My Ántonia and “Neighbour Rosicky”: Lessons in Literature and Life through Storytelling

Connie Piper

Today young men and women are hanging on to tenuous threads of family relationships and desperately need a stronger connection to community than their evanescent pride in the hometown basketball team. Few families find time to eat even one meal together let alone to spend an evening together in conversation. Video Kingdom and Blockbuster, the NFL and the NBA, MTV, “Deal or No Deal,” the Worldwide Web, jobs at Burger King, after-school practices, ad infinitum, leave little time for Grandma’s stories about going to country school or Great-Grandma’s stories about the Depression, or Grandpa’s stories about how he lost the family ranch. Sadly, most students do not recognize that they can find strength and identity by looking back at their own family and community histories. For this reason alone, I welcome the opportunity to teach Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and “Neighbour Rosicky” to my high school juniors.

Together, My Ántonia and “Neighbour Rosicky” offer students some interesting lessons in storytelling. Although Cather in her introduction to My Ántonia tells Jim Burden that “no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it” (1), readers from a myriad of backgrounds experience a profound response to Jim’s account, his “thing about Ántonia” (2)—even Eminem-addicted, tattooed high school juniors of the New Millennium.

Critics and college professors alike have spent much time debating the structural devices and the form of My Ántonia and whether or not to classify it as a novel. Willa Cather is very direct about the form of the novel in her introduction to My Ántonia. As E.K. Brown points out, Cather never says the book is a novel in the traditional sense (199). She simply has her character Jim Burden, who like Cather herself lives in New York, present her one day with his memories of Ántonia, a girl they both admired in their youth in Nebraska: “Here is the thing about Ántonia . . . I didn’t take time to arrange it; I simply wrote down pretty much all her name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn’t any form” (2). Ironically, it is Burden himself who gives My Ántonia form. Thus, early on, students—like other readers—begin to realize that they, too, can write like this.  They, too, can write down "pretty much" what names "recall" to them and not worry so much about "form.”

James Woodress argues that Jim Burden is “both a structural device and a point of view” for the novel (Life and Art 181). Except for the brief introduction, Burden, a middle-aged lawyer for a railroad company, narrates the story without any of the pretensions of a professional writer. Cather, of course, uses Burden’s strong feelings about his childhood memories to weave together stories of her own childhood memories of Red Cloud, Nebraska. Because Cather presents her narrator simply as a man telling about his childhood, readers make allowances for Burden’s lack of sophistication as a writer. Cather saves the novel from becoming overly sentimental, Woodress adds, by juxtaposing Burden’s romanticized memories and the harsh realities of pioneer life. Many students will recognize this blending of idealization with reality in the stories their elders tell about the past. Doris Grumbach says that “Cather loved artistic contrast, the violent event set against the monotony of life on the prairie” (xxv). Burden, by confessing that the story “hasn’t any form,” allows Cather the freedom to draw into the narrative other stories of the hardships endured by the immigrants—stories of snakes, loneliness, hunger, insanity, extreme weather, and suicides. Also, by following Burden from the farm to Black Hawk, to Lincoln, to New York, to San Francisco, and back to Black Hawk on visits, Cather allows readers to learn the “latest” about the lives of the characters.

Of course, Jim’s primary interest is the central figure of the book, Ántonia Shimerda, the Bohemian girl who symbolizes for Jim and Cather “the whole adventure of our childhood” (2) and “a rich mine of life” (227). Jim’s admiration for Ántonia and his sense of their having “possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past” (238) help shape the structure of My Ántonia. Jim makes his focus on Ántonia clear when he decides to give his book a title before leaving it on Cather’s desk: “He went into the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote across the face of the portfolio ‘Ántonia.’ He frowned at this moment, then prefixed another word, making it ‘My Ántonia.’ That seemed to satisfy him” (2). Thus, both Jim’s persona and his passion for his image of his past personified in Ántonia give form to Cather’s My Ántonia.

