Jim tries to study diligently at college, but he discovers that his mind is too full of memories of people and places from his past. He’s frustrated at the amount of space Jake and Otto and Russian Peter take up in his mind. His obsession with nostalgia contrasts with Ántonia’s way of living: She embraces her heritage and adjusts to whatever happens in life. Jim tries to shape his life; Ántonia lets life shape her. As a result, Ántonia is happier than Jim, who feels that his happiest days are over—“the best days are the first to flee.”
Cather makes her characters often seem larger than life by presenting them through Jim’s eyes and by linking them to the classics. For example, Jim compares the hired girls to the poetry of Virgil: “If there were no girls like them in the world,” he says, “there would be no poetry.” He also relates farm life to the classics when he recalls words from Virgil’s Georgics, stating that “the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow.”
Against the bleakness of the April prairie, Cather sets the glittering and tragic story of Camille. Jim compares himself and Lena to two jackrabbits running on the prairie; they are innocent and unsophisticated. The author adds a touch of irony when Jim and Lena walk home after the play under the umbrella that Mrs. Harling gave Jim as a graduation present. We know she wouldn’t approve of his associating with Lena, just as Grandmother Burden wouldn’t have approved of Lena using her name to gain entry to Jim’s rooming house.
Lena is attractive to men because she is kind to all of them: the old ones, the lonely ones, the odd ones, and the young brash ones like Jim. Lena represents the delights of love—without ties or responsibilities. She is spring, youth, romance. Her colors are blue, white, and gold. She carries jonquils and hyacinths and has an aura of lilac and violet. Yet her easy-going, permissive way of giving love, and her idea of what marriage means, seem empty in contrast to the down-to-earth, solid qualities of Ántonia.
At the close of this section, Jim is nineteen, has had a youthful crush, and now seems destined to settle down to a respectable career.
