Table Of ContentBloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
The Adventures of  The Grapes of Wrath Portnoy’s Complaint
Huckleberry Finn Great Expectations A Portrait of the Artist 
The Age of Innocence The Great Gatsby as a Young  
Alice’s Adventures in  Gulliver’s Travels Man
Wonderland  The Handmaid’s Tale Pride and Prejudice
All Quiet on the  Heart of Darkness Ragtime
Western Front I Know Why the  The Red Badge of 
As You Like It Caged Bird Sings Courage
The Ballad of the Sad  The Iliad The Rime of the 
Café  Jane Eyre Ancient Mariner
Beowulf The Joy Luck Club The Rubáiyát of Omar 
Black Boy The Jungle Khayyám
The Bluest Eye Lord of the Flies The Scarlet Letter
The Canterbury Tales The Lord of the Rings Silas Marner
Cat on a Hot Tin  Love in the Time of  Song of Solomon
Roof Cholera The Sound and the 
The Catcher in the  The Man Without  Fury
Rye Qualities The Stranger
Catch-22 The Metamorphosis A Streetcar Named 
The Chronicles of  Miss Lonelyhearts Desire
Narnia Moby-Dick Sula
The Color Purple My Ántonia The Tale of Genji
Crime and  Native Son A Tale of Two Cities
Punishment Night The Tempest
The Crucible 1984 Their Eyes Were 
Darkness at Noon The Odyssey Watching God
Death of a Salesman Oedipus Rex Things Fall Apart
The Death of Artemio  The Old Man and the  To Kill a Mockingbird
Cruz Sea Ulysses
Don Quixote On the Road Waiting for Godot
Emerson’s Essays One Flew Over the  The Waste Land
Emma Cuckoo’s Nest White Noise
Fahrenheit 451 One Hundred Years of  Wuthering Heights
A Farewell to Arms Solitude Young Goodman 
Frankenstein Persuasion Brown
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Willa Cather’s
My Ántonia
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Editorial Consultant Janis P. Stout
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: 
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia—New Edition
Copyright ©2008 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction ©2008 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form 
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia / edited and with an introduction 
by Harold Bloom.-new ed.
       p. cm. —  (Modern critical interpretations)
       Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN 978-0-7910-9626-0 (hardcover : acid-free paper)  1.  Cather, Willa, 1873–1947. 
My Ántonia.  I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Modern critical interpretations : Willa 
Cather’s My Ántonia. 
  PS3505.A87M8947 2008
  813’.52—dc22
                                                            2008007336
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Contents
Editor’s Note            vii
Introduction            1
Harold Bloom
The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Ántonia            5
Blanche H. Gelfant
The Defeat of a Hero:  
Autonomy and Sexuality in My Ántonia             25
Deborah G. Lambert
Immigrant Backgrounds to My Ántonia:  
“A Curious Social Situation in Black Hawk”            39
Sally Allen McNall
“Fire and Wit”: Storytelling and the  
American Artist in Cather’s My Ántonia            49
Paula Woolley
Pro/Creativity and a Kinship Aesthetic             75
Susan J. Rosowski
Marek Shimerda in My Ántonia:  
A Noteworthy Medical Etiology            89
Patrick Shaw
vi Contents
My Ántonia and the Parables of Sacrifice          95 
Steven B. Shively
The Observant Eye, the Art of Illustration,  
and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia             105 
Janis P. Stout
Jim Burden and the White Man’s Burden:  
My Ántonia and Empire            117 
Michael Gorman
Americanizing Cather: Myth and Fiction  
in My Ántonia            141 
Diana H. Polley
Why Do We Read—and Re-read—My Ántonia?            151 
Ann Romines
Chronology            163
Contributors            165
Bibliography            169
Acknowledgments             173
Index            175
Editor’s Note
My  introduction  argues  for  Cather’s  aesthetic  eminence,  in  the  tradi-
tion of Walter Pater and Henry James, her critical and novelistic masters, 
respectively.
 Blanche H. Gelfant locates the key to My Ántonia in the unreliability 
of Jim Burden as narrator, since he is a solipsist and an avoider of sexuality, 
attached most deeply to a vision of his own childhood.
 Examining the same theme of sexuality, Deborah G. Lambert relates 
to Cather’s lesbianism, after which Sally Allen McNall discusses the theme 
of immigration in the novel.
 Ántonia’s own art as a storyteller is analyzed by Paula Woolley, while 
Susan J. Rosowski emphasizes Cather’s lesbian identification with nature’s 
wildness.
 The strange figure of Marek Shimerda is seen by Patrick Shaw as a 
counterdesign that ignites Cather’s imagination.
 For Steven B. Shively My Ántonia is a parable of yielding up expecta-
tions, after which Janis P. Stout’s concern is with Cather’s visual acuity.
 Michael Gorman traces the American imperialism against our Indians 
or Native Americans, which is subtly conveyed by Cather.
 The theme of national identity is handled by Diana H. Polley, while Ann 
Romines values My Ántonia for the surprising questions it keeps raising.
vii
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
willa cather (1873–1947)
I
W
illa Cather, though now somewhat neglected, has few rivals among 
the American novelists of this century. Critics and readers frequently regard 
her as belonging to an earlier time, though she died in 1947. Her best nov-
els were published in the years 1918–31, so that truly she was a novelist of 
the 1920’s, an older contemporary and peer of Hemingway and of F. Scott 
Fitzgerald. Unlike them, she did not excel at the short story, though there 
are some memorable exceptions scattered through her four volumes of tales. 
Her strength is her novels and particularly, in my judgment, My Ántonia 
(1918), A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s House (1925); fictions worthy 
of a disciple of Flaubert and Henry James. Equally beautiful and achieved, 
but rather less central, are the subsequent historical novels, the very popular 
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Shadows on the Rock (1931). Her 
second novel, O Pioneers! (1913), is only just short of the eminence of this 
grand sequence. Six permanent novels is a remarkable number for a modern 
American writer; I can think only of Faulkner as Cather’s match in this 
respect, since he wrote six truly enduring novels, all published during his 
great decade, 1929–39.
Cather’s remoteness from the fictive universe of Fitzgerald, Heming-
way and Faulkner is palpable, though all of them shared her nostalgia for an 
older America. She appears, at first, to have no aesthetic affinities with her 
younger contemporaries. We associate her instead with Sarah Orne Jewett, 
about whom she wrote a loving essay, or even with Edith Wharton, whom 
she scarcely resembles. Cather’s mode of engaging with the psychic realities 
11