Theme Of Nostalgia In Willa Cather's My Antonia

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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.——My Ántonia.

With the scene of Nebraska prairie where the fresh, tender, wind blowing over the green fields; dew falls down from the leaves with the first golden ray of summer sunshine, children smiling under the blue sky as the wind tickling their face, I’m brought back to the old time that Jim Burden and his friends has spent in their childhood together. Willa Cather, the author of My Ántonia, makes this novel nostalgic because it reminisces the childhood life bound with different characters, life and the picture the midwest landscape.

Nostalgia first represents a disease which Greek soldiers die for suffering pain of homesickness; then it gradually developed as a sense of “acute homesickness”, referring to "a bitter sweet longing for things, persons, or situation of the past”. To elaborate, nostalgia is a way to evoke people to reminiscence their earlier time related to the past characters, places, things and so on. …show more content…

Jim marries a woman who is the only daughter of a distinguished man and becomes a successful young lawyer thanks to this marriage. It seems like he is the life winner because of both his advanced career and brilliant marriage. However, Behind this glamorous success, Jim’s life was unhappy, for his wife does not love him at all—she has her own fortune and lives her own life. Whenever thinking of the present life, it makes Jim to reminisce his faded childhood, ordinary, but pure and free.

In Cather’s novel, she depicts the “nostalgia disease” and “feeling of nostalgia” by representing different characters’ life experience

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