“My Ántonia” by Willa Cather (post 2): Ántonia is a split personality; she and Jim imagine people as vividly as imaginary companions or alternate personalities.

Ántonia

Ántonia is first portrayed as having a masculine temperament—“ ‘I like to be like a man.’ She would toss her head and ask me to feel the muscles swell in her brown arm” (1, p. 133)—but is later portrayed having “the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world” (1, p. 229) and as being an Earth Mother with ten children.

When most reviews of this novel say she is just a strong woman adapting to circumstances, they are rationalizing a distinctly contradictory portrayal.

Ántonia and Jim have such vivid imaginations and memories that people they have known become like imaginary companions they talk to, or alternate personalities inside them:

Ántonia: “Of course it means you are going away from us for good,” she said with a sigh. “But that don’t mean I’ll lose you. Look at my papa here; he’s been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him” (1, p. 311-312).

Jim (first-person narrator): “But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how” (1, p. 254).

1. Willa Cather. My Ántonia. Edited by Charles Mignon with Kari Ronning. Historical Essay and Explanatory Notes by James Woodress with Kari Ronning, Kathleen Danker & Emily Levine. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1994.