How My Ántonia drew on The Aeneid
A documented line of influence: Willa Cather demonstrably engaged Virgil’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
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On My Ántonia’s page
- Jim's classical education runs on Virgil — he reads the Aeneid by name, memorizing long stretches of it — and Cather uses the epic of exile and resettlement as the mythic frame for a Nebraska of uprooted Bohemians, Norwegians, and Russians making a new home.
- The novel's elegiac sense of a heroic founding age now vanished is the Aeneid's pietas and loss transposed to the Divide, an American myth told in a Virgilian key.
On The Aeneid’s page
- Cather lays the Aeneid's story of exile and the founding of a new homeland over the American frontier: immigrants displaced from the old world build a patria on the prairie, the way Aeneas carries Troy to Latium.
- Jim Burden spends a college summer "scanning the Aeneid aloud and committing long passages to memory," and Cather hangs her quiet epic of settlement on Virgil's epic of migration.