But elsewhere another form of progress emerges as Cather develops a more pointedly political sense of injustice and reform. Her treatment of Kit Carson is a case in point. She undermines Carson's heroic status. He had passed into American mythology as soon as his explorations of the West were reported in John Frémont's journals in the 1840s, and after he served in the Mexican War Carson became a national hero. In Moby Dick, published just after the war, Melville mock-heroically refers to Carson when Ishmael asks whether Hercules, described as "that antique Crockett and Kit Carson," should be admitted into the pantheon of whalemen (373). As Carson became a prototypical American hero, his many biographers iconized a muscular Christian devoid of the usual cowboy vices. Cather's Carson is demythologized. He is smaller and slighter than Latour expects, and a Catholic (nineteenth-century biographers glossed over this fact); and his role in the capture of the Navajo in their ancestral lands is squarely acknowledged: "Carson followed them down into the hidden world between those towering walls of red sandstone, spoiled their stores, destroyed their deep-sheltered corn-fields, cut down the terraced peach orchards so dear to them. When they saw all that was sacred to them laid waste, the Navajos lost heart. They did not surrender; they simply ceased to fight, and were taken. Carson was a soldier under orders, and he did a soldier's brutal work" (293-94).
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Despite Jim's glorification of youthful death, Cather does not portray the suicides in My Ántonia as "triumphant endings," but as grisly acts that are selfish and hurt others. Both Mr. Shimerda and the tramp jeopardize the well-being of others, Shimerda by leaving his family dependent on the sympathy of the community, and the tramp by damaging the threshing machine. Cutter kills not only himself but his wife just so that his money will not go to her or her family after his death. Cutter's suicide at the end of the novel counterbalances Shimerda's suicide in book 1 and ends Jim's romanticized attraction to taking one's life. Rudolph's question about the novelty of Cutter's "killing himself for spite" is answered by the cumulative contrast of the suicidal men with the nontraditional male and female artists who encourage life and sensuality. Earlier, when Mr. Shimerda offers Jim his gun, Ántonia provides an alternative to the two males' desire for death and dissolution. She carries in her hair a faintly singing insect that reminds her of Old Hata, the Bohemian beggar woman who used to sing "in a cracked voice" for "a warm place by the fire" (27). Here Ántonia views art and warmth as equal means of exchange, thus linking creative work with the work of survival, without valuing one over the other; tellingly, she dwells not on Old Hata's talent (or lack of talent) but on the children's love for her. Her emphasis on the emotional relationship of the artist to her audience shows that Ántonia feels no need to promote the greatness of her talent. She accepts as a fact of life the artist's perpetual struggle for life, fighting poverty and cold, yet (to Jim's amazement) she manages to maintain her enthusiasm and even to convey it to others. Jim interprets Ántonia's nesting of the insect not as an act of empathic identification with Old Hata but as an example of her ability to provide the nurturance the artist needs to survive the hardships of life. As an adult, Jim wants to see Ántonia as continuing to fulfill his needs, so that he can derive the will to live as well as the material with which to create. Reaffirming his image of her as a maternal nurturer of life-an always asexual lover, mother, sister, muse, "anything that a woman can be to a man" (206)-allows him to continually circle back to his childhood without acting on his unhappiness with his adult life.
The relation between these two worlds is further evident in correspondences between Cliff City and St. Peter's garden. Outland describes Cliff City's front courtyard as bordered by a "low stone wall" and a "fringe of cedars . . . like a garden" (208, 201). But only like a garden: "The court-yard was not choked by vegetation, for there was no soil. It was bare rock, with a few old, flat-topped cedars growing out of the cracks, and a little pale grass" (208). The front courtyard bears an unmistakable resemblance to St. Peter's "walled-in garden," a French anomaly in Hamilton: "There was not a blade of grass; it was a tidy half-acre of glistening gravel and glistening shrubs and bright flowers. There were trees, of course; a spreading horse-chestnut, a row of slender Lombardy poplars at the back, along the white wall, and in the middle two symmetrical, round-topped linden-trees" (14-15). Yet there is a significant difference between these spaces. Aside from its wall, the cliff dwellers' courtyard is a matter of something found, not made; as Father Duchene remarks, the inhabitants of Cliff City "built themselves into this mesa and humanized it" (221). St. Peter's grassless garden, in contrast, is the work of twenty years spent getting "the upper hand" (15), and there is quite a difference between humanizing a place and getting the upper hand of it: the cliff dwellers find natural life amid bare rock, while St. Peter imposes bare rock upon the soil and its natural life. He is, in this odd respect, a grotesque, harmless version of his Spanish adventurers, conquering and killing what he encounters, imposing a foreign idea of order. 2ff7e9595c
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