My Antonia
My Ántonia: The Natural Changes in Willa Cather’s Work
My Ántonia, a novel by Willa Cather, is written in the account of Jim Burden, a fictional character who resembles Cather in a lot of ways. Being born in Virginia but grew up in Nebraska, Willa Cather is famous for her works about life on the Great Plains of the Mid-West. This story, supposedly written by Jim, is set in the stage of westward migration in the mid-late 1800s, and tells Jim’s experience as a child growing up in Black Hawk, Nebraska. As Cather said in her later years: “that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake. It has been the happiness and the curse of my life.” her childhood memories, represented by the Nebraskan landscape, have always been an indelible part of her. In commemorating her own memories, Cather artistically incorporates details of the Nebraskan landscape into different stages of Jim and Ántonia’s lives. In My Ántonia, Willa Cather employs the varying features of the Nebraskan prairie as representations of the changes in Jim Burden’s character, thus highlighting Jim’s romanticism on the fleeting past.
The red grass of the Nebraskan prairie, a sign of the pristineness of the prairie and a symbol of Jim’s innocence, has gradually faded into the skyscrapers of New York City. When Jim first comes to the countryside of Black Hawk, the prairie is completely wild and pristine, just like Jim’s innocence as a child. Willa Cather writes: “Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I” (Cather 17). The red grass, a physical sign of the richness of the soil, is everywhere when Jim first arrives in Black Hawk, suggesting that the land has not been cultivated by human, but is still rather pristine and wild. By comparing Jim with the red grass, Cather implies that Jim’s personality is not yet is influenced and shaped by the people around him, that he is just as pure as this boundless,
My Ántonia, a novel by Willa Cather, is written in the account of Jim Burden, a fictional character who resembles Cather in a lot of ways. Being born in Virginia but grew up in Nebraska, Willa Cather is famous for her works about life on the Great Plains of the Mid-West. This story, supposedly written by Jim, is set in the stage of westward migration in the mid-late 1800s, and tells Jim’s experience as a child growing up in Black Hawk, Nebraska. As Cather said in her later years: “that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake. It has been the happiness and the curse of my life.” her childhood memories, represented by the Nebraskan landscape, have always been an indelible part of her. In commemorating her own memories, Cather artistically incorporates details of the Nebraskan landscape into different stages of Jim and Ántonia’s lives. In My Ántonia, Willa Cather employs the varying features of the Nebraskan prairie as representations of the changes in Jim Burden’s character, thus highlighting Jim’s romanticism on the fleeting past.
The red grass of the Nebraskan prairie, a sign of the pristineness of the prairie and a symbol of Jim’s innocence, has gradually faded into the skyscrapers of New York City. When Jim first comes to the countryside of Black Hawk, the prairie is completely wild and pristine, just like Jim’s innocence as a child. Willa Cather writes: “Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I” (Cather 17). The red grass, a physical sign of the richness of the soil, is everywhere when Jim first arrives in Black Hawk, suggesting that the land has not been cultivated by human, but is still rather pristine and wild. By comparing Jim with the red grass, Cather implies that Jim’s personality is not yet is influenced and shaped by the people around him, that he is just as pure as this boundless,