My Antonia class system
My Antonia class systemIn “My Antonia” Willa Cathers seems to target the differences between the western, pioneer, farmer and the eastern, industrial, businessman. This contrasting seems to peak in the span of two paragraphs at the end of book four where Cathers injects a passage wrought with imagery and personification to relay her message. Here, the reader is placed into the mind of Jim Burden, the main character, during a period in his life when he is to choose the person him will grow up to become. Cathers exposes the conflict going on inside him as he struggles between choosing the eastern life expected of him or the western life he has wanted.
Jim Burden is a young man at this point with a Harvard Law education, the promise of a good job, and the implication of financial success. He would settle for nothing less at this point in his life had it not been for the success he had seen around him in people like Lena, Tiny, and Mr. Harling amongst several others. However, in this passage, as his last meeting with Antonia before he leaves to the east comes to an end, he says, “I wish I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.” (251) He reveals that he longs not for his financial success but rather for something else, he tells us that he desires something he once had. Jim also says, “I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall.” (251) In this personification of the land Jim makes the west sound like someone he wants to be with. He describes the land as a magical person pulling to keep the two together. As a child Jim was entrenched in the land in the west no matter what he was doing and now he longed to have that companionship back.
This longing reveals the conflict Jim sparked when he chose to explore a life as a businessman, or more specifically a lawyer, in the east. Cathers uses imagery in the first part of this passage to do an incredible job of capturing this battle inside him. Cathers writes, “As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east,...
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