Willa Cather's My Antonia (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

191 Pages·2008·1.065 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

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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
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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