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

Women on the Frontier in My Ántonia   In 1891, marking the elimination of free land, the number Bureau announced that the frontier no longer existed (Takaki, A Different Mirror, 225).  The force out of the frontier meant the constant impoverishment, instead of the wealth they had dreamed of, for a banging number of immigrants from the Old World they came too late.  My Ántonia, however, illuminates another frontier, a frontier within America that most immigrants had to face.  It was the frontier between Americans and foreigners.  The immigrants were still foreign to the Americans who came and settled earlier.  They had to overcome the language and cultural barrier 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 through foreigners. Furthermore, it is women, the hired girls, who atomic number 18 put in the foreground in the novel.& nbsp What has made America is the foreign within, or rather, the foreign women on the frontier.               The division between 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 grandmother 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 heterogeneity within one Bohemian-American family.  Children learn Bohemian, the parents mother tongue, first, and English when they go to school. They eat twain 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 left the house, is another real 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 future citizens of America.  Even though they claimed the end of the frontier, her children might confront another kind 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.