1. “’ We were so deep in the grass that we could see nothing
but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of us
(26).”
Book Two

2. Setting plays a large part in My Antonia throughout the course of the novel, as the setting
changes greatly from Book I to Books IV and V. Book I starts when Jim Burden is ten years old and goes to
live in Nebraska with his grandparents after his parents death. The book takes place in the 1880’s, which
fosters the setting as an small Nebraskan farm town. The vividness with which Jim describes his
childhood town relates to the theme of nostalgia. He writes, “There was nothing but land: not a country
at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No there was nothing but land […] (15)”. Jim
describes the open plains where he spent his childhood years as if he was just there yesterday (depicted
in this mural), rather than writing about his childhood more than twenty years later. His vivid
descriptions show that he thinks about his childhood often, showing he feels very nostalgic about the
time he spent with Antonia. Jim describes his childhood home with vivid descriptions that make readers
feel as if they are in the Nebraskan country-side: “[…] yellow leaves and shining white bark made them
look like the gold and silver trees in fairy tails (24)”.
Setting obviously influences the lifestyle of the Burdens, transportation, etc, and therefore is
very important. In the story, the characters ride on horse-drawn carriages to get from place to place.
Setting also influences the relationship between Jim and Antonia. Because the book takes place in 1880,
Antonia cannot go to school because she is both an immigrant and a girl. Therefore, Jim has to help her
learn English: “’Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Antonia!’(27).”
Overall, the vivid descriptions of home that Jim includes have a major effect on both the plotline
of the novel and helps create a nostalgic mood. These descriptions and this mood continue throughout
the novel.
Book One

3. Book One
A key theme in My Antonia is nostalgia. In the introduction Willa Cather presents us with
the idea that Jim is eager to remember his childhood because his marriage is unhappy. She
says of his wife, “that she married this unknown man from the West out of bravado (10).”
Jim and his wife have very little in common and don’t seem to be very interested in each
other. Book 1 is written in language that makes prairie life sound like heaven. It gives the
impression that the time on his grandparents farm was near perfect. In Jim’s eyes, “The
whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed (38).” His
biblical reference shows that he sees the prairies as almost divine. As the books progress,
the tone become darker and grayer. Jim says that “winter lies too long in county towns;
hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen (125).” This view of winter contrasts
darkly with his view of winter in the country. In the country “The sky was brilliantly blue,
and the sunlight on the glittering white stretches of praire was almost blinding (52).” His
change in attitude towards winter shows that he doesn’t want to be where he is. He wants
the tranquility of life before Black Hawk. He wants to go back to when he and Tony spent
long fall days on the prairie. By the time Jim is an adult, he did not want to go back to
Nebraska because he “did not want to find her [Antonia] aged and broken…In the course
of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early
ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to
one again.(205).” He doesn’t even want to go see Antonia for fear that it will ruin his
memories; he wants to continue to remember his childhood through rose colored glasses.
Jim’s constant thought of days gone by shows that nostalgia is a fundamental theme of My
Antonia.

4. Book One
•Josiah Burden-Jim’s grandfather. Josiah is a strongly religious man, silent and given to
hard work.
•Emmaline Burden-Jim’s grandmother. Emmaline shows great concern and
compassion for the Shimerdas and is a loving maternal figure for Jim.
•Mrs. Harling-The matriarch of the Harling family, and a charismatic and active woman.
Mrs. Harling develops a strong affection for Ántonia, and she provides myriad activities
for her children, Ántonia, and Jim, to take part in.
•Russian Peter-Pavel’s housemate, and a fat, happy man. Like Pavel, Peter was forced
into exile from his native Russia following a wolf attack on a wedding party. Peter
eventually finds himself severely in debt and sells off his belongings, leaving America
for a job as a cook in a Russian labor camp.
•Mrs. Shimerda-The matriarch of the Bohemian immigrant family. Mrs. Shimerda is a
brusque, bossy, and often curt woman. After the suicide of her husband, she is forced
to make do with the little that she has in an attempt to provide for her family.
•Otto Fuchs-The Burdens’ hired hand, who looks like a cowboy out of one of Jim’s
books but is actually an Austrian immigrant. Good-natured despite his rough
appearance, Otto decides to seek his fortune in the West after the Burdens move to
Black Hawk.

