MY ANTONIA: Study Preparation Directives
We will cover these ideas in our novel’s discussion. If you do not feel
comfortable or knowledgeable enough about each topic, it is your responsibility to ask
clarifying questions in class or with the teacher by appointment before school, after school,
or during seminar period.
FROM BOOK ONE:
1. What might be some of the feelings Jim Burden had as he traveled from Virginia to
Nebraska?
2. CHARACTERIZATION OF JIM BURDEN (3 qualities, 3 examples for each quality)
3. CHARACTERIZATION OF THE SHIMERDA FAMILY MEMBERS.
Words, descriptions phrases that reflect this novel to be a pioneer story. (5 examples)
4. Compare the Burden’s living conditions with that of their neighbors.
5. Examples of prejudice and alienation that either the Shimerdas or Burden’s experience.
6. Advantages Jim had in living among people of different ethnic, religious and cultural
backgrounds.
7. How Mrs. Shimerda reacts to hardship; how the Shimerdas react during the extreme
first Nebraska winter.
8. Jim concept of happiness: “…to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
9. Jim’s articulation of growing up in a little prairie town: “It was a kind of freemasonry…”
10. Meaning: “It took a clear meditative eye like my grandfather’s to foresee that they [the
cornfields] would enlarge and multiply until they would be not the Shimerdas’ cornfields,
or Mr. Bushy’s, but the world’s cornfields; that their yield would be one of the great
economic facts…which underlie all the activities of men, in peace or war.”
FROM BOOK TWO:
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Changes encountered by Burden family when they move to Squaw Creek.
The unusual “social situation” that exists in Black Hawk.
Why Jim dislikes the Black Hawk people.
Why Cather would include stories like the “tramp Iverson, Wick Cutter, etc.
Contributions of Lena, Tina and Antonia to some of the families who hired them.
FROM BOOKS 3,4,5:
16.
17.
18.
In Book Three, describe briefly how Antonia, Jim, and Lena Lingard change.
From Book Four, construct a portrait of pioneer women.
Book Four focuses mainly on Jim’s narration of Lena and the “hired girls”
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
Describe the attitudes and conclusions Jim conveys about “hired girls.”
Traits in Antonia that led to her betrayal by Donovan; traits Tiny and Lena had that were
similar.
The setting for Book Five is 20 years later. Clarify how Antonia still is the girl of Jim’s
memories. Explain what is different about her as told by Jim.
Meaning: “All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so
tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and
straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”
Explain the significance of the novel’s closing lines, “...we possessed the precious, the
incommunicable past.”