Antonia Living in Thoreau’s Cabin: Rereading Willa Cather’s My Antonia in light of Walden.

My Antonia has been critically celebrated as one of Willa Cather’s Nebraskan novels of the ecological ideal in which humanity and nature harmoniously go together to compose the environment itself. To achieve this ecological ideal of para-human environmentalism, the labor of the human being works as the most essential factor since it is the activity of labor by which human beings as part of nature interact with nature to subsist in the natural environment. However, the true meanings and values of the nature-friendly intrinsic labor, not the alienated market-oriented one, accomplished by Antonia Shimerda, the pioneering protagonist of the novel, have not been sufficiently explored in My Antonia because the ecological and existential significance of her intrinsic labor on the Nebraskan prairie cannot be truly appreciated by Jim Burden, who is the sole narrator of the novel. Although Jim shares the childhood memory with Antonia in the Midwestern prairie, he has pursued an upper-class career of big-business lawyer, so that he would not be able to understand the importance of Antonia’s intrinsic labor. Therefore, this essay attempts to analyze the essential meanings of Antonia’s intrinsic labor for pioneering her family farm on the Great Prairie, which is in dynamic harmony with nature itself, in light of Henry David Thoreau’s ecological discourse of labor in his Walden. By building a cabin with the spirit of “voluntary poverty” on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, he pursued “the essential laws of man’s existence” and wanted to define “all the marrow of life” by doing intrinsic labor, not deprecated and excessive one. In this regard, Antonia and Thoreau share the true value of ecological environmentalism in their works of practicing intrinsic labor for achieving simple but self-sufficient independent life in nature.