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Scenes of Survival on the American Frontier

There is something inadvertently puzzling about the inconsistency between plot and title for My Antonia by Willa Cather and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Both books are named after something they are not: My Antonia is really a study of frontier America, Antonia just one of the many success stories that play out over the years. Housekeeping, too, is accurate only in that housekeeping is what is rendered impossible by Ruth and Sylvie’s way of life. Both books are charged with nostalgia, odes to the rapidly changing landscape of the American frontier. Their narratives hinge on the suicide of a parent unable to adjust to a changing world. In My Antonia, such tragedy is countered by the endless pursuit of small-scale success, an individualistic endeavor made possible through the consistent practice of pragmatic skill. It is an attitude that clashes with the way of life as presented to us by Ruth and Sylvie, who choose to remain in a state of permanent impermanence, for whom loss and existence come in one muddy mixture. In rejecting the fundamental unit of a nuclear family they roam untethered, their decision to move away from the pragmatic requiring a complete surrendering of individuality for an existence rooted in the perpetual past.

Pragmatic skill brings success insofar that it provides shelter: the house is both functional and social, the central structure around which the narrative unfolds. We see this in My Antonia, in which success is synonymous with owning a home. Jim’s grandparents are successful from the onset, a fact made clear by having a house on a hill that provides shelter through the harsh winter. Tiny and Lena’s successful careers are discussed alongside their owning apartment houses near each other (3.1). Failure, by extension, is marked by an inability to carve out space in a rapidly changing world, as we see with the Russian brothers and the death of Mr. Shimerda. This sentiment is echoed by Ruth’s grandparents in Housekeeping, with her grandmother reminding her that “‘so long as you look after your health, and own the roof above your head, you’re as safe as anyone can be’” (27). Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River” is similarly a detailed account of proper sheltering. When Nick sets up a tent, we are told that “he was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it” (184). In all these cases, the ability to build a house isn’t simply an act of self-sufficiency or protection. Shelters are markers of success on the American frontier, stabilizing forces around which lives unfold and people come together. They represent a domestication of nature, a molding of it into something both predictable and abundant, followed by the inevitable reaping of its benefits.

This pragmatic skill is also forgiving to those who practice it, providing leniency within a new social order. For Antonia and her family, the old world can exist alongside the new so long as they buy into this culture of small-scale accomplishment. For Ambrosch, this inconsistency comes in the form of never mastering English, and a lifetime of spending money on mass and prayers. It is an attempt to shorten his father’s time in purgatory, an adherence to the customs and superstitions of the world they escaped. For Antonia, a failed first marriage leaves her penniless and with an illegitimate child, a fate that at first seems like complete ruin, and even Jim spends twenty years putting off seeing her in this state. But her fate is much the opposite: through hard work and self-sufficiency she builds a large second family and run a multi-acre farming operation, achieving success as defined by American sentiment. Like her brother, she also preserves the culture of her home country, speaking its language and following its customs. We see this same sort of cultural leniency and open-mindedness in Housekeeping. Lucille is welcomed with open arms when she ventures outside the confines of her grandmother’s house, a change made possible only after honing the skills that are deemed useful in society despite having lived her entire life on its periphery. Notably, this change is also marked by an exchange of shelters, the replacement of her grandmother’s decaying house with that of her home economics teacher.

However, the world of the pragmatic demands ongoing commitment, and each success is absolute only insofar as it is temporary, quickly replaced by the next phase of progress. My Antonia, beyond its characters, is also a study of the rapidly changing landscape around Black Hawk, its land “broken” in and turned into ploughed fields and paved roads. For Tiny and Lena, success comes in the form of moving away from home and getting jobs. Change doesn’t simply stop there, and they subsequently move further away and grow their own businesses, which they continue to expand for the rest of their lives. The same is true even for those who remain. Antonia, who stays on the same land that she grew up on, engages in the persistent act of expansion and improvement, boasting a cellar stocked with food and children to help run her property. Even this image of abundance is fleeting; there is an implicit understanding that the next generation will move away onto different pursuits, since the land she has now is not enough to be split up amongst all of them. The transience of success also holds for Lucille in Housekeeping, whose entrance into society occurs only after a year of consistent exercises, strict dieting, and deliberate reading. This, too, is a stepping stone for her future plans of moving to Boston and starting life anew, the only concrete goals in all her plans is those of relocation and searching for a new home.

