“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” My Antonia is a beautiful story of love, life, and loss. It often delves into deeper concepts and accents some of the most enchanting mysteries of life. It also highlights the idea that happy endings do not exist in the way we imagine, and are never perfect. “It remains a humane story about a courageous Bohemian immigrant girl forced by fate and family exigencies to grow up on the beautiful, harsh …show more content…
The people in the midwest are pioneers: immigrants, farmers, explorers: those searching for new life and opportunity. Many of these people and immigrants come from Northern Europe, with knowledge of farming, and just enough poverty to seek a new life. Since they came from various countries, many had to learn the language--a few not even deigning to do so. “Europe figures in My Antonia as a lost Eden, or a repository of terrible secrets that haunts the immigrants in their new land,” affirms Kathleen Norris of PBS. These characters are portrayed as very real people with their own intertwining lives and ideals. However, especially to strangers, the people of the West are rigid, not overly friendly, and a people of few words. They are hard-working, independent, and self-sufficient. Their self-sufficiency is apparent in the women as well. “Cather’s feminist approach to this particular period of history casts a new light on the roles that women played in the settlement of the western prairies in America,” avers Elizabeth Giglio, underlining how My Antonia shows women in a new light in which they can work hard and support themselves. The people of the prairie are also are stubborn, but have a deep sense of community, especially within families, which tend to be unusually large. The high mortality …show more content…
In this novel, one can see how cyclical things are for Western farmers: time of year, crop cycles, as well as the idea of individuals living and dying by the land. Life is a cycle for these people who must live by the seasons, and where the crops are in their own life cycle. In My Antonia, the idea of past is clearly portrayed as an incredibly important element to the story and to Western life. “ Ántonia does not try to escape or ignore her past but embraces it, carrying it with her in the present,” tells Robert E. Scholes in Hope and Memory in My Antonia. Antonia’s attitude reflects much of the attitude of the farmers and innovators of the West: the idea that the past is important, but not to be missed or regretted. The Western farming lifestyle also brings out the independence in these characters. They are used to living on their own, working for themselves and their families, feeding themselves, working hard, and being utterly self-sufficient. Obviously this lifestyle would bring out the feeling of independence in those participating in it. Cather also highlights the idea of heroism and progress in Westward expansion, often using symbolism and imagery to do so. “On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained
In conclusion, the story describes that life changes, and nothing stays the same throughout it. It is in the hands of the people to decide that how they want their life to be. They can make it as beautiful as they want to and they can also make it worse than it has ever been
She is very close to her father so this impacts her deeply. She feels the need to step up and care for her family. This turns Antonia into a very hard worker. She begins working with Ambrosch, her brother, by plowing the fields. She takes on the responsibilities of a man. This makes her stop going to school. This worries Jim until he finds out that Antonia is actually very hurt by the event of her father dying. Antonia cries in secret and longs to go to school.
Antonia and Jim of My Antonia In Willa Cather's My Antonia a special bond is formed, shattered, mended, and eventually secured between the main characters, Antonia Shimerda and Jim Burden. Jim and Antonia seem to be destined to affect each other's lives dramatically, from the beginning of the novel. Starting at a young age, the main characters lives are intertwined. They form a special bond, which have both positive and negative affects on their relationship.
The American college dictionary defines success as 1. The favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors, 2. The gaining of wealth, possessions, or the like. This has been the general seances for the past hundred years or more. But in more modern days the prospective of success has changed slightly. It has shifted to having a good education, going to collage, getting a carrier getting married & having children. Having your own home and eventually dying and passing it all on to a child or children. Success is no longer satisfaction or personal goals. It has been supplemented by the goals society has preset for the populous that have been drilled into the minds of the young from the very beginning. To a man named Santiago in The Old Man and The Sea by: Earnest Hemingway, success was to conquer the Marlin Santiago had fought for so long. But as a cruel twist of fate his success is taken away in an instant when the prize he had fought so hard for was eaten by sharks, leaving Santiago with no spoils left to show for his hard fight. He was even so crushed by of the loss of the Marlin that he cried out to the sea "I am beaten.....hear stands a broken man" (234). Santiago still experienced success in the fashion that when he returned to port the little boy named Manolin that he had taught how to fish earlier in the novel was allowed to come back to fish with him. This was the ultimate form of success that was perceived for Santiago by Hemingway. To Jean Valjean in Les Misreables By: Victor Hugo , Valjean's success was represented in the form of going from convict to loving father of a daughter. The little girl named Cosette may not have been his true daughter, but after he had had dinner with a bishop that had seen the possibility of good in he started the transformation of his life. he met Cosettes mother and vowed to save her daughter from the place where she was being kept. The success Valjean experienced was what made his character the man that he was. But to Willa Cather in My
He is apprehensive about seeing Antonia, fearing that she will no longer be the idealized person who exists in his memory. Jim is not let down when they meet, as even though she is now a “battered woman … but she still had that something that fires the imagination, could stop one’s breath for a moment” (226). Age has not dampened the spirit that Jim was drawn to throughout his youth and now his adulthood. He speaks about her through a lens of true love and respect, telling her children that he “couldn’t stand it if you boys were inconsiderate [towards Antonia] … I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there’s nobody like her” (222). Jim refers to Antonia as a “rich mine of life,” and it is clear that Antonia’s type of richness is more valuable in Jim’s eyes. Through her, he is able to realize that tangible fiscal wealth is far less precious than the impalpable beauty of emotional connection and
My Antonia, by Willa Cather, is a book tracing the story of a young man, Jim Burden, and his relationship with a young woman, Antonia Shimerda. Jim narrates the entire story in first person, relating accounts and memories of his childhood with Antonia. He traces his journey to the Nebraska where he and Antonia meet and grow up. Jim looks back on all of his childhood scenes with Antonia with nearly heartbreaking nostalgia. My Antonia, is a book that makes many parallels to the sadness and frailty, but also the quiet beauty in life, and leaves the reader with a sense of profound sorrow. One of the main ways Cather is able to invoke these emotions in the reader is through the ongoing theme of separation. Willa Cather develops her theme of separation through death, the changing seasons, characters leaving and the process of growing apart.
