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How Does The Impact The Hired Girls Have On Jim In My Antonia

764 Words4 Pages

In her novel “My Antonia,” Willa Cather shows the impact the Hired Girls have on Jim is the way they offer him a nostalgic connection to his past by using the works of Virgil, and from this connection Jim is able to reach deep intellectual and personal understanding. After being away from his childhood home for many years, and in the midst of pursuing his studies, Jim is reunited with Lena Lingard. The effect she has on him is immediate and lasting, and after seeing her for the first time Jim finds himself thinking of the past. “When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing - the Danish laundry girls and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me” (173). All it takes is a single visit from Lena to send Jim deep into contemplation, reminiscing about the times he had on the prairie. In particular, Jim thinks of a …show more content…

It floated before me on the page like a picture, and underneath it stood the mournful line: Optima dies...prima fugit” (174). The best days are the first to flee - Cather’s comparison of the girls to the line of Virgil shows us that the memories are a strand of thread that connects Jim to his childhood, invoking deeply nostalgic feelings. His time on the prairie is unrecoverable and inescapable, a time he sees as his ‘best’ before his inevitable aging and moving and changing. Jim decides, with the memories of his past fresh in his mind, that, “If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.” The way the Hired Girls are so easily able to bring up memories and feelings of such intensity for Jim, even many years and many miles away, is a source of deep intellectual understanding for him. It makes clear to him both why poets exist and why he cares about the poetry - the deeply personal nature of Virgil’s works are

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