symbolize the Nebraska land. Jim remarks that "more than any

other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the

country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood". [11]

Antonia is more than just a friend, she symbolizes all of the pleasant

memories of their youth.

For Cather, Antonia personified some of her feelings concerning

the midwest after she had moved away. Even though the farm

life was very difficult, she looks upon her time in Nebraska in a

nostalgic way. Antonia is a symbol of the bravery and solid

values of the pioneers Cather encountered in her childhood.

"Willa Cather has often been regarded as a writer of

serentiy and certainty who celebrated the pioneers,

praised a symbol of fertility called Antonia, and turned

back to America's past in nostalgic escape...We can

all be glad that she knew who she was, a member not

of any lost generation but of the hearty midwestern

stock that had come to represent bedrock national

values, blessedly removed from an industrialized East

and a retrograde South." [12]

Like Antonia, Cather considered herself an immigrant to the

midwest. She did not write about this directly, but her own

relocation and attempts to assimilate into Nebraska life had

to have given her a feeling of comradery with these Bohemians.

"Cather appropriated the lives of the immigrants and used

them as a means of writing about her own experience." [13