This is America - a town
of a few thousand, in a region of
wheat and corn and dairies
and little groves.
The town is, in our tale,
called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.
But its Main Street is the
continuation of Main Streets
everywhere. The story would
be the same in Ohio or Montana,
in Kansas or Kentucky or
Illinois, and not very differently
would it be told Up York
State or in the Carolina Hills.
-Author's Preface
As all of us know, Sinclair Lewis was the great liberal critic of small town, bourgeois Middle America. His novels demonstrated the small-minded conformity of the conservative folk of the MidWest, content to wallow in smug self-righteous ignorance. This at least is the common understanding of Lewis. But I found this book to be somewhat more nuanced. The satire extends not just to the townfolk of Gopher Prairie, but to the city folk of Washington too. Thus, when Carol Kennicott decides to return home, I did not see it as necessarily a surrender. She notes several times that noone in Washington cares about her, the way the townspeople back in Minnesota did. This seems to me to be the fundamental dilemma that Lewis sets up: Main Street requires conformity to tradition and social standards in exchange for recognition, respect and love from one's neighbors, the City offers freedom and individuality precisely because there's noone there who cares about you or what you do.
Instead of flatly condemning small town America, Lewis seems to have had a more limited goal in mind. When Carol is planning to return, a leader of the suffragettes tells her that she need not heroically assault Gopher Prairie and the attitudes she finds there:
There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the
only kind that accomplishes much anywhere:
you can keep on looking at one thing after another
in your home and church and bank, and ask why
it is, and who first laid down the law that it had
to be that way. If enough of us do this impolitely
enough, then we'll become civilized in merely twenty
thousand years or so, instead of having to wait
the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist
friends allow. ...Easy, pleasant,
lucrative home-work for wives: asking people to
define their jobs. That's the most dangerous
doctrine I know!
Dangerous it may be, but it is also pretty conservative, shockingly
so for a Socialist. What is spelled out there is a program that would
allow for gradual reform of egregious wrongs, without tossing out what
is good. It is the exact opposite of what actually occurred over
the next 70 years of New Deal hegemony. This excellent message is
obscured somewhat because the section that takes place in the city is pretty
brief, while the town life portion goes on interminably. But it does
redeem the book, which I sort of expected to just be just a hysterical
screed. It's too bad that there's not more focus on this aspect of
the novel. It offers constructive criticism and gives the book some
universal significance, rescuing it from just being a slice of a life at
a limited time and place in our history.
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (C)
