65 pages • 2 hours read
My Antonia
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Themes
The Plight of Immigrants on the Nebraskan Frontier
Through the mostly sympathetic eyes of Jim Burden, the novel examines the plight of immigrants on the Nebraskan frontier. Jim experiences the strangeness of a different state, which enables him to form a bond of discovery with Ántonia as they explore the new environment. However, Jim does not suffer from the same disadvantages as those experienced by the newcomers from Europe. The immigrants face prejudice from Americans, a language barrier, cultural misunderstandings, and a sense of tremendous distance from their homelands. When Jake Marpole travels with Jim on the train from Virginia to Nebraska, he warns Jim against talking to the Bohemian immigrant passengers because “you were likely to get diseases from foreigners” (5). As Jim matures, he thinks the American townspeople’s attitude toward the immigrant hired girls is stupid. The American townspeople do not distinguish between immigrant girls whose fathers and grandfathers were educated and respected in their homelands (such as Ántonia and Lena) and the foreign girls who had less lofty backgrounds (such as the three Marys). To the Americans, distinctions between the immigrants did not matter because “all foreigners were ignorant people who couldn’t speak English” (200-201). Jim angrily observes that despite the young American-born men’s attraction to the beautiful, vigorous immigrant girls, the townsmen would never marry them: “Their respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth” (202).
The immigrants’ initial inability to speak English often prevents them from getting information or help and enables unscrupulous people to take advantage of them. When the Shimerdas arrive in Nebraska, they are the first Bohemian family in their area. A fellow countryman, Krajiek, swindles them, selling things to them at inflated prices because he is their only interpreter: “They could not speak enough English to ask for advice, or even to make their most pressing needs known” (20). Shimerda ends up with very little money, despite having departed Bohemia with $1000 because “he had in some way lost on exchange in New York” (76) and Krajiek overcharges him for land and farm equipment. The Russian Peter, also limited in his English language skills, is cheated by the dishonest moneylender, Wick Cutter, and Peter can “give no very clear account of his transactions with Cutter” (50-51). Unable to communicate in English, Peter and Pavel have to go “about making signs to people, and until the Shimerdas came they had no friends” (33). The Americans assume that Pavel is an anarchist because of his wild gestures, even though “he had no means of imparting his opinions” (33).
Cultural misunderstandings additionally arise from an ignorance of the immigrants’ customs. Mrs. Shimerda’s gift of her treasured dried mushrooms is thrown out by Grandmother Burden because she does not know what it is, and the Shimerdas’ Catholic rituals seem strange to the Protestant American settlers. Financially struggling American-born farmers would never let their daughters “go out in service” (199) doing domestic work, but the Bohemian and Scandinavian girls work as hired girls or in the farm fields to pay off their families’ debts. Jim notices that one effect “of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous” (200). However, the sense of isolation in an unfamiliar culture, the hardships, and the homesickness prior to achieving good fortune could cause some immigrants to succumb to depression and suicide, as in the case of Ántonia’s father.
The Rights and Position of Women on the Nebraskan Frontier
In My Ántonia, Willa Cather shows the impact of ethnicity and differing circumstances on women’s roles on the Nebraskan frontier. Cather offers a range of portraits of striking female strength, from Grandma Burden performing more traditional female duties to Frances Harling operating as “her father’s chief clerk,” discussing “grain-cars and cattle” with her father as if they were “two men” (149-150).
In the Virginia-born Burdens’ household, the gender roles are clearly separated: Grandmother Burden works in the kitchen and garden, while her husband and the farmhands labor out in the fields. Grandmother Burden focuses on keeping the men “warm and comfortable and well-fed” (66), mending their clothes, and bringing food to help their immigrant neighbors. After supper, Grandmother Burden washes dishes while her husband reads the newspaper upstairs. As the patriarch of the family, Grandfather Burden reads verses from the Bible to the household before bed.
On the farms of struggling Bohemian and Scandinavian immigrants, however, gender occupations are less strictly defined: Women work out in the fields or do any job that needs to be done. Daughters, such as Ántonia and Lena, find that they are expected to work like men to help provide for their families. Ántonia plows the fields and is proud of her physical strength although Grandmother Burden warns that “heavy field work’ll spoil that girl. She’ll lose all her nice ways and get rough ones” (125). Jim thinks that Ambrosch, “put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that the farm-hands around the country joked in a nasty way about it” (126). Although Ántonia physically competes with her brother, she still defers to him: “since the father’s death, Ambrosch was more than ever the head of the house, and he seemed to direct the feelings as well as the fortunes of his women-folk” (127). Lena’s father is not a very successful farmer, and she has to herd his cattle, “bareheaded and barefooted, scantily dressed in tattered clothing” (165). Lena manages to preserve her feminine ways, even though Jim notices that other girls “usually got rough and mannish after they went to herding” (165). When Ántonia and Lena move into town, they both take the opportunity to make pretty dresses for themselves and go dancing. Later, Lena tells Jim that she will never get married because she had too much experience of family life, taking care of babies for her mother and herding cattle for her father. For Lena, marriage is all about “being under somebody’s thumb” (192).
