Julie
A few reflections.
What struck me most is how little resistance the novel actually needs in order to defeat its protagonist. There is no spectacular repression here, no obvious villainy. What Carol encounters is something quieter and, for that reason, more difficult to grasp: a social order that reproduces itself through the everyday, through habit, through what simply goes without saying. As she realises in the end, there is no individual, it is all institutions, the crystalised and natural-seeming landscape that binds her feet.
It used to be common, as Mark Schorer notes, to align Sinclair Lewis with Flaubert, to read Main Street as the American Madame Bovary. But the comparison only really holds if we shift its ground. Emma Bovary is destroyed by her fantasies, by the mismatch between imported desire and provincial reality; Carol Kennicott, however, is not simply deluded. Her aspirations, aesthetic, reformist, vaguely utopian, are not in themselves incoherent. Indeed Main Street is what happens when the Bovary problem is no longer primarily psychological, but socio-historical. It is then a text that should be read much more historically. Carol herself, is not a revolutionary in a political sense, and finds herself catechised by a suffragette for having no political power. Instead, she is but an aesthethic reformer, and an symptomatic bearer of diffuse pregressive ideals. It is a kind of minor utopian consciousness. She carries a utopian impulse that cannot find a viable form within the social totality she inhabits. Importantly, she fails not simply because the town is traditionalist, but because the social structure she inhabits has no mechanism to absorb or translate her impulses. Her critique therefore remains individual and stylistic, instead of the 20th century collective and systematic rebellion.
Gopher Praire, should be read beyond it as mere setting, instead, as a model of a total system. It encompasses an economic order (small-town capitalism), an ideological apparatus (respectability, conformity, gender roles), and a cultural regime (taste, architecture, conversation). To Carol, it appears closed and unyielding, but this very closure is not timeless. It is historically produced and sustained, presenting itself as natural and inevitable. As Lewis himself observed, the modern city might be harsh, yet the cruel city could be made to yield. The small town, by contrast, 'would not for a minute concede one inch of its bleak and rigid tyranny.' Hence, Carol isn't just fighting conservatism, the Puritan traditionalism, but instead a form of life that has naturalised its own limitations.
This tragedy is to be understood by the historical moment. A time of intense optimism about American life. Progressive reform, new artistic movements, and intellectual ferment, from Henrik Ibsen to H. G. Wells, from Freud to Bernard Shaw, had created a sense that a new social and cultural order was imminent. Indeed when Carol herself asks, and gives voice to the expansive, almost boundless aspiration, "What do we want?", it is not merely the modest reform, nor "an age of tranquility and charming manners," she wants not to "enthrone good taste again." Instead she wants everything. A total transformation of life itself. A boundless demand that cuts across class and role. This was a reality in New York or Washington, it is not a reality in Gopher Prairie, and so the demand has nowhere to go. It cannot be translated into institutions, movements, she has no one to discuss poetry, European revolution, or whatever else with at night. So it remains hers, and remains powerless. Followingly, we see the slow wearing down of Carol. She becomes a working woman with no work. Her libidinal energy becomes directed into domestic routines, that neither require nor reward her capacities. Her adaption erodes her soul. Though her temporary departure suggests that another life is imaginable, her return marks the persistence of the structure that had defeated her in the beginning, an unchanging structure, where "we'll become civilised in merely twenty thousand years or so." Indeed she realises the town remains what it was. She no longer hates the town, she has given up, and finds that her utopian desire has dissipated into the quiet continuity of the everyday.
A few reflections.
What struck me most is how little resistance the novel actually needs in order to defeat its protagonist. There is no spectacular repression here, no obvious villainy. What Carol encounters is something quieter and, for that reason, more difficult to grasp: a social order that reproduces itself through the everyday, through habit, through what simply goes without saying. As she realises in the end, there is no individual, it is all institutions, the crystalised and natural-seeming landscape that binds her feet.
It used to be common, as Mark Schorer notes, to align Sinclair Lewis with Flaubert, to read Main Street as the American Madame Bovary. But the comparison only really holds if we shift its ground. Emma Bovary is destroyed by her fantasies, by the mismatch between imported desire and provincial reality; Carol Kennicott, however, is not simply deluded. Her aspirations, aesthetic, reformist, vaguely utopian, are not in themselves incoherent. Indeed Main Street is what happens when the Bovary problem is no longer primarily psychological, but socio-historical. It is then a text that should be read much more historically. Carol herself, is not a revolutionary in a political sense, and finds herself catechised by a suffragette for having no political power. Instead, she is but an aesthethic reformer, and an symptomatic bearer of diffuse pregressive ideals. It is a kind of minor utopian consciousness. She carries a utopian impulse that cannot find a viable form within the social totality she inhabits. Importantly, she fails not simply because the town is traditionalist, but because the social structure she inhabits has no mechanism to absorb or translate her impulses. Her critique therefore remains individual and stylistic, instead of the 20th century collective and systematic rebellion.
Gopher Praire, should be read beyond it as mere setting, instead, as a model of a total system. It encompasses an economic order (small-town capitalism), an ideological apparatus (respectability, conformity, gender roles), and a cultural regime (taste, architecture, conversation). To Carol, it appears closed and unyielding, but this very closure is not timeless. It is historically produced and sustained, presenting itself as natural and inevitable. As Lewis himself observed, the modern city might be harsh, yet the cruel city could be made to yield. The small town, by contrast, 'would not for a minute concede one inch of its bleak and rigid tyranny.' Hence, Carol isn't just fighting conservatism, the Puritan traditionalism, but instead a form of life that has naturalised its own limitations.
This tragedy is to be understood by the historical moment. A time of intense optimism about American life. Progressive reform, new artistic movements, and intellectual ferment, from Henrik Ibsen to H. G. Wells, from Freud to Bernard Shaw, had created a sense that a new social and cultural order was imminent. Indeed when Carol herself asks, and gives voice to the expansive, almost boundless aspiration, "What do we want?", it is not merely the modest reform, nor "an age of tranquility and charming manners," she wants not to "enthrone good taste again." Instead she wants everything. A total transformation of life itself. A boundless demand that cuts across class and role. This was a reality in New York or Washington, it is not a reality in Gopher Prairie, and so the demand has nowhere to go. It cannot be translated into institutions, movements, she has no one to discuss poetry, European revolution, or whatever else with at night. So it remains hers, and remains powerless. Followingly, we see the slow wearing down of Carol. She becomes a working woman with no work. Her libidinal energy becomes directed into domestic routines, that neither require nor reward her capacities. Her adaption erodes her soul. Though her temporary departure suggests that another life is imaginable, her return marks the persistence of the structure that had defeated her in the beginning, an unchanging structure, where "we'll become civilised in merely twenty thousand years or so." Indeed she realises the town remains what it was. She no longer hates the town, she has given up, and finds that her utopian desire has dissipated into the quiet continuity of the everyday.