The landscape and the environment in Willa Cather's, My Ántonia, plays several roles. It creates both a character and protagonist, while it also reflects Cather's main characters, Jim and Ántonia, as well as forming the structure of the novel. Additionally, it evokes several themes that existed on the prairie during the time in which the story takes place. Some of these themes that directly relate to the novel, which are worth exploring, are endurance, hardship, and spirituality. Additionally, the symbolism of the "hot and cold" climate will be examined, revealing the significance it has on the novel in an overall manner. The analyses will further explain Cather's construction of the novel, which is based on three cycles: the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of life and physical development and lastly, the cultural cycle.
The warm blackness of summer nights, settling over your lawn and drifting down familiar street signs, over coffee shops closed for the night and broken down asphalt. Dust, collecting on creaking wooden floorboards and swirling through age-old sunlight. A song forgotten, notes away from your ears. Nostalgia is an emotion that all human beings experience and know well. Willa Cather expands on this fact, infusing her award-winning novel, My Ántonia, with sentimentalism and melancholy. Cather tells a tale of home, drawing from the idealistic “American dream” that all Americans know well. Jim Burden, a young orphan, moves to the countryside, spending his days watching men work in the dusty fields and find community amongst themselves. He adores
Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia is often celebrated for its complimentary depiction of the immigrants that flocked to America at the turn of the twentieth century and hailed for its progressive approach to the ever-relevant immigrant debate. Despite the novel’s superficial benevolence towards foreigners, Janis Stout questions the authenticity of the book’s (and, by extension, Cather’s) kindnesses in her critical article “Coming to America/Escaping to Europe.” Stout argues that Cather’s ethnic characters (or lack thereof) reflect the popular, discriminatory views of her time, and extracts evidence from both the novel and the author’s personal life to buttress this claim. Stout’s criticism inspired my own interpretation-- that Cather’s treatment
Immigrant Experiences in My Ántonia My Ántonia, written by Willa Cather, is known as a romantic novel. This novel brings life to the old memories contained in the narrator’s mind about a young girl from his childhood. Jim Burden narrates his life through the young girl’s experience in the Nebraska prairie. The novel also “tells the story of America’s immigrants, the story of their settlement, [and] their assimilation” (Goggans 153).
Labrie, Janet M. "The Depiction of Women's Field Work in Rural Fiction." Agricultural History 67 (Spring 1993): 119-33. JSTOR. Web. 15 Mar. 2012.
My Antonia, Jim's nostalgia for the past is represented by nature, symbolic elements, and above all Antonia. The Nebraskan prairies are beautiful and picturesque and set the scene for a memorable story. Big farm houses and windmills placed throughout the graceful flowing golden yellow grass become a nostalgic aspect of Jim as he leaves his childhood life behind. The frontier includes destructive and depressing winters and luscious summers that
Women in the nineteenth century, for the most part, had to follow the common role presented to them by society. This role can be summed up by what historians call the “cult of domesticity”. The McGuffey Readers does a successful job at illustrating the women’s role in society. Women that took part in the overland trail as described in “Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey” had to try to follow these roles while facing many challenges that made it very difficult to do so.
In her novel, My Antonia, Cather represents the frontier as a new nation. Blanche Gelfant notes that Cather "creat[ed] images of strong and resourceful women upon whom the fate of a new country depended" . This responsibility, along with the "economic productivity" Gilbert and Gubar cite (173), reinforces the sense that women hold a different place in this frontier community than they would in the more settled areas of America.