My Ántonia

"I first read My Ántonia in college, and this was a time when I was very into the more avant-garde, formal end of modernism , so I looked at it and just assumed, fairly dismissively, that it was going to be this sort of bucolic country romance. And I read it and was totally captured by it, in a way, I think, that I didn’t have the vocabulary for at that age. I suppose you’d say now that I liked the vibe of it, without fully understanding where the vibe came from. But over the years I’ve re-read it a number of times and I’ve come to recognize it as a radical book, quietly so. It occupies a weird zone, in that it initially seems to behave like a 19th-century romance despite being published in 1918, but the novel itself is as ‘modern’ as anything by Faulkner. If you synopsize it, a man remembers his youth in the Midwest and his ongoing friendship with a Bohemian immigrant farm girl. It sounds quite realist, but Cather isn’t interested in following the traditional route of an agrarian romance at all. They don’t eventually get together, for one – 99% of books like this would end with them realizing their feelings for each other – and the novel’s approach to family, which is often the point towards which bildungsroman narratives converge, is profoundly ambivalent. Family units are dysfunctional or cobbled together, and characters find other ways of living together. It was only on subsequent readings I realized just how much My Ántonia was a queer novel, how much the essentialist approach to gender and sexuality is picked apart or described in terms of a social convenience. Then, when you discover that Cather would also present as male and go by ‘William,’ this reading of the novel really opens up. Cather is also able to conjure these images that are extremely evocative, that lead from color or sound rather than character or plot, and these images – there’s a long description of a plough backlit by the setting sun – are also dramatizations of transitions between moments of understanding, so you have an epiphany communicated without the character necessarily knowing it at the time. It feels radical to me."