My Antonia

Jim believes that immigrant girls like Ántonia are more interesting because they “learned so much from life, from poverty” and were “made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new” (198). All the young men of Black Hawk find the country girls attractive, and Jim admires the immigrant girls’ differences from the American-born girls who were raised in towns. However, the daughters of the townspeople think that physical exercise is unrefined for females. Financially struggling American-born farmers would never let their daughters “go out in service” doing domestic work, but the Bohemian and Scandinavian girls do not have the option to teach, so they work as hired girls to pay off their families’ debts.

Jim thinks the American townspeople’s attitude toward the immigrant hired girls is stupid. The American-born settlers do not distinguish between immigrant girls whose fathers and grandfathers were educated and respected in their homelands (such as Ántonia and Lena) and the foreign girls who have more modest backgrounds (such as the three Marys). Jim angrily observes that despite the young American-born men’s attraction to the beautiful, vigorous immigrant girls, the townsmen will never marry them because they prefer respectability: Despite Sylvanus Lovett’s infatuation with Lena Lingard, he marries someone more sedate. The three Bohemian Marys are the subject of scandalous gossip due to their pregnancies, which happen while they are working as housekeepers and cooks, but they are such excellent domestic laborers that they are always hired.

Ántonia’s success as a dancer leads to problems. She begins thinking only of the night’s dance and becomes distracted at work. Delivery boys and young farmers invite her to parties and picnics. One night, Mr. Harling hears a scuffle and a slap on the back porch: Harry Paine, who is marrying his employer’s daughter in a few days, had danced with Ántonia, then insisted on walking her home. He kissed her despite her protestations, and she slapped him hard. Mr. Harling tells Ántonia that she has been socializing “free and easy” girls, and now she has “the same reputation” (207). He announces that Ántonia must stop going to the dances or find another place to work.

Ántonia refuses to stop going to dances and tells Mrs. Harling that she is going to work in the Cutters’ household. Mrs. Harling is shocked, warning Ántonia that Mr. Cutter will ruin her and if she works there, she cannot return to the Harlings’ home. Ántonia insists that can take care of herself: She will earn a dollar more and there are no children there, so she can have more time off in the afternoons and evenings. Knowing how much she has sacrificed for her work and family, Ántonia asserts that she “has got to take her good times when she can” and wants to have her fling “like the other girls” (108). Mrs. Harling lets her go, wishing she had never become fond of Ántonia.

A dishonest moneylender, Wick Cutter came to the frontier “to escape restraint” (209). Without all of the legal oversight of an established society, Cutter can more easily victimize immigrant farmers like the Russian Peter by charging exorbitant fees each time money is borrowed and taking advantage of the female immigrant workers in his household. Jim despises Cutter’s “peculiar combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness” (211).

A gambler, Cutter enjoys quarreling with his wife and enraging her by his debauchery. She is “a terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, raw-boned, with . . . prominent, hysterical eyes” (211). Mrs. Cutter clips newspaper paragraphs about unfaithful husbands while Cutter rises daily when she most wants to sleep. Afraid that his childless wife might outlive him and inherit his property, Cutter works out with dumbbells.

When Ántonia moves to the Cutters’ household, she seems to only care about parties and enjoying herself: With Lena’s assistance, Ántonia sews copies of fashionable dresses. She wears gloves, high-heeled shoes, and bonnets. Jim and other high-school boys enjoy watching Ántonia, Tiny, Lena, and Anna walk downtown, and Jim still thinks proudly that Ántonia is the prettiest. As a high school senior, Jim can leave school early, and he sometimes sits in the ice cream parlor with the hired girls, hearing their rural news. Jim is angry when Tiny teases him about possibly becoming a Baptist preacher. Jim is gossiped about by townspeople who think it odd that he shows “no interest in girls of his own age,” preferring the company of the older immigrant girls.

After the Vannis depart town, Jim is invited to join the former Progressive Euchre Club (which has become the Owl Club), but he declines. He is restless for something to do in the evenings, but when he enjoys listening to immigrant farmers talk at Anton Jelinek’s saloon, Jelinek asks him not to come by because he knows his grandfather does not like it. Jim feels that the townspeople live repressed lives: “made up of evasions and negations” (219). Jim attends the Saturday night dances at Firemen’s Hall where he can meet the same people that he used to see at the Vannis’ dance pavilion: Ántonia, Lena, Tiny, the three Marys, and the Danish girls. Knowing that his grandparents would not approve, Jim waits until they are asleep and then climbs out his window.

