Blog # 2: My Antonia Essay Brainstorming
Blog # 2
My Antonia Essay Brainstorming
Length: 4-5 pages, double spaced
Topics
1. *Gender Roles
How do Cather’s My Antonia and Solomon Butcher’s photograph(s) (on the American Memory Website) blur the lines typically drawn to define the roles of men and women? What does this blurring suggest about life on the Plains in the late nineteenth century and gender roles? Be sure to narrow your focus on only 2-3 characters.
My Antonia & photograph—how do they break through gender barriers
• Antonia, defies gender roles…works in the fields (Jim’s grandmother doesn’t approve)
• Immigrants, forced to work for their families…no other choice-must support families…different lifestyle than town girls
• Victorian Womanhood: women, fragile, weak, gentle, innocent, helpless, etc.
separate spheres: men-public; women-domestic
• Life in the plains in the late nineteenth century defied gender roles mainly because most settlers were immigrants taking advantage of the homestead act, but they rarely had enough money to support themselves and women and children were forced to work in the fields and on the farm so that they could properly support their families
• Antonia…other hired girls
• Parallels with photograph
Photographs: depict working families, including women, children, and young women, according to Victorian Womanhood, women should stay in home all day and not work or sweat, but rather, manage the household. Families and immigrants who settled on the plains usually were very poor and lacked experience with farming. For most families, all family members had to work to farm, harvest, and care for the farm animals in order to support the family. Gender roles: equality, all had to work, there wasn’t a choice. Men often managed farms but women and children worked everyday. Sense of equality in standing up to hardship and obstacles.
2. -Land and Imagery
How do Cather’s My Antonia and Harvey Dunn’s painting “The Prairie is my Garden” and “Winter Storm” (viewable on Harvey Dunn Website) define an American sense of place and contribute to an aspect of a collective American identity? Focus your attention on only a few key, but substantive passages, in the novel to help narrow your focus.
• Jim talks about the land a lot, it certainly defines his identity
• American sense of place and contribution to an aspect of a collective American identity: pioneers; settling the unsettled land; starting afresh; starting a new country; Manifest destiny; homestead act; immigration; settlement
• Parallels with paintings
3. *Immigrants and American Identity
How do Cather’s My Antonia and Anzia Yezierska’s “America and I” (5 page short story) characterize the immigrant’s “voice”. Do these texts affirm the immigrant as an outsider? Or as an insider? For the immigrants represented in these stories, what does it take to be an “American”? Narrow your focus on only a few characters.
• My Antonia: immigrants make their own way, adapt to some American customs and traditions but keep their “old countries” in their hearts and minds
• Outsider or insider: More of an outsider than an insider. Kind of individual to who the person is. Some immigrants want to forget their past…others want to keep it alive. Mr.Shimerda is an outsider, he never finds happiness in the new country, and eventually, he misses his old country so much that he commits suicide. Lena Lingard and Tiny, and the Harlings are insiders they adapt to American culture, clothing, language, and commercial/entrepenuerial mindset and way of life. Tiny and Lena manage their own businesses, and Lena especially adapts to the clothing worn in America. Mr. Harling and Francis are both business people who run a big business. The Shimerdas, on the other hand, preserve their old culture and language. They insist that many things that they have from the “old country” are better than things in the new country. Many of Antonia’s children don’t even speak English, they speak Bohemian and they often eat traditional Bohemian food.
• What does it take to be an “American” (for immigrants)? Well, it takes an extreme adaptation to the customs and American ways of life. It takes an adaptation to the language and mannerisms of the English language. It is kind of complicated, I guess.
• Short story: (to be continued once I have read short story)
4. -Settler Life and Oblinger Letters
How do Cather’s My Antonia and any selection of the Oblinger Letters (from the American Memory website) help vivify settler life? How does this way of life contribute to American identity?
• American identity: settlement, making a way for themselves, esp. immigrants, hardships of settlement
[5. If you have an idea for another topic which needs to include both the novel and another source (visual or written), let me know in advance. I’m happy to help you work something out.] (too late for this one)
