critiscisms of My Antonia
In the past, critics have ad moralized and/or brutalized every writer they could get their pen on. This is seen from criticisms of Henry Adams to William Butler Yeats. These writers critique everything about the writer and his/her works. For instance many critics criticize Willa Cather's novel, My Antonia. Their criticisms lie on the basis that My Antonia is based on cyclical themes with no structure holding each of the My Antonia's books. In other words, as a collection of five different accounts remembered by the main character, Jim Burden, My Antonia is characterized by a loose plot structure yet the existence of common themes is expressed in a cyclical nature. According to James E. Miller, Jr.'s " 'My Antonia': A Frontier Drama of Time," Willa Cather's novel, My Antonia, is "defective in structure." (Bloom 51) Its structure is basically based on the narrators', which is Cather herself, point of view about when the main character, Jim Burden, remembers specific moments in an abstract pattern in his life about his Antonia. This is so because the collection of books that make up the novel, My Antonia, is about Willa Cather; the narrator's idea of what and to what point Jim Burden remembers. Miller also states that the
"It is in the dramatization of Antonia from the girlhood of the opening pages through her physical flowering in the middle books to, finally, her reproduction of the race in a flock of fine boys in the final pages of the book that her life it represented...as a cycle in its stages of birth, growth, fruition and decline. " (Bloom 54-55) Wells, Kim. Domestic Goddesses. August 23, 1999. Online. Internet. November 4, 1998. The end of the novel is also without a circle. The completion of the novel has a literal homecoming and completion of the circle. This circle is when Jim Burden goes back to the road with which the novel began, and ending as it began in the autumn of the year. An even greater importance is Jim's sense of returning to an awareness of the deep sources of his life, as symbolized in his childhood, in the land, and in Antonia. "The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is." (Cather 273) "The first book of My Antonia, The Shimerdas, introduces from the start the drama of time in the vivid accounts of the shifting seasons...portraying the terrible struggle for mere existence in the bleakness of the plains' winter, dramatizing the return of life with the arrival of spring, and concluding with the promise of a rich harvest in the intense heat of the prairie's summer. This is Jim Burden's remembered year, and it is his obsession with the cycle of time that has caused him to recall Antonia in a setting of the changing seasons." (Miller 55)
Some common words found in the essay are:
Jim Burden, Willa Cather's, Finally Jim, Peter Pavel, Jim Antonia, Book Shimerda's, Kim Wells, Harold Bloom's, Antonia Shimerdas, Jim Burden's, jim burden, novel antonia, cyclical themes, willa cather's novel, cycle seasons, cycle stages, cather's novel, life cycle, antonia moves, willa cather's, cather's novel antonia, cycle seasons cycle, human life, section hired girls, constant cyclical themes,
Approximate Word count = 1367
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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