29 February 2008

like a revolution

Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, I do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways and is often away from his office for weeks together. That is one reason why we seldom meet. Another is that I do not like his wife. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.

from the opening pages of Cather's My Antonia. There is an alternate opening chapter (included as an appendix in an edition that also had a foreward by Kathleen Norris, which I have scouted on Google Books Search but haven't yet been able to look at in depth), where the description of Burden's wife is extended:

"She was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something unexpected. She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing during a garment-makers' strike, etc. I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm."

Perhaps not incidentally, the absence of Burden's wife enables the narrative (her lack of enthusiasm being utterly opposed to the work of narration).

The only other appearance of enthusiasm in My Antonia relates to Mrs. Harling, the domestic revolutionary:

"Her enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all the everyday occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary, at the Harlings'. Preserving time was a prolonged festival, and house-cleaning was like a revolution."

Next up: Wharton's The House of Mirth