Frontier Relationships In Willa Cather's My Antonia

The introduction of My Ántonia begins with an unknown female narrator giving background information on Jim Burden. The unknown narrator makes it clear that she knows Jim well because the two of them grow up together. The narrator originally wanted to write a memoir about their friend, Ántonia, to which Jim complies because he knew Ántonia best and therefore, is more qualified. Ántonia Shimerda, is an immigrant Bohemian girl who can be identified as androgynous, like Alexndria, for the same reasons. Androgynous is a word that fits Ántonia because she has a combination of both masculine and feminine qualities and expresses herself as such in a nontraditional fashion. Cather presents a situation where Ántonia is unable to attend school like Jim because of her family’s struggling circumstances. Ántonia does not have the time to balance both school and her work around the farm. Jim and Ántonia begin discussing the possibility of her attending school. However, Ántonia implies attending school is something little boys do, that she can work

Jim can attend school and not have to worry about chorus around a farm. Ántonia does not have that pleasure, though, because she must work the farm, much like men traditional would. As stated in Claudia Yukman’s “Frontier Relationships in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia,” ““Because they work under these conditions, the immigrant women in My Ántonia developed a subjectivity outside familiar gender roles as they still exist among the girls who have grown up in the more stable society of Black Hawk.” (97). Cather gives another clear example of where Ántonia expresses her masculinity is when she writes, “Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but {...} how much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that the farm-hands around the country joked in a nasty way about it”