E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #88 (TIE): Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person”
by Ernie on 22/02/08 at 11:04 am
Number 88 (TIE): My Antonia, Willa Cather (1918) AND “The Displaced Person,” Flannery O’Connor, The Sewanee Review, v. 62, n. 4, Autumn 1954, later in A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) and Complete Short Stories (1971). I decided to link these two. The Cather is a rather short novel, and the O’Connor is a rather long short story. Both border on novellas, and both treat the subject of eastern European immigrants in rural America. The Cather is the more thorough and loving of the two, treating the bumbling farmer Bohemians in Nebraska with intimacy and considerable detail, displaying their jealous, neighbor-frustrating behavior alongside their generous and dignified “old world” behavior. My Antonia is essentially a bildungsroman, following the early life and coming of age of the young, beautiful Antonia (spoken of by her father as “My Antonia, see that she learns to read English”). Her story is told by Jim, two years her junior, who loves her as a friend and eventually as a possible lover or wife.
She and her siblings adapt to life in America with varying degrees of success (her sullen and overbearing older brother Ambrosch remains sullen and overbearing until he is forced to marry a much older, wealthier woman who keeps him on a short leash). The American farmers, accustomed to the amenable and mild Norwegian immigrants, gradually come to accept the “exotic” and difficult Bohemians, who assimilate more slowly to life on the plains. It is also a spectacular, panoramic portrayal of farm and town life in Nebraska when much of the prairie remained in its natural state, before the “fences went up” and the roads and railroads divided the land. We come to love Antonia as much as Jim (who never idealizes her), and wish her well in America.
O’Connor, on the other hand, permits her “displaced person” to remain distant and mysterious to her nativist American characters. He is never closely examined. The story is told strictly from the American perspective. Published 36 years after Cather’s novel, O’Connor’s displaced person is a refugee from Second World War Europe. He is fleeing a terrible past as much as rushing toward an optimistic future. The patrician woman farmer who hires him is wary of him because he comes from “over there,” where unimaginably evil things have happened. She makes no distinctions among Europeans, and the whole history of Europe in the twentieth century remains hopelessly murky and dangerous to her. She doesn’t know “which side” he was on. The resentful former slaves, who also work the farm, while away the days, doing as little as possible. They develop further resentments toward the displaced person, who works diligently in order to earn enough money to bring his family over to America. When he is mortally injured in an accident, no one rushes to help him, and both white overseer and black tenant farmers are relieved when he dies and leaves them to return to the way of life they seemingly had always known.
