Lucia and Octavia

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Lucia and Octavia: An Italian Mother and Her Italian American Daughter in Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim Mario Puzo’s book The Fortunate Pilgrim presents us with the classic story of the immigrant pilgrim to the United States. The book opens with the iconic picture of early New York life lived in the tenements where “women gossiped on wooden boxes, men puffed cigars . . . children risked their lives in dangerous play” (4). Here in the ethnic neighborhoods of New York in 1928 we meet an Italian family as we begin to follow their story where it was common that “all the people sitting on the sidewalk” for a block or two nearby your home were family and friends (4). Lucia Santa rules her family with a heavy hand and a loving heart. She was proud of the fact that her family “lived in the best tenement on Tenth Avenue” (22). Lucia’s oldest child is her daughter Octavia, and as much as her mother is a product of her country, Italy, Octavia strives to be American. The two women appear at first to be complete opposites, showing the clash of the old world versus the new, but as the novel progresses the similarities between the two women unfold and their dependence on one another helps them to hold their family together. Lucia Santa first appears on the scene as “a small, round, handsome woman” (8). Her dress is that of a matronly Italian mother with “heavy jet-black hair coming into a bun, [and] wearing a clean black dress” (6). Lucia is like many of the women of the time and neighborhood. She steps outside at night and like the village squares of Italy each tenement “had its group of women, all in black sitting on stools and boxes. . . . They recalled ancient history, argued morals and social law, always taking their precedents from the mountain village in southern Italy” (6). Lucia and the women would bemoan “the corruption of the innocent by the new land”

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