A Modernist Approach to Willa Cather's My Ántonia

從表面上看，薇拉‧凱瑟的小說，以一個不連貫的劇情圍繞著中心人物，安東妮雅‧詩木達，為特色。安東妮雅的生活由於未婚懷孕而有很大改變。被男友拋棄而返鄉的安東妮雅生下一名女嬰。然而，從不同的角度來閱讀這本小說，我們了解，一個支離破碎的敘事結構內並列著吉姆‧布爾頓的生活空虛。正如中年的安東妮雅，散發出為母者的光芒，讓故事敘述者，吉姆，可在情感上尋求依靠。若以另一個嚴格的角度來看，吉姆極需把他的感情生活導向正軌，就如同現代主義者極力在一片混亂中使撥亂反正。儘管吉姆一開始以悠久的移民者自居，而且精英主義還是悄悄在社會階級分類中作祟，他的情感空缺及他對外籍勞工女孩，尤其是對安東妮雅及莉娜‧林加德的回憶，作為超越現代主義價值二分法的橋樑。在其他方面，現代主義的精髓就在於，正如我們所看到的，使用脫節的講故事方式及以開放式的結局作為故事結尾。

關鍵字

薇拉‧凱瑟；《我的安東妮雅》；現代主義；統一；分離；二分法

並列摘要

On the surface, Willa Cather's novel features an incoherent plot revolving around the central character, Ántonia Shimerda, whose life is greatly mutated by premarital pregnancy. Ántonia gives birth to a baby girl and returns to the Nebraska prairie after her boy friend abandons her without tying a marital knot. However, in our reading of this novel from a different perspective, we learn that Jim Burden's narratives are nested within a fragmented narrative structure in juxtaposition with the empty void of life. Just as the middle-aged Ántonia, radiant with maternal confidence, on which the narrator, Jim Burden, can emotionally lean, so through a critical lens, Jim's need to get his emotional life back on track can be read in the context of the modernist aspiration of making order out of chaos. Even though Jim starts out as one of the established settlers, and the elitism still creeps in between the lines of social divisions, his emotional vacancy and memories of the hired girls, especially of Ántonia and of Lena Lingard, serve as a kind of bridge in transcending the continuing dichotomy of values which modernists have presented. Thus, Jim's tacit sense of belonging, a sense of mooring, counters his feelings of rootlessness, both of which become structured into a dazzling array of modernist trends. In other ways as well the essence of modernism lies, as we see it, in the use of a disjointed mode of storytelling and the need for open-ended closure.