A Frontier Education in "My Antonia"

            Willa Cather, in "My Antonia," presents a strong idea of the importance of a good education. Without knowledge one cannot form a successful future to support themselves. Through the duration of the novel, the reader follows the growth of a young Jim Burden. He attends school and continues to college to become a lawyer while country girls, like Antonia, work on farms or as housekeepers. As Jim grows and advances, Antonia appears flat and stagnant. She seems to simply shift from one hard labor to the next with no hope of rising. But in fact, it is Antonia who receives the greatest knowledge as she builds a prosperous farm and family, far surpassing Jim's study of Latin and literature. Cather shows how a formal education will find you employment but it does not grow the mind or fully complete the soul. Antonia ends the novel a mature and happy adult, content with everything in her life while the educated Jim is still a boy searching for adulthood and his place.
           Compared to her, Jim's progression appears to be a successful arch. He begins as an orphan moving to his grandparents on the wild prairie. He arrives as a lost child and is spared from the labor of the farm, spending his days running errands or teaching English to his Bohemian immigrant neighbors, Antonia and her sister. Unlike what the title suggests, Jim Burden is written as the romantic hero. He is set up with one task; to teach Antonia. This is the one goal he fails.
           After Antonia's father dies, she is sent to work in the fields and Jim is moved into town to start school. While Jim studies Antonia is plowing fields. When he is in class she is hired out as a hand on neighboring farms. Antonia was understanding what it was to be an adult, working as hard as any man, and learning what it meant to work hard and discovered the pleasure of the fruits of her labor. By the time she was sixteen, Antonia knew what she could accomplish through her own strength and had gained a skill to start a future.
           It would take Jim 20 years after graduation to return to his Antonia. They are both married; Jim to a society woman and Antonia to a Bohemian immigrant. Jim is still a boy at heart and Antonia remarks on how he has stayed quite the same. His figure is free from signs of age or wear while she is older, hair grizzled, and some teeth missing, but still the same girl. "She was there in the full vigor of her personality, battered but not diminished" (Cather 244). He admires how well Antonia raised her boys; "straight, well-made fellows, with good heads and clear eyes" (Cather 253). He decides he could stay and slip easily into this family. "There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet" (Cather 272).
         Antonia is the essence of life and the fertility of the frontier. She used the knowledge from working the land as a child to build a thriving farm for her family. This is not to say that Jim is not educated of as successful. As a lawyer he gained great standing and built wealth, but he was never a man, happy with his success. Through her own education, Antonia has matured beyond Jim and is content with where life has led her, never once looking back at what she could have been if she had followed Jim to school. Life is not just about going to school and gaining book smarts, it is also about working hard to grow a future with which you can feel accomplished.