My Antonia
... his grandparents, who lives in Nebraska, and there he feels that he seems to walk into a paradise of nature. He and Antonia, a neighbor girl, enjoy the ecstasy which nature can afford to them. And he develops a profound affection with Antonia. Moreover, he feels the happiness of being "dissolved into something complete and great" (Cather 14). It shows Jim's intimate relation with nature. However, seasons change. "When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still . . . . They have to grow up, whether they will or no" (Cather 124). So when Jim is old enough to go to high school, the Burden family moves to a nearby town, Black Hawk. Jim says good-bye to childhood and nature, but, when Antonia also comes to town as a helper for the Harlings, he still keeps a close relation with Antonia. However, one night in order to protect Antonia from Wick Cutter's sexual attack, Jim sleeps in Antonia's bed and is attacked by Mr. Cutter. He is frightened and runs away. Having finished the studies in high school, Jim makes another journey moving from Black Hawk to Lincoln to receive college education. There not only nature but also Antonia seems to him so far away, but Jim misses them all and awaits a return to her. Before going to Harvard, Jim goes back to his home town and pays a visit to Antonia. After this brief visit to his country home, Jim goes to Harvard for advanced study and does not return until about twenty years after. The middle-age Jim goes back to the scenes of his childhood, and sees an aged Antonia. A battered woman replacing a lovely girl, Jim sees for the first time Antonia's real identity rather than his ideal image of her. To Jim, Antonia has become "a rich mine of life, like the founder of early races" (Cather 227). Jim's literal journey into the great prairie of North America serves a metaphorical vehicle for an interior journey in a quest for his lost early self and his proper spiritual home when he is sent to his grandparents at the age often. And this journey into a dream-like land seems to be a return to his lost world, the realm of the Imaginary before the coming of the Symbolic Order. Jim's journey into the great prairie of North America might be seen as the reunion of Mother and Child--the return to one's origins, the memory of childhood experience. These main features of the Imaginary as unification and gratification dominate the whole atmosphere of Jim's sense of his childhood. For example, during the long night drive to his grandparents' home on the wagon, Jim "had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, as were outside man's jurisdiction" (Cather 8). Leaving Man's world behind, he seems to go into another world and becomes dissolved into it because "Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out" (Cather 8). What's more, lying on a warm yellow pumpkin in the middle of the garden, Jim gains a sense that I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. (Cather 14) The introduction is a prelude to all of these internal situations that are evident in the novel. The feeling that is conveyed through the introduction is one that leans very heavily on the fact that Jim sees Antonia as much more than a friend but more so as a mother. In the novel, since Jim is an orphan, he sees both Nature and Antonia as his mother. At the very beginning of the story when Jim starts his journey in search for a new mother, Jim says, I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. . . . we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world. (Cather 5) This new world is the Mother Earth, still and dark. The great earth seduces Jim to come to her embrace, to come to her womb; he feels that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweed^Òs when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. (Cather 12) On the other hand, Jim's affection with Antonia is more like that between child and mother. In his b...