Surgical Mentoring: Building Tomorrow's Leaders by John Rombeau & Amy Goldberg & Catherine Loveland-Jones

Author:John Rombeau & Amy Goldberg & Catherine Loveland-Jones [Rombeau, John & Goldberg, Amy & Loveland-Jones, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Medical, Surgery, Colon & Rectal, General
ISBN: 9781441971906
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2010-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

MY ÁNTONIA 311

With Jim’s grandparents too old to take care of their farm, the Burdens move to Black Hawk, where social custom and prejudice relegate Ántonia to the lowest rung of the social ladder as one of the “hired girls,” the immigrant daughters forced off the farm to work as domestics for the more established citizens of Black Hawk. As pioneer life gives way to town life, there is a clear loss of stature among the townspeople and a confusion of assessment that undervalues as primitive those who have subdued the prairie and created the conditions out of which the prairie towns were created. Although Jim’s sympathy is clearly with the hired girls, whose instinctive openness and vitality contrast with the drearily respectable, supercilious townspeople, Jim’s career as a student will break his close association with Ántonia, who will be glimpsed only occasionally through reports from her friends. He learns that she has been deceived by a lover and left pregnant and unmarried. Meeting her again working in the i elds, Jim i nds that despite all that she has suffered, Ántonia retains her sympathy with others and affection for her life. Their meeting prompts Jim’s crucial statements, “The idea of you is part of my mind,” and “You really are a part of me,” evidence that Ántonia has secured a symbolic place in Jim’s imagination that the conclusion of the novel will help to clarify.

It is 20 years before Jim sees Ántonia again. Married to Anton Cuzak, Ántonia is the Demeter-like organizing principle of a prosperous farm and her large family. Toothless, gray-haired, and l at-chested, she is “battered but not diminished.” For Jim, Ántonia possesses the “i re of life”; she has become the indomitable spirit of the land itself. By the end of the novel Jim completes a reunion with his childhood soulmate, a vital linkage with his past, and a return to his spiritual home. Ántonia, in turn, has been grandly appreciated as a principle of fertility and goodness, an indestructible, redeeming impulse to set against the counterforce of time’s destruction and the inauthenticity of civilization. There is a sense of almost overwhelming culmination in the novel’s concluding paragraph:

This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together 312 THE NOVEL 100

again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.