This does not mean that women's roles went undefined in immigrant communities; and the fact that Antonia is ostracized as a foreign, loose woman by the "American" community demonstrates how clearly defined social roles were.
In the South, meanwhile, well-bred women had a well-defined role ("lady") until post-Reconstruction culture obliged them "to deal with the problems [of disestablishment] arising from a modernizing urbanizing economy" (Douglas 49). The "disestablishing," suffocating effect of modernization on Southern women can be seen in The Sound and the Fury in the suffocating environment of the Compson household, and in Caddy's response to her situation. Faulkner's work reflects a response to the dynamic of transformation on the part of Americans in the South who by 1910 had been entrenched in an idiosyncratic culture seasoned by the bitter legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. If in the Yoknapatawpha cycle there is limited reference to the influx of immigrants as such, there is nevertheless a sense of the disruption and indeed dis
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