65 pages • 2 hours read
My Antonia
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Symbols & Motifs
Rattlesnakes
Cather utilizes the large rattlesnake at the prairie-dog town in several symbolic ways. Initially, the rattlesnake is a symbol of predators that prey on the vulnerable. Rattlesnakes live at prairie-dog town because they can snatch the prairie dogs or the brown earth owls that nest underground for their meals. Cather extends the rattlesnake symbol to the human world by describing Krajiek, who takes financial advantage of his fellow Bohemian immigrants, as a type of predator. The Shimerdas hate Krajiek, but because they speak the same language in a foreign land, Krajiek is their only ally. Cather explicitly compares Krajiek to the rattlesnakes: The Shimerdas “kept him in their hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie-dogs and the brown owls house the rattlesnakes—because they did not know how to get rid of him” (32).
Jim Burden’s killing of the huge rattlesnake also symbolizes for Ántonia that Jim is no longer a boy. For Ántonia, Jim’s feat places him in the traditional masculine role of protector and she must defer to him. Jim actually felt sick and frightened when he killed the snake, recalling: “I didn’t run because I didn’t think of it” (46). Ántonia wants Jim to display the dead snake to all the neighbors, and Jim starts to feel he has done a heroic deed and that he is equal to anything in this “great land [that] had never looked to me so big and free” (48).
Ántonia Shimerda
Ántonia is a symbol of the immigrant experience to Jim Burden, particularly the vigor and energy of the immigrant women starting in a new land. When Jim observes the rural immigrant girls who come to work in town, he admires them: “The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new” (198). He notes that these immigrant girls “physically . . . were almost a race apart” from the more constrained townswomen of Black Hawk. Like Ántonia, their “out-of-door work had given them a vigour which . . . developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement” (198). Jim views Ántonia “as a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races” (353), overcoming hardship and building a new country out of raw materials.
Ántonia also symbolizes the natural landscape of the Great Plains to Jim: “More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood” (x). Jim describes Ántonia’s eyes as “big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood” (23). Ántonia is never artificial: “Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart” (176). She is like the open, free country for which Jim develops a passion.
Ántonia represents the past as well to Jim: his childhood innocence and adventures. He and Ántonia both arrived in the new world of the Nebraska prairie as children, coping with the loss of their familiar homes and discovering wonders together. The purity of their childhood friendship is sustaining to Jim as an adult: Ántonia’s face is “the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women’s faces, at the very bottom of my memory” (322). Jim informs Ántonia: “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” (321). Jim’s bond with Ántonia is their shared, early experiences: “we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past” (372).
The First Road
When Jim Burden returns to Nebraska after 20 years away, residing in New York and traveling the country on his legal work for one of the Western railways, he stumbles upon “a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out. . . to my grandfather’s farm, then on to the Shimerdas’” (370). This first road is a symbol of the original wildness of the undeveloped prairie and of Jim’s own precious childhood in the region. The half-mile of road was “all that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thing across the open prairie” (371). Jim notes that “everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the highways were surveyed” (370).
The road evokes Jim’s memories of his first arrival on the Nebraska frontier; it was the road over which he and Ántonia rode in rumbling wagons at night when they first arrived in Black Hawk. For Jim, the road symbolizes his and Ántonia’s destiny: The road brought them together by chance and determined the trajectory of their young lives. Although Jim delayed returning to Nebraska, already having experienced disappointments in life, and fearing disillusionment, he finds that his return has “the sense of coming home to myself” (371). The road brings him full circle, and Jim understands that a renewal of his friendship with Ántonia is possible: “Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again” (372).
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