F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s masterpiece The Great Gatsby (1925) often takes honors as the American novel of the 20th century. It’s my favorite. But Willa Cather‘s My Antonia (1918), about rural Nebraskan life in the late 1800s, may be in the same league. In some sections, the Cather novel may even be better in the vividness of its language. On Tuesday, August 24, Antonia will be the topic of a Meting of the Minds chatcast moderated by Tom Peters and sponsored by the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center. (Note: “Meting” is the correct spelling in this case. It’s a play on “mete out.”)
Later I’ll have more on Meting–as well as links to free copies of the book and other goodies. But first here’s a continuation of my Gatsby–My Antonia comparison, which I’ll offer just as a recreational reader. Far more parallels are evident than merely the shared Midwestern background of Cather and Fitzgerald. Besides, rural Nebraska is not St. Paul, and if you really want to be fussy, Cather didn’t move to Nebraska from Virginia until she was four.
Okay: the big issues here. Does anyone else notice the resemblance between Jay Gatsby and Jim Burden, My Antonia‘s main narrator? “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away,” Fitzgerald writes of Gatsby. “This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament; it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”
Now compare this to My Antonia‘s description of Jim Burden: “As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his naturally romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it often made him seem very funny when he was a boy, has been one of the strongest elements in his success. He loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development…He never seems to me to grow older. His fresh color and sandy hair and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man, and his sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful as it is Western and American.” Ah! Gatsby, too, at least the last part of the description.
On top of that, Cather explicitly compares the romantic Jim Burden to his wife, who’s incapable of real enthusiasm about anything. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses the coolness of Jordan Baker’s relationship with Nick Carraway as a contrast with Jay’s feelings for Daisy.
Yet another Gatsby-My Antonia parallel is that Jim Burden caught up again with Antonia after years of separation and “renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life…set apart time enough to enjoy that friendship. His mind was full of her that day.” No, that isn’t the same as a Jay Gatsby relentlessly tracking down Daisy to repeat the past. But it’s clear that Antonia is the human embodiment of Jim’s passion for something else, the Nebraska of his boyhood.
I won’t explore here all the parallels between the two books, but the above is what most strikes me. Got your own opinion about My Antonia in a Gatsby context or any other? Show up at the chatcast and speak up to Tom Peters, who, besides his MLIS, also holds a masters in English. Here’s his lowdown on the chatcast, which, though intended for the blind and other print-challenged people, is open to anyone:
(Tuesday, August 24, 2004 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Central Daylight Time):
The Meting of the Minds Online Book Discussion Group will be discussing the novel My Antonia by Willa Cather. A lawyer recalls his Nebraska boyhood and the girl who was a strong influence on his life in this novel about pioneering conditions and the assimilation of the immigrant. (RC 13491 and BR 11320) (2 cassettes). For your information, various digital versions of the novel are available at Blackmask.com An online version in HTML format also is available from the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial in Red Cloud, Nebraska. An online scholarly edition is available from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
When you click on Meting’s audio chat page, you’ll download a small, safe program if you haven’t participated in a chat before. You’l also need a computer with a sound card, as a well as microphone if you want to ask questions by voice rather than keyboard.
Meanwhile you can hear an old discussion of My Antonia from public station WAMU in Washington, D.C.
Still other links:
—Blackmask‘s additional information on Cather. You’ll find a short bio, not just links to her works in different formats.
—The Willa Cather Electronic Archive–which even includes links to a recording of a Cather speech in 1933. The speaker introducing Cather isn’t very intelligible, but her own voice is for the most part.
—EDsitement‘s Antonia lesson plan.
—Wikipedia‘s write-up on Willa Cather, including a link to some Catherisms.
—Amazon’s page on My Antonia, which is available in paperback, hardback, and audio and cassette versions, as well as an e-book (let’s hope that the latter has features that go beyond the free public domain edtions).
—Barnes and Noble edition (cover shown above).
Another detail: My Antonia, as mentioned above, is partly about the assimilation of the foreign-born in what might at first seem an unlikely rural setting. It is not. My Antonia serves as a lesson for us today, given the inflows of new Americans into so many small towns in the past quarter century or so.
