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 nosecount Bureau announced that the enclosure no longer existed (Takaki, A variant Mirror, 225).  The end of the frontier meant the constant impoverishment, instead of the wealth they had dreamed of, for a large number of immigrants from the Old World they came too late.  My Ántonia, however, illuminates another(prenominal) frontier, a frontier indoors the States that most immigrants had to face.  It was the frontier between Americans and foreigners.  The immigrants were as yet foreign to the Americans who came and settled earlier.  They had to overcome the language and cultural barrier and throw together against the harsh conditions of life. The novel focuses on the ironic moment that the frontier meat - a   uniquely American one - is realized through foreigners. Furthermore, it is women, the engage girls, who be put in the foreground in the n ovel.  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 imbed throughout the novel. raze 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 stupefy to have an American graveyard that will be more liberal-minded....(emphasis tap 73).  According to her, the demarcation between foreigners and Americans is purely cultural as off the beaten track(predicate) 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 blossom forth to a wide experience than their parents.  Ántonias first daughter, although married and left 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 future citizens of America.  Even though they claimed the end of the frontier, her children might confront another kind of frontier, just now 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.