My Antonia by Willa Cather

I'm writing a paper on Cather's My Antonia as we speak. It's all about representations of reader response to literature in the novel and Cather's status in the American canon, your usual English lit baloney. But let's forget about all that for a second. This novel, canonical or not, moved me to tears with its transcendent beauty. Cather paints a shimmering prairie in colours blue and gold, making you wish there still was some magical frontier out there in the world where people could still start a new. This is a story of immigrants together building a new country out of bits of old blended in with the drive for a fresh beginning. For anyone like myself who has been through the immigrant experience the story still rings true through the fog of decades past and miles untraveled. Antonia is herself a representation of that old America, beautiful and strong, fruitful and fulfilling, before that immaculate vision began crumbling in chunks. Perhaps it never was true, perhaps it was always an aesthetic appeal to be seen as a glistenning Venus rising from the seafoam while the reality of America was dull with dirt all along. It doesn't really matter does it? The myth that My Antonia etches onto the canvas of global culture stands alone as a wonderful memory that may never had been, like a childhood dream that you remember as well as anything that actually happened.