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My Antonia
I think that Willa Cather admired Antonia's indomitable spirit. Although many hardships came her way, she was never defeated. Her defeats were temporary setbacks - her father's death, her pregnancy...
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My Antonia
One of the most obvious cultural contrasts is between the Burdens and the Shimerdas. The Burdens are prosperous and affluent; they are used to the prairie and farm life. The Shimerdas, on the other...
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My Antonia
Jim Burden, whose full name is James Quayle Burden, is from Nebraska and from the same town as the nameless narrator of the introduction to My Antonia by Willa Cather. The narrator is taking a...
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My Antonia
Both Jim and Antonia are immigrants in a sense, though while Antonia has crossed continents and oceans to arrive in America, Jim is an immigrant from the South and is therefore moving to a...
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My Antonia
My Antonia showcases the lives of two different families—the Burdens and the Shimerdas—as they navigate their lives on a Nebraska plain in the late nineteenth century. The Burdens have lived...
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My Antonia
I think most people would say Jim learns the most, since Jim is the narrator and it is really his story that we experience in the novel. Antonia comes to represent for Jim a kind of idealized...
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My Antonia
Although the town girls are more highly respected socially than the hired girls, Jim feels that the hired girls are much more full of life and engaging than their pampered counterparts. Jim...
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My Antonia
One of the first things that struck me about the novel, My Ántonia, by Willa Cather, was the author's impressive use of imagery woven throughout the story. This answer deals with Chapter Two. One...
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My Antonia
Mr. Harling is a man with a keen eye for business who openly disapproves of Antonia's carousals at the town dances. Jim describes him as "autocratic and imperial" and finds his shadow which is...
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My Antonia
Jim is deeply affected by Mr. Shimerda's suicide because he most identifies with his sense of pride. Mr. Shimerda was a successful man in his home country, moving his family for unselfish reasons....
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My Antonia
It is clear from this moving and lyrical novel that Antonia is a character who exerts a curious magnetism and fascination on the narrator. One of the most memorable descriptions about this...
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My Antonia
Mrs. Shimerda resents the Burdens at times because they are well-off enough to live comfortably, and she and her family have nothing. As Grandmother kindly explains to Jim, "a body never knows...
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My Antonia
For Cather, setting is not so much about physical locations as it is about seasons and weather--the most important and most uncontrollable factors in being a Nebraska farmer. Cather moves her story...
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My Antonia
This is a really interesting question, specifically if you look at the book from more of an American Studies standpoint in terms of Frederick Jackson Turner's Fronteir Thesis. Antonia at the...
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My Antonia
There is a friendly, companionable atmosphere between the two families, Shimerda and Burden. When the Shimerda's arrive, Mr. and Mrs. Burden immediately go to them offering friendly hospitality....
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My Antonia
Two themes that seem to stand in the forefront of this work are THE AMERICAN DREAM and COMING OF AGE. The American Dream In the early 20th Century, immigrants flooded to the US to secure their...
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My Antonia
An early example of Cather's use of landscape description to symbolize a character's feelings is in Jim's first impression of the endless Nebraska prairie. Riding in a wagon from the train to his...
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My Antonia
As with many other themes in the novel, Jim’s family enacts ideals—all that is good in American society. His grandfather and grandmother practice religion quietly and are tolerant of the...
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My Antonia
In her characterization of Antonia, Cather rejects many traditional gender stereotypes. After her father's death, Antonia is forced to renounce most of her feminine activities and instead enter the...
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My Antonia
More than anything else what lingers on in the mind after reading this book is the intense, passionate and above all evocative way that the landscape of the frontier is described in this work and...
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My Antonia
When the reader first meets Antonia, she is a young girl. She is full of hope and plans for the future. She wants to learn English, she wants to go to school. After her father dies, however, she...
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My Antonia
Of the three girls, Lena's aspirations are most clearly spelled out. She wants to live in the city and become a dressmaker, and she wants independence. Married life is not for her, she does not...
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My Antonia
As the narrator, Jim Burden, so acutely observes, "it was homesickness that killed Mr. Shimerda" (Chapter XIV). In the old country, Mr. Shimerda was a weaver and a musician. He was happy...
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My Antonia
Peter and Pavel are two Russian immigrants who live close to the Shimmerdas and the Burdens. The text hints that Pavel has a past in Russia that seemingly haunts him. They seem to be good people in...