Thus, in this world of relentless self-improvement standing still is equivalent to falling behind. We see the consequences of this in Housekeeping, in which the death of Ruth’s grandfather leaves the family “cut free from the troublesome possibility of success” (13). The world he leaves behind is one that decays and falls in on itself, in which houses collapse and towns flood with water. Even the house that Ruth’s grandmother places all her confidence in cannot withstand the ravages of time, revealing itself to be flimsy and dangerous once Sylvie stops maintaining it. The danger of such complacency is best demonstrated in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”, in which failure is an inability to build a proper shelter and pausing in the middle of a journey is synonymous with death. In both cases, when progress is paused nature becomes a force that overwhelms, impossible to tame or domesticate. In taking on such inhuman scales of experience it becomes harsh and unpredictable, a fact that Ruth and Lucille bear witness to on their fishing trip. They pass by empty shells of former houses that have long since been abandoned by the families that built them, unable to hold up to harsh winters and bitter starvation. The two sisters soon experience this for themselves in their own desperate attempt to build a makeshift shelter, their failure to do so a scene of destruction that remains a simple fact of existence in their world. There is no moral quality to the darkness that surrounds them, and their survival feels no less fated than their death would have been.

To practice pragmatic skill is therefore to practice American individualism, an elevation of the self that is larger than nature itself. We see this in Ruth’s grandfather, who in the act of scooping up “eggshells, a bird’s wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragments of a wasp’s nest” would “peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them”. In doing so he demonstrates that nature is something that can be scooped up and placed alongside mundane items of everyday utility, in his “breast pocket, where [he] keeps [his] reading glasses” (17). Similarly, in My Atonia nature is not something which is feared but instead something that is tamed and made useful. Winters are harsh but predictable, and even the biggest blizzards are narrated from the warm confines of a heated kitchen and cake on the counter. There are still casualties, such as the death of the tramp in the harvesting machine, but such casualties are offhand comments, the inevitable fate of those who do not live within the safe realms of pragmatism.

Ruth and Sylvie’s rejection of pragmatic skill thus becomes a rejection of their own individuality, a molding into the faceless mass of people who do not fit into the confines of society. When they are burning her grandmother’s house down, Ruth remarks that she and Sylvie “were almost a single person” (209) that night, identical in thought and action. The destruction of a home signifies the ultimate departure from that fundamental unit of small-scale success, the symbol of security that is so revered in My Antonia and by the permanent dwellers of Fingerbone. In destroying that which tethers them to the world of progress, the two enter the ranks of “transients”, the diaspora of the nameless who are left behind in the wake of progress. Ruth has encountered these before in the liminal space she occupies prior to the fire, noting that “like the dead, we could consider their histories complete” (179). It forebodes the existence within nonexistence that awaits after the two are declared dead by the town, victims of the lake that claimed both mother and grandfather before them.

In surrendering their individuality, Ruth and Sylvie do not need to come up with something to replace practical family life, because the act of rejection is itself a surrendering of their place in society. For Ruth, the remains of swallows that are eaten by cats and left on the ground are no different from farmed poultry made for human consumption, but it is a difference that makes Sylvie unfit to be a parent in the eyes of the townswomen who visit her. This change in perspective is one that is ultimately irreversible, because “once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could have ever been otherwise” (157). It is not simply that the world doesn’t understand Ruth and Sylvie, but that they themselves are no longer able to understand the world. They ascribe to a way of life that does not see the purpose of progress nor comprehend it in any form. For them the past is permanently mixed with the present, and there is therefore no sense in in chasing after new successes. They enter lives of listless existence, moving from town to town long enough to simply linger, ghostly fixtures trailing in the dust of everyday small-scale America.

In many ways, survival in the American frontier requires a relentless display of small-scale pragmatic skill and self-reliance. To be successful in the traditional sense is to constantly move onto bigger and greater undertakings; to sit still means to fall behind. But it is also a way of life that is a forgiving one, letting Antonia and her brother mix their old world with the new and recover from setbacks that at first seem irreversible. In some sense, Ruth and Sylvie’s departure from cultural cannon is easy to read as a tragedy, the ultimate failure of society to sustain those who do not think like the status quo. There is a certain sadness to Ruth’s remark that “perhaps unsheltered people are angry in their hearts”, that the life of the transient is one that is constituted by the constant observance of what one does not have. But Robinson’s “resurrection of the ordinary”, with its poetic prose and breathtaking imagery is a celebration of the mundane and the overlooked. The book itself is a way to show to the rest of the world that which is impossible to properly observe in the light. It is a refreshing reminder of existence beyond that of relentless individualistic success that is so celebrated in My Antonia, and that such existence are closer than we think, and might even be contained within us.

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