My Antonia - Effects Of Landscape
In Willa Cather's, My Antonia, the Nebraska prairie is a vehicle for opportunity and opposition. Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda's lives are direct descendants of this dualism that inhabits the prairie, and decisively creates the distinction between the two friends. Although only a few miles separated Jim from Antonia, the landscape of the United States made the two strangers.
The Nebraska prairie may have been the only medium in which Jim would have ever met Antonia. Jim's character represents all that Antonia's lacks. Their similarity is that both are traveling through foreign lands to start a new life. The difference is that Jim's ticket is paid for. From the beginning of the novel Willa Cather sets up a clear distinction between the statuses of Jim and Antonia. Antonia is an immigrant and speaks an inadequate amount of English. This isolates her and her family from the new life they're trying to establish. Jim is a citizen and is moving out to a land that has been established by his grandparents. The Shimerda's have been uprooted from their homeland to start a new existence from scratch. Jim came from a productive farm in Virginia, while the Shimerdas came from an unyielding life in Bohemia.
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The expansive plains of Nebraska was instrumental in bringing together these polar classes in that it deposited the two families side by side.
Land in My Antonia, is associated with power. On the train to Black Hawk, the conuctor makes reference to a family from "over the water" traveling to the same destination as Jim. His companion, Jake, said " you were likely to get diseases from foreigners" (10). This reference directly implies that the Shimerdas are indecent, and not of the same caste as Jim; an American citizen. The phrase, "over the water" is another way of saying, "not from our soil" or "not an American". This polorizes natives from foriegners, and puts a stigma on immigrants as being irregular.
The Burdens have been instituited in the...
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