Apart from the fact that the study of My Ántonia provides students a chance to debate its narrative form as a novel, Cather’s decision to make Jim Burden the storyteller allows for another juxtaposition: the juxtaposition of oral storytelling and the traditionally male literary definition of narration. Paula Woolley argues

Although Cather often expressed her admiration of oral storytelling and other forms of folk or “low” art, her prevailing desire to position herself within the male-dominated and male-defined literary tradition prevented her from explicitly identifying Ántonia as artist. Instead, through her references to Virgil, Cather emphasizes Jim’s role as the storyteller who seeks to “bring the Muse into [his] country” (169). Still, once we view Ántonia as an artist rather than as Jim’s muse, we find that she is only one of a group of nonprivileged creators in My Ántonia whose work provides an alternative to the tradition of Western high art. Traits that Cather elsewhere described as signifying the “true artist” characterize not only Ántonia but also Lena Lingard, Blind d’Arnault, and the actress in Camille. By highlighting these usually unnoticed artists in My Ántonia, we can begin to see new patterns and contrasts emerge from the jumble of impressions that Cather produces by including the stories and art of others. (150)

The rich texture of the storytelling in My Ántonia lies in what may at times seem, especially for

high school students, to be what Woolley calls a “jumble of impressions.” Cather herself

compares the pattern of storytelling in My Ántonia to “the other side of the rug, the pattern that is supposed not to count in a story” (Bennett 210). Cather’s analogy is a wonderful way for students to see the contrast between classic storytelling and oral storytelling.

Jim Burden, the narrator of My Ántonia, is an unhappily married New York lawyer, an educated man, but not a professional writer. Much is made of his passion for Latin and the line from Virgil: “Primus ego in patriam mecum . . . deducam Musas” [“I shall be the first to bring the Muse into my country”]. With the typical naiveté of a college sophomore, Jim believes that Gaston Cleric’s scholarship is the thing to admire, although Jim describes Cleric’s lectures as “clouded, obscure, elliptical” (167). On those occasions when Cleric becomes eloquent, Jim dismisses “his bursts of imaginative talk”—that is, Cleric’s art for storytelling—by arrogantly suggesting that Cleric “squandered too much in the heat of personal communication” (167). Jim seems to overlook the fact that he is more excited by Cleric’s oral storytelling than by the great poetry of Virgil. Jim also chastises himself as someone who can never be a scholar because he can “never lose himself for long among impersonal things” (168). So even as an educated man, Jim sees himself as “falling short” because his mind “plunges away” to the “places and people” of his “infinitesimal past” (168), and the “jumble of impressions” of his childhood “accompanied [him] through all [his] new experiences” (168).

Ironically, as Jim tells his story, he fails to realize that he is not the first to bring the Muse to his country. The Muse rode beside him on the train to Nebraska in the form of Jake Marpole. The Muse greeted him at the train station in the guise of Otto Fuchs. In Grandmother Burden, the Muse “was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away” (9). Jim encounters the Muse again and again in his youth, but never does the Muse entice him as much as when she takes the shape of the immigrant girls. However, Jim does not begin to recognize the Muse in her various forms until Lena comes to visit him in Lincoln. On the very evening after his having “been brushed by the wing of great feeling” (170), Lena knocks on Jim’s door to deliver his epiphany: “—the Danish laundry girls and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If

there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious” (173). Cather leaves little doubt that she finds narration sadly lacking when it is not grounded by honest emotions linked to a definite place and to a specific community of people. Cather told Carrie Miner that “a story was not made out of legs and arms and faces of an author’s friends and acquaintances, but out of an emotion or an excitement” (Robinson 213).

Learning that much of My Ántonia is based on fact fascinates most students and makes them see the connection between feeling and the art of storytelling. Woodress stresses that minor characters as well as the major characters and their stories are based on real life. Besides the commonly known facts that Ántonia is based on the life of Annie Sadilek Pavelka and that Jim is actually Cather, that Black Hawk is really Red Cloud, Nebraska, and that the Harlings are the Miner family, Woodress extends the list of actual connections to the community of her youth. Blind d’Arnault is based on two blind piano players Cather heard play in Lincoln and Red Cloud: Blind Boone and Blind Tom. Wick Cutter is a man named Bentley, a moneylender in Cather’s Red Cloud and a man apparently as villainous as he is portrayed in My Ántonia. Mrs. Gardener is Mrs. Holland, and Gaston Cleric is one of Cather’s professors at the University of Nebraska, Herbert Bates. Woodress assures us that the list goes on (Life and Art 177). My Ántonia, therefore, provides for students concrete evidence that storytelling at its best comes from the community, from the experience of living life, and from the need to share lessons learned from that experience.

