Volume 6: History, Memory, and War. My . Each narrative of western settlement is rooted in a . Nowhere is this challenge more complex—or more rewarding—than in reading Willa Cather, a writer simultaneously celebrated for her depiction of pioneers and respected for her historical authenticity. The bounty from this garden has been sampled often in the last decade and a half. Mike Fischer has unearthed the . These studies demonstrate the veracity and continuing vitality of Guy Reynolds's assertion that . My trespass into this field attempts to reveal how Cather's most enduring pioneer text—My . Pay Articles from October 1933 Part 1. 600 CAULKERS JOIN SHIPYARD STRIKE; Tie-Up in This Area Is Now Complete, Union Leaders Declare. Article 10 -- No Title.I argue in particular that with the Great War as its immediate subtext, this novel reaches back to the closing years of the American frontier and the influx of European immigrants to the Plains states, projecting an image of the nation and legitimizing its status as . Like the openings to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, it operates as a narrative of transmission establishing a fictionalized origin for the text. The most obvious effect of the introduction is the distance it establishes between Cather and her story. In the opening pages, an unnamed female narrator credits Jim Burden, a childhood acquaintance, for writing the tale. Jim Burden and the White Man's Burden My The American Frontier comprises the geography, history, folklore, and cultural expression of life in the forward wave of American expansion that began with English. The Don Bell Reports are of enormous importance for persons interested in the unvarnished truth (history) of the promotion of socialism in the United States. Establishment and its Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to install the Maoists into. As the dates of its composition suggest, My . Written as the First World War ravaged Europe and cast as the reminiscence of middle- aged Jim Burden, it is a . Cather further complicates the account by making its teller a rural Nebraskan turned successful New York attorney and infusing the memory of his prairie childhood with a wholehearted acceptance of progress (the Yankee credo) and a fair share of romantic yearning. As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his naturally romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it often made him seem very funny when he was a boy, has been one of the strongest elements in his success. He loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development. He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable things in mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an idea can once get Jim Burden's attention, can manage to accompany him when he goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons, then the money which means action is usually forthcoming. Jim is still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams. Brief overview of European history (before 1492) The peoples of Europe have had a tremendous effect on the development of the United States throughout the course of U. While described as one who loves exploring . Although they do not figure explicitly in the novel, the history and culture of the Plains Indians form a palimpsest occasionally—and tellingly—exposed in the text, especially when considering the impact federal policies like the 1. Homestead and Pacific Railroad acts and the 1. Dawes Act had upon the original inhabitants of Nebraska. Equally significant are suggestive allusions in the novel to Spain's presence in North America. Such rhetoric and imagery hints to America's wresting the mantle of empire from Spain in the 1. Spanish- American War and suggest that, in addition to absorbing Spain's colonial holdings in the Caribbean and Pacific, the United States has inherited Spanish obligations in Europe. In other words, within the pastoral and nostalgic account ascribed to Jim, Cather traces the United States' cultural heritage and its rise to global power—a genealogy suggesting that America has a duty, as de facto European state, to participate in the Great War. TAKING POSSESSIONDespite the sentimentality with which this novel has been received traditionally, Cather scholars—reflecting America's long history of distrusting jurists—have treated Jim's narrative as a suspect document. While narratologists have pointed to the intricate layering involved in the tale's construction and transmission, feminist readings have focused on the relationship between Jim and his subject, . Among the vanguard in questioning Jim's reliability as a narrator is Susan J. Rosowski, who asserts in The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism (1. Jim's allegiance as an adult is not to . What Rosowski perceives in Jim's treatment of . On the ride from the train station in Black Hawk to his grandparents' homestead, the orphaned traveler peers from the wagon bed into the dark night and concludes, . If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land. In subtle strokes, Jim Burden erases the inhabitants preexisting the arrival of European settlers from his memoir. The black night, which he suggestively labels . On one level his reflections about the prairie's barrenness suggest the youthful ignorance of a ten year old on his inaugural visit to the Plains. Yet beneath this childish observation lurks the willful blindness that Cather writes into the adult narrating this episode. Deborah Karush notes that Cather's novels promote a . Jim's reflections certainly fit this pattern. He specifically equates the emptiness of the prairie landscape to its lack of infrastructure and agrarian development. Progress requires improvement to the land: it demands fences, fields, and roads. At the time he is credited with writing the story of . As a railroad attorney, his career would entail what Patricia Nelson Limerick cleverly calls . Successful performance of his duties would necessitate an intimate familiarity with the territorial statutes, congressional legislation, and military involvement making the land grants to the railroads possible. Competing experiences of dispossession and possession figure prominently in the early chapters of My . In one sense, Cather's entire tale charts Jim's individual journey from banishment and divestiture to acquisition, and, accordingly, in its earliest appearance, Nebraska is Jim's Paradise Lost. Upon disembarking from the train at Black Hawk, Jim and the immigrant family he sees huddling together on the station platform are enveloped by cold and . The night's imposing blackness and the steam engine's smoldering fire evoke Miltonic images of Hell encountered by Satan and his minions after being exiled from Heaven to a . Disoriented by his new surroundings, Jim gazes toward Heaven and contemplates his fate. As he looks up at the unfamiliar expansive sky, . His remarks a few lines later extend upon this phrasing: . I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be. The orphaned boy feels that he has traveled not merely beyond the authority of men but beyond the influence of Heaven—no need for prayers since they can no longer be heard, let alone answered. Cather's wording—being . Though his initial thoughts reflect the idea of being exiled, Jim's views about his new surroundings soon move from the nihilistic toward the existential. His life in the West will be what he makes of it—what he takes and claims title to, including . His determination to make his own world is reflected in the final lines of the introduction, when the speaker points out how he corrected the working title of the manuscript by adding . Before his narrative even begins, Cather establishes not only Jim's impulse to acquire but also his awareness of the role semantics play in acquisition. Of course, this is a lesson a successful railroad attorney in an age of phenomenal railway expansion would know well: to procure anything legitimately it must be first recognized and named. By having Jim prefix the title of his manuscript with the first- person singular possessive pronoun, Cather deepens the parallel between Jim's judicious claim to . Shortly after they arrive, . The ensuing encounter is incredibly Edenic. What name?' she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her my name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed into the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and again, 'What name?'. Hidden from everyone and everything but the red grass, blue sky, and yellow cottonwood, Jim names the things around him on that breezy autumn afternoon with the assurance of Adam in the Garden. While an exercise in discovery for . Jim's thoughts about teaching . During the lessons Jim attempts to exercise authority over . She was four years older . I resented her protecting manner. Before the autumn was over she began to treat me more like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons. Like Professor Higgins, Jim wants to influence his student in more than language matters, and he soon gets his wish. The desired change in . Though he and Otto Fuchs, the Burdens' Austrian farmhand, later realize the cold autumn day and the age of the snake took away its . I had killed a big snake. At this point, she has become both his inspiration and his invention and, like other resources in the West, will become subject to his exploitation. THE DEAD SNAKE: COMMEMORATION AND APPROPRIATIONIn addition to enhancing Jim's esteem in . During the post- mortem examination of the unfortunate rattler, Jim uses all . As I turned him over I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind of respect for his age and size. He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil. Jim's victory allegorizes America's decimation of the American Indians and Spanish colonial enterprise. Not only does this passage reflect the legacy of what Werner Sollors in Beyond Ethnicity (1. Metaphorically, the rattlesnake Jim encounters symbolizes the obstacles facing American continental expansion and hemispheric hegemony. Competing claims to the land and the armed resistance formed by parties opposed to the United States realizing its manifest destiny constituted the chief impediment to the new nation's growth in size and influence.
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