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My Antonia
It is important to realise the way in which this powerful novel represents a criticism of the American Dream, the impulse that brought so many immigrants from all over Europe to the West, like the...
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My Antonia
Part of the power of Cather’s novel is her acknowledgement that the immigrant experience could be a harsh one. Mr Shimerda’s suicide is an example. Antonia’s father is profoundly unhappy in...
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My Antonia
What Laura Ingalls Wilder did for the white, Anglo pioneers of America in the 1800’s, it might be argued Willa Cather did for American immigrant pioneers. Wilder, of course, documented in a...
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My Antonia
The Shimerdas and the Burdens are neighbors, with the Burdens acting as mentors to the Shimerdas, who have just migrated to Nebraska, speak no English, and know nothing about farming. When the...
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My Antonia
Mr Shimerda wants Jim to teach Antonia to speak English. The passage is in Book I, Chapter 3: We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was waiting for me. Before I got into...
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My Antonia
Why is our homeland so important to us? Why are memories so important to us? Why are our family roots so important to us? Antonia means all these to Jim: she is Nebraska, she is his young past,...
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My Antonia
Antonia’s feelings evolve during the course of the novel. Initially, she identifies all things connected with her father and her childhood with Bohemia but later when she has her own children,...
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My Antonia
You'll want to pick a passage or two that you personally find "interesting and vivid," but I hope that I can help get you started by talking about what passages I would pick. While many people...
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My Antonia
The fact is that any first person account in a story can be considered unreliable. This is because we are seeing the action through the eyes of one character. Any person, because of their own...
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My Antonia
Well, yes, the previous answer is correct, Jim is an orphan and has to travel to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. This makes for an interesting story though, because that fact that he is an...
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My Antonia
In Black Hawk, the "hired girls" are all daughters of immigrant farmers; they are country girls, as opposed to the town girls in Black Hawk. These hired girls work to help their families pay off...
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My Antonia
Jim Burden is a ten-year-old orphan who moves from Virginia to Nebraska to live with his grandparents on their farm. Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant, moves to Nebraska with her family. Each...
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My Antonia
Let us remember that figurative language is a literary technique that is based on comparison. The most common examples are similes, metaphors and personification. Considering this excellent novel,...
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My Antonia
Chapter 7 of the story My Antonia, by Willa Cather is meant to be quite allegorical. In a pastoral romance such as this, we tend to assume that all that happens will be prim, proper, innocent,...
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My Antonia
Antonia makes this statement to Jim when he relays the suggestion made by his grandmother that Antonia attend the term of school that is to begin in a week. Antonia, who has been doing brutally...
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My Antonia
British novelist W. Somerset Maugham wrote, It is very difficult to know people. For, men and women are not only themselves, they are also the region in which they are born....You can know them...
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My Antonia
First, think about the changing setting in the novel. The story begins in a rural area, where nature and scenery are very important. The countryside is explained in great detail, and affects how...
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My Antonia
The nature of the relationship between Jim and Antonia reflects idealism and transcendence can exist in the interactions between human beings. While time changes both Jim and Antonia, there is...
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My Antonia
In my copy, there is a footnote on the first page in Chapter 1 which explains how the name is pronounced. It reads as follows:"The Bohemian name Antonia is strongly accented on the first...
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My Antonia
One important difference between Jim and Antonia is, of course, that Jim is a member of an established and properous Anglo Protestant family, while Antonia's family are Catholic immigrants from...
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My Antonia
Cather's use of simple langauge and a straightforward tone to present a realistic depiction of humanity is evident, for example, in the following passage: Before I could sit down in the chair she...
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My Antonia
There's a pretty good article (link below) about this topic. The article begins with a letter written to a newspaper in defense of Cather's position. The writer, Charles Slama, argues: "The...
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My Antonia
In Willa Cather's novel, My Ántonia, the girl we meet at the beginning is very different than the woman we see at the end—if all we use is our eyes. In the story's early chapters, we meet...
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My Antonia
By the novel's end, Antonia has come full circle. She is comfortable and fulfilled, with a complete sense of herself, of which her Bohemian heritage is a large part. By speaking with her husband...
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My Antonia
Willa Cather is drawing a portrait of childhood, Midwestern living, and internal psychological growth, adjustment to change, and maturing. This novel has no superficial motives behind it. She is...
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My Antonia
The above quote indicates the very powerful magnetism that Antonia exerts on Jim, the narrator of this novel, throughout the story. Remember the title of this book and how it represents the way...
