What are Marek Shimerda and Blind d’Arnault Doing in Jim’s Pastoral? Disabled Presence in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia - Laboratoire de recherches sur les cultures anglophones Accéder directement au contenu
Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2017

What are Marek Shimerda and Blind d’Arnault Doing in Jim’s Pastoral? Disabled Presence in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia

Résumé

Willa Cather started writing My Ántonia at the end of 1916, about a year after the publication of The Song of the Lark, a novel about a Colorado girl of Swedish descent who becomes the leading Wagnerian soprano of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The Song of the Lark follows the typical progression of the Bildungsroman: Thea Kronborg, the heroine, embarks on a journey toward fame in which characters and events are all subordinated to the development of the plot. For instance, the death of Thea’s friend Ray Kennedy allows her to study music in Chicago (thanks to the money from his life insurance) and thus finds a structural justification in the story. In My Ántonia, however, Cather’s ambition was to write a novel that was not based on plot but on “the other side of the rug, the pattern that is not supposed to count in a story.” The result is a story that “hasn’t any form” in which characters, events and embedded narratives owe their inclusion in the book to their emotional charge (for instance, the story of Pavel and Peter in bk. 1 ch. 8) and, more implicitly—on the level of the author rather than the narrator,—their capacity to conjure up the figures of a bygone era (a case in point is the character of Tiny Soderball, who corresponds to the type of the bold businesswoman who makes a fortune in the Gold Rush). The unity of the novel is guaranteed by its tone—the elegy—and its controlling theme—the pastoral. If this description is accurate one character at least does not seem to fit in My Ántonia: Marek, the Shimerda son with an intellectual and physical disability, is neither a character whom Jim admires (like Ántonia or Mrs. Harling) nor one whom he hates (like Wick Cutter). Therefore, he does not stir intense emotions in him which could justify his presence in the narrative. Rather, Jim’s feelings are ambiguous toward Marek and the way the “crazy boy” systematically appears in paragraphs that deal with something or someone else could make his presence go almost unnoticed. Marek does not fit in the idealized world of the “pastoral of innocence” that My Ántonia is supposed to be. Nonetheless, Jim chooses to include Marek and his presence in the narrative needs to be accounted for. I will argue that this presence can best be understood by comparing and contrasting Marek with the other disabled character of the story, the pianist Blind d’Arnault. To solve the contradiction between Cather’s racist depiction of d’Arnault and her simultaneous praise for his musical talent, Elizabeth Ammons proposes that Cather’s racism serves to cover her own indebtedness to African-American music. My argument will be somewhat different as I will consider that there is no contradiction here, since Blind d’Arnault and Marek Shimerda are used to figure the primitive forces at work on the fringes of the pastoral retreat, their description in subhuman terms being a corollary to their function in the novel. Incidentally, my analysis will lead me to examine in what way Jim and Cather differ or agree, reopening the debate about Jim’s reliability.

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hal-01541648 , version 1 (04-02-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01541648 , version 1

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Florent Dubois. What are Marek Shimerda and Blind d’Arnault Doing in Jim’s Pastoral? Disabled Presence in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre. In the Country of Lost Borders: New Critical Essays on My Ántonia, , pp.89-106, 2017, Intercalaires : agrégation d'anglais, 978-2-84016-257-5. ⟨hal-01541648⟩
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