FREE ESSAY ON CRITISCISMS OF MY ANTONIA

CRITISCISMS OF MY ANTONIA

In the past, critics have ad moralized and/or brutalized every writer they could get their
pen on. This is seen from criticisms of Henry Adams to William Butler Yeats. These
writers critique everything about the writer and his/her works. For instance many critics
criticize Willa Cather's novel, My Antonia. Their criticisms lie on the basis that My
Antonia is based on cyclical themes with no structure holding each of the My Antonia's
books. In other words, as a collection of five different accounts remembered by the main
character, Jim Burden, My Antonia is characterized by a loose plot structure yet the
existence of common themes is expressed in a cyclical nature.
According to James E. Miller, Jr.'s  'My Antonia': A Frontier Drama of Time, Willa
Cather's novel, My Antonia, is defective in structure. (Bloom 51) Its structure is
basically based on the narrators', which is Cather herself, point of view about when the
main character, Jim Burden, remembers specific moments in an abstract pattern in his life
about his Antonia. This is so because the collection of books that make up the novel, My
Antonia, is about Willa Cather; the narrator's idea of what and to what point Jim Burden
remembers. Miller also states that the novel lacks focus and abounds in irrelevancies.
(Wells 1) This is due to the fact that Cather didn't provide and consistent character
portrayal throughout her novel. Another critic, Kim Wells, asserts Miller's opinion on
the novel. Because as he states the novel has many variations from a theme. (Wells 1) For
instance the section about the hired girls and also the part when Peter and Pavel, two
lonesome
Russian Settlers, tell Jim and Antonia a tragic tale that horrifies and fascinates the
children. This tale was about when Peter and Pavel drove a sled with a bridal couple
across dark, snowy Russian country and were attacked by hordes of ravenous wolves, where
the wolves killed both the bride and the groom. These examples are divergences which
weaken the overall structure of the novel. (Wells 1)
Even though both critics say that the novel has a loose structure, they also state that
the only thing that resembles any type of structure is the constant use of cyclical
themes. For instance as Miller puts it,  the cycle of the seasons of the year, the cycle
of the stages of human life, and the cycle of the cultural phases of civilization. (Bloom
59) In Miller's essay he states that in 
The first book of My Antonia, The Shimerdas, introduces from the start the drama of time
in the vivid accounts of the shifting seasons...portraying the terrible struggle for mere
existence in the bleakness of the plains' winter, dramatizing the return of life with the
arrival of spring, and concluding with the promise of a rich harvest in the intense heat
of the prairie's summer. This is Jim Burden's remembered year, and it is his obsession
with the cycle of time that has caused him to recall Antonia in a setting of the changing
seasons. (Miller 55)
Book one, The Shimerda's, introduce the beginning of two cyclical themes. One of which is
the cycle of the seasons of the year, which begins in the narrators'/Jims' mind in the
autumn when the Shimerdas move to Nebraska, the winter when Mr. Shimerda commits suicide,
then spring followed the death of Mr. Shimerda, and finally summer in the cyclical theme
of the seasons of the year which created another cyclical pattern within itself. This
imbedded cyclical theme is on 
the stages of life is based on the fact that Antonia moves into adulthood while Jim stays
as a child as stated by Kim Wells. (Wells 1) This happens because in the section the
hired girls Antonia moves into the city from the farm where she used to live. The
movement from a rural to an urban area made Antonia mature quicker so she would be able
to survive in the city. While on the other hand Jim leaves the farm to go to college, in
which inclosing walls unlike that of Antonia protects him. Then Antonia moves into
adulthood with a marriage and birth while Jim is at college toiling on the prospect of
adult love with Lena Lingred. Finally, Jim moves into an odd marriage and then goes back
to the farm with Antonia and her children. In the novel the reader encounters the
impression that Jim is more closely alike to the children in maturity than that of the
maturity of Antonia. 
She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which
fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a movement by a look or gesture
that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. (Cather 261)
In this we see Jim's feeling of incompleteness while on the other hand Antonia is an
adult with a worn body and a spirit which is there unlike that of Jim's spirit which
appears lost even though his body looks new.
The theme that life is a cycle in My Antonia is also supported by Harold Bloom's comment,

It is in the dramatization of Antonia from the girlhood of the opening pages through her
physical flowering in the middle books to, finally, her reproduction of the race in a
flock of fine boys in the final pages of the book that her life it represented...as a
cycle in its stages of birth, growth, fruition and decline.  (Bloom 54-55)
In which he describes how Antonia went from girlhood in the beginning of the novel to her
regression back into childhood. Even though the regression is usually seen in Jim Burden
going home to [him] self. (Cather 273) The fact that Jim is going back to Antonia is like
going home to his childhood. It is at that moment that he realizes that Antonia's and his
love does not depend on physical proximity. The fittest place to talk to each other.
(Cather 239) Also in coming back to his psychological childhood he asks Antonia,  'I'd
have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything
that a woman can be to a man.' (Cather 240)
The end of the novel is also without a circle. The completion of the novel has a literal
homecoming and completion of the circle. This circle is when Jim Burden goes back to the
road with which the novel began, and ending as it began in the autumn of the year. An
even greater importance is Jim's sense of returning to an awareness of the deep sources
of his life, as symbolized in his childhood, in the land, and in Antonia. The feelings of
that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the
sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's
experience is. (Cather 273)
Every writer has been criticized in the past. The future will hold the same thing for
them, whether it is a brutalizing and/or ad moralizing pen. Willa Cather's novel, My
Antonia, is one of hundreds of thousands of novels, poems, and etc. of literary works,
which are criticized. The critics that criticize the novel, My Antonia, all explain the
fact that the novel has a very loose structure or none at all. With that 
in mind they also explain that the only literary technique, which was used in the novel,
that holds the whole novel together is the constant cyclical themes. These themes are the
cycle of the stages of human life, the cycle of the seasons of the year, and the cycle of
the cultural phases of civilization.
Bibliography
Works Cited
Mayell, Frank. American Literature: Realism to 1945. Pasadua: Salem Press inc., 1981
Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Views: Willa Cather. New York: Chelsea 
House Publisher, 1985.
Wells, Kim. Domestic Goddesses. August 23, 1999. Online. Internet. November 4, 1998.