Where Willa Cather's narration begins to go awry: cherchez les hommes

Here's where two of her narrative decisions begin to let Willa Cather down in "My Antonia": in the 4th section, A Prairie Woman's History (?), the narrator, Jim Burden, comes home to Black Hawk, Nebraska, after completing his degree at Harvard, and he learns of a lot of changes in the town, or more specifically among the Norwegian/Swedish farm girls who'd come into town to make their fortunes and then, in various ways, had moved on: He learns that Tiny had moved west and made a lot of money in the Klondike and had settle in San Francisco, that Lena - who obviously came onto him during her time as a dressmaker in the college town of Lincoln - has moved west as well and is a very successful and influential dressmaker in SF, and most important he learns that Antonia followed her railroad man fiance to Denver, where he refused to marry her, ran out on her in fact, leaving her pregnant - and she's returned home with her child, a "fallen woman," but still proud and independent. The problem? All of this is told to Jim - we don't see any of it dramatized or realized or unfolding in a narrative arc. He's just gathering information from other townsfolk. Cather would have been better off here with the freedom of a 3rd-person narrator that would allow her to change point of view when necessary (and which she used successfully in Death Comes for the Archbishop). All that said, Jim does go off to the farm to find Antonia - and they have a rather emotional meeting - Jim says to her that he'd wished she could have been his "sweetheart" or his wife, and that she will always be in his life. She tearfully says she has no regrets. A very nice scene, in a very limited way. The problem is, it's hard to understand Jim's emotional-romantic-sexual attitude toward Antonia: if he really is or has been in love with her, what's to prevent him from marrying her right now? If he feels he can't do that because now they are of an entirely different social stature - he's a Harvard-educated city lawyer and she's a farm laborer - he should articulate that, right? The puzzling thing overall is Jim's lack of sexual drive - toward her, toward anyone. He seems to love her even more - now that she's completely inaccessible to him. This asexuality may arise from Cather's strange decision to tell this story from a male point of view - she's a great writer in many ways, but Jim, and perhaps other male characters as well, are so lacking in sexuality that they don't seem real - not in the same way that her ambitious, colorful female characters seem real. The evil men are more vivid and credible, but she's at sea with a nice straight-arrow like Jim Burden.