My antonia Jim antonia and the land
In America's Pioneering history, strong bonds between people and the land they live on have been built. From this bond, the act of colonizing land brings people together in intense relationships. In My Antonia, Willa Cather looks into these bonds between people, land, and people through the relationship between the 2 main characters, Jim and Antonia. Throughout the story, Antonia as a representation of a life very different from Jim's and as a strong bond with the land shows us Jim's fascination with Antonia. She is his counterpart. Antonia represents an alternative to Jim's life as a middle-class American boy. Unlike Jim, she's able to move away from all the stereotypes and boundaries of her class and gender. Antonia is a lot less inhibited than Jim is and listens to her heart more. In the end, Jim's decisions are made according to social thumbs up or thumbs downs. He goes through a rebel stage and ignores all of his responsibilities to his own class to hang out with people his family and friends don't think highly of, but when he figures out that what he's doing is hurting his grandparents and where they stand socially like honor wise, he stops really fast. He goes back to the whole country women feel of life when he ignore
In Conclusion, I think Willa Cather is very accepting of Jim and Antonia's fate. They both represent their respective people, class and native wise. I think she's trying to get the point across that when you don't have much in life money and status wise, you take what life gives you and you make that everything. The connection in My Antonia is the land being all Antonia really had and Antonia being all Jim really had. notably different socially and attitude wise. Her difference helped him to define himself, his own choices. He says that he might have liked to have Antonia as something closer like "a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister" ( ), but he never went after her like that. Willa Cather's opinion of them comes across as Antonia and Jim being better counterparts than intimates. The last thing he does in reference to this all is him writing "My" in front of her name. She is his because he took in his image of her so much that its s his studies and starts to hang out with Lena in Lincoln but right after Gaston Cleric, his mentor, gives him a little bit of advice, he forgets about Lena and focuses back onto his studies. After doing things like this over and over, he ends up really far away from Nebraska to the point where he can't ever be as close again. Back to present tense, the grownup Jim
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Approximate Word count = 892
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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