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 this meant that for first time in U.S. history, problems of assimilation were magnified. Before 1890, as Cooke comments, "the immigrant stream had flowed out of Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, England, and Canada, [but] in the next thirty years the mass of immigrants came from Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and again and always Ireland. . . . All told, in the first two decades of this century, an unbelievable fourteen and a half million immigrants arrived" (Cooke 2...