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Review of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street:
I just finished reading two days ago Sinclair Lewis’most-famous work, Main Street. Written in 1920, it is his story of small town America,and of small town Minnesota. Having myself grown up in small-town Minnesota, I read it as a perspective on that culture, and the attitudes of its citizens, as well as Lewis’ critique on their social views and way of life. Interestingly, I found that while more than sixty years have passed between the writing of the novel and when I was more or less living in his ‘set,’ his work is dead-on in many respects.
Lewis, however, portrays his small town, Gopher Prairie, through the lens of an outsider, his heroine Carol Kennicourt. She is the daughter of a respected judge from Mankato, earns a college education from an institution in the ‘metropolitan’ Twin Cities, and aspires to move to a small, hick country town and reform its residents to her modern, liberal and, in her opinion, more advanced world view. She is courted by a country doctor from Gopher Prairie, accepts his offer of marriage, and starts her new life there, ready to begin her life-long endeavor.
The one dramatic element of this book, and there is substantially, only this one, are her successes, which are few, and her failures, which are almost always inevitable, to make this town anew. Through her disappointments, Lewis masterfully depicts the attitudes of this small town culture. They are provincial. They are small-minded, conservative, disdainful of ‘city folk’ from Minneapolis, and suspicious of farmers, especially of German and Scandinavian immigrant farmers. They are gossipy, republican, religious, and overall very simple folk where standard dinner party conversation is limited to hunting and the scandalous nature of those who refuse to behave within the bounds of their limited social order.
Carol pushes against this thinking, and is rebuffed constantly in her attempts to do so. To some, this novel may seem devoid of action, without a plot, and a story that only seems to move as fast as change in this small town, which is to say, almost not at all. I find, however, that there is a genius to Lewis’ madness in this method. In small tidbits, he throws a grenade of a potential plot-twist, about ever fifty pages, which threatens to turn the whole story upside down. Instead, it is revealed that the pin was never pulled, and a potential change to Carol’s drab town again fizzles into nothing, and her fighting the forces of the village lead only to her further isolation. In this way Lewis portrays the mind-numbing pace of life in a small town, in one brief moment of potential newness that agonizingly never materializes. Not only does this accurately portray the small town, it keeps the plot moving.
Another aspect I find interesting: the portrayal of social stratification. In a very telling and skillfully crafted passage, the aristocracy of the town is defined as belonging to a profession, earning more than four thousand dollars a year, or having both sets of grandparents born in America. Carol is a member of this upper strata; she constantly rails against it, even as she lives well because of it. Part of her defiance against the mores of this town is manifested in her socializing with non-members of her set. Cavorting with a socialist, her housekeeper, and a tailor’s assistant on different occasions incurs their ire and disapproval.
Although this minor aristocracy exists and this ‘classless’ America, the social change of this time period is apparent. The fortunes and fates of the world do come to Gopher Prairie, as the First World War ends and prosperity arrives. Domestic servants are more difficult to find. Women of well off families do enter the work-force during the war, and it is accepted, albeit on more ‘patriotic’ grounds. It is interesting to see that many of the changes Carol initially advocated for, such as a new school building, do come about, but not by her revolutionary actions toward the beginning of the novel, but rather by the great, uncontrollable forces that press on the town from the outside.
So how does Lewis’ Gopher Prairie of 1910 to 1920 compare with the small town that I knew during the 1980s? The most obvious are factors of geography, namely that his is in the rural, agrarian central part of the state, while I grew up in the rural, forested, and, for the most part, unpopulated northern part. There also lacks the upper crust social set in mine, a casualty of the post-world war I years and their consequences, which Lewis’ hauntingly predicts and hints at in the last half of his novel. It is fascinating to see the Scandinavian immigrants, my very recent ancestors, employed as field hands and manual and domestic laborers only so few decades ago, while now they are accepted and as much in the norm of my hometown. In fact, they hold the very occupations and wealth of the people who in Gopher Prairie looked down on them and criticized their sloth. Irony was not lost on Lewis, and indeed many of his portrayals carry similar such satirical observations.
Strikingly accurate is Lewis’ observation of the mindset of the small-towners, and their belief in the superiority of their way of life. Namely, that in a small town, where everyone knows everyone else, all are held accountable and to the high moral standards with no deviations to such. I would agree that this is still the case, although with some relaxing, but there is still a sense that you are being watched by your neighbors, an all too often reality for Carol, and your words to one member of the town are as good as said to all, confidences and secrets aside. Though not directly answered, the question is tackled: is it in fact moral to sacrifice the privacy of yourself and your neighbors to ensure moral behavior in society?
I enjoyed reading Main Street. Coming from a small town, Lewis is dead-on in depicting the mindset of those who live there. It is a fascinating read, full of social commentary, and well sketched characters with believable personalities who are both real and engrossing to follow their development. Comparing the small town of then and the small town of today leads one to think for many hours after reading the book.
