"The Train of Thought": Classed Travel and Nationality in Willa Cather's My Ántonia

"THE TRAIN OF THOUGHT": CLASSED TRAVEL AND NATIONALITY IN WILLA CATHER'S MYÂNTONIA Scott Palmer Tufts University of Oregon There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth. —Robert Louis Stevenson, From Scotland to Silverado "To write is, of course, to travel," writes Iain Chambers near the beginning of his fine study of modern itinerancy, Migrancy, Culture, Identity. His suggestion that language itselfis a form oftravel, "a caravan ofthought," echoes in Robert Louis Stevenson's meditation on the relative breakdown of domestic/foreign binaries within travel.1 Stevenson's description ofthe subjective, relative dimension of space opened by traveling emphasizes memory as its primary catalyst, suggesting that in the unfolding experience of travel a narrative awaits, latent in the moment itself. Stevenson's American traveljournal clearly codes itselfas bourgeois, its observations serving to illuminate the important role memory plays in migrancy, tourism and relocation, particularly those moments in which class divides or distinguishes the nomenclature oftravel. It is with this point of departure in mind that I propose a reading ofWillaCather'sMyAntonia as atravel narrative of sorts, one that emerges from the reverie of railway travel to consider the intersecting discourses ofnationality, class and gender within the settlement ofthe American West. Michel de Certeau's theorization of localized experience in The Practice ofEveryday Life serves as a useful introduction to this relationship between transportation and narrative, as he notes that both terms contain "spatial trajectories" that"traverse and organize places."2 Drawing from modern Athens' name for mass transit trains,metaphorai, de Certeau plays upon the term's dual meaning, explaining that travel creates a topographic story that traces not only the genesis and conclusion ofa narrativejourney but also explores the spaces in between that make this eventual arrival possible. Similarly, My Antonia draws at- 240Scott Palmer tention not only to the means oftravel employed by the characters but also focuses on their particular experience while travelling, most notably in Jim Burden's retrospective style ofnarration. Cather immediately establishes Jim as an itinerant soul— a migrant quite different from Antonia. He loses his parents in his tenth year, an event that determines the trajectory ofa restless life that ultimately finds him acting as lawyer and agent for one ofthe "great Western railways."3 Brokered by the railroad, his return to the East coast is a return to and a navigation amongst the commercial urban centers of America rather than a classic site ofimmigration. Even across national borders, the existence of railroads always extends toward an implied urban center ofcommerce, includingthe wide open spaces ofthe Great Plains. Initially, railtraffic between cities consisted largely ofthe goods and raw materials that served to build new and even bigger urban spaces.4 While tourism was becoming an increasingly popular use of railway technology these new passengers could still be seen as living corollaries to the ore, coal, steel, timber and supplies that rode the railroad to their intended destinations, a condition that continues to characterize the railroad today.5 Like travel itself, railroads are most frequently viewed as connective tissue between two points rather than spaces with their own internal system of events. Those points, subjected to the mechanical compression ofsteam travel, substitute proximity for remoteness, knowledge for obscurity. Yet within this transaction of space, experience is not elided but transformed into another , less familiar condition that retells events in universal, ratherthan local, time. This new standard of Greenwich mean time, adopted by the national railways in 1883, flattened regional idiosyncrasy just as the train's window reducedthe broad expanses ofthe Westto a rolling, panoramic background. Indeed, MyAntonia's very existence is explained in Cather's introduction as the product of a conversation the narrator and Burden had while travelling across the Iowa plains. Sitting together in the hot and dusty observation car "reminded us ofmany things," the narrator explains, leading the two ofthem to reflect on their childhood in Black Hawk, ofwhich both regard Antonia as the central, resonant theme of their collective reminiscence (ix). Thus, the suggestive associations of the countryside become filteredthrough the singular experience ofrailway travel to generateMyAntonia. Travelling...