The Bohemian Paradox:

1
The Bohemian Paradox
My Ántonia and Popular Images of Czech
Immigrants By Tim Prchal And Willa Cathers
views of the Czech Immigrants
Presented by Brittany Wallack
2
Americans views stereotypes of Czech immigrants

• Inarticulate
• Illiterate
• Undesirable
• Resistant to assimilation (qtd. in Prchal 4, 6,
  7).

3

• Old Immigrants
• English
• Dutch
• Germans
• Scandinavians
• Others from northern and western Europe

• New Immigrants
• Czechs
• Hungarians
• Polish
• Italians
• Greeks
• Others from southern and eastern Europe (Prchal
  5-6).

4
. . . Millions of foreigners have poured into
our midst from central and southern Europe and
Asia Minor Italians, . . . Poles, Russians,
Bohemians, . . . --- most of them . . . passive,
inarticulate, and illiterate agriculturalists by
inheritance . . . .These people differ
fundamentally from the more intelligent and
efficient Northern races . . . (qtd. in Prchal
6). (The quote immediately above this note first
appeared in a 1910 McClures article written by
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.)
5
Willa Cathers Views

• My Ántonia is seen as her response to reshaping
  the image of Czech immigrants.
• Cather presented Czechs and their efforts to
  resist assimilation in a positive light (Prchal
  4).
• My Ántonia contradicts the view that the Czechs
  are passive, inarticulate, and illiterate.
• Cather places Czech immigrants as equals with
  old immigrants.

6
Many of our Czech immigrants are people of a
very superior type (Cather Nebraska 256).
The political emigration . . . brought to the
United States brilliant young men both from
Germany and Bohemia (257). From Cathers
feature article Nebraska reprinted in My
Ántonia. Appendix C. Ed. Joseph R. Urgo.
Cather states that immigrants have come here to
live in the sense that they lived in the Old
World, and if they were let alone their lives
might turn into the beautiful ways of their
homeland (qtd. in Prchal 4).