Tom's Two Cents : Willa Cather's My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop

Somehow in the literary shuffle of my early years I read a famous short story, “Paul’s Case”, by the late 19th-early 20th century American writer Willa Cather, and then promptly forgot about her. In those days the great female writers in America—Cather, Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett—were shunted to the back pages of anthologies and their longer works seldom taught at all. Cather was one of those, popular and respected in the early part of the 20th, then somehow shoved to the back burner, except in high school. She certainly didn’t deserve it. I’ve only just read two of her works back to back— My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop— they could not be more different in setting and content, but both contain more than a stroke of literary genius.

My Antonia, though told from a male point of view, is clearly about women in Nebraska, struggling for their identity in a male dominated New World. That world is the then pioneer state of Nebraska, being settled by Bohemians, Russians and Germans, as well as established Americans from the East Coast. Cather’s family itself had moved from West Virginia to Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was ten.  Seldom has pride of place and evocation of atmosphere been so beautifully handled in a novel. I’ve never even been through Nebraska, much less to it, and now I don’t feel the need to go! Cather’s descriptions, or rather evocations, of time and place are so beautifully integrated into the narrative that one truly feels one has been there with her in that time and place. Her characters come vividly to life as well. My Antonia seems especially relevant to our time, since it speaks so clearly to the role of women in society. Antonia ultimately chooses a traditional role, but some of her friends do not, and become highly successful career women.

Death Comes for the Archbishop could hardly be more different, except that it too illustrates the author’s power to evoke character, time and place. Set in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, from the 1850’s to the 1880’s, Archbishop is novelistic history, intertwined with local folklore, and as such combines a very loose narrative about two real French Jesuits who come as missionaries to the New World with a series of interwoven local tales, mostly from the Spanish/Mexican/indigent Indian populations. On the personal level this is the story of a great missionary partnership between two men who serve the pueblo of Santa Fe as Bishop (later Archbishop) and Vicar. Again, as in My Antonia, and perhaps even more so, a vivid sense of place—this time it is the Southwestern landscape, before the arrival of the Americans—is achieved.

In both these books plot is very secondary, so don’t expect a thrilling narrative. Both these books are about time and the past remembered, in the most positive way possible.