It is quite a shock to young Carol.
It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others. Between a large new “block” of two-story brick shops on one side, and the firebrick Overland garage on the other side, was a one-story cottage turned into a millinery shop. The white temple of the Farmers’ Bank was elbowed back by a grocery of glaring yellow brick. One store-building had a patchy galvanized iron corince; the building beside it was crowned with battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks of red sandstone.
She escaped from Main Street, fled home.
And so begins Sinclair Lewis’s famous and unflattering study of small-town American life.
She wouldn’t have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely. She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of staring at women as though he had been married too long and too prosaically; and old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean -- his face like a potato fresh from the earth. None of them had shaved for three days.
And Carol’s problems with Gopher Prairie go far beyond these ugly appearances. She quickly discovers that there is no intellectual curiosity to be found.
Carol listened. She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie. Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set, the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse.
Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was invariably of personalities: the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going to send for a pair of patent leather shoes with gray buttoned tops; the rheumatism of Champ Perry; the state of Guy Pollock’s grippe; and the dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink.
It is a state of affairs any college-educated person would find frustrating, and any artist would find unbearable. And Lewis, of course, is writing from direct experience -- as Gopher Prairie is famously based on his own hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota. He does an excellent job encasing the reader in the mindset he himself escaped. Whether it is books…
“One trouble with books is that they’re not so thoroughly safeguarded by intelligent censors as the movies are, and when you drop into the library and take out a book you never know what you’re wasting your time on. What I like in books is a wholesome, really improving story, and sometimes-- Why, once I started a novel by this fellow Balzac that you read about, and it told how a lady wasn’t living with her husband, I mean she wasn’t his wife. It went into details, disgustingly! And the English was real poor. I spoke to the library about it, and they took it off the shelves. I’m not narrow, but I must say I don’t see any use in this deliberately dragging in immorality! Life itself is so full of temptations that in literature one wants only that which is pure and uplifting.”
...or art…
Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world: It’s art but is it pretty?
...time and time again, the aversion to new ideas and new ways of thinking is suffocating.
Carol decides to reform Gopher Prairie. She studied sociology and village improvement at college after all, and it was time to put all that book learning to useful purpose. But can she do it? Will the town allowed itself to be reformed?
She reverted to her resolution to change the town -- awaken it, prod it, “reform” it. What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They’d eat her all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier to change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not take their point of view; it was a negative thing; and intellectual squalor; a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers. She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a people. What of that? The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be the beginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickening roots to crack their wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as she desired, do a great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not be content with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the blank wall.
At first it is poetry, then plays. She desperately tries to introduce something she calls culture to the small-minded people of this small town, but they rebuff her again and again. Not in ignorance and shame, but in superiority and aloofness. They have a philosophy, Carol comes to bitterly understand, one that is as old as the hills. Here it is, “complete”:
The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. “We don’t need all this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that’s ruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us.”
The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.
All socialists ought to be hanged.
“Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals in his novels, and folks say he’s made prett’ near a million dollars out of ‘em.”
People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked.
Europeans are still wickeder.
It doesn’t hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell.
Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.
Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.
The farmers wants too much for their wheat.
The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they pay.
There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm.
In case you can’t tell, I think that’s called satire.
But of course, the town will not be reformed. Not in the way Carol wants. The ugly people in their ugly town will not be changed. Even though she finds a few kindred spirits, young people who yearn for the same kind of revolt Carol does…
“I believe all of us want the same things -- we’re all together, the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the Negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the Respectables. It’s all the same revolt, in all the classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We’re tired of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the husbands!) coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have plans for a Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we’ll produce it; trust us; we’re wiser than you.’ For ten thousand years they’ve said that. We want our Utopia now -- and we’re going to try our hands at it. All we want is -- everything for all of us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want everything. We sha’n’t get it. So we sha’n’t ever be content --”
...even they come to disappoint her.
She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in:
“See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don’t class yourself with a lot of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically, and I’ll admit there are industrial injustices, but I’d rather have them than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and hideous player-pianos and --”
At this second, in Buenos Aires, a newspaper editor broke his routine of being bored by exchanges to assert, “Any injustice is better than seeing the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness.” At this second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl at the chauffeur beside him, “Aw, you socialists make me sick! I’m an individualist. I ain’t going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo’s as good as you and me?”
