Symbolism-Antonia

__**Symbolism In My Antonia**__-Tristin J //Opening Activity:// This activity is similar to Sasha's in terms of using pictures to express ideas. Everyone will have a piece of paper and an assortment of colored writing utensils. I will state an object, idea, or color, and you will draw the first thing that comes to mind, in the color that comes to mind. For example: I could say rose, and you might pick up a red cryon and draw a rose. Or, I could say red, and you might draw a red rose.

I made a list of symbols I found in the book, with discussion questions, and some with coresponding ~literary critisism~. Look these over and brainstorm any other symbols you think I missed. Also, keep in mind the archetypal definitions of colors and ideas in mind. You will probably want this sheet with you in class.

~Jim's conviction that "some memories are realities" is infused with a deep, nostalgic longing for a prelapsarian past, a time before disillusionment. His desire to return to a less-tarnished version of himself permeates the narrative, seeping through its pages into the very minds of its readers. Who has not longed, even briefly, for such a homecoming? Yet memory is, at heart, a devilish process, a trickster that doles out not simply comfort and pleasure but also terror and mourning.**~** Memories are a major part of Jim's life. Think about his childhood, the deaths, the moves, the peoople he's encountered, and his hopes and dreams. Critic Lisa Marie suggests that memmory is the most important thing to Jim. Something he will always have, can elaborate on; building his dreams upon the past. This is were he places his purpose and desires. Why do you think that Jim could never have ended up with Antonia? Think of his observant tendencies compaired to Nick's from Gatsby. Why is Jim content to watch others lives and build his own life on memories? What do you think abount the confliting parts of the memmory: comfort/pleasure vs terror/mourning
 * Memmories**: "In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again." p211


 * Houses**: ~If Jim experiences his present life in terms of homelessness--a fact suggested by his estranged marriage and essential transience--then he imagines that his memory can both ground his identity, making him recognizable to himself, and provide him with a more mobile home, one constructed in time rather than in space.~ ~Jim's earliest memories invoke domestic scenes that are the haven of remembrance: the Burden kitchen and the Harling home, in particular.~Jim's deepest and most conflicting desire is for a home. He wants to belong, yet seems to fear the commitment. Once again, question why he could not end up as the husband ing Antonia's dream home. If he desires this, what


 * Death**: ~Yet, in the spaces that separate Jim an//d// Antonia//,// //w//e find a shocking variety of memories that recount disturbing, radical violence, stories of "violent deaths and casual buryings" that give Jim "a painful and peculiar pleasure"~ ~Jim's snake, his encounter with Wick Cutter, Pavel's story of the wolves, //Antonia's// story of the tramp's suicide, even Mr. Shimerda's suicide, are all fragments of memory that return, along with Blind d'Arnault's racialized history and the enduring marks of Native Americans on the Nebraska plains, to haunt the home and hearth not simply of Jim's story but also of his culture's sense of its own identity and history. In these episodes, Cather's construction of memory is particularly, if peculiarly, Gothic.~ Lisa Marie now suggest through the theme of death that this novel could be considered Gothic. Think about Peter and Pavel, the Cutters, Jim's seeming facination with death. Do you agree?


 * Trees**: There is a recurrant motif of trees in the novel, mostly because of the setting: Nebraska. The attention to detail is expressed early in the book when Jim admires a tree, and is later brought back in Antonia's beautiful orchards. She treats her trees like children, and like her kinds they represent success and afluence. Once again Jim expresses sadness to find that the old mountain ash in front of the Harlings was cut down. p174


 * Deserts**: (spiritual emptiness, death, hopelessnes) Setting: Nebraska could be seen as a desert; especially in the winter time. How do the characters cope with this. Think of the time of year when Mr. Shimeras commited suicide.


 * Snakes**/ Heroism: (evil, sensuality, mystery, wisdom, destrucion) ~Jim initially frames his adventure with the snake as the moment when **//Antonia//** returns to her proper place as a girl. Her pride at being able to work in the fields was, for Jim, a threatening elision of gender difference, and the snake episode works to subdue that pride. ~Jim's "subsequent" knowledge that the snake was old and without "much fight in him" ostensibly undercuts his heroism, and Jim seems to take a modest bow to his audience, admitting candidly that he was simply lucky (34). It is curious, however, to see that a "circus monstrosity," a Gothic abomination that defies all attempts to define it, can become, through time, simply an old, out-of-shape snake. While Jim's later realizations seem to deconstruct myths of the hero's omnipotence, they really work to dismantle the monster's omnipotence. In other words, Jim can only contain the nausea that threatens to overcome both his identity and his narrative memory by reconfiguring his battle as "a mock adventure" (34). If the snake remained as unrepresentable and monstrous as it first seemed, where would--where could--Jim put it?~ Once again, question if Jim is a hero. What could he have done differently to be one? What do you think of the critics idea of a mock adventure? Was it really a mock adventure? It seems to me that she is suggesting that he really is a hero, especially because of his humility.

//"I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my// //ikes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me." (206)// A "natural-born mother" is, perhaps, what Jim has sought all along. Certainly, she displaces not only his own mother's face but also his grandmother's and, in fact, the faces of all the women he has ever known.im's feeling that **//Antonia//** can "stop one's breath for a moment by a look or a gesture that somehow revealed the meaning of common things" is funded precisely by his equivalent sense that she is Eve in the garden, "a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races" (226-27). In both images, there is less of **//Antonia//**--or of any human woman--than there is of Jim's attempts to find a ground on which to stabilize his otherwise unruly memory. *Antonia represents all the women figures in his life. Why is she so important to them. Is Antonia as successful and happy as she looks? Is Jim happy? Why does Willa choose to portray Antonia this way?
 * Archetypal Woman**: (good mother, terrible mother, soul mate) ~Antonia ultimately builds Jim's dream house, one from which he can come and go at will. Antonia offers him images of domesticity and motherhood that are, for him at least, safely contained as possibilities and not actualities.


 * Circles** : ~faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring the Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the centre; but grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there. (42) Jake and Otto Gothicize this marking, imagining that the circle is an inscription of savagery, a sign of torture. Grandfather Burden, the pragmatist, punches a hole in their Gothic tale and makes the circle practical, mundane.~ The novel starts and ends in the same place. Jim walking on the road in Nebraska. Lion King anyone? Look at the very last page of the book, when Jim finds out "what a little circle man's existance is." What is the message of the book. What is Willa communicating?

Sorry it is so long, you might need to use the back of your paper as well. Thanks and see you tomorrow. Tristin


 * Title:** //WILLA CATHER'S MY ANTONIA: HAUNTING THE HOUSES OF MEMORY//, By: Lucenti, Lisa Marie, Twentieth Century Literature, 0041462X, Summer2000, Vol. 46, Issue 2**Database:** //MAS Ultra - School Edition//