Towards the end of My Antonia, Jim Burden, at this point in the novel, a middle-aged success story, returns to Nebraska, determined to see his childhood friend, Antonia. Her home is comfortably bucolic—ducks and geese quacking in the yard, cats sunning on the porch, young women laughing as they wash dishes. Sure, Antonia appears older than she is, and much older than Jim, but Jim admires her, noting, “whatever else was gone [of her youth and beauty, we suppose], Antonia had not lost the fire of life.” From Jim’s perspective, Antonia is “a rich mine of life.”
In one of my favorite passages, Jim describes Antonia’s children exiting a fruit cellar: “they all came running up the steps together, big and little, tow heads and gold heads and brown, and flashing little naked legs; a veritable explosion of life out of the dark cave into the sunlight. It made me dizzy for a moment.” In case we miss the symbolism there, later the childless Jim reflects on the likelihood that Antonia’s children and their children , all that Bohemian energy, will vitalize Nebraska “for a long while yet.” Shortly after, the novel ends with Jim walking the faded remains of the road upon which he and Antonia, as children, had arrived, a road, he says, that had determined for each of them all that they could ever be.
As a much younger reader, I did find that idea bothersome, the idea that my or anyone else’s being and becoming could be determined, limited. But, now, middle-aged, I notice that Cather keeps drawing my attention to the road, to memories evoked by the road, memories that connect Jim and Antonia, no matter the differences between them as adults. The road also suggests that to become “successful” in America, one must move. Most of Cather’s characters – Lena Lingard, Tiny Soderberg, Jim Burden—do move towards opportunity, whether to work or to attend school. They find benefactors and mentors, train in some profession, and rise socially. Antonia’s life on the other hand is marked by hardship, hard work and a few bad choices, but by novel’s end, Antonia is, arguably, the happiest of the lot, rooted in a new land, steeped in the language and culture of her home land, and surrounded by family that blends new and old. In Cather’s view, roads may lead us away, but roads also invite us to return, to honor and hold dear, our old ways, the better to appreciate who we have become.