The Alembic of Art is the chapter of My Antonia The Road Home that will be discussed. This chapter suggests that Willa Cather uses references from the arts in creating the novel My Antonia. Much of Willa Cather's background came from her childhood in Nebraska. It even uprooted the character Annie Sadilek, from Red Cloud, a town Cather lived in during her adolescence ("Classic Notes", 1). Despite her background, John J. Murphy believes "My Antonia is a novel in which vision and arrangement create character" (Murphy, 37) and Cather created this by using inspiration from such things as the Bible and paintings. There are many specific and non-specific biblical borrowings and echoes in the novel, My Antonia. One example is when Grandfather Burden reads from the Bible, first from Psalm 47 and then the first two chapters from Matthew, the account of Christ's birth. Then when the Burdens go to the Shimerdas after the suicide "they looked very biblical as they set off" (Cather, 100). The Christmas Story of Matthew and Luke echoes in Widow Steaven's account of the birth of Antonia's child. Also, Jim's goodbye scene with Antonia, illuminated by the sun and moon, reflects Revelation 12:1. "Cather's biblical subtext is an unusual one for an American western in that it incorporates Antonia's Catholic tradition and Jim's Protestant one to make events notable" (Murphy, 40). Murphy also suggests that Cather was influenced by paintings that she saw while visiting Barbizon in 1902. Many of the paintings Cather saw were reminiscences of Nebraska in the primitive huts of mud and stone, wheat fields, and peasant women. Cather associates Antonia with the paintings of Jean-Francois Millet. These paintings often contained "women who looked old and battered, who were bent and slow and not food for much else. Such brave old faces as most of these field-working women have, such blithe songs they hum, and such good-humored remarks they bawl at a gir...
