My Antonia Critics Flashcards
Percy H Boynton (1924)
“Antonias career would have been treated as steps of abnegation…most contemporary novelists it would have been a complete defeat…But Miss Cather has retained an imaginative regard for the vital experience of mothering a family”
H. L Mencken(1919)
“she has got such a grip upon her materials—upon the people she sets before us and the background she displays behind them—that both take on an extraordinary reality. I know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the western prairies more real than My Antonia makes them, and I know of none that makes them seem better worth knowing.”
Harlan Hatcher (1935)
“Antonia…became the symbol of emotional fulfillment in motherhood on a Western farm. The thesis was arresting, appearing as it did in 1918 at the very moment when farm and village life were coming under the critical eyes of the novelists intent upon exposing its pollution. Without satire or bitterness and with only a little sentimentalism, Willa Cather pictured a strong character developing under severe difficulties which would crush a less heroic soul, surviving the most primitive hardships in a sod hut, toiling like an ox in the field with the men, enduring want, cut off from ordinary pleasures, withstanding betrayal and the cheap life as a hired girl to a triumphant serenity as mother to a healthy group of shy, awkward but happy and laughing boys who are content with their life on the farm.”
Carl Van Doren (1921)
“Antonia has less spectacular attributes of heroism, and exhibits the usual instincts of self-preservation hardly at all. She is gentle and confiding, and her strongest impulse is to give well-being and happiness to others. Yet the maternal current is so deep and sure in her that it saves her from mediocrity. Goodness, often negative and annoying, amounts in her to heroic effluence. It touches everything round her with reality. ‘She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize as universal and true…. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the foodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last…. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.’ In actual life Antonia was a Bohemian girl who was kind to Willa Cather in her childhood. In the novel Antonia has become so real that, while not in the least a symbol of herself, she brings symbols to mind, as only reality can do. It is not easy to say things so illuminating about a human being as Willa Cather says about Antonia. It is all but impossible to create a character with such
sympathetic art that words like these about Antonia and the apple tree toward the end of the book only
confirm and interpret an impression already made.”
Donald Heiney (1958)
“in the end it is Antonia who dominates the book: vigorous, unselfish, possessing a certain sensitivity and yet realizing her basic limitations, she is content to devote her life to the hard labor of the farm and to her children, leaving the world of culture and education to the more fortunate Jim”
