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Jim Burden’s fascination with Antonia and the immigrant “hired girls” is a main focus of the novel “My Antonia” by Willa Cather. However, while he does seem to admire them and spend a lot of time with them, he does not marry any of them in the end. There are many causes that contribute to Jim’s final marital arrangement.
Since Antonia exists from the start of the novel, and is the central character of the novel, the initial assumption, if any, would be that at some point in the novel, Jim and Antonia share a romantic relationship. The reasons readers would tend to expect that would be the facts that they spend a lot of time together, especially as children, and that Jim writes of her with a lot of admiration and fondness. However, Jim expresses that his feelings for her were not romantically inclined by saying that he would have liked for her to be “a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister – anything that a woman can be to a man” (lines 16 – 17, pg ...