Hardships In Willa Cather's My Antonia

Willa Cather shows her readers the economic hardships of the homesteaders through her novel My Antonia. She does this in the hopes that we, her readers, will come to understand better the many sacrifices and sufferings the homesteaders had to endure. Her novel My Antonia shows us these trials through the autobiography of Jimmy Burden. In this book we walk in the footsteps of Jimmy, and live through the many hardships he and his fellow homesteaders had to face. We are able to really see how nature predicts the fate of these people. Fierce snow storms, and summers filled with drought or too much rain can so easily destroy everything that these people had worked so hard to build. This book also gives us a taste of the hardships that many immigrants
had to face. Immigrants such as the Shimerdas, a bohemian family, and Pavel and Peter, who are both Russians, came from their country where they had been wealthy and prosperous to this land for new beginnings and opportunities. It was these people who sacrificed and suffered the most. Some of them, like the Shimerdas, did not even know how to farm and ended up almost starving and freezing to death their first winter spent in the prairie. Even though these people struggled for years they were able to make a fortune through the constant hard work and dedication they put into their farms in the hopes of making better lives for their children.