m leaves the farm to go to college, in which inclosing walls unlike that of Antonia protects him. Then Antonia moves into adulthood with a marriage and birth while Jim is at college toiling on the prospect of adult love with Lena Lingred. Finally, Jim moves into an odd marriage and then goes back to the farm with Antonia and her children. In the novel the reader encounters the impression that Jim is more closely alike to the children in maturity than that of the maturity of Antonia. "She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a movement by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things." (Cather 261) In this we see Jim's feeling of incompleteness while on the other hand Antonia is an adult with a worn body and a spirit which is there unlike that of Jim's spirit which appears lost even though his body looks new. The theme that life is a cycle in My Antonia is also supported by Harold Bloom's comment, "It is in the dramatization of Antonia from the girlhood of the opening pages through her physical flowering in the middle books to, finally, her reproduction of the race in a flock of fine boys in the final pages of the book that her life it represented…as a cycle in its stages of birth, growth, fruition and decline. " (Bloom 54-55) In which he describes how Antonia went from girlhood in the beginning of the novel to her regression back into childhood. Even though the regression is usually seen in Jim Burden going "home to [him] self." (Cather 273) The fact that Jim is going back to Antonia is like going home to his childhood. It is at that moment that he realizes that Antonia's and his love does not depend on physical proximity. "The fittest place to talk to each other." (Cather 239) Also in coming back to his psychological childhood he asks Antonia, " 'I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, o...
