Monday, December 19, 2011

My Antonia: Behind The Scenes

 Willa Cather suggests in her novel, "My Antonia", that she agrees that life back then was very hard if you did not have the necesssities. During that time, you needed land, know how to communicate with other farmers, money, and enough people to work your farm so that you can grow enough food to survive.

My Antonia is told in the perspective of another main character, Jim, but if the story was told in Antonia's perspective things would be different in many ways. Jim is on the richer side of it all, he was born and raised in America and had all the land for farming. Antonia was an immagrant who came with her family to America hoping to have better life. What Antonia got was a life of struggle trying to grow enough food and barely living right. If the story was told in Antonia's perspective, a lot of things that Jim did not know about Antonia would come out.

Cather being a woman does not tell the things that a man would do in the situation that Jim was in. If the author of this novel would have been a man, Jim would have acted totally different towards Antonia. The perspective of the novel is a mix of both sounding like a man writing, and sounds like a woman pretending to be a man. The perespective sounds like a man writing because of othe way that Jim did not help Antonia, but in the same way it also sounds like a woman because of the way Jim cares about Antonia.

Jim changes the title in my opinion because he understands Antonia, he knows what Antonia has gone through throughout the life that she has lived. They may have never became a "couple", but they were extremely close. Also becasue Antonia probably only actually acted a certian way towards Jim, meaning that she was his Antonia.

This novel shows the way that pioneers struggled during that time, and the hardships of being an immagrant. Willa Cather shows well how a person of Antonia and Jims caliber would handle situations. A book in Antonia's perspective would be an awesome sequel to this novel.





              

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