The golden girl of the West:

Abstract

Horace Greely’s famous injunction, ‘Go West young man and grow up with the country’ is obeyed to the letter by Jim Burden, the narrator of My Antonia. Indeed, the novel’s opening deliberately sets a false trail evoking the world of cowboys, saloons and campfires and encouraging the reader to expect a conventional Western adventure. Jim Burden, recently orphaned, and Jake Marpole, ‘a mountain boy’, are on their way from Virginia to Jim’s grandparents in Nebraska ‘to try [their] fortunes in a new world’ (3). To underline the point Cather even has Jim reading a ‘Life of Jesse James’ on his train journey West. Glued to his dime novel, Jim declines to meet the Bohemian girl and her family, also travelling to Black Hawk, and is backed up by Jake who said ‘you were likely to get diseases from foreigners’ (5). The novel, it seems, is to inhabit the white, male, Protestant sphere of the classic Western.