The Antelope Wife

The Antelope Wife | Literary Precedents

William Faulkner's linked short stories in such works as Go Down, Moses foreshadow the structures that Erdrich creates in her novels. The focus of Faulkner's stories is on the McCaslin family from the pre-Civil War past to the novel's present in the twentieth century. Erdrich's The Antelope Wife deals with more families, but the historical sweep of the novel is similar to Faulkner's. Animals like Old Ben the bear in Faulkner and the dog Lion provide symbolic aspects of wilderness and human behavior just as Erdrich's antelope women do in The Antelope Wife. As Faulkner's...

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