, and thus the dynamic interplay of different social voices in the text. As Cather’s work is conveniently divided into five books, there is also the sense that it is about the narrator Jim Burden’s various stages in his life—childhood in Nebraska, adolescence in the town of Black Hawk, life in college, adulthood, and temporary return to childhood community. Such book divisions encourage readers to perceive the first book of the novel, “The Shimerdas,” as Jim’s shared past with the immigrant daughter Antonia, encouraging the understanding of the themes of the pull of memory and sentimental attachment to the vanished American prairie as central to Cather’s work. In this paper, rather than reading Jim’s romantic tendencies of contemplation and reflection as conditioned by his gender privilege as signaled by the proprietary title of the novel “My Antonia,” I focus on the importance of Jim’s own perceptions of his classed and national identity as determining of his relationships to the immigrants. My goal here is not to make the inane argument that class, nation, and gender are somehow conveniently separable, but to illustrate how the novel charts Jim’s romantic inclinations as nurtured by his own recognition of his social and ethnic difference, thus the book being a powerful statement on the construction of identities as dependent on selective, at times violent appropriation of the trying experiences and differentiated individual realities.
Abstract
Followed by the initial spate of generous commentaries on the novel, a significant portion of critical insights on Willa Cather’s My Antonia since the mid 1980s has revolved around discussions of narrative voice and authority, storytelling, and gender, and thus the dynamic interplay of different social voices in the text. As Cather’s work is conveniently divided into five books, there is also the sense that it is about the narrator Jim Burden’s various stages in his life—childhood in Nebraska, adolescence in the town of Black Hawk, life in college, adulthood, and temporary return to childhood community. Such book divisions encourage readers to perceive the first book of the novel, “The Shimerdas,” as Jim’s shared past with the immigrant daughter Antonia, encouraging the understanding of the themes of the pull of memory and sentimental attachment to the vanished American prairie as central to Cather’s work. In this paper, rather than reading Jim’s romantic tendencies of contemplation and reflection as conditioned by his gender privilege as signaled by the proprietary title of the novel “My Antonia,” I focus on the importance of Jim’s own perceptions of his classed and national identity as determining of his relationships to the immigrants. My goal here is not to make the inane argument that class, nation, and gender are somehow conveniently separable, but to illustrate how the novel charts Jim’s romantic inclinations as nurtured by his own recognition of his social and ethnic difference, thus the book being a powerful statement on the construction of identities as dependent on selective, at times violent appropriation of the trying experiences and differentiated individual realities.
참고문헌 (15)
- Carden, Mary Paniccia, "Creative Fertility and the National Romance in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Antoina", Modern Fiction Studies, 45(2), pp.275~302 (1999)
- Cather, Willa, "My Antonia" (2006), Oxford UP
- Funda, Evelyn I., "The Breath Vibrating Behind It: Intimacy in the Storytelling of Antonia Shimerda", Western American Literature, 29(3), pp.195~216 (1994)
- Goldman, Ann E., "Rereading My Antonia, In The Cambridge Companion to My Antonia", pp.159~174 (2005), Cambridge UP
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- Irving, Katrina, "Displacing Homosexuality: The Use of Ethnicity in Willa Cather’s My Antonia", Modern Fiction Studies, 36(1), pp.91~102 (1990)
- Lindemann Marilee, "It Ain’t My Prairie: Gender, Power, and Narrative in My Antonia, In New Essays on My Antonia", pp.111~135 (1999), Cambridge UP
- Lucenti, Lisa Marie, "Willa Cather’s My Antonia: Haunting the Houses of Memory", Twentieth Century Literature, 46(2), pp.193~213 (2000)
- Millington, Richard H., "Willa Cather and ‘The Storyteller’: Hostility to the Novel in My Antonia", American Literature, 66(4), pp.689~717 (1994)
- Palmer, Scott, "The Train of Thought: Classed Travel and Nationality in Willa Cather’s My Antonia", Studies in American Fiction, 29(2), pp.239~250 (2001)
- Rosowski, Susan J., "The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism" (1986), U of Nebraska P
- Stegner, Wallace, "Modern Critical Interpretations on Willa Cather", pp.41~50 (1987), Chelsea House
- Swenson, Jeffrey, "Art and the Immigrant: The Other as Muse in Cather’s My Antonia and Rolvaag’s Boat of Longing", MidAmerica, 32, pp.16~30 (2005)
- Wilhite, Keith, "Unsettled Worlds: Aesthetic Emplacement in Willa Cather’s My Antonia", Studies in the Novel, 42(3), pp.269~286 (2010)