My Antonia, Notes Part Two:

When we consider the Latin phrase that Jim learns during his studies with Gaston Cleric (the phrase that also serves as the book's epigraph) -- Optima dies, prima fugit -- what kind of story do we believe we are reading? The phrase means "the best days are the first to flee." How were Jim's "best days" his days with Antonia in rural Nebraska? When Jim reflects upon this passage, he wistfully imagines himself being "the first to bring the muse to his country." Recall the passages from my book manuscript (which I also emailed to all of you) concerend this sense of bringing "the muse" to one's country. How is Nebraska -- where Antonia, his gradnparents, the "Hired Girls" -- Jim's "country"? What is his relationship to that place? To that land (or landscape)? Has it shaped him? If so, why would he need to bring the muse to it?

Jim's education introduces him to "the classics" -- these ancient muses are the ones to whom he refers. How is reverence for poets of ancient Greece and Rome "retrogressive"? How does reverence for those artistic beauties relate to life in America, for the young immigrant owner of a farm, for the people in small towns, for poor people in cities? When I contended that Jim could not be the first to bring the muse to his country, because it was already there, what do you think I meant? How might we think of Antonia as a potential muse? A muse generally inspires other people, and we have seen that Antonia certainly does this. But how is she a muse for herself and for the family she builds? Does she transcend the sort of hemmed-in narrative role of "earth mother" in the novel? What kind of mother does she become (think of her role with her first child and then with her later children)?

Earl indicated that many feminist readings of this novel have read Jim as an emergent patriarch, as it were, one who "uses" Antonia and misreads her and her family from the start. Is this too harsh an assessment of Jim in your opinion? Certinaly he gains something from his relationship with her, but, as she indicates, she gains something from her relationship with him. Is their relationship not one of dominance but rather one of mutal love, mutual benefit? Kalynn pointed out that while some people have conceived of the very title itself as a proprietary stand by Jim -- of owning Antonia and her memory and all that is associated with her -- it could just as well be a term of endearment, one that is indelibly imprinted on his mind from Mr. Shimerda's utterance of it. So, "my" might not be possession, but rather sublime affection.

And by the end of the novel, what kind of life do we see Jim leading? And what kind of life is Antonia leading? How do their lives rely on land? And how do they demonstrate aspects of the "American dream"? In Jim's job as a lawyer "for the railroads," what might his role be in regard to borders, passageways, incursion on land, and technology? What do we know of his adult life and the emotion of it? What is his directional momentum (which is especially pertinent given his employment with the railroads, a whole industry concerned with the movement of people and goods across land, with modernization)? Were his best days gone (to hearken back to the Latin phrase he so powerfully recalled)? And Antonia . . . what kind of woman is she at the end of the novel? She might have lost some of her youthful vigor, certainly, but is she a desiccated American, Bohemian, or American-Bohemian figure? What is her identity? She is "in place" where, exactly? Is she a future emblem? And what of her nurturance of children and of soil? As we discussed in class, how is she a subtle symbol of the environemtnal imagination, personified? How is she a harmonious, bi-directional emblem?