Antonia has many characteristics that are positive such as her strength, beauty and caring. Cather tends to overplay her positive characteristics even when they are mundane and downplay her negative characteristics. He tends to play on the three main characteristics that were mentioned earlier, such as her strength, her natural bohemian beauty even when she gets older, and how she cares for everyone around her. Cather admires her even through all her downfalls, such as the whole incident with Wick Cutter.
Antonia has a lot of natural beauty, many people throughout the book mention this. One such example is, “Your mother, you know, was very much loved by all of us. She was a beautiful girl.” In this quote Jim was talking about how Mrs. Harling and Widow Stevens always talked about how beautiful she was. Another such example was “Sometimes… it doesn’t occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty.” From the beginning of the book Jim had always admired Antonia’s beauty from her first description, “The little girl was pretty, but Án-tonia was still prettier.” and so we know Cather intoned those feelings into Jim.…show more content… An example of this is as follows, “Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but… how much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do.” This quote shows us how Antonia has been expected to do more as she became more adapted to farm work. Antonia had grown up very strong, we can assume this when Jim says, “She had come to us a child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl, although her fifteenth birthday had just slipped by.” Several times throughout the story we were given examples of Antonia’s strength, compared with other