Probably one of the best lessons Cather shares is that the answers to the riddles of literature and life are not simple. Cather sought a mentor in Stephen Crane, “the first genuine man of letters she had ever seen” (Bennett 205), in much the same way as the sophomoric Jim does in Gaston Cleric. In 1895 Crane visited an editor at Lincoln’s State Journal. Cather, who was working there her junior year at the University, deliberately eavesdropped Crane’s conversation with the newspaper’s editor and apparently “hounded” him for some days until he spoke with her about writing. Young Cather, like the young Jim Burden, thought in Classic terms: She believed that if “one burned incense long enough, the oracle would not be dumb” (Bennett 205). Cather finally was able to ask Crane if “stories were constructed from mystical formulae” (Bennett 206). Crane, whom life had already taught hard lessons, scoffed at her naiveté: “Where did you get all that rot? Yarns aren’t done by mathematics. You can’t do it by rule any more than you can dance by rule. You have to have the itch of the thing in your fingers . . . “ (qtd. in Bennett 206). With experience, Cather learned that “yarns” come from something deep: an “itch” in the heart. Her storytelling was close to the folk culture of her family and neighbors and inspired Cather to look with greater respect at Mary Ann Anderson, a woman from Back Creek, Virginia, and the first storyteller to influence Cather. Edith Lewis says that Cather as a child often hid under quilting frames to listen to Anderson and the other elderly quilters from Back Creek. Lewis calls Anderson “the preserver and transmitter of local folklore, gossip, and legends,” and adds that Anderson was “the best of the storytellers” and “knew the family histories of all the countryside, and all the dramatic events that had become legends among the country people. Her talk was full of fire and wit, rich in the native idiom” (10-11).

Cather’s youthful imagination, sparked by Anderson, flourished. Her grandmother Rachel Boak taught Cather to read. Both of Cather’s parents enjoyed fiction and poetry, her father often reading aloud to the Cather children. The Cather family had a library of standard classics as well as popular fiction, and Cather’s Aunt Franc introduced her to Byron and Scott. In the countryside farmwomen told stories and gossiped, while in Red Cloud her neighbors the Wieners introduced Cather to French and German and shared their library with her. Will Ducker, a storekeeper, taught Cather Greek, and together they read Virgil, Homer, Ovid, and Anacreon. Cather became a voracious reader herself, although increasingly growing impressed by high-brow literature (O’Brien 78-81). But with time Cather modified her tastes and adopted the folksier Sarah Orne Jewett as a mentor as well as her beloved Henry James (O’Brien 29).

Like Cather, Jim realizes that his life is rich with the stories of Grandmother Burden, Otto Fuchs, Widow Stevens, Ántonia, and Ántonia’s son Rudolf Cuzak. And when he sits down after Lena’s first visit to him in Lincoln, Jim tries to study, but the image of Lena coming across a field in her short skirt floats “like a memory of an actual experience” onto the page of his Latin book above the words “Optima dies . . . prima fugit” (174). Cather’s epiphany upon meeting Crane reverberates in Jim’s early literary awakening: “With her prairie background bounded on the one side by red grass, horses, and cattle and on the other by Greek and Latin classics she had read, she had come to the conclusion that nothing was of importance except good stories and the people who wrote them” (Bennett 205). Of course, both My Ántonia and “Neighbour Rosicky” make clear that in time Cather included in that list the people whose lives inspired good stories

and those who told good stories. Cather’s decision to heed Stephen Crane’s advice that “yarns aren’t done by mathematics” served her well and teaches students today that creativity in literature springs from communal experience as well as individual experience.

