A Study On The Living Dilemma Of Immigrants In My Antonia

Willa Cather(1873-1947)is a famous American woman writer in the first half of the 20 th century and My Antonia is one of her frontier novels and her masterpiece.Against the background of the Nebraska prairie,this novel tells the story of the immigrants who are represented by the heroine Antonia.Since its publication in 1918,My Antonia has been widely studied by critics both at home and abroad.Researches of My Antonia are conducted from the perspectives of Marxist Criticism,New Criticism,Feminist Criticism,Ecocriticism and so on.And these studies provide different angles for us to understand this novel more profoundly.Post-colonialism is a theory about cultural criticism which appeared in the western academia in the 1970 s and has a strong ideological feature.Under the guidance of the main ideas of Said,Spivak and Homi Bhabha who are representatives of post-colonialism,this thesis studies the living dilemma of immigrants in My Antonia and analyzes the different choices of the three types immigrants and their significance for the immigrant community.This thesis consists of four chapters besides the Introduction and the Conclusion.The first part is the Introduction.It introduces the life experience and literary achievements of Willa Cather,the story of My Antonia,and its literature review.The first chapter is the theoretical basis of the thesis.On the basis of a comprehensive introduction to the theory of post-colonialism,this chapter introduces the main ideas of Said,Spivak and Homi Bhabha who are representatives of post-colonialism and concludes the theoretical essence of post-colonialism.The second chapter analyzes the representatives of immigrants in My Antonia.Immigrants can be divided into three types according to their different attitudes to life in the novel.They are pessimistic type,realistic type and optimistic type.This classification lays the foundation for the following discussion of the different choices and their significance.The third chapter discusses the living dilemma of immigrants in My Antonia in detail.It includes the “Other” position of immigrants in American mainstream culture,the conflicts between different cultures and the hybridity of the immigrants.The fourth chapter discusses the three choices of immigrants and their significance.The immigrants represented by Mr.Shimerda make the negative choice;the immigrants represented by Antonia choose the compromised return and the immigrants represented by Lena make a positive try.The last part of this thesis is the Conclusion.This part summarizes the living dilemma of immigrants in My Antonia and concludes that immigrants are moving from the negative stage to the positive stage and it also means that the life of immigrants will be more promising.