Throughout her writing Cather espouses the value of Primitivism, seen here through the characterisation of D’Arnault. “Primitivism typically refers to the act of idealising people, or entities of any sort, deemed “primitive””, tending to “point to a condition in which humans are united with nature”. D’Arnault is consistently portrayed through a lens of condescension, partially as a frail and pitiable creature, partially as an intuitive musical genius. The notion of the Primitive is present elsewhere in the novel, most notably in the characterisation of the titular Antonia Shimerda, who is described as being at odds with the American-born girls living in the town; “She was a rich mine of life like the founders of early races”. Sources: Etherington, Ben. 2017. Literary Primitivism. Stanford University Press. Cather, Willa. 2018. My Ántonia. London: Penguin Books.

My Old Kentucky home is a ballad composed in 1853 by Stephen Foster, an American composer known for parlour and minstrel music. The original 1853 lyrics contain an abolitionist message, the song being inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. According to musicologist Susan Key, Foster “took a number of steps to mitigate the offensive caricatures of blacks, including depicting blacks as real, suffering human beings…”, with his music combining Black and White American musical traditions. The song was referenced within the autobiography of Frederick Douglass as a song in which “anti-slavery principles may take root and flourish”. The song, branded as a “Plantation melody” maintained popularity throughout the 19th century, often being featured in blackface minstrel stagings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, leading to the song’s now murky legacy. Cather’s inclusion of the song as a part of the setlist of d’Arnault, the novel’s only African American character, lightly suggests Cather’s sympathy towards the plight of African Americans. These sentiments are made more prominent elsewhere in Cather’s work, notably her 1940 novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl, in which the abolitionist daughter of a slave owning family helps an enslaved girl escape to freedom. Sources: Magazine, Smithsonian. n.d. “The Complicated Legacy of ‘My Old Kentucky Home.’” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/complicated-legacy-my-old-kentucky-home-180975719/.

Douglass, Frederick. 1845. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: Clydesdale Press.​​

While the town of Black Hawk is a fictional creation it was largely based on Willa Cather’s childhood hometown of Red Cloud in frontier Nebraska to which she had moved at the age of 10. In her fiction, Cather often drew from remembered experience, with Jim’s train journey from Virginia to Nebraska mirroring her own. Red Cloud was founded in 1870, and was named after Chief Red Cloud of the Teton Sioux tribe, who ranged across the Nebraskan frontier. Despite the significant link between Cather’s hometown and Nebraska’s Indigenous history, the presence of Native American people is hardly felt in My Antonia. In the 1880s, Red Cloud was a bustling town with a population of around 2500, this busy townscape represented in Book 2 of My Antonia, “The Hired Girls”. During Cather’s childhood Red Cloud experienced a wave of immigrants leaving Bohemia due to the abolition of serfdom, the likes of whom most likely inspired the characterisation of the Shimerdas. Sources: “Willa Cather’s Nebraska.” n.d. Www.chipublib.org. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://www.chipublib.org/willa-cathers-nebraska/. Janis P. Stout. 2009. “Between Candor and Concealment: Willa Cather and (Auto)Biography.” Biography 32 (3): 467–92. https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.0.0114.

Cather’s depiction of Bohemian and Scandinavian communities on the American frontier contributes to her pluralistic representation of America as a nation of immigrants. Her commitment to diversity is a constant presence throughout her oeuvre, namely in her 1913 novel O Pioneers!, featuring the trials of a Swedish-American family on the Nebraskan prairie. Willa Cather maintained a progressive stance on the invaluable benefit immigrants may bring to America, stating in her 1923 essay Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle , “Our lawmakers have a rooted conviction that a boy can be a better American if he speaks only one language than if he speaks two. I could name a dozen Bohemian towns in Nebraska where one used to be able to go into a bakery and buy better pastry than is to be had anywhere except in the best pastry shops of Prague or Vienna.”. While the America of the early 20th century was indeed ethnically and culturally diverse, Cather’s underrepresentation of German, Mexican and Native American communities amongst others remains a notable absence. Sources: “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle | Willa Cather Archive.” n.d. Cather.unl.edu. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://cather.unl.edu/writings/nonfiction/nf066. Vecoli, Rudolph J. 1996. “The Significance of Immigration in the Formation of an American Identity.” The History Teacher 30 (1): 9. https://doi.org/10.2307/494217.