Today's class period helped to relieve some of my confusion over Cather's gender politics: they are complicated, and in that sense, it is okay to be confused. A less acceptable confusion, perhaps is my apparent inability to read roman numerals. I am not that dumb, I swear :)
While my group was hashing out our ideas on the wrong sections of The Hired Girls, we came to a few conclusions that helped me with the novel. While I had been reading Jim as a direct representation of Cather's sexuality, Mary alerted me that I would be less confused if I didn't confine Jim solely to Cather's experience. She is also doing other things with his character, which makes sense as he doesn't seem to be particularly attracted to any women besides the hired girls. As he says, "People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no interest in girls of his own age"(105), yet at the same time he has a sexually charged dream about Lena Lingard. We discussed how he seems to be attracted to the hired girls more than others because they have more of a physical presence than the town girls. This intersects directly with class, as the lower class girls had to work with their bodies and thus were strong and tan, whereas the wealthier girls did not do physical labor and remained rather limp and weak. Jim seems to associate the hired girls with a certain fertility and health, much like the land which he loves so much. This can be seen in his dream sequence, in which Lena kisses him in the fields, the very image of fertility in a short dress, holding a reaping hook. (While this can be seen as an eerie representation of death, we discussed how reaping also implies the bounty of the harvest- the death of the wheat, but the health of the people who then use the wheat.)
Yet throughout all of this Antonia's relationship to Jim remains puzzling. He at times seems desperately attracted to her, yet at the same time always remains at a distance from her. He says of his dream about Lena, "I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Antonia, but I never did"(109). Thus we came to the conclusion that while Jim has a certain attraction to Antonia, she represents something much more than sexuality to him. He seems to put her on a pedestal, such that she is like a muse to him. While he admires her and desperately wishes to be near her, there is no room on the pedestal for two, and the last thing he wants is to lower her or take her off the pedestal of his mind, thus he remains in constant conflict over his relationship with her.
This becomes even more clear in the end of the book, as Jim leaves Antonia for a period of over 20 years only to find that she has had a child out of wedlock, by a man that then left her, and has gone on to marry a poor man and to have 10 children. Back on the subject of Gender in the book, I found the end of the story to be particularly confusing and complicated, as with the rest of the book. While Antonia, throughout the book has been a shifting feminine figure, always a little bit masculine and earthy, with moments of more "civil" femininity, the end of the book finds her completely in the role of a traditional farm woman. I was angered by this ending, as it seemed as if Antonia had given up herself for this womanly ideal. She had previously stated that she wanted to create a better life for her children than she had as a child, and yet when she has her own children she doesn't even teach them English- a skill she KNOWS will help them get on in the world. She also has far more children than they can comfortably raise, such that they aren't starving, but always working to make ends meet. She even loses some of her own hobbies, as she talks about hunting with Jim and says that she can never shoot a gun anymore because she has children and it makes her squeamish. I found this awful. While I am sure that it is true that there are women who become more worried about gun safety after having a child, this just seemed like a complete reversal of her own independent, wild self. Jim describes her as battered on more than one occasion, yet he also lauds the fact that she continues to have a "fire" and a "light" and "life" in her that other women her age do not hold onto. In this sense, Cather once again confuses the gender politics of this novel. While she seems to be lauding a certain compliance with traditional gender roles past a certain age, she also shows Antonia to be rather beaten down by life, though now completely downtrodden. My best shot at interpreting this would be to say that Cather has Antonia fall into the most realistic roles for a woman of her class in the time period, and gives us a realistic picture of the strain this would take on a woman with ten children, but tries to maintain a certain glamorization and pastoral love for Antonia by allowing her to retain her spirit. After all, the spirit of Antonia seems to be what Jim is lauding the whole time, it makes sense that that should be the only thing to remain despite the passage of time that Cather disdains so.
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