Through her, Cather celebrates the vitality and fruitfulness of the pioneering era as a type of lost paradise. This portrait of Ántonia is widely acknowledged as one of the most memorable characters in twentieth-century literature. Jim, a successful well-traveled and cultured East-coast lawyer, remains romantic, nostalgic, and unfulfilled in life. Ántonia survives her father's suicide, hires herself out as household help, is abandoned at the altar, gives birth out of wedlock, but achieves fulfillment in her marriage to a Czech farmer, her loving children, and their flourishing farm. Their wildly differing places in the social hierarchy account for their respective fortunes. The story is told as Jim relates his own image of Ántonia in a nostalgic re-creation of his childhood and youth. Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918) is the story of both Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant to the state of Nebraska in the 1880s, and the novel's American-born narrator, Jim Burden.
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