Marshall writes:
Life for the characters in My Antonia is nothing short of agonizingly difficult. The characters must content with the land, the economy, and most of all each other. The degree of these challenges is closely linked to the seasons. In the book, there is a noticeable change in the characters attitudes, and even their welfares with the seasons. For example the Russians, Pavel and Peter, fall upon extreme misfortunes in the winter, and the story they tell to Antonia tells of the reason for their flight to America, which also coincidently takes place during the winter. Along with that, there is a noticeable change in tone in the narration during the colder months, and the warmer ones. The summer months have a tendency to delve into exploration, emotional connections and the wonders of the pristine world around them. This is in stark contrast to the winter months which have a tendency to deal with death, hardships and the often bleak realities of frontier life. Cather does this to use the seasons as a vehicle for emotional connection between the read and the characters. By getting creating a constant, and consistent emotional cycle for both the reader and the characters Cather helps them to actively bond as time goes on. This makes the novel more interesting as a whole.
Mr. Colburn responds:
So you seem to be saying that Cather is manipulating things here, and using the seasons as stage scenery to affect the mood of the audience. The seasons here are like T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative"--something that can be a kind of vehicle for emotion.
I wonder what else in the novel works the same way. And I wonder what the relationship is between heightening the emotional effect in this way and not turning the reader off with a lack of realism--staying within the bounds of what we could "reasonably expect," as Daniel Meyer puts it. Where else in the novel is there a tension between heightening the emotion and remaining realistic? I'm thinking of the stories we hear about minor characters; I'm thinking about the natural descriptions, and I'm thinking about the religious debates that pop up every do often. Maybe others of you can think of other ways Cather seems to stack the deck?
I'm also curious about the tone of the book. I have always thought of it as being quite calm and understated--but maybe others of you don't see it that way? There is quite a lot of drama and violence, so why, as Dalia has asked, did I say that the book seemed calm, or even, to some readers, boring?
I agree with Marshall that different seasons seem to change the feel of the book as well as the moods and emotions of the characters. It is obvious that when winter is around, the general feel of the book is much colder than in the warmer months. It also seems clear to me that Cather is very aware of this and is most likely doing it as a vehicle to help get emotional messages across. I wonder, though, if the book takes this a little too far as it seems like the split isn't very natural. I know that it is much harder to keep your spirits up in the winter, especially on a farm where all of your welfare comes from the warmer months, but it doesn't seem very realistic to me that everything bad would happen in the winter, and that when spring comes, peoples problems just disappear with the cold weather. This makes we wonder why Cather might make the split so dramatic. I wonder if some big event later in the book will take place in the spring, to throw readers off. Or, possibly, the theme of the seasons could be so stressed, and divided, to foreshadow a catastrophic event in Jim's life that will happen in a future winter. Whatever the reason is, I am curious to find out.
ReplyDelete-Sydney Karnovsky