What Cather doesn't quite get right in My Antonia

As you read Willa Cather's novel "My Antonia," think about this: Doesn't it seem like an evocation from of an era long gone, like the reminiscence of an old person looking back on his or her youth in a place far away and long ago? Some of this feeling is quite accurate - especially for 21st-century readers who read this novel for a sense of what life was like on the thinly populated prairie and in the small towns in 19th-century Nebraska. Yet Cather wrote the novel in 1918, and it was a reflection on her life on the prairie in the 1880s or 1890s - 20 or 30 years back. That would be like someone today writing a novel set in 1980 - which would in no way have to feeling of a long-ago, bygone time, right? In other words, part of the nostalgic (but not elegaic) mood of My Antonia is purely fictive, Cather's creating through her evocative language. But in another sense, this novel gives the lie to the cliche that we live in a time of rapid changes. We do in some ways - technological, primarily - but in other ways the early 20th century in America was actually a time of more dramatic change: the great settlements, the massive European immigration, the arrival of the automobile, the new prosperity, the political suffrage movement - perhaps there was more change between 1890 and 1920 than in any other era. Finished 3rd section of My Antonia, Lena Linborg, in which the narrator, Jim Burden, goes through his freshman year at U. Nebraska in small university town of Lincoln (the 3rd different setting for the novel, each one somewhat more "settled" but not exactly sophisticated), and in this section Lena, one of the country girls who'd come to town to make her fortune, a "fast" girl in the lingo of the era, looks Jim up in Lincoln and they begin a long friendship - dinner, theater, long walks - which oddly does not lead to romance. Lena certainly seems to want to fall in love with Jim - or maybe just to have sex with him - but Jim shows no interest, or no drive - is this part of the weirdness of Cather's writing a novel from the male point of view, which she doesn't really quite get - particularly when it comes to sex? Ultimately, Lena says she never wants to marry anyone (doubtful - but it does also seem like she's coming on to Jim, telling him she won't tie him down) and Jim decides she's too much of a distraction from his studies and determines to follow his favorite classics teacher off to Harvard - all readers today will be shocked at how apparently easy it was to transfer into Harvard at that time: all it took was a letter from a newly recruited junior faculty member. In other words: connections. Shocking!