A Study Guide for Willa Cather's My Antonia

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Willa Cather's "My Antonia," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535829090

Book preview

4

My Ántonia

Willa Cather

1918

Introduction

Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918) is the story of both Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant to the state of Nebraska in the 1880s, and the novel's American-born narrator, Jim Burden. The story is told as Jim relates his own image of Ántonia in a nostalgic re-creation of his childhood and youth. Their wildly differing places in the social hierarchy account for their respective fortunes. Ántonia survives her father's suicide, hires herself out as household help, is abandoned at the altar, gives birth out of wedlock, but achieves fulfillment in her marriage to a Czech farmer, her loving children, and their flourishing farm. Jim, a successful well-traveled and cultured East-coast lawyer, remains romantic, nostalgic, and unfulfilled in life. This portrait of Ántonia is widely acknowledged as one of the most memorable characters in twentieth-century literature. Through her, Cather celebrates the vitality and fruitfulness of the pioneering era as a type of lost paradise. My Ántonia is widely considered the best of the author's Nebraska novels which reflect her childhood experiences growing up on the plains. Since its appearance, Cather's carefully crafted fiction has gathered a steady following. Her reputation has continued to grow since her death in 1947. Although contemporary reviewers sometimes faulted the author's work as overly nostalgic and obsessed with the past, today critics see Cather's Nebraska novels, and My Ántonia in particular, as well-crafted, sympathetic portrayals of the uniquely American experience of immigrant pioneers.

Author Biography

Born in Virginia in 1873, Willa Cather spent the first decade of her life on her family's farm in Back Creek Valley. In 1884, her family moved to join her father's relatives among the ethnically diverse settlers of the Great Plains. This area would serve as the inspiration for several of her novels, including My Ántonia (1918). Her father tried farming but soon settled the family in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a town of approximately 2,500 people. Cather remembered vividly both the trauma of leaving a hill farm for a flat, empty land and the subsequent excitement of growing up in the new country. She took intense pleasure in riding her pony to neighboring farms and listening to the stories of the immigrant farm women she met there. Cather accompanied a local doctor on house calls and by her thirteenth birthday had adopted the outward appearance and manner of a male. She signed her name William Cather, Jr. or William Cather, M.D. Eventually returning to more conventional modes of dress, she later dismissed the episode as juvenile posturing.

At sixteen, she left home to prepare to enroll at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, which she entered in 1891. Her freshman English instructor gave her essay on Thomas Carlyle to a Lincoln newspaper for publication and by her junior year, she was supporting herself as a journalist. From Lincoln, she moved to Pittsburgh as a magazine editor and newspaper writer. She then became a high school teacher, using summer vacations to concentrate on fiction. In 1905, she published her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden.

In 1906, Cather was hired to edit McClure's, a leading muckraking magazine, and