ELIT 48C Class #9

Lie or Lay? What is the difference?

Lie and Lay

• To lay is to place something or put something down, and it must be followed by a noun or pronoun, a thing; to lie is to recline. A lie is an untruth, and to lie also means "to tell an untruth." Examples: Lay that package on the mantel, will you please? Bridgette would like to lie in the hammock near the pool. Sometimes it's tempting to lie when you're in trouble, but a lie only makes things worse. (Hint: Lay sounds like place; lie sounds like recline. But be careful: lay is also the past tense of the verb to lie: Jay lay on the couch all day yesterday.)

AGENDA

Review Historical Context

LectureMy Antonia Books II and IIIThemes and Style

DiscussionQHQs

Review: Historical Context

Increasing Immigrant PopulationResistance to Immigrants: cheap labor

and untrustworthyThe Homestead Act: 160 acres Opposing Theories: The “melting pot”

versus the “salad bowl”Frederick Jackson Turner and the

image of the American West

DISCUSSION Theme: a main idea or an underlying

meaning of a literary work that may be stated directly or indirectly.

Style: the way a writer writes; the technique which an individual author uses in his writing.

My Ántonia Style: RealismJim Burden gives voice to a romanticism, or at least an overly sentimental or positive outlook that seems close to romanticism. The homesteading German, Danish, Bohemian, and Scandinavian settlers were the embodiment of a cultural tradition Cather cherished. However, the novel is saved from sentimentality by the evocative depiction of the harsh realities of pioneer and immigrant life and the complexity of the characters, who are rarely, if ever, only sympathetic or only despicable. British modernist E.M. Forster coined the phrase “round” to describe these complex characters.

Style: Imagery and Symbols

Cather's sparse but allusive style relies on the quality and depth of her images. She consciously uses the land, its colors, seasons, and changes to suggest emotions and moods. Summer stands for life (Ántonia can’t imagine

who would want to die during the summer) Winter stands for death (Mr. Shimerda commits

suicide during the winter).

Animals are used as symbols of the struggle for survival experienced by the Shimerdas during their first winter. The essential grotesque image of the cost of this struggle is that of Mr. Shimerda’s corpse frozen in his blood

His coat and neck cloth and boots are removed and carefully laid by for the survivors.

Which other Images or symbols can you name?

Imagery and Symbols

Themes: Coming of Age• My Ántonia is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, that traces

Jim Burden's development from the age of ten. • It begins when he is orphaned and newly transplanted to his

grandparents' farm in Nebraska, where he first feels erased. • His escape into romanticism first takes the form of a young boy's

fascination with outlaws, such as Jesse James, and lost adventurers, such as the Swiss Family Robinson.

• As an adolescent, he remains estranged although conventional. Bored by the sameness of his small, pioneer town, he is intrigued by the romantic foreignness of the hired girls, girls he will never marry, and he keeps away from girls that would be suitable for him.

• As an adult, he remains virtually without a real home. His marriage is childless; he and his wife live almost separate lives, his being a life of travel on the railway through the land that he loves.

DifferenceIt is through the eyes of Jim Burden, an orphan and thus

something of an outsider himself, that Cather considers differences of class, nationality, and gender.

Even before young Jim arrives in Nebraska, he is met with prejudice against foreigners. Jake thinks that foreigners spread diseases.

But Cather makes it clear that prejudice was not invented in America. Otto tells Mrs. Burden, "Bohemians has a natural distrust of

Austrians." And Norwegian Lena feels fated by the Lapp blood of her

paternal grandmother. "I guess that’s what's the matter with me; they say Lapp blood will out."

In your groups: Take ten minutes to review the reading, discussion questions, and the QHQs for today!

1. What are the contrasts that are being developed between the characters in this section?

2. What is the importance of independent women in this section, and why has Cather chosen to develop these characters here?

a. Lena states “I’ve seen a good deal of married life, and I don’t care for it. I want to be so I can help my mother and the children at home, and not have to ask lief of anybody.” This passage captures the motif of the ‘new woman’ because it depicts a woman as the breadwinner for her family, rejects the assumed importance of marriage, and portrays woman as an independent being who doesn’t have to suppress her wants and actions.

