Modernist Dust: Memory, Nostalgia and Aesthetics

If Victorian dust was feared as filth and contagion, modernist dust could look very different. In the early twentieth century, some writers and artists turned to dust not as a marker of decay but as a symbol of memory, comfort, and even beauty. Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) exemplifies this reversal, treating the dust of the Nebraskan prairie as central to character, landscape, and identity. Dust, in this modernist setting, moves away from dirtiness and disease toward nostalgia and rootedness.

Dust as Subjective

In My Ántonia, dust is never inert. It becomes what Bill Brown calls a “thing”: not just matter, but something defined by its changed relation to human subjects (1). From the opening chapter, dust asserts its presence - Jim Burden recalls that “red dust lay deep over everything” on a summer train ride across Iowa, the substance itself provoking memory and storytelling (3).

Unlike Victorian dust, which clung to bodies as a marker of poverty, Cather’s dust is generative. It comforts as much as it irritates. Jim recalls the “dusty-smelling night” as he listens to Mr. Vanni’s harp, the dust grounding him in place while soothing a loneliness that language cannot address (2).

Dust and Memory

Dust is deeply tied to memory in Cather’s novel. Nowhere is this clearer than in the description of Mr. Shimerda’s grave: “Years afterward… the dusty roads used to look like soft grey rivers flowing past it” (2). Here dust softens rather than sullies. It becomes a medium of remembrance, linking the grave to the characters’ origins. The dusty roads evoke both the hardships of immigrant life and the nostalgia of childhood. Unlike Victorian dirt, which symbolised decline, this dust enshrines memory and continuity.

Dust and Landscape

Cather also uses dust to mark difference between East and West. For her characters, the prairie’s “dusty streets” are signs of life and movement (p. 5). For outsiders, however, the same landscape was seen as barren and inhospitable. One New York journalist described Central Park during a heat wave as “sickly… covered with dust” (3).

Cather resists this external dismissal. In My Ántonia, dust embodies vitality rather than degeneration. Jim describes “the felty beat of the raindrops on the soft dust of the farmyard” (4), a syntactic pairing that fuses dust with rhythm, peace, and harmony. Dust is woven into the everyday fabric of prairie life, not as an obstacle but as a grounding force.

Dust and Reversal

Cather repeatedly frames dust through reversal - overturning expectations of modernist aesthetics, gender roles, and even narrative form. In “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), she criticised over-furnished fiction, calling instead for fewer objects invested with greater meaning (1). Dust exemplifies this principle.

In My Ántonia, dust is both natural and symbolic. When Ántonia and her brother wash “the field dust from their hands and faces” (6), cleanliness recalls Victorian associations of purity. Yet Jim also sees Ántonia “sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered” (7). Here dust threatens gender norms, marking Ántonia with strength and resilience. For Jim, this is troubling: he prefers the image of Ántonia cleansed and domestic. Dust thus becomes a marker of gendered tension, symbolising a woman’s connection to land and labour that resists easy containment.

Dust, Wealth, and Desire

For Cather’s male narrator, dust is also tied to capitalism. Jim associates dust with fertility and prosperity: Ántonia becomes “a rich mine of life” (7). The land itself, fruitful yet dust-covered, blurs into Ántonia’s body. Dust here symbolises not decay but productivity - though filtered through Jim’s patriarchal and possessive gaze.

This tension reveals dust’s double life in modernism: it can symbolise home and security for women, yet economic success for men (8). What Victorians saw as a threat to health becomes, in Cather’s fiction, a resource for life and value.

Dust in Modernist Art

Literature was not alone in reframing dust. Surrealist artists like Man Ray treated dust as aesthetically powerful, photographing it not as dirt but as landscape. His famous Dust Breeding (1920) depicts accumulated dust on Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, transforming neglect into a strange new world of texture and form. Like Cather, Man Ray made dust visible not as filth but as something worth preserving.

Conclusion

Modernist dust, as seen in Cather’s My Ántonia, is a substance of reversals. It no longer signals disease or decline, but comfort, nostalgia, and strength. Dust binds characters to place, turns memory into matter, and destabilises expectations of gender and modernity. It shifts from filth to aesthetic, from nuisance to memory, from disease to vitality.

By embracing dust, Cather and her contemporaries rejected an idealised modernist focus on urban sophistication. They turned instead to the overlooked, the granular, and the ordinary. Dust, far from being swept away, became the very substance through which modernist landscapes and identities were imagined.