My Antonia Essay: Women on the Frontier -- My Antonia Essays

Women on the Frontier in My Ántonia   In 1891, marking the elimination of throw overboard land, the Census Bureau announced that the confines no longer existed (Takaki, A Different Mirror, 225).  The end of the frontier meant the constant impoverishment, instead of the wealth they had daydream of, for a large number of immigrants from the Old World they came too late.  My Ántonia, however, illuminates another(prenominal) frontier, a frontier within America that most immigrants had to face.  It was the frontier in the midst of Americans and foreigners.  The immigrants were still foreign to the Americans who came and settled earlier.  They had to overcome the language and cultural breastwork and struggle against the harsh conditions of life. The novel focuses on the ironic moment that the frontier spirit - a   uniquely American one - is realized done foreigners. Further more(prenominal), it is women, the hired girls, who are put in the foreground in the novel.  What has make America is the foreign within, or rather, the foreign women on the frontier.               The division amongst the Americans and the foreigners is found throughout the novel. Even though naturalized, immigrants are still Bohemians, Russians, Norwegians, and so on.  They are foreigners in conception as Jim Burdens grand induce says, If these foreigners Norwegians are so clannish, Mr. Bushy, well have to have an American graveyard that will be more liberal-minded....(emphasis mine 73).  According to her, the demarcation between foreigners and Americans is purely cultural as far as foreigners are not clannish and liberal-minded like Americans... ...an the heterogeneousness within one Bohemian-American family.  Children learn Bohemian, the parents mother tongue, first, and English when they go to school. They work through both American and Bohemian food.  Mother from country and father from city, children are open to a wide experience than their parents.  Ántonias first daughter, although married and odd the house, is another significant heterogeneity of the family.    As the first Mormons scattered sunflowers seeds on their ways to freedom, Ántonia, a woman on the frontier, has raised many upcoming citizens of America.  Even though they claimed the end of the frontier, her children might confront another large-minded of frontier, but it is clear that it is not the same frontier on which their mother has had to stand.  The frontier comes back, but always in a different shape.