The Norwegian immigrant, Mrs. Harling, and Ántonia both have “strong, independent natures” (180), and Mrs. Harling is “the head of the household” (148) when her husband is absent on business. However, when Mr. Harling returns, “he demanded all his wife’s attention” (156). Mrs. Harling pays no attention to anyone else when her autocratic, imperial husband is home, making “coffee for him at any hour of the night he happened to want it” (157). Due to his daughter Frances’s “unusual business ability,” Mr. Harling is also “exacting with her,” and she “never got away from her responsibilities” (149). However, with his son, Charley, who is preparing to attend Annapolis, Mr. Harling is “very indulgent” (149).
The immigrant girls not only have to work on the farms or as domestics in town, but they also are frequently taken advantage of by their male employers. The three Bohemian Marys get pregnant while working as housekeepers or cooks. Cutter is known for his debauchery: “two Swedish girls who had lived in his house were the worse for the experience” (210), and he planned to rape Ántonia. Ántonia gets pregnant by Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor who had promised to marry her but who ultimately deserts her. Ántonia must bear the social stigma but persists in raising her child. The hard work to which the immigrant girls are habituated, however, eventually enables them to triumph: The three Marys turn out to be “steady” (349), even good butter-makers and managers with large families, and Lena becomes “the leading dressmaker in Lincoln” (298), later moving to San Francisco. The maternal Ántonia manages to overcome Donovan’s betrayal and find a Bohemian husband, Anton Cuzak, with whom she can live the farm life she desires and rear many children. Ántonia does not mind helping her city-bred husband with work in the fields because it helps her achieve her own goals of successfully raising a family.
The Impact of the Prairie Environment on Jim Burden
When Jim Burden moves from his Virginia home to his grandparents’ residence on the Nebraska frontier, the prairie environment has a powerful impact on him. Jim experiences a profoundly different landscape with climate extremes that shape his personal development and perspective. Jim’s first impression, upon arriving in this “new world” (3) is how large it is: The train travels all day, and “it was still, all day long, Nebraska” (5). On his first wagon ride, Jim cannot see any fences or fields: “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made” (7). The lack of human cultivation makes Jim feel as if “the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction” (7). For the first time, he sees no familiar mountain ridges when he looks up at the sky, and no hills, “only the complete dome of heaven” (8). Between the vast Nebraskan earth and sky, Jim feels insignificant, overwhelmed by the natural environment: He “felt erased, blotted out” (8), even reluctant to say his prayers because he felt he was at the mercy of fate.
However, Jim eventually feels a oneness with the prairie’s all-encompassing nature, and this discovery fills him with happiness. On his first day of exploration, Jim sees the large cornfield and sorghum patch cultivated by his grandfather, but everywhere else “as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I” (14). Jim has an imaginative mind that allows him to view the red grass as “the colour of wine-stains” and the wind blowing through the grass as if “the whole country” (15) is running. He perceives the earth as if it were a living creature, like a wild buffalo, with “the shaggy grass . . . a sort of loose hide” (16). Jim wants to “walk straight through the red grass and over the edge of the world,” floating off into the sun and sky “like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads” (16). He is so entranced with the natural surroundings that he almost forgets he “had a grandmother” (15), and when she leaves him in the garden, he is “left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content” (17). Jim leans back against a huge pumpkin and quietly observes the non-human life around him, personifying their activities, including “giant grasshoppers. . . doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines” (18). Immersed in nature, Jim becomes “something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins” and does “not want to be anything more” (18). He feels “entirely happy . . . dissolved into something complete and great” (18).
During Jim’s study of classical literature at college in Lincoln, his mind returns to the vivid scenes of his prairie childhood. The immigrants seem like heroic figures to Jim for overcoming hardships to cultivate the land: “[A]ll the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. . . it was like watching the growth . . . of a great idea” (306). Jim becomes a lawyer for a Western railway, loving “with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs” (x). Although Jim approves of the prospering country’s development, he still feels most at home, when he takes a walk out of town where some land has never been plowed. Jim has the sense of coming home to himself in the wild prairie that had so impressed him as a wondering child.
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