5. Book One
As a youth in Nebraska, Jim develops a close friendship with a Bohemian immigrant
girl named Ántonia Shimerda. Jim is intelligent and intropesctive being the only boy
his age who is more interested in academics and reflection than in roughhousing. He
also likes to spend time alone or with girls such as Ántonia or other hired girls. Jim is
married, but has no kids and works as a legal counsel in New York City. His
thoughfulness, romantic nature, and attatchment to his childhood friends and the
Nebraksa landscape give a nostaligic quailty that highlights his story. Rather than
remaining close to Ántonia through the years, Jim allows himself to drift apart from
her, always preserving her special place in his heart by treating her memory with
greater and greater nostalgia as the years go by. Jim acquires an impressive
education along the way at the University of Nebraska and Harvard. At the end of the
novel, when Jim reunites with the middle-aged Ántonia on the Cuzak farm. He can
reforms a real relationship with Ántonia, acknowledging that she still exists and is still
herself even after the past that they shared has ended. He emphasized something
very personal to him from his past when he calls his memoir “My Ántonia” rather
than “Ántonia.” Jim is not claiming ownership of Ántonia, but indicating that the story
of Ántonia contained within his memoir is just as much a product of his own mind
and heart as it is of the past.

6. Book One
Ántonia moves to Nebraska from Bohemia with the rest of her family in her early
teenage years. Intelligent, optimistic, loyal, and kindhearted, the naturally
gregarious Ántonia is forced to accept a difficult life after the death of her father.
She is also trapped by the cultural differences that make her feel like a outsider
and has to deal with other complications: the Shimerdas go hungry, and their
poverty forces Ántonia to work as a servant girl; certain members of the Black
Hawk community judge her harshly for her love of dancing; her fiancé betrays her
and leaves her to raise a child alone. Yet she never loses her quality of inner grace
and self-sufficiency. Ántonia always tries to make the best of her circumstances,
but she refuses to sacrifice her independence to improve her life. For example, she
would rather work for the wretched Wick Cutter than follow Mr. Hartling’s order to
stop going to the dances.
Ántonia is based on an actual figure from Cather’s childhood—a girl named Annie
Pavelka, like Ántonia an immigrant and a hired girl in town whose father
committed suicide. Cather admired Annie’s inner radiance and her independence,
and sought to capture those qualities in Ántonia.
http://www.literarytraveler.com/authors/willa_cather_red_cloud.aspx

7. “ Black Hawk […] was a
Books 3-5 clean, well planted little
prairie town with white fences
and good green yards about
the dwellings, wide, dusty
streets, and shapely little trees
growing along the wooden
sidewalks (102).”
Minor Characters

8. Book Two
Book 2 takes place in Black Hawk, a small Nebraskan town, as
depicted in this mural. Jim and his family move there after living
outside the town for a few years. This setting is important because, as
Jim writes, “ […] I saw less of the Bohemians (93)”. He lives in a town
now rather than on land owned by his family. He makes different
friends, and meets new people that are very different from the
Shimerdas. Shortly after their move to Black Hawk, Antonia gets a job
as a servant for a neighboring family. Tension enters Jim and Antonia’s
relationship because the townspeople feel that they are better than
the hired girls. The differences between Jim and Antonia brought
about by this move to Black Hawk show that the setting has a major
influence on the story because a change in the setting caused new
conflicts that would not have occurred had there not been a change in
setting. Overall, Book 2 takes place in a small Nebraskan town called
Black Hawk. It is very different from the farm lifestyle, and changes
the relationship between Jim and Antonia, showing the importance
setting plays in the novel.

9. Book Two
A Norwegian immigrant’s daughter and a friend of Ántonia’s. Lena has a brief
liaison with Jim in Black Hawk and a more extended relationship with him in
Lincoln, where she sets up her own dressmaker’s shop. Lena is pretty and
blonde, and craves independence and excitement. Men are always attracted to
her, but she refuses to marry and give up her freedom. Lena craves excitement
and autonomy, refusing to marry any of the men who fall in love with her
beauty and charisma. Her choice to live in San Francisco is nearly as extreme for
someone from Black Hawk as Jim’s decision to move to New York. Lena
continues to become more important to Jim as he attends college, when they
are both in Lincoln together. She is still a pivotal figure in his growth from
childhood to adulthood.

10. Book Two
Tiny Soderball-One of the hired girls in Black
Hawk and a friend to Ántonia and Lena. After
working with Mrs. Gardener in the Boys’
Home, Tiny travels west and makes a small
fortune during the Alaskan gold rush.

11. “ Optima dies prima fugit
(173).”
Theme Poster
Middle

12. Book 3-5
Optima dies, prima fugit is a central theme of Willa Cather’s My Antonia.
Throughout the book, peace is achieved just to be ruined. At the beginning of
the story, Antonia and Jim become friends. They spend a couple idyllic years
roaming over the untamed Nebraska prairie just to find themselves confined
to the dingy streets of Black Hawk. Jim remembers autumn happily, saying
that, “all those fall afternoons were the same, but he never got used to them
(38).” He then describes the beauty of the prairie scene with a sort of golden
glow to it. This shows that he remembers the good times with a perfection
unattainable in actuality. Antonia experiences dancing and fun in Black Hawk
until Larry jilts her, leaving her an unmarried woman with a baby who “ […]
had come home disgraced (189).” The good times lasted a couple years, the
shame lasts forever. Jim finds a mentor in Gaston Cleric, but Gaston Cleric
dies. The heavenly days come, but they are always soon to be replaced by
something more stoic. The best days are the first to flee was a major theme
all through My Antonia.

