65 pages • 2 hours read
My Antonia
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Book 5, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 5: “Cuzak’s Boys”
Book 5, Chapter 1 Summary
Twenty years pass before Jim keeps his promise and returns to Nebraska to see Ántonia. Jim deferred his trip because he was afraid of disillusionment—of losing his precious, early memories of their childhood friendship if he finds her worn out and aged: He heard that Ántonia married Anton Cuzak, a cousin of Anton Jelinek, and now has a large family. Once, Jim sent Ántonia photographs of her native village when he was in Europe. Tiny had told him that Ántonia has “not done very well” because her husband is weak and she leads a difficult life. Jim finally visits Ántonia after Lena tells him that he will like her husband and that he is a good man.
When Jim drives out to the Cuzaks’ farm, he is greeted by a number of Ántonia’s children and sees that Ántonia has not “lost the fire of life” (336). Ántonia excitedly introduces her nine children to Jim, and they are proud to show Jim the new fruit cave, which is filled with preserved fruits. When the children run up the cellar steps into the sunlight, Jim is dazzled by the “explosion of life out of the dark cave” (339). Ántonia shows Jim the cherry and apple orchards and tells him that the first 10 years were a struggle to create a farm on the cheap land; her city-born husband often got discouraged, but he worked hard, and she was able to help in the fields. She says she is glad she worked for the Harlings in town and learned about housekeeping but is grateful that her daughters will never have to be hired girls. Jim feels like a farm boy again in the company of Ántonia’s sons, who treat him as an old family friend. Jim confesses to them that he was once in love with their mother and knows there is no one like her. After supper, they share old photographs, including some of a youthful Jim. Jim spends the night in their barn and wonders at Ántonia’s primordial strength.
Book 5, Chapter 2 Summary
The next day, Jim hears that Martha has married a handsome farmer and has her own baby now. Ántonia says Cuzak always loved Martha as if she were his own daughter; if he had not, Ántonia would not have married him. Jim meets Cuzak and their eldest son, Rudolph, when the men return from a street fair. Jim thinks Cuzak looks like “a humorous philosopher” with “an air of jaunty liveliness about him” (356). Cuzak appears amused that he has so many children and kindly gives them presents he brought back from his excursion. He is delighted to learn that Jim has heard a famous Bohemian singer perform in Europe.
Rudolph tells Jim news about the Cutters: When the couple became very old, Cutter was afraid that his wife would outlive him, and her relatives would inherit his property. Two years ago, Cutter bought a pistol, shot his wife, and then wanted witnesses to see he had outlived her, before he died from shooting himself: He died by suicide out of spite.
After supper, Cuzak walks with Jim in the orchard and tells him about his background. He apprenticed as a furrier, then worked in a fur shop in Vienna. He came to New York, then unsuccessfully tried to raise oranges in Florida before visiting his cousin in Nebraska where he met Ántonia, who was the kind of girl he wanted to marry. Cuzak admits it was a hard job to get the first crops planted, and his wife had to encourage him not to quit. Now, they are finally prospering. Jim finds Cuzak “a most companionable fellow” (366). He is still a city man, who enjoys theaters and socializing, but Ántonia has managed to acclimate him to the farm with her warm heart and lack of strictness.
Book 5, Chapter 3 Summary
When Jim finally bids goodbye to the Cuzaks, he finds that he is reluctant to lose the companionship of Ántonia’s pleasant, manly sons, and he invites two of them to go hunting with him next summer.
When Jim returns to Black Hawk, he finds that most of his friends are either dead or have moved away. He chats with Jelinek and then takes a long walk north of town before he has to catch his train. Out on the prairie, where some long, shaggy grass still remains, he feels at home again. He comforts himself with the idea that there are plenty of Cuzaks to socialize with for a long time in the future.
Book 5, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Book 5 brings Jim’s story full circle through his reunion with Ántonia. It takes him 20 years to return because Ántonia was a talismanic presence in his life: He cares for her as a person, but even more than that, she symbolizes his entire childhood and experience of the prairie. After hearing about her hardship—one of the most difficult circumstances that could befall a young woman—Jim worries that life will have defeated Ántonia. He does not want to see her suffer, but his resistance to visiting is also selfish because he fears that her present-day diminishment will destroy his idyllic childhood memories. It is not fair for Jim to make Ántonia responsible for protecting his childhood happiness; she has lived a difficult life and has made the most of less-than-ideal circumstances. Rightly or wrongly, Jim sees Ántonia as an extension of himself, and his love for her is sincere and complex. To him, she is an archetype of every woman—wife, mother, lover, sister, and the land.
Jim finally returns to Nebraska twenty years after his last meeting with Ántonia, he is relieved to find that Ántonia, despite her aging, is still the vigorous personality he loved and the woman who inspired his imagination. Although Ántonia has suffered tragedy, she has overcome her disappointments. Cather’s description of Jim’s visit to the Cuzaks’ farm emphasizes Ántonia’s productive fertility: She has given life to 10 or 11 healthy, well-mannered, interesting children as well as planted and cultivated orchards and wheatfields. The emergence of Ántonia’s children from the dark cellar into the sunlight exemplifies Jim’s characterization of Ántonia as “a rich mine of life, like the founder of early races” (353). Although Tiny Soderball and Lena Lingard initially appeared to be more successful in adult life than the temporarily disgraced Ántonia, Jim’s experiences at Ántonia’s home leave no doubt that she has triumphed. In Chapter 2, Jim learns that even Ántonia’s illegitimate daughter has prospered as she is loved by her stepfather and married with a child of her own. The Cuzaks’ loving marriage contrasts with the Cutters’ hate-filled, dysfunctional marriage, which ends in violence over the issue of inheritance. Cuzak is not acquisitive, but sociable and a lover of culture like her father.
Chapter 3 ends the book with the image of a circle as Jim finally has “the sense of coming home” to himself in Nebraska. Jim has discovered that he can renew his friendship with the Ántonia and extend it to the companionship of her husband and her children, rather than seeing her as someone who only exists as part of his past. His wonderful early memories with Ántonia are not diminished by meeting her again and seeing Ántonia in a different stage of life with her maturing family. When Jim finds a half-mile still existing of the first road he and Ántonia had arrived on as children, it is a symbol of the remnants of the undeveloped prairie and of Jim’s own precious childhood in the region. Now, he understands that the bond of their shared past can bring them together again in the future. In this book, Cather offers a way for Americans to make peace with their nostalgia for a pioneer past, as well as look ahead to a progressive future.
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