1) We first meet Jim as a young boy newly arrived in Nebraska, overwhelmed by the immensity and power of the landscape. He has just lost both parents and has traveled hundreds of miles to live with his grandparents. On the first night of his journey, he muses, "I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be." What is the mood of this passage - desolation, resignation, or both? Do you think it unusual that a young boy would be so fatalistic about his future? How does this introduction to the prairie set up the scenes of Jim's young life there - and his relationship with Antonia?
2) As a storyteller, Cather doesn't waste words; her language is simple and lucid. Yet when writing about nature, she shifts into high gear, becoming rather passionate and almost erotic in her descriptions: "I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass." Is this Jim Burden's or Cather's perspective? Do you think such passages either enhance or detract from the story?
3) Antonia's mother, Mrs. Shimerda, is not meant to be a likable character: she is jealous and mistrustful of her wealthier neighbors, and is clearly resentful of the hard life she faces in Nebraska. Given these considerable personality flaws, do you feel any sympathy for her plight? Why do you think Cather has drawn such a negative portrait of an immigrant woman? Is there any validity in the resentment Mrs. Shimerda feels toward Jim's grandparents, despite their generosity to her and her family? How has Cather's depiction of immigrants to America - the hardships and opportunities they experienced in their new country - weathered the test of time?
4) Although she does not reveal her own religious tendencies concerning Mr. Shimerda's suicide, Cather's description of Antonia's father's burial site is the closest she comes to spirituality in the novel: "I never came upon the place without emotion...I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence - the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the homecoming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper." How does Cather use the landscape in this and other passages to convey her own feelings about loss, redemption, and rebirth? What importance does the countryside hold for Jim Burden?
5) In the town of Black Hawk, winter isn't beautiful as it is on the prairie; it is harsh and punishing: "Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk." How does this passage demonstrate Cather's preference for country life over city life? What is she saying about nature versus civilization?
6) Why do we learn so little about Jim Burden's life after he leaves Nebraska for the East? From the little information that we are given directly, what can we infer about Jim's adult life - his work, his marriage, his happiness?
7) Why do you think the relationship between Antonia and Jim never develops into a romance? What does Jim's final observation, that "the road of Destiny...had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be," say about the fatalistic tone of the novel's first scene?
8) Cather begins her novel with an epigraph from Virgil, "Optima dies...prima fugit", or "the best days are the first to flee." Why do you think Cather opens the story on such a wistful note? Why do you think Jim is constantly looking backward, to the past, instead of toward the future, which for him seems filled with success? If he's not happy in a city setting, why doesn't Jim move back to Black Hawk or to the prairie?
MORE PENGUIN CLASSICS O Pioneers!
Introduction by Blanche Gelfant
0-14-018775-8
The first novel in Cather's renowned "prairie trilogy," this story of a young Swedish woman's devotion to the Nebraska farm she inherits from her father is a heroic portrait of American immigrants and the rich, forbidding Midwestern prairie they inhabited. Resolute in her refusal to sell the land when she comes on hard times, Alexandra Bergson triumphs through cunning, foresight, and sheer force of will, eventually establishing herself as a woman of considerable means. Alongside stunning evocations of the unforgiving but beautiful American landscape, episodes of tragedy and loss reveal another common theme in Cather's works, as various characters struggle to balance their inner desires with the demands forced upon them by society and family.
Also available on audio cassette from Penguin•HighBridge Audio
