How the West Was Whitened: “Racial” Difference on Cather’s Prairie

TYPE A Indian EYES HAIR ^ ^» D a r k « D ir k W K L > T V Inf e ) C«r “” BLr' OEuropeQri O B l u e OR^- b loricle _ . or Danish. ° IO(JS 6 DT IT Y. T HE EUGEN ICS T REE. From The Journal of Heredity 13.2 (February 1922): 95. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society. 4 0 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e w i n t e r 2 0 0 7 ing so closely on Jim ’s description of the owls in the prairie- dog town, not only makes the Shimerdas, like the snakes’ prey, “quite defense­ less,” it also makes the m “rather degraded” (29). According to Anne Farrar Hyde, prairie- dog towns were an integral part of the “well- crafted panorama” created by western guidebooks, which encouraged train travelers to look for the m as an exciting feature of an otherwise monoto­ nous prairie (130). T he novel uses this popular image to manifest the ambiguity surrounding new immigrants’ capacity to enact the Ame rican value of “self- government.” Yet My A ntonia also deploys class as a way for Anglo- Americans to read and assimilate new immigrants. Despite their ignorance about the Bohemians’ customs, food preparation, and religion, the Burdens immediately understand that Mr. Shimerda, with his “dignified ma n­ ner,” is middle- class and Mrs. Shime rda is not (just as Marie Shabata is and Frank is not) (23). Although most Slav immigrants were said to come from a degraded, neofeudal peasantry, even racial theorists like Stoddard, as we’ve seen, acknowledged that some possessed gentility, although he argued that Czechs who did had an infusion of Nordic blood (174). W h e n Jim and Mrs. Burden pay their winte r visit and find the Shimerdas in need, Mrs. Shime rda laughs at the Americans ’ sur­ prise “scornfully” and shakes an empty coffee pot at the m with “a look positively vindictive ” (71). Mr. Shimerda, on the other hand, sits Mrs. Burden down and calmly explains that he is from a respected Bohe mian family, that their present need is circumstantial (73). Mr. Shimerda, in other words, satisfies the Burdens’ social sensibilities in several ways: he is genteel, he is grateful for their charity, and he recognizes their respect­ ability. Like Frank Shabata, Mrs. Shimerda embodies many of the worst qualities associated with new immigrants: she is tactless, ungrateful, and contemptuous of the Burdens’ social advantages.5 Just as Jim ’ s responses to Antonia alternate between respect of and disdain for her foreignness, Antonia herself alternates between e xhibit­ ing her father’s Old- World gentility and her mothe r’s new immigrant crassness. A t times Antonia is gracious, sensitive, and attuned to high “culture,” like her father; at other times, she is boastful and conte mptu­ ous, like her mother. Afte r Mr. Shime rda’s suicide, her mothe r’s and Ambros ch’s new immigrant qualities threaten to subsume the finer characteristics of Cathe r’ s title character. Antonia becomes less ge n­ teel both by becoming more “masculine,” doing farm work that “a girl ought not to do,” and by becoming darker- skinned, her body morphing into one resembling “peasant women in all old countries” (121, 117). “T he Shimerdas,” the n, reverses Cathe r’s more common attribution of J e a n C . G r i f f i t h 4 0 5 traditional fe mininity as a Bohe mian racial trait. Instead, it draws upon conceptions that “‘peasant’ is in fact the term which best describes the typical Alpine ” and that, more generally, “lower” races and classes “suf­ fered” from a lack of gender differentiation, from their me n and their wome n being too similar (Stoddard 15).6 Just as Antonia is threatened with being her brother’s “drudge” twice in the nove l— after her father’s death and after she returns home pregnant and unmanie d in “A Pioneer Wom a n’s Story”— Slav wome n of the peasant classes were believed to be the...