13. Book 3-5
The setting in Books III, IV, and V is greatly different than the setting in the first two books.
After graduating from high school, Jim moves to Lincoln, Nebraska, a huge city compared to where
he was living before. He goes there and focuses on his studies, changing his relationship with
Antonia to the point where they rarely talked anymore. Again, a conflict in the story is caused by a
change in setting, showing how important setting is to the storyline. Rather than describing open
plains blowing in the wind, Jim describes “dusky stairways” and “mushy yards” (173). He now lives
a completely different life than before. He is hundreds of miles away from the prairie where he
grew up, and the feeling of nostalgia is beginning to come into his character. In Book IV, Jim
furthers himself from home even more when he attends Harvard law and becomes a lawyer. In
addition, his relationship with Antonia has changed so much that in the time they were apart, she
had a baby, as he found out upon returning to Black Hawk. Again, a change in setting has made a
major impact in the storyline, showing just how important setting is to the novel.
In Book V, Jim is settled in New York City, thousands of times bigger than the town where
he grew up. “I told Antonia I would come back, but life intervened, and it was twenty years before I
kept my promise (205)” he writes. While he has become a successful lawyer, Antonia has remained
in Black Hawk, and has a full family. The change in setting has affected the storyline to the point
that Jim is a completely different person than he was when he was living in Black Hawk. The setting
in these sections of the novel is represented by a picture of a city in the early 1910’s, which was
when this part of the book took place. Compared to past settings, this is more industrial, built up,
and less open. The quote ‘Optima dies prima fugit’ is a Latin phrase meaning ‘the good days are the
first to flee’. This describes the nostalgia that Jim feels as he is writing this, the longing to be back
on the farm in the open prairie, free of all tensions and stress. Overall, the setting in these sections
of the book is represented by a city because Jim lives in New York, however he longs for his old life.

14. Dome Descriptive Details
Cather uses many descriptive
details in the novel to place
images in the readers’ minds.
This allows her to take very
simple scenes, such as Jim
describing a snowfall, and turn
them into such vivid images
that one can picture
themselves in that situation.

15. “ […] for more than anything else, I felt motion in the
landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind,
and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a
sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild
buffalo were galloping, galloping (20).”

16. Dome
Throughout the novel, Jim Burden (the novel is in his perspective)
describes the beauty of the Nebraskan plains. He writes, “As I looked
about me, I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea.
The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine stains,
or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was
so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be
running (20)”. Although he wrote these descriptions more than
twenty years after he lived in a small farm town in Nebraska, he writes
as if he was just there yesterday, showing that he feels nostalgic about
Antonia and his childhood. The grass is important because it is one of
the more vivid descriptions Jim provides in his writing.
To represent the importance of the grass in the novel, we decided to
have real grass as the floor in our museum. This grass is watered with
an underground irrigation system, which runs at night to save visitors’
feet from getting wet. The grass is maintained by museum workers,
and receives all the sunlight it needs from the skylight in the ceiling
(look up!).

17. Dome Frame Story
In the book, Cather uses the idea of an frame story
as the backbone for her writing style.
She begins talking about Jim and how he and an unknown narrator are conversing
about Antonia. Jim then says that he has recently been in contact with her and the
This prompts a shift in the
novel that takes the reader
back into Jim’s childhood.
This reminiscence also feeds
on some of the major themes
of the book such as nostalgia
and how Jim slowly becomes
attached to his past.
unknown narrator urges him to channel his feelings into a writing piece.

18. Descriptive Detail Frame Story

20. Basement
Mr. Shimerda-The patriarch of the Bohemian immigrant
family. A melancholy man given to artistic and scholarly
pursuits, Mr. Shimerda feels very much out of place in
foreign land. His depression eventually leads to suicide,
leaving his family members to pick up the pieces and
struggle to make a living on their own.

21. Basement
Russian Pavel-Tall, gaunt, and nervous, Pavel is
an immigrant who falls ill under the care of the
Shimerdas. He had been ostracized and forced
to leave his native Russia after a frightful
incident involving a wolf attack on a wedding
party.

22. Basement
Wick Cutter-The leading moneylender in Black
Hawk and a shady character.

23. Basement
Gaston Cleric-Jim’s tutor at the university in
Lincoln. Cleric eventually moves on to a
teaching position at Harvard University and
brings Jim along with him. His premature
death from pneumonia has a strong effect on
Jim.