¶ … Willa Cather's novel My Antonia (1918) the Nebraska prairie of Jim Burden's, Antonia' Shimerda's, and Lena Lingard's childhood and adolescence functions not just as a vivid, sometimes stark setting for the story. It is also as an extremely important psychological and symbolic reference point for the major characters. The setting of their Nebraska childhood is a reference point, psychologically and physically, from which friendships are forged, important experiences are had, and personalities develop. The idealized setting of Jim's (and Jim's childhood friend Antonia's) earlier life is frozen in Jim's mind. However, within the novel Jim must also move past his nostalgia to develop a mature relationship with Antonia; Nebraska, and his own adult self. Both Jim and "his" Antonia (the title of the novel serves to underscores how very personal and subjective Jim's memories are, of Antonia, and their childhood environment) lose their parents early in life. In Jim's case, both parents die; in Antonia's her father commits suicide. The Nebraska plain becomes for either of them at times almost like a comforting parent, at least symbolically. Despite the fact that the narrator of the story, Jim Burden, has now moved away to New York and become a lawyer, his reference point, from which all experience, even now, seems to continue to be filtered remains...
Returning there after twenty years, however, Jim finds that he can accept that the Nebraska of his youth is gone, and appreciate Antonia, and Nebraska, as they are today, only by reconciling recollections of his past with realities of the present.
Antonia, the main character of the novel My Antonia. My Antonia The magnum opus, My Antonia is a well-composed masterpiece by the eminent author Willa Cather who is well-known for her scholarly depiction of life in the frontiers (Back cover). The distinguished novelist in her masterwork My Antonia has portrayed the strong personality as well as the persisting qualities of a young Bohemian girl named Antonia who migrated from United States
Thus, while one character had a targetable aim, the other, Antonia, had a symbolic purpose for Jim's life. Antonia's role in the novel goes beyond that of encompassing the pure nature of childhood. It represents a clear window of strong powerful women. Better said, "This extremely influential character represents a positive compromise with feminist ideals. She is independent and strong while still living as a wife and mother" (Giglio, 2006).
Antonia: Introduction etc. The landscape of the agrarian lifestyle in Nebraska is such that Mr. Shimerda is the least suited for this type of life. He has the soul of an artist and so longs for a more refined world in which to express himself. He is a man who needs to live among people with ideas who express those concepts in conversation, which is not the world he finds
Immigration in My Antonia IMMIGRATION AND MY ANTONIA With America gaining significant economic growth in the 19th and 20th centuries, its popularity among other nations of the world increased dramatically. There was a wave of immigrants entering the country during that period and especially after the Great wars when there were disturbances in the European countries many people left their homeland and entered United States in search of better jobs and a
Antonia The Immigrant's Struggles in My Antonia The life of the immigrant family is shown to be a difficult one in Willa Cather's My Antonia. The families are haunted by a longing for the past and the dread of the difficulties of the future on a landscape that is both foreign and forbidding. This paper will illustrate how Cather's novel highlights the struggles that immigrants faced when residing and settling in
Cather's My Antonia Willa Cather's My Antonia is a novel that is essentially about a place -- in this case the Nebraska prairie -- and all of the elements in it are mostly ways of exploring what this place meant to the narrator, Jim Burden. Willa Cather, herself, moved to Catherton, Nebraska, at the age of nine, so many of the stories and the general setting of the story itself are
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