The
Fairfax Library Book Discussion Group will meet Thursday, January 8th at 7 p.m.
to discuss our January book My Antonia by Willa Cather.
Discussion
questions are below.
Here
are some links for additional background and information:
Willa Cather Foundation with links to
info about Red Cloud, NE and the prairies
Willa
Cather’s letters have only been opened to the public since 2013. Read a review
of those letters here.
Coming
up, we have the following books to look forward to reading:
Thurs.
Feb. 12 Tenth
of December by George Saunders
Thurs.
Mar. 12 The
Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Thurs.
Apr 9 At
Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón (OBOM choice)
Thurs.
May 14 The
Good Lord Bird by James McBride
Thanks
for reading with us. I look forward to seeing you at the Fairfax Library.
Beth Bailey-Gates
Friends
of the Fairfax Library
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
My Antonia by Willa
Cather
- Why might Willa Cather begin her
novel with an introduction from an unnamed female acquaintance of Jim
Burden? What effect does this device have on the reader?
- Why does Jim title his manuscript
"My Ántonia"? What does he mean when he states,
"It's through myself that I knew and felt her"?
- This book is often seen as a
coming-of-age novel. How does Ántonia challenge Jim's growing masculinity?
- When does Ántonia's father call
her "My Ántonia"? How deeply does his death change her
life? Why does it affect Jim so much?
- Do you feel the stories narrated
by others—such as the story of the young bride and the wolves—are
essential to the novel? Why or why not?
- How is the land a character in
this novel? Is it the hero?
- What qualities do Ántonia and Lena
share? How do they differ? Why does Jim pursue a romance with Lena and not
Ántonia?
- Jim's family is low-church
Protestant; the Shimerda family is Roman Catholic. What role does religion
play in the novel?
- Is Ántonia triumphant at the end?
Is Jim?
- Why do you suppose the image of
the plough in the setting sun has become one of Cather's most memorable
symbols?
- Cather once said that "one's
strongest emotions and one's most vivid mental pictures are acquired
before one is fifteen." How is this true for Jim Burden and his view
of Ántonia?
- The novel's epigraph, "Optima
dies ... prima fugit," is cited by Jim later in the novel: "the
best days are the first to flee." How is this a fitting summation of
the novel's theme?
- Why is getting "a
picture" of Ántonia important enough to Jim and the narrator of the
introduction that they decide to write about her? (p. 5
- When Jim and Ántonia meet as
children, why do they become such close friends?
- Why does Pavel's story about the
wolves and the wedding party affect Jim and Ántonia so deeply?
- Who or what does Cather intend us
to see as responsible for Mr. Shimerda's suicide?
- Why does Cather repeatedly include
images of people and objects silhouetted against the sun? What does the
vision of the plough mean to Jim?
- Why does Jim prefer "the
hired girls" to the Black Hawk girls? Is Frances right when she says
that Jim puts "a kind of glamour" over the hired girls? (p. 175)
- What is Cather suggesting about
gender roles with the characters Frances, Antonia, and Lena?
- Why is Antonia so determined to
keep going to the dancing tent that she would rather leave her job with
the Harlings than stop dancing?
- Why does the incident at Wick
Cutter's house make Jim feel that he never wants to see Ántonia again and
that he hated her almost as much as he hated Cutter
- Why does Jim leave Lena Lingard in
the end, despite how much he enjoys being with her?
- Why does Jim tell Antonia,
"I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother
or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man"? (p. 240)
- What does Jim mean when he says
that "Cuzak had been made the instrument of Ántonia's special
mission" (p. 270)? What is her mission?
- How have immigrants enriched
American culture? How have they been transformed by it?
- Would you agree with Virgil and
Jim that the earliest days are the best and the most quickly gone?
- Do you agree that happiness
consists of being "dissolved into something complete and great"
(p. 20)?
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