An analysis of life in the wild west in my antonia by william cather

Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather d. She was intensely moved by the dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the Nebraska prairie, and the various cultures of the European-American, immigrant and Native American families in the area. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out".

The area was being farmed by immigrants. Black Hawk is actually her home of Red Cloud. To some extent, the book is history, and much of it is autobiography.

Cather reveals this aspect not only through factual elements but also through the pervasive nostalgic mood in which she wraps the story. Cather has transmuted her past into a romantic story, one that goes beneath experience to deeper significance. Woman is the key theme of this complex work: Most of the women, with the exception of Mrs.

Shimerda and some of the crabbed Black Hawk ladies, are admirable. The immigrant women are the real heroines who defy the male-dominated Victorian culture of respectability that posited women as sheltered, fragile, inferior beings. Through these girls, Cather says that women should be allowed to live the way they wish, have the same chance for pleasure as men, and be able to compete equally.

Lena and Tiny show that women can break free. Escaping Black Hawk, which stands for the stultifying older America, they have established themselves in the more exciting urban scene.

Although they are better off than the trapped women of Black Hawk, they seem to be hardened, lonely. There remains a void in their lives. At the time she wrote this book, Cather was living on her own in the urban East as a professional writer. She was a Lena, a Tiny who now perhaps looked back with envy at the pioneer girls who returned to the land.

Producing large families and taking charge of their own farms, they prove to be the best models, the most complete women. Cather gives her mythic stature. By the end of the book, she is the mother of a new stalwart race and the shaper of destiny. This book is also about the prairie, about the vast environment that awaited those who sought to farm it.

When she lived in Nebraska, she was not enamored of the prairie; now she imparts to it Edenic qualities, especially after it has been farmed.

It was magnificent before the coming of the pioneers, but the plow has made it sublime. This is a pastoral story, with the land as garden and farming as the ideal existence.

It is an old theme leading back through American and European literature to classical times. It is significant, however, that it had almost always been a masculine story, told by men with males as protagonists. Cather was writing at a time when many native-born Americans demanded that immigrants should conform to their culture or be excluded from the country.

Cather believed, however, that their heritages were important, that they brought energy and enrichment to the United States, to a society too much like Black Hawk.

She sees signs that the next immigrant generation is becoming Americanized, losing its special qualities.Home › American Literature › Analysis of Willa Cather’s Novels. Analysis of Willa Cather’s Novels By Nasrullah Mambrol on May 17, • (0) Willa Cather (—) was a prolific American novelist noted for her portrayals of the settlers and frontier life on the American plains.

ANALYSIS. My Antonia () Willa Cather () Wallace Stegner. If, as is often said, every novelist is born to write one thing, then the one thing that Willa Cather was The one thing beautiful in her life, the thing she shares with Jim, is the land itself, the great sea of grass, the wild roses in the fence corners of spring, the.

, The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation (now the Willa Cather Foundation) was founded to support the study of her life and work, and to maintain many sites in her hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska. Willa Cather Essay Examples. total results. An Analysis of My Antonia, a Novel by Willa Cather An Analysis of the Old Wild West in the Novel My Antonia by Willa Cather.

words. 2 pages. An Analysis of Willa Cather's Novel My Antonia. 1, words. 3 pages. Critic's Criticism on My Antonia by Willa Cather. 1, words. 3 pages. An. The Spirit of Antonia in My Antonia The life of Antonia Shimerdas, the main character in Willa Cather's My Antonia, could easily be judged a failure.

Perhaps measures of wealth, career, beauty and love fall short when held next to Antonia. The Prairie Life. My Antonia, written by Willa Cather, is one of the most recognizable stories of both immigrant and prairie caninariojana.comhed in , the novel is the last in what has been called.