Paula Woolley explores at some length the dynamics between the storytelling of Jim, the narrator, and the storytelling of Ántonia and the other characters in My Ántonia in her essay “‘Fire and Wit’: Storytelling and the American Artist in Cather’s My Ántonia.” Woolley’s essay provides good insight into the nature of the storytelling at work in My Ántonia, and I try to assign it to my better readers when I teach Cather. Woolley feels that careful reading reveals a struggle between Jim and Ántonia—a struggle that represents what today are identified as masculine and feminine styles of storytelling. Jim’s voice is the traditionally masculine literary voice, while Ántonia’s voice belongs “to a tradition of oral literature, which values communal sharing rather than originality and solitary authorship” (155). Ultimately, Cather “tacitly celebrates the oral tradition of storytelling and allows other voices to enter and challenge her elite male narrator,” Jim Burden, who, ironically, realizes that the voices of his “less sophisticated” friends are the sources of the vitality and the poignancy for his own narration (155). This essay offers college-bound high school students and college freshmen a good introduction to supplemental reading related to Cather’s narrative method in My Ántonia.

Having students read Cather’s “Neighbour Rosicky,” the first of the three stories in Obscure Destinies, after having them read My Ántonia not only completes Ántonia’s story but also delineates more fully Cather’s portrayal of the art of storytelling. The main character, Anton Rosicky, is generally considered a composite of Annie Pavelka’s husband John and Cather’s father Charles (Arnold 135). Woodress, too, considers “Neighbour Rosicky” to be “in a sense a sequel to My Ántonia” as well as one of Cather’s best stories (Literary Life 438). He feels that the emotional power of the story comes from Cather’s feelings for her father. Cather’s love and admiration for the Pavelka family adds even greater dimension to the moral lessons in the story. Woodress promises that “Neighbour Rosicky” “rarely fails to move the most blasé reader” (Literary Life 438)—encouraging words for teachers of a generation of students often referred to as non-readers. Brown recommends that “Neighbour Rosicky” should conclude the study of My Ántonia primarily because it is a study of the same man and the same household that Jim Burden visits twenty years earlier at the end of My Ántonia (275), although Woodress feels that the story takes place sooner, “some ten years after Jim Burden left [the Cuzaks] prospering on their farm” (Literary Life 438).

In this story, Ántonia Shimerda becomes Mary, and Ántonia’s husband, Anton Cuzak, becomes Anton Rosicky. The Cuzaks’ son Rudolph, the novice storyteller who ends My Ántonia by telling Jim how Wick Cutter murdered his wife and committed suicide, seems to be the same character, only now he is the oldest son of the Rosicky family and married to Polly, an American girl from town. Although Rosicky seems more contented as a farmer than Cuzak, both miss the excitement of theatres, streetlights, and evening outings with friends, and both count their wives and children as unexpected blessings. Both Ántonia and Mary allow their husbands the freedom to socialize without harsh words. Cather’s description of Anton and Mary Rosicky’s relationship is essentially the description of Anton and Ántonia Cuzak’s marriage as well:

She was rough, and he was gentle,—city-bred, as she always said. They had been shipmates on a rough voyage and had stood by each other in trying times. Life had gone well with them because, at the bottom, they had the same idea about life. They agreed, without discussion, as to what was most important and what was secondary. They didn’t often exchange opinions, even in Czech,—it was as if they had thought the same thought together. A good deal had to be sacrificed and thrown overboard in a hard life like theirs, and they had never disagreed as to the things that could go. (240)

Primarily, “Neighbour Rosicky” completes the study of My Ántonia because Cather is able to

finish telling her story about John Pavelka.

Just as Doris Grumbach defines My Ántonia to be in essence “a series of dramatic or elegiac episodes,” Woodress concludes that the tone of “Neighbour Rosicky” is “retrospective and elegiac” and that the story has “little plot” (Literary Life 439). Consequently, neither work is a result of “mathematics” but are “yarns” that Cather’s fingers could not refrain from writing. Like My Ántonia, the lessons about life as well as the artistry of the storytelling in “Neighbour Rosicky” reveal the strong connection Cather has to her feelings for the people in her life and her memories of them.

