Sound & The Fury and My Antonia

The purpose of this research is to examine the theme of migratory consciousness as seen in the characters of Caddy in The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and Antonia in My Antonia by Willa Cather. The plan of the research will be to set forth the background for development of the theme of migratory consciousness in American fiction, including the impact of migratory patterns on women, and then to discuss the pattern of ideas relative to migratory consciousness in each work, as embodied in each character.

Patterns of migration and immigration in the United States from 1910 to 1930 cannot be understood without some reference to the same patterns in previous periods. As far as migratory consciousness is concerned, the later period was heir to the earlier periods of migration, in the sense that movement across the ocean from Europe on one hand, and across the continent from east to west on the other, represented the pursuit of opportunity, improvement, and progress at the very time when the United States economy increasingly was industrializing and urbanizing and when its agricultural base was essentially stabilizing. It was during this period, too, that the ethnic face of immigration to America changed dramatically. The bulk of immigrants in this period tended to be the "huddled masses," unable to speak or write in any language, including English. Many were also Jewish; in 1880 there were 250,000 Jews in the U.S., but in 1924 there were 4.5 million (Cooke 278). All of thi

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e old; the alternative, as we have seen, is suicide. This dynamic impresses, and, as Miller says, "remains with" Jim in the last pages of the story. Such adaptability and vitality inform Randall's statement that in My Antonia America itself "is now the land in which 'Europe' can reach its finest flower" and the "chaos" of America can be tamed, inflected by the civilizing force of Europe into the "synthesis" of "a settled agricultural society" (Randall 78). It is in such a sense that Jim Burden gains appreciation of and insight into a sensibility that, in his life and work, has become alien to him, and based on the perspective of a stranger obliged to find a place in a strange land: "The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me" (Cather, Antonia 321). The declaration is not so much romantic as symbolic; Jim brings to this moment a disappointed romantic life, married to what the Introduction implies is a social climbing wife. But he becomes the proxy for the native-born American acknowledging how much America takes from (and owes to) its new arrivals. Cather's Antonia is a woman beset by the worst features of provincia

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