Classic Book Review: Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Part 2
September 19th, 2005,It’s difficult to know where to begin a brief discussion of Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott. The book is at once a study of a region and of the emergence of an entire modern American culture–a culture that in many ways has not changed much since the book was published in 1920. It touches on more issues than can be analyzed here, issues such as provincialism and small town life, marriage, class, politics, and the changing role of women. Given the regional focus of this column, I’ll first examine the book’s view of “the Northern Middlewest,” “the newest empire of the world” as Carol Kennicott thinks of it.
The heroine of the story is born Carol Milford in Mankato, Minnesota. Her father, originally from Massachusetts, is a judge and something of an intellectual. Carol reads Balzac and Rabelais in his library, and she acquires “a willingness to be different from brisk efficient book-ignoring people.” While in college Carol becomes interested in sociology and for a time fantasizes vaguely about a career in “village-improvement”–the reform and beautification of a “prairie village.” She quickly drops her fantasy for the more pragmatic profession of librarian. She spends a year training in Chicago, then works in St. Paul. But when she meets Dr. Will Kennicott, from the small town of Gopher Prairie, her vision of village improvement returns and the two eventually get married, despite some misgivings Carol has about the doctor.
The story then follows Carol’s continuous cycle of romantic, idealistic endeavor followed by disappointing reality as she vainly tries to make an impact on the stolid town. She finds a wide variety of people in Gopher Prairie, but their lives are dominated by gossip and a conformity that narrowly restricts behavior and thought. She becomes subject to what another intellectual resident, Guy Pollock, calls the “Village Virus.” As he describes it, this is “the germ which…infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You’ll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants–all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp.” Such people think they can keep their cosmopolitan interests up to date, but distance and isolation prove to be too powerful, and the virus claims them as victims.
Carol also finds that the town is simply ugly, in a way that the beauty of the surrounding countryside cannot quite redeem. She has traveled and seen the Twin Cities and Chicago, later California and the East Coast, and her more traveled eyes sees the lack of beauty that the residents of Gopher Prairie cannot make out. See, for example, Carol’s first impression of the house that she will share with Dr. Will Kennicott:
“A concrete sidewalk with a ‘parking’ of grass and mud. A square smug brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cottonwoods. A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window to the right of the porch. Window curtains of starched cheap lace revealing a pink marble table with a conch shell and a Family Bible.”
Carol concludes that the town’s ugliness, and many of its other aspects, result from its pioneer rawness, the very newness of its region. Making her way to Gopher Prairie after marrying Dr. Kennicott, Carol looks at her fellow train travelers and thinks, “They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is a pioneer land.” And as a pioneer land, she concludes, its future is still to be determined.
The novel describes the class structure of the town, which consists of a largely Yankee upper-class–people such as Sam Clark and Ezra Stowbody and the Kennicotts–and a lower class made up mostly of Scandinavian and German immigrants who work as farmers and servants–people such as Miles Bjornstam and Bea Sorenson. The upper class, a business class, rules over the town with the “sedate pomposity of the commercialist.” This coming together of new and old Americans, native and immigrant communities, is one of the interesting dimensions of the book. The Yankee families look on the new immigrants with some suspicion and condescension, and there is occasionally some ugliness, particularly when the arrival of World War I leads to the dominance of a bullying patriotism, but for the most part the different groups manage to coexist peacefully.
The novel is fascinating also for its realistic details of life in the early twentieth century. We see, for example, how the residents of Gopher Prairie ready their houses for the onset of the harsh winter. “Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest,” the narrator tells us, “it is an industry.” Residents put up “storm sheds” outside their doors and hang storm windows, while “the poorer houses of Gopher Prairie” are “banked to the windows with earth and manure”–all efforts to keep houses warm during the winter.
Next week: More on the social criticism of Main Street.