Cather's Burden: Toward a Demographic Reading of Non-Reproduction on the 19th-century Prairies

What are the contradictions of representing biological reproduction on the prairies? Willa Cather’s My Antonia unwittingly offers us some purchase on this question, providing as it does a vibrant narrative account of... [ view full abstract ]

What are the contradictions of representing biological reproduction on the prairies? Willa Cather’s My Antonia unwittingly offers us some purchase on this question, providing as it does a vibrant narrative account of reproduction on the prairies from the vantage point of someone who opted out of it—all while taking as given the putative emptiness of the prairie in the wake of Indigenous land dispossession and during a wave of European immigration. This paper discusses how the novel—a work widely hailed as the first prairie novel-- manages the demographic historical facts of reproduction-as-colonial space-filling project as a formal problem.  Cather’s Jim Burden tells the tale from the vantage point of someone who chose a different life for himself, even as he longs nostalgically for the landscape and the novel’s protagonist, Antonia.  Cather’s Burden thus stands as both a formal narratological framing device and a demographic repository of emotional and political weight. Within the text, despite his clear emotional attachment to the eponymous Antonia, he leaves for school, ultimately ending up in NYC and a childless marriage—all at a time when Nebraska has been simultaneously depopulated by anti-Indigenous government policy, settled by immigrants, and subject to declining birth rates.  The subject of non-reproduction is, in other words, deeply tied to the recursive politics of land dispossession, immigrant settlement, and population redistribution. Burden is more familiar to literary critics, however, as bearing the weight of autobiographical significance: the frame through which Cather’s own queer life and her view of the prairie is both channeled and refracted.  This paper investigate how population statistics scale down to exert a force on the forms of social belonging and the narrative strategies at play in representing nineteenth-century prairie life in My Antonia.