Antonia

The Immigrant's Struggles in My Antonia

The life of the immigrant family is shown to be a difficult one in Willa Cather's My Antonia. The families are haunted by a longing for the past and the dread of the difficulties of the future on a landscape that is both foreign and forbidding. This paper will illustrate how Cather's novel highlights the struggles that immigrants faced when residing and settling in the American frontier.

One of the biggest challenges that the immigrants faced was the obvious language barrier. This is evidenced by Antonia's quick and yearning desire to learn the English language, to which end Jim is befriended. Jim represents mainstream America, in one sense, and the promise that his future has in store for him is what the Shimerdas and the other immigrant families do not have. By desiring to learn the language of the new land, Antonia shows...
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