Wide Open Spaces

“Willa Cather.”  Most of my campus Marshall Scholarship nomination interview got lost in an anxious haze, but the committee chair and fervent Nebraskan asked me to name my favorite author and explain my choice.  That reply, which embodied my love of the Midwest, the Southwest, immigration history, and poetic prose in one name, remains embedded in my otherwise unreliable memory.

Willa stayed with me.  My most enjoyable moments teaching at Valparaiso University came in CORE, where I had the privilege of sharing My (and I mean my personal love for) Ántonia with students descended from the immigrant farmers of whom Cather wrote.

 

image via Wikipedia

 

During my years as an at-home mother attempting to find intellectual companionship in a book club, my mommy friends found themselves forced to read O Pioneers! at my insistence.  The diverse backgrounds of those women many who came to the Midwest from further afield for their husband’s jobs seemed to necessitate their reckoning with the historical narrative into which their personal narratives unwittingly wove.

I think of Willa Cather each time I see an Andrew Wyeth’s painting, Christina’s World, which has never been Christina’s but Ántonia’s to me.

 

Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth, 1948 via MoMa.org

 

Ántonia and Christina have been on my mind often while watching the second series of Wallander on Masterpiece Mystery.  The open flat fields with an occasional farm in the series strongly resemble Christina’s and Ántonia’s great planes.  The ability of Swedish immigrants to settle into their particular ‘new’ worlds in the most arid parts of the Midwest seems less mysterious.

My memories of Scandinavia are of Norwegian fjords and Swedish beaches.  The ubiquitous grain fields hiding Wallander’s crimes failed to leave an impression on my childhood imagination.  I suspect now that the immigrants who staked their claims to our flatlands after travails on the high seas found great comfort in their familiarity.

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