Questions

3. Discuss the differences Jim sees between the country girls and the town girls.

4. Explain the importance of the dance pavilion to both Jim and Antonia.

5. Explain why Willa Cather has chosen to devote one of the books of her novel to Lena Lingard.

a. The reason Jim includes an entire book about Lena Lingard, lends itself to the possibility that the original narrator of the story is Lena Lingard.

6. Discuss the importance of the narrator leaving Black Hawk for college life.

Discuss My Ántonia in terms of one or more of the modernist manifestos.

• F.T Marinetti: “Manifesto of Futurism”• Mina Loy: “Feminist Manifesto”• Ezra Pound: “A Retrospect”• Willa Cather: The Novel

Démeublé• William Carlos Williams:

“Spring and All”• Langston Hughes: “The Negro

Artist and the Racial Mountain”

Langston Hughes• “Where Willa Cather, along with many other modernists, sought to

divide high art from popular entertainment, Langston Hughes urged African American artists to embrace black popular culture, epitomized for Hughes and many other observers of the 1920s by the innovations of jazz” (348), Cather’s My Antonia seems to unintentionally promote Hughes’ point. This chapter goes into depth about the upbringing of a blind black pianist, Samson, whose musical talent is coincidentally discovered by their white slave owners, the d’Arnaults. After his musical potential consisting of “an absolute pitch, and a remarkable memory” (117) was discovered, Cather explains: “as piano playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than his other physical senses” (117), when referring to Samson’s jazzy compositions.

• QHQ: What is the role of black people and black culture in the story and in Jim’s society?

Mina Loy• Cather presents Jim as an intelligent, lovable young boy in the

beginning of the story. The idealistic lens he views the world through bleeds optimism in the first book. However, as Antonia ceases to be one of the beautiful observations of Jim’s surroundings (which are made beautiful through Jim’s descriptions), and begins to assert herself as a monarch of her household, there is a palpable shift in Jim’s reaction to her. […] Thus, I think from the perspective of a feminist, such as Mina Loy (an assumption that’s based off what little I know of her), Jim’s budding aversion to the Bohemian woman is his reflex to their emerging independence.

QHQ: Lena

1. Q: What does Lena mean to Jim? How does Jim’s relationship with Lena contrast to the one he has with Antonia?

2. Q: Is Lena in love with Jim? Why does Jim kiss her, and why does she allow him to multiple times?

QHQ: Jim

1. Q: Why does Book 2 end so abruptly after Jim’s fight with Wick Cutter? Why does Jim seem to want to hurry his story to his University days?

2. Q: How do the details of the incident between Jim and Mr. Cutter in chapter 15 of Book II change what would normally be an assault? Is it almost as if Jim has been raped in Antonia’s place?

3. Q: Is this Scene where Jim is being “raped” more a blow to him or a blow to his manhood? How does it affect our perception of the male and female roles in this story knowing that it was Jim who was the victim instead of Antonia?

The Cutters

1. “Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare with his wife, and yet, apparently they never thought of separating” (125).

If Mr. and Mrs. Cutter were so unhappily married, why then did Mr. Cutter not take her up on the opportunity when she threatened to leave him, and why did Mrs. Cutter never leave when they were always fighting, they had no children, and he had no intention of including her in his inheritance??

QHQ: Antonia

1. Q: In Chapter III of Book II, Antonia says “’Maybe I be the kind of girl you like better; now I come to town,” to Jim when she arrives in Black Hawk, in reference to the conversation they had at the end of Book I. Why does being in town (or just living under the same conditions as Jim in general) allow her to be a different kind of person, and what are the implications of this?

2. Q: How do the power of language and story-telling help Antonia develops as a character?

More Questions

• Q: How are the differences and treatment between the classes shown in the novel?• Q: Is Lena in love with Jim? Why does Jim kiss

her, and why does she allow him to multiple times? • Q: Compare Mrs. Harling’s relationship with her

husband to Minnie Foster’s relationship to her husband in Trifles.

HOMEWORKFinish My Antonia (1918): Book IV and Book V Post #9: Answer one of the following prompts:1. Compare and contrast Tiny Soderball and Lena Lingard’s

success with money.2. Discuss why Willa Cather chose to have Antonia return to the

Shimerda farm as an unwed mother.3. Discuss the differences between the Cuzak household and the

Shimerda household from many years before.4. Write your own QHQ