The entire setting is magical, as when “some of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow leaves and shining white bark made them look like the gold and silver trees in fairy tales.” This is nature’s wonderland, in contrast to the United States’s urban hellholes of the early 20th century. They made a gold ribbon across the prairie. And there was so much motion in it the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running the sunflowers grew some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough leaves and many branches which bore dozens of blossoms. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains. But just how faithful was this “realist” novel to the hard facts of the American West?Ĭather writes poignantly of something as mundane as grass:Īs I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. Certainly the plains on a late-summer day can look inviting. “Her descriptions of the natural world are masterful, although she does a pretty good job of making her characters and situations feel real and convincing, too.”īut just how real were they? Cather seems in love with the natural world, and invests it with majesty. “Much of my delight came from Cather’s quietly exquisite prose,” he wrote. Essayist Peter Galen Massey expected the volume to be dull and old-fashioned, and instead found it rapturous. Hermione Lee, writing in The New York Review of Books, asserted that, “celebration of Cather as an American pastoralist, a kind of Midwestern Robert Frost, which greeted her books when they were published, still continues,” and claimed Cather “the standardbearer for vanished American values.” As first lady, Laura Bush held a White House symposium on women in the American West, in which Willa Cather featured prominently. Perhaps because of the omissions, Cather’s seemingly simple 1918 novel about an immigrant farm girl has proved as resilient as all-weather prairie grass in the American literary imagination. The reality of 1880s Nebraska finds the pioneers of Willa Cather’s My Á ntonia far more tough and even heroic than the romantic oil painting in prose that she left us wants to admit.
ONE OF THE MOST famous Western novels was, in fact, more dewy nostalgia than an accurate depiction of life on the frontier.
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