My Antonia Essay: Role of Women -- My Antonia Essays

Role of Women in My Antonia The role of the women in My Antonia as the show shimmyd laborers and workers in the new community does not, certainly, alleviate the questions of immemorial influence offered in the discussions of gender. Certainly, the fact that ntonia is deprived of the education she longs for and yet cannot have, because it is she who is responsible for her familys success--School is all right for little boys. I help make this land wholeness good farm (94)--cannot be seen as entirely good, if we agree that the value of education is among the greatest of all human values (Woolf 45) and in spite of her protests to the contrary, the bitter acknowledgment of exclusion brings ntonia to tears. However, recognizing the womens relationship to the development of national culture does suggest some alternative readings to the conclusions often reached, even as ntonias sacrifice of her own education does not exclude the contribution she makes to American culture, as we shall se e. Recognition of nation-construction effects our reading of the play of gender in the text. One such instance is in the case of storey authority, which has frequently been cited as Jims patriarchal subsuming of ntonia, as we have seen. While Jim appends the my to his transcription of ntonias history, however, it is worth reiterating that ntonia is never, in fact, Jims rather, his possessive My reflects a failed attempt at possession, as his amorous advances were firmly rebuffed and as the adult ntonia never seeks his assistance or support. At the same time, that the tale is proffered via an anonymous female narrator further undermines Jims narrative authority, for his masculine presumption to speak for ntonia undergoes... ...hts the unconstructedness of the American frontier and the central role of women in forging a community, and by extension in negotiating a unfledged national consciousness. Through the subversion of Jim Burdens narrative authority and a disrespect for gender delineations, Cather emphasizes the constructedness of patriarchal norms, highlighting their irrelevance to successful cultural consciousness. Finally, through ntonias last assumption of a nurturing role, she assumes not a passive feminine identification or a sudden retreat into traditional female roles. Rather, ntonia becomes emblematic of the women who speculative the frontier community in their own image, infusing it with their own ethnicities and resisting the hegemonizing impulse of the tangle of norms we now know as the American nation. Works CitedCather, Willa. My Antonia. Boston Houghton, 1977.