Ántonia begins dating Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor known as a ladies’ man. One evening, when Donovan is absent, Jim walks Ántonia home, and Ántonia becomes indignant when he tries to kiss her. He retorts that Lena lets him kiss her even though he prefers Ántonia. Ántonia is shocked and says she will scratch Lena’s eyes out. Ántonia does not want Jim to mess around with Lena because she hopes he will go away to school and make something of himself.

One day, Jim notices that his grandmother has been crying. She has heard that he sneaks off to the firemen’s dances and that townspeople think he is becoming a bad youth. Jim does not want to hurt her and promises never to go again. He decides to read Latin in the evenings, complete his college requirements during the summer, and enter the university in the fall; he wants to leave home as soon as possible. In his loneliness, Jim drops off an anonymous May-basket for Nine Harling and often walks home with her older sister, Frances, telling her his plans. Frances tells him that Mrs. Harling will be fine again with Jim after he passes his college examinations, but she cannot understand why he prefers to be with Ántonia and Lena rather than with the girls of his “own set” (228).

During graduation, Jim looks at Mrs. Harling while he makes his speech. Afterwards, she tells him how surprised she was by how well he did. She gives him a silk umbrella with his name on the handle as a gift. On his way home, he sees Lena, Ántonia, and Anna waiting for him, and they congratulate him on his speech: Jim dedicated his oration to Mr. Shimerda. Ántonia tearily hugs him. Afterward, Jim watches the young women in their white dresses walk away.

The day after high school graduation, Jim begins studying, memorizing passages from Virgil’s Aeneid. In the evenings, Mrs. Harling sometimes asks him to let her play the piano for him. She insists to Jim’s grandparents, who worry about him, that he is not too young to go to college alone. Jim takes only one holiday during the summer: In July, Ántonia invites him to accompany her, Tiny, Lena, and Anna to the river for a picnic “like old times” (232).

When Jim sees Ántonia seated by the river, he realizes that she has been crying—the elder flower makes her homesick. She remembers her father talking to a friend in Bohemia “about music, and the woods, and about God. . . beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country” (236). Jim tells her about feeling her father’s spirit when he was alone on the Burdens’ farm and his certainty that Mr. Shimerda returned to his old country. Ántonia tells Jim that her father did not have to marry her mother, who had been a poor girl working in his mother’s house. He could have paid her money instead, but he was very kind. His family quarreled with him when he chose to marry her. Jim plans to visit Ántonia’s village in Bohemia someday.

The other girls talk about how coming to a new country was a trial for their mothers. Lena announces that she will move her mother out of the sod house since the men will never do it. When Lena starts to slowly draw her fingers through Jim’s hair to remove sand, Ántonia pushes her away and gives Jim a rough tousle.

In late August, when the Cutters go to Omaha for a few days, Ántonia becomes worried that Cutter is planning to play some trick on her. She visits the Burdens and tells them about Cutter’s strange behavior before his departure. He placed his silver and valuable papers under Ántonia’s bed and made her promise not to sleep elsewhere or have any friends stay the night while he was away. Grandmother Burden is apprehensive and suggests that Ántonia stay at the Burdens while Jim sleeps at the Cutters to protect the valuables. Jim does not like the Cutters’ home but agrees to do the arrangement because Ántonia is so upset.

On the third night of Jim’s stay, he is suddenly awakened by someone sitting on the edge of the bed. He feels “something hairy and cologne-scented” (248) brushing his face and realizes that Cutter is bending over him. He shouts and Cutter violently attacks him, realizing that Ántonia is not there. After Jim bends back his thumb, Cutter lets go of his throat, and Jim escapes through the window.

Although Jim’s lip is cut, his nose is injured, and his eye is swollen shut, he implores his grandmother not to call the doctor or let anyone know what happened. Ántonia sobs at his door, but Jim is angry at her for getting him involved with “all this disgustingness” (250). They find out that the injured Cutter left on the morning train. When Grandmother Burden and Ántonia go to the Cutter place to pack her belongings, they find that her clothes have been trampled. Mrs. Cutter arrives at the front door: Cutter had tricked her into traveling to Kansas City so he could return to Black Hawk without her to rape Ántonia. Jim perceives that quarreling with Mrs. Cutter at the escapade’s end is the primary source of excitement for Cutter, rather than the act itself.