Marilyn Arnold concurs that “Neighbour Rosicky” is nearly perfect in its ability to project a sense of “harmony, unity, and completeness in life and art” (135). Arnold describes Rosicky as a man able to acquiesce to life: “No blind idealist, Rosicky has a total understanding of what is worthy and what is not, and his one desire as an old man is to convey that understanding to his children. Through a lifetime of sorting out values he has acquired a sense of balance, a healthy perception of the other side of things, and a great tolerance for variety” (135). Although Cather has no children, she, too, considers herself old at the time she wrote Obscure Destinies and is as eager as her character Rosicky to share what she had learned of life with her readers, using the art she has spent a lifetime perfecting: the art of storytelling. She uses her art to weave “the various strands of his life and memory into a pattern, moving carefully and repeatedly from present to past and then back again,” achieving a “balance and wholeness” especially by “contrasting or pairing opposites: city and country, winter and summer, older generation and younger, single life and married life, Bohemians and Americans” (Arnold 138). The result is much like Jim’s dream of Lena Lingard: a kind of amalgamation of life itself and the fiction of storytelling. Marilyn Arnold says that in “Neighbour Rosicky” Cather “seems to be looking . . . for a way to organize experience, not just in art but in life as well. She is using art to generate a comprehensive vision that can reconcile and make whole the vast number of disparate elements that constitute a human life” (135).

The best days are the first to flee, but they are the ones too often forgotten when oral storytelling is neglected. Together My Ántonia and “Neighbour Rosicky” present strong arguments that storytelling—especially oral storytelling—is at the very heart of human existence and the genesis of “classic” literary forms. The art of storytelling cannot be ignored or replaced. Students need to recognize that courage, strength, perseverance, honesty, commitment to land and community as well as a healthy sense of humor are lessons linked to memories. Although memories can be distorted or confused with dreams, as are Jim’s memories of Lena Lingard, and although high school students may not relate fully to a teacher’s exhortation that keeping in touch with the past is important, students really do need to learn what Cather has Jim realize at the end of My Ántonia: “Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again” (211). They, too, like Neighbour Rosicky need a “tap-root that goes down deep” (244). When students make that connection, they can recognize that their parents’ memories, and their grandparents’ memories, and the memories of their neighbors and their friends are important. They can begin to understand that storytelling is important, so important that it is an art—an art not only developed by Virgil long ago, but an art developed by the hired hand, by the old lady next door, by Grandma, and by the students themselves. With personal connections with literature, students can see that literature is much more than a ladder to social status. It is a means to enhance their existence. It is a means “to reconcile and make whole the vast number of disparate elements” of their lives.

And what is the best way to help students to discover that personal connection and that personal enhancement? Why, have students write narratives of their family stories, of course. I ask students to write a narrative of a family story or a series of family stories or episodes similar to Cather’s selection of stories. These stories are not to be family trees or those genealogies with long lists about who married whom and their subsequent lists of offspring. I encourage students to consider stories that their families enjoy repeating at family gatherings and lively, colorful tales that are “handed down.” Generally speaking, the assignment works well. After all, students today, in spite of their tattoos and earrings, are not so different from the young Willa Cather. They, too, are looking for where they belong. They just sometimes don't know it.

Works Cited

Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather’s Short Fiction. Athens: Ohio UP, 1984.

Bennett, Mildred R. The World of Willa Cather. 1951. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.

Brown, E. K. Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. Completed by Leon Edel. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. 1918. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

---. “Neighbour Rosicky.” Collected Stories. 1932. New York: Vintage, 1992. 231-61.

Grumbach, Doris. Foreword. My Ántonia. By Willa Cather. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. vii- xxix.

Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. 1953. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000.

O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Robinson, Phyllis. Willa: The Life of Willa Cather. Garden City: Doubleday, 1983.

Woodress, James. Willa Cather: Her Life and Art. New York: Pegasus, 1970.

---. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.

Woolley, Paula. “‘Fire and Wit’: Storytelling and the American Artist in Cather’s My Ántonia.”
Cather Studies. Vol. 3. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996. 149-81.