Cather Studies, Volume 7: Willa Cather as Cultural Icon

“Have I Changed So Much?”: Jim Burden, Intertextuality, and the Ending of My Ántonia

140 “Have I Changed So Much?” Jim Burden, Intertextuality, and the Ending of My Ántonia T I M O T H Y C . B L A C K B U R N Jim Burden’s question to an Ántonia who does not recognize him after two decades—“Have I changed so much?” (322)—has had an unintended significance over the past thirty- five years, during which Jim has gone from a quiet, romantic memoir writer to the virtual villain of My Ántonia: unreliable, immature, repressed and repressive.1 Such characterizations hinder recognition of Cather’s intertextual structuring of book 5 of My Ántonia. Through allusions to the Odyssey, Jim’s return to Ántonia is placed within mythic contexts of return, suggesting heroic stature even while delineating modernity. Through allusions to “Rip Van Winkle,” both in its original form by Washington Irving and its dramatic form by Joseph Jefferson, Jim’s return marks a profound change of era. Jim emerges as a restless Odyssean traveler living without despair in an America that has failed its great cultural opportunity. In Cather’s modernist aesthetic, to be “absolutely true” to a subject means much more than providing an accurate account of what happened. It can mean connecting to heroic patterns as well as to a figure from popular culture who resonates as something prototypically American and lost, a genial spirit of another time. Every novel’s form cannot help but be unique. Thus, My Ántonia is “the other side of the rug, the pattern that is supposed not to count in a story. In it there is no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle for success. I knew I’d ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern. I 141 “Have I Changed So Much?” just used it the way I thought absolutely true” (Cather, Interview 77). Readers have sometimes resisted the way Cather made the story or a character rather than resisted the “usual fictional pattern.” In My Ántonia there is a sense of loss, of something missed, some potential not grasped. While much commentary on Jim Burden in effect locates this disappointment in the lack of romance between Jim and Ántonia, an intertextual reading of the novel finds it in the lost potential of the immigrant contribution to American culture. Unlike the sense of distant loss in many romantic and modernist works, this loss is as close and palpable as the feeling at a performance of Jefferson’s immensely popular Rip Van Winkle. In “Cuzak’s Boys,” Jim Burden writes about himself with less distance than in the rest of the novel, that is, as a man writing about a man rather than the boy he once was, precisely at the time Cather invites readers to consider him in terms of others as remote as Odysseus and Rip Van Winkle. This modernist approach is heightened by Jim’s presumed awareness of Odyssean overtones to his return, so that readers participate, in a sense, in the writing and imagining. In the first section of this article I establish Cather’s allusive invitations, with particular emphasis on Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle. In the second part I read “Cuzak’s Boys” in terms of the allusions by comparing and contrasting Jim, Odysseus, and Rip in detail. In the third section I argue that the epilogue to Cather’s final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, uses the same source material as Jim’s return in My Ántonia, suggesting a consideration of the children’s point of view to separate the adult Jim from the boyish icon Ántonia’s family has made him. T H E A L L U S I O N S : T H E O D Y S S E Y A N D “ R I P V A N W I N K L E ” From the first sentence of book 5 of My Ántonia, Cather places Jim’s return in the Odyssean tradition, thus making explicit the motif of return in earlier parts of the novel: “I told Ántonia I would come back, but life intervened, and it was 142 t i m o t h y c . b l ac k b u r n twenty years before I kept my promise” (317). Cather’s many fictional returners come back at widely varying times; given the Odyssey’s ubiquity and cultural resonance and Cather’s...