Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [10]
Dreiser more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. Without his pioneering, I doubt if any of us could, unless we liked to be sent to jail, seek to express life and beauty and terror (Nobel Prize acceptance speech, delivered December 12, 1930).
Hamlin Garland, now nearly forgotten, was another writer whose work provided a liberating precedent for the budding realist who wanted to portray his banal surroundings as they really were.
I had realized, in reading Balzac and Dickens, that it was possible to describe the French and English common people as one actually saw them. But it had never occurred to me that one might, without indecency, write of the people of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, as one felt about them. Our fictional tradition, you see, was that all of us in mid-Western villages were altogether noble and happy; that not one of us would exchange the neighborly bliss of living on Main Street for the heathen gaudiness of New York or Paris or Stockholm. But in Mr. Garland’s Main-Traveled Roads I discovered that there was one man who believed mid-Western peasants sometimes were bewildered and hungry and vile—and heroic. And, given this vision, I was released; I could write of life as giving life (Nobel Prize acceptance speech).
Lewis spoke of fiction as “contemporary history” ( John J. Koblas, Sinclair Lewis—Home at Last, Bloomington, MN: Voyageur Press, 1981), and blended historical and social issues smoothly into all his stories. Main Street is, among so many other things, an illustration of the current populist concern over the exploitation of farmers by the parasitical townspeople: The influential economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen had propounded theories about the rise of the country town, in a 1915 book, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, that Lewis’s novel directly addresses. The overheated patriotism that had so disgusted Lewis during World War I also finds a place in Main Street, in which Lewis was able, if belatedly, to express his contempt for tribal chest-beating.
With his portrayal of Carol and Will Kennicott’s up-and-down marriage, Lewis added his voice to the excited cultural dialogue that was taking place on the subject of marriage and women’s roles in and out of the home. Henrik Ibsen’s groundbreaking play A Doll’s House (1879) had shocked contemporary audiences with its portrayal of an apparently happy, spoiled bourgeois wife who leaves her husband and family to learn to become a fully fledged human being. Where Ibsen’s Nora Helmer is a tragic figure, Carol is earthbound and frequently ridiculous; but Carol’s anguish is no less real, and the issues and circumstances that divide her from her husband are no less pressing. When Carol says “I am trying to save my soul” (p. 206), we are meant to respect this statement as the literal truth.
H. L. Mencken, here as so often Lewis’s greatest appreciator and critic, understood the sociological significance of the Kennicott marriage in “the disparate cultural development of male and female, the great strangeness that lies between husband and wife when they begin to function as members of society. The men, sweating at their sordid concerns, have given the women leisure, and out of that leisure the women have fashioned disquieting discontents” (Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 18).
What is so brilliant about Lewis’s treatment of the Kennicott marriage is that he reverses our expectations by making the frequently lumpish Will both the more powerful personality of the two and, very often, the more sympathetic. This was a conscious decision: In his introduction to a 1937 edition of the novel Lewis admitted that Carol is not “of as good stuff as her husband.... I had most painstakingly planned that she shouldn’t be—that she should be just bright enough to sniff a little but not bright enough to do anything about it.”
Some readers have exaggerated Carol