10: Main Street

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

There’s a funny kind of story about Main Street; it was awarded the 1921 Pulitzer prize only to be rejected by the Board of Trustees with the prize going eventually to Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. It’s funny because the two works have a great deal in common and this little Wikipedia fact gives me a perfect opportunity to talk about both books. Sinclair Lewis is the 1930 Nobel Laureate of Literature.

Meet Carol Kennicott, the main character of Main Street. Carol Kennicott is a woman of intelligence, education and good understanding, who feels oppressed by the pettiness, the hypocrisy and the wilful ignorance of her small world, the town of Gopher Prairie, in which she lives with her husband. She loves music, art and books and is unhappy in a town that has no true appreciation of those things, which other residents, including her husband, consider to belong to a different world than their own. Main dinner conversations are invariably about town gossip and the doings of various persons – not a word about liberal ideas or interesting books. All is dull and meaningless and Carol longs for something more.

Meet Newland Archer, the main character of The Age of Innocence. Newland Archer is a man of intelligence, education and good understanding, who feels oppressed by the pettiness, the hypocrisy and the wilful ignorance of his small world, the select society of upper-class New York, in which he lives with his wife. He loves music, art and books and is unhappy in a society that has no true appreciation of those things, which the other residents, including his husband, consider to belong to a different world than their own. Main dinner conversation are invariably about town gossip and the doings of various persons – not a word about liberal ideas or interesting books. All is dull and meaningless and Newland longs for something more.

They have further things in common. Carol tries to press on reforms in the village; a new Georgian town hall, for example. Her reforms are rejected and ridiculed by everyone and Carol is oblivious to everyone’s true opinion of her. Newland Archer pursues Ellen Olenska and is oblivious, until the end, that everyone has been aware of his secret flirtation.

The similarities end eventually; The Age of Innocence is a smoothly written story of the Golden Age of upper-class New York and Main Street is a viciously realistic satire of small town life. Not much happens in Main Street – well, that’s just not true ... satire happens in Main Street. All of the small town personae are archetypes that have been brought to a horribly overbearing life by realistic details and dialogue. The endless description aptly gives the idea of Carol’s oppression in such a society, fully of petty little back-stabbings, vicious gossip, and the pettiness of Main Street, with its generic name and rundown shops, which eventually dominate Carol’s life. It is a depressing and realistic atmosphere and one might sympathize with Carol. If only she were likeable.

The truth is that Carol is not likeable. She is wrong and ignorant about many things – not about history or literature, of course, as she is very well-read and smart, but about the people around her. She assumes that because the villagers have no very sophisticated ideas, that they have no ideas at all. She assumes that because they are placid and dull at dinner parties that they really are placid and dull. She doesn’t see that the town gossip is their outlet of intellectual activity and the activity therein is substantial because the power of gossip to ruin a person or drive them out of town is very real and substantial. Carol sees the power of gossip with her own eyes, as she watches two of her friends succumb to its effects, and yet she does not understand that these events were caused by the thoughts and ideas of the townspeople, an entity that she never gave much thought to.

Further, Carol finds the same dissatisfaction in life in Gopher Prairie that Newland Archer finds in New York. The foibles of people of Gopher Prairie are human foibles and not particular to small towns. And yet Carol never considers that this might be the case and yearns to be in a big city. Indeed, when she finally gets away to Washington, she finds that office gossip is just as bad a village gossip.

This book said everything about small town life that I too detest, with eloquence, realism and savage satire. I think it’s the savage satire that I don’t like. It was so bleak – the long description which were describing Carol’s conversion into a typical small-town woman in a large city when she visits Minneapolis (she has all the experiences and thoughts of a villager in a strange city, thinking of what her small-town friends would think if they saw her doing this and that) are so very austere and the reader sees that Carol’s case is hopeless – that she would be absorbed into the village, lose her love of knowledge, become as dull as the next woman, and if a new Carol Kennicott should come along, she would ridicule her and patronise her with the rest of the villagers.

Newland Archer found his “something more to life” in the form of Countess Ellen Olenska, whom he was forced to let go of in a whirl of dramatic sacrifice and tragic loss. Carol Kennicott never does find any embodiment of her “something more to life” and her idea, as suggested by the last chapter, would ebb away slowly and prosaically, in her nursery and her kitchen, without the blaze and glory of tragedy.