We value independence, hard work, courage, and ambition, and nobody has embodied that more neatly in our national history that the figure of the pioneer.
In a lot of ways, the spirit of those intrepid folks is, even to this day, celebrated in America.
It’s the motto that defined this country, that sent the pioneers steaming from Atlantic to Pacific, taming the Great Plains along the way. What is My Ántonia About and Why Should I Care? As a result, the novel provides modern readers a glimpse into the lives of the early white settlers of the American West. My Ántonia focuses on the lives and concerns of average Nebraskans, including European immigrants – the kind of people that Cather grew up around. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Cather chose to write about everyday people in the American West. Interestingly, while studying at the University of Nebraska, Cather herself used to wear men's clothing and go by the name "William."Ĭather was also nontraditional in her choice of subject matter. Additionally, the characters in the story break from stereotypical gender roles – the women are strong, athletic, and active, while the men are generally passive and weak. To begin, the novel is written by a woman but told through the eyes of a male narrator. For this reason, the novel is sometimes considered a modernist work (see "Genre" for more). First, its narrative structure is mainly built from episodes and anecdotes rather than a continuous storyline – Cather thinks nothing of jumping twenty years ahead in between chapters. The novel forms a sort of "trilogy" with two other prairie novels by Cather, O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915).įor its time and context, My Ántonia pushed the boundaries of traditional literature. Cather, like her character Jim, moved to Nebraska when she was ten years old, and she bases many of the events, characters, and settings of the novel on her own childhood experiences. The novel takes the form of a fictional memoir written by Jim Burden about an immigrant girl named Ántonia with whom he grew up in the American West.
My Ántonia, published in 1918, is arguably the most famous work of American novelist Willa Cather.
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