Theme Of Nostalgia In Willa Cather's My Antonia

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.——My Ántonia.

With the scene of Nebraska prairie where the fresh, tender, wind blowing over the green fields; dew falls down from the leaves with the first golden ray of summer sunshine, children smiling under the blue sky as the wind tickling their face, I’m brought back to the old time that Jim Burden and his friends has spent in their childhood together. Willa Cather, the author of My Ántonia, makes this novel nostalgic because it reminisces the childhood life bound with different characters, life and the picture the midwest landscape.

Nostalgia first represents a disease which Greek soldiers die for suffering pain of homesickness; then it gradually developed as a sense of “acute homesickness”, referring to "a bitter sweet longing for things, persons, or situation of the past”. To elaborate, nostalgia is a way to evoke people to reminiscence their earlier time related to the past characters, places, things and so on.

It is crystal clear that it is the sharp contrast between Jim, the main narrator’s present life and his childhood contributes to the tone of nostalgia in the whole novel.

Jim marries a woman who is the only daughter of a distinguished man and becomes a successful young lawyer thanks to this marriage. It seems like he is the life winner because of both his advanced career and brilliant marriage. However, Behind this glamorous success, Jim’s life was unhappy, for his wife does not love him at all—she has her own fortune and lives her own life. Whenever thinking of the present life, it makes Jim to reminisce his faded childhood, ordinary, but pure and free.

In Cather’s novel, she depicts the “nostalgia disease” and “feeling of nostalgia” by representing different characters’ life experience

respectively.

To begin with, Mr. Shimerda undoubtedly is the representative figure for “nostalgia disease—homesickness. Born in Bohemia, Mr. Shimerda is a well-educated and respectful musician; they were supposed to be a happy family until they decided move to Black Hawk, a small town of Nebraska, the midwest of America in order for a rich life. However, life does not go in the right way as they expected; as the immigrants, they have to face much more difficulties such as totally unfamiliar language environment they are in, the undeveloped farming skills, and the pressure to local’s view of immigrants. All these unexpected issues are like a huge stone in Mr. Shimerda’s heart stopping him breathing. How lonely and desperate Mr. Shimerda is that he misses his lovely hometown more an more, until this agony of nostalgia forced him end this miserable and poignant life by shooting himself. As it says in novel:” I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his own country.” Mr. Shimerda is a representation of the immigrants to midwest who struggle with sharp culture difference, language barrier and poverty and also suffer from the pain of nostalgia at the beginning of twentieth century.

What’s more, Cather puts more emphasis on the “feeling of nostalgia” which arouses sympathy towards readers. Jim is orphaned when he was ten and moved from his hometown Virginia to Nebraska which is an unfamiliar land. At Black Hawk, Jim meets Antonia there, who is the dearest daughter to dead Mr. Shimerda. Same as his father, living abroad, the local language, culture and even people are alien to Antonia, which indicates that she has to make her efforts to accommodate unfamiliar life. More unfortunate she is, life becomes harder after the death of Mr.Shimmerda since Antonia becomes her whole family’s support. The two young children are gradually bounded by the same experience and mutual feeling of homesickness.

The time Jim spent with Antonia is so memorable and meaningful that makes Jim to fall in love with her through her unique character which he romanticized as she grows up and what she experiences. Jim see how a simple, innocent girl he thought has grown up with such a strong will power that she makes her effort to learn English and to integrate into the local life; works away from home to support whole families after her dad shot himself and learns how to do farm work and housework and takes good care of owner’s children at a tender age. She is the brave one in Jim’s heart who would rather give up her own job in order to hold the chance to dance, struggling with social inequity. For Antonia, hired girls have equal right to do whatever they would like, just as those country girls. Antonia infected Jim deeply so that in his future life, her company would always be his emotional support, and would always be his “nostalgia”.

After twenty years they have not seen each other, when Jim sees Antonia again, all the memory of them are flashing in front of his eyes—he spent time with her, listening to her telling stories at Harling’s house; They danced at the hotel and walked home excitedly and lingered a long whiled at Harlings’s gate, whispering in the cold until the restlessness was slowly chilled out of us; they went to the river swimming and playing games; he comforted her stop crying due to homesickness etc. Jim realized that his affection to Antonia has never faded, like he says:” Do you know, Antonia, since I’ve been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.” He wants to be a little boy again so desperately.

In addition, not only does Cather take advantage of country life to depict nostalgia in the novel, but also she makes a specific description of scenery in order to emphasize the affection to the past. Like the book says:” Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough has sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie. “ We human beings are such insignificant in this vast universe; we are not able to keep the romantic moment permanently; the only thing we can do is to remember those valuable moments we possessed and to keep them in heart. As Jim says:” Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. “

Throughout the whole novel, it dawn on me that Cather’s real purpose for this novel is not only to evoke people’s feeling of nostalgia, but also make people to realize what we live is what we own; those unforgettable memories will eventually give us power to support the future life we are looking forward to.