The Fury and My Antonia

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, [ only if] in the next thirty years the mass of immigrants came from Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and again and always Ireland. . . . All told, in the origin two decades of this century, an unbelievable fourteen and a half zillion immigrants arrived" (Cooke 278-9).

The implications of that shift took hold decisively after 1900. As Cooke notes, Theodore Roosevelt, who was chair in 1912, "was the first influential man of his time to come o'er clearly that the United States was no longer a inelegant nation but an industrial giant run berserk" (Cooke 299). America, and in particular the American frontier, was one of the "longed-for places" that contained the ensure of utopian happiness (Ainsa 119). However, although the operative dynamic was one of agitate and optimism, the pursuit was not always matched by achievement of happiness.

The alike(p) category of pursuit associated with migration in and transformation of society was not, as a practical matter, equally open to men and women during the teens and 1920s. That undo between promise and fulfillment, coupled with the unavoidability of wholesale transformation of the social landscape brought on by both in-migration and industrialization, provides material for the work of both Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Both Faulkner

Rosowski, Susan J., Mignon, Charles, Ronning, Kari, and Link, Frederick M. "Editing Cather." Studies in the Novel 27 (Fall 1995) 387-400.

In the South, meanwhile, well-bred women had a well-defined role ("lady") until post-Reconstruction farming obliged them "to deal with the problems [of disestablishment] arising from a modernizing urbanizing economy" (Douglas 49). The "disestablishing," suffocating impression of modernization on Southern women can be seen in The Sound and the Fury in the suffocating environment of the Compson fellowshiphold, 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 entrench in an idiosyncratic culture seasoned by the harsh legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. If in the Yoknapatawpha cycle there is particular reference to the influx of immigrants as such, there is nevertheless a sense of the disruption and indeed disappearance of a beaten(prenominal) way of life. Faulkner gives Jason Compson's eager, greedy embrace of modernism and peremptory rejection of the genteel, blueish Old South the name of Snopesism. Jason, says The Sound and the Fury, "competed and held his own with the Snopeses who took over the little town following the turn of the century . . . (no Snopes, but Jason Compson himself who as soon as his mother died . . . committed his retard younger brother to the state and vacated the old house, first chopping up the vast oncesplendid [sic] rooms into what he called apartments and selling the whole function to a countryman who opened a boarding house with it)(Faulkner 212). Further to this point, Matthews refers to The Sound and the Fury as an exercise in the discovery of loss and to Jason's "financial behavior" as an take on "to fill the vacuum of loss" (377). Jason's experience of loss of cover refers to his family (especially Caddy), but the perverse form it takes because of his own money-driven decisions
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