Introduction to My Antonia
About Willa Cather
Since childhood, Willa Cather had the ability to see her own
brand of art in the people, situations, and emotions of everyday life. Her
unique perspective on ordinary life can be found in her celebrated novels,
short stories, and essays. Cather is best known as the voice of frontier life
on the American plains, where she spent the years of her youth and young
adulthood. According to Cather, these were the years during which she
unconsciously gathered the rich material that would inspire her to write when
she was an adult. She says:
Every
story I have written since then has been the recollection of some childhood
experience, of something that touched me while a youngster. You must know a
subject as a child, before you ever had any idea of writing, to instill into it
. . . the true feeling.
Cather was born on December 7, 1873 , the eldest child of Charles and Mary
Virginia Cather. When she was ten years old, her family moved to a small
settlement west of Red Cloud, Nebraska .
Cather was at first homesick and had difficulty adjusting to the rough, open
landscape of the Nebraska
prairie. However, she found that her diverse collection of neighbors was a
striking and welcome contrast to the flat, drab countryside. At that time,
immigrants came from all over Europe to farm
in Nebraska .
Young Cather was befriended by some of the older immigrant women, and their
unique experiences made a strong impression on her. Later, Cather relates:
I
have never found any intellectual excitement any more intense than I used to
feel when spent a morning with one of these old women at her baking or butter
making. . . . I always felt . . . as if I had actually got inside another
person’s skin.
About My Antonia
Willa
Cather’s My Ántonia is written as a
young man’s reflections on the people and places of his youth. The narrator,
Jim Burden, is a New York City
lawyer who grew up on the Nebraska
frontier. His memories show his affection for the past and his connection to
his childhood friend, and paint a vivid portrait of life in Nebraska in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
From its first pages, My Ántonia
depicts the ethnically diverse, hardworking people who came to the American
plains. The novel also powerfully depicts the open landscape of the prairie and
the rugged lifestyle of its settlers. In 1920, H. L. Mencken, a famous literary
critic and essayist, wrote:
I
know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the western farmlands more real
than My Ántonia makes them, and I know of none that makes them seem better
worth knowing. The primary focus of the novel is Ántonia.
The novel
is set mainly in the Nebraska Divide, a rural farming area in southern Nebraska , and in Black
Hawk, a town just east of the Divide.
Cather grew up in this area and based the fictional town of Black Hawk on the real
town of Red Cloud ,
which sits on the Republican River . Another
setting described in the novel is Lincoln ,
Nebraska
The novel
begins in the late 1880s and covers a period of about thirty years of the
narrator’s life. This was an eventful
time in the actual history of Nebraska .
In 1862 Congress passed the first Homestead Act, which granted 160 acres of
free land in the West to anyone at least twenty-one years old who promised to
settle it. The concept of providing free land to hardworking settlers was first
suggested by western pioneers who were struggling to build farms on undeveloped
land. They argued that, because the land was worthless until developed,
Congress should give them parcels of land as a reward for helping to improve
the country. Close to a million people requested homestead applications between
1863 and 1890. More farms were created in this time period than any other in U.S. history.
The Homestead Act was also a key factor in the United States ’ expansion westward.
The
Homestead Act created opportunities for many struggling American citizens and
immigrants to the United
States . Between 1881 and 1920, southern and
eastern Europeans, including Bohemians, were part of a major immigration
movement to the United
States . Many of these immigrants, like the
Shimerdas in My Ántonia, came to the United States
to take advantage of available prairie land.
In 1865 the
Union Pacific Railroad began building its line farther into Nebraska territory. They advertised Nebraska farmland in the
East as well as in Europe . From 1869 to 1879 Kansas and Nebraska attracted a
large number of settlers. Between 1874 and 1877, however, swarms of grasshoppers
invaded the area and damaged much of the crops. Many settlers left their farms
and returned east. Drought, bad credit policies, and low prices on agricultural
products caused further distress to Nebraska
farmers. In My Ántonia, Cather
captures the hardships facing pioneers as they tried to build new lives to
in unfamiliar territory.
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