"Willa Cather – Fictions of Gender in My Ántonia"

Résumé En

While recognized for her truthful rendering of life in the West, Cather did not choose to write her memories directly, even less to write an autobiography or to publish a diary. She did not account for her lived experience through her own voice or through a female voice for that matter. Quite the contrary. Cather turned to a male narrative point of view and it is through Jim Burden (and his memories) that Ántonia Shimerda is given life. Surrendering one's voice and welcoming Jim's instead may raise a number of questions. Like Phyllis Rose, readers could justly ponder whether " My Ántonia … [would] have been better [book] if [it] had been told from the point of view of women instead of men? " It might be easy to solve this riddle with a simple " [p]erhaps, but then [it] would not have been the [book] we know " (A.15). Added to this difficulty (and keeping in mind that Ántonia Shimerda originates from Jim's memories), personal memory, as Eric Hobsbawn has shown, is always " a remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts " (206). As historians have explained, " memory cannot be independent of cultural influences, but is shaped or even constructed by them " (Summerfield 67). Starting from this premise, readers of My Ántonia should not only wonder if the novel would have been a better book if narrated from a woman's perspective, but rather (and most interestingly) how gender and the norms that specifically shaped Cather's society intersect with the process of creation and how these 'influences' inform (or alter) Jim Burden's narrative point of view.