Death In My Antonia Death

The natural tendency of life is towards death, thus death is not an uncommon thing. So it is in Willa Cather’s My Àntonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop, with several deaths spread throughout the novels: the violent deaths of Mr. Shimerda and the Cutters in My Àntonia, as well as the peaceful deaths of Father Joseph Vaillant and Father Jean Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop.

In Willa Cather’s My Àntonia, death is depicted as a much more violent and dismal affair than in Death Comes for the Archbishop, with the murder/suicide of Mr. Shimerda and the murder-suicide of Wick Cutter and his wife. The first incident of such is relayed by Jim Burden in Chapter Fourteen of Book One of the novel, and the question of who truly took Mr. Shimerda’s

Wick Cutter and his wife. “Wick Cutter was the money-lender who had fleeced poor Russian Peter” (114). Mr. Cutter was known to be a gambler in his personal life and a swindler in his business life- he was known to cheat people out of a deal (115). The same held true when it came to his estate, a third of which would have gone to his wife if she survived him, per a recently enacted law. The thought of this displeased Mr. Cutter, so he purchased a pistol and shot his wife in order to survive her, and an hour later shot himself out of spite (191). “Now, would you have thought that man had such a cruel heart? To go and do that poor woman out of any comfort she might have from his money after he was gone”

The first death recorded is that of Father Joseph Vaillant, whose cause of death is unknown. A point that is made known is the impact which Father Vaillant had on the people around him. The novel states that “there was not a building in Denver- in the whole Far West, for that matter, - big enough for [Father Vaillant’s] funeral” (286). He even impacted a certain French priest in such a way that the man, hospitalized though he was, took a train and a cab from Chicago to Father Joseph’s funeral