1. Why do you think the novel opens with an unnamed speaker who grew up with Jim Burden and who disappears from the novel after the Introduction.Why might Cather have chosen to frame her narrative in this fashion?
2. Just as My Antonia’s setting is initially raw and featureless, its narrative at first seems haphazard: “‘I didn’t arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people’s Antonia’s name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn’t any form.'” Is Jim’s description really accurate? Although the narrative proceeds chronologically, its structure is unconventional, as Antonia is present in only three of the five sections and much of her story unfolds via exposition. What effect does Cather produce by telling her story in this fashion?
3. What is it that makes Mr. Shimerda unable to adapt to his new home and ultimately drives him to suicide? Is he simply too refined—too rooted in Europe—to endure the harshness and solitude of the prairie? How do we reconcile Shimerda’s suicide with that of Wick Cutter, a crass, upwardly mobile small-town entrepreneur. What do these two deaths suggest about the prerequisites for surviving in this part of Nebraska?
4. From their first meeting, when Jim begins to teach Antonia English, he serves as her instructor and occasional guardian. Yet he also seems in awe of Antonia. What is it that makes her superior to him? What does she possess that Jim doesn’t? What makes her difference so desirable?
5. At times Jim’s feelings towards Antonia suggest romantic infatuation, yet their relationship remains chaste. Nor does Jim ever become sexually involved with the alluring—and more available—Lena Lingard. Curiously, Antonia appears to disapprove of their flirtation. And, whether he is conscious of it or not, Jim seems wedded to the idea of Tony as a sexual innocent. Following the failed assault by Wick Cutter, “I hated her almost as much as I hated Cutter. She had let me in for all this disgustingness.” [186] How do you account for these characters’ ambivalent and at times squeamish attitude toward sexuality? In what ways do they change when they marry and—in Antonia’s case—bear children?
6. In one of her essays, Willa Cather observed, “I have not much faith in women in fiction.” (Willa Cather: Double Lives) Yet in Antonia the author has created a genuinely heroic woman. Do her female characters seem nobler, better, or more deeply felt than their male counterparts? In spite of this, why might Cather have chosen to make My Antonia’ s narrator a man?
7. For her epigraph Cather uses a quote from Virgil: Optima dies… prima fugit: “The best days are the first to pass.” How is this idea borne out within My Antonia? In what ways can the novel’s early days, with their scenes of poverty, hunger and loss, be described as the best? What does Jim, the novel’s presiding consciousness, lose in the process of growing up? Does Antonia lose it as well? How is this notion of lost happiness connected to Jim’s observation: “That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great”?
8. Although My Antonia is elegiac in its tone, it is also notable for its striking realism about gender and culture. Not only does the novel have a female protagonist who prevails in spite of male betrayal and abuse (and two secondary female characters who prosper without ever marrying), it also portrays the early frontier as a world in which Bohemians, Swedes, Austrians, and a blind African-American retain their ethnic identities without dissolving in the American melting pot. Significantly, at the novel’s end Antonia has reverted to speaking Bohemian with her husband and children. How important are these themes to the novel’s overall vision?
(Questions adapted from Bantam Classics edition.)