earticle

영어

This study focuses on how food can contribute to various immigrants’ life and their food stories. In this work, food is used as a literary device to explain various characters’ lives with ways of survival, violence and death, and communication and sharing etc. Food can not only influence people’s survival and identity, but also reveal social stratification and the differences. The work shows that Ántonia shapes her own identity as an immigrant through the process of cooking her own food in the harsh settlement. A variety of foods, food cultures, and eating actions and so on can cause people’s life to be reinforced or to lead to catastrophe. Ántonia’s cooking, however, ultimately becomes a means to change her hard life into a rich one and at the same time proves what the generational integration of the food culture is. Furthermore, it also proves homogeneity through food, the importance of family eating, and a sense of community. It means that she established her healthy identity through trial and error in the end. Hence, she ultimately suggests her vision of both the sustainability of human life and future generation, having successfully replaced her constant labor in Nebraska with her own food.