The Irrecoverable Past In My Antonia

“I think that most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age 15. That’s the important period: when one’s not writing. Those years determine whether ones work will poor and thin or rich and fine” elaborated Willa Cather, while discussing her childhood to fellow writer Lewis Carroll. This statement is descriptive of a large element in Cather’s writing, especially in her novel My Antonia, where the protagonists living situation is eerily similar to the authors childhood environment. At age 9, her family moved to Nebraska where her father attempted to farm the land. Willa Cather knowingly or unknowingly inserts her experiences into the novels structure as well as its protagonists in order to express the theme of an unrecoverable past. In the novel, most of the character interactions revolve around Jim and his Bohemian neighbors who had recently immigrated to start a new life. Jim tutors and befriends Antonia, a tomboyish daughter of the Shimerda family. The family was likely inspired by the several immigrant households that Cather encountered as a child such as the Wieners, a Jewish family who gave her access to their large library, …show more content…
E.K. Brown, one of her biographers, defends her by explaining that the novel exists not to tell a story necessarily, but to convey a feeling (Brown 206). Jim begins his memoir with an acknowledgement of this: “I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Antonia’s name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn’t any form” (Cather 6). Understanding My Antonia as a fictional memoir allows the genre to become attached to its theme, because the functions of memory exist primarily in the emotions we draw from our past experiences. Cather’s sentimentality of her own past is transferred to Jim as he attempts to gain control of his own memories and the longing emotions that accompany