At this second Carol realized that for all Guy’s love of dead elegances his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
The mind control is deep here, man. And that, probably, is Lewis’s larger point, made more express here than elsewhere. The struggle is not just Carol’s. It is the struggle of progressives everywhere. The opposition is not just the blinkered people of Gopher Prairie. It is the large and timeless force of conservatism, the protectionism of what we have against those we fear will take it.
And, In fact, these forces, with their relentless and ignorant sense of superiority, rather than being changed by Carol, slowly succeed in changing Carol instead.
Did I say relentless?
In the manner of one who has just beheld a two-headed calf they repeated that they had “never heard such funny ideas!” They were staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word “dude” is no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not always peddlers or pantsmakers.
There a Quixotic element to Lewis’s novel. Again and again, without fail, Carol is confronted with the solidity of the windmills of Gopher Prairie.
It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment … the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God.
A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs, prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.
And eventually, inevitably, it wears Carol down.
She went hastily up to her room, to her mirror. She was in a mood of self-depreciation. Accurately or not, this was the picture she saw in the mirror:
Neat rimless eye-glasses. Black hair clumsily tucked under a mauve straw hat which would have suited a spinster. Cheeks clear, bloodless. Thin nose. Gentle mouth and chin. A modest voile blouse with an edging of lace at the neck. A virginal sweetness and timorousness -- no flare of gaiety, no suggestion of cities, music, quick laughter.
“I have become a small-town woman. Absolute. Typical. Modest and moral and safe. Protected from life. Genteel! The Village Virus -- the village virtuousness.”
And later, after she has sought affairs with some of the initially alluring but resolutely feckless men, further distancing her from the clucking respectability of Main Street…
Then, in a very great desire of rebellion and unleashing of all her hatreds, “The pettier and more tawdry it is, the more blame to Main Street. It shows how much I’ve been longing to escape. Any way out! Any humility so long as I can flee. Main Street has done this to me. I came here eager for nobilities, ready for work, and now -- Any way out.
“I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don’t know, they don’t understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound.”
They. They’ve pushed her to this extreme. But Carol, like Lewis, understands that the ‘they’ in question is not merely the people of Gopher Prairie, but the institutions they represent.
And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered laughter.
There is deep analysis in this book of otherwise simple fiction; analysis of the forces and institutions that have shaped and will continue to shape American Society. And finally, it is one of those institutions, mentioned only among others in the list above, that may be the most humbly powerful of them all, demanding strict conformity, but offering sublime connections in return.
She was at Sunday morning service at the Baptist Church, in a solemn row with her husband, Hugh, Uncle Whittier, Aunt Bessie.
Despite Aunt Bessie’s nagging the Kennicotts rarely attended church. The doctor asserted, “Sure, religion is a fine influence -- got to have it to keep the lower classes in order -- fact, it’s the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows and makes ‘em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and they knew more about it than we do.” He believed in the Christian religion, and never thought about it; he believed in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol’s lack of faith, and wasn’t quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she lacked.
That’s one of the Church’s powers. On Main Street, it is universally understood to be good for someone, even if it is not good for one’s self.
Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic.
When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children to think about; when she experimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as “washed in the blood of the lamb” and “a vengeful God”; when Mrs. Bogart boasted that through his boyhood she had made Cy confess nightly upon the basis of the Ten Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism -- without the splendor.
And that’s another. It’s foreignness, it’s ritual, it’s mystery. And yet...
But when she went to church suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, “My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come into abiding grace,” then Carol found the humanness behind the sanguinary and alien theology. Always she perceived that the churches -- Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, all of them -- which had seemed so unimportant to the judge’s home in her childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in St. Paul, were still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the of the forces compelling respectability.
It has real power over people’s lives, and not unwillingly. In Gopher Prairie and on Main Street, it is religion and provides both the respectability and the humanness that their people intrinsically seek. And even Carol, raised without it, and understanding it only as a sanguinary and alien theology, can’t help but see that.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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