My Antonia Symbolism

My Antonia by Willa Cather is a novel that includes bone-chilling tragedy and life affirming uplift. The story centers around a memoir by Jim Burdin, a middle age New York lawyer who decided to write down his reminsces of his dear friend Antonia Shimerda. The story begins with Burdin heading on a train for Nebraska to live with his grandparents. He is ten years old and both of his parents have recently died. On the train he spots a Russian immigrant family and he is intrigued by them; the family includes a pretty twelve year old girl named Antonia. In an act of serendipity, they turn out to be his grandparent’s neighbors. The novel follows Jim and Antonia’s ensuing friendship, and the lives of all the other people in town. Both of the main …show more content…
While the other characters in the novel are after money and other forms of success, Antonia keeps a stark purity throughout. Her pure personality is matched with an incessant love of the land, where the others have other things that they are chasing after. Antonia spends the whole novel working the land, without reward, but loving every minute of it. Her purity is rewarded in the book’s ending, as Jim describes the lushness of the orchard around him ‘’...we could smell the ripe apples on the trees. The crabs hung on the branches as thick as beads on a string, purple-red, with a thin silvery glaze over them’’ (Cather 220). Lush vegetation, thick fruits, the symbolism strikes in the reader of a farm version of a garden of eden. Except in this story, Antonia is born in a worldly hell, and works, and works, and struggles her way to paradise. Even though it is not her aim, the farm also starts to make serious amounts of money. Jessica Winston, in her essay, ‘’A Medidating Presence in My Antonia’’, writes ‘’In transforming the once foreign land into something familiar, Antonia transformed herself from an immigrant girl to a pioneer women’’.A pioneer, that most treasured of American phrases, from immigrant to pioneer, from the outcast to the ideal. Antonia achieves this all through hard work and goodness. As everybody else was chasing whatever desire they may have had on their mind, Antonia was getting up in the morning, tending to her treasure. The fruit it has beared is symbolic of the fruit in her life. Cather, through the structure of her novel, makes the reader honor the woman like Antonia and reminds the reader that if we all look far enough, we all come from someone like her. Someone who dedicated themselves to the simple idea of rasiing a family and doing good. It